Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media 3030760545, 9783030760540

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Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media Edited by Nizar Zouidi

Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media

Nizar Zouidi Editor

Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media

Editor Nizar Zouidi University of Hail Hail, Saudi Arabia

ISBN 978-3-030-76054-0 ISBN 978-3-030-76055-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Professor Peter Thomson For all the times he was there for me and all the times I wasn’t there for him.

Preface: The Story Behind/of the Book

Embarking on his journey to Ithaca, the wily Odysseus never imagined that the trip would be of epic proportions. The winding paths of his great voyage of self-discovery led Odysseus beyond the comparatively narrow world of the Iliad. Like Odysseus, I started this academic odyssey with a straightforward path in mind. However, my project soon proved to be an epic journey where will and fortune worked together to honor me with the editing of a collection of insightful essays that see and analyze as much evil as the currently available critical tools can uncover in the everexpanding and ever-transforming—and colliding—worlds of literature and media. This book started as an attempt to contribute a definition of the word “villain” to an upcoming encyclopedia of literary terms. The challenge was to put together a succinct but comprehensive account of the development of the concept in the broad context of the ever-expanding category of literature. After studying the history of the term and some of its contemporary applications in literature and literary criticism, it was clear to me that attempting to define such a character in the ethical, political, and aesthetic greyness of the present academic condition would be an arduous task. Any definition of the term “villain” should have a dynamism that would make it navigate the minefields of interdisciplinarity and discursive instability that characterize the field of literary studies. Therefore, it was deemed necessary to further explore the theoretical, cultural, and historical grounds that such a definition aimed to cover. It

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soon appeared that this was no viable project for a single person. Unless one has the means and the courage to make it a lifetime quest, going through seemingly endless primary sources and perusing an ever-larger theoretical corpus would be a futile endeavor. As a result, it was necessary to find a more realistic and practical pathway toward the goal. The best course of action was to distill the latest findings of different scholars from different academic backgrounds and standings to build an up-to-date and comprehensive understanding of the themes of villainy and evil. The call for papers that launched this collection came as a result of my decision to postpone the writing of a definition of the word “villain” until I finish exploring as many representations of this kind of character as possible across the interdisciplinary spectrum (or spectra) of literary studies. Still, the project had to start cautiously. Despite the fluidity and complexity of the themes of villainy and evil in literature, many scholars of literary studies are actively engaged in studying them. I did not want to be overwhelmed with proposals. This is why the initial version of the call for papers was circulated among a small circle of colleagues. There were fewer proposals than expected, but a team of dedicated reviewers emerged from this first stage. This small team helped me bring the project to a publishable form. Their efforts and dedication were invaluable to the shaping of this collection. Encouraged by the feedback of the publisher and the reviewers, I decided to publicize the call for papers and widen its scope. As a result, it was amended to include studies of forms of media products that are closely related to literature and literary works, such as films and video games. However, since the core team of reviewers was made up of literature specialists, the inclusion of some media forms was unsettling. Many of the reviewers were not enthusiastic about the inclusion of media studies in the collection. As a result, the number of articles that study “nonliterary” media in this collection remained limited even after the final call for papers. Due to the dominance of literature in this book, the question was always whether to use the expression “literary media” in the title or leave the word “media” unqualified. Putting the word literary in parentheses was an option that occasionally crossed my mind, but I was fortunately saved from the daunting task of discussing what makes a certain form of media literary or more literary than another. In the final proposal, I deleted the word “literary,” but I made sure that the whole team retained an awareness that loose and elusive terms like literature,

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literariness, the literary, and media could no longer be the thread that connected the pieces of this collection together. This decision was also prompted by the diversity of the authors, who hail from different academic and cultural backgrounds and whose interests are diverse. Some are established scholars with long teaching and research careers, while others are early career researchers and Ph.D. candidates. Some of the authors are also artists and poets. As a result, the writing styles as well as the perspectives of the authors are varied. The experience of reading through their works and trying to formulate a summary that connects them—whether during the preparation of the proposal or the writing of the introduction—was an exercise in interdisciplinary and cultural dialogue. This dialogue reshaped my understanding of the purpose and scope of this collection. Indeed, as the authors offered remarks about the proposal and the introduction, my initial traditionalist conceptualization of the book gave way to a more dynamically dialogic structure. Their remarks helped me redesign the book to reflect the intersections between the different disciplines and backgrounds of the authors. The dialogic structure of the book, which I explain at greater length in the introduction, is intended to reflect the dynamism of the subjects of villainy and evil in literature and media. This book seeks to energize interpretive dialogues about these two themes in literature and media through the eclectic interdisciplinary critical tools of performative studies. It intends to explore as many of the interpretive possibilities of the works studied as possible. The following pages, therefore, do not claim to have reached the bottom of the abyss. Nevertheless, they intend to drag you in, for a book about the critical appreciation of the subjects of villainy and evil would have little merit in one’s eyes if it were not deliberately mean. Hail, Saudi Arabia November 2020

Nizar Zouidi

Acknowledgments

I would like to start by thanking you who is reading this. I want to tell you that I appreciate your willingness to imbue this work with the life energy of every written word, your (inner) breath. But before you even knew this book existed, every bit of it had to go through many hands. I particularly wish to thank the literature editors Allie Troyanus and Rachel Jacobe and the anonymous reviewers from Palgrave Macmillan for their invaluable help in shaping this book. The production team of Palgrave and Springer was extremely professional and highly communicative. I wish to thank them all for their efforts and dedication. I also want to express my deepest gratitude to Anthony Wright, who helped me and some of the authors with the proofreading and correction of the manuscript. Surviving this academic venture into the world of evil would not have been possible without the contribution of many dedicated guides and companions. They helped me with the reviewing and correction of many sections of this book—including this Acknowledgment statement—and they also reviewed the articles submitted to this collection and helped me select the most suitable among them. These reviewers and guides include some of the authors. This is why I would like to start by thanking those who contributed both as authors and reviewers: my friend and mentor Professor Sadok Bouhlila, and the passionate and dedicated Professor Amy Cummins, Dr. Tammie Jenkins, Dr. Ahmet Süner, Professor Bill Scalia, and Dr. Sélima Lejri. The articles and the different sections of the book were also reviewed by scholars who did not contribute to this collection. I

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am deeply grateful to Dr. Olfa Gandouz, Dr. Nabil Cherni, Professor John Gerard Champagne, Dr. Fawez Jazem, and Dr. Ramzi Marrouchi for their dedication as guides for and reviewers of different articles and sections of this collection. The advice of some of my colleagues and teachers, especially Professor Mohammed Almansouri, Professor Abdnabi ben Baya, Dr. Hassine Ben Azouna, Dr. Yasser Rhimi, Dr. Samir Mistiri, and Dr. Hassan Zriba, was invaluable in the preparation of the groundwork of this collection. The article of Ibtisam M. Abujad began as a presentation sponsored by the World History Association. It was later developed into a fullfledged chapter. I wish to extend special thanks to her dissertation director Professor Jodi Melamed from Marquette University and Merry WiesnerHanks from the World History Association for supporting Ms. Abujad in writing her thought-provoking article. Finally, I would also like to extend warm regards and best wishes to the authors who did not make it to the final selection. Many excellent articles had to be rejected because they did not fit the logic of the book. This book took a long time to prepare and it required some sacrifices from the authors who committed to it, even though they knew that the selection process would be competitive and that their selection in the initial phases was not a promise of publication. I certainly cannot mention their names here, but some of them are partnering with me on another book where their articles form the skeleton of the work.

Introduction

Evil in/and Performance In 1967, Palgrave Macmillan published Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost by Stanley Fish. Fish’s book was not the first to offer insights about the themes of evil, villainy and sin in Paradise Lost or other works of literature.1 Its centrality to the ongoing debate about villainy, evil and sin emanates from the fact that it brings the reader’s own experience into play. The readers are not simply engaged in the generation of meaning; their own experiences and their own evil tendencies

1 There are many other critics and philosophers who wrote about these themes. For example, in his Literature and Evil (2012), George Bataille uses the works of Emily Bronte, Baudelaire, Blake, Michelet, Kafka, Proust, Genet and De Sade to prove that literature cannot be considered innocent and that evil is one of its essential components. In addition, leading figures of poststructuralism, postcolonialism and postmodernism such as Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said also tackled these themes and revealed the repression, dominance, denials and marginalization that characterize differenttexts. These forms of discursive violence are involved in the creation and dissemination of different discourses and discursive practices. Because of the influence of these figures and their approaches that seek to uncover and destabilize the reigning asymmetrical discursive and social intersubjective relationships, it is possible to argue that almost all the contemporary critical literature is in one way or another concerned with what may be referred to as evil (a survey of these writers would involve a great deal of necessary digressions that would occupy too much space for the present book, as their engagement with evil is not always straightforward).

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are now the focus of criticism. Speaking about the reader’s experience of Paradise Lost, Fish argues that “we are led to consider our own experience as part of the poem’s subject” (1967, 3). Accordingly, the reader of Paradise Lost “is confronted with his own corruption” (1967, ix). Fish, therefore, demonstrates that themes like sin, corruption, and evil cannot be approached from a safe critical distance. They rather require continuous dynamic engagement from readers, scholars, and researchers. Studying these themes, therefore, is an interactive experience that involves the studying subject in the generation of the meaning and significance of the works studied. In this context, The Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media focuses on the performative aspects of villainy and evil in a large corpus of works that fall into the fluid categories of literature and media. The study of these performative aspects of villainy and evil aims at revealing how performance and performativity affect our experience of the thematic and generic properties of works of literature and media. It also seeks to show that the themes of villainy and evilplay a crucial role in the structuring of our experience of these works as readers, audiences, players,2 critics, or fans. Discourses and discursive practices in, about and around the representations of villainy and evil in literature and media are increasingly complex. Not only are we confronted with the question of whether moral categories like good and evil still have any validity in critical discourses and practices now or in the foreseeable future, but we also cannot unequivocally define the boundaries of these two fields of study—or the boundaries between them. In addition, studying the thematic and generic properties of literary works and media products in an increasingly revisionist, experimentalist, and pluralistic cultural (and interdisciplinary) academic context can only further problematize these issues. This entails that the purpose of our book can by no means be to artfully or artificially bring the ongoing debates to a conclusion. This collection takes advantage of the interdisciplinary nature of performance studies to present the reader with a variety of theoretical and interpretive possibilities and potentialities. It endeavors

2 Videogame players are a very complex category. They can be considered as

contributing readers, actors, writers of the second degree, etc., depending on the nature of the game.

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to introduce new directions, evaluate common practices, and even revitalize some once-popular methods by showing their usefulness to contemporary and future academic engagements with the themes under study. In this sense, this collection does not fall into the common practice of claiming to be invariably innovative in its approach. The authors believe that describing a book as dealing with a recurrent theme but approaching it differently is a useless cliché.3 This book is rather eclectic. It encourages the reader to go beyond disciplinary boundaries and engage in the ongoing interdisciplinary dialogues about villainy and evil. Dialogic interdisciplinarity is the guiding principle of this collection. We are aware that it is one of the dynamics of the evolution of critical theories, discourses and practices. This project—even in its raw form— is motivated by the ambitious objective of dynamically investigating elusive—and ever-evolving—themes and characters in the evolving, everexpanding, and intersecting fields of literature and media. Our awareness of the necessity of reflecting this dynamism throughout the book informed our choices of the approach and theoretical framework of the present collection, its thematic focus, and the structuring of its different Sections. The authors of this book chose performance studies as the main (but not the only) theoretical framework for the study of evil and villainy in Anglophone literature and media. They focus on the representations of the (post)human body (even in its disembodied state) as the perpetrator, victim, and locus of villainy and evil. The titles of the Sections and the distribution (and organization) of the articles within them are governed by the principle of dynamic historicity that is both dialogic and interdisciplinary in nature. The articles of this collection explore the themes of villainy and evil through the lens(es) of performance studies. Assets of theoretical and practical interdisciplinary frameworks, performance studies provide the authors with the critical tools that allow them to examine a wide range of

3 This formula assumes that the world of academic research is less densely populated

and less dynamic than it really is. This paragraph pays homage to the honored tradition of using this empty formula, albeit in what we hope to be a subversive manner. This book aims to survive the passage of time and cope with the evolving critical discourses and discursive practices both within and outside the academic context. (Not all the qualities that would enable us to achieve this objective are unique to this collection. Some of them are qualities that it shares with other works on the same themes.)

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corpora in a dynamically interdisciplinary—and even dialogically provocative—manner. The scope of performance studies is not confined to a single discipline. Indeed, “Performance scholars can be found under the mantle of philosophy, ethnography, art history, political theory, media studies, music, rhetoric, theatre and literary studies” (Davis 2008, 1), among others. These scholars may be described as forming a loose interpretive community that is constantly gaining ground in academic institutions. Even when there were only a few performance studies departments, this emerging academic trend had been described as having “its own pantheon of theorists, [describing] the world in its own image and increasingly [training] students under its auspices” (Davis 2008, 1). In addition, many influential academic figures in different disciplines are—considered (by themselves and/or others) as—performance scholars. This is probably why performance studies can be described—but not defined—as a set (or sets) of interdisciplinary theories and practices that identifies and analyzes different types of performance and performative practices across a large number of (loosely) interconnected fields of study. As a matter of fact, the scope of performance studies and their interests are dynamically expanding in more than one direction. They encompass many aspects of human existence—and human experience. In his introduction to Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Philip Auslander remarks that the word “performance” itself “extends into many areas of human endeavors” (2003, 1). Like other scholars, he is aware that it is “important to preserve the multidisciplinarity of the concept” (2003, 1). This emphasis on interdisciplinarity is characteristic of most performance scholarship. Many of the major works in the field are collective endeavors by a number of scholars from different disciplines that try to focus on certain areas of shared theoretical and/or practical interest. In this spirit, the present collection brings together a number of scholars from different—related, relating, and/or relatable—disciplines to study the performativity of villainy and evil in the ever-expanding fields of literature and media. Another characteristic feature of performance scholarship is its interest in the human body. Indeed, according to Philip Auslander, “there is perhaps no element more basic to performance of all kind—and more difficult to theorize—than the human body” (2003, 3). The body is, therefore, considered central to every kind of performance. It is the main asset (and/or liability) of the performing entity, with which it is sometimes—not unjustifiably—considered one and the same.

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Judith Butler argues that the body is the doer of all human actions, especially those which are not usually considered bodily, like discourse. For her, “speaking is a bodily act” (2004, 172), even when it seems to emanate from a source that is not commonly considered corporeal. In this vein, she writes: Of course, there are ways of using speech that occlude the body as its condition, which act as if the meanings that are conveyed emanate from a disembodied mind. But that is, as it were, still a way of doing the body, a way of doing the body as disembodied. (2004, 172)

This quotation shows that, even when denied, the body is always the locus of every human action, including those actions that are sometimes referred to as purely discursive. Viewing the undeniable centrality of the body as a primary subject matter for performance studies, the following chapters attempt to highlight the role of the body in the performative “representations” of villainy and evil in the different work studied in this collection. This interest in the performing body serves as a thread that connects the different sections of this book. In this collection, the body is read in its different shapes and states. The authors attempt to look at— and analyze—the body naked, clothed, covered, disguised, deformed, (mis)shaped, static, moving, acting, reacting, free, chained, transforming, silent, speaking, shunned, desired, desiring, ailing, healthy, thinking, thought of, performed, and performing.4 The contributors also dynamically engage with the meaning and the significance of/generated by the different states, acts, and aspects of the performing/performed body. As such, the present collection endeavors to go beyond the static representational understanding of the themes and genres under scrutiny and attempts to energize the performative power and potential of these themes and genres. Performance and performative approaches to data and materials across disciplines are characteristically dynamic. They are seen as processes that “[resist] definitions or achieved positions” (Chinna 2003, 10). Performance scholars are concerned with the dynamics of their object of investigation. This is why performance is described as an ongoing process

4 The list is endless—the body has infinite possibilities and potentialities.

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rather than a destination. The dynamics of performance create webs of interactive relations across disciplines and historical periods.

The Structure of the Book While this book aims at historicizing evil and villainy as performance in literature and media, it does not adopt a strictly linear periodization of the different manifestations of the performative nature of villainy and evil throughout the long history of literature and media produced in the English language. Rather, this collection attempts to reflect the dynamic intersections of different cultural movements and periods in the performative framework of our studied corpora. This collection does not adopt a linear chronological periodization as such an approach conceals and represses the lingering tensions that still characterize the relationship between different works of literature and media across conventional historical periods. In this collection, we endeavor to plot—or chart—a non-linear course through a network of relations that connects the primordial absolutism of human centeredness in the scenes of temptation in Everyman to the chilling moment in a futuristic fantasy game (Mass Effect: Andromeda) where a (post)human pathfinder gazes helplessly from the window of a space station stranded on the edge of an unknown galaxy contemplating the endless void or, more probably, wondering if Commander Shepard had been able to eradicate the threat of the reapers5 back in the Milky Way. Our approach to historicity sees time as a fabric of interconnected cultural moments—or better, movements—whose dynamic web of interactive relations changes continuously according to one’s perspective. Accordingly, this collection is divided into moments that encompass the manifestations and influence of a historical or cultural period, phenomenon, or movement across time and space. The choice of the word “moments” is meant to reflect the dynamic nature of our approach to history. Responding to a work and interpreting it “is something you do” (Fish 1996, 71). It is an act you perform. An act is framed by time, space, and agency. As readers, audiences, players and critics, our experience of the history of works of literature and media

5 A race of destructive sentient machines that emerge from dark space every 50,000 years to purge organic life from the galaxy.

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is characterized by the intersections of different time frames. However, it is conventional to refer to the studied text or work as the present play, novel, etc. In addition, it is also a convention to use the present tense to relay our interpretations of these works. Interpretation is a performativeact that should be described in “the present tense of live performance” (Baldo 2008, 8). The present context of academic institutions and the power of different interpretive communities also contribute to the (academic) (in)validation of certain interpretive possibilities. Therefore, our responses to the works that belong to different historical periods are invariably framed and contextualized by the presentism of the interpretive act. This is the main reason why we chose to divide this book into moments.

Section I: The (Dis)Embodiment of Evil in Medieval and Renaissance Moments Another reason for this choice will be made clearer after we consider the use of the word “crusade” by George W. Bush and narrate and analyze an anecdote about a social media post by a Hollywood celebrity. I will demonstrate that these two narratives show that medievalism is still present in the ways we think and speak about ourselves and others. Medieval rhetoric still plagues the relationship between Islam and the West and between Muslims themselves. This is why, along with medieval and Renaissance works, this Section will also feature an article on contemporary pornography that shows how medieval fetishes about Muslim women still dominate popular media. When George W. Bush described his military campaign against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003 as “a crusade,”6 the word reverberated through Muslim and Christian communities across the world. It probably caused more outrage than the campaign itself. It was soon

6 In a 2020 article, the Daily Express deputy political editor Sam Lister referred to the pro-Brexit media campaign led by his tabloid newspaper as “a crusade.” The entire Brexit campaign was marked by the proliferation of discursive violence based on discriminatory and militarist rhetoric soaked in medieval allusions. The resurgence of the farright has (re)popularized medieval rhetoric in Britain. For more on this subject, consult Anthony Bale’s blog article “Is Brexit a Crusade?” and his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Literature of the Crusades, where he argues that the term itself is as elusive and complex today as it was in the times of the crusades.

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dismissed as “a slip of the tongue” and was never allowed to enter into acceptable political discourse again. Less than a decade later, a video of Jihadi John threatening those he called “infidel crusaders” with the most brutal medieval form of slaughter reminded the world that the relationship between two of the religions that make up important cultural forces in the English-speaking world has not been “de-medievalized.” Medieval rhetoric, symbols and images still constitute defining components of the way certain communities and individuals conceive their identity – or the identities of others. It determines how they perceive themselves and how they think they are perceived by cultural others. In the first section of this collection, the authors explore how the theme of evil forms an integral part of the notion of selfhood in English medieval and Renaissance literature. This section also attempts to investigate the role of medieval and Renaissance heritage and colonial medievalist fetishism in the twenty-first-century making and representation of the Muslim female identity in popular media. Therefore, along with works from the medieval and Renaissance literary “canon,” this section studies the representation of hijab fetishism (as a colonialist and medievalizing fetish) in twenty-first-century pornographic media. The first article in this Section of the collection is entitled “Contours of an Inherent Frame: The Underpinnings of Evil in Everyman” by Bibhash Choudhury. Everyman is a medieval play about the religious themes of sin, temptation, and salvation. This article revisits the classic morality play and attempts to reveal the role of performance in structuring its thematic framework and the identity of its main character, Everyman. It endeavors to show the performative psychological mechanics of prayers, temptation, and salvation in the play and how these mechanics contribute to the play’s archetypal structure that has been emulated by many modern plays. The practice of giving physical shape to emotions and drives on the stage (through the embodiment of the devil and the seven deadly sins by actors) reveals the performative nature of selfhood and of the psychological and ideological processes that form this concept. Diabolic evil is another archetype that continues to inspire literature and media. “If You Only Knew: Mephistopheles, Master Mirror, and the Experience of Evil” by Dustin Lovett compares The Tragic History of Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe with the multi-award-winning 2015 videogame The Witcher3: Wild Hunt. Marlowe’s play is based on an anonymous work that appeared in Germany in 1587. It relates the story of Dr. Faustus, who contracts his soul to the devil in exchange for magical

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powers. Lovett’s article explores the use of this archetypal narrative both in Marlowe’splay and in the third game in the Witcher series, which is based on a book series of the same name by the Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski. Set in a medieval-based fantasy world, the Witcher series follows the adventures of Geralt of Rivia and their impact on his world. In his article, Lovett investigates the possibilities of two performance environments, namely, the theater and electronic gaming platforms. The timeframes of many historical periods overlap as different representational technologies bring new insightful possibilities to the archetypal medieval narrative. While in the previous articles evil has a supernatural or fantasy origin, the article by Jeffrey McCambridge attempts to uncover the performative dynamics of the narrative vilification of the religious other in medieval and Renaissance chivalric literature. In his “Recognizable Patterns of Evil in Muslim Characters in Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature,” McCambridge reads the narratives of chivalric exploits against the grain and reveals the ideological undertones that jar with the seemingly harmonious and romanticized genre. The representation of the Muslim other in Western literature and media is still characteristically rife with medieval allusions. The anecdote of a certain American celebrity posting a photo of herself (on social media) wearing a niqab and a dress that does not cover her legs while claiming to be promoting multiculturalism and a Middle Eastern feminist responding to the post saying “if you wear this in my country, you will be flogged or stoned” and blaming the star’s “ignorant exoticism” for the propagation of gender ideologies that seek to return the Muslim woman to medieval times shows that much medievalism is involved in the debate about face coverings. The veil (headscarf and face-veil) is (re)emerging— or is being reinvented—as a visual symbol of Muslim female identity in the West.7 While hotly debated in some Muslim countries where such 7 The emphasis on the hijab as a visual identification of the Muslim woman, either as a

symbol of her empowerment or as a symbol of her oppression, shows that there is excessive visuality at play in the contemporary image of Islam in the West (and elsewhere). A few decades ago, it was possible for someone like Muhammad Ali (the famous boxer), who was not bearded and wore a suit, to speak about Islam in the media. Western-looking Muslims are now being sidelined in favor of more visually traditionalist Muslims. This tendency is not confined to the (mis)representation of Muslim communities in the media. The conservatives’ reaction to the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s “you ain’t black” remark also relied heavily on visuality as colored Republicans led the offensive

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debates are possible, mainstream pornography found in it a visual stereotyping fetish that attracts fans. It has become a tag on many adult websites and is sometimes presented as a clothing fetish (just like high heels, latex, or uniforms). Videos under the category of “hijab” can also have tags like Caliphate, Isis, Islam, etc. There is a disturbing amount of colonialist and medieval rhetoric involved in the reinvention of the hijab as a visual identifier of Muslim female identity in certain popular media in the West. In “Desiring Empire: The Colonial Violence of ‘Hijab Pornography,’” Ibtisam M. Abujad discusses how the manufacturing of desire in contemporary hijab erotica speaks to the racial hierarchies which, though embedded in the politics of the twenty-first century, recall the long history of the ideological denigration of Muslim lives and labor. She argues that the exploitation of the hijab in adult pornography and fetish fashion performs power dynamics which denigrate embodied Muslim womanhood and manhood by speaking to the imperial desires of the Western consumer. The Muslim other holds a significantly central position in medieval and Renaissance conceptions of evil. The final article of this Section explores another manifestation of the interconnections between Islam and evil in a number of piracy narratives from the period. In this article, Jared S. Johnson highlights the relation between piracy and converting to Islam in George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, the anonymously authored Captain Thomas Stukeley, and William Diborne’s A Christian Turned Turk. The article explores the dynamics of temptation and apostasy in depictions of English pirates of the time. As they leave Western shores and set sail, the historical pirates are absorbed by a world of narratives that makes them the embodiment of all the evils feared and hated by the Western Christian self. This article brings fresh perspectives on the themes of temptation and otherness discussed in the previous articles.

against what was labeled as Biden’s reductionist racialization of the voting process. This visuality of ethnic, religious and cultural communities is nowhere more obvious than in popular pornography (ethical pornography is still confined in its treatment of race, cultural differences and other related issues).

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Section II: Performing Moral Deformity in the Shakespearean Moment William Shakespeare is arguably the most revered and most studied of all English writers. He is most famous for his then unique and now archetypal depiction of characters in his plays. As Harold Bloom justifiably argues, “there is an overflowing element in the plays [of Shakespeare], an excess beyond representation, that is closer to the metaphor we call ‘creation’” (1998, xviii). Shakespeare created many iconic characters whose influence on English and world literature and culture is unparalleled (to put it mildly). In many critical, literary and artistic representations, these characters are turned into templates that are used to understand or fashion other characters. Writers and artists—whether they lived before or after Shakespeare—may deviate from the Shakespearean models, but they cannot go beyond them. No matter what they do with their characters, Shakespeare will find a way to haunt them (the characters and authors) with or without the help of criticism. Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus are invoked by Stephen Greenblatt to explain the tyrannical tendencies of some twenty-first-century political figures in the United States and beyond. In 2019, David Michôd depicted the life of Henry V in a movie entitled The King.8 The choice of the title, intentionally or unintentionally, reveals that Henry V can be conceived as the ultimate representation of kingship. Likewise, Shylock has the most powerful—even absolutelike—“Jewishness” that any literary character can claim. He cannot be ignored whenever any other literary or even “real” Jewish person is described or created. Even when he is not mentioned, he can be detected by any keen-eyed Shakespearean. Shylock is also a very powerful and relentlessly cunning villain both in schemes and intent, but he is just a villain. He is not the villain or even the Shakespearean villain. Shakespeare “created” many villains, but none of them comes even close to representing villainy as an absolute idea. Nevertheless, all of Shakespeare’s villains are formidable characters, and it usually takes an authorial tour de force to defeat them (an 8 The film is loosely based on Henry IV Parts One and Two and Henry V by Shakespeare. The film engages dialogically with the historical and Shakespearean ‘masternarratives.’ Many events and characters are reimagined and many of the Shakespearean lines are deftly recontextualized.

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unknown law in the case of Shylock, a secret about the birth of Macduff in the case of Macbeth, or a dream that drains the villain’s performative power in the case of Richard III). No characters are more fascinating in their relationship with the author than the Shakespearean villains. They usually defy their creator and claim a degree of authorial control over the plays through their performative powers. Eventually, the author has to introduce a twist in the events to regain control of the stage.9 The question of who the ultimate puppeteer in a play is is central to the Shakespearean moment of the history of villainy and evil. Evil Shakespearian characters—whether they were created by Shakespeare himself or by other authors—can be presumptive. They may lay claim to the plays themselves. In the White Devil by John Webster, Lodovico claims to be the author of the final scene of the play. He says: “I limb’d this night piece and it was my best” (5.6.297). Lodovico, of course, is deluded. He is the puppet of the Duke of Florence. In the plays of Webster, characters are manipulated by other characters who, in turn, are the puppets of more cunning characters. A similar pattern may be seen in the plays of Shakespeare, where different performing entities vie for control of the performative space on and off the stage. This is why it is important to study this paradigm of performative manipulation in Webster before tackling the Shakespearean villain. In the first article of this Section, Hend Hamed analyzes the character of Ferdinand in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Webster’s play dramatizes the torture and subsequent murder of the Duchess at the hand of her brother Ferdinand as a punishment for marrying her steward. In the play, Ferdinand appears to be an Oedipal lover whose Hamlet-like jealousy makes him easy prey for the incitements of his manipulative brother, the Cardinal, but he himself is a relentlessly brutal manipulator who uses Bosola to kill his sister and then denies him any reward. He also stages a charade to torture his sister and “bring her to despair” (4.1.116). In her article “The Psychological Origins of Evil: The Trickster in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi,” Hamed endeavors to explore the psychological drives and motives that form the character of Ferdinand as a villain to reveal the

9 When the villain feels most secure in his achieved status, Shakespeare strikes back by introducing a hidden card that changes the rules of the game of performative dominance.

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multilayered nature of his personality. This article will serve as a transition to the Shakespearean realm as Ferdinand has many similarities with Shakespearean characters. Like Ferdinand, his brother the Cardinal and his minion Bosola, the villains of Shakespeare seek ultimate power. Macbeth, for example, does not only wish to know the future, but also seeks to control it. This is why he covets the secret knowledge of the weird sisters. Shakespeare created special types of characters that are associated with the dark worlds of magic and sorcery. The weird sisters in Macbeth as well as Prospero and Caliban in The Tempest are salient examples of this. In her article “A Show of Illusions: Performing Villainous Magic in Shakespeare’s The Tempest & Macbeth,” Lisann Anders shows that Shakespeare uses magic to experiment with the concept of power. She argues that political power is still central to the pursuits of the different characters in the two plays. At the end of the two plays, magic is rejected in favor of political stability. Shakespearean villains and tricksters do not always have magical powers or mysterious dark forces to assist them in their pursuit of power. This does not prevent them from bending the stage and everyone in and around it to their will, however. In “The Demon’s Amorous Looking Glass: Reflections on the Villain’s Performative Self-Fashioning in Richard III by William Shakespeare,” I attempt to explore the role of performative powerplay in Richard III’s ascension to the English throne and his ultimate downfall. In the play, Richard’s performative dominance and political power grow simultaneously. He uses his performative power to fashion and refashion his visual image to suit his political purposes. His theatrical power makes him a master of courtly intrigue and a skillful crowd manipulator. By exploring Richard’s manipulation of the visual dynamics of the stage, this article reveals the intertwinement between the theatrical and the political in the play. In Shakespeare’s plays, courtly intrigues usually take subtle forms that test the limits of theatrical representation. One such form is letters. Letters are frequently used as tools of deceit in Shakespeare’s plays. On stage, their very presence is disturbing. They are not accessible to everyone. They may be read or written on the stage, but the audience cannot see their content. Moreover, they can be hidden, intercepted, and falsified. They are dangerous tools of courtly intrigue whose secrecy and privacy cannot be taken for granted. In her article “‘It is his hand’: Villainy through letters in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Twelfth Night,” Sélima

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Lejri attempts to reveal the powerplays involved in the handling of letters in the Shakespearean world on and off the stage. Shakespearean court politics may help us understand recurrent philosophical questions about the nature of political power. In her article “Villainy as a facet of Nietzsche’s Wirkliche Historie prefigured in Shakespeare’s Richard II and concretized in Brecht’s Man Equals Man and The Measures Taken,” Mariem Khmiri compares Shakespeare and Brecht in the light of Nietzsche’sconcept of effective history.10 She reads Shakespeare’s dramatization of history as a preamble to the dynamic non-linear performative understanding of history that characterizes the philosophy of Nietzsche and the dystopian works of Brecht. This final article of this Section traces the influence of Shakespearean paradigms on two of the most innovative figures in Western literature and philosophy.

Section III: Language, Race, and the Dehumanization of the Evil Other in (Post)Colonial Moments Colonialism is a lingering phenomenon. It does not end after the political and military relations between the colonizing power and the colonized territory are revised and reconfigured. By studying the representation of the racial other in British and American colonial narratives, the articles of this Section do not merely analyze the vilification of the racial other but also show how the denial of voice and individuality to the evil other further dehumanizes them. “[T]ales of slavery, suppression, resistance, difference, place and responses” (Quayson 2000, 2) are also narratives of the dehumanizing racialization of moral standards. Whether represented as good or evil, the native characters are denied the individuality and agency of the European heroes and villains. The issues of race, language, and culture are also moral and aesthetic issues in colonial narratives. The racial other is a linguistic impasse. The figure of Friday is usually invoked as the prelinguistic—even prehuman—other that needs to be— or resists being11 —initiated into the world of speech by his colonizing

10 This notion and its derivative Foucauldian genealogy are akin to our conception of dynamic historicism. 11 As in Foe by J. M. Coetzee, where the silent Friday challenges both Daniel Foe’s and Susan Barton’s narratives.

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master. When they are subject to investigation or trial, their linguistic and cultural vulnerability are made visible. To be interrogated and then narrated in the language of the colonizer is to be subject to their moral and ideological standards. They cannot reclaim their stories because they do not master the language of narration. However, their linguistic and narrative absence makes them a disturbing presence that prevents the master narratives from achieving completeness. They remain discursive and narrative lacunae that threaten the integrity (pun intended) of colonial justice. One of the most intriguing convicts in American literature is Tituba. She is a slave who was interrogated and tried during the notorious Salem witch trials. The trials were a major event in colonial America that took place between February 1692 and May 1693 in the town of Salem, Massachusetts. During this period, a number of colonists, Native Americans, and African slaves were tried and executed for witchcraft. The trials are an unhealed scar in the American literary consciousness. They are the subject matter of many literary works. In her article “Tituba’s Stairway: Representations of Tituba in Historical and Fictional Texts,” Danielle Legros Georges explores the historical and fictional accounts of Tituba. She argues that while very few contemporaneous documents exist about Tituba, she is a major character in later fictional and historical accounts of the Salem witch trials. In this sense, she is made in and of the narrative. In colonial narratives, the racial other is not the only one who is dehumanized by the colonial narratives. The colonizer is also affected by the moral and political ambiguity of his situation. He is divided between the ideals of colonialist propaganda and the realities of colonial work. In his article “Colonial ‘Idea’ and ‘Work’: The Evil in Marlow’s Heart of Darkness,” Ahmet Süner studies the characters of Marlow and Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s novel. The novel relates the story of Charles Marlow’s trip to the Congo and his encounter with the colonial agent Mr. Kurtz. The story of Kurtz and the narrator’s encounter with him dispels the grand narrative of colonialism. Initially represented as a relentless pursuer of the colonial promise, the Kurtz Marlow finds is a wrecked and disillusioned man. He is at once attractive and repulsive. Marlow tries to distance himself from Kurtz, but he cannot help sounding like him. His narrative voice is not totally his own. (Pre)colonial legacies are still a crippling burden in many of the former colonies. The effects of colonialism on the former colonies are certainly devastating. However, not all the evils of colonialism came with

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it. Some predated the colonial period. The colonizing forces benefited from precolonial social injustices. They even promoted them to ensure their dominance. The result was obviously detrimental to the progress and empowerment of the socially marginalized.12 In Pakistani Panjab, feudalism and patriarchy are the reigning social paradigms. While the existing form of patriarchal feudalism was introduced under the Mughal Empire or before it, the British preserved and even promoted it. After the independence of Pakistan, the social structures established by the Mughals and promoted by colonialism did not decline or disappear. Women are still victimized by these social injustices. In her article “Caught in a Feudal Hang-Up: My Feudal Lord Mirroring a Villain and the Rebellion of a Pakistani Woman,” Humaira Riaz explores the evil legacy of colonialism and precolonial feudalism in Pakistan as depicted in Tehmina Durrani’s novel My Feudal Lord, which exposes the hypocrisies and injustices of upper-class Pakistani society. It is the autobiography of an abused Muslim wife in a very conservative society where speaking out results in more than demonizing and vilification. The male-dominated patriarchal society of Pakistani Panjab promotes inequality between genders and legitimizes abuse and injustices. Masculinity and gender roles are among the many complex concepts in contemporary culture. Questions of power, ethnicity, and morality determine the accepted masculine identities. In the United States, different ethnic communities have types of masculinity that appear in literature for all ages, even children. In her article “Good Versus Evil in Max’s Lucha Libre Adventures Series (2011–2020) by Xavier Garza,” Amy Cummins studies the performative nature of identity in Max’s Lucha Libre Adventures in the light of questions of good and evil. Cummins is interested in the cultural meanings of wrestling and examines the contested roles of Mexican American machismo under the surface of the personas of masked wrestlers. In the four books of this series for early adolescent readers, the ambiguities of masked luchadores are seen through performances of virtue, villainy, allegiances, and rivalries.

12 They are more difficult to challenge since they are represented as part of the colonized national or cultural identity.

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Section IV: Obsessed Avengers, Revenants, and Vampires in the British and American Romantic Moments The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were ages of political, cultural, and technological revolutions that transformed our understanding of the universe and of our position and role in it. Transformation and innovation may at first sight seem to be the main characteristics of the literary and cultural scene of the period. However, attitudes to the past in this long period of cultural, political, and artistic transformation are intriguing. This period witnessed the emergence of iconic evil characters and creatures that still inspire creative works. These characters and creatures share a destructive obsession with the past. The first article of this Section is entitled “Melville and Ford: Ahab and the Duke.” In this article, John Price, the critic and film director, traces the influence of Moby Dick on John Ford’s film The Searchers. Price shows that “the ambiguity of heroism and villainy is a hallmark of both American Romanticism in literature and the more modern incarnations of [these two moral and aesthetic categories] in classical Hollywood westerns.” The article shows the recurrent paradigms of hostile nature and the lonely quester in both works. It also reveals the impact of the frontier experience in shaping representations of the American character both in literature and cinema. Delving deeper into the story of Ahab and the legendary white whale, Bill Scalia offers an in-depth analysis of the creative power of Ahab’s performative language in his “Naught Beyond: A Phenomenology of Ahab’s ‘Madness Maddened.’” Herman Melville’s novel recounts the fatal journey of a whaling ship whose captain is obsessed with finding and killing the white whale that possibly bit off his leg. The captain’s vengeful rhetoric transforms the whale from a dumb brute creature to a “willed agent.” Scalia’s article is an exploration of the creative and transformative power of performative language in the novel. Transformation and obsession are also the ingredients of the eighteenth-century gothic novel The Monk by Matthew Lewis. The Monk is a novel about a demon disguised as a woman who seduces a monk. The demoness Matilda changes shapes as the monk Ambrosio’s obsession with her grows. In her article “Seductive Female Villains and Rhetoricians in The Monk and Zofloya; or, The Moor,” Hediye Özkan studies the performatives of seduction in The Monk by Matthew Lewis and Zofloya; or, The

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Moor by Charlotte Dacre. She shows the performative nature of gender in both novels and studies the demonizing of the sexual and racial other by the dominant white male culture. The depiction of demons, white whales, and other non-human—or better post-human—evil creatures in Romantic literature illustrates its intriguing relationship with the past. The rhetoric of Ahab turns Moby Dick into a willful wrongdoer who deserves punishment. Matthew Lewis’ Matilda is—in a certain sense—a revenant seeking retribution. She is a creature that has transcended the boundaries of time to avenge herself on the monk. This recurrent pattern of revenge is characteristic of much of the literary output of the period. This makes it possible to consider some human characters in realistic works as revenants. In “Dressed to Kill: Manipulating Perceived Social Class Through the Con of Clothing in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Fiction,” Sabrina Paparella studies the character of the conman in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction. These conmen are generally social upstarts who used to be seen as pariahs, misfits, and outcasts. They return in new forms to exact revenge on those who marginalized them or to obtain their long-denied object of desire. The conmen of the works of the Bronte sisters or Fitzgerald represent the gothic paradigm of the vengeful revenant, albeit in a more realistic manner. The final article of this Section continues with the realistic versions of the gothic paradigms. The archetype of the haunted house that watches and controls its dwellers is the main focus of “Supernatural Doppelgangers: Manifestations of Villainy in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights” by Tammie Jenkins. The author explores how homes in Wuthering Heights influence the behavior of their inhabitants. The latter are figuratively haunted by their homes and cannot break free from their mysterious influence.

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Section V: A World of Dark Secrets: Espionage, Silent Wars, and the Threat of Nuclear Annihilation in the Post-World War Moments The First and Second World War experiences were devastating. The number of deaths and the scale of destruction were unprecedented. The use of nuclear weapons in the Second World War proved the vulnerability of the human race. Both wars were followed by periods of apprehension and uncertainties. The peace treaties were fragile, and their provisions sowed the seeds of competition and further conflicts. The threat of another destructive war was always looming on the horizon. Peace reigned on the surface, but espionage, covert actions, and secret operations were carried out by the competing powers. Moreover, post-World War societies were far from peaceful. The crime was rife. The 1920s and 1930s as well as the Cold War and post-Cold War eras witnessed the emergence of transnational organized crime that still plagues our world. The World Wars and their aftermaths have revealed that destructive urges and ideologies cannot be fully eradicated or kept in check. The threat of nuclear annihilation is heightened by the uncontrollable incidents that took place in nuclear sites such as Chernobyl. This gave rise to a genre called nuclear fiction that depicts the horrors of historical and fictitious (but possible) nuclear accidents. In her article “Debating ‘the Nuclear Evil’ in U.S. Nuclear Fiction,” Inna Sukhenko discusses the representation of nuclear disasters in post-Chernobyl American nuclear fiction. She shows how performance increases the vividness and imminence of the imagined apocalyptic worlds of post-Chernobyl nuclear fiction. The rise of dystopian fiction is another manifestation of the fear and pessimism that reign in the post-war era. George Orwell’s 1984 holds a central position in the history of the genre. The novel depicts the life of Winston Smith under the totalitarian regime of Big Brother. In his article “The Evil Gaze of the State and the Post-Human Interrogator in 1984,” Sadok Bouhlila focuses on the character of O’Brien and, in particular, his role in the interrogation and reconversion of Smith. The article examines how the acts of torture and brutality performed by the post-human interrogator gave the novel added critical power in an age when the spirit of man was threatened from all sides by mass conditioning and the distortion of truth.

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Hypervigilance and suspicion are key elements of the post-war world. Human nature is no longer seen as virtuous or noble. The human subject is seen as prone to evil tendencies. The rise of detective fiction reflects this distrust of human nature. The works of Agatha Christie and Gladys Mitchell are very salient examples of this tendency. In her article “Wicked Speech and Evil Acts: Performativity as Discourse and Murder as Responsibility in Curtain—Poirot’s Last Case (1975) and Speedy Death (1929),” Federica Crescentini attempts to study the performative nature of evil in two inter-/post-war detective novels. Crescentini discusses the investigation process and shows how forensic performatives structure the story of the crime. Truth as a narrative is always craving a linear completeness13 that is constantly challenged by the clever discourses and acts of the unrevealed criminal. The issue of the relationship between peace, safety, and freedom is still debated in many political, academic, and philosophical circles. Central to this ongoing debate is the question of how it may be possible to keep the dangerous elements of a free society in check while also protecting it from outside threats. Imagining futuristic societies that struggle to survive and keep their members away from danger is characteristic of contemporary works of science fiction. In his article “Host of Otherness: The Trope of the Urban Space Habitat and the Concept of Evil in Contemporary Science Fiction Media,” Mark Filipowich studies the representation of the futuristic space megalopolis in a number of films and videogames set in outer space. These works depict communities of humans and alien races living side by side in huge space stations, usually protected by a human hero. The article studies the allegories that pervade these science-fiction narratives and focuses on the gigantic space habitat as an allegory for the contemporaneous human metropolis.

13 Once the detective can piece together a powerful linear narrative, he should be able

to force everyone to submit to it. However, legal justice is proven to be less cunning than the villains of these two novels.

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Section VI: Good Criticism of Evil Art: Studying Evil in Revisionist Academic and Cultural Moments In the multidisciplinary and multicultural academic world, the concept of evil is problematic. The Manichean worldview is now seen as questionable. Academics generally avoid moral categories when they study works of literature and media. However, there seems to be a lingering but subtle moralism that still determines their responses to certain works. Certain literary texts and media works are still considered evil, even in this seemingly post-ethical academic condition. The final section of this book illustrates the new revisionist tendencies of addressing evil themes and villainous characters in academia and shows some of their limits and potentialities. This section starts with an article that challenges the aesthetic and moral binaries that have reigned for a long time. It reflects the post-binary spirit of contemporary academia. In her “Busting Binaries: Beyond Evil in Youth Literature, a Consideration of Emezi’s Pet,” E. F. Schraeder analyzes the metaphors of the angelical and the monstrous in this novel by Akwaeke Emezi. Schraeder explores the multilayered allegories of Pet, where the revisionist spirit of contemporary (meta)art and (meta)literature is embodied by every detail of the novel, from the names of the characters and places to the unconventional techniques of the narration. Aligned with the post-binary spirit of contemporary academia, Schraeder’s article reflects (on) the complexities of contemporary (meta)aesthetic approaches to evil in literature. The lines that used to separate the categories of good and evil are no longer taken for granted. The moral and artistic standards of representing heroes and villains are revisited by writers, artists, historians, and critics. The revisionist problematizing of the notion of villainy is epitomized by the 2019 film Joker. In his “On the Performance of Villainy and Evil in Joker (2019),” Kelvin Ke Jinde deals with the performative aspects of the film and how they contribute to the refashioning of the iconic villain of the early twentieth century. Cinema has changed our understanding and appreciation of the themes and narrative techniques of crime fiction. The new medium certainly reshaped the genre. It provided innovative authors and directors with representational possibilities that were unthinkable before. Many of the works of the director Alfred Hitchcock are milestones in the history of

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cinema. Many of his films changed the manners in which the art of cinema is practiced or appreciated. One of these films is Rope (1948). Inspired by the 1924 Leopold-Loeb murder case, Hitchcock’s first technicolor movie explores the proposition that murder is a privileged art. In her article “‘Making Our Work of Art a Masterpiece’: The Aesthetics of Evil in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope,” Brennan Thomas examines the unorthodox Hitchcockian techniques featured in the film, from its exceptionally long takes (ranging from four to ten minutes of screen time) to several disguised cuts achieved via close-ups of darkened set objects or costumes. Although incongruous with Rope’s more conventional storytelling elements, these daring methods synthesize the film’s ghoulish themes of consumption, decay, and death, evoking feelings of uncomfortable voyeuristic curiosity as Hitchcock toys with the aesthetic possibilities of murder for its own sake. The deliberate neutralization of morality in the film reveals the challenges of a post-ethical aestheticism. The article explains the implication of the director’s aesthetic choices on the story, its theme, and how we perceive it as spectators. Despite the academic questioning of moral categories, some books are still considered evil by certain critics. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis is a case in point. The text of the novel has been condemned as evil by many critics due to the appalling acts of cruelty, murder and mutilation depicted in it. In the final article of the book, “Textual Evil and Performative Precarity in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho,” Nicky Gardiner analyzes early critical responses to Ellis’ controversial novel. He shows how the current status of the book has been affected—or even damaged—by the moralism of these responses. Even in a post-ethical academic context, the legacy of early moralism still determines the status of certain works.

References Auslander, Philip. 2003. “General introduction.” In Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by P. Auslander, 1–24. London: Routledge. Baldo, Jonathan. 2008. “The Greening of WILL Shakespeare.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3 (2): 1–30. Bale, Anthony. 2019. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades, edited by A. Bale, 1–8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bataille, George. 2012. Literature and Evil. London: Penguin Classics.

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Bloom, Harold. 1998. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. London: Routledge. Chinna, Stephen. 2003. Performance: Recasting the Political in Theatre and Beyond. Oxford: Peter Lang. Davis, Tracy C., ed. 2008. The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fish, Stanley. 1996. “Literature in the Reader Affective Stylistics.” In ReaderResponse Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, edited by J. Tompkins, 71–100. London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fish, Stanley. 1967. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Quayson, Ato. 2000. Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? Cambridge: Polity Press.

Contents

Part I The (Dis)Embodiment of Evil in Medieval and Renaissance Moments 1

2

3

4

5

Contours of an Inherent Frame: The Underpinnings of Evil in Everyman Bibhash Choudhury

3

If You Only Knew: Mephistopheles, Master Mirror, and the Experience of Evil Dustin Lovett

15

Recognizable Patterns of Evil in Muslim Characters in Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature Jeffrey McCambridge

37

Desiring Empire: The Colonial Violence of “Hijab Pornography” Ibtisam M. Abujad

55

Villains of the High Seas: Apostasy and Piracy in George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, The Anonymously Authored Captain Thomas Stukeley, and William Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk Jared S. Johnson

71

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Part II 6

7

8

9

10

12

13

Performing Moral Deformity in the Shakespearean Moment

The Psychological Origins of Evil: The Trickster in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi Hend Hamed A Show of Illusions: Performing Villainous Magic in Shakespeare’s The Tempest & Macbeth Lisann Anders The Demon’s Amorous Looking Glass: Reflections on the Villain’s Performative Self-Fashioning in Richard III by William Shakespeare Nizar Zouidi “It Is His Hand”: Villainy Through Letters in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Twelfth Night Sélima Lejri Villainy as a Facet of Nietzsche’s Wirkliche Historie Prefigured in Shakespeare’s Richard II and Concretized in Brecht’s Man Equals Man and the Measures Taken Mariem Khmiri

Part III 11

CONTENTS

91

105

121

139

161

Language, Race and the Dehumanization of the Evil Other in (Post)Colonial Moments

Tituba’s Stairway: Representations of Tituba in Historical and Fictional Texts Danielle Legros Georges

181

Colonial “Idea” and “Work”: The Evil in Marlow’s Heart of Darkness Ahmet Süner

203

Caught in a Feudal Hang-Up: My Feudal Lord Mirroring a Villain and the Rebellion of a Pakistani Woman Humaira Riaz

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CONTENTS

14

Good Versus Evil in Max’s Lucha Libre Adventures Series (2011–2020) by Xavier Garza Amy Cummins

Part IV

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243

Obsessed Avengers, Revenants and Vampires in the British and American Romantic Moments 263

15

Melville and Ford: Ahab and the Duke John Price

16

Naught Beyond: A Phenomenology of Ahab’s “Madness Maddened” Bill Scalia

281

Seductive Female Villains and Rhetoricians in The Monk and Zofloya; or, The Moor Hediye Özkan

303

17

18

19

Dressed to Kill: Manipulating Perceived Social Class Through the Con of Clothing in Nineteenthand Early Twentieth-Century Fiction Sabrina Paparella Supernatural Doppelgangers: Manifestations of Villainy in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights Tammie Jenkins

Part V

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A World of Dark Secrets: Espionage, Silent Wars, and the Threat of Nuclear Annihilation in the Post-World War Moments

20

Debating ‘the Nuclear Evil’ in U.S. Nuclear Fiction Inna Sukhenko

21

The Evil Gaze of the State and the PostHuman Interrogator in 1984 Sadok Bouhlila

22

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Wicked Speech and Evil Acts: Performativity as Discourse and Murder as Responsibility in Curtain—Poirot’s Last Case (1975) and Speedy Death (1929) Federica Crescentini

351

373

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23

CONTENTS

Host of Otherness: The Trope of the Urban Space Habitat and the Concept of Evil in Contemporary Science Fiction Media Mark Filipowich

Part VI 24

25

26

27

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Good Criticism of Evil Art: Studying Evil in Revisionist Academic and Cultural Moments

Busting Binaries: Beyond Evil in Youth Literature, a Consideration of Emezi’s Pet E. F. Schraeder

431

On the Performance of Villainy and Evil in Joker (2019) Kelvin Ke Jinde

445

“Making Our Work of Art a Masterpiece”: The Aesthetics of Evil in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope Brennan Thomas

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Textual Evil and Performative Precarity in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho Nicky Gardiner

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Ibtisam M. Abujad is a doctoral candidate and instructor of English at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her research focuses on the intersections between race, gender, and transnationalism in contemporary Muslim cultural productions. Her most recent scholarly work can be found in Muslim American Hyphenations: Cultural Production and Hybridity in the Twenty-First Century (Lexington, 2021). Abujad is also a poet, with creative works published in a number of literary journals, including Rigorous, The Nasiona, Cream City Review, and The Pointed Circle, among others. Lisann Anders holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in English and American Literature from the University of Zurich, Switzerland and an M.A. in Screenwriting from NUI Galway. She has taught several courses on Shakespeare and organized the Zurich Shakespeare Festival in 2016. Her research interests include Shakespeare, popular culture, and film. Lisann is the author of Communication in Postmodern Urban Fiction: The Shadow of Imagination (Cambridge Scholars, 2020), and she has published several articles in volumes focusing primarily on films and literary movie adaptations. Two of her published works include “Making Her Own Destiny: Disney’s Diverse Females” and “The Normal Abnormal: Identity Formation in the Circus Space.” Her most recent project is an edited collection of essays on The Umbrella Academy, which will be published with McFarland.

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Sadok Bouhlila is an Associate Professor in English literature in the Faculty of Letters, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Manouba, Tunisia, where he still teaches. His main areas of interest include modern fiction, literary theory, utopian and dystopian studies, science fiction, and posthumanism. He published Modern Dystopian Fiction: Genesis, Typology, Evaluation in 1990 and co-edited a book titled Utopias in 2010. He has also published a number of articles in local and international journals on a range of issues, including Orwellian studies, science fiction, Derrida, and cultural studies. His forthcoming publications include a re-appraisal of Orwell’s main works in light of the Arab Spring. Bibhash Choudhury is Professor in English at Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam, India. His publications include English Social and Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2005, 2019), Beyond Cartography: The Contemporary South Asian Novel in English (Papyrus, 2011), and Reading Postcolonial Theory: Key Texts in Context (Routledge, 2016). Federica Crescentini obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Foreign Languages and Literature, then a Master’s degree in Languages for Translation in 2015, both from the University of Urbino, Italy. Currently, she is an independent scholar, and she has participated at the International Agatha Christie Conference (Cambridge, 2017) and at the conference “Urbinoir 2019” (Urbino, 2019). Amy Cummins, Ph.D. works as Professor of English in the Department of Literatures and Cultural Studies, College of Liberal Arts, at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley campus in Edinburg, Texas. Dr. Cummins wrote the chapter “Teaching Texas Borderlands Young Adult Literature” in Teaching Young Adult Literature (MLA, 2020), part of the MLA’s Options for Teaching series. Mark Filipowich is a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada researching the ideological processes embedded in architecture and urban design. He studies the cultural representations of the city in the contemporary context of architectural postmodernity. Nicky Gardiner is an ECR researching new materialism and the corpse in contemporary literature, having received his AHRC-funded Ph.D. on the same topic from the University of Huddersfield in 2020. His research interests include body theory, poststructuralism, posthumanism, and material philosophy in contemporary literature and theory. Nicky is

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currently working on his monograph Dead as a Doornail: New Materialisms and The Corpse in Contemporary Fiction and as a Learning Developer at the University of Newcastle. Danielle Legros Georges is a writer, translator, academic, and author of several books of poetry, including The Dear Remote Nearness of You (Barrow Street Press, 2016), winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motten book prize. She directs the Lesley University MFA program in Creative Writing. Her awards include fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boston Foundation, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. In 2015 she was appointed Boston’s second Poet Laureate. Hend Hamed is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Ain Shams University, Egypt, and is currently working at the Arab Open University, Kuwait. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in 2010 and 2014, respectively. She is the author of a number of articles published in journals worldwide. Tammie Jenkins holds a Doctorate degree from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Dr. Jenkins’s recent publications include “Bearing Witness to a Peculiar Institution: A Gendered Reading of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ” (Salem Press, 2020) and “Reading, Singing, and Viewing Rape: Uncovering Hidden Messages of Manhood and Womanhood in Popular Culture” in Taboo: Journal of Culture and Education. Dr. Jenkins currently works as a special education teacher in a local school system. She enjoys cooking, reading, and traveling in her leisure time. Jared S. Johnson is an Associate Professor of English at Thiel College, a private liberal arts college in Greenville, Pennsylvania. He has written on English Renaissance drama, early modern cultural studies, and film and media adaptations of Shakespeare. Jared received his Ph.D. in English from Stony Brook University, New York, and wrote his dissertation on English stage representations of service and servitude during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. Kelvin Ke Jinde teaches in the Department of Media and Communication at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China. His working experiences include teaching at the Singapore Institute of Technology,

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LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore. His research interests are East Asia and Southeast Asian cinema, cultural representation and identity, and media practice. He is particularly interested in examining the intersections between history, heritage, and screen cultures. As a media practitioner, his creative practices lie within practice-based research and video production. He is particularly interested in place and landscapes. He has also exhibited his digital shorts at various international film festivals. Mariem Khmiri graduated in 2012 with the degree of agrégée from the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Tunis, where she also gained considerable teaching experience. She currently teaches full-time at the Higher Institute of Applied Studies in Humanities of Sbeitla, University of Kairouan (Tunisia). She obtained her Ph.D. in Shakespeare with honors in 2019 from the University of Manouba (Tunisia). Her areas of expertise principally cover the question of Shakespeare as a precursor of the literature and philosophy of the absurd. She has published multiple academic articles on literary criticism, comparative literature, education, and cultural studies in international journals and also contributed to a grammar book for foreign students of Arabic titled Arabic Grammar: The Root System, published in 2015 by Irfan Publishing. Sélima Lejri is a Lecturer in English and American Literature and Literary History at the University of Humanities and Social Science, Tunis. She graduated from the University of Tunis and obtained a Master’s degree (1998) and a Ph.D. (2005) in Renaissance drama from the University of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her research interests include Greek and early modern drama, religious and cultural life in Renaissance England and anthropology. Dustin Lovett is a Ph.D. candidate in the Comparative Literature program at the University of California Santa Barbara. His current research focuses on the connections between the development of Early Modern Faustian literature and changing attitudes toward the scientific status of magic throughout the period. However, his research interests include the whole breadth of Faustian literature in English, French, and German, as well as Weimar journalism and the theory and practice of translation. Jeffrey McCambridge is a Ph.D. candidate at Ohio University, where he studies late medieval and early modern literature, focusing primarily on

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presentations and performances of Islamic alterity in the West and graphic depictions of Islam and Muslims. He received his MA from IUPUI (Indianapolis, Indiana), where he worked for two years in the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies on The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, Volume III (Kent State University Press, 2017), and he also has a chapter in New Directions in Early Modern English Drama (De Gruyter, 2020). Dr. Hediye Özkan teaches in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Aksaray University, Turkey. Her areas of expertise are nineteenth-century British and American literature, life writing, women writers, activism, and intersectional theory. She is an Associate Editor of Watchung Review and is currently working on an edited book project on marginalized women and work in British and American literature and media. Sabrina Paparella is a writer and editor who works in digital media. She received a B.A. in English Literature from UC Riverside in 2012 and completed an MA in English Literature from Claremont Graduate University, California in 2014. Her primary areas of interest are graphic novels, manga, children’s and young adult literature, and folklore. She is from Los Angeles, California, where she currently resides. John Price has both a professional and academic background in film and literature. He has a Ph.D. in Film and Literature from Northern Illinois University and a B.A. in English and Communications from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He also has over twenty years of film and television production experience as a producer, director, scriptwriter, and videographer. His published works include “Traces of Utopia in A Man for All Seasons ” in Literature/Film Quarterly (2019), “Modernizing Augustan Satire on Screen: Gulliver’s Travels (1996)” in Jonathan Swift and Philosophy (Lexington, 2017), and “Early American Literature Meets Classic Hollywood: The Scarlet Letter (1934)” in Poli-Femo: Letteratura e Arti (2016). He is currently a faculty member in the English department at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Dr. Humaira Riaz is a faculty member in the Department of English at City University of Science & Information Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan. Her research interests are diaspora literature, feminism, comparative literature, racism, and Islamophobia. She has published a number of articles on these subjects, including “Islamophobia: Literature Review of its Definitions and Early Twenty First Century Approximations” and

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“Inner Alienation: Diasporic Consciousness in Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron.” Bill Scalia has published essays on literature and film in the journals Religion and Literature, Literature/Film Quarterly, and The Mark Twain Annual, and contributed a chapter on Ingmar Bergman for the anthology Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema (Cambridge Scholars, 2009). He also edited the anthology Ralph Waldo Emerson (Bloom’s Classic Critical Views) (Chelsea House, 2008). Dr. Scalia teaches writing and literature at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland. E. F. Schraeder is an Ethicist, a Poet, and a Speculative Fiction Writer. Dr. Schraeder is the Author of Liar: Memoir of a Haunting (forthcoming, Omnium Gatherum, 2021), Ghastly Tales of Gaiety and Greed (Omnium Gatherum, 2020), and two poetry chapbooks. Semi-finalist in the 2019 Charlotte Mew Chapbook Contest, Dr. Schraeder’s creative work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Birthing Monsters, Dark Moon Digest, Mystery Weekly Magazine, Dark Voices, The Feminist Wire, Lavender Review, and others. A former philosophy professor, Dr. Schraeder holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. emphasizing applied ethics. Dr. Schraeder’s non-fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Vastarien: A Literary Journal, Radical Teacher, the ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Blog, and other venues. Inna Sukhenko is a visiting researcher at the Environmental Humanities Hub at Helsinki University, Finland, and a researcher at Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, Ukraine. Her academic interests include narrative studies, nuclear fiction, nuclear non-fiction, nuclear criticism, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities. Her special interest lies in the literary energy narrative within ecocritical studies and energy humanities. She defended her Ph.D. at Dnipro National University, Ukraine. She has contributed to international projects on ecocriticism, environmental literature studies, and energy humanities. She is among the contributors to the Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (Routledge, 2019). Ahmet Süner is a Turkish scholar and an Assistant Professor in English Language and Literature at Ya¸sar University, Izmir, Turkey. He has two PhDs, one in Comparative Literature (2006, University of Southern California), the other in Structural Engineering (1999, Duke University).

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He has a record of a wide range of publications on different subjects, including Victorian literature and colonialism. Brennan Thomas is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Francis University, Loretto, Pennsylvania and directs the university’s writing center. She has published scholarly articles on the social, political, and consumerist elements of the films Casablanca, A Christmas Story, Bambi, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, as well as the television series South Park. Nizar Zouidi is an Assistant Professor of English language and literature in the Department of Education at the Higher Institute of Energy Sciences and Technology, Gafsa, Tunisia. He currently teaches in the Department of English in the College of Arts at the University of Hail, Saudi Arabia. In Tunisia, he taught in the Department of English for a number of years as a lecturer, and when the new Department of Education was established, he moved there to help. After the first batch of students graduated, he moved to the University of Hail to start his international teaching career. Nizar holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Manouba, Tunisia. His main area of research is Renaissance drama, specifically the theatrical representation(s) of evil in the early modern period. He has published a number of academic works on the subject and attended conferences and seminars worldwide.

PART I

The (Dis)Embodiment of Evil in Medieval and Renaissance Moments

CHAPTER 1

Contours of an Inherent Frame: The Underpinnings of Evil in Everyman Bibhash Choudhury

The circumstances that operated to orient the emotive and moral purposefulness of Everyman were not subsumed by as straitjacketed a moral paradigm as is often taken to be.1 Thomas Van Laan, for instance, argued that Everyman’s “prayers are ejaculatory, restrained by his ignorance of spiritual life” (Van Laan 1963, 471). In such a framing of Everyman’s mobility toward a corrected course there is an insistent and marked emphasis on the teleological imperative of the moral design within which he is sought to be so placed. While it is a commonplace that Everyman relies on the conditions of allegory for effective reception and appreciation, the themes that are presented through the structure of the play are symbolic insofar as their functionality is concerned. The characters are, in such a processed reading plane, seen as representatives of conditions, states, or figurative elaborations of otherwise abstract ideas. 1 Author’s note: Insights drawn from my edition of the text of Everyman (Choudhury 2014) have been made use of in the writing of this article.

B. Choudhury (B) Gauhati University, Guwahati Assam, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_1

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By extension and implication these figurative transformations are physically shaped to encompass the baggage/s of certain ideologies. Moreover, collectively, a particular worldview is sought to be conveyed through the marshaling of these symbolic resources—one that was comprehensible to the medieval audience. Such a positioning of the thematic dimensions of Everyman is interestingly placed because it is ordinarily assumed that metaphorical or symbolic language would be less intelligible than mere literal rendering; the structure of medieval society, at least that segment that attended these performances or constituted the target audience of plays like Everyman, was stratified in a way that relied on a particular pattern of education, an education that was programmed to especially address the spiritual side of life. Various agencies were mobilized to cater to this condition: the pulpit, or more specifically the sermon, the emblem books, the traveling monks and friars and their missionary progress, the stained glass images in the churches and cathedrals, the articulation of Biblical narratives through different media like saints’ lives, and the promotion of Christian ideals through religious literature are some of the agencies that contributed toward the effective dissemination of spirituality in the lives of medieval people. This pervasiveness, however, was controlled by its own local logic, for where a particular set of agencies functioned suitably, the same may not have held good for other areas as well. The best example of this situation is exemplified by the way the mystery cycles operated. While mystery cycles relied (like morality plays) on a very careful cultivation of visibility or visual appeal, it was definitely tailored to suggest the local flavor through a proper incorporation of incidental yet significant detail. This is perhaps one of the reasons for the subtle variations in the treatment of the same story in different cycles. By the time morality plays like Everyman started engaging its audiences’ attention, “visual imagination” had already consolidated into a very effective mechanism through which to transfer the otherwise abstract concepts and ideas. In the case of the mystery cycles there already existed a pregiven framework, essentially Biblical, which provided the audience an apparatus to recognize and place the symbolic within the known storylines. In that sense, morality plays represent a more evolved state in the history of English theater, for here the playwright was required to devise a storyline that formulated the spiritual issues through an intelligible but non-scriptural presentation. Seen thus, plays like The Castle of Perseverance or Mankind are formatted to be non-scriptural in that they do not directly adopt an existing Biblical narrative for the purpose of spiritual

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storytelling. The import of both mystery and morality plays remained basically the same—to engage the medieval mind’s attention in terms of a given Christian worldview. The role of the visual imagination, in this context, was immense. The concepts of the plays were such that the audiences were expected to imaginatively picturize the story, even though the personifications used for the purpose were sometimes quite complicated. When Death makes his entry in Everyman the audience obviously just did not confine the idea of death to the physical appearance of the actor playing the part but also contributed themselves to the visualization. This understanding was conditioned by various factors such as scriptural knowledge of the viewer, the idea of death vis-a-vis salvation, the ferocity of death as the annihilation of physical existence, death as the mere doorway toward freedom, death as facilitator of spiritual liberty, death as darkness, and death as the consequence of sin, among others. Depending on the viewers’ ecclesiastical or theological orientation, this visual reconstruction of death would be different. The allegorical condition that is so essential to the conception of morality plays makes it imperative that the audience respond to this feature adequately, without which the very edifice of the genre would collapse. In Everyman, the visualization of materialism—the character of Goods, for instance—must have been extremely textured, for it implied not just the pursuit of material comfort or physical pleasures but also involved an understanding of the consequences of such a pursuit. In this context, J. L. Styan comments: “Inclusiveness was a fundamental prerequisite of the morality play experience, and its allegorical mode, constantly inviting comparisons that were extensions of the material, permitted the spectator to extend his viewpoint and expand his mind” (Styan 1996, 49). It is therefore necessary to examine the function of the allegorical mode in the context of conventions that the medieval mind had grown accustomed to, and in terms of the design such an enterprise was supposed to engage. Everyman, for instance, simultaneously represents the species of humankind, epitomizing the qualities that are associated with man (such a process was necessary for the identification of the viewer) and also stands as an individual specimen, one whose troubles are not necessarily the same as the viewer’s, so that the allegorical engagement facilitates the both identification and distancing at the same time. The allegory functions at another level also: all the characters are part of Everyman, they are externally stimulated to suggest the condition of conflict and his account-book implies that the responses of the others are determined by

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his behavior. In other words, the other characters (excluding God and Death) emanate from him; but then, the allegory is organized in a way that shows the independence of these characters, who are not subject to his dictates. So, while they are, from one perspective, parts of him, they also possess—both in dramatic and thematic terms—an autonomy that adds another aspect to the conceptualization of the central direction of the play. The generic pressure perhaps contributes to the way in which the symbolic overtones are engaged in Everyman. Although, as a morality play, Everyman submits to the symbolic orientation that essentializes the class, it presents a fascinating polemic of the virtue/vice binarism to focus on the status of the protagonist’s spiritual condition in the light of material aggrandizement. The arrival of Death and his first interaction with Everyman sees a man-about-the-world, quite blissfully engrossed in the life-pattern he has framed for himself. We see this in the query about Everyman’s movement that comes both as a poser, as well as a mark of indignation: Everyman, stand still; whither art thou going Thus gaily? Hast thou thy Maker forgeet? (lines 85–86)

The gay Everyman, so conditioned by his materiality, is not just a gloss that he has to discard. Rather, this is the crucially evident emblem of the evil disposition that underpins the human predicament, elasticized here to project a kind of ignorance of the sudden call to play out God’s command. Seemingly taken unawares, Everyman, however, does not succumb readily to the call; he, typically foreshadowing the shadowy selves that mark out craftier incarnates of evil, buys time with Death. Such a locating of evil, underpinned herein to the apparent moral design of the play, however, has not received adequate critical attention. A view such as Lawrence Ryan’s in “Doctrine and Dramatic Structure in Everyman”, where he standardizes the idea that Everyman “is conceived as a didactic work under a dramatic form” (Ryan 1957, 722) is part of the critical writing on this medieval play where the contours of the moral frame have been sought to skirt clear of the question of evil in the text. The cloaking of the deeper implication of evil is brought about by two important tropes that function as part of the moral arithmetic in the play. The first is that of responsibility. Responsibility is projected as one of the major issues in Everyman. As Everyman tries to recruit companions for his journey he comes to realize that he cannot share his responsibility. Goods, which

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so favorably facilitated his comfortable earthly life, refuses to give him company; in fact, none of his “companions” are willing to go with him. The morality framework drew attention to the importance of the individual’s accountability for his deeds. In the context of the times that generated and nurtured morality plays the concept of responsibility was intrinsically bound up with the concept of religion. Everyman’s growth is also related to his coming to terms with his awareness of what religiosity entails. To draw upon Jacques Derrida’s framing of this paradigm, religion “is responsibility or it is nothing at all. Its history derives its sense entirely from the idea of a passage to responsibility” (Derrida 1995, 2). The design of the play is such that Everyman comes to recognize the potentiality of responsibility only when he places himself within the ambit of the religious condition that demands his passage through death. One implication of Everyman’s wantonness (which, incidentally is not shown but presumably is characteristic of his existence till the time of Death’s summoning) is that he has not really been responsible. Responsibility in Everyman’s case emerges in a changed connotation following his transformation—a change occasioned not by will, but by the realization that the others have nothing to do with his journey; in this sense, his awareness functions as the condition informing his responsibility. This situation of responsibility as a necessary ingredient in the moral mix places the question of individual judgment within the axis of a higher order to which Everyman is potentially subject. In that context, it is not unbecoming in such an argument to show the scheme of things take over the individual’s choice-making capacity. If this worldview is taken as a form of conditioning, then the responsibility paradigm can be framed thus: it is not that Everyman was not certain of his position prior to the summoning by Death, but only an interactive movement through relationships that he valued so much earlier led him to reconfigure his sense of obligation anew. With a changed view of the life-system there is a simultaneous re-setting of values. The comfortable material life that was so valuable to him cannot be part of the spiritual exercise his is enjoined to undertake; nor can his earthly friends go with him, for after all, the individual must bear his/her share alone. Even in such a spiritually ordered neatness, the fault-lines that subsist in the individual/community set-up surface all too visibly. It is in this context that the character of Knowledge acquires significance. Knowledge can awaken the individual’s lost spiritual moorings but cannot go along; Knowledge watches Everyman descend but does not enter the grave. In Everyman responsibility is devised as an ethical position—for once

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Everyman recognizes the value of his Good Deeds, he also comes to value the importance of owning up for things he did. It is interesting to note that Good Deeds is extremely weak at the beginning of the encounter with Everyman, and while there is no corresponding contrast called “Bad Deeds” the weakness suggests the overwhelming indulgence of irresponsibility. For Everyman, being responsible also means being morally brave; it becomes, on acceptance of the inevitability of the journey with Death an acknowledged and principled choice. Here, when it comes to the question of acceptance of the design, the fore-laid plan that bespeaks of his responsibility, we see the architectonic play of evil resituate the morality paradigm again. Unlike modern representations of the moral dilemma where characters are more assiduously placed—Louis MacNeice’s One for the Grave: A Modern Morality Play (1967) is one example—Everyman’s positioning within the moral fabric of responsibility is so designed that there appears to be little scope to engage with his personal worldview, if any, outside the larger orientation which seals his track toward a divinely determined state. His responsibility, thus, is conditioned by the expected conformity to the sequence of earmarked actions which his adherence is supposed to emblematize. In MacNeice’s representation, it is interesting to see how the process of delineation is culled to make the forms of address clear at the very outset: The basic pattern, however, the story line, follows that of the medieval Everyman and must on no account be sacrificed. This means that in production a clear delicate balance must be preserved between its primary content, which is serious, and the revue or music hall elements (sometimes pretty near slapstick) which are introduced not primarily for their own sake but for their satirical purposes, the modern Everyman’s world being one which cannot be properly treated without satire. (MacNeice 1967, 14)

What the twentieth-century environment serves to facilitate for MacNeice in terms of the adopted parameters for representation with satire being the undercutting device is, in essence, the underpinned faultline inherent in the medieval version of Everyman that he can now capitalize upon as a writer re-making the text for a modern audience. Even as the “primary content” which is offered in its “serious” form finds its performance space, the scope for the questioning of the fissures in that articulated world surfaces with remarkable intensity in the modern world.

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The satirical dimension of MacNeice’s rendering opens up the potential which housed those aspects of the evil worldview that wrought Everyman as she sought to work his way out of the divine diktat. The couching of the situation in which he is placed upon the arrival of Death within the matrix of responsibility, for example, makes it quite difficult for Everyman to find a way out of the chosen predicament. It is worth pursuing this in a more sustained vein especially because of the tighter restrictive environment where he is programmed to chart a pre-determined path. Seen as an adherent, Everyman fits the bill of the returnee whose submission to the format laid down for him comes to epitomize the classic devout in action. For this logic to work, the reductionist lens which visualizes Everyman as an individual manifestation of a generic pattern leaves little scope for him to deviate. Interestingly, however, it is this crucial tightening of the barricade of the moral prison-house that holds the underpinned evil orientation to which Everyman is so potentially subject. When Death lays down the terms of his departure, the incredulous Everyman does not even consider himself ready for the purpose: Full unready I am such reckoning to give I know thee not: what messenger art thou? (lines 113–114)

Everyman’s dismissal of Death at this first meeting borders on both nonchalance and a kind of arrogance that stems from his confidence in his ability to sustain himself the way he is, without any worry. What is more interesting, however, is his prioritization of his own life-route at that given time, for he refuses to accede to the “messenger” on two counts: one, he is not prepared to give any “reckoning” and second, he is protective about his privacy for which the opening up of the self to persons unknown would be a violation of his own dignity. It becomes apparent, soon after, as he is compelled to submit to the structure of the divine, that this bombast will not suffice for him, his adversary is not to be tackled by refusal. Once he realizes that Death cannot be kept at bay, Everyman tries every tactic he has at his disposal or can think of to outsmart the destiny that awaits him. The underpinnings of evil in Everyman does not give way to a divine orientation as in evidence because of the manner in which the thematic engagement is wrought through the fabric of faith. From the situation at the beginning where Everyman finds himself confronted by Death to the very end where he is seen to have transformed himself to the man of faith, there is an insistent irony which is not wished away by the

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apparent moral design. The question of faith, especially the final working out of the moral logic that guides it in the play, needs to examined here. Everyman’s faith finds a new connotation following the rejection of his offer by his companions to accompany him on his journey. We could also say that his faith is seen to have been restored because he comes to situate himself in the context of his friends, especially those that he believed in. In the conventional reading, this marks for him a re-examination of the very condition of belief. If we grant that his awareness of spiritual life leads him to accept his new identity as God’s chosen it also inaugurates the affirmation of his faith. True religiosity, in Everyman’s case consists in the maturity of his inner attitude through which he is able to contextualize his loss of life in terms of his faith. This position does not quite address the marks of desire to subvert Death in which Everyman is continuously engaged, well until the path of faith offers him the justification to submit to it entirely. When he descends to his grave, Everyman submits himself completely to God, which he does with full knowledge and in faith: Into my hands, Lord, my soul I commend; Receive it, Lord, that it be not lost. As thou me boughtest, so me defend, And save me from the fiend’s boast, That I may appear with that blessed host That shall be saved at the day of doom. (lines 880–85)

The inevitability of the journey, which he was trying to prevent initially and then postpone, is here re-presented as the passage toward salvation. “Into thy hands, Lord, my soul I commend” (880)—this is a palpable indication of Everyman’s submission to his faith. Although this admission comes at the very end of the play, the design of Everyman is aimed at attending this issue in all its seriousness, especially in terms of how the audience receives it. In presenting the central importance of belief for a proper Christian way of life Everyman relies on a particular tradition where such a design is taken for granted. Rodney Needham’s summary aptly articulates this condition: The concept of belief certainly seemed, by the great reliance placed upon it in the Western tradition, to have an essential and irrefragable significance, formulated over centuries of theological exegesis, philosophical analysis, and its numerous applications in common discourse. (Needham 1972, 234)

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It is clear that although the question is a moral one, the matter extends intrinsically to the larger question of knowledge, more significantly, self-knowledge. In allegorical terms the appropriate insight into the self’s condition creates the atmosphere for the understanding of faith, and Everyman’s humility at the end suitably facilitates his passage to an envisaged afterlife. Built into this very frame, it is the circuitous presence of evil which queers the pitch in Everyman. Here, it is imperative to visit the initial circumstances that govern Everyman’s encounter with Death. Admitting that Death arrived when he was “least in mind” (line 119), Everyman tries to bribe his way through out of the circumstance he finds himself in: “a thousand pound shalt thou have/And defer this matter till another day” (lines 121–122). The germination of the very process of easing out of the situation holds the key to the quest for alternatives, bribery being one, and arguably the one most effective in worldly terms, but as this does not work, he seeks a way out by another means: “Spare me till I provided of remedy” (line 139). Interestingly, Everyman is pursuing a path here of buying his way through, unwilling to surrender to the format that is pre-determined for him. This tendency to mark out his own path through a register that he is not only comfortable with, but also one that is in popular currency in the society he occupies provides an insight into the nature of the predicament in which he is placed. On the one hand, as has been conventionally argued, there is the moral imperative and the call to faith which underlies the very purpose of the play as a “morality” and the audience it targets, and on the other, there is an insistent individualization of values where the submission to a larger divine paradigm is sought to be scored in the whole performance. When we try to see what triggers the bribery mode in Everyman —from his desire to offer pounds to Death to his seeking of companions—there is an underpinning of the man-about-town, a swagger which he holds fast to, one which is so deeply etched in his very psyche. It is this element in the configuration of Everyman that has remained unexplored in discussions of the play. Evil, in its many contours, need not be operative at the levels of banality or overtly exposed for it to be effective as a design in the scheme of individual journeys undertaken by someone such as Everyman. The chameleon-like swift-changing personality of the Everyman of Louis MacNeice in his modern version of the medieval play underscores this feature all too well: “the actor playing Everyman must obviously be extremely plastic, changing tint at the drop of a hat” (MacNeice 1967, 14), directs MacNeice in his stage notes, foregrounding thereby the textured alterations to which the man can work himself into, leaving no doubt in the minds of the audience how the shifty Everyman is an individual given to multiple movements, not necessarily oriented to

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subsist only in a much grander divine scheme. MacNeice’s satiric counterpointing of the individualism of Everyman, which comes under serious threat when he faces the situation of resignation from the position he holds is further nuanced through the lack of control Everyman has over anything that unfolds on the stage. In MacNeice’s representation there is doubt and skepticism in the very nature of his existence: Floor Manager: No future in it, did you say? You don’t mean a future life? Everyman: I don’t know anything about that. floor manager: Don’t you? Everyman: Do you? Floor Manager: I’m not here to answer questions; I’m here in charge of this studio. It’s you who must answer any questions there are. And I tell you time’s running short. Everyman: I think my life here is possibly the only one. Floor Manager: Possibly? Everyman: Probably. Floor Manager: Not ‘certainly’? Everyman: Probably. Floor Manager: Then let’s assume it is the only one. In that case, has it been worth while? Everyman: Of course it’s been worth while. Maggie’s Voice: (from darkness ) Liar! Everyman: Don’t listen to her. I told you that wasn’t me. Eleanor’s Voice: (from darkness ) Liar! Everyman: Don’t listen to her either. You can’t pin me down like this. After all I’m Everyman: I’ve had wives and lives by the million, I’ve had every sort of career, I’v—(MacNeice 1967, 25)

Although this scene veers close to vaudeville, there is a swaying of Everyman from assertiveness to a more nervous assessment of his position in the given circumstances. In Everyman, the genesis of such an uncertainty is exhibited as an ostensible dilemma of lack of companionship and visualization of the lesson to be imparted but the inherent desire to subvert the existing frame is nuanced into the texture of the subject. To see Everyman as an individual alone, one who is wholly responsible for what happens to him—this is one of the central tropes guiding the choicedilemma he faces when it comes to having companions on his journey—is also to place him in isolation from the world he occupies. On the contrary, his confidence initially to bribe his way through comes from knowledge of the world, which he knows to be one that is conversant such ways of

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manipulation. There is an interlinking process where Everyman’s situation as an individual is circumscribed by his role in that very society from which he cannot be disengaged. Both formats—the one which locates Everyman as an individual, and the other that situates him as a generic figure—leave spaces for re-visitation when engaged with singularly. Human evil does not exist in a vacuum. It is in constant interaction with technology, ideology and history. However, while the modes of interaction are complex, it would itself be a psychological defense to use this complexity to avoid answering ‘in man’ when confronted with the question of the origin of evil. (Alford 1990, 25)

This interactive dimension between the individual and the schema of a larger mechanism—orchestrated in Everyman by the paradigm of the divine—facilitates the play of the potential for evil through its very process of rendering. The formal movement of Everyman to his pre-determined journey is conditioned by the understanding that he is a man of submission, one who processes his self to submit to the structure of faith, and it is this very alignment which provides the spacing of evil, conditioned within the same matrix through a tug-and-pull that could be read as ending up not by the decimation of evil, but by a supplanting of fear which the other side of the faith he is seen subscribing to. A reading such as this can gain from the placement of evil within a matrix where the lack of room to maneuver can be offsetting to the very idea of a moral universe it seeks to project and validify. It is in this context that we can draw from the insight provided by Alain Badiou in his discourse on the ethical contouring of evil as a human condition: The Good is Good only to the extent that it does not aspire to render the world good. Its sole being lies in the situated advent [l’advenue en situation] of a singular truth. So it must be that the power of a truth is also a kind of powerlessness. Every absolutization of the power of a truth organizes an Evil. (Badiou 2001, 85)

This enunciation of Badiou formats the inevitability of evil being woven into the fabric of Everyman quite well in that the overarching markers that orient the moral worldview into which Everyman is drawn cannot unweave the oppositional paradigm which coexists in that very scheme. Reading Everyman not merely in terms of the moral bracket to

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which it has been so often pigeonholed, especially as a carrier of didactic value, opens up the feasibility of engaging with the text’s richly contoured variables, including that of the inherent presence of evil, which enables us to look at its richness as a social text, and more importantly, such an exercise can open up modes of argument where set patterns would give way to nuanced enunciations, not foreclose it.

References Alford, C. Fred. 1990. “The Organisation of Evil.” Political Psychology 11, no. 1: 5–27. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3791512. Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward, London: Verso. Choudhury, Bibhash, ed. 2014. Everyman. Guwahati: Papyrus. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. “Secrets of European Responsibility.” In The Gift of Death, 1–34. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacNeice, Louis. 1967. “One for the Grave: A Modern Morality Play.” The Massachusetts Review 8, no. 1: 13–92. https://www.jstor.org/stable/250 87527. Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, Language, and Experience. Oxford: Blackwell. Ryan, Lawrence V. 1957. “Doctrine and Dramatic Structure in Everyman.” Speculum 32, no. 4: 722–735. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2850293. Styan, J. L. 1996. The English Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Laan, Thomas F. 1963. “Everyman: A Structural Analysis.” PMLA 78, no. 5: 465–475. https://www.jstor.org/stable/460724.

CHAPTER 2

If You Only Knew: Mephistopheles, Master Mirror, and the Experience of Evil Dustin Lovett

When Faust first entered literature with the 1587 publication in Frankfurt of a popular, anonymously authored chapbook, Die Historia von D. Johann Fausten, he cut the figure of a cartoonishly hedonistic heretic and the clear villain of his own story, a story that soon became an Early Modern bestseller and European phenomenon, translated into seven languages by 1612, including English as early as 15881 with a pseudonymous translation by P.F. Gent[leman], The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus. Marlowe, the enfant terrible of Elizabethan theater, seized on the popularity of the English chapbook, adapting it for the stage as The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. While closely following his source in terms of overall story—a learned doctor of theology turns to magic, makes a pact with Satan via the demon Mephistopheles, pledging his soul in exchange for twenty-four years of 1 Although the oldest surviving editions of the chapbook are from 1592, contemporaneous evidence points to the possibility of its existence at this earlier date.

D. Lovett (B) University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_2

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the latter’s service, and after a series of theological and natural philosophical discussions and zany adventures, the devil claims his due—Marlowe makes significant, though often subtle, changes in his Doctor Faustus to the characterization of its leading roles, Faustus and Mephistopheles, that complicate and unsettle the story’s internal economy, particularly on the question of evil. Where the chapbook Faustus is an inveterate sinner, thief, and occasional murderer, Marlowe’s Faustus sometimes strikes the pose of a grandiose dreamer, sometimes the pathetic figure of a man in over his head, and where before Mephistopheles had been a creature of violence and perfidy, Marlowe makes him something of a gentleman demon. Strange as it may seem in a play about devils and necromancers, it is not always easy to find the evil and villainy supposed to define Doctor Faustus. Such elusive questions often benefit most from a comparative approach that looks to similar stories whether from other genres, eras, cultures, or as in the present case, even from other media to shift the critical perspective, make less obvious connections, and highlight overlooked elements. In the case of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus , a comparison to its source clarifies the deliberate changes made to obscure the evil in the play and a, perhaps unexpected, comparison with a videogame, CD Projekt’s2 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, specifically its Hearts of Stone story addition, serves to bring it back to light. Strange as it may seem to look to a videogame as a point of comparison for a classic work of English literature, just as music enthusiasts must sometime be reminded that the Beatles wrote pop music, literary critics must likewise bear in mind that Elizabethan theater was also, if not essentially, a popular medium of entertainment. Moreover, as a retelling of the Faustian legend, or more precisely that of Pan Twardowski,3 in the Witcher’s fantasy world, Hearts of Stone bears explicit thematic similarities to Doctor Faustus while maintaining enough

2 Although CD Projekt Red is a Polish game publisher and developer, the Witcher 3 was written simultaneously in English and Polish (Suellentrop 2017). 3 According to a senior writer on The Witcher3, Karolina Stachyra, CD Projekt’s managing director, Adam Badowski, told the writer’s room that “he want[ed] Pan Twardowski. Not literally, obviously, but this kind of story” (quoted in McKeand 2016). The Polish folktale of the nobleman magician Pan Twardowski has roughly contemporaneous roots with that of Faust but did not initially feature a contract with the devil. That and other elements seem to have developed over time, borrowing from the Faust tale among others (Wiemken 1961, xviii; K˛epa 2019).

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specific differences to focus attention on the oft-overlooked insidiousness that underlies the machinations of Marlowe’s devil.

The Elusiveness of Evil in Doctor Faustus Marlowe begins complicating Faustus’s moral status in his play from its very title. Although the English chapbook states that Faustus’s life is “damnable” and his death “deserved,” Marlowe concedes simply that his story is “tragical.” This point may seem minor, but because it represented such a novelty in the literature of the time, much of the first Faust book’s effectiveness as a cautionary tale depended on its framing. While stories about pacts with the devil abounded in pre-Reformation folktales and popular religious literature, the devil almost inevitably got the short end of the stick. A trickster folk hero or even a future saint might well cut a deal with the devil, only to dupe him in the end, or after a sufficient display of contrition, expect some saint, usually the Virgin Mary, to come and nullify the contract in an eleventh-hour act of intercession. In other words, before the Faust book, salvation was the norm and damnation an aberration. The German chapbook and its translations thus went to great pains to frame the text so readers would understand from the start that, not only would Faust meet a bad end, but he was the villain of his own story and not a figure with whom readers should identify. To this end, the German Faust book includes a dedication and “Foreword to the Christian Reader” by the publisher that spell out, literally chapter and verse, the sins Faust commits and why he deserves and will receive damnation, along with anyone else who makes a pact with the devil. This story itself then complements this initial framing with frequent commentary from the narrator on Faustus and Mephistopheles’s evil. Although the English Faust book eschews a foreword, it bears a markedly condemnatory title and maintains the narrative’s constant vilification of Faustus and Mephistopheles. The chapbooks’ incessant refrain about the pair’s “wickedness” betrays not only their didactic function, but also a concern that readers may lose themselves in wonderment at their actions and forget the evil they represent. For his part, Marlowe takes a very different approach in characterizing the bad doctor and his diabolical servant. In the play’s text, the word “evil” occurs only in the name of the “Evil Angel” and is never spoken by any character. Tellingly, the word “wicked,” so beloved by the English Faust book as a descriptor of

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its villains, appears only once in Doctor Faustus , about halfway through the play, when the doctor himself exclaims: When I behold the heavens, then I repent. And curse thee, wicked Mephistopheles, Because thou hast deprived me of those joys. (Marlowe 2003, 7.1–3)4

The use of this keyword in the English reception of the Faust tale cannot help but be significant, particularly during such an important scene in the play wherein Faustus first begins to contemplate repentance only to be dissuaded by the appearance of Lucifer himself. Hurled, however, at Mephistopheles by Faustus, who bears primary responsibility for his loss of heaven, it also cannot help but be equivocal and lack the authority of the chapbook’s narrator. For his part, despite making use of a chorus in the narrator’s place to convey in poeticized, and much abbreviated, fashion some of the expository information in the chapbook, Marlowe does not use it to render the narrator’s judgments. This withholding of authoritative judgment, particular in the case of their shared protagonist, is striking when comparing Doctor Faustus to its source. The English chapbook makes it clear that Faustus was rotten from the start: “But Faustus being of a naughty mind and otherwise addicted, applied not his studies […] But it is manifest that many virtuous parents have wicked children” (History of the Damnable Life 1994, 186). Marlowe’s chorus offers no comment on Faustus’s character as a child, thus removing from his play the implication that Faustus’s wickedness was due not to the temptations of magic but rather to his own inborn nature. Beyond framing his essential character, the narrator of the English chapbook concludes the first chapter by stating that “‘No man can serve two masters’, and ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God’; but Faustus threw all this to the wind, and made his soul of no estimation, regarding more his worldly pleasures than the joys to come. Therefore at the Day of Judgment there is no hope of his redemption” (History of the Damnable

4 This article makes use of an edition of the A-text of Doctor Faustus without the later division into acts but with modernized spelling and punctuation for the ease of reference and comprehension by non-specialists. Although making use of the A-text, this article’s arguments apply to the B-text of the play as well.

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Life 1994, 187). While this condemnation, which smacks of predestination,5 also accurately describes the action of Marlowe’s play, the opening chorus of Doctor Faustus frames its protagonist very differently: Till swoll’n with cunning of a self-conceit, His waxen wings did mount above his reach, And melting heavens conspired his overthrow. For, falling to a devilish exercise, And glutted now with learning’s golden gifts, He surfeits upon cursed necromancy. (Marlowe 2003, Prologue.19–24)

These lines clearly impute Faustus’s fall to his study of black magic and not to an essentially bad character, a point emphasized by the use of disparaging adjectives for magic, e.g., “devilish exercise” and “cursed necromancy,” but not Faustus himself. Furthermore, by reframing his fate in terms of the classical tradition of tragedy by allusion to Icarus instead of the scriptural language of sin and judgment, the opening chorus subtly reopens the very possibility of identification with Faustus the chapbook attempts to prevent, transforming Faustus from the godless villain of the chapbooks into an ambivalent Marlovian antihero. Without the chapbook narrator’s authoritative insistence on his villainy, Doctor Faustus submits its protagonist to its audience’s judgment-based solely on his deeds, deeds which, though often morally ambiguous, rarely rise to the level of evil that would qualify him as a villain. Faustus remains, of course, an inveterate sinner even in Marlowe’s play, from the idolatry of his pact with Lucifer and the lust that takes him to bed with a spirit in the guise of Helen of Troy to the despair that ultimately seals his fate, but his actions within the drama further undercut any characterization of Faustus as a villain. This is the more surprising because his early speeches make it sound as if he will make himself a diabolical Tamburlaine. What Faustus ultimately does, however, hardly measures up to his vision of what he might do: O, what a world of profit and delight, 5 Originally issued by an orthodox Lutheran printer, the German chapbook’s chapter merely ends with: “weshalb ihm auch keine Entschuldigung sein soll” Historia 1961, 15), in English: “wherefore there should be no excuse for him.” intensification of this sentiment by anticipating God’s judgment suggest P. F. may been a Puritan.

first (Die The have

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Of power, of honour, of omnipotence, Is promised to the studious artisan! All things that move between the quiet poles. Shall be at my command: emperors and kings. Are but obeyed in their several provinces, Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds; But his dominion that exceeds in this, Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man; A sound magician is a mighty god: Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity. (Marlowe 2003, 1.55–65)

This monologue certainly has a sinister undercurrent, but in the end, it proves merely bluster. Faustus’s actions, when they do affect others, are either to their minor benefit, such as conjuring spirits for the amusement of the emperor and some of his students or sending Mephistopheles to fetch grapes for the Duchess of Vanhalt, or are largely on the order of pranks, such as those he plays on the pope, the rude knight, or the horsecourser. Although all of these rather silly adventures are found in the English chapbook, the vertiginous disparity between Faustus’s reveries in his study, which have no parallel in the source material, and these pranks and japes has so boggled some critics’ minds that it sparked a debate throughout the twentieth century as to whether Marlowe even wrote the prose of the middle scenes (Smith 1965, 171, note 7; Marcus 1989, 2, note 1). There seems to be a fundamental incongruity between Marlowe’s portrayal of Faustus and that emanating from the chapbook, but perhaps that incongruity rests less on the question of Faustus’s plans and their execution than the vision of evil Marlowe seeks to convey. Much as Doctor Faustus reframes the English Faustbook’s presentation of its namesake, it also reframes the nature of his adventures. In selecting what episodes to incorporate into the play, it does not seem accidental that adventures like that in Chapter 47 of the chapbook, in which Faustus murders a rival illusionist out of jealousy, have been left out. The adventures chosen for inclusion in the play’s middle section, in the A-text at least,6 are among his most harmless. In his own investigation into “The Nature of Evil in Doctor Faustus,” Warren D. Smith, 6 The B-text does include, in act 4 scene 3, an adventure in which Faustus sics Mephistopheles and other devils on three knights and their soldiers, but only after they attack him, attempting to kill him. Even so, the audience learns in the very next scene that Faustus’s assailants were allowed to live, though forced to wear horns on their heads.

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who recognizes Marlowe at work even amongst the “shallow frivolity” of these middle passages, sees them as a “fitting dramatic contrast to the titanic desires of the protagonist,” which addresses what he sees as the central message of the play, to wit, “the essential pettiness of evil” (Smith 1965, 175). Others see in it signs that Faustus “has deteriorated from teacher and scholar into court jester” (Okerlund 1977, 271) or simply into a “numskull” (Fitz 1977, 217–218). Without going so far as to say the evil in Doctor Faustus is all essentially petty or that Faustus’s obvious foolishness amounts to simple numskullery, suffice it that the gap between Faustus’s early preening and the execution of his design clearly serves to emphasize how ill-equipped he is to play the villain. If Doctor Faustus has a villain, as a play about a necromancer and his devilish companion seems it must, but the bad doctor himself hardly fits the bill, suspicion naturally falls upon Mephistopheles. After all, any Elizabethan theatergoer would know that a devil was the very embodiment of evil. In fact, much of the early excitement and controversy that surrounded Marlowe’s play seems to have stemmed from the anxiety that Faustus’s stage conjuring might call forth actual devils, as attested by contemporaneous reports of just such occurrences (Guenther 2011, 46–47). In the credulous age of the witch trials, the devil presented an obvious choice for a villain, and yet, Mephistopheles’s villainy in Doctor Faustus is far from obvious, which is the point. While open and clearly stated in the Faust book, evil in Marlowe’s play is a subtle beast, lurking behind the paltry parlor tricks that while away Faustus’s allotted time. Looking for signs of Mephistopheles’s evil in his direct actions in the play, however, yields little. In his capacity as Faustus’s servant, he merely carries out the conjurer’s pranks, and when acting on his own, goes no farther than transforming Ralph and Robin into a dog and ape, respectively, fates they do not seem overmuch to mind. Overall, the Mephistopheles of Doctor Faustus cuts a rather sympathetic figure. In place of the uncouth and violent figure of the chapbook, Marlowe’s Mephistopheles possesses a certain “dignified gravity” (Okerlund 1977, 272) and is, seemingly at least, forthright, particularly in contrast to the muddled and manic Faustus. These qualities appear on full display in the first meeting between devil and doctor. After summoning Mephistopheles, Faustus inquires how it is that Mephistopheles is out of hell, and the devil replies:

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Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells. In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss? O, Faustus, leave these frivolous demands, Which strike a terror to my fainting soul! (Marlowe 2003, 3.78–84)

Although not yet bound to Faustus by a pact, Mephistopheles not only answers his question directly but even goes beyond the question. The devil’s deeply moving, and to all appearances heartfelt, expression of profound despair seems an unsolicited warning to Faustus about the fate that awaits him at the end of his current road. Faustus, however, fails to heed the warning and responds: Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude, And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess. (Marlowe 2003, 3.86–87)

This remarkable exchange has no precedent in the chapbooks and has the effect of establishing Mephistopheles as both a credible and even likeable figure, immediately subverting audience expectations about demons. The gap in their respective experiences, most crucially of hell and time—Mephistopheles’s taste of “eternal joys” compared to Faustus’s dreams of twenty-four years of pleasure—frames the play’s opposition of a knowing Mephistopheles and a heedless Faustus. This relationship and the sympathy for the devil it engenders, however, helps conceal Mephistopheles’s machinations and suppress the feeling that something sinister lies just beneath the surface of his urbanity. While the play’s opening establishes Faustus’s learning, here it hints at Mephistopheles’s knowledge, the kind that comes only with long experience, and which he will subtly exploit throughout the play to Faustus’s ruin, only revealing his duplicitousness in scene 13, the one time in Doctor Faustus that its two leads approach the malicious villainy of their chapbook counterparts. Beginning with Wagner discussing Faustus’s preparations to die, the penultimate scene of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus features the conjuration of Helen of Troy for the scholars, Faustus’s confrontation with the Old Man, and Helen’s return to serve as Faustus’s paramour for the brief remainder of his life. Of these, the confrontation with the Old Man proves the most revealing about the stakes of evil in the play. After first speaking

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to the Old Man who calls on him to seek God’s mercy, Faustus is so appalled at himself and his actions that he cries out in despair, at which point Mephistopheles appears and wordlessly hands him a dagger to end his own life. The moment is striking because, until this silent moment, Mephistopheles and Faustus, the latter’s occasional reproaches aside, had seemed to enjoy a good rapport as merry pranksters. Suddenly the pranks seem to have a darker edge, and that darkness only grows. While the Old Man manages to dissuade Faustus from suicide, once he has left the stage after moving Faustus to repentance, Mephistopheles reappears and threatens his conjurer: Thou traitor, Faustus, I arrest thy soul. For disobedience to my sovereign lord: Revolt, or I’ll in piece-meal tear thy flesh. (Marlowe 2003, 13.65–67)

This threat of evisceration is given constantly in the chapbook, accompanied by lesser acts of physical assault, but in the play, although Faustus later tells his fellow scholars that he did not confide his situation in them because “the devil threatened to tear me in pieces if I named God, to fetch body and soul if I once gave ear to divinity” (14.45–46), the threat only appears on Mephistopheles’s lips here. Mephistopheles’s claim to be “arresting” Faustus’s soul in the name of his “sovereign lord” also spells out the devil’s double game. Although obliged to act as his conjurer’s servant, his loyalty has always remained with Lucifer. While this violent turn may seem sudden, in fact, it merely represents an escalation of the strategy of manipulation Mephistopheles has employed throughout as Faustus’s infernal handler, something that becomes clear once Faustus sics the devil on the Old Man as part of his attempt to reconcile with Lucifer and avoid dismemberment. Hoping to regain Lucifer’s favor and prove his repledged loyalty, Faustus commands Mephistopheles: Torment, sweet friend, that base and crooked age, That durst dissuade me from thy Lucifer, With greatest torments that our hell affords. (Marlowe 2003, 13.74–76)

Moments before Faustus had used “sweet friend” to describe the Old Man (Marlowe 2003, 13.56). His use of it now to describe

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Mephistopheles, along with his evocation of “our hell” points to a sympathy symptomatic of a renewed resignation to his fate, a sympathy that perhaps causes him to miss the meaning of Mephistopheles’s reply: His faith is great; I cannot touch his soul; But what I may afflict his body with. I will attempt, which is but little worth. (Marlowe 2003, 13.77–79)

Here, after threatening Faustus with physical violence, Mephistopheles clearly articulates of what “little worth” the body is in comparison to the soul, but Faustus fails to grasp the significance of these words. If, for instance, Faustus could find the faith to endure the devil’s threats of physical pain, he could still, though nearly at its end, break his contract and redeem his soul, perhaps even avoiding the physical pain, since Mephistopheles’s attempt at the Old Man’s body seems to come to naught.7 Nevertheless, Faustus, failing to heed the devil’s meaning, backslides into sin and sensuality, asking for Helen as his paramour. No doubt Mephistopheles knows what Faustus will do because Mephistopheles knows humans from millennia of experience while Faustus does not even know himself, and in this knowledge gap lies the villainous undercurrent of Marlowe’s play. This explanation may appear obscure, but the picture becomes clearer when Doctor Faustus is read within the context of the demonological “knowledge” of its day, and the relationship between knowledge and Mephistopheles’s villainy in Doctor Faustus will likewise come into focus with a comparison of his character and that of his counterpart, Master Mirror, in Hearts of Stone.8

7 Although somewhat ambiguous, the Old Man’s lines when confronted with the devils Mephistopheles sends after him seem to imply they cannot touch him: “Ambitious fiends, see how the heavens smiles / At your repulse, and laugh your state to scorn!” (Marlowe 2003, 116–117). 8 The moniker “Master Mirror” likely refers to an aspect of the Pan Twardowski legend wherein Pan uses a mirror to call forth the spirit of a Polish king’s deceased wife (K˛epa 2019), itself likely derived either from Faust’s own conjuration of Alexander and his consort Helen, or from the older legend appertaining to Trithemius (Dédéyan 1954, 23).

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Playing with Knowledge As stated in the introduction, Hearts of Stone is a story addition, what is known in videogame nomenclature as downloadable content, or DLC, to the game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The relationship between them has no direct analogue in print literature but would be something like a novella the events of which run parallel with and connect to a novel. Like the series of Polish fantasy stories and novels by Andrzej Sapkowski from which it derives, the Witcher series of action-adventure role-playing videogames developed and published by CD Projekt participates in what Umberto Eco already identified in the 1980s in his essay, “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” as the perpetual trend of “neomedievalism” in popular culture.9 More specifically, the various Witcher series participate in the neomedieval “dream” of “an ironical revisitation, in order to speculate about our infancy, of course, but also about the illusion of our senility” (Eco 1986, 67). Hence, the Witcher’s narrative world constitutes a decadent and fantastical medievalism, freely mixing Medieval, Early Modern, and even contemporary tropes in a fictional setting that evokes the past merely to alienate the present from itself in order to examine it and its relationship to its past amidst the clink of swords and crackle of magical fire. In this vein, the series’ (anti)hero, Geralt of Rivia, whom the player of The Witcher3 controls for most of the game, performs that most storied of fantasy professions: monster slayer. However, profession is the key word, and Geralt only slays for pay, and what is more, can only go toe to toe with these creatures, torn from the pages of Medieval bestiaries and folklore, because of alchemical mutations that set him apart from regular humans and position him as an outsider. By interposing the player, in the persona of Geralt, as a third party in a dispute between Olgierd von Everec and Master Mirror, Faustus and Mephistopheles’s respective analogues, Hearts of Stone makes use of the already double-outsider position offered by the gaming medium, i.e. the player outside the game world playing an outsider within it, to offer a novel perspective on the otherwise well-trod territory of rewriting the Faust tale. To summarize briefly the plot of Hearts of Stone, Geralt accepts a contract from a man named Olgierd von Everec to slay a monster that turns out to be a prince under a spell and consequently 9 For a detailed analysis of neomedievalism as a phenomenon more generally in contemporary popular culture, including video games, see Fitzpatrick (2019).

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finds himself captured by the prince’s subjects. Seemingly from nowhere, Master Mirror appears to Geralt in captivity, offering to free him if he will do a favor in return. That favor turns out to be acting as Master Mirror’s proxy in the dispute with Olgierd over their contract, the termination of which requires Geralt to grant three seemingly impossible wishes for Olgierd. Once the tasks associated with each wish have been accomplished, the player, as Geralt, then has the choice of either allowing Master Mirror to claim Olgierd’s soul, or risk Geralt’s soul by challenging Master Mirror to a contest to reclaim Olgierd’s.10 Beyond the obvious Faustian motifs evident in even this perfunctory summary, various other intertextual elements link the game to the Faust tradition. For instance, much of the information the player gleans about Master Mirror comes from a professor who is a “specialist in black magic and the occult” who identifies Master Mirror as a “demon” and “evil incarnate,” despite the Witcher’s not adhering to Christian theology (Gamer’s Little Playground 2016, 4:12:38, 4:15:30–44).11 Likewise, Olgierd conjures spirits in the form of completely black animals, a cat, and a dog, in apparent reference to the pre-chapbook folklore tradition wherein Faust would be accompanied by demons in the shape of animals (Dédéyan 1954, 6, 9, 23). Such intertexts along with shared thematics establish a basis of comparison, but it is, perhaps unintuitively, the places where Hearts of Stone’s thematic expressions most appear to diverge from those of Doctor Faustus that unexpected similarities emerge, which, in their resonance with Early Modern demonological literature, help illumine the more obscure aspects of Mephistopheles’s machinations. Although the Faust legend as presented in its earliest literary forms, the chapbooks and Marlowe’s play, concerns itself equally with power

10 Intriguingly, this choice of whether to allow Olgierd’s damnation or “intercede” on his behalf, not only gives players a greater stake in the outcome of the story but, intentionally or not, recapitulates the split between the pre- and post-Faustian stories of diabolical pacts. 11 Playing through Hearts of Stone can take upwards of ten hours, in addition to the dozens required to play through The Witcher3 itself. However, the “cutscenes” containing the characters’ main narrative actions and exchanges of dialogue can be spliced together to create a cinematic edit of the game. This essay will cite one such edited playthrough found online, and because player choices will affect some of the dialogue and actions portrayed in the game, it will endeavor to note whenever a certain decision must be made to access particular dialogue or events.

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and wealth, it has become synonymous with the quest for knowledge, a knowledge usually conceived of as forbidden, occult knowledge beyond human ken, but the absence of this arcane quest from Hearts of Stone draws attention to the ways in which Marlowe frustrates the question of knowledge, as he does the closely connected one of evil, in Doctor Faustus by consistently subverting expectations. Despite Marlowe’s Faustus suggesting that he will have the spirits under his command “Resolve me of all ambiguities” and “read me strange philosophy” (Marlowe 2003, 1.81, 87), no such education ever occurs. Meanwhile, in Hearts of Stone, the player eventually learns that Olgierd “wished for riches, then immortality” (Gamer’s Little Playground 2016, 3:59:45), but no mention is made of knowledge. This may in part be because long philosophical disquisitions would be no more fun for the average player to sit through in a sword-and-sorcery videogame than for groundlings to stand through in an Elizabethan theater. The long “disputations” of the chapbooks on theology and natural philosophy do find expression in much-abbreviated, parodistic form in Doctor Faustus , but, as its absence as a motivation in Hearts of Stone helps emphasize, these scenes ultimately speak to the mootness of the search for such knowledge in Doctor Faustus . By making a show of Faustus’s immense learning in his opening soliloquy, Marlowe pointedly builds anticipation about the place of knowledge in the play, as does the fact that Faustus’s first requests of Mephistopheles, both before and after he signs his pact, almost entirely concern his desire for knowledge, but here again, Doctor Faustus undermines expectations, including those of the doctor himself. Thus, when Faustus and Mephistopheles “argue of divine astrology” (Marlowe 2003, 7.34), rather than reveal anything new, Mephistopheles’s answers are so by the book that Faustus exclaims: Tush, these slender trifles Wagner can decide. Hath Mephistopheles no greater skill? (Marlowe 2003, 7.48–49)

Though sharing Faustus’s dissatisfaction with the devil’s answers, some readers might suspect that Mephistopheles may be giving misleading answers, this would go against Mephistopheles’s own understanding of the pact. When Faustus demands: “Villain, have I not bound thee to tell me anything?” Mephistopheles responds: “Ay, that is not against

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our kingdom” (Marlowe 2003, 7.69–70). Though that caveat will prove important, it does not necessarily call Mephistopheles’s credibility into question in matters of science. Even the demonophobic King James I agreed in his Daemonologie that, for necromancers, the devil would “obli[ge] himselfe to teach them artes and sciences, which he may easil[y] do, being so learned a [knave] as he is” (James VI and I 1982, 15). Since there was little to be gained from lying about scientific facts, devils could be considered reliable teachers. Rather than looking for deception in Mephistopheles’s answers to Faustus’s questions, one should rather consider that the deception, or self-deception, in Doctor Faustus lies more in the questions that go unasked and unanswered before Faustus signs over his soul. To understand the nature of Faustus’s disappointment in Marlowe’s drama, it helps to remember the Faust legend’s origins as a folktale. In his analysis of the folk traditions at play in Doctor Faustus, beyond the motif of a contract with the devil, Fitz identifies “the tradition of the wasted wish and foolish bargain” (Fitz 1977, 216). Fitz places all of the blame on Faustus for being too much of a numskull to understand what exactly he has bargained for, but Hearts of Stone, by linking its Faustian themes much more explicitly to the tradition of wish tales, underscores the dual nature of responsibility for the bad outcomes of the bargain: the carelessness of the human wisher and the malignancy of the demon’s interpretation of the wish. Hence, the game’s be-careful-what-you-wishfor refrain takes on added urgency and poignancy in a world in which a demon “grants what you wish, not what you want. All who sign a pact learn the difference” (Gamer’s Little Playground 2016, 4:21:08). This succinct formulation of folktale reality, namely that malign wish granters, be they Master Mirror or Mephistopheles, interpret their contracts strictly and never to the benefit of the one who signs in blood, helps clarify what transpires when Mephistopheles offers Faustus a very peculiar book shortly after the sealing of their pact. Although Mephistopheles gives the book to Faustus seemingly as a distraction from his disappointment at not being able to take a wife, the book does appear the direct answer to the wishes he expressed earlier. As Mephistopheles tells him: The iterating of these lines brings gold; The framing of this circle on the ground.

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Brings whirlwinds, tempests, thunder, and lightning. (Marlowe 2003, 5.160–162)

These powers respond directly to the “profit and delight” and the power to “raise the winds” and “rend the clouds” Faustus desires from the study of magic, but Faustus is not content and responds by asking for different spells. Once Mephistopheles shows him that those spells are also in the same book, Faust asks for a book in which he “might see all characters / and planets of the heavens, that I might know their motions and / dispositions” (Marlowe 2003, 5.171–173). Mephistopheles turns to that information, again in the same book, and Faustus responds: Nay, let me have one book more—and then I have. done—wherein I might see all plants, herbs, and trees that grow. upon the earth. (Marlowe 2003, 5.175–177)

Mephistopheles reveals that the same volume contains this information too. An incredulous Faustus shouts: “O, thou art deceived” (Marlowe 2003, 5.179), but it is Faustus, of course, who is deceived. Although, the book grants Faustus’s wish to the letter, it disappoints Faustus. As the spirit in the form of a cat warns Geralt in Hearts of Stone: “A man should frame his wishes carefully. It forestalls disappointment” (Gamer’s Little Playground 2016, 3:34:50). Faustus clearly expected to learn a great deal using magic, but he never thought to ask ahead of time whether and how much more there was to know. Both the humor and poignancy of this scene stems from Faustus’s disappointment at finding that, despite all the libraries he has previously devoured to attain his learning, all the knowledge he seeks can fit into a single volume. The answer to his wish is simultaneously the proof of its inadequacy. Together with his disputation over astronomy with Mephistopheles, this scene suggests that, in the universe of Doctor Faustus anyway, there simply is not much more for learned Faustus to learn. Where Hearts of Stone eschews it entirely, Doctor Faustus quickly dispenses with the conjurer’s quest for knowledge. The play’s subversion of that quest rests ultimately in Marlowe’s lack of interest in what Faustus can learn from Mephistopheles compared to what Mephistopheles already knows about Faustus and what the doctor fails to learn about himself.

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The Patience of Evil It should unsettle Faustus that Mephistopheles seems so readily and directly to grant his wishes before he even voices them to the spirit. Although not long before handing over the book Mephistopheles does promise Faustus that, in exchange for his soul, “I will be thy slave, and wait on thee, / And give thee more than thou hast wit to ask” (Marlowe 2003, 5.45–46), Faustus had already expressed his desire for what the book contains, only he had been alone at the time. Thus, Marlowe first subtly hints at Mephistopheles’s insidious game with Faustus. In the sixteenth century, devils were generally thought to know, as James puts it, “the secret[s] of an[y] persons, so being they [be] once spoken” (James VI and I 1982, 15). This stems in part from devils’ preternatural senses and abilities, including the possession of objects and invisibility (James VI and I 1982, 27; Weyer 1991, 31–37). Hence, using the conventions of theater to make Faustus speak his internal thoughts aloud, Marlowe provides a pretext for Mephistopheles to know what Faustus wants and use it against him. Without even having to hear humans express their secrets aloud, however, devils were thought to have several major advantages in their dealings with humans, most prominently their age and the experience that comes with it. In Hearts of Stone, this is made explicit when the player visits the professor who reveals there are records dating back thousands of years of Master Mirror making pacts with humans to torment them, but even before players learn the length of time Master Mirror has been studying humans, they see its fruits. For example, if, after being freed from imprisonment, the player heeds Master Mirror’s request to meet at midnight at the crossroads, the devil explains why Geralt has come, saying “you feel you owe me” and that “even the most rotten scoundrels have this inner compunction to repay debts of gratitude” (Gamer’s Little Playground 2016, 0:34:50–35:05). Though such exploitation of human nature finds no such explicit mention in Doctor Faustus , the understanding that, based on millennia of experience, devils were able to predict the future, in particular with regard to human actions, was widespread at the time of the play (Clark 1997, 189). It would thus have framed the context through which an Elizabethan audience viewed Mephistopheles. Moreover, it implicitly underlies many of Mephistopheles’s interactions with Faustus. Where Hearts of Stone’s modern audience, unfamiliar with the intricacies of Medieval and Early Modern demon lore, requires Master Mirror

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to be much more explicit, Marlowe can rely on an Elizabethan audience’s background knowledge, particularly then, still in the midst of the witch-craze, to know that Mephistopheles must always in some way be misleading Faustus to prevent his salvation and secure his soul for Lucifer. This, Mephistopheles likewise accomplishes by manipulating Faustus’s human impulses. Whenever Faustus falls into remorse for having sold his soul, as after the frustration of his quest for knowledge early in the play or after his confrontation with the Old Man near its end, Mephistopheles, with the aid of the Evil Angel, stokes Faustus’s regrets, turning them to despair by lying and insisting Faustus cannot be saved. Here, Mephistopheles’s earlier truthfulness in matters indifferent to a devil, i.e., “that is not against our kingdom,” secures Faustus’s credulity when the time comes to lie to win his soul for that kingdom (Cox 2002, 41). Demonologists of the time considered such mixing of truth and lies to ensnare mortals as the standard practice of devils (James VI and I 1982, 15; Weyer 1991, 32). More insidiously, however, Mephistopheles plays on Faustus’s very human desire for sensual pleasure and entertainment to distract him whenever he wanders too close to repentance. Thus, for example, when Faustus first signs his pact with Mephistopheles and his blood spells out “homo, fuge,” sending him into a reverie, the devil tells the audience he will “fetch him somewhat to delight his mind” (Marlowe 2003, 5.81–82). Mephistopheles then summons devils to put on a show for Faustus in a pattern that repeats throughout the play, perpetually tempting him away from salvation. If Doctor Faustus knew himself as well as he knows so many other things, he might see through Mephistopheles’s manipulations, but as with Olgierd’s wish in Hearts of Stone, Faustus’s own in Marlowe’s play ultimately alienates him from himself. The player learns from the spirits in animal form that, after wishing for immortality, “von Everec ceased to be human” (Gamer’s Little Playground 2016, 3:53:06). Without his mortality, Olgierd loses his connection to other people and to his former self. Although he had made his wishes initially in order to marry his wife, he finds he no longer loves her because he no longer feels anything. Everything in life has become boring to him and he must chase ever stronger sensations to feel anything. Olgierd’s fate points to an oftoverlooked aspect of Faustus’s pact, namely, that it transforms Faustus into “a spirit in form and substance” (Marlowe 2003, 5.95–96). This would of course entitle Faustus to the preternatural powers of a devil, but rather than use them to realize the ambitious dreams of his early

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monologues, he becomes increasingly a creature of immediate satisfaction. Mephistopheles, of course, feeds this tendency as well, from encouraging him to spend his time in Rome pranking the pope to helping him trick the horse-courser. Smith points to the significance of how, in terms of society, Faustus “proceeds downward in rank from Pope, to Emperor, to Duke and Duchess, to horse-courser” with a concurrently “increasing pettiness of his feats” (Smith 1965, 173). The longer Faustus spends as a spirit indulging in his powers, the more he seems to lose sight of the human dreams of greatness he nursed in his study. Just as Olgierd’s contract with Master Mirror to win his wife’s hand causes him to lose his love for her, the pact Faustus seals with Mephistopheles to achieve his grand dreams causes them to evaporate amidst the feasting and pranking with which his final years pass away. Ultimately, of course, the time Faustus fritters away provides the very stakes of any deal with the devil. E. M. Butler frames it succinctly when she observes how Marlowe’s Faustus particularizes the whole paradox of Christianity in that he “provokes a nemesis far beyond his deserts: punishment in eternity for a sin committed in time” (Butler 1952, 48). Time also represents the advantage devils hold over mortals, not just in the experience that comes with time but in their very experience of time. Here again, in bringing to the foreground what Marlowe leaves obscure, Hearts of Stone helps illuminate the place of time in Doctor Faustus . Where Mephistopheles hardly utters the word, Master Mirror talks often about time and his love for it. At one point, he even demonstrates his mastery over it by freezing time, so he and Geralt can have a private conversation in a crowded room, illustrating to what extent time is irrelevant to a being that lives for eons. While Olgierd tries desperately to avoid paying his due, concocting impossible wishes and stipulating that his debt can only be collected when he and Master Mirror are standing on the moon, the devil waits until he obliges Geralt to work as his proxy, knowing he will be able to fulfill Olgierd’s requests and then lure him to an old temple, on the floor of which the moon is depicted in a large mosaic. Master Mirror needs only wait for what to him is an inconsequential amount of time. Mephistopheles makes no such show in Doctor Faustus but nevertheless uses the leverage of his own experience of eternal time to cozen his victim. In Doctor Faustus, the devil proposes no timeline for the pact. It is Faustus who stipulates the twenty-four years, a length of time significant only because it had become the traditional time frame. As Heinz Politzer

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intimates in “Of Time and Doctor Faustus,” Mephistopheles makes no offer himself because “He is aware of what Faustus has not yet come to realize,” namely, that no amount of human time can make up for an eternity of torment (Politzer 1959, 146). In the late sixteenth century, twenty-four years of guaranteed life, health, and prosperity would have seemed immensely valuable, in a way it may be hard for some modern readers to appreciate, and even more so to a man of advanced years as Faustus is often portrayed. However, to a creature like Mephistopheles who has “tasted the eternal joys of heaven,” even a hundred years or more would mean nothing. Faustus eventually realizes this, crying out in his final soliloquy: Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, a hundred thousand, and at last be saved. O, no end is limited to damnèd souls. (Marlowe 2003, 14.99–101)

What Faustus learns at last, Mephistopheles has known from the beginning, and therein lies Mephistopheles’s true treachery. Knowing what he knows, the devil not only seeks to entrap Faustus in such an unequal bargain but to hold him there, patiently running out the clock to forestall Faustus’s realization until it is too late. What makes Doctor Faustus such a compelling play and Mephistopheles such a compelling villain rests in the indirectness and subtlety of the vision of evil they convey. Unlike his chapbook predecessor, Marlowe’s Mephistopheles never resorts to outright physical violence, only threatening it near the end of the play as a sign the devil has always been capable, but had no need, of it. Instead, Mephistopheles exploits the gap between what he knows from very long experience and what Faustus knows from books to mislead Faustus into his own damnation. Not that Mephistopheles does not warn Faustus: When, shortly after signing their pact, Faustus refuses to believe Mephistopheles about the existence of hell and torment after death, Mephistopheles taunts him: “Ay, think so still, till experience change they mind” (Marlowe 2003, 5.130). Although Faustus does not recognize it, the devil is here hinting at his undoing. Despite being perhaps the most learned specimen humanity has to offer, he lacks the experience and time-tested patience to see through the devil’s duplicity. The evil Mephistopheles does lies not in explicit displays of cruelty but in tacit manipulation, making the dagger

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handed to Faustus as a temptation to suicide merely a visible stand-in for the rope Mephistopheles has been giving him throughout the play, with which to hang himself. The true evil of Mephistopheles’s designs resides, not in outright lies or violent deeds, but in knowing the enormity of what awaits Faustus and doing everything possible to steer him toward that fate, leading him to squander the little time that remains him. Marlowe achieves this vision of villainy with such devilish subtly and implicit appeals to his era’s shared body of demonic lore that it can be difficult to grasp. Comparison to Marlowe’s source, the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus , however, illustrates how he accomplishes his obfuscation of evil, while comparison to the modern neomedieval videogameThe Witcher 3’s Hearts of Stone story offers a path for modern readers to recover the mindset necessary to see through Mephistopheles’s deceptions, deceptions Faustus himself only sees through too late. The fallen doctor’s final cry of “Ah, Mephistopheles!” rings with the fear of imminent torment, yes, but also the tardy recognition of betrayal.

References Butler, E. M. 1952. The Fortunes of Faust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Stuart. 1997. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cox, John D. 2002. “‘To Obtain His Soul’: Demonic Desire for the Soul in Marlowe and Others.” Early Theatre 5 (2): 29–46. Dédéyan, Charles. 1954. Le Thème de Faust dans la littérature européenne, vol. 1. Paris: Lettres Modernes. Die Historia von D. Johann Fausten. 1961. Doctor Fausti Weheklag. Edited by Helmut Wiemken, 1–130. Bremen: Carl Schünemann. Eco, Umberto. 1986. “Dreaming of the Middle Ages.” In Travels in Hyperreality, translated by William Weaver, 60–71. San Diego: Harvest. Fitz, L. T. 1977. “‘More Than Thou Hast Wit to Ask’: Marlowe’s Faustus as Numskull.” Folklore 88 (2): 215–219. Fitzpatrick, KellyAnn. 2019. Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones. Rochester: Boydell & Brewer. Gamer’s Little Playground. “The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone All Cutscenes (Game Movie) 1080p HD.” YouTube Video, 4:34:49. January 21, 2016. https://youtu.be/YEibBLiR574. Guenther, Genevieve. 2011. “Why Devils Came When Faustus Called Them.” Modern Philology 109 (1): 46–70.

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History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus. 1994. Translated by P. F. Gent. In Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and Their Sources, edited by Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman, 186–238. London: Routledge. James VI and I. 1982. “Daemonologie.” In Minor Prose Works of King James VI and I , edited by James Craigie, 1–58. Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society. K˛epa, Marek. 2019. “Pan Twardowski: The First Pole on the Moon.” Culture.pl. January 11, 2019. https://culture.pl/en/article/pan-twardowski-the-firstpole-on-the-moon. Marcus, Leah S. 1989. “Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The Case of ‘Doctor Faustus’.” Renaissance Drama 20: 1–29. Marlowe, Christopher. 2003. “Doctor Faustus.” In Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, edited by Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey. New York: Penguin. McKeand, Kirk. 2016. “The Making of The Witcher 3’s Greatest Villain.” Eurogamer, October 23, 2016. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/201610-23-the-making-of-the-witcher-3s-greatest-villain. Okerlund, A. N. 1977. “The Intellectual Folly of Dr. Faustus.” Studies in Philology 74 (3): 258–278. Politzer, Heinz. 1959. “Of Time and Doctor Faustus.” Monatshefte 51 (4): 145– 156. Smith, Warren D. 1965. “The Nature of Evil in ‘Doctor Faustus’.” The Modern Language Review 60 (2): 171–175. Suellentrop, Chris. 2017. “Witcher’s Studio Boss Marcin Iwinski: ‘We Had No Clue How to Make Games’.” Glixel. Accessed April 20, 2020. https:// archive.is/20170316221825/http://www.glixel.com/interviews/witcherstudio-boss-we-had-no-clue-how-to-make-games-w472316#selection-469.0469.72. Weyer, Johann. 1991. De praestigiis daemonum. Translated by John Shea. Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Wiemken, Helmut. 1961. “Introduction.” In Doctor Fausti Weheklag, ix–lxxiii. Bremen: Carl Schünemann.

CHAPTER 3

Recognizable Patterns of Evil in Muslim Characters in Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature Jeffrey McCambridge

There is a kind of necessity we should know evil as well as good, falsehood as well as Truth, that we may avoid the one, and so much more love the other. He that hath smelled a stinking weed will smell with more delight the sweet Rose; he that reads the Alcoran will find it smell worse than Mahomet ’s carkass did, which after his death lay putrifying upon the ground, which his disciples permitted for many days together, hoping he would have been as good as his word, who made them a promise that he would rise again the third day; but at last finding he had forgot himself, and that his body smelled not so sweet as Alexander’s did after his death, they were forced to bury it, or otherwise the Dogs who were beginning to bury him in their guts, had saved them the labour. —Alexander Ross, “A needful Caveat or Admonition for them who desire to know what use may be made of, or if there be danger in reading the Alcoran”. I have escaped the evil, and found the good. —Justus Lipsius, Of Constancy, second book.

J. McCambridge (B) Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_3

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Evil is not always easily recognizable; sometimes evil is hidden behind a seductive, or benign, veneer. From Richard Lovelace to Jeffrey Dahmer, the aesthetics of evil are as important as the actions of evil; they are, however, often misleading. Sometimes, however, evil announces itself through its words and appearance. Shakespeare’s Richard III and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, two infamous early modern villains, have twisted bodies that signal malintent that cannot be hidden from those who have been properly trained to read their bodies and not just their actions.1 This chapter interrogates some of the recognizable patterns in the characterization of real-life Muslims as evil Saracens in medieval and early modern English literature—that is to say, the ways in which Saracenic evil is internalized as a part of Saracenic culture—as well as some of the ways in which evil is displayed across the Saracen body and then presented on the page and on the stage. Like the letters on the page, evil must be read in order to be recognized and understood. As such, when evil presents itself, it does so as a hermeneutical challenge. The existence and presence of evil, both as abstract concepts and character traits, is accompanied by several imperatives. First, evil must be recognized, meaning there are wellestablished paradigms of evil and also a scale of the severity of evil in any given period. Understanding evil also necessitates an understanding of a standardized concept of good that can stand in clear contrast. Good, a statement of quality as well as action or intent, is a poor antonym for evil, and neither virtuous nor lawful is any more satisfactory. Further complicating the recognition of evil is that conceptions of evil change over time. Brian Davies writes that the Latin word for “evil” is malum, but the word didn’t connote the same meaning for medieval readers as “evil” does for readers today (Davies 2019, 1). Second, once evil has been recognized for itself it must be challenged, fought, and exterminated. Afterwards, the memory of evil is immortalized in narrative as a celebration of the heroic actions that eliminated it as well as a tool for recognizing that type of evil in the future. But the hermeneutical imperative of evil remains a problem. Postcolonial scholars have noted that the recognizable patterns

1 Such specialized training can be found in Ambroise Paré’s 1573 medical manual Des

monstres et prodiges [Of Monsters and Wonders], a treatise on congenital abnormalities. The information in this medical manual is almost entirely second and third hand and is primarily an explanation that birth defects are the result of immoral parents, a woman’s problematic imagination, and sometimes demons. The book was widely popular and Paré was a royal physician.

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of evil are often associated with images of foreignness, and medieval and early modern literature are explicit in their orientalizing of evil (Cohen 2000). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has pointed out in his foundational “Monster Culture” that the coding of cultural and ideological difference as monstrous, a concept closely related with evil in narrative, creates the imagery of monsters in popular culture who are representative of actual populations whose extermination is then easily justified. Monsters, after all, must be slain. The ethical argument about the propriety of slaying monsters rarely materializes because of the understanding that monsters are evil. It is a rare situation in which the monster is questioned about its motives or called upon to justify its monstrousness; “When we think of evil,” Matthew Boedy writes, “we usually consider extreme actions done by those outside or beyond our humanity” (Boedy 2018, ix). The identification of monstrosity is largely an easy task; the deconstruction and interrogation of monsters, however, proves difficult. The literary monster is a referent for the anxieties, desires, and fears of the culture that produces them, but the monster rarely represents just one thing. Monsters and their monstrosity, almost universally coded as evil in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, exist within complex cultural and narrative networks. This chapter draws examples from a selection of romance and dramas to demonstrate that the characterizations, representations, and symbols used to illustrate that Saracenic evil is rarely created ex nihilo, but instead engage in deeply rooted narrative traditions. From the giant of MontSaint-Michel to the giant Fierabras from Alexandria, Saracenic evil is most commonly represented through monstrous aesthetics. The opening lines of the medieval romance “Otuel a knight,” which tells “Of bolde batilles…Þat was sumtime bitwene / Cristine men and Sarazins kene” (2019, ll. 4–6).2 The distinction between Christian men and Saracen kind is important because the word implies a type of being that is somehow other than a man, that is, a human. The poem begins by associating

2 “Of bold battles…That were sometimes between / Christian men and Saracen kind.”

Kene can also mean kin, that is, relations. Otuel’s conversion is facilitated by Charlemagne and the Peer’s, who pray that he will abandon his Saracenic faith while he duel’s an evenly matched Roland. While Otuel’s conversion brings his military prowess to Charlemagne’s army, the ultimate goal was to spare the beloved Roland. The dark-skinned Otuel’s conversion is heralded by a white dove that lands on his helmet mid battle.

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Christianity with humanity and the Saracenic faith with kinds. The physiological division here is conveniently along military lines, and the poem that follows regales the heroics of the “bold battles” between these two foes. Because Saracens represent real-world Muslims, understanding the tradition of characterization and representation can give insight into the ways in which anxieties about Islamic alterity have shaped “Western” views of evil and monstrosity. Evil exists as moral, ethical, and legal [as malice] concepts, each of which are slightly different. Evil can also be used adjectivally to refer to persons, situations, and anything else that exists in opposition to good and virtue. Evil, at least in a pure sense, belongs to the realm of fiction and the characterizations used as examples in this investigation are of fictional archetypes, and the presence of evil in these fictions creates a binary by which good and virtue are often quietly defined in opposition to the flamboyant evil of Saracens, their culture, and their faith. While the stories under investigation in this chapter are fictions, they often recall real events or events believed to be historical. As such, they serve as witnesses to their own historical veracity as pre-anthropological accounts of populations and places according to the best scientific knowledge of their time but are also carefully constructed fictions that validate the religious and racial assumptions of superiority held by authors and audiences. Girard has noted the connections between evil and desire in narrative, writing that the duality between good and evil is often a necessity that motivates characters and plots (Girard 1990). These plot devices work because the symbols of evil are widely understood. This chapter is interested in how Saracen behaviors were coded as evil in ways that audiences could read and understand. Like the Uncanny of Jentsch and Freud, Saracens in medieval literature are both alien and familiar. The frightening familiarity of fictional Muslims is didactically useful; Saracens are outsider communities (them v. us ) but also recognizable enough to be read through the audience’s Christian worldview and held accountable to Christian mores, ethics, and laws. Saracens paradoxically remain a separate-yet-internalized community with only remote connections to Christianity, characterized by their irrational hostility toward the Christian community that also serves in part as their origin. In Anxiety, Lacan notes that the presence of the Uncanny complicates the otherwise easy distinctions between good and evil , and is closely related with cultural anxiety (Lacan 2018, 74–75). The connections noted

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by Lacan can be transferred to the fear of Saracenic alterity, which manifests with enough frequency to be classified as an existent cultural anxiety exercised through literature. This anxiety, despite its complications, manifests in the form of the East v. West binary. The characterization of Saracens as an evil—though appealing—community is complicated by the few Saracens who either demonstrate demonstrably Christian virtues or are afforded the opportunity to convert from their wicked religion.3 These converts are often emblematic of Saracen wickedness, towering giants and licentious barbarians who terrorize Christian men and women, only to then be transformed, sometimes physically as well as religiously, before bringing their brute strength and wealth to the Christian militaristic cause. Conversion is in itself not an option for the average Saracen in most stories, which are simply not equipped with any sort of framework for recharacterizing an absolute enemy even as a cautious ally. Narratives involving conversion rarely have satisfactory resolutions. Tamburlaine grows tired and dies, Fierabras and Floripas meekly accept tripartite authority in Spain, and Palamedes remains comedic relief whose romantic endeavors are frustrated at every turn—a narrative trend that was revived by the Victorians. Saracens have value as symbols of threatening alterity that is articulated through the rhetoric of evil. Conveniently, Saracens signify evil transgression in ways that are not limited to religion, social codes, the ethics of trade, or warfare. As Said observed throughout Orientalism (1994), literary representations of the Islamic East are rarely reflective of the historical realities of the Islamic East, and instead are symbols that serve as referent for undesirable or difficult to articulate issues form the author’s culture projected onto the fictional Muslim. For the sake of this chapter, the culture projecting its own anxieties and problems is medieval and early modern England. It has been noted that Said’s Orientalism does not apply to pre-Enlightenment literature without emendation, but Said’s Freudian focus on projection and Foucauldian interrogation of power and narratives of power as presented by Said are evident in each of the following characterizations of Saracens as the exemplars of evil (Akbari 2000, 19; Ahmad 2000, 160–161). 3 While there are examples of conversion in literature, the token converts are grossly outnumbered by the hundreds of thousands of Saracens whose dead bodies are left to litter the battlegrounds, a gruesome warning for any who challenge Christianity, even if that challenge exists in the form of subscribing to a different faith.

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Yet, the identification and utility of evil remains a problem in literature. Saracen pride is infamous, but the famed Roland, Oliver, and even Charlemagne display sinful pride with regularity. In Book Eleven of his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo writes that he knows what time is, at least as long as he does not have to explain what it is to someone else (Augustine 2007, 11.14.17). While time and evil are not the same, the inability to explain an easily recognizable phenomena applies to multiple concepts. Evil, after all, seems simple enough, but one of the problems with evil is that it is not as simple as it seems. Evil is deceptive in this way, hiding layers of complexity. Amplifying this issue, the meaning of the word evil has nuanced over the centuries. The Middle English adjective ivel, meaning “wicked, depraved, sinful,” is an etymological descendent of the Old English yfel and Old Kentish efel.4 Yfel was used nominally both in a moral sense and as a thing that is harmful or grievous, as found in the Anglo-Saxon version of Genesis (“Forðhealde to yfele” [inclined to/prone to evil] 8:21; “Treo ingehydes godes and yfeles ” [tree of knowledges of good and [of] evil] 2:9), and adjectivally as a thing that is “bad, not good of its kind.”5 It is also found in many adjectival compounds, such as yfel-cund [lit. “evil-kind” but also “of an evil nature” or more simply, “malignant”], yfel-dæde [lit. “evil deed” but also “misdeed,” “sin,” or “injurious action”; “of evil deeds”], yfel-dond [lit. “evil-doer” but also “malefactor”], yfel-donde [lit. “evil-doing”], yfel-full [lit. “evil-filled” but also “wicked” and “evil”]. It also surfaces as the verb yfelian (to do evil to, to maltreat, to afflict, to injure, to wrong, to get bad). These many lingual forms of the word evil provide an important background for the medieval ivel and its associated forms that helps us look back into the ways that evil was conceptualized in medieval literature. Lingually and thematically, the medieval ivel was related to oul. An oul, from the Old English awel (also ouel, houl, owul, neul, euel, eaul, and evil ), was a hooked instrument used in torture (“Þi bile is stif & sharp & hoked, / Riht as on ewel þat is croked” [“The Owl” ll. 79–80]; “Ful hard it is with flesshook or with oules / To been yclawed, or to brenne or bake” [Chaucer 2007, ll. 1730–1731]). These medieval manifestations of the word evil connote immorality, criminality, and pain, each of which implies a binary opposite that is not evil. Also implicit are the complex

4 “ivel adj.” Middle English Compendium. 5 “Yfel.” An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online.

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power dynamics of evil as it relates to that which is not evil. The antithesis of immorality, for example, is morality, and the conceptions and assumptions about morality embedded within the ideological frameworks of the texts mentioned in this study are essential to understanding explicit and implicit evils. That which is designated moral has the authority to stamp out which is designated as evil , even though the violent actions required to destroy evil are not always easily distinguished from the actions of evil. That the authors of texts from the medieval West were Christian is largely a given. For these authors, validity of Christianity is not an assumption but a universal fact, even if the author himself has doubts. It is possible that the certainty in Christianity found in medieval literature is an attempt to compensate for the many heretical and reform movements within the Latin Church. The reliance on Saracen scapegoats then, makes a bit more sense. Saracens were never a major military or religious threat in—or to—England, at least directly, and yet Saracens surfaced as antagonists in many English language texts. The relentless insistence that Saracens are a heretical sect that must be rooted out allows for a Freudian projection of internal conflict onto an external, largely abstract enemy. Many of the signs of Saracenic evil are obvious, at least much of the time. For example, Saracens are militaristically hostile (Chanson de Roland), violently inhospitable (The Sowdone of Babylon), invasive (Tamburlaine), and sexually aggressive and transgressive (The King of Tars ); Saracen misconduct both vilifies real-world Muslims and serves as an implicit threat against Christian misbehavior—in the Middle Ages it was widely known that the Saracenic faith had roots in the Nestorian heresy (De Voragine 2012, 756–759). The Saracen faith demonstrates how Christian Truth can be malformed and imitated, while also providing cautionary tales that teach how to be, and not to be, Christian. Langland’s Piers Plowman, for example, provides an anti-hagiographic account of the pseudoprophet Mahomet, a lecherous renegade cardinal who counterfeited Christianity to assume temporal power. Mahomet, too weak and infirm to conquer by the sword (as per barbarian tradition), saw the Truth of Christianity and mixed it with Jewish and pagan traditions to present a carnal faith to the easily fooled Ishmaelites (Arabs) (Langland 1969, “Passus XV”). The pseudoprophet Mahomet is a recognizable trickster figure, and his abject wickedness is inherited by his followers, the Saracens, who, despite their moral failings, give generously in charity. Here, the entire history of Islam is given to instill shame in Christians for not giving more in charity. In this way, Langland’s Piers Plowman gives the

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story of Islam—incorrect as it may be—and yet isn’t about Islam at all. Instead, Saracens provide a useful example as a milestone for evil (they are intrinsically violent, murderous, intemperate, and have no sexual ethics or values, all of which they try to compensate for by giving exaggerated amounts of charity). This story also highlights the dangers masked by Saracen good deeds. If only viewed through the lens of their charity, the Saracens appear generous, but their sexual indiscretions, hoarding, and gluttony betray a culturally rooted selfishness that cannot be negated through charity. Charity is only one of many hermeneutical problems with Saracens and their complex practices. Like Saracen bodies, Saracen actions are not always easily interpretable. Frankish troops are able to don Saracen garb and sneak across enemy lines (Sir Ferumbras ) and readily communicate with Saracens without the aid of an interpreter or translator, at least when doing so would present a narrative inconvenience. The dichotomy of darker skinned Saracens and lighter skinned Christians was not absolute, and while the blackness of a Saracen bore witness to the evil within his soul, his ideology, and his actions, there were dark skinned Christians who did not suffer the same associations within the popular narratives. While modern conceptions of race may have medieval and pre-medieval roots, medieval and modern racialized prejudices are not synonymous.6 On the contrary, Africa and Asia still held a measure of prestige as lands of wisdom, wealth, and power. The problems with interpreting Saracens fueled interest in learning about Saracens and created the demand for more fictions as well as non-fiction accounts, or the prevalence of Saracens in literature sparked interest in learning about them as seductively wicked people. It is not surprising, then, that some of the clearest descriptions of Saracens and their wickedness are found in Alexander Ross’s 1649 English translation (of the 1648 French translation of an earlier Latin translation of the Qur’an). In a prefatory section titled, “A Needful Caveat, or Admonition, for them who desire to know what Use may be made of, or if there be danger in Reading the ALCORAN ,” Ross writes that, because the Saracens are evil it is dangerous to know too much about them. Despite the inherent dangers, however, Ross attests that “look[ing] into the Turkish vanities” is the only way to understand the evils of the 6 Bartholomey Anglicus writes that the men of Ethiopia are blue because the sun “roasteth and toasteth them” in the continual heat. This perpetual heat also inflames the passions of all people with skin darker than the mild English.

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heretical Saracen sect.7 Interestingly though, Ross takes pains to justify his own interest in this evil. Ross defends the general interest in Islam by writing that Islam’s wickedness is self-evident and therefore the seductions of Saracenic deviance, indulgence, and excess are not a real danger for real Christian readers. Addressing his English audience, Ross writes: “Thou shalt find it [the Alcoran] of so rude, and incongruous a composure, so farced with contradictions, blasphemies, obscene speeches, and ridiculous fables.” Arguing that only Christian’s whose faith is characterized by a Turk-like instability will fear knowledge about a geopolitical and religious rival religion, Ross writes that weak-minded Christians [i.e., his critics] already “wander as far into utter darkness, [as if] by following strange lights, as by this Ignis Fatuus of the Alcoran.” In the conclusion of his note to the Christian Reader, Ross makes another revealing claim about the representation of Islam, especially as understood in medieval and early modern England. Adopting the rhetoric of health, Ross refers to Islam as a “poyson” [poison] that “hath infected a very great, but most unsound part of the Universe” and argues that an English translation of the Alcoran—which makes the evils of Islam apparent—is the antidote. This imagery makes sense in light of the pervading view of Islam as a heresy, or corruption/contamination, within the Christian body, and the very physical rhetoric of Christianity. As antidote to the poison of Islam, the translation of Islamic scripture as well as the accompanying knowledge about the religion, Ross’s translation not only diagnoses problems within the Saracenic faith but conversely confirms the health of Christianity. Because the Saracen faith, an evil, heretical, and infirm subset of Christianity, has a direct relationship with Christianity’s vitality, Ross makes it incumbent upon Christians to recognize the signs of Saracenic corruption and contamination. By pathologizing the Saracen faith, Ross internalizes it. This imagery also highlights the anxieties about Saracens: how easily they can infiltrate the Christian body, which is vulnerable to this “poyson.” Or, as Othello scolds his soldiers when he finds them quarreling in Shakespeare’s play, asking, “Are we turned Turks?” (Shakespeare 1997, 2.3.183). Despite its evils then, the existence of the Saracenic faith serves a useful function for the Christian audience of Saracenic romance and drama by validating the 7 That Saracens were a heretical Christian sect with roots in Persian Nestorianism was widely attested in theological and popular literature on Islam and Muslims in the Christian West.

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audience’s preexisting assumptions about their own religious affiliations without requiring them to understand Islam and Christianity and without requiring any actual acts of faith on their part. The fictional testimony that Saracens provide to their own wickedness within English romance and drama allows the audiences to remain unreflective of their own faith, which is implicitly and explicitly understood to be not only superior, but the Truth. Further, by branding Islam as a poison that afflicts the divinely favored Christian body, Saracens and their faith are made to be intrinsically both foreign and hostile while also necessitating their eradication or removal. Ross’s translation of the Qur’an was the first widely available version in English, and despite an official ban on its publication and distribution it became an under-the-table bestseller in early modern England. But Ross’s translation was neither England’s introduction to Islam nor the first denunciation of Islam as a heretical, evil sect. In his ominously titled book, On Evil, Terry Eagleton writes that evil is thought of as “uncaused, or to be its own cause.” In this observation, Eagleton notes that this origin from the self is one of many similarities between evil and good, writing that “Apart from evil, only God is said to be the cause of himself” (2010, 4). Medieval and early theologians did not believe that the Saracenic faith was self-created, but instead that it had roots in Christianity. Its associations with Lucifer and the Anti-Christ, however, give it a sense of threatening autonomy in fiction. These associations also give the Saracen faith surprisingly pre-Islamic roots, and Ross’s rhetoric as well takes its cue from the Latin writings of medieval theologians, who were often imitating Augustine and Aristotle. Ross’s treatment of the Saracen faith echoes Peter the Venerable’s Contra sectam Saracenorum [Writings Against the Saracens ], in which he refers to the Saracens as a “Mohammedan madness” [At Mahumeticus furor] and compares it with “many other monsters named Christian” [multaque alia Christiani nominis monstra] (2016, 221, 226)—a term that can refer both to their spiritually hybrid nature as pagan Christians or to their physical alterity, but which also is seen in the populations of monsters living and thriving in Saracen territories. Similarly demonstrating transgression with historical and religious ethos, theologian Thomas Aquinas compares Mohammed’s leadership to robbers and thieves, implicating all Saracens in collective criminality (2014, 73). Like Peter the Venerable before him, however, Aquinas is unsure about how to deal with the Saracenic threat. Both are thoroughly convinced of the Saracenic threat

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and the explicit dangers of the existence of Saracenic evil, yet in their attempts to explain the (alien and often contradictory) complications of the simplistic Saracenic faith, both find themselves reluctantly classifying the Saracenic faith as a heretical sect rather than pagan threat. This distinction may seem academic, but both were writing refutations that were parts of larger scholastic contributions to the Crusades. The inherent problem was creating an easily identifiable narrative for Saracenic alterity that did not also implicate Christians in the same behaviors. Furthermore, an accusation of heresy is an internal matter, while the identification of pagans is external. Heresy is a crime and requires proof, and the problem with Saracen heretics is that they do not respect the authority of the Gospels. While this distinction amplifies the popular belief that Saracens are evil, it potentially removes them from the Christian fold and insulates them from official accusations of heresy, and the resulting punishment—a problem with the representations and classifications of Saracens at an official level. Despite the problem of identifying Saracenic heresy, theological accounts of medieval Islam characterize it as a hybrid religion, and this is emphasized as the core of its criminality and is what vilifies the Saracens collectively through their spiritual counterfeit. De Voragine, Aquinas, Peter the Venerable, and Ross all describe a history in which a lowborn orphan and merchant married outside his social class and used that marriage to bolster his aspirations for kingship, which were initially satisfied through business interests. While traveling with a trade caravan through formerly Roman Syria, the young Mahomet listened to the religious stories of Jews and Christians, and the young trickster recognized their truth as well as the opportunities they provided. Knowing that his fellow Ishmaelites were ignorant and superstitious, Mahomet created an elaborate, yet inconsistent, network of stories that would appeal to the pagan Arabs but retained and imitated the light of Christian Truth. The result of Mahmet’s temporal, literary efforts was the Alcoran. But the evils of hybridity, which violate the sacred dictates of Aristotle and Pliny, are not limited to the nature of the Saracenic faith. The faith, as it turns out (rather conveniently), is a reflection of Saracen physiology.8 Not only do Afro-Asiatic Saracens tend to have darker skin than European Christians—a physiological feature that only selectively matters in the Middle Ages—but they live among the monsters in their monstrous territories, 8 See the physiological and scientific descriptions in Bartholomey Anglicus’s encyclopedia.

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and the resulting miscegenation does not go unnoticed by the authors of English romance and drama. In terms of narrative, this serves two factors. First, English audiences loved monsters. From Beowulf to Frankenstein, monsters and the monstrous serve as a leitmotif lurking in the background of English plots. Second, Saracens, their territories, and their monsters provide exotic locales, events, and thrills that serve as a narrative vehicle for the Christian moral embedded within the romances and dramas. The problem with Saracen monsters, at the height of romantic felicity, however, is that they do not respect geopolitical borders. Like the real-life Muslim armies that overtook Jerusalem, Spain, and Sicily, they are invasive. They do not know their place. At its root, this is a physiological and an aesthetic problem, but also a relatively convenient one. Should all Saracens be human, for example, Saracenic evil would not be easily recognizable. Like Richard III’s twisted spine, the majority of Saracens display their evil across their body. As with all general rules, there are exceptions, however. The narrators of Sir Ferumbras and La Chanson de Roland meditate on the stately beauty of the hoary Emirs Balan and Baligant, whose dignified white hair, broad chests, and golden armor would greatly enhance the aesthetics of the Christian community, if only conversion were possible. The fantasies of appropriation, or perhaps acquisition, are short lived. Both emirs meet their ends in battle with Charlemagne at different points in the Spanish campaign. While the poems lament that these Saracen leaders could not be conscripted, they celebrate their deaths as an important cleansing.9 The Saracen faith is physically and spiritually infirm (with the inner reflected in the exterior), malformed, and ugly—usually. As with all representations of Saracenic alterity, there is a spectrum that cannot be easily taxonomized. Saracen beauty provides its own seductions but is not the dominant representation of Saracens in medieval or early modern literature. More often than not, Saracen morality—which was always in error—was generally visible across the Saracen physique and features.

9 In Charles the Grete, Balan’s execution is little more than a detail. “Thenne Ogier was present which hated hym in his hert, & forthwyth he smote of hys heed, & Fyerabras pardoned hym gladly” (197). In La Chanson de Roland, after Charlemagne strikes Baligant’s head so hard that he splits it open to the beard while shouting “Monjoie,” the “Paien s’en turnent, ne volt Deus qu’il i remainent ” [The pagans turn and flee, God wishes that they not remain] (262.36223). Once the literal head of state is removed, the Saracens are thrust from the lands.

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Images of Saracenic ugliness are found in the many monsters who illustrate the stories and manuscript margins of the Middle Ages. The ugliness of the Soudan of Damas’s black skin stands in stark contrast to the monstrous beauty found in the snow-white complexion of the princess he abducts (King of Tars ). The Saracen giant who rapes the duchess at Mont-Saint-Michel is grotesque.10 The giant Fierabras’s physical bulk is matched only by his braggadocio and excessively hostile razing of Rome (La Destruction de Rome). Floripas, Fierabras’s sister, is almost grotesquely beautiful, but despite her beauty she displays a monstrous disrespect for authority and refuses to accept the expected roles and behaviors for a woman. While her misbehavior ultimately benefits the Frankish soldiers she betrays her father to protect, her conversion to Christianity and marriage with Sir Guy, as well as the division of Spain among her, her husband, and her brother, effectively limit Saracenic control over the Saracenic heartland in Europe. Despite her conversion and acceptance into Christian society, Floripas is stripped naked in front of the Frankish soldiers at her baptism and even the ancient Charlemagne finds himself sexually aroused by her exotic beauty (Herritage 1967, 198). Unlike the monstrously seductive Floripas—who eagerly converts and denounces her Saracen past (to the point of actively advocating the execution of her father, Emir Balan)—Bramimonde, the wife of the Saracen King of Zaragoza, is forced to convert after Charlemagne destroys the last Saracenic kingdom in Spain and kills the Emir of Babylon, Baligant. Upon conquering Zaragoza, Charlemagne’s army razed the mosques and synagogues, erasing Spain’s Islamic—and Jewish—history, even if only in fiction. Mirroring the destructive transformation of the Spanish landscape, an action that alters the nation’s identity, Bramimonde’s forced conversion is accompanied by the changing of her name to Juliana. While both Floripas and Bramimonde are sexualized and rendered the custody of the Frankish crown, Charlemagne does not change Floripas’s name, leaving her with the name given to her by her royal Saracen parents. The name Juliana is the feminine form of Julianus and means “youthful” in Latin, a fitting appellation for a rebirth. While the name was borne by many Christian martyrs, saints, nobles, and nuns, its medieval popularity comes primarily from Julian the Hospitaller. As the patron of hospitality invoked by travelers seeking safe lodgings, Bramimonde’s rebranding as Juliana is

10 The giant’s ethnicity is not disclosed in every version of the Arthurian legend.

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likely not coincidental. The destruction of her home and kingdom, the erasure of her identity and name, and the removal of her royal status are all decidedly inhospitable actions. Bramimode’s fate is presented as salvation in Chanson de Roland, just as the demolishing of Saracen Spain is presented as a defensive rescue mission and not an invasion. The irony in her rough treatment should not be lost. Stories that include conversion—since it is a stretch to describe medieval or early modern stories as “narratives of conversion”—rare as they may be, are an important pattern in representing Saracenic alterity (in addition to the criminal and monstrous). “Conversion,” from the Latin and French conversion, connotes the action of turning around, revolving, or rotation. Sometimes this can be a turning back or return,11 but regardless of the origin and destination of the turn, or shift, conversion is not only an ideological transformation, but in the case of Saracens in medieval and early modern literature is also an erasure of the convert’s prior Saracenic history. At the point of conversion, Fierabras—who is absent for the majority of the poem that bears his name—exits the poem Sir Ferumbras and does not reappear until he is needed during the climactic final battle—against his father—where his military prowess and brute, giant strength turns the tide of the battle. But the Fierabras that emerges from the margins of the narrative hardly resembles the brash Saracen who sacked Rome, desecrated the dead body of the pope, looted the holy relics, and later challenged the peers to single combat. This Fierabras is meek, reserved, and spends most of his time on the page weeping. He has lost his confidence, and the character earlier known for his titanic size appears reduced in every conceivable way, as if this representation of Saracenic excess also lost his physical bulk when he lost his ideological bulk. Conversion is not the standard treatment in medieval and early modern narratives and appears to only be awkwardly included when necessary for the story. Fierabras’s conversion allows for a later military victory, and his sister’s conversion facilitates the liberation of Roland and his peers from the Emir’s prison, allowing for the comical reversal in which the Emir is locked from his own castle and forced to siege his own stronghold. Inverting the situation but retaining the hallmarks of the pattern of representing Saracen conversion, Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, who

11 “conversion, n.” OED Online March 2020. Oxford University Press.

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had previously conquered Saracen territories while threateningly shaking his fists at Christian lands, finds himself trapped in Asia. By the end of Part II , Tamburlaine—the mighty Asiatic conqueror who threatened the gods, the blind cartographers who had the audacity to draw maps before his conquests, and Mexico—had grown tired and lost the will to press forward. After burning a “Turkish Alkoran” on-stage, symbolically distancing himself from his Saracenic faith, Tamburlaine calls for the preserved body of his beloved wife Zenocrate to be paraded for the audience, and dies with her, being carried off stage by chariots pulled by his enemies rather than horses. With his death, the mighty Scourge of God’s unified Saracen empire is left in the hands of his weak, effeminate son, negating the Saracenic threat. Rather than leaving the Saracen territories unified and strong, Tamburlaine’s conquest leaves them vulnerable, a coordinated but weak state. The conversion story, while explicitly demonstrating the superiority of Christianity, is also an act of historical rewriting. While each of these stories is fictional, they are historical fiction. Fierabras never sacked Rome, nor did he kill any popes, but Charlemagne did invade Spain and Timur-i-Lang conquered Persia and battled the Ottomans. The implied historical ethos of the fiction lends credibility to the unsavory and pejorative representations of Saracens.

References Primary Sources Anglicus, Bartholomey. 1893. Medieval Lore: An Epitome of the Science, Geography, Animal and Plant Folk-Lore and Myth of the Middle Ages: Being Classified Gleanings from the Encyclopedia of Bartholomey Anglicus on the Properties of Things. Edited by Robert Steele. London: Elliot Stock. Aquinas, Thomas. 2014. Summa Contra Gentiles: Booke One: God. Translated by Anton C. Pegis. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Augustine. 2007. The Confessions. Translated by Philip Burton. New York: Everyman’s Library. Brault, Gerald J., ed. 1978. The Song of Roland: An Analytical Edition. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Chandler, John H., ed. 2015. The King of Tars. Kalamazoo: The Medieval Institute. Chaucer, Geoffrey. 2007. The Canterbury Tales. Edited by Peter Tuttle. New York: Barnes & Noble.

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De Voragine, Jacobus. 2012. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. Translated by William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Doane, A. N., ed. 1991. The Saxon Genesis: An Edition of the West Saxon Genesis B and the Old Saxon Vatican Genesis. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Grœber, G., ed. 1873. “La destruction de Rome, premiere branche de la chanson de geste de Fierabras.” Romania 2: 1–48. Hausknecht, Emil, ed. 1969. The Romance of the Sowdone of Babylone and of Ferumbras His Sone Who Conquered Rome. London: Oxford University Press. Herritage, Sidney J. H., ed. 1966. Sir Ferumbras. London: Oxford University Press. Herritage, Sidney J. H., ed. 1967. The Lyf of the Noble and Crysten Prynce Charles the Grete. Translated from the French by William Caxton and Printed by Him 1485. London: Oxford University Press. Langland, William. 1969. The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts Together with Richard the Redeless. Edited by Walter W. Skeat. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lipsius, Justus. 1594. His Second Book of Constancy. Translated by John Stradling. London. Marlowe, Christopher. 1981. “Tamburlaine.” In The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, Volume 1, edited by Fredson Bowers, 71–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melick, Elizabeth, Susanna Fein, and David Raybin, eds. 2019. “Otuel A Knight.” In The Roland and Otuel Romances of the Anglo-French Otinel. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications. Paré, Ambroise. 2015. Des monstres et prodiges. Edited by Michel Jeanneret. Geneva: Gallimard. Peter the Venerable. 2016. Writings Against the Saracens. Translated by Irven M. Resnick. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Ross, Alexander. 1649. The Alcoran of Mahomet, Translated Our of Arabique into French by Sieur Du Ryer, Lord of Malezair, and Resident of the King of France at Alexandria, and Newly Englished for the Satisfaction of All That Desire to Look into Turkish Vanities, to Which Is Prefixed the Life of Mahomet. London. Shakespeare, William. 1997. Othello. Edited by E. A. J. Honigmann. London: Bloomsbury. The Owl and the Nightingale. 1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Secondary Sources Ahmad, Aijaz. 2000. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso. Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. 2000. “From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation.” In The Postcolonial Middle Ages, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 19–34. New York: Palgrave. Boedy, Matthew. 2018. Speaking of Evil: Rhetoric and the Responsibility to and for Language. London: Lexington Books. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. “Monster Culture: Seven Theses.” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3–25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. 2000. The Postcolonial Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave. Davies, Brian. 2019. “Evil and Late Medieval Thought.” In Evil: A History, edited by Andrew P. Chignell, 225–251. New York: Oxford University Press. Eagleton, Terry. 2010. On Evil. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Girard, René. 1990. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 2018. Anxiety. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Cambridge: Polity. Said, Edward. 1994. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

CHAPTER 4

Desiring Empire: The Colonial Violence of “Hijab Pornography” Ibtisam M. Abujad

In her important work on the colonial exploitation of intimacy, Ann Stoler argues that “the matters of the intimate are critical sites for the consolidation of power, that the management of those domains provides a strong pulse on how relations of empire are exercised, and that affairs of the intimate are strategic for empire-driven states” (2006, 4). This manipulation and commodification of intimacy are especially prevalent in the twentyfirst century, an era where militaristic expansionism has been replaced with more diffuse, but no less oppressive, forms of empire and colonization. In this diffuse globalist imperialism, manufactured desire becomes fertile land for the justification of local and far-reaching cultural and economic colonization. In recent years, the exploitation of the hijab in pornographic film and fetish photography has served the purposes of this diffuse globalist imperialism by cultivating anxieties surrounding the Muslim figure. The utility of the hijab for these exploitative productions lies in the inextricable connection between the social marginalization of Muslims and contemporary global politics in which Muslimness has become especially

I. M. Abujad (B) Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_4

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assailable. It is, therefore, the aim of this article to examine the centrality of the hijab in contemporary fetish images and pornographic film, while also uncovering the political racial underpinnings of its exploitation. Ultimately, I argue that the exploitation of the bodies and labor of Muslim women, the vilification of Muslim men, and the ideological denigration of Muslimness in these commodified filmic and photographic images enables the concentration of power, wealth, and mobility in capitalist entities and the nation-states of the Global North. In doing so, I connect the lived experiences of Muslims to larger structures of global power which operate through and on the “culture machine.” Before moving into my discussion of the colonial employment of the hijab in pornographic images, I must mention that examinations of pornography have historically fallen into the categories of “radical ‘antiporn’ feminism and ‘free-speech’ or ‘pro-sex’ feminism which took place in the 80s and 90s, mainly in the United States” (Van Doorn and van Zoonen 2009, 266). In these debates, there was a focus on “choice” as an indicator of freedom, and this focus, though offering important critique of gender roles and norms, obscured the power hierarchies that make choice limited in its availability and applicability. Contemporary scholars argue against a one-dimensional focus on “choice” because it makes discussions about gender Eurocentric and individualistic, and, therefore, results in the failure to consider the impact of race, class, and global systems of exclusion and domination. Akeia A. F. Bernard argues that “we too often incorrectly see choice where there is constraint and coercion. If there is in fact a difference within the structures of colonialism and modern patriarchal capitalism, it is primarily within the mechanisms of coercion” (2016, 4). Bernard, in discussing the role of coercion, points to the more diffuse hegemonic practices in the contemporary imposition of power on peoples, bodies, and labor. Through coercion, the means to survive and thrive become limited to incorporation into a system of subjugation. An examination of the coercive nature of commodified sexualization, manifested in either objectification or “self-sexualization” (or both), calls forth the importance of considering the function and consequences of such processes. In considering this, we are reminded that the body is not produced in a vacuum, nor is it a tabula rasa free from cultural inscriptions and social conscriptions. Therefore, the body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were a lifeless recipient of wholly pregiven cultural relations. But neither do embodied

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selves preexist the cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies. Actors are always already on the stage, within the terms of the performance. Just as a script may be enacted in various ways, and just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives. (Butler 1997, 405)

The body cannot be separated from the forms of identification which constitute its relationship to the realm of the social. In other words, any “doing” with bodies, is also a “doing” with histories, with spiritual practices, with discourses, all of which are subjected to local and global structures of power. We must recognize that “agency as it is portrayed here, is not only limited to the ‘rational self-interested’ individual but is further constrained in the context of the power relations which structure these visual encounters: agency, like empowerment, is projected as a gift to be granted by the consumer of the images—and potential donor—implicitly reaffirming the civilizing mission” (Wilson 2012, 68). We see the historical baggage of this civilizing mission in nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century Orientalist images of the exotic nude Muslim woman which feature the hijab. Of those which come to mind is Flaubert’s perverse “fulfillment of a sensual kind” in his travel writings about the nineteenth century “Oriental” woman (Brown 2004, 43).1 We may also recall the posed, and often manipulated, postcards of veiled Moroccan native women of the same period, which were often the site of scholarly examinations of the role of heteroerotic (and homoerotic) desire in the cultivation of “the West and the rest” (Sanoussi 2017). The hijab, therefore, was and continues to be a prominent and complex feature of the colonial imaginary which cannot be confined to individualistic interpretations. This sentiment is affirmed in The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture (Shirazi 2001), which constitutes one of the few texts discussing the hijab in contemporary print erotica and media. In this important work, Faegheh Shirazi argues that capitalist employment of the images of the hijabi Muslim woman are embedded in a “blatantly racist politics … [which] transform this ‘otherness’ into an amorphous evil” (2001, 61). The commodification of the hijab follows the logic of early colonization, but states and markets have come to depend on a new form of diffuse 1 Also see Said’s discussion of Flaubert in Said (1978).

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global economics which conducts racial projects through the regulation of identities and affect (Thomas and Clarke 2013, 313). We must recall that Paul Gilroy describes this type of “new racism” as. defined by its strong culturalist and nationalist inclinations. Whereas in the past raciology had been arrogant in its imperial certainty that biology was both destiny and hierarchy, this persuasive new variant was openly uncomfortable with the idea that ‘race’ could be biologically based. Consciousness of ‘race’ was seen instead as closely linked to the idea of nationality. Authentic, historic nations had discrete cultural fillings. (2000, 32)

This “new” geographically oriented racialization and its intersections with global capitalism, which Anibal Quijano argues are the “two fundamental axes of the new [colonial] model of power” (2000, 533), produce a conception of Muslims that is dependent on the paradox of fear and desire. The hijabi woman, for global capitalism, calls forth these affective responses. Commenting on this paradox, Shirazi argues that “advertisers exploit the Western stereotype of the exoticism and sensuality of the veiled woman in order to sell jeeps to American middle-class men. Penthouse, Playboy, and Hustler also exploit this semantic flexibility of the veil in order to sell sex and politics primarily to male consumers” (2001, 39). The “semantic flexibility” which Shirazi discusses is deeply rooted in what Sajidah Kutty describes as the three personas that images of the Muslim woman conjure in the contemporary colonial imaginary: the exotic belly dancer, the oppressed domestic woman, and the militant “mujahida” (as cited in Bullock and Jafri 2000, 36). The social and political relationships and interactions with Muslims both within the Global North, and in nation-states and peoples of the Global South, produce and reinforce these stereotypes. In other words, global corporations, states, and even other organizations capitalize on these sentiments by exploiting the colonial personas that Muslim women inhabit and the affective impact that the hijabi woman evokes in the imperialist psyche. In twenty-first century politics and media, the capitalist exploitation of this phenomenon is accomplished either through exclusion and racialization or through a problematic celebratory “multiculturalism” and assimilative citizenship. In other words, the fascination with the hijabi woman manifests in “inclusivity narratives” which celebrate incorporation into a structure of profit and gain, or the converse, which is the banning

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and punishing of veiled bodies. The year 2016 is an especially illustrative historical snapshot of this dynamic. In 2016, fifteen towns in France supported a policy that banned the burkini, swimwear worn by Muslim women which covers the head and body. According to journalist Lizzie Dearden (2016), police enforced this ban by encircling a woman on a Nice beach and requiring her to remove her tunic. “Dozens of women have been fined [for wearing the burqini]… some have been arrested, while others have been given verbal or written warnings.” Images of police circling a woman while she is forced to undress in a public space is quite a dystopian exercise of state governmentality that seems as if a scene from a futuristic novel. However, the reality is that the policing of French women’s embodied identification with Muslimness is a form of epistemic violence produced by and for the denigration of spiritual expressions and community affiliations not sanctioned by the state. It is made all the more absurd if compared to the wide-spread celebratory sentiments toward hijabi woman occurring during the same year. In 2016, Covergirl featured Nura Afia, a YouTube fashion “influencer” along with other YouTube beauty vloggers in what they described as an “inclusion campaign.” In an interview with Sarah Larimer (2016), Afia describes L’Oreal’s campaign as “an accomplishment for us all … never before heard of anything like that happening before- in the U.S. at least.” That same year, Playboy followed suit. They featured the journalist Noor Tagouri “in their [2016] October issue wearing jeans and long sleeves for the magazine’s Renegades series,” which, according to the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC News 2016), “honours people from different industries ‘risking it all to do what they love,’ as part of Playboy’s no-nude efforts.” On the magazine’s cover, Tagouri’s hunched, leather-clad, relaxed body and grunting or roaring facial features performs what would socially be conceived of as masculine, unexotic, and Western. In being featured on the cover of the pornographic magazine, Tagouri does indeed resist gender norms and standards, while also constructing herself as “subject” in the face of twenty-first century widespread attempts to dehumanize and alienate the Muslim Other. However, this does not negate the “the imperial, military, racist, sexist, and economic ends to which the capitalist imaginary has been put” (Gökariksel and McLarney 2010, 4). Though Tagouri’s participation does subvert oppressive stereotypes, she is tokenized as a tool for advertising Playboy’s supposed inclusivity. However, this capitalist multiculturalism often “celebrates the empowerment of product choice, self-fashioning

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through commodities, representation in the market of images and ideas, realization of consumer desires, and participation in the structures of economic power.” (Gökariksel and McLarney 2010, 4). It hardly lays bare the colonial logic and the hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that are being tacitly reproduced. We see this colonial logic functioning in the fetishized images of latex fashion by the Dutch designer Sebastian Cauchos, who, on his social media sites, calls his current designs and earlier uses of the hijab in photos of Turkish Bulgarian model Marilyn Yusuf “a tribute to the hijab.” Originally consisting of latex-clad images of contorted bodies, such as in his 2013 photoshoot titled “Latex in the City,” the presentation of his designs evolved into more commercialized images of latex-hijab fashion on his Big Cartel ecommerce platform. On his social media platforms, Cauchos describes himself as a “modestfashion-activist” (@SebastianCauchos, Instagram), a label which is exploitative of the identification of Muslim women, especially in the Global North, with the term “modesty.” In this “violence of appropriation” there is an obvious oppressive colonial savior narrative of sorts. Cauchos is claiming to liberate what he perceives to be the sexually repressed Muslim woman. In the images of the fully clad hijabed women wearing latex and rubber, there is an enforcement of a gendered duality onto perceptions of Muslim women. “In these images there is a familiar dichotomy at play here. For white women, there is the duality of the Madonna/whore that characterizes their roles and identities. For black women, there is the Jezebel and Mammy distinction. So too there is a second contradictory piece to Muslim women’s imposed identity. Juxtaposed to the wholly sexual ‘belly dancer’ is the wholly pure ‘oppressed’ woman in need of salvation” (Perry 2014, 82). The designer imposes this duality onto Muslim womanhood, all the while claiming to liberate and save these women from what he describes as “skin taboo.” In doing so, he purports to speak for the Muslim woman and assumes the role of the transcendent and exploitative hand of empire. It, therefore, follows that the gagged hijabed2 woman on this designer’s ecommerce site should not only be seen as a manifestation of gendered domination, but also as a symbolic enactment of colonial domination of the Muslim figure. The employment of the hijab on models who 2 I use the word “hijabi” when it is the Muslim woman herself who is identifying with the practice of covering. However, I use “hijabed” when the hijab is externally imposed or used in mimicry of Muslim practices, by people who do not identify as Muslim.

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may not be Muslims themselves, is not only a tool to sexualize and exoticize women’s bodies, but the ideological colonization of Muslimness. Though Muslim women’s bodies “are often constructed as racialized, exotic Others who do not fit the Western ideal of womanhood,” they are also “feared and reviled on the same basis as all Muslims” (Perry 2014, 79). Therefore, the veil as a signifier functions to give this designer, and the consumer, access to Muslimness through both a male and imperial gaze. I argue that this performance of domination and manipulation of bodies, through dressing and posing, and capitalist consumption, enacts violence on these symbolically Muslim bodies. It thus become obvious that the images from Cauchos’ fashion show which portray women in latex hijabs on which is printed the Arabic word for “hat” (qub’a) standing alongside women donning latex blouses containing inflatable breasts, are a tool to sexualize the hijab, while also depicting Muslim practices as oppressive. The juxtaposition of uncovered legs with hijabed heads, Arabic lettering on neck chokers and stomachs, and mentions of propriety and sexual prudence even call forth the exoticized images on the colonial postcards described earlier in this chapter. However, the conflation of Muslimness with Arabness points to something different. The consumer can visibly see the relationship developed between the desire for and the consumption of Muslim sexuality and the desire to access, know, and dominate Arab economies and bodies. In her discussion of veiled women in the cartoons within Penthouse, Shirazi argues that. while photographs of veiled women in Playboy and Penthouse aim at drawing the male gaze, cartoons of veiled women mock and ridicule Muslim society. The meaning of the veil when portrayed in a cartoon also depends on the overall state of political relations between the United States and the countries of the Middle East. For example, when the United States was at war with Iraq, cartoons, especially in Hustler, depicted veiling as a barbaric practice … Once the veil is assigned a certain meaning, the veil itself acquires the power to dictate certain outcomes—the garment becomes a force in and of itself, and this force must be deferred to by many people. When the semantics of the veil are defined, they set a dynamics of the veil in motion that dictates context. (2001, 8)

Shirazi points to the ways in which the hijab functions as symbol for the relationship with the Other, either as an expression of desire in the print pornography, or that of abjection in the political cartoons. However,

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what I would argue is that, even in images that are meant to sexualize and fetishize, the hijab does carry political connotations which can include “a play of [both] xenophobia and xenophilia” (Honig 2001, 76). Assigning the Muslim to the geographical locale of the Middle East, other than being extremely oppressive to the majority of Muslims who are not or do not identify as Arabs, expresses a power relationship with “the Arab,” either meant to assimilate her or him or call attention to her or his difference. We must remember that “sources of colonial control” are twofold: “one that works through the requisition of bodies”—those of both colonials and colonized—and a second that molds new “structures of feeling”—new habits of heart and mind that enable those categories of difference and subject formation” (Stoler 2006, 2). Therefore, in the desire for the exotic Other, or in the manipulation and exploitation of this desire, there is a visual manifestation of deeply political and ideological investments. This form of sexualization and fetishization is, therefore, invested in Arab symbology because of the ways in which desire facilitates certain political engagements with the Arab, even if only manifested in the performance of Arabness or its conflation with Muslimness. I would even point to the uses of blackface to express the oppressive racial motivations of this type of performance, which, though not exactly the same as what I describe, is illustrative of the ways in which to dress the nonMuslim (or non-Arab) woman in garb that is meant to perform religion and identity and, then, commercialize this image would be to speak to histories of oppressive raced interactions. For the Arab and the Muslim, these histories would be those that are imbricated with the events of 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror. Thus, if in these fetishized images “the veil symbolizes woman’s willingness to partake in male fantasies,” it also comes to symbolize women’s willingness to participate in imperial fantasies, the fantasies of domination of the racialized Muslim, who is ethnicized into that which is the same as the Arab (Shirazi 2001, 46). This is even more apparent in the 2014 pornographic film Women of the Middle East (Madison), whose actors “Pakistani-American performer Nadia Ali and the half-Iranian, half-Tunisian Arabelle Raphael, as well as so-called ‘ethnic’ performers” wear various types of veils, niqabs, and fullbody burqas, as they interact in submission or domination with American actors playing the roles of “Middle Eastern” or “Muslim” men. “The movie opens with the message: ‘For a Middle Eastern Woman, veiling is not just a way to suppress her from having sexual freedom. It is a symbol for all of the human rights violations against these women, such as rape

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and domestic violence. Take the veils off!’” (Awad 2015). It is, therefore, very curious that the film makes a concerted effort to feature roles in which women keep the veils on. The film’s poster features one of the film’s four vignettes, containing a man wearing a Muslim skull cap, while his chained neck is pulled by a topless woman in a black niqab, or face-veil, as they traverse a dry hilly landscape. The man looks down and to the side, seemingly exhausted, while the woman looks straight back at the viewer, obviously in a position of dominance. The inversion of the patriarchal hierarchy is not meant to empower women, as the film’s producer claims, but to capitalize on the sexual availability of Muslim women’s bodies and to tap into the proliferation of rampant Islamophobia in the twenty-first century. Not only is there the very same conflation of Middle Eastern identity with Muslim symbolic practices, but, in the vignettes in which the character of the veiled Muslim woman binds and dominates, there is a power dynamic which enacts the fantasy of subjugating and enslaving the Muslim man. We must recognize that “elaborate codes of conduct that affirmed manliness and virility arose from colonial cultures of fear—white men making unfounded claims to legitimate rule saw their manhood bolstered by equally unfounded claims to racial superiority” (Stoler 2006, 37). Therefore, the male consumer sees his masculinity bolstered by the domination of the Muslim man. The film, however, does more than affirm the sexual virility of the colonizer; the film legitimizes the need to subdue the threat of the Muslim Other. It is helpful to recall that the disciplining and punishment of the Muslim man following 9/11, as part of the “War on Terror” and especially in Guantanamo Bay, functioned through sexual domination and the manipulation of gender norms. Johanna Bond describes that “both female and male perpetrators used sexual violence and humiliation against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib … They employed a number of related strategies including feminization of the enemy, hegemonic nationalism, manipulation of honor and humiliation, performativity and exploitation of gendered tropes within U.S. culture” (Bond 2013, 9). It follows, therefore, that in the images of domination within the pornographic film, there is “a gesture of humiliation, attributing to them [the Muslim man] sexual passivity under the threat of rape. This tension between hypersexuality and sexual passivity defines one of the domains of masculine subjection of the colonized.” (Lugones 2010, 744). The violence is sexual, physical, and also very much gendered in the colonial imaginary of the consumer;

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in the images featuring a Muslim dominatrix, the scenes wherein the “domineering partner in a variety of BDSM roles” (Dickson 2015) is the “American” pornographic actress, this actress becomes the avatar for the desire to exploit the Muslim woman and, at the same time, overpower the Muslim man. It becomes clear that this characterization “embodies the [Muslim] slave as well as the [American] master” (Shirazi 2001, 47). Thus, to answer the question posed by this film’s producer Kelly Madison, “Would I ever incite violence by making fun of Allah?,” one cannot help but answer that the film enacts many forms of violence, only one of which is sexual, and the violence which it incites is culturalist, ideological anti-Muslim violence in the minds of the film’s consumers (Dickson 2015). Therefore, to put it simply, the film does the ideological work for the consumer in the Global North, validating already problematic and contradictory assumptions about Muslims as being antithetical to his or her identity. On the other hand, for consumers who identify as Muslim, this instills a sense of inferiority. We are reminded that “every colonized people-in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality” (Fanon 1967, 18). In the film, the actor transforms her or himself into a Muslim character by wearing the skull cap or veil, which then becomes a cultural signifier justifying U.S. governance over this Otherized character and his religion (or way of life). Ultimately, a distorted conception of the character’s Muslimness is made to justify her or his subjugation. We can see that the political puppetry in the film functions as “colonization of cognitive perspectives, modes of producing and giving meaning, the results of material existence, the imaginary, the universe of intersubjective relations with the world: in short, the culture” (Quijano 2000, 540–541). Former adult film actor, Nadia Alia, who identifies as Muslim herself, describes her experiences with this form of colonial puppetry, stating, I did find the adult industry very racist. For a movie, they wanted me to wear the Islamic garb and have “Donald Trump” fucking me from the back. It was like sending a message through porn—a political message…It was disrespectful, trying to use me as a clown for religious political messages. It was more than just a movie; it was bigger than that. Young girls getting into the porn industry aren’t thinking about these roles they are offered, they’re just doing it for the check. (Snow 2018)

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The sexual act described by Ali is indicative of the Islamophobic policies in the United States existent since 2016. Just as in Women of the Middle East, the surface tells of a commodification of contemporary geopolitics for material gain. However, when we subject the film to more intense scrutiny, it becomes obvious that the film reproduces the U.S. globalist agenda, which, in its economic imperialism, depends on hemorrhaging other nation-states’ natural and human resources to empower its own control of the world economy. In the process, or to bolster the narrative in the film, Ali is racialized, not through epidermalization, but through religious symbology. In other words, as a woman-of-color, Ali’s brown complexion is not what makes her the alien Other, it is the “Islamic garb” which makes Ali’s labor easily exploitable and makes the film commercially appealing to its producers. In analyzing this, we therefore come face-to-face with current racebased prejudice against Muslims, which is rooted in the perception that the “being” and “doing” of Muslimness are an existential threat to the nation-state and its global economic reach. If “visual politics are intricately woven in to the workings of race and power around the world,” then the Islamic garb in the aforementioned film becomes a prop meant to racialize the Muslim Other, thus making her assailable against the hegemony of the United States and its imperial and patriarchal gaze. The inability to resist interpellation into this hierarchical system is indeed a product of the “the dividing line between the watched and the [imperial] watchers” (Kazi 2019, 33). Ali describes, “I was in Vegas dancing and these…white men asked what nationality I was. I said I was Pakistani and one said, ‘Oh, you’re like ISIS.’ I laughed it off but it was very racist and deep down inside I felt they’d already put me in a category” (Snow 2018). This is characteristic of the ways in which “non-whites…are terrorists or illegals,” perpetually foreign, relegated temporally as villains and spatially as aliens (Sivanandan 2008, xv). The exploitation of their labor within the boundaries of the nation-state is part and parcel of the very same mechanism which enacts the hemorrhaging of resources on a global scale. With that said, a number of actors who are employed in pornographic film and fetish modeling, though acknowledging their capitalist exploitation, remain steadfast that their decisions to self-sexualize are inherently tied to choice and are a unique liberatory reaction to what they perceive to be their sexually repressive societies. Though it is not at all the function of this paper or my research philosophy to depict Muslim women solely as agency-less victims or prescribe morality, it is an integral part of my

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critique to parse how choice can act as a guise, hiding coercion into hierarchical structures. In other words, I must ask how liberatory sentiments are constructed in relation to the denigration of other forms of being so that I am able to uncover power dynamics that are often left invisible. In examining Ali’s discussion of choice, I recall that “a demonstrated disaffection for one’s native culture and native mother were a critical gatekeeping criteria for European membership” (Stoler 2006, 2). The combination of Ali’s discussion of her instructive role to “Middle Eastern women,” whom she argues “don’t know how to be intimate,” coupled with her descriptions of being sexually “suppressed” by what she describes as a strict religious upbringing sheds light on how the internalization of Eurocentric ideals can be equally oppressive (Macmillen 2016). By depicting herself as not-Other, or not sexually repressed and oppressed, she is expressing privilege and an investment in hierarchy which mimics the very same colonial dichotomous negation of the Other. Her conception of “freedom” is predicated on the teleological function that she serves for other “Middle Eastern women.” It is this teleological function, however, which results in various other forms of dehumanization that she experiences. In describing herself as “barely scraping by,” Ali affirms that the filmmakers exploited her economic disadvantage to capitalize on the problematic contemporary sentiments toward Muslims. “Poverty and powerlessness are imbricated in colour and race. Discrimination and exploitation feed into each other” (Sivanandan 2008, 55). It is, therefore, poignant that these very same political sentiments are at the heart of the structures of marginalization which denied her from access to equitable means to sustain herself economically and socially in the first place. It has become evident that what has been termed “hijab porn” is an all too clear reminder of the relationship between globalization, economic imperialism, and attempts to colonize Muslim minds and bodies. The decolonization of this form of cultural exploitation is an important way to uncover the intersections between intimacy and power. Only through situating desire in relation to structures of power can there be a recognition of the vilification inherent in the exploitation of the hijab. Doing this, however, is complex because there is the risk of silencing Muslim women’s voices. To prevent this, Muslim women’s subjectivity must not be seen through the Eurocentric lens of individualism. Their autonomy and self-governance must be examined in relation to the power dynamics which make “choice” an artifact of empire. Though choice is central in discussions about human rights, there must be a recognition that

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it can be used as a red herring, becoming manipulated to construct it as synonymous with incorporation into colonialist and capitalist systems of exploitation. Arguments which center individualistic conceptions of choice can be used to serve the idealization of Eurocentric culturalism in service of the “civilizing mission.” Muslim women’s bodies would then be exploited to justify the denigration of Muslimness and construct it as alien, violent, oppressive, and repressive. Ultimately, it is these very structures of exploitation and domination which marginalize Muslim women and men, denying them life-sustaining economic access and social equity. The exploitation of the hijab in fetish images and pornographic films therefore invites the consumer to explore their colonialist fantasies, and to ponder the raced conceptions of the Muslim. The fetishized exploitation of the hijab, niqab, and burqa signal this racialization, this new racism which depends not only on epidermalization, but on ethnicity, geography, and culture. It is these fetishized forms of religious symbology which invite the epistemic violence of the imperial gaze, as they do with their facilitation of the male gaze. They perform submission for the consumer and reinforce her or his nationalist identifications. It is my aim, therefore, that this work serves to decolonize the Muslim man, woman, and their ways of being-in-the-world by uncovering the imbrication of the manufacture of desire in globalist politics, while also confronting the gendered, classed, and raced dimensions of the colonial imaginary.

References ABC News. 2016. “Journalist Noor Tagouri Becomes First Woman to Wear Hijab in Playboy.” ABC News, September 28, 2016. https://www.abc.net. au/news/2016-09-28/muslim-reporter-becomes-first-hijab-wearing-modelin-playboy/7884660. Awad, Nina. 2015. “Women in The Middle East’ Porno Claims to ‘Empower’ Muslim Women.” Stepfeed, August 4. Benard, Akeia A. F. 2016. “Colonizing Black Female Bodies Within Patriarchal Capitalism: Feminist and Human Rights Perspectives.” Sexualization, Media, & Society, December 13, 2016: 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/237462381 6680622. Bond, Johanna. 2013. “A Decade After Abu Ghraib: Lessons in Softening up the Enemy and Sex-Based Humiliation.” Law & Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 31, no. 1: 1–36. Brown, Frederick. 2004. “Flaubert in Egypt.” New England Review 25, no. 4: 40–63.

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Bullock, Katherine H., and Gul Joya Jafri. 2000. “Media (Mis)Representations: Muslim Women in the Canadian Nation.” Canadian Woman Studies/Les Cashiers De La Femme 20, no. 2: 35–40. Butler, Judith. 1997. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, edited by Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury, 401–418. New York: Columbia University Press. Dearden, Lizzie. 2016. “Burkini Ban: Why is France Arresting Muslim Women for Wearing Full-body Swimwear and Why are People so Angry?” Independent, August 24. Dickson, E. J. 2015. “This Muslim-Themed Porn is Trying to “Empower” Middle Eastern Women.” MIC, August 3. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skins, White Mask. New York: Grove Press Incorporated. Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Gökariksel, Banu, and Ellen McLarney. 2010. “Muslim Women, Consumer Capitalism, and the Islamic Culture Industry.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6, no. 3: 1–18. Honig, Bonnie. 2001. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kazi, Nazia. 2019. Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics. Rowman & Littlefield. Larimer, Sarah. 2016. “She’s One of the New Faces of CoverGirl. and She’s Wearing a Hijab.” Washington Post, November 8. Lugones, Maria. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25, no. 4: 742–759. Macmillen, Hayley. 2016. “Muslim Adult Performer Nadia Ali on Reconciling her Job with her Religion.” Refinery29, July. https://www.refinery29.com/ en-gb/2016/07/118435/nadia-ali-porn-star-muslim-interview. Madison, kelly. 2014. “Women of the Middle East.” Pornfidelity, November. Perry, barbara. 2014. “Gendered Islamophobia: Hate Crime Against Muslim Women.” Social Identities 20, no. 1: 74–89. Quijano, Anibal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3: 533–580. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Sanoussi, Anas. 2017. “Tangier and the Cultivation of Desire in the Print Travel Guides: Latent and Transgressive Forms.” Via 11–12. https://doi.org/10. 4000/viatourism.1696. Shirazi, Faegheh. 2001. The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.

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Sivanandan, Ambalavaner. 2008. Catching History on the Wing: Race, Culture and Globalization. London: Pluto Press. Snow, Aurora. 2018. “Why the World’s Most Famous Muslim Porn Star Called it Quits.” Daily Beast, July 28, 2018. https://www.thedailybeast.com/whythe-worlds-most-famous-muslim-porn-star-called-it-quits. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2006. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thomas, Deborah A., and M. Kamari Clarke. 2013. “Globalization and Race: Structures of Inequality, New Sovereignties, and Citizenship in a Neoliberal Age.” The Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 305–325. Van Doorn, Niels and Liesbet van Zoonen. 2009. “Theorizing Gender and the Internet: Past, Present, and Future.” In Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics, edited by Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard, 261–274. New York: Routledge. Wilson, Kalpana. 2012. Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice. London: Zed Books.

CHAPTER 5

Villains of the High Seas: Apostasy and Piracy in George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, The Anonymously Authored Captain Thomas Stukeley, and William Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk Jared S. Johnson

Early modern English stage representations of villainy were rooted in both Christian notions of evil during the period and the concept of a character’s fall from greatness embodied in ancient Greek tragedy. From the 1590s to the first decades of the seventeenth century, the English commercial stage followed in the footsteps of its medieval forbearers in casting its villains in the mold of the era’s vice figures, messengers sent from the Devil to tempt characters to commit sins and peccadillos in the hopes of winning souls for their master. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is the most famous example of this, but other plays that appeared during this time, such as William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), Barnabe

J. S. Johnson (B) Thiel College, Greenville, PA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_5

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Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter (1607), and Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass (1616), featured similar power dynamics. At the same time, a new type of villain—the apostate pirate—began to take hold of the popular imagination of the English people, appearing in both plays and widely circulated pamphlets. In George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1588–89), the anonymously authored Captain Thomas Stukeley (1595), and William Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (1609–12), the seductive allure of a pirate’s life took the place of the Devil’s offers as the dominant threat to Christian souls on the English stage. The devil pact made popular by Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus became adapted by playwrights who depicted the looming threat of piracy on the High Seas, specifically in the form of the Barbary Corsairs. For Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, the concepts of piracy and conversion to Islam were inextricably interwoven. In the same way that popular representations of the devil pact and the aberrant sexuality engendered by it functioned to invert Protestant spiritual and sexual behavior, so too did representations of “turning Turk” during the period express imaginatively the antithesis of Protestant Christianity. Both onstage and in print, English representations of Islam were largely generated not as faithful renderings of the Islamic world but as religious polemics aimed at elevating English Protestant religious life and subordinating Islam as religious other, if not outright enemy. Similar to anti-papal rhetoric, which Peter Lake wryly remarks was “not an early exercise in the study of comparative religion” (1989, 74), depictions of the threat of turning Turk reflect fears and anxieties about English religious life more than they did tangible and ideological elements of early modern Muslim life. Daniel Vitkus has argued that representations of Islam in Tudor and Stuart drama reflected a growing commercial interest in the Levantine Mediterranean. Vitkus cites Richard Staper’s involvement in commercial negotiations with the Ottoman sultan during the 1570s leading to Richard Harborne’s embassy and the founding of the Levant Company in 1581 (2003, 26). While Vitkus’s study aims to demonstrate the deep divide between representations of Islam on the stage and the multicultural Mediterranean as a place of historical contact, it is important to remember the relative lack of contact with the Ottoman world for many of the period’s writers. Richmond Barbour notes that English historian Richard Knolles, who published Generall Historie of the Turks in 1603, had no contact to speak of with the Islamic world; he was educated at Lincoln College, Oxford, and then became a grammar school headmaster. Despite never studying

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Turkish or sailing to the Levant, Knolles must have felt somehow qualified to write the massive work that is the Generall Historie, which was taken from Italian, German, French, Greek, and Latin sources (Barbour 2003, 17). For Barbour, Knolles’s compendious history is a polemical treatise that is deeply invested in casting the Islamic world in a negative light, as it features prominently the act of fratricide by Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed III, to eliminate his nineteen brothers as illustrative of Muslim morality. The work incorporates historical victories against the Ottomans to demonstrate Muslim weakness. According to Barbour, in works such as Knolles’s Generall Historie, “Antitheatrical and masculinist discourses converged […] to build a fundamental proto-orientalist critique: eastern shows of opulence and power, however strange, exciting, or fearsome, were deceptive, effeminate, and debasing” (2003, 29). It is in the context of Barbour’s reading of Knolles’s polemic that I want to begin talking about the intertwining of two forms of others that reflect and refract Protestantism and privateering, a violent extension of proper merchant activity. These two others, of course, are Islam and piracy.

The Barbary Corsairs: Piracy’s Turkish Turn Because of the historical dominance of the Mediterranean economy by the Barbary pirates during this period, piracy became associated if not homologized with Islam. The tension between English commercial jingoism that grew out of nationalist commercial histories published by Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas and the victimization of English sailors at the hands of the Barbary pirates further aggravated the Othering impulse by the English of the Barbary pirates. As Barbara Fuchs (2000) explains, anti-Muslim rhetoric served as the vehicle through which economic lawlessness was projected onto the Muslim faith. As the Barbary pirates continued their economic dominance of the early modern Mediterranean as autonomous and semi-autonomous sovereign states, they were associated during the era with the Ottoman Empire. In the English popular imagination, “an increase in piracy essentially equaled an advance by the Turk” (Fuchs 2000, 49). The application of crusades-era rhetoric to early modern problems with piracy was largely cosmetic. Rebuffing Fernand Braudel’s allegation that piracy in the Mediterranean during the early modern period was an extension of the crusades, Fuchs observes that “the religious motivations for piracy were largely cosmetic; the true stakes

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were economic” (2000, 49). Indeed, Fuchs notes that although Christian pirates such as the Knights of Malta, too, terrorized the European trading powers in the Mediterranean, the Barbary corsairs captured the imaginations of English writers. In the Elizabethan era, “the English turn to piracy in the Mediterranean established a connection between England and Islam, the satanic other of Christian Europe” (Fuchs 2000, 49). Fuchs’s association of Islam with Satan invites comparisons between English representations of witchcraft and Islam. In Thinking with Demons (1999), Stuart Clark explores the satanic discourse of witchcraft in the European popular imagination. Clark theorizes these works as deliberate, propagandistic acts of inversion and contrariety. In particular, Clark notes that in representations of the witches’ sabbat—the imagined ritual event in which the devil pact is performed—writers and artists were attentive to the concept of “fidelity”: “The minuteness of detail and the exactness of the inversions were thus vital aspects of witchcraft depictions. [… Demonology] had the conservative effect of constructing and maintaining norms by portraying them in their demonic opposites” (1999, 29). English portrayals of Islam during the period follow a similar logic of representation. Unlike popular theatrical depictions of Satan and his minions, however, the image of the Turk in the theater is that of a homogenized but ill-defined racial and religious identity who lives a piratical and parasitical existence vis-à-vis Christian nations. Daniel Vitkus suggests that in the plays, “the Turks’ stereotypical features […] include aggression, lust, suspicion, murderous conspiracy, sudden cruelty masquerading as justice, merciless violence rather than ‘Christian charity,’ [and] wrathful vengeance instead of turning the other cheek” (2000, 2). In the pirate plays that tended to draw the link between the Barbary pirates and Islam, something akin to the devil pact emerges through the construction of turning Turk, a religious choice made by individual Christian subjects to renounce their faith and to become Muslims. The trajectory of “turning Turk” moves from the imperial to the personal as piracy replaces sovereignty as the master trope of religious conversion, which is an extension of changing attitudes toward Islam as a result of King James’ war on piracy. While Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (Marlowe 2011) and Robert Greene’s Selimus (Greene 2000) employ the Muslim world as a metonym for empire in which dissenters become enslaved, the later plays understand Islam as a synecdoche for both the tyrannical qualities embodied by Tamburlaine and Selimus and the attributes that stand in an inverse relationship to English

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Protestant Christian life, particularly with respect to modes of masculinity and sexuality. In this respect, Christians turned Turk function not as intimidating, tyrannical enslavers but as victims of tragedy, spiritually enslaved by their vices and doomed to a fate not unlike that of Faustus. Marlowe’s and Greene’s understanding of Islam in Tamburlaine, Parts 1 and 2 (1587–8) and Selimus (1594), respectively, consists of little more than a setting in which to stage imperial acquisition accomplished by overt violence. Furthermore, though both Tamburlaine and Selimus discuss Islam as a religion in their respective plays, it is always through the voice of the religious outsider. The Muslim faith, like all faiths both characters seem to imply, is little more than a political tool that is used to sway the masses. Tamburlaine describes the worship of “Mahomet” as something performed “[i]n vain” (5.1.177), while Selimus “count[s] it sacrilege to be holy” (2.15) and “scorn[s] religion—it disgraces man” (2.21). As such, both “Turkish” characters participate in anti-Islamic discourse, refusing to grant any type of legitimacy to the Muslim faith as, per the logic of the discourse, even the faith’s members deny its veracity. By the time that Barbary piracy had been sensationalized by the Ward and Dansiker pamphlets in England, the threat of Islam had morphed from something external that threatened to colonize European Christendom to something internal that could transform the spiritual and national identity of the individual English citizen, working in much the same way as the perceived threat of witchcraft more than a decade earlier. The shift in English drama from representations of Islam as a hostis relegated to the temporal and imperial realm in the 1590s to that of a spiritual enemy in the early 1600s follows the transition of monarchical power from Elizabeth I to James I, following the death of the Queen in 1603. King James brought a special brand of religious and political paranoia to the English throne, and Jacobean foreign policy reflected the King’s major preoccupations. Scottish and English pamphlet literature under James captured the Jacobean spirit of zealotry and jingoism. James Carmichael’s Newes from Scotland, published in 1592 and depicting the North Berwick witch trials, is a salient example. This work sensationalizes the Scottish legal proceedings of 1591 that charge Francis Stewart Hepburn, 5th earl of Bothwell, with treason and find a number of his Scottish subjects guilty of witchcraft. Similarly, the piracy-themed pamphlet literature that emerged in 1609, the anonymous Newes from the Sea, Barker’s A True and Certaine Report,

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and the anonymous The Lives, Apprehensions, Arraignments, and Executions, reflects both the Jacobean systematic dismantling of what Barbara Fuchs calls “the carefully constructed [Elizabethan] fantasy of privateering as a way of controlling piracy” in the wake of the peace treaty that James signs with Spain in 1603 (2000, 50) and James’s subsequent staging of the shame and pain associated with renegadism through the public execution of nineteen pirates in 1609 under his orders.

“A Face So Full of Fraud and Villainy”: Muly Mahamet and Captain Thomas Stukeley In some ways, the prototype for the Faustian pirate began not in the Jacobean era but in the Elizabethan period through the dramatic mythologizing of Captain Thomas Stukeley, a maverick Devonshire pirate and sometime privateer. Rumored to be the illegitimate son of Henry VIII, Stukeley was the type of privateer that posed a significant risk to the crown as his illicit activities mark him as a violent, intractable sailor always functioning beyond the pale of state control. Stukeley was imprisoned various times in his career for various alleged crimes including an accusation of piracy in 1558, the deliberate deception of the Queen in 1563 to raise funds to attack the Portuguese, French, and Spanish illegally, and his rumored involvement in a plot to enable the Spanish to invade Ireland in 1569. His record of lawlessness culminated in an accusation of treason that same year, causing him to seek asylum in Spain. Stukeley was eventually excommunicated by Queen Elizabeth in 1571. In the same year, he fought alongside the Spanish in the Battle of Lepanto, King James I’s all-time favorite victory over the Ottomans. Stukeley is best remembered as a Faustian tragic hero who finally met his end in 1578 at the Battle of Alcazarquivir (or the Battle of Alcazar as it is more commonly known by his English contemporaries), a conflict between the Portuguese and Moroccans. In the conflict, Stukeley literally lost his footing when a cannon ball maimed his legs, leading to his death. Dramatic representations of Stukeley appear in George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (Peele 2005, 63–128), published in 1594 but probably written in 1588–89, and the anonymous Captain Thomas Stukeley (Edelman 2005, 134–230), which appeared in 1595. Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar loosely connects piracy with Islam, though not through the trope of turning Turk. Instead, the play’s major

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villain, Muly Mahamet, enlists the military aid of Portuguese King Sebastian and mercenary Captain Thomas Stukeley to stage a coup against his Mahamet’s uncle, Abdelmelec, who has recently wrested the Moroccan throne from his nephew with the help of Amurath, the Ottoman Sultan. The play was performed by the Lord Admiral’s Men in 1594 according to Henslowe’s diaries. The plot of Peele’s play treats both Stukeley’s death and the internal monarchical conflict resulting from Muly Mahamet’s usurpation of the Moroccan throne. Peele stages Muly Mahamet’s power grab in “The Second Dumb Show” during the Prologue of Act One by depicting Muly Mahamet “smother[ing]” his two younger brothers and “strangl[ing]” Abdelmunen, his uncle and rightful Moroccan king (1.Prologue). The villainy of Muly Mahamet can be traced to the sins of his father, Abdullas, the previous ruler who defied the established plans of succession by naming his son, Muly Mahamet, his heir. Now that Abdelmunen has been murdered, his brother, Abdelmelec, enlists the aid of the Turkish Sultan Amurath to depose Muly Mahamet. After Abdelmelec seizes power, Muly Mahamet flees to Portugal, where he appeals to Sebastian, the Portuguese king, for military assistance against Abdelmelec. Peele reinforces Muly Mahamet’s villainous acts with his motives for such actions, delivered in the form of stage soliloquy. Although Peele depicts Muly Mahamet’s villainy through the Dumb Show murder of his brothers and uncle early in the play, the character retains his false face through much of the drama. His soliloquy at the close of Act Four reveals his contempt for his allies and his hatred of his enemies: Now have I set these Portugals awork To hew a way for me unto the crown, Or with their weapons her to dig their graves. You bastards of the Night and Erebus, Fiends, Furies, hags that fight in beds of steel, Range through this army with your iron whips, Drive forward to this deed this Christian crew, And let me triumph in the tragedy, Though it be sealed and honoured with the blood Both of the Portugal and barbarous Moor. (4.2.70–9)

Here, Muly Mahamet imagines the classical Furies as his personal minions who will act on his behalf in the slaughter of both the Portuguese faction and Abdelmelec’s army. Later in the soliloquy, he conjures Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, to deliver “All torments, tortures,

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plagues, and pains of hell” to Abdelmelec himself. Muly Mahamet’s direct address to the audience demonstrates the deep degree of his vengefulness against his political foes and allies. Furthermore, he embodies the qualities of the medieval Vice figure as a skillful puppeteer, placing his enemies in positions to destroy each other. Only after the Battle of Alcazar begins does King Sebastian realize the iniquity of Muly Mahamet’s plans to sacrifice the Christian soldiers. Witnessing his ally, the Duke of Avero, being struck down, King Sebastian divulges his discovery to his fellow general, Captain Stukeley, in a moment of anagnorisis: Stukeley, alas, I see my oversight! False-hearted Mahamet, now, to my cost, I see thy treachery, warned to beware A face so full of fraud and villany. (5.1.67–70)

Sebastian casts Muly Mahamet as a devil figure here, and although Muly Mahamet’s Muslim faith has not played a significant role in the play, Sebastian projects the negative attributes that he associates with Islam, “fraud and villainy,” onto Muly Mahamet’s face, a visible marker of phenotypical difference that Sebastian interprets as moral. If Muly Mahamet stands as the clear villain of Peele’s play, then Captain Stukeley’s alliance with him serves to augment his already sullied reputation within the play. Like Muly Mahamet, Stukeley functions outside of the moral boundaries implicitly set forth by Peele in the play in his disavowal of English identity and his plot to invade Ireland as an act of insurrection against the queen. He boasts after securing troops and supplies from the King of Spain to mount an assault on Ireland, “I am the Marquess now of Ireland made, /And will be shortly King of Ireland” (2.1.79–80). Daniel Vitkus theorizes the figure of Stukeley in The Battle of Alcazar as both a “sympathetic victim” and “a contaminated figure who has strayed too far and must pay the price of his transgression” (2003, 83–84). In this sense, Peele’s Stukeley is not unlike Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, minus the religious overtones. Stukeley’s easy disavowal of his English identity to become a pirate mirrors the whimsy with which Faustus surrenders his soul in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (Marlowe 2005, 5–53). In his opening monologue, Faustus briefly considers each of the academic disciplines he has mastered only to reject it with the flippancy one might employ in perusing a cocktail menu (1.1.64). After Mephistopheles takes leave of

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Faustus after their first round of contract negotiations, Faustus mercurially exclaims, “Had I as many souls as there be stars /I’d give them all to Mephistopheles” (1.3.102–3). Peele’s Stukeley, similarly, lacks impulse control and changes alliances with reckless abandon, leaving in his wake a series of poor decisions that lead him to his tragic fate. After procuring “seven ships, two pinnacles, and six thousand men” (2.4.99) from King Philip II of Spain for the express purpose of waging war against the occupying English forces in Ireland in order to reclaim it as a Catholic territory and install Stukeley on the throne, Stukeley allows King Sebastian of Portugal to co-opt the fleet to support Muly Mahamet’s claim to Morocco. Stukeley ultimately suffers the karmic consequences of his political opportunism and defiance of sovereign authority by the play’ s end as Jonas and Hercules, two Italians under Stukeley’s command, stab their leader. Mortally wounded, Stukeley reflects on his life of piracy as he bleeds out onstage: My golden days, my younger careless years, Were when I touched the height of Fortune’s wheel, And lived in affluence of wealth and ease. Thus in my country carried long aloft, A discontented humour drave me thence To cross the seas to Ireland, then to Spain. (5.1.138–43)

Here, Stukeley’s “discontented humor” mirrors a similar impetus that drives Faustus toward his doom in Marlowe’s play. Instead of the intellectual boredom expressed by Marlowe’s character, Stukeley’s appetite for exploration—both geographical and spiritual—becomes expressed through piracy. Although Jonas condemns Stukeley as a “villain” (5.1.130) after delivering a death blow, Peele allows Stukeley a redemptive arc in the character’s final monologue. In contrast to a Faustus who can never repent, Stukeley appeals to a higher authority: Stukeley, the story of thy life is told; Here, breathe thy last, and bid thy friends farewell: And if thy country’s kindness be so much, Then let thy country kindly ring thy knell. Now go and in that bed of honour die, Where brave Sebastian’s course doth lie. Here endeth Fortune’s rule, and bitter rage; Here ends Tom Stukeley’s pilgrimage. (5.1.173–80)

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In his final line of the play, Stukeley describes his life’s journey as a “pilgrimage,” with obvious religious undertones. While Faustus believes his earthly sins to be so egregious that eternal damnation is inescapable, Stukeley welcomes death. Stukeley sees the temporal world as harsh and unfeeling, operating according to fickle whims of Fortune. In framing the story of his life as a religious pilgrimage, though, a newly introspective Stukeley is able to see the folly in his bellicose nature: “Dared to the field, that never could endure /To hear God Mars his drum but he must march” (5.1.167–8). Stukeley’s moment of self-awareness gives way to a bleak acceptance of fate or divine providence as he muses, “But from our cradles we were marked all /And destinate to die in Afric here” (5.1.171– 2). Peele’s Stukeley became a villainous pirate because that is the role he was destined to play. While George Peele highlights Stukeley’s tragic ambition in The Battle of Alcazar, the anonymous author of Captain Thomas Stukeley, a play that was staged a year later in 1595, seeks to emphasize Stukeley’s Faustian fall from grace. In this play, Stukeley almost compulsively makes bad decisions, squandering his class and honor in the vein of the proverbial prodigal son. Furthermore, the anonymous Captain Thomas Stukeley focuses on Stukeley’s early career in Ireland rather than his demise in the Moluccas. The anonymous author begins a scene of social transgression, which brings Stukeley’ s social status into high relief: Stukeley’s love interest, Bess, wants to marry him and not her fiancée, Vernon. This dynamic serves to allow the playwright(s) to contrast the protagonist’s noble birth with his ignoble proclivities, a discrepancy that can be accounted for as the conflict between competing class values. In announcing his worth to Vernon and Bess, Stukeley claims that he is: “a gentleman and well derived, /Equal, I may say, in all true aspects, /With higher fortune than I aim at now” (1.70–74). Curtis and Lady Curtis, Bess’s parents, discuss their future son-in-law’s social worth in much the same vein. Curtis asserts, “Stukeley is a gallant man, /And one here in our city much beloved.” Credentializing Stukeley even further, Lady Curtis observes, “Nay, husband, both in court and country too, /A gentleman well born, as I hear, /His father’s heir” (1.100–104). The conversation between Curtis and Lady Curtis, here, articulates aristocratic values; that is, Stukeley becomes a worthy potential son-in-law by virtue of his noble birth and likely inheritance. Stukeley’s aristocratic status becomes contested and undermined, however, by his failure to embody merchant class virtues such as thrift, prudence, and honesty,

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recalling Faustus’s wasting of his intellectual talents on the vain pursuit of necromancy. Unlike the ambition and lawlessness that Peele attributes to Stukeley as the captain’s tragic flaw, the author(s) of Captain Thomas Stukeley intends the protagonist’s pugnacious spirit and prodigality as his hamartia. Curtis, amending his earlier praise of Stukeley, adds with concern: “Passion of me, wife, but I heard last day, /He’s very wild, a quarreller, a fighter, /Ay, and I doubt a spend-good too” (1.107–109), a worry that becomes negated by Lady Curtis’s optimistic though ultimately erroneous excuse for Stukeley’s flaws: “This is but youthfulness – marriage will tame him” (1.110). The anonymous author has no such domestication of Stukeley in mind.

“Ward Sold His Country, Turned Turk, and Died a Slave”: Daborne’s Pirate Villain The mythology surrounding Stukeley in these two plays that appear in the 1590s, that of the hubristically defiant pirate whose karmic insubordination eventually leads to his eventual murder by his own men in Peele’s play and the perpetual and incurable prodigal in the anonymous Captain Stukeley, becomes extended, transferred, and Islamicized after the turn of the century as Captain John Ward. Stukeley’s arrival on the English pop cultural scene in the mid-1590s burned into the minds of playgoers the image of an intractable bad boy who protested the gravity of the inextricably linked forces of Church and State through the buoyancy of his own will. A little over a decade later, through the figure of Captain Ward, the exuberance of the piratical spirit becomes paradoxically bound to the “idol” of “Mohammed.” The 1609 pamphlets detailing the lives of Ward and his accomplice, the Dutchman Simon Dansiker, the anonymous News from the Sea, of two notorious pyrats Ward […] and Danseker and Andrew Barker’s A True and Certaine Report of […] Captaine Ward and Danseker employ the trope of “turning Turk” as a way of explaining the means by which Ward becomes victim to his own tragic ambition. In contrast to the pamphlet literature, though, the playwright Robert Daborne seeks to distinguish his theatrical vision of the pirate from those previous works in his play, A Christian Turned Turk (Daborne 2000, 149–231), which was penned sometime between 1609 and 1612 through the voice of the Chorus: “What heretofore set others’ pens awork, /Was Ward turned pirate; ours is Ward turned Turk” (Prologue.7–8). Unlike the Stukeley plays, the confluence of piracy and Islam coalesces in the

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figure of Ward. Furthermore, as we will observe in the figure of another renegado, Ward’s religious apostasy acquires a fetishistic sexual quality as renegadism, like witchcraft beforehand, becomes coded as both moral and sexual transgression. The double-bind induced by turning Turk and renouncing Protestant Christian marriage as the proper outlet for sexual expression combines the discourses of idolatry and sodomy. Furthermore, the play understands such behaviors as a form of spiritual bondage. Indeed, in Ward’s final moment of anagnorisis at the end of the play, Daborne’s tragic protagonist describes himself and other renegadoes as “slaves of Mahomet” (16.291). Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk, one of his two extant plays,1 dramatizes the life of the most notorious pirates of the Tudor-Stuart Era in England, Captain John Ward. Daborne was a minor playwright; born in 1580, he was a near contemporary of Shakespeare and died in 1628, twelve years after Shakespeare. Daborne’s father was a cloth merchant from Surrey, and the son spent his early life in spending not only his father’s money, but that of his father-in-law as well, a common pleas attorney. Traditionally, Daborne has been branded a profligate better known for his debts to Philip Henslowe, a leading Renaissance theater manager who financed the theater company for which Daborne was writing, the Lady Elizabeth’s men, than his theatrical production (Halpern 2004, 456). Like his theatrical character, Ward, Daborne had a “conversion experience” of his own; in 1617, he took holy orders and became a priest in Lismore, Ireland. As we will see, though, the parallels between Daborne and his theatrical creation (or perhaps more accurately, appropriation) become reflected and refracted through the fantastical Captain Ward. Though Daborne borrows generously from the Stukeley plays in crafting his piratical anti-hero, casting Ward as both victim to his own ambition and compulsively compunction-free prodigal, the playwright renders Ward a slave to a false faith, a deliberate contrast to the Christian model of a servant to Christ, through the trope of turning Turk. Daborne’s history as a debtor who was bound to his theatrical master, Henslowe, no doubt informs his understanding and, hence, dramatic representation of power dynamics. In seeking to define the relationship between playwright and theater company, Richard Halpern uses the historical example of Daborne’s dealings with Henslowe to suggest that

1 The other is A Poor Man’s Comfort, published in 1655.

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“regular” Renaissance playwrights like Daborne and Marlowe (that is, playwrights who did not have access to the means of theatrical production like Shakespeare did toward the end of his career) entered into a kind of Faustian bind vis-à-vis their theater managers (2004, 457). Specifically, Halpern has this to say of the financial situation: “[h]aving signed a contract with Henslowe and become financially dependent upon him, Daborne pledges his faith and Christianity against his obligation to his worldly master, wishing that God may desert him if he proves false to Henslowe” (2004, 457). Halpern envisions this contract as Faustian because although the playwright sells his product (or Faustian soul) to his “master,” he is never fully autonomous in his ability to bring his fantasy into fruition; instead, he must rely on the company itself to realize the playscript. Mephastophilis becomes a sort of Michael Bay figure for Halpern, a “purveyor of special effects” who embodies “the visual and spectacular apparatuses (including the stage itself) that are the contribution of theatrical capital, whether furnished directly by an impresario such as Henslowe or by a joint-stock company such as the Lord Admiral’s Men” (2004, 459). For Halpern, Henslowe becomes the “vice figure in [his] economic morality play” (2004, 459) starring Christopher Marlowe and co-starring Robert Daborne as tragic protagonists; in Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk, the Vice is not constrained to a single character; instead it permeates and inhabits the Islamic setting of the play, early modern Tunis. Furthermore, Daborne echoes Marlowe’s irony in labeling the enslaver as the slave. In the same way that Mephistopheles presents himself as Faustus’s slave (2.1.46) belying the actual power relationship, so too does Ward’s defamatory categorization of Christians turned Turk as “slaves of Mahomet” (16.291) function as a Freudian projection that more accurately reflects his own social and spiritual position. Turning Turk on the English stage, like the devil pact before it, makes spiritual slaves of all those who accept its terms. Daborne characterizes Ward in much the same vein as the anonymous Newes from the Sea and Barker’s A True and Certaine Report as we first see him as a pirate when the play opens. Daborne depicts him playing “Hazard,” a dice and card game that, in Renaissance minds, would hold a certain ambiguity: on the one hand, gambling symbolized waste and profligacy; on the other, as Shakespeare will tell us in The Merchant of Venice, “venture” was the means by which vast profits could be yielded. The scene of Ward’s conversion, though, functions as an index not only

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of religious conversion but also a form of economic conversion. The Prologue announces that “Our Muse doth take /A higher pitch, leaving [Ward’s] piracy/To reach the heart itself of villainy” (12–14). While villainy is primarily a moral term, we need to keep in mind that during the early modern period, the spelling of words in the English language had not hardened nor were meanings (then as now) absolute. So, while we distinguish in modern English between villain as evildoer and villein as serf of slave, the early moderns did not necessarily.2 Though Ward is a pirate at the play’s opening, he is not yet a convert to Islam. Ironically, Daborne employs the inversion of Protestant Christian marriage, here envisioned as marriage to a Muslim woman, in order to tempt the pirate into his Faustian bind. Like Mephistopheles’ employment of the specter of Helen to convince the magician to remain bound to his pact in Marlowe’s Faustus , Daborne casts the janissary captain’s sister, Voada, as his play’s femme fatale. Voada persuades Ward to turn Turk in order to marry her, only to subsequently turn shrew herself to frustrate him. Ward’s self-justification of his own conversion smacks of Faustus as Ward elevates earthly gifts above that of the divine: So, the day leaves the world chaste Voada. Nothing can make him miserable enjoys thee. What is’t I lose by this my change? My country? Already ‘tis to me impossible. My name scandalled? What is one island Compared to the Eastern monarchy? […] Besides, they are slaves stand subject unto shame. One good I enjoy outweighs all ills whatever Can be objected. To sum my happiness; That god on earth, to whom all men stand bare Gold, that doth usher greatness, lackeys me. I have more than I can spend. […] I’d rather lead on slaves Than be commanded by the power of kings Beauty, command, and riches—these are the three The world pursues, and these follow me. (7.177–94) 2 Villein comes from Ancient French, but the term is most likely also connected to the

Latin villa, the physical space to which the villein is bound. The term also meant villain, and the spelling of the latter gradually replaced that of the former. One root of the term villein is the word vile, which is etymologically rooted in the Ancient and Old French word vile and Latin vilum, meaning having low value or being cheap (OED Online. https://www.oed.com).

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Daborne’s Ward expresses essentially the same sentiment as that of Marlowe’s Faustus: the materialist fantasy of earthly pleasure through sex, power, and wealth. Ward’s play differs, though, in Ward’s equivocal employment of the language of slavery to characterize all human relationship s: to reputation, to gold, to monarchy. While the language of slavery permeates Daborne’s play text, sometimes employed as a term of slander, other times used to characterize power dynamics as Ward does above, and still other times embodied as physical slaves on the stage, the most telling use of the language of slavery comes at the moment of Ward’s suicide, when his fortune has soured and the Governor and Voada turn against him. Voada feigns being seriously wounded during a heated quarrel with her husband, and the Governor sentences Ward to receive “All tortures man e’er knew” (16.288). In Ward’s dying speech, he characterizes the Muslim citizens of Tunis as “slaves of Mahomet” (16.291). This turn of phrase is both an inversion of the Christian ideal of serving Christ and a conflation of Islam’s prophet and deity. In his final moments onstage, Ward curses his former lifestyle and warns of the spiritual dangers of a pirate’s life: All you that live by theft and piracies, That sell your lives and souls to purchase graves, That die to hell, and live far worse than slaves, Let dying Ward tell you that heaven is just, And that despair attends on blood and lust. [Dies.] (16.315–21)

Ward comes to the conclusion that the practice of engaging in Islamic piracy is a perversion of proper modes of religion and commerce. Ironically, even the Islamic Governor of Tunis characterizes Ward as a slave himself, reflecting: “Ward sold his country, turned Turk, and died a slave” (16.325–26). English adventure dramas of the 1590s into the early 1600s expanded the geographic scope of representation far beyond the safety and familiarity of England’s moated boarders. Additionally, these plays provided playwrights and audiences the opportunity to explore the fringes of English identity through the figure of the English pirate. George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, the anonymously authored Captain Thomas Stukeley, and Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk dramatize the encounters of real English pirates in a competitive, dangerous, and violent world outside of the protection of the state. In depicting the notorious

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pirates Thomas Stukeley and John Ward, the playwrights made some important first steps in creating the mythology of piracy. The pirate plays of this era depict the concept that despite the hostile settings, the real battle against villainy takes place within the soul.

References Barbour, Richmond. 2003. Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Stuart. 1999. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Daborne, Robert. 2000. “A Christian Turned Turk.” In Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, A Christian Turned Turk, and The Renegado, edited by Daniel Vitkus, 149–231. New York: Columbia University Press. Edelman, Charles, ed. 2005. “Captain Thomas Stukeley: The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley.” In The Stukeley Plays: ‘The Battle of Alcazar by George Peele and ‘The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley, edited by Charles Edelman, 134–230. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fuchs, Barbara. 2000. “Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes, and the English Nation.” English Literary History 67: 45–69. Greene, Robert. 2000. “Selimus, Emperor of the Turks.” In Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, A Christian Turned Turk, and The Renegado, edited by Daniel Vitkus, 55–143. New York: Columbia University Press. Halpern, Richard. 2004. “Marlowe’s Theater of Night: Doctor Faustus and Capital.” English Literary History 71, no. 2: 455–495. Lake, Peter. 1989. “Anti-popery: The Structure of a Prejudice.” In Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642, edited by Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, 72–106. London: Longman. Marlowe, Christopher. 2005. “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (A-Text 1604).” In Doctor Faustus: A Two Text Edition, edited by David Scott Kastan, 5–53. New York: W. W. Norton. ———. 2011. Christopher Marlowe: Four Plays: Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Dr. Faustus, edited by Brian Gibbons. London: Methuen Drama. Peele, George. 2005. “The Battle of Alcazar.” In The Stukeley Plays: ‘The Battle of Alcazar by George Peele and ‘The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley’, edited by Charles Edelman, 63–128. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Vitkus, Daniel (ed.). 2000. Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, A Christian Turned Turk, and The Renegado. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2003. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

PART II

Performing Moral Deformity in the Shakespearean Moment

CHAPTER 6

The Psychological Origins of Evil: The Trickster in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi Hend Hamed

Introduction Evil is not a concept that could be easily defined. Many philosophers, politicians, and psychologists have attempted to explain the meaning of evil and give it a precise definition, but their endeavors have been always inadequate. Evil could be construed from a plethora of perspectives including the moral, religious, or even the intellectual. However, these are not the only dimensions that evil could be looked at from. In his book What Evil Means to Us, Fred Alford met with several prisoners as well as a number of working people and college students, interviewed them about the concept of “evil” and asked about what this word means to them. Generally, the word “dread” was used by the interviewees as a reason if not a synonym for evil. A big number of the prisoners involved in Alford’s study were passionate and filled with penitence on describing how evil they were. According to Alford, dread is not the holistic idea behind evil, not even its basic part; “but it is its ground: the dread of being human, vulnerable, alone in the universe, and doomed to die” (Alford 1997, 3).

H. Hamed (B) Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_6

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Based on Alford’s observations, this paper is an attempt to delve into Wesbter’s trickster’s character to underscore his reticent sufferings and silent implorations. In Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, evil is played upon from a sundry of events by different characters. Since the reality of evil itself remains obscure, the characters involved in evil actions may find it problematic to explain the reasons behind their evil doings. In fact, every character in the play could relatively be an evildoer. Antonio is evil because he married the Duchess to climb the ladder of the social and political hierarchy whereas Bosola agreed to becoming the “intelligencer” in the Duchess’ palace for the same reason. The Cardinal is represented as an evil “religious” man from the start of the play who would hire Bosola to commit his dirty work on his behalf. As for Ferdinand, it becomes apparent that his turbulent personality, sexist remarks, incestuous innuendos, and bestial descriptions would aptly grant him the role of the trickster in the play.

The Psychology of Evil: The Trickster’s Dread In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1980), Carl Jung coined the term “collective unconscious” by which he refers to primordial types or universal images that exist in every human even before his birth. According to Jung, the archetype applies indirectly to the “representations collectives since it designates only those psychic contents which have not yet been submitted to conscious elaboration and are therefore an immediate datum of psychic experience” (Jung 1980, 5). Among the different archetypes discussed by Jung is the shadow archetype. The shadow archetype could be seen in light of Freud’s unconscious since the shadow seems to accommodate all the qualities that are not present in the self. Inevitably, it “comprises all that is worst and best in mankind” (Stevens 2002, 251). As per Jung’s theories, if the person could not control his shadow, he would not pass the process of individuation and would, therefore, fall a patient to neurosis. Based on the “collective unconscious” theory, a person does not choose whether his shadow (his id—his real self) is good or bad; the only thing he could do is be aware of this shadow and thence, stifle its existence in the conscious. Among different archetypes, Jung introduced the trickster archetype which he defined as “a collective shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals” (Jung 1980, 484). This archetype holds

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the very early intellectual and moral sphere in front of the person’s eyes so he would always aim to being higher and more civilized. Jung adds: The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has daemonic figure who was originally autonomous and even capable of causing possession. (1980, 478)

Jung maintains that the trickster exists in all of us but civilization always work on annihilating his presence. Any human being who does evil actions would never revert to the trickster (i.e., himself) as the sole reason behind such maleficent doings but would always blame external circumstances instead. Even if the daemon is within the gates, the evildoer would find it very difficult to admit that these are the workings of the trickster. The trickster is, thus, “a primitive “cosmic” being of divine-animal nature, on the one hand superior to man because of his superhuman qualities, and on the other hand, inferior to him because of his unreason and unconsciousness” (Jung 1980, 473). By joining the divine and bestial elements, the trickster believes he has the upper hand in all events including life and death, in addition to seeing himself as a monstrous, unruly animal who should be obeyed. “In his clearest manifestations,” Jung explains, “[the trickster] is a faithful reflection of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level” (1980, 465). Man finds himself fighting the brutal animal within, trying to curb its paws while enjoying the absolute power endowed to him by the divine quality he claims to enjoy. Despite his uncontrollable behavior, the trickster is not really evil, but “he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and unrelatedness” (Jung 1980, 473). In other words, the trickster is imprisoned in animal consciousness unable to free himself from its claws. Fred Alford proposes an idea in his book that supports Jung’s claims. From his discussions with the inmates, he realized that “somethings people think about evil are buried deeply in the unconscious” (Alford 1997, 2). Some of these inmates would confide that they did evil actions because they are evil, as if this is the only justification they could provide for what they have done. If these two ideas would be joined in view, it is apparent that Alford’s inmates felt the existence of the trickster and were

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not able to repress its needs and desires. Instead of silencing his dreadful voice, they gave him the upper hand that he utilized to dismantle the conscious and voice the monstrous, tempestuous trickster instead. The trickster would exorcise any means of civility or morality from the psyche and would replace them with dread and fear; fear of being recognized and hence, deconstructed from/by the self. One of Alford’s inmates confided that: “the evil person wants to crawl inside me and control everything I do. Everything I think, everything I am. He wants to take me over” (Alford 1997, 21). Ostensibly, the evildoer is unaware that this is the trickster, or his dark shadow, who wants to control his entire being. In Jung’s words, the “primitive cannot assert that he thinks, it is rather that something thinks in him” (Jung 1980, 153). The human would feel that he is possessed by an ulterior entity that is neither internal nor foreign to his being; and this is how the deeply- rooted dread the evildoer feels emerges. As is clear, thence, the key tenet on which Alford’s theory is built is the idea of dread. In his book The Primitive Edge of Experience, Thomas Ogden introduces the term “autistic-contiguous” position by which he refers to the “sensory-dominated, pre-symbolic area of experience in which the most primitive form of meaning is generated on the basis of the organization of sensory impressions, particularly at the skin-surface” (2004, 4). This kind of “sensory” experience is primitive, namely, it is innate in the mind of the human and therefore could be easily assimilated to Jung’s archetypes. According to Alford, his inmates were suffering from the “formless dread of our presymbolic, preverbal experience [the autistic-contiguous position], the fear that the self is dissolving” (Alford 1997, 9). Humans would try to bury such feelings of dread inside the mind which, by default, only makes the threat more powerful for “repression would prevent [feelings] from vanishing, because repressed contents are the very ones that have the best chance of survival” (Jung 1980, 474). By doing evil, the evildoer attempts to “evacuate this experience [dread] by inflicting it on others making them feel dreadful by hurting them” (Alford 1997, 3). They feel that by doing so, they would be metamorphosing their passivity, haplessness, and suffering into action and strength. Since the trickster is part of our primitivity or collective unconscious, then it does not belong to the civilized world with its manners and ethics. The trickster, who is half divine, half beast, only believes in survival. If‚

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according to the primitive world, man is either a victim or an executioner, the trickster would certainly choose to be the latter. Most evildoers presume that victimhood is synonymous with oblivion: a person would never be remembered if he dies as a victim. Death is the ultimate result of life and the trickster would prefer dying as an executioner not as a scapegoat. If sadism is defined as “the joy of avoiding victimhood” (Alford 1997, 27), then doing evil is a form of sadism. Sadism is the pleasure of taking control of the experience of victimhood by inflicting it upon another. In Alford’s words “destroying the other, we destroy our dread … separating from it after having given it protosymbolic form in the body of another” (Alford 1997, 43). By torturing, terrorizing, and victimizing the other, the evildoer gives form to his dread and alleges his freedom from it by exercising it on the victim. The evildoer, then, moves from being a sadist to being a sadomasochist. In this sense, sadomasochism is “fusion, seeking to merge with the other in order to contain one’s dread” (Alford 1997, 51). This oneness with the victim does not assume an identification with him but rather suggests the evildoer’s inability to create the boundaries required between the self and the other. This suspension entails possessing the victim’s body, both physically and metaphorically, and attempting to agonize him/her as vehemently as possible. Sadomasochists “overcome their suffering by becoming it, like riding the tiger, or rather, becoming the wild beast” (Alford 1997, 125). One of Alford’s inmates, Susan Smith, drowned her kids while being utterly confident that she was not trying to kill her children, but to kill herself. This distorted view of the self and the other disorients the person intensely by making him believe that it is plausible to kill others so as to kill yourself or even torture them because you are tortured (Alford 1997, 47). By finding a vessel to contain one’s dread, the evildoer assumes a fruitful escapism of the dread himself. Usually, the victim chosen by the evildoer is innocent and guiltless so that the evildoer exercises his power on his victim scrumptiously. Thus, evil does not refer to a devaluation of otherness because this “other” is intimidating, but it is the annihilation of the other because the other is good. According to Alford, evil is “the special quality of badness called envy, the desire to destroy the innocence and goodness for its own sake, because the very existence of innocence and goodness outside the self is an intolerable insult to the grandiose but empty self” (Alford 1997, 71). The reference here is to the trickster who doesn’t see any philanthropic quality in people but rather infiltrates their “selves” and connects

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with their “shadow” tricksters. When the trickster notices the absence of another fellow trickster, the divine-bestial quality takes over and decides to end the existence of that innocent self. “How can being a victim— living and dying for a belief or value rather than power —be meaningful in a world in which being a victim is tantamount to having never existed” (Alford 1997, 79–80)? This is how the trickster thinks and would hence act accordingly. Torturing the victim before killing him is one essential aspect of the evil action. The evildoer starts fantasizing about how he will torture his victim, sometimes even by giving the victim the luxury of picking his torturing tool or technique. Torture could be, thus, seen as a form of creativity or an art per se. “Torture,” Alford explains, “is frequently couched in the language of drama, a work of art” (Alford 1997, 103). Torture is the opposite of drama, in fact, in the sense that in drama “a transformed larger world is acted out on a small stage [but in] torture, the world is reduced to the body of the victim” (Alford 1997, 103). Torture, thus, reduces the whole world to the human body which, consequently, turns to symbolize a realm of pain and suffering. Art (or torture) becomes a way to give form to one’s dread. Evil is, thus, creativity that has to be performed. However, what occurs afterward is not an escapism or a distraction from the dread as the evildoer hoped would happen. In contrast, most of Alford’s inmates were all sepulchral and replete with contrition after having committed the murder or the sin. The evildoer would hold all the responsibility for his evil deeds and would regret his actions. The main reason for the evildoer’s actions is to transport this dread to the victim so as to flee from this dread himself. What really happens is that the evildoer begins a process of sympathy and empathy especially if he knew the victim. Despite the huge amount of penance and commotion felt by the evildoer post hoc, nothing changes “this tendency to inflict terror on others” (Alford 1997, 59). The trickster would remain in control as long as the self is too weak to expunge itself from its grip.

Ferdinand: Webster’s Trickster Readers are introduced to Ferdinand at the beginning of the play via Bosola and Antonio, the steward, who has just returned to Italy from France. Act 1, scene 1, is a praise of the French court and an implied criticism of the Italian court incarnated in the characters of Ferdinand and

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his brother the Cardinal of Aragon. Bosola’s depiction of the brothers as “plum trees, that grow crooked over standing pools,” (1.1.5) highlights their corruption and thus, sets the framework for their characters and connects them with evil from the very beginning of the play. However, it is not long before we see Ferdinand in person and understand his character in a better light. The character of Ferdinand appears very quickly to be a tremendously imperious figure as is clear in his conversation with his courtiers: “Why do you laugh? Methinks you that are courtiers should be my touch-wood, take fire when I give fire; that is, laugh when I laugh, were the subject never so witty” (1.1.8). One page later, Antonio blatantly puts it: “The duke there? A most perverse and turbulent nature. What appears in him mirth is merely outside; If he laught heartily, it is to laugh all honesty out of fashion” (1.1.9) As a start, Ferdinand is seen as a dominant character who sees that he should be obeyed no matter what his orders are and as an obstinate dyspeptic who finds it implausible to control his behavior and his anger. This testifies to his bestial-divine nature sharing both godly-like and animal qualities. Antonio, also, alludes to the duke’s double nature, i.e., the fact that what he feels is not necessarily what he shows. Antonio adds later that Ferdinand “speaks with others’ tongues, and hears men’s suits with other’s ears; will seem to sleep o’the bench only to entrap offenders in their answers; dooms men to death by information, rewards by hearsay” (1.1.10). The duke is presented as a character who lacks self-confidence, who listens to people without forming a clear opinion about what they say, and who is only associated with “doom” and “death.” Undoubtedly, Ferdinand represents evil in the play and would thus be expected to be the Duchess’s foil. Ferdinand’s dominance is reinforced by his decision of hiring Bosola to spy on his sister and threatening her not to marry for the second time. In their discussion, Ferdinand and the Duchess showcase the major antithesis this play is built on: the duchess who values life and sees herself no “holy relic” and Ferdinand’s tendency to control and presumably destroy others. Ferdinand threatens his twin sister with their father’s poniard, “I’d loth to see’t look rusty” (1.1.16), he says, in an attempt to frighten his sister from remarrying. The idea of exercising control is taken from Ferdinand to a great extreme, he doesn’t find it delinquent to utilize weaponry, even in the face of his sister. What is, also, perceptible in their conversation is Ferdinand’s aberrant use of sexual innuendos which echoes unconscious incestuous sentiments. Perhaps it’s the trickster who has these feelings for the Duchess and not Ferdinand himself, but the result is no different,

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“he is deformed so beastly by his intemperate anger” (Hirsch 2005, 22). Ferdinand’s shadow trickster is the one in control of Ferdinand and is trying unceasingly to take him over. The Duchess is, however, not fully aware of her brother’s state of mind. When she married Antonio, flouting her brother’s menaces, she reassured him: “Do not think of them: All discord without this circumference is only to be pitied, and not fear’d: Yet, should they know it, time will easily scatter the tempest” (1.1.21). The Duchess’s adamant trust that her brothers will eventually calm down after knowing of her marriage underscores her innocence and her unawareness of the reality of the trickster fighting for exorcism. Although Ferdinand’s villainous attributes have been obvious from the very beginning of the play, they become more ostensible after he discovers his sister’s treachery (from his viewpoint). In his angry fits, the language of the trickster appears to take over his personality. He confides to his brother that he has “grown mad” (2.5.41) with it. He explains that his sister has been “damned.” He tells his brother: “Here’s the cursed day to prompt my memory; and here’t shall stick till of her bleeding heart I make a sponge to wipe it out” (2.5.41). The Cardinal responded that his brother should control his anger and stop being a “tempest,” but this excited the trickster more who began fantasizing over how he would torture and destroy his prey. His fantasies are very much analogous to Alford’s inmates: “Would I could be one, that I might toss her place ‘bout her ears, root up her goodly forests, blast her meads and lay her general territory as waste as she hath done her honours” (2.5.42). As noticed, the actions Ferdinand aspires to commit are depicted in a very graphic mode that puts Ferdinand and Alford’s inmates on the same ground. He resumes: “we must now use balsamum, but fire, the smarting cupping-glass, for that’s the mean to purge infected blood, such blood as hers” (2.5.43). His only response to the “sin” his sister committed is to demolish her, burn her, and thwart her very existence. He would also “hew” her to pieces if needed. The trickster’s bestial quality is apparently in play here, daydreaming how he would molest his prey. It is no surprise, therefore, that his inclination to use animal imagery becomes more palpable. He compares his sister to a “heyna” and resumes with his disruptive fantasies: I would have their bodies burnt in a coal-pit with the ventage stopp’d, that their curs’d smoke might not ascend to heaven; or dip the sheets they lie in pitch or Sulphur, wrap them in’t, and then light them like a match;

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or else to boil their bastard to a cullis, and give ‘t his lecherous father to renew the sin of his back (2.5.44).

From this instant onwards, the trickster takes full control of Ferdinand, strengthening both the divine superiority (life and death) and the bestial primitivity (consider the brutality of his inner dwellings). The Cardinal finds no other way to respond to his brother’s ruthless fantasies except to leave him alone. Ferdinand would now begin his metamorphosis until he takes the complete form of the trickster. Ferdinand, then, decides to meet his sister for two major reasons. First, he wants to lower her spirits and make her desperate and second, he needs to discover the identity of her husband. He spends the entire time speaking with her, screaming, and cursing and when he gets the chance to know her husband, he asks him to remain hidden so that he won’t get himself killed. As paradoxical as these actions would seem, they testify to Ferdinand’s inner conflicts. Whereas he seems to take his power from the trickster, he is also trying to suppress and resist his calls. His tendency to refer to animals becomes more intense here when he tells his sister: “the howling of a wolf is music to thee, screech-owl” (3.2.52). The wolf is going to be a recurrent motif in the play and would be explained in detail later when commenting on Ferdinand’s eventual lycanthropy. However, comparing human beings to animals is rather pervasive in the trickster’s make-up since he, himself, is half-bestial. As an animal, Ferdinand dreads other human beings because he could only realize the bestial part in them and this could be one of the reasons why he wanted to get rid of his sister. His wide and “wild” imagination, enhanced by the evil trickster, led him to believe that the only way to avoid such dread would be to eliminate the cause of the dread, namely, his sister. Ferdinand could be regarded here as a ruthless sadist who would fantasize in torturing and killing his victim; the victim he chooses meticulously to absorb the dread of his empty self. Evil is a form of art and creativity, and by using drama, Ferdinand takes his revenge from the duchess. He writes and directs a play but decides not to participate in the acting. Drama was used before to force Claudius confess to murdering his brother in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and was also used in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. The play-within-a-play was a major Elizabethan technique used in revenge tragedies to spur torture notwithstanding psychological and mental torture. The trickster is now wholly in control and Ferdinand’s evil seems to stem entirely from his shadow. As per Alford, art and specially drama, becomes a way of giving

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form to the trickster’s dread and this is what Ferdinand does. Before ordering Bosola to murder his sister, he decides to transfer his dread to her, assuming that he will no longer feel this dread. He orders Bosola to create effigies for her husband and children and he gives her a wax hand (pretending it’s her husband’s) to make her fall into desolation. Catherine Belsey explains that Ferdinand’s “offer of the dead hand to the Duchess is a grotesque and cruel caricature of the wooing scene” (1980, 129). Not only does he make her feel guilty for the death of her family, he even brings mad men who perform mad dances and actions in front of her to make her lose her sanity: Damn her! That body of hers. While that my blood run pure in ‘t, was more worth than that which thou wouldst comfort, call’d a soul. I will send her masques of common courtezans, have her meat serv’d up by bawds and ruffians, and, ‘cause she ‘ll needs be mad, I am resolv’d to more forth the common hospital. All the mad-folk, and place them near her lodging; there let them practice together, sing and dance, and act their gambols to the full o’ th’ moon: If she can sleep the better for it, let her. (4.1.76–77)

The Duchess herself is, however, well aware of the absurdity and the artificiality of the situation as she tells Bosola: “I account this world a tedious theatre, For I do play a part in ‘it ‘gainst my will” (4.1.74–75). The role the Duchess now is forced to play is the role of the victim and since she is no victim, she does not accept to embody this character. She does not yield to Ferdinand’s torture and maintains confidently that she is “Duchess of Malfi still” and that she is not scared of death. Ferdinand’s “artifice envelopes the Duchess, reducing her to a lifeless work of art” (Belsey 1980, 123) believing that she has no control whatsoever over her life (this is the divine attribute of the trickster) and that his actions would bring her close to despair. “She’s plagu’d in art” (4.1.76), as Ferdinand describes her status-quo. As the villain, Ferdinand thinks that by torturing his sister, she would absorb all his dread, letting him flee his fate. This does not happen, however, and Ferdinand “fuses” more with his sister after her death, his dread multiplies, and even though he tries to detach himself from taking the responsibility of this vile action, he develops feelings of guilt and remorse:

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Let me see her face again. Why didst thou not pity her? What an excellent honest man mightst thou have been, if thou hadst borne her to some sanctuary! Or, bold in a good cause, oppos’d thyself, with thy advanced sword above thy head, between her innocence and my revenge! I bade thee, when I was distracted of my wits, go kill my dearest friend, and thou hast done’t. (4.2.88)

By becoming more terrified, Ferdinand succumbs more to his shadow (the trickster) that would continue possessing him until his subsequent madness. Despite his various attempts at throwing his sister’s murder over Bosola’s shoulders, Ferdinand knows perfectly that he is the sole person to be repudiated for this horrendous action. The dread within surges and his bestial nature dominates. His use of animal imagery becomes more extensive with specific reference to the wolf. He compares the duchess’ kids to “young wolves” and later tells Bosola that the wolf “shall find her grave, and scrape it up … to discover the horrid murder” (4.2.89) and he confesses that this is a “deed of darkness.” This revelation would divulge Ferdinand’s utter disapproval of what happened to the duchess despite being the one who wrote and directed the drama of her torture. This apparent mayhem attests, on the one hand, to the presence of the trickster who managed to distort Ferdinand’s consciousness, and on the other, to Ferdinand’s utter failure at getting in terms with his trickster and thus suppressing his consistent calls for domination. Upon his return to Milan, the trickster’s behavior becomes awkward and all the courtiers suspect his mental sickness. The doctor explains to the Cardinal that Ferdinand is suffering from lycanthropy. He elaborates: “In those that are possessed with ‘t there o’erflows such melancholy humour they imagine themselves to be transformed into wolves; steal forth to church-yards in the said he was a wolf, only the difference was, a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside, his on the inside; bade them take their swords, rip up his flesh, and try” (5.2.96). Lycanthropy is defined as: The reality of the werewolf, that is, the phenomenon of metamorphosis from human form to wolf. Simultaneously, the term also referred to the delusion that one was capable of such transformations, whether this delusion was the result of madness, melancholy, hallucinogenic drugs, illness, or the diabolic exacerbation of any of these cases. (Hirsch 2005, 2)

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Ferdinand has a tendency from the beginning of the play to see people as mere beasts but with his eventual lycanthropic mentality, this predisposition becomes more of a pattern: part and parcel of his character. Failure to fight the trickster turns him completely into that trickster. In his Dictionary of Symbols, J. E. Cirlot writes that the wolf is a symbol of the principle of evil per se (1971, 275) while mythologically, the wolf is “regarded as the animal of both Apollo and Ares” (Coleman 2007, 1104) in Greece, and in Egypt, it is “scared to Wepwawet” (Coleman 2007, 1104). As a recurrent motif, the wolf becomes a replica for the trickster who carries both bestial and divine traits. While speaking to Bosola in his remorseful fit, Ferdinand told him that he had hopes he would inherit the Duchess’s possessions after her death, identifying greed to be his sole motivation behind his actions. However, built on the psychological theories explained earlier, this could be seen as nothing but a misleading afterthought. Ferdinand had to choose to either be a victim or a victimizer, this is how the trickster deluded him and mutated his consciousness. Seen as the ultimate source of evil in the play, the duchess is always seen as his foil: “you were too much i’ th’ light,” he tells her, “but no more” (4.1.73). The Duchess becomes a threat to the evildoer’s confused self and that is why she was chosen to be his victim. According to Belsey, “the Duchess’ dissimulation, her equivocation, her double entendres, her cursing and her madness are in a sense like Ferdinand’s” (1980, 127). At the same time, profound examination of these similarities emphasizes the moral distance between the duchess and Ferdinand. The trickster saw the duchess as the most suitable candidate to play the role of the victim but the dread never went at bay. Amid his mad convulsions and right before his death, Ferdinand was frightened of something (someone) that was following him. Surprisingly, it turned out to be his shadow: Ferdinand: … Look, what’s that follows me? … Malatesti: ‘Tis your shadow. Ferdinand: Stay it; let it not haunt me. Malatesti: Impossible, if you move, and the sun shine. Ferdinand: I will throttle it. [Throws himself down on his shadow] (5.2.96).

As irrational as it may seem, only after turning mad (losing his entire self, his identity, his consciousness), that Ferdinand becomes aware of his

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shadow trickster. He sees his trickster and attempts to kill it unaware that this is still himself and that he wouldn’t be able to get rid of this evil side only; it has to be a comprehensive annihilation. He sees all people now as beasts as he tells the doctor: “you are all of you like beasts of sacrifice” (5.2.98) announcing the victory of the bestial trickster in every single one of us. As per many of Alford’s inmates, it is rather impossible to flee one’s fate. Evil is too powerless in the face of fate; thus, you will kill so as not to be powerless. Prior to his death, Ferdinand announces his weakness and vulnerability: “My sister, O my sister! There’s the cause on ‘t. Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, like diamond, we are cut with our own dust” (5.5.118–119). Ferdinand’s final words affirm his complete submission to fate and bring him back to hold responsibility for all the evil actions he has committed. He knows that his downfall was caused by his anger, turbulence, and confusion and that he shouldn’t blame any one but himself.

Conclusion This paper is an attempt to interpret Ferdinand’s evil actions from a psychological lens. Although he appears to be a hateful villain, Ferdinand is always in a war with his trickster that was pushing him toward the abyss. Like Fred Alford’s inmates who thought that evil is rooted in the unconscious, Ferdinand’s evil springs from the trickster who represents one’s primitivity, according to Carl Jung’s theories. The double nature of the trickster—being half divine and half beast—created the evildoer’s route toward murdering his twin sister. The villain’s dread of dying as victim led him to transfer this dread into the innocent duchess believing that he would put this dread at bay. However, feelings of remorse and contrition pervaded the villain’s psyche, turned him into a madman, and caused his death.

References Alford, Fred C. 1997. What Evil Means to Us. New York: Cornell University Press. Belsey, Catherine. 1980. “Emblem and Antithesis in The Duchess of Malfi.” Renaissance Drama 11: 115–135. https://doi.org/10.1086/rd.11.419 17181.

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Cirlot, J. E. 1971. A Dictionary of Symbols. London: Routledge. Coleman, J. A. 2007. The Dictionary of Mythology. London: Arcturus. Hirsch, Brett D. 2005. “An Italian Werewolf in London: Lycanthropy and The Duchess of Malfi.” Early Modern Literary Studies 11: 1–43. Jung, Carl G. 1980. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Ogden, Thomas H. 2004. The Primitive Edge of Experience. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Stevens, Anthony. 2002. Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. London: Routledge. Webster, John. 2001. The Duchess of Malfi. Accessed May 24, 2020. https://sch olarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/776/duchess.pdf.

CHAPTER 7

A Show of Illusions: Performing Villainous Magic in Shakespeare’s The Tempest & Macbeth Lisann Anders

Performing Villains in Shakespeare In a rather conservative definition by James Edward Siemon, “the ideal villain stands apart from the society of lovers and […] can therefore, be easily disposed of when he is of no further use” (1972, 437). This description proves to be useful in terms of identifying potential villains in classic romantic comedy plots such as Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and it would seem that it also holds true for Romance plots such as The Tempest or tragedies such as Macbeth. However, it proves to be more difficult in the case of The Tempest and Macbeth, in which none of the characters is in fact removed from the plot since each of the potential villainous characters is of significance for the exploration of human nature and different personality traits. Even the Weird Sisters haunt the ending of Macbeth despite their absence or maybe because of their absence, recalling

L. Anders (B) University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_7

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the historical use of the term “weird,” which refers to “fatalistic powers” (Neuenfeldt 1994, 15). In both Shakespearean plays, The Tempest and Macbeth, the question arises who the villain is and if there are maybe even several villains. What makes them villains? What is the motivation behind their villainy? To determine the villains of the plays, the hunger for power plays an important role—at least at first sight; in The Tempest it seems to be the blood thirst of Caliban as well as Prospero’s ambitious brother Antonio whereas in the Scottish play, Macbeth himself and his wife Lady Macbeth compose the power-hungry couple. According to Richard Strier, “Power is the capacity to coerce and enslave, to ‘control’ in the very strong Renaissance sense of the term” (1999, 25). Indeed, villainous characters in both plays make use of these forms of violent power while at the same time, there are other evil, supernatural forces at work. Magic plays a central role in both plays and is closely associated with political ambition. Questions that are to be considered here are how far villainous acts and magic are aligned as well as the way in which their staging is related to characters’ political and personal ambition. The witches, also known as the Weird Sisters, and Prospero are not only executioners of magic using it to influence the future, but they are also performers of magic.1 On the one hand, they present themselves as mysterious characters in their attire as well as language and on the other hand, they also make a show of it on a meta-level, i.e., for the audience who is watching the plays. This performative quality does not only associate magic with the theater, but it also suggests that both are highly seductive and manipulative. Since both plays revolve around political power struggles, a connection between the theatricality of magic and the theatrical quality of politics can be assumed. The characters in the plays are manipulated through the performativity of magic to aid political goals; through that, their villainy is emphasized since the latter relies on performativity as well. Moreover, the audience is made an accomplice of the illusory act through their suspension of disbelief and lack of intervention. In the following chapter, it is to be argued that the link between villainy and magic is strong enough for both plays to abjure magic in the

1 Bent Holm illustrates that in the historical context of the play, “Extra-theatrical reality included belief in witchcraft and trials. It is commonly accepted that the theme of witchcraft in Macbeth specifically refers to James’ interest in the issue” (1999, 2).

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end and try to restore order in a world of chaos on the diegetic as well as extra-diegetic level through an act of performativity. In order to analyze the performative act of villainy in the plays, it has to be determined who is to prove the villain in Macbeth and The Tempest, respectively and what determines malevolence in those plays. When Maurice Charney states, “Shakespeare’s villains are arbitrary and irrational in the pursuit of their wills, as if they need to consult with no one else among their many counsellors” (2012, xiii), he generalizes Shakespearean villains and only delivers one possible explanation of villainous behavior in the plays. In fact, when looking at Macbeth and The Tempest, Charney’s generalization only pertains to a certain degree. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the famous villain-duo, are indeed marked by a certain irrationality. They are blinded by the chance of ultimate power and decide to murder King Duncan—a decision which is triggered by an irrational belief in fortune-telling and the hallucination of a dagger. However, the choice to kill Duncan is not arbitrary; it is a planned regicide, in which even potential witnesses are eliminated. The team develops arbitrariness in their villainous actions only later in the play with the continuous descent into madness. On the other hand, if the Weird Sisters are considered the villainous force of the play, Charney’s statement seems to be confirmed as they are supernatural and thus irrational forces and they seem to choose their victims arbitrarily. However, they also represent fate and even though fate is rooted in arbitrariness, the Sisters choose Macbeth and shape his fate by telling him the future, which is a conscious decision on their part. Their will is to cause chaos and they pursue this goal from the very first scene of the play. Villainy in Macbeth is thus defined not only by violent arbitrary actions, but by the conscious decision to be villainous and to perform this villainy by means of magic and violence, respectively. The motivation behind this decision presents itself as a hunger for power in the case of Macbeth and his wife, but also the Weird Sisters long to exert power by their intervention in Macbeth’s fate and their control over him. This nexus between villainous performativity and the strife for power is similarly illustrated in The Tempest. The most conspicuous villain or rather villains in the play are Antonio and Sebastian. Antonio, Prospero’s brother, seized the place as duke with the help of Alonso, the king of Naples, and attempted to kill his brother, who was occupied with his magic books and hence neglected his dukedom. Only by means of the help of Gonzalo, Prospero was able to escape with his daughter Miranda.

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While it could be argued that Antonio’s treason can be justified due to the neglect Prospero showed for his duties, the intended murder marks him a villainous character from the beginning. Moreover, on the island, he proves to be a tempter and manipulator who convinces Sebastian of the sweetness of power that is to murder for. Likewise, Antonio himself is ready to murder to rid himself of any potential obstacles in his reign. Therefore, he makes a pact with Sebastian to kill Alonso if Sebastian kills Gonzalo. These attempted murders followed by their lies after Ariel wakes the victims up and their lack of remorse after being forgiven their crimes at the end of the play, shows not only their evil character but emphasizes their factual powerlessness since both of them do not possess magic (nor are they interested in the natural magic of the island). They are both calculating politicians who try to achieve ultimate power by earthly means, but they do not obtain power over the supernatural realm. Quite significantly, neither of them fails because of their rejection of magic—after all, it was this rejection which made Antonio duke—but because of their ruthlessness, which requests punishment.

The Dark Triad of Personality This ruthlessness ingrained in evil desires can be aligned with the “Dark Triad of Personality,” which allows to classify Antonio and Sebastian (even though Antonio much more as the latter) as characters who deviate from the norm in a dangerous way. Deriving from psychology, the Dark Triad is also expedient in literary studies when determining villainy due to its illustrative representation of the relationship between and characteristics of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy (Jakobwitz and Egan 2006). Antonio and Sebastian can be considered narcissistic in terms of their pride, arrogance, controlling nature, and duplicity, which is emphasized in their derision of Gonzalo’s idealism: Gonzalo: Had I plantation of this isle, my lord, – Antonio: He’d sow’t with nettle-seed. Sebastian: Or docks, or mellows. Gonzalo: And were the king on’t, what would I do? Sebastian: Scape being drunk for want of wine. Gonzalo: I’the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things, for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate;

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Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too,—but innocent and pure; No sovereignty, – Sebastian: Yet he would be king on’t. Antonio: The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. […] Sebastian: No marrying ‘mong his subjects? Antonio: None, man; all idle; whores and knaves. (II.i.140–162)

In addition to their narcissistic arrogance, their Machiavellian nature is revealed in their political approach, namely their calculating, immoral, and manipulative behavior that is driven by self-interest. Antonio, as the more experienced politician, certainly shows a deeper connection to Machiavellianism since he already used these feats in order to ascend to power over Milan, which is why he can easily manipulate Sebastian into attempting to kill Alonso and Gonzalo (II.1.198–292). Traits of psychopathy remain discernable in both characters; Antonio and Sebastian both take risks, lack empathy, and refuse the acknowledgment of guilt for their actions, which, alongside a high charisma, makes them dangerously psychopathic (Jakobwitz and Egan 2006, 333). All three dimensions combined can be placed in the cut surface of the Dark Triad, making them the ultimate villains despite their lack of success in their endeavors. Yet, it is not only these two characters who show traits of the Dark Triad and thus villainous qualities in The Tempest. Prospero and Caliban, too, share similar characteristics. Even though their motivation is also power, they use the villainous attributes as a performative act in order to regain political power. Caliban is, however, neither as proud and controlling as Antonio and Sebastian, nor does he lack remorse. He is primarily driven by Machiavellian motives. Despite Caliban’s manipulation of Stephano and his persuasive suggestion to set out to kill Prospero, he can be said to put on a show of aggressive villainy. His wish is to reconquer the island from Prospero. He does not long for ultimate power, which can be seen in his instant submission to Stephano, whom he sees as a powerful king. Rather, he desires freedom from magically inflicted

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pain and punishment. His constant rebellion against Prospero is in itself a performance as he consciously chooses to make himself heard: This island’s mindmind, by Sycorax my mother, Which though takest from me. When thou camest first, Thou stroked me, and made much of me; wouldst give me Water with berries in’t; and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee, And show’d thee all the qualities o’the isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile: Cursed be I that did so! All the charms Of Sycorax, toads beetles, bats, light on you! For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o’the island. (I.ii.331–344)

His carefully constructed monologue, which presents an argumentative line on justifying his claim to this island can be considered a performative act to prove his equality in language and status to Prospero. When the latter claims power over him by having taught him the meaning of words in the first place, Caliban replies wittingly, “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse” (I.ii.363–364). This cursing is not a curse in the magical sense of the word but a pun on it. Caliban can perform an act of cursing even though he cannot supernaturally control the curse. The cursing thus becomes a staged act of villainy. He further embraces the role of the villain when he is accused of having attempted to rape Miranda. Caliban, who is presented by Prospero and Miranda as the sexually threatening Other in Edward Saïd’s sense of the term, replies in such an exaggerated and defensive, almost defiant way, that it seems more like a performance than a genuine confession. Since Prospero makes him a villain and even calls him, among other things, “Hag-seed” (I.ii.365) and a “demi-devil” (V.i.273), Caliban plays the part that has been allocated to him. Likewise, Prospero can be considered a performative villain. Even though, in many regards, he is not the traditional stereotype for the classification of a Shakespearean villain (one reason being that his schemes all succeed in the end without any negative repercussions), he nevertheless possesses a few traits of the Dark Triad, which he uses in a performative

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way in order to secure his dukedom and the future of his daughter. Prospero is narcissistically inclined, a behavior which already surfaces in Milan but also in his presentation of himself in the second scene of the play. In Milan, he neglected his dukedom, i.e., he did not care for his people because his devotion was directed at his magic books, showing him as selfcentered. On the island, his narcissistic personality can unfold even more since he can rule the island by means of magic. Already in the very beginning, when Prospero first appears (I.ii), his self-absorption and pompous view of himself becomes clear as the first part of the lengthy scene is— with small interruptions from Miranda—one long monologue. In this self-praising, he tells the backstory from his perspective, vilifying Antonio in absentia, and demanding attention to his lengthy speech. This request for attention, “Dost thou attend me?” (I.ii.78), is not only directed at Miranda but also the audience who are forced to listen and rest their gaze on him alone. His performance is not villainous, yet; however, it already sets the stage for his villainous intentions since it becomes clear that he raised the storm, or rather, he had Ariel “perform” the tempest, as he himself calls it (I.ii.193), that made the king’s ship sink in order to get revenge on his brother. As Stephan Laqué points out, The tempest has been a theatrical performance offered by Prospero’s servant-spirit Ariel whom he greets exactly like a stage-director might greet his leading actor once the curtain has fallen […]. The storm stands exposed as a product of theatrical machinery and, as will emerge, as a part of Prospero’s political machinations. […] The Tempest is less concerned with imagination, than with the making of shows, with the counterfeiting of reality. (2014, 147)

Hence, the spectacle Prospero performs is a theater play of villainous actions to reach his political ambitions. Alongside narcissism, Prospero also encompasses the Machiavellian personality trait of the second aspect of the Dark Triad (Jakobwitz and Egan 2006, 332). Prospero’s Machiavellian self-interest and immoral behavior is highlighted in the plot he creates for Miranda and Ferdinand. First, he plans for them to fall in love and arranges their meeting by having Ferdinand separated from the rest of the shipwrecked group. Behind this carefully played out plot, there is no altruistic motive to be found. Prospero desires a political union between Milan and Naples, in which his family line will rule both Milan and Naples. Therefore, here, “the focus

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is on the strategic manipulation of reality, on the way in which the liberties which the theatre can take with reality can serve to further political ends” (Laqué 2014, 147). In a second step, he plays the Machiavellian villain to strengthen the love and thus union between Miranda and Ferdinand. He makes the conquest of Miranda particularly difficult for Ferdinand so that the latter is deceived in thinking he has to fight for his love. Prospero reckons, “They are both in either’s powers: but this swift business / I must uneasy make, lest too light winning / Make the prize light” (I.ii.451–453). His behavior extends to physical threats against his daughter, “Silence! One word more / Shall make me chide thee, if not hate thee” (I.ii.475–476). Prospero masks his true intentions by means of his unusually uncivilized behavior. According to Miranda, her father is usually “of a better nature” (I.ii.497) and she asks him, “Why speaks my father so ungently?” (I.ii.445), suggesting that Prospero’s manners differ in this scene. Therefore, his harshness toward Ferdinand is controlled and becomes a performative act to achieve his goals. While his rude behavior in the match making plot is calculated, his outbursts of anger toward his servants Ariel and Caliban are not and fall into the third category of the Dark Triad, namely psychopathy (Jakobwitz and Egan 2006, 333), where his true villainous character is revealed. Caliban is constantly punished for his verbal rebellion against Prospero. While the first punishment, i.e., confining him into a rock, appears justified—he wants to protect Miranda—the constant physical violence against Caliban cannot be vindicated. Indeed, Caliban curses Prospero; however, his curses are but empty words and, as mentioned before, do not contain any magical powers. Prospero’s violence is thus irrational, which matches Charney’s definition of Shakespearean villains, who can appear “irrational in the pursuit of their wills” (cf. 2012, xiii). Moreover, his villainous behavior can also be seen in his treatment of Ariel. Even though Prospero freed Ariel from imprisonment, he keeps him as a servant for his personal needs. He has promised to free Ariel but has always postponed the fulfillment of this promise. When Ariel reminds him of the latter, Prospero loses his temper or rather, he performs the role of the evildoer in his chiding of Ariel while simultaneously presenting himself as the benevolent savior Ariel should be grateful to (I.ii.250–293). This performance of alleged benevolence is supposed to palliate his almost malicious subjugation of Ariel for his own needs, namely getting his revenge on Antonio. Nevertheless, there are moments, especially toward the end of the play, when Prospero experiences a change of heart due to Ariel who feels pity

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for Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian. Only then does Prospero develop a conscience and empathy, slowly stepping out of the role of the villain. Similar to Prospero’s performance of benevolence, Macbeth, too, puts on the performative act of the good soldier and innocent subject of the king when King Duncan’s lifeless body is found. In fact, even before, when King Duncan and his entourage arrive, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth, delude their guests by playing the welcoming hosts when, in fact, they have already conspired to commit regicide. Macbeth’s villainy is thus masked up by an act of performance, but this deceiving behavior makes him and his wife even greater villains since their betrayal is threefold. While they betray the unwritten rules of hosting, namely protecting the guests and caring for their well-being, they also commit regicide in order to rise to power. Their lies in the form of their performative act complement their villainy. Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth thus encompass traits of the Dark Triad of Personality, just like the characters in The Tempest. Lady Macbeth is cunning and manipulative, using Machiavellianism in order to persuade Macbeth to murder Duncan. Her interests are purely narcissistic as she desires to gain power and is uncompromising and even aggressive in her pursuit. Finally, she shows traits of psychopathy as she is superficially charming but callous. Macbeth, who is weaker in his villainous traits than Lady Macbeth, has to grow into the role of the villain. While he starts out as a good soldier and loyal subject to the king, his wife convinces him that casualties are necessary to reach ultimate power. His psychopathic tendencies only surface as he develops into a villainous character. While he experiences guilt and fear right after the deed, within the course of the play, Macbeth turns into a psychopath, who is violent, risk-taking, and impulsive. Not only does he order Banquo’s murder, his brother-in-arms, but also the slaughter of Macduff’s entire family. While Banquo evokes some form of guilt in Macbeth when he haunts the latter at the banquet (III.iv), Macbeth’s remorseless descent into madness cannot be stopped. While Lady Macbeth’s guilt leads her into a passive madness (V.i), Macbeth’s leads him to more violence. The triggers for the turn or rather turns in Macbeth’s personality, from the soldier who kills for his king and country, to the murderer who fears judgment and finally to the murderer who lacks empathy completely, can be seen in dark magical forces that influence his decisions and behavior.

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Magic and Power The first stimulus to a change in Macbeth’s perception of potential power is given when he meets the witches for the first time, and when they predict his future as Thane of Cawdor and finally as king. Inspired by the idea of power, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth scheme their way up the social ladder. This instance of fortune-telling is presented as more than a mere trigger. The witches plan their performance from the very beginning and set the stage carefully in order to deliver their message to Macbeth (I.i and I.iii.30–37). They show a world with its own language, manners and atmosphere […]. It is a world pervaded by a distinctive verbal music, setting it metrically apart from blank-verse or prosaic humanity. It is a world of sense impressions, of sensuality and corporeality. And it is a world of ritualistic ceremony, possessed of its own sense of hierarchy, structured by the potent number three and expressing itself through incantation, dance, and spectacle. (Rosador 1991, 10)

Their purpose is to create a performance of chaos and turn Macbeth into a villain, which they stress with their famous utterance “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (I.i.11). Furthermore, their entire appearance seems to be a performative act to highlight their ambiguous role and liminality— they are neither women nor men, neither from the world of the living, nor from the world of the dead, as Banquo remarks, What are these, So wither’d and so wild in their attire, That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’earth, And yet are on’t? Live you? Or are you aught That manman may question? You seem to understand me, By each at once her choppy finger laying Upon her skinny lips: you should be women, And yet your beards forbid me to interpret That you are so. (I.iii.39–47)

The witches are figures who can conjure up shapes and ghosts to maneuver Macbeth onto the path of his fate. Thus, their first entry affects Macbeth’s personality as he turns from the hero of the story to traitor— he both betrays his king as well as the friendship to Banquo by murdering them.

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The second instance their ghostly magic makes Macbeth an even more evil, more psychotic villain is when he visits the witches a second time. The second witch even comments on Macbeth’s villainy with her notorious exclamation, “By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes” (VI.i.44–45). Even though they first calm Macbeth by showing the circumstances of his defeat—which he assumes will never happen (VI.i.94)—it is their conjuring of Banquo’s children that drives Macbeth to more fear and hate and conducts him to the murder of Macduff’s family (VI.i.112–124). Immediately after the meeting with the Sisters, he schemes this next act of villainy: Time, thou anticipat’st my dread explots: The flighty purpose never is o’took, Unless the deed go with it. From this moment, The very firstlings of my heatz shall be He firstlings of my hand. And even now, To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done: The castle of Macduff I will surprise; Seize ipon Fife; give to th’edge o’th’sword His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls That trace him in his line. No boasting like a food; This deed I’ll do, before this purpose cool: But no more sights! (IV.i.144–155)

Again, Macbeth is blinded by vague shapes that play out the future before him. This performance of knowledge leads Macbeth to believe that his reign cannot be ended if he takes the necessary precautions and eliminates all potential threats to his power. Therefore, he immerses himself in tyranny, which eventually culminates in war. In the end, Macbeth realizes that there is no hope for him since he exceeded his limits. Macbeth calls for his servant Seyton, which is the phonetical equivalent to Satan, three times. The number three is associated with Satan’s three temptations of Jesus Christ—he was tempted by materialism, narcissism, and political power (BBC 2020), just like Macbeth. Yet, also the proverb “speaking of the devil” is alluded here since Macbeth calls out the latter’s name and he appears. Consequently, Macbeth conjures up the devil himself, who damns Macbeth. Even though the servant Seyton does not literally curse or tempt Macbeth, he delivers the news of Lady Macbeth’s death (V.16) and thus makes Macbeth realize that his soul is condemned, and the only thing left for him to do is to despair and die. Macbeth reminisces,

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I have almost forgot the taste of fears. The time has been, my senses would have cool’d To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse, and tir, As life were in’t. I have supp’d full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, Cannot once start me. […] To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (V.9–28)

Macbeth thus acknowledges that he has only played the role of the villain and that this role ends with his death. With his death does not only his tyranny succumb but also the magical illusions as “magical power vanishes only, as James [I] repeatedly insists, in the presence of the lawful king, that is, if confronted with and seized by an unstained royal charisma” (Rosador 1991, 4).2 It can thus be said that his villainy is determined by illusions; Macbeth is blinded by the performance of mischievous magic, which makes him lose his sense of reality. Likewise, Prospero is blinded by the abilities of magic. His neglect for Milan, his violent punishments of Caliban, his plan for revenge, and his manipulation of Ferdinand are all based on magical powers. His authority over magic can be connected to the historical reality of Shakespeare’s time since the “process of appropriating magical authority in order to prop and extend the crown’s power accelerated dramatically with James’s accession to the throne” (Rosador 1991, 3). Without his instrumentalization of magic, he would not be able to perform the villain. Caliban realizes this as he insists on destroying Prospero’s books to take away the latter’s knowledge and ability of magical performance. Caliban explains, “I am subject 2 Of course, the notion of the lawful king is debatable in Macbeth’s case since the prophecy claims Banquo’s children to be kings and not Malcolm’s, who succeeds Macbeth on the throne.

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to a tyrant, – a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island” (III.ii.45–47) and that it is necessary “First to possess his books; for without them / He is but a sot, as I am, not hath not / One spirit to command: they all do hate him / As rootedly as I:– burn but his books” (III.ii.94–97). The performance of magic does not only allow Prospero to play the villain though, but it renders him the power to test and reveal villainous potential in others. Thus, his use of magic exposes not only his brother Antonio, but also the guilt Alonso feels for his past actions. Ariel puts on a show of illusions in Prospero’s name in order to see the group’s goodness or evilness. Here, Alonso redeems himself, which is why Prospero later greets him in a welcoming manner. Moreover, Ariel sees the potential for redemption in Sebastian and Antonio, which is why he convinces Prospero to pardon them (V.i.16–32). Nevertheless, Prospero stages another theatrical presentation by conjuring the group in a magic circle, in which he presents himself to them in a performative way, using magic to call all the attention to himself again (V.i.33–199). This performance is best emphasized in his words directed to his brother, in which he first pretends to still seek revenge before he finally forgives him, “For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother / Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive / Thy rankest fault, – all of them” (V.i.130–134), since the “rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (V.i.27–28). Disclosing villainy for the purpose of eventual redemption is, however, not only used for Antonio and company but also for Caliban and his companions Trinculo and Stephano. They are chased by illusions of howling dogs and hounds as a punishment but also, paradoxically, to make them see reason. While Caliban truly regrets his actions and arguably, eventually gets what he truly desires, namely his island and his freedom, showing that he is no villain any longer, Antonio and Sebastian, even though forgiven, do not undergo this change and remain evil and “can never be trusted” (Simonds 1995, 68). They still ridicule their inferiors (V.i.264–266), showing a lack of empathy whereas Prospero learns to treat not only his equals with mercy but also his servants. Therefore, villainy is expressed not only through magic but also by means of the treatment of inferiors. Yet, even Prospero needs approval of his newly gained role as the Duke of Milan, which is why he turns to the audience in the epilogue as if they were his people, since “Only their approval can take a rightful ruler like Prospero back to his seat of power” (Laqué 2014, 155). Therefore, in order to redeem himself and restore order, Prospero needs to be forgiven on a meta-theatrical level.

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Likewise, in Macbeth, villainy is also revealed not only in the treatment of inferiors, but also by the exposure to magical performances. On the one hand, once he is king, Macbeth could have proven to be a just leader and thus, there would have been potential for redemption. Instead, he proves to be a tyrant to his subjects. On the other hand, the exposure to magic also shows Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s dark personality. The witches’ performance of magic exposes Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as villains who are avid for ultimate political power. Moreover, if Banquo’s ghost as a supernatural appearance is considered to be a magical illusion, his dramatic show at the banquet publicly reveals Macbeth’s villainy. However, in contrast to the characters in The Tempest, Macbeth does not find the path to forgiveness or redemption because he never rejects the magic of the witches nor denies Banquo’s appearance. Until the very end, he believes in the prophecies and still has faith in the power of magic, not realizing that it is merely an illusion. The Tempest displays that magic is only a performance and that true power thus lies in the rejection of it since the true ruler cannot be a magician and the true magician not a ruler (Rosador 1991, 11). That is the reason why Antonio was successful in gaining power in the first place, but it is also the reason why Prospero can regain his power. Of course, this is a political propagandistic comment on King James I’s superstition and aversion to witchcraft and magic (despite his fond interest in the matter). Even though James I “was pleased by such identifications with royal magicians or the ascriptions of magical power to himself”, he, as God’s representative could “not be touched by devilish or magical power. Royalty is thus enabled to appropriate whatever prestige attaches to its rival. Most important: by overcoming the powers of magic or by not being touched by them, the monarch proves him- or herself legitimate and truly charismatic” (Rosador 1991, 4). Therefore, Prospero is only a powerful political leader by rejecting magic, making James I the template for the dramatic figure. The rejection of magic thus shows the virtue of a person. Therefore, when Prospero sets Ariel and Caliban free and rejects the magic that granted him villainous power as well as the power to expose villainy, only then can he be a good person and a just ruler again and be forgiven by the audience. As Rosador points out,

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The Tempest insists on the illusionary nature of magical power. Magic may uphold authority and rule under the laboratory conditions of a secluded island setting, contained in time and space and strictly segregated from secular, divinely power. It may have its brief hour during the theatrical present, but is shut of from both past and future reality. (1991, 13)

Hence, both The Tempest and Macbeth reveal the theatrical nature of magic, villainy and power. Only when magic is rejected, villainy can be stopped; only when magic is rejected, true power is revealed; only when magic is rejected, the performance of magical illusions ends and order is restored.

References BBC. n.d. “The Identity of Jesus.” BBC Bitesize. Accessed 2 June 2020. https:// www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zvxtgwx/revision/8. Charney, Maurice. 2012. Shakespeare’s Villains. Plymouth: Lexington. Holm, Bent. 1999. “Shakespeare’s Ambiguous Magic in The Tempest.” In The Renaissance Theatre: Texts, Performance, Design I: English and Italian Theatre, edited by Christopher Cairns, 1–11. Aldershot: Ashgate. Jakobwitz, Sharon, and Vincent Egan. 2006. “The Dark Triad and Normal Personality Traits.” Personality and Individual Differences 40, no. 2: 331–339. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S01918869 05002606. Laqué, Stephan. 2014. “Machiavellian Poetics: The Political Teachings of Prospero.” Poetica: Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 46, no. 1–2: 141–155. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24710122. Neuenfeldt, William J. 1994. The Making of the Cauldron: An Analysis of Witch and Witchcraft Power in Macbeth. Stanford, CA: Humanities Honors Program, Stanford University. Rosador, Kurt Tetzli von. 1991. “The Power of Magic: From Endimion to The Tempest.” Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production 43: 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521395291.001. Siemon, James Edward. 1972. “The Canker Within: Some Observations on the Role of the Villain in Three Shakespearean Comedies.” Shakespeare Quarterly 23, no. 4: 435–443. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2868682. Simonds, Peggy Muñoz. 1995. “‘Sweet Power of Music’: The Political Magic of ‘the Miraculous Harp’ in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” Comparative Drama 29, no. 1: 61–90. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41153733. Shakespeare, William. 1951. Macbeth, edited by Kenneth Muir. London: Arden.

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———. 1994. “The Tempest.” New York: Barnes & Noble. Strier, Richard. 1999. “‘I am Tempest.” In Writing and England, edited by Derek Cambridge University Press.

In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Power’: Normal and Magical Politics in The Political Engagement in Seventeenth Century Hirst and Richard Strier, 10–30. New York:

CHAPTER 8

The Demon’s Amorous Looking Glass: Reflections on the Villain’s Performative Self-Fashioning in Richard III by William Shakespeare Nizar Zouidi

The study of dramatic characters and character paradigms has always been a common practice in early modern literary studies. Despite the waning interest in the basic literary concepts in contemporary critical discourses, the characters of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ford, Fletcher, Chapman, and Webster have never failed to arouse the interest of critics. The analysis of the major early modern drama characters still represents a large portion of the critical literature about the period. In his article “Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama,” Kevin Curran mentions a considerable number of recent critical and creative works (published in 2016 and 2017 alone) that are partly or fully devoted to the study or the reimagining of a single Shakespearean character or character paradigm. This shows that literary critics and other writers still find the study of Renaissance characters

N. Zouidi (B) University of Hail, Ha’il, Saudi Arabia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_8

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relevant. The contemporary interest in Shakespearean and early modern characters can—in part—be explained by the deeply entrenched belief that “the Renaissance offers a privileged vantage point on the development of modern subjectivities” (Schiesari 1994, 169). This explains the fact that much of the critical literature about Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is concerned with the notions of age, gender, gender roles, ethnicity, social status, identity, and selfhood. In early modern drama, these issues are usually explored in relation to the limitations and potentialities of the theater and the dramatic arts. The performative nature of the self that characterizes early modern drama certainly appeals to post-modern critics who no longer see the subject as “a stable entity possessing fixed spiritual, mental, or physical qualities,” but rather “as the precipitate of variously mutable subject positions engendered within complex networks of power relations and discursive systems” (Sikes 2007, 3). This legitimizes the use of performance studies to examine the characterization of early modern dramatis personae. Although, as Tracy C. Davis writes, “not everyone acknowledges that performance studies is a discipline in its own right”1 (2008, 1) and some prominent performance theorists “consider it important to preserve [its] multi-disciplinary nature” (Auslander 2003, 1), there is an agreement among performance scholars about the centrality of the human2 or performing subject to the study of the performance events (in theater and elsewhere). In the introduction to Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Philip Auslander underlines the importance of the human elements of performance. He argues that the performance event acquires meaning through the interaction of its human elements, mainly the performer and the audience. He writes: “if the performer is one side of the performance equation (the production side), audiences and spectatorship are the other side (the reception side)” (2003, 3). The relationship between the performer and the audience and spectators is dialogic in nature. It is based on “the copresence of the

1 Davis explains that “performance scholars can be found under the mantle of philosophy, ethnography, art history, political theory, media studies, music, rhetoric, theater, and literary studies” (2008, 1). 2 Major performance theorists like Philip Auslander and Richard Schechner do not avoid using the word “human” when they speak about the performer or the character being performed.

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performer and the audience members […] and the mutuality of making meaning” (Davis 2008, 4). Equally important to the performance equation is a third human or humanized3 presence. This is the entity (character, thing, abstract concept, etc.) that is being performed. According to Richard Schechner, one of the objectives of performance theory is to explain the theatrical techniques with which “people turn into other people, gods, animals, demons, trees, beings, whatever – either temporarily as in a play or permanently as in some rituals” (2008, xi). Therefore, performance studies may be defined as an interdisciplinary set of theories and approaches that reflects—among other things—on the theatrical as well as the theatricalized forms of subjectivity in the different arts—and in “real” life. As such, it can help us understand how early modern dramatic characters negotiate their subjectivity through their discursive and performative interactions with the different elements of the theater on and off the stage. Therefore, as the theoretical framework of this chapter, performance studies will provide us with the critical tools necessary to study the theatrical, performative, and visual politics and poetics involved in the portrayal of the eponymous character of Richard III.4 This chapter argues that Richard uses his theatrical (visual) and discursive power to control the performative space of the play and subject all of its elements to his will, thus limiting the performative and interpretive possibilities available to the other characters of the play, who are either his instruments or his victims. It also seeks to reveal the performative nature of Richard’s visual image by throwing light on the ways in which he uses his body in his machinations. The performative energy of the major Elizabethan and Jacobean stage villains renders them extremely elusive theatrical beings. They can be described as mutable agents of change that constantly shape and reshape themselves and the world around them through the power of performance. Therefore, their relationship with the theater as a space of

3 At least because the material presence of the performing human subject (body and consciousness) invests the performed entity with recognizable human traits. 4 This chapter will focus on the depiction of Richard in The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (referred to throughout this chapter as Richard III ), but it will refer to other Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean works that also represent this historical figure whenever relevant. All quotes come from William Shakespeare, Richard III , ed. John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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performance is dialogic in nature. In Henry VI Part III , Richard—then the Duke of Gloucester—describes himself primarily as a shape-shifting actor: Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile, And cry ‘Content’ to that which grieves my heart, And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, And frame my face to all occasions. I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall; I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk; I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor, Deceive more slily than Ulysses could, And, like a Sinon, take another Troy. I can add colours to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, And set the murderous Machiavel to school. Can I do this, and cannot get a crown? Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down. (Henry VI Part III 3.2.198– 211)

In this soliloquy, Richard stresses the performative nature of evil. Rather than referring to the supposed “nature” the evil characters and creatures alluded to, he speaks about their actions or deeds. This emphasizes his non-essentialist conception of evil. Indeed, he promises the audience and the readers to surpass all these characters and creatures in the artfulness and scale of their devious methods—and not in their evil nature. Therefore, he may be described as a literary palimpsest where other villains and evil creatures are written under erasure as they are overshadowed by his performance. Intertextuality plays an important role in the construction of the character of Richard III. Indeed, Harold Bloom describes the tragedy of Richard III as “a fresh starting point for the development of the Elizabethan and Jacobean hero-villain after Marlowe” (2010, xi). For Bloom, Richard III departs from the Marlovian model to pave the way for the appearance of the more (theatrically) self-conscious villains of the Jacobean era. The stage villain of the period relies on theatrics to achieve his goals. He is native to the world of the theater and familiar with its dynamics. He manipulates the different elements of the stage and uses them to his advantage. As such, he may be described as a master of stagecraft.

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The theatrical and metatheatrical consciousness of post-Marlovian villains appears in many of their utterances where they boastfully speak about their theatrical mastery. John Webster’s Lodovico, for example, has the audacity to proclaim: “I have limbed this night-piece and it was my best” (The White Devil 5.5.297). In this line, Lodovico seems to go as far as indirectly claiming the authorship of the play. The example of Lodovico shows that post-Marlovian villains seem to have developed a sense of metadramatic consciousness that makes them—deludedly—claim a share in the authorship of the plays. This share usually depends on the performative and discursive space they (are allowed to) occupy and the discursive and performative power of the characters they are pitted against. Therefore, it is possible to describe the late early modern play as a discursive and performative battleground where different performing entities vie for supremacy. The villain’s awareness of his theatrical nature gives him the advantage. Since dominating the performative space requires the skillful manipulation of the different elements of the theatrical event, the performative energy of early modern stage villains helps them control their surroundings—be they on or off the stage. The skillfulness of their performance usually earns the villains the admiration—and even the (passive) complicity—of the audience. Therefore, their manipulative strategies extend beyond the fourth wall. In this vein, Amy Cook tells us that characters like Edmund, Iago, and Richard III “align themselves with the audience and in doing so bring the audience to their perspective” (2010, 86). The villains of the late early modern stage try to lure the audiences on and off the stage to their side. One of their most effective strategies is to manipulate the theatrical world within and outside the visual field of the audience and the other characters (who, in some respects, are turned into an onstage audience). In Othello, for example, Iago manipulates his general’s field of vision by making him misinterpret the gestures of the other characters. In Act Four, scene one, he makes him believe that Cassio is talking about Desdemona to arouse his suspicion and ignite his jealousy.5 This strategy

5 As he smiles Othello shall go mad

And his unbookish jealousy must construe Poor Cassio’s smiles, gestures, and light behaviours Quite in the wrong (Othello 4.1.98–101).

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is also used in other plays such as Much Ado About Nothing, where Borachio tricks Claudio and Don Pedro into believing that he has an affair with Hero by flirting with her chambermaid who is wearing her clothes. In the play under scrutiny, Richard uses the same strategy to accuse the Queen and her faction of his brother’s murder.6 The meta-theatrically conscious villains of the late early modern period use stage craft to manipulate their theatrically unconscious victims. As a stage villain, Richard’s meta-theatricality may be described as one of the subtlest in Shakespearean and early modern drama. According to Harold Bloom, “Richard’s peculiarly self-conscious pleasure in his own audacity is crossed by a sense of what it means to see one’s own deformed shadow in the sun” (2010, xi). Richard’s rhetoric and his actions reflect this self-consciousness and self-reflexivity. However, his language is quite elusive and his performative energy only mystifies his identity. In public, “Richard manipulates those around him into perceiving him as the wronged friend or the retiring religious figure” (Cook 2010, 28). In private, he describes his own physical deformity and moral crookedness with an intriguing mixture of sarcasm, audacity, pride, and fascination. His soliloquies, therefore, are as unreliable as his public utterances. In “The ‘confessing animal’ on stage: authenticity, asceticism, and the constant ‘inconstancie’ of Elizabethan character,” Peter Kaufman illuminates the relationship between the soliloquies of the major Shakespearean characters and the religious discourses and discursive practices of the time. The early modern period was a time of religious reformation in England. The teachings of the reformist theologians Martin Luther and John Calvin contributed to the reshaping of English religious thought after the reforms of Henry VIII. In the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, the relationship between God and man was still being redefined. The institutional and institutionalized principles and practices of the reformed faith had not taken any final shape. Debates were raging in every circle as a new world-picture was being drawn and the different elements that compose the world order were being repositioned. The nature of man and his position and role in the (reshaping of the) universe became central intellectual issues in the early modern era. 6 This is the fruit of rashness. Marked you not

How that guilty kindred of the queen Looked pale when they did hear of Clarence’s death? O, they did urge it still into the King (Richard III 2.1.133–6).

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Furthermore, the importance of introspection and self-examination increased as the traditional role of the Church in the salvation of the faithful dramatically declined. “Calvin [in particular] commended selfexamination and self-criticism” (Kaufman 1999, 51) as a means of establishing whether a person’s soul is saved or damned.7 This Calvinist emphasis on self-examination is reflected in early modern drama, where major characters “engage in agonizing self-analysis” (Kaufman 1999, 52). The influence of John Calvin is particularly obvious in the soliloquies of Hamlet. These soliloquies, Kaufman tells us, were “occasionally read as prayers” (1999, 62). However, many Shakespearean characters do not seem to see the reflexive prayers of the Calvinists as unquestionably truthful mirrors of the inner self. The prayers of Claudius in Act Three, scene three of Hamlet are evidence of that. The king breaks off his prayers by saying: “My words fly up; my thoughts remain below/words without thoughts never to heaven go” (Hamlet 3.3.99–101). This shows that, for Claudius at least, prayers as a discursive form (and type of performance) do not necessarily reflect the true intentions of the praying subject. The words of Claudius echo Hamlet’s indignation as he fails to react properly to the death of his father. It is, therefore, impossible to establish “the extent to which one could say anything definite about inner reality” (Kaufman 1999, 53) through prayers and soliloquies. Richard is certainly a subtle and complex villain. As such, his soliloquies can hardly be considered faithful or stable reflections of his inner thoughts. In his soliloquies, Richard constructs his self-image in a very disturbing manner. For example, his continuous references to his deformed body as a defining feature of his person(ality) destabilize the common beliefs of the period. Indeed, for most medieval and early modern writers, “we know ourselves as mental entities” (Yrjonsuuri 2008, 114). For them, “self-reflexivity is inconsistent with corporeality” (Yrjonsuuri 2008, 112). Richard, however, tries to ascribe his villainy to his physical deformity, saying: But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking glass; I, that am rudely stamped and want love’s majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; 7 Puritans (who can, in many respects, be called Calvinists), for example, used to recite and improvise prayers “to recover assurances of their election” (Kaufman 1999, 61).

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I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them— Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to see my shadow in the sun And descant on mine own deformity. And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determinèd to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days. (Richard III 1.1.14–31)

In these lines, Richard tells the audience that he cannot play any role other than that of the villain because his deformed body does not allow him to fit in the existing world order. Richard describes his world in corporeal terms.8 It is a world where bodies interact with each other. The lustful merrymakers of Edward IV’s court are either seducing or enjoying each other through their bodies. Richard’s body, as he describes it, lacks the “fair proportion” (1.1.18) necessary to “strut before a wanton ambling nymph” (1.1.17). He cannot seduce or enjoy other bodies. In the corporeal economy of the later days of Edward IV’s reign, Richard’s body is worthless.9 He is neither “shaped for sportive tricks/Nor made to court an amorous looking glass” (1.1.14–5). He can only spend his time scornfully looking at his deformed “shadow in the sun” (1.1.26). His body is an isolated body that does not fit in the performative space in which he initially finds himself. In fact, his physical deformity makes him an outcast in the new world order of peace he helped to establish through his murderous acts in the final part of Henry VI . He, therefore, plans to disturb the peace and reshape the world that does not seem to acknowledge him by murdering his way to the crown (thus, (re)positioning his body at the center of the corporeal economy of his world). 8 Richard’s bawdy corporeal language is certainly rife with exaggerations and morbid distortions, but it reveals the importance of sex in the courtly life of the later days of Edward IV’s reign. 9 In times of war, the body of Richard was valued for its strength and violence. His merit is based on his being a destroyer of bodies in Henry VI . In this play, he will play the same role but through intrigue and guile rather than open violence.

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Richard refuses to remain on the margins of the new world order— literally and metaphorically. He rather takes center stage by discursively and performatively dominating the play and reducing all the other characters to mere puppets that he uses to attain his objectives. As Bloom puts it, “Richard is his play, no other role matters much” (1998, 64). Richard seems to give the other characters very little performative space. He is present in most of the scenes, and even when he is absent, the other characters cannot help but talk about him. He sometimes even has a representative who maintains control of the scene in his absence. This role is played mainly but not exclusively by the Duke of Buckingham.10 Richard stifles any attempt to challenge his hegemony.11 The other dramatis personae inevitably fail to achieve any distinctive identity. Those who—intentionally or unintentionally—try to acquire a character are cut short by his sharp tongue or sharper daggers. As a result, the other characters remain incomplete in a manner that renders their roles almost unplayable. Bloom describes Richard III as “any actress’ nightmare, for none of the women’s parts are playable” (1998, 68). He then argues that even the “male characters of the play, except for the malformed Richard [and, to a lesser extent, his brother Clarence], are not individualized” (ibid.). As a result, they cannot be described as characters in the proper sense of the term. Richard does not allow any other character to develop or achieve their full potential. He either overwhelms them theatrically and discursively or removes them from the stage. He does not tolerate competition. This is why he controls all the scenes and does not allow any other character to speak or perform beyond what he has—metaphorically—“scripted” for them. For example, he instructs the assassins he sends to kill Clarence not to “hear him plead” (1.3.354). He warns them by saying: “Clarence is well-spoken and perhaps/May move your hearts to pity if you mark him” (1.3.355–6). Richard is aware that if his brother were to be given enough discursive and performative space, he would be able to thwart his plans. 10 The loss of Buckingham’s support was one of the major factors in the downfall of the historical Richard III. In the play, Shakespeare theatricalizes their relationship by making Buckingham one of the main sources of Richard’s theatrical power. 11 Only when Richard is silenced in the dream-world are the ghosts of his dead victims able to challenge him and drain his discursive and performative energy to bestow it on Richmond (if he were to speak, he would certainly overpower them). The dream in Act Five, scene four seems to be an authorial tour de force that breaks Richard’s performative and discursive hegemony to pave the way for his military defeat.

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He also tells Buckingham that Prince Edward and his brother should die because they are a threat to his rule. Richard cannot tolerate the sons of Edward IV because both of them show great potential. The Prince questions the decisions of his uncle, and the Duke of York shows himself to be “[b]old, quick, ingenious, forward, [and] capable” (3.1.154). They both resist his theatrical and discursive hegemony and successfully put him on the defensive—at least temporarily. This is why he will not allow them to live (especially the “parlous” (2.4.35) young Duke of York).12 He feels threatened by any potential development of the other performing entities in the play. If they were to become fully fledged characters, they might disturb his discursive and performative supremacy and interfere with his plans. Richard Schechner describes performance as “make-believe” (2008, xi). As such, it relies on pretense. It is common for Shakespearean characters to condemn theatricality as synonymous with falsehood and deception and to refuse to be defined by their performance. For example, in Twelfth Night, Viola says: “I am not that I play” (1.5.167). In this line, the disguised female character claims that her identity is different from the male role she performs. Similarly, Hamlet, the most studied of Shakespeare’s characters, uses every opportunity to condemn theatricality. He too refuses to be defined by his theatrical performance. For instance, when the King and the Queen admonish him for wearing black at the coronation ceremony of his stepfather, he bursts out: “Seems,” madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.” ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected ‘havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed “seem,” For they are actions that a man might play. But I have that within which passeth show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (Hamlet 1.2.75–87)

In these lines, Hamlet claims to have an inner self that cannot be reflected through theatrical devices. He sees selfhood as something (a 12 He cannot let them take the stage with him again.

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word that can only be used technically here) beyond performance, beyond corporeality, and even beyond language.13 Unlike Hamlet and Viola, Richard embraces theatricality, performance, corporeality, and discourse as the defining elements of his subjectivity. As a matter of course, he does not make any claim to a unified, stable, and true sense of selfhood. Rather than denying them access to his subjectivity, Richard seems to invite audiences on and off the stage to try to figure him out. This seems to be everything everyone in and around the play is trying to do (or is allowed to do). The other characters turn into spectators who watch the performance of Richard on the stage. Even when he is absent, they seem to be looking at him. They describe his looks and his actions with a vividness that stirs the imagination. Whether he is on or off the stage, all eyes (including the mind’s eyes of the audience and the other characters) seem to be fixed on him. Because of the “anthropological asymmetry … between looking and being looked at” (Brighenti 2010, 1), Richard seems to be vulnerable. As Brighenti explains, “the act of looking prolongs in all sorts of different directions towards different activities involving thought, awareness, understanding, appreciation, recognition, talk, manipulation, and control” (ibid.). Accordingly, to be observed is to be the object of all the cognitive, discursive, and physical activities involved in or resulting from the act of looking. To be looked at is to be objectified. Rather than defensively resisting the public gaze by denying his theatricality like Hamlet, Richard maintains control over his self-image by doing the exact opposite. He induces the other characters to (mis)interpret and (mis)judge him within the performative frames he sets for them. In Act Three, scene four, he manipulates the scene by shifting these performative frames. First, he makes the council members play the guessing game in his absence. His accomplice, the Duke of Buckingham, directs the attention to Hastings. When the Duke of Gloucester first enters, he continues the work of Buckingham. He showers praises on Hastings while looking cheerful and “smooth” (3.4.53). This alleviates Hastings’ suspicions and makes him vulnerable. Richard also successfully avoids the main subject of the meeting. As the Lord Protector and his henchman Buckingham leave the council without allowing it to make any decision (through continuous digressions), the council members return to 13 It is the unnamable and uncanny “that within which passeth show” (Hamlet, 1.2.86). It cannot be named or described. This is why it is beyond language.

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the guessing game. They continue to draw up plans for the Prince’s coronation while speculating on Richard’s opinion. None of them suspects that he wants to usurp the throne. Assured of the love and support of Richard, Hastings becomes defenseless. Having temporarily removed the Bishop from the stage (by asking him to bring strawberries), leaving the other members of the council to talk “freely” in his absence, Richard can now frame Hastings or any other lord for treason. As soon as the Bishop reenters, he storms through the room and accuses Hastings of conspiring against him with Queen Elizabeth. He overwhelms him with his performance and rhetoric before he has him executed.14 The other lords are baffled and have no alternative but to follow Richard. Through performance, Richard controls the stage and everyone on it. He directs their senses, their movements, and their language. Through his overwhelming performative and discursive power, Richard makes himself the center of the play. He is the most visible character in it. Because “different tools of seeing produce different ways of knowing” (Cook 2010, 53), Richard has to suppress the flux of interpretive possibilities to maintain control over his image. He either controls the way he is seen by others through his rhetoric and performance or has another character (mis)lead the observers. The Duke of Buckingham, himself deceived by Richard’s outward appearance, plays this role. In Act Three, scene seven, the visual plays an important role in the deceptive strategy of Richard. After the Duke of Buckingham and Catesby portray him as leading a life of religious asceticism, the citizens of London come to find the Duke of Gloucester standing “between two clergymen” (3.7.90) with “a book of prayers in his hand” (3.7.93). The Duke of Buckingham does not allow the Mayor of London or the citizens to read the tableau on their own. He offers a ready-made interpretation, describing the priests as “two props of virtue for a Christian prince,/To stay him from the fall of vanity” (3.7.91–2). The Duke depicts Richard as both a religious and a political figure. He constantly stresses Richard’s princely nature to prevent the citizens from seeing him as a purely religious figure. Richard, his accomplices, and his henchmen dominate the

14 To perform the illegal act of executing a noble without trial (by his peers), the historical Richard is said to have stationed an army of about 6,000 men in and around London to crush any dissent. Shakespeare’s Richard does not seem to need an army. After he silences the other lords through his spectacular performance, he easily convinces the Mayor of London that Hastings deserved his fate.

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scene.15 They lead the citizens and speak on their behalf. The other observers are never allowed to think, interpret, or speak for themselves. The visual image of Richard, therefore, is shaped and reshaped through (controlled) language and performance. The character of Richard III has one of the most intriguing visual histories. The inclusion of lines from his Henry VI soliloquy in a number of important representations of Richard’s first soliloquy in Richard III — for example, in the 1955, 1995, and 2016 movies—reveals that a compelling sense of visual completeness has marked this Shakespearean character. The graphic representations of Shakespeare’s Richard also attest to this meticulous visual completeness. They usually try to capture more than one dimension of his body. In paintings, the actor portraying Richard is usually depicted from the side (for example, the paintings of Mr. Kean as Richard in the early nineteenth century). In photos, even if the actor is facing the camera, the burden of the unequal shoulders is made visible (as in the 1910 photo of the actor Frank Benson). This reflects an awareness that Shakespeare’s Richard is not visually one-dimensional. He cannot be represented from one single side. This multidimensionality of Richard’s visual image probably precedes Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s most likely source of the physical and moral description of Richard is The History of Richard III by Thomas More.16 “Despite its unfinished state, the English version of the History has been a work of enormous reputation and influence” (Logan 2005, xv). In the sixteenth century, it was not published as an independent work but was “incorporated into a series of popular and successively cannibalizing sixteenth century chronicle histories, of which it quickly came to be 15 Vital to the control strategies of Richard in this scene is the distribution of the performing bodies across the performative space. He places his accomplices and henchman in key positions (Buckingham leads the crowd, Catesby is behind them, and the other henchmen are possibly in the middle) to maintain control over the crowd. Positioning his own body is also important as it helps him deceive the crowd and coordinate with his accomplices and henchmen. 16 The account of his rise to power that was written by Dominic Mancini in 1483, which throws a different—more sympathetic—light on Richard’s actions, was not unearthed until the first half of the twentieth century (see Mancini 1969). It is unlikely that Shakespeare knew of it. In addition, the earliest surviving portrait of Richard is dated to the second decade of the sixteenth century, a time when the last Plantagenet king of England was the target of the demonizing propaganda of the Tudors. It is not possible to establish whether Shakespeare could have had access to that distorted portrait, let alone seen any alternative depictions of Richard.

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regarded as the finest segment” (ibid.). Shakespeare read and “admired” (ibid.) the History that was included in the chronicles. It inspired his Richard III. More describes Richard in the following manner: Richard, the third son [of the Duke of York], whom we now entreat, was in wit and courage equal with either of them [his brothers Edward IV and George Clarence], in body and prowess far under them both: little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crookbacked, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard-favored of visage, and such as in states called warly, in other men otherwise. He was malicious, wrathful, envious, and from afore his birth, ever froward […] none evil captain was he in war, as to which his disposition was more meetly than for peace. (2005, 9–10)

More’s depiction of Richard is known to be so politically biased that some modern editors of his book often correct some information. For example, George Logan includes a number of footnotes in which he contradicts More. However, even More seems to have found great difficulty in vilifying Richard unequivocally. He confesses that Richard was brave, witty, easygoing, popular, and generous. He also admits that some accounts of Richard’s birth and deformity might have been exaggerated and biased. The body and personality of one of the most vilified kings of English history did not lend itself easily to a one-dimensional interpretation even in the times when he was the target of demonizing and distorting propaganda. Shakespeare certainly captured the physical (and moral) multidimensionality of Richard. In the play, he is likened to a “toad” (1.2.145) or a “hog” (1.3.225) to denote the visibility of his deformed shoulders (and connote his foul nature). More than one detail of his appearance is made visible either through language or through performance. These details play an important role in the incessant fashioning and refashioning of his image. As Kathrine Schaap Williams puts it, “Richard’s body takes a different form with every show, reminding us that ‘deforming’ is another early modern term used to describe the actor’s shape-shifting behaviour” (2016). The vivacity, skill, and energy with which Richard uses his body enable him to keep everyone’s eyes fixed on him. They cannot help but notice the tiniest detail of his physical appearance. In the coronation scene, for example, Catesby deduces that the king is angry with Buckingham because “he bites the lip” (4.2.26).

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In many scenes, the other characters seem to be observing Richard and trying to interpret his facial expressions and movements. Only a few of them can interpret his appearance as successfully as his henchman Catesby. The Duchess of York, for example, can see through the deceptive looks of her son,17 and she tries in vain to oppose him. In Act Two, scene two, she tries to warn the son of Clarence against Richard’s powerful shapeshifting, saying: “O that deceit should steal such gentle shapes/And with a virtuous visor hide foul guile” (2.2.26–9). Her warnings, however, go unheeded, and the children of Clarence become the victims of Richard’s scheming. Therefore, it seems that the characters that can read Richard’s appearance correctly are either loyal to him like Catesby or powerless like the Duchess of York. The other characters usually fail to read his true feelings and intentions in his face or movements. He has total control of every part of his body and uses it to deceive them. Richard’s body is his most efficient strategic asset. The calculated positioning of his body (and of other bodies) on the stage, the deft use of his limbs, and the changes in his facial expressions serve his strategic purposes. He also uses his discursive and performative skills to highlight the part(s) and/or aspect(s) of his body that serve his deceptive strategies. In the play, Richard is represented primarily as an actor. As such, he is defined by his performance. Indeed, John Jowett describes Richard III as “a performance piece” (2000, 1). For him, it is, in many ways, “about the nature of performance” (ibid.). Jowett adds that the play is celebrated as a “centerpiece of the dramatic tradition influenced by Shakespeare” (ibid.) because of the role of Richard. His performative and discursive hegemony makes him the most visible character in the play. His deformed body further heightens this visibility. He shapes and reshapes his body using theatrical and discursive devices. This enables him to manipulate the manner in which he is seen by everyone around him, be they on or off the stage. To sum up, this chapter sought to examine the discursive and performative strategies used by Richard to constantly fashion and refashion his

17 According to Stephen Greenblatt, “Richard III is among the few plays of Shakespeare

to depict a mother-child relationship” (2018, 62). This relation, however, is not cordial. The Duchess tries to dissociate herself from Richard and even wants to kill him. As Greenblatt says, “it is clear that she is sickened by what she has brought into the world” (2018, 63). Richard does not hesitate to instruct his henchman Buckingham to question the honor of his mother in public by claiming that Edward, his brother, was a bastard.

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self-image. The analysis revealed that the distribution of discursive and performative power on the stage structures the narrative of Richard III . By manipulating his own image through theatrical devices, the hero-villain of the play dominates the stage and subjects the other characters to his will. It is Richard who positions the speaking and acting bodies in the discursive and performative space of the play and distributes the roles (at least until the ghostly exorcism of Act Five, scene four divests him of his power). His hegemony is sustained by his discursive and performative power that makes him invulnerable even as he willingly takes the role of the observed.

References Auslander, Philip. 2003. “General Introduction.” In Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Philip Auslander, 1–24. London: Routledge. Bloom, Harold. 1998. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. ———. ed. 2010. Bloom’s Shakespeare through the Ages: Richard III. New York: Infobase. Brighenti, Andrea Mubi. 2010. Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cook, Amy. 2010. Shakespeare’s Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Curran, Kevin. 2017. “Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama.” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. 57, no. 2: 427–474. Davis, Tracy C. (ed.). 2008. The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2018. Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Jowett, John. 2000. “Introduction.” In William Shakespeare, Richard III , edited by John Jowett, 1–132. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaufman, Peter Iver. 1999. “The ‘Confessing Animal’ on Stage: Authenticity, Asceticism, and the Constant ‘Inconstancie’ of Elizabethan Character.” In Performance and Authenticity in the Arts, edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, 49–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Logan, George M. 2005. “Introduction.” In Thomas More, The History of King Richard the Third: A Reading Edition, edited by George M. Logan, xv–li. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mancini, Dominic. 1969. Usurpation of Richard the Third. Translated by C. A. J. Armstrong, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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More, Thomas. 2005. The History of King Richard the Third: A Reading Edition, edited by George M. Logan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Shakespeare, William. 2007. “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 670–713. London: Wordsworth Editions. ———. 2007. “Much Ado About Nothing.” In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 520–549. London: Wordsworth Editions. ———. 2007. “Othello, the Moor of Venice.” In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 818–857. London: Wordsworth Editions. ———. 2000. Richard III , edited by John Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2007. “The Third Part of King Henry VI.” In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 65–97. London: Wordsworth Editions. ———. 2007. “Twelfth Night; or, What You Will.” In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 641–669. London: Wordsworth Editions. Schechner, Richard. 2008. Performance Theory. London: Routledge. Schiesari, Juliana. 1994. “Libidinal Economics: Machiavelli and Fortune’s Rape.” In Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, edited by Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz, 169–183. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sikes, Alan. 2007. Representation and Identity from Versailles to the Present: The Performing Subject. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Webster, John. 2019. The White Devil. In Robinson, ed. Benedict Scott. London: The Arden Shakespeare. Williams, Kathrine Schaap. 2016. “Richard III and the Staging of Disability.” British Library, March 15, 2016. https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/ richard-iii-and-the-staging-of-disability. Yrjonsuuri, Mikko. 2008. “Perceiving One’s Own Body.” In Theories of Perception in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Simo Knuuttila and Pekka Karkkainen, 101–116. New York: Springer.

CHAPTER 9

“It Is His Hand”: Villainy Through Letters in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Twelfth Night Sélima Lejri

Introduction While unsealing the secret letter Oswald was to deliver to Edmond on behalf of his mistress Goneril, Edgar musingly comments on secret letters: Leave, gentle wax; and manners, blame us not: To know our enemies’ minds, we rip their hearts; Their paper is more lawful. (4.5.249)1

Edgar here makes an allusion to the state proceedings in Tudor Stuart England regarding traitors: he compares himself both to the inquisitor who rips open the mind of the suspected villain through torture, and to the executioner who digs out the body parts of the victim, holding aloft his heart to the public while ritualistically pronouncing: “Behold the heart of the traitor” (Howell 1816, 382). Indeed, secrecy and potential 1 All further references to this play are from the 1992 edition Of The Tragedy of King Lear, edited by Jay L. Halio, and published by Cambridge University Press.

S. Lejri (B) University of Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_9

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danger were often associated with the epistolary device in an age that rediscovered the Latin tradition of the “familiar” or private letter where personal opinions and motives are disclosed (Schneider 2005, 75).2 The shift from a medieval feudal-based society to an individualist one saw the rise of the sense of inwardness, self-reflexivity and self-expression that found a thriving ground in the new literary genre of the sonnet, the theatrical device of the soliloquy as well as in correspondence through letter-writing, with autographs gradually replacing scribal letters.3 On the Elizabethan stage, while some villainous characters display their skills in the art of oratory to manipulate their audiences or wreck their opponents, others opt for the materialized form of the letter, the written word that they bring out of private closets or seal with forbidding wax to work as perfect baits for curious readers. The stage perfectly represents and echoes the cultural anxieties generated by the circulating manuscripts of the time, laden as they were with political and religious implications. Andrew Gordon attests: “the letter was a key textual instrument […] the most wide-ranging and vital socio-text of its time and one particularly prone to being remade and re-imagined through forgery” (Gordon 2016, 87). Critics have analyzed the import of letters in King Lear, their circulation, their (non) delivery, their crucial plot function and the dramatic impact thereof on the course of the events.4 As for Maria’s witty epistle in Twelfth Night, it has been regarded as the central comic device of the play, the outcome of which is “Shakespeare’s most brilliant visual and situational scenes” (Vickers 1979, 236). Furthermore, in both plays as well as in the rest of the Shakespearean works, letters heighten the performativity of evil as they possess “a stage life that is specifically theatrical” (Stewart 2008, 22). Of the several letters in King Lear, among which the ones exchanged between the love triangle Edmond-Goneril-Regan, this

2 Judith Rice Henderson explains that the Renaissance inherited both the medieval official style of letter-writing, and the classical tradition of familiar letter-writing (see Henderson 1983, 89). On the reemergence of the familiar letter in the Renaissance, see Del Lungo Camiciotti (2014, 22–23), Jardine (1996, 78–97). 3 On interiority in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, see Maus (1995). For a comprehensive view and analysis of the notion of self in the Renaissance and its roots in classical stoicism (mainly in Epictetus, Seneca and Cicero), see Baldwin (2001, 341–364). On autography in the Renaissance, see Chartier (2014, 76–77). 4 See mainly Stewart (2008, 193–230), Bergeron (1993, 157–176).

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study singles out Edmond’s forged letter which effects the most tragic turn in the play in the Earl of Gloucester’s household, conventionally called the sub-plot, then rebounds on the royal family, which constitutes the major plot. It is this forged letter that presents striking similarities in its aspects and motives with Maria’s forged letter in Twelfth Night. The first part addresses the villains’ identity usurpation through handwriting as a perversion of the Renaissance values, namely the humanist spirit of individuality and the contemporary concepts of selfhood, privacy, and authenticity. Moving from the humanist cultural and intellectual orientation, the second part grounds the rhetorical devices of the letters in the religious context of Post-Reformation England where, on the one hand, the Word of God is brought into focus by the dissemination of Protestantism, and on the other, martyrs’ letters from across the religious spectrum and reformers’ works become objects of idolatry as well as suspicion, interception, and even forgery.

“A Fustian Riddle”: The Anti-Familiar Letter In Twelfth Night and King Lear, Shakespeare makes letter-writing a central device of villainy and revenge between rivals on the social level. Commenting on the disciplinary import of conformity in Renaissance copy-books and copy-texts, critic Goldberg notes: “Writing well is a social sign, a sign of socialization. The written mark is a class marker” (2003, 116). Indeed, in order for them to secure social promotion, the two villains, Edmond and Maria, make use of education and wit on the one hand, and of social clichés and cultural assumptions on the other which they demonstrate in not only the content but also the form of their respective letters. Their perfect imitation of the handwriting of their respective social betters, Edgar, the future of earl of Gloucester, and Olivia, countess of Illyria, is in itself a claim of a better social distinction and a threat to status differentials, as both are socially below their rivals, and in the case of Edmond the bastard, a marginal figure. Edmond turns “the plague of custom” (1.2.3) in his favor by reporting his elder and legitimate brother’s presumable threat to abuse his privileged position and to “deny his letter” (2.1.77). Maria’s social climbing is a direct one: She “appropriates Olivia’s authoritative position when she acts as Olivia’s proxy” (Tvordi 1999, 123), and she also targets her social superior, the steward Malvolio.

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It is true that Edmond wins his father’s title and land by revealing the latter’s secret letter intended to help the French army (3.5.14). But the first step in his social ascension owes to the letter he forges to ruin his brother’s fortune. Bitterly acknowledging the fact that he cannot have land by the law of primogeniture, Edmond defiantly seeks resourcefulness in his mental capacities and physical dexterousness as well as in cultural and social clichés about elder brothers that come in handy: “Let me, if not by birth, have land by wit./All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit” (1.2.155–156). Likewise, bent on avenging herself on the supercilious steward whose status is above hers in the countess’s household (Lindheim 2007, 699), Maria cunningly employs her educational and intellectual assets within the frame of her mistress’s official letters. Her plot earns her the titles of “devil of wit”and “little villain” (2.5.166, 11)5 by her admirer, the countess’s uncle, who eventually marries her and helps her secure a position into the aristocracy: “Maria writ/The letter at Sir Toby’s great importance, / In recompense whereof he hath married her” (5.1.341–343).6 What education Edmond has benefited from thanks to the nine years he spent abroad is unknown (1.1.27), but his training as a knight is deduced from his mentioning of the “rules of knighthood” that he complies with in his fighting with his brother at the end of the play (5.3.135). Being a nobleman, Edmond must have been sent to another aristocratic family to receive a humanistic, comprehensive education that encompasses not only skills in swordsmanship but also knowledge of Greek and Latin letters. The schooling of princes, courtiers and noblemen is outlined in a few famous treatises of the time, among which Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), which was translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561, and Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster (1570). Copying the roman handwriting, i.e., the italic form, imitating the style and rhetoric of the Greco-Roman writers, and writing fictive familiar letters and orations to imaginary persons were among the pedagogical methods that ensured good learning for Renaissance scholars 5 All further references to this play are from the 2001 edition of Twelfth Night, Texts and Contexts, edited by Bruce R. Smith and published by Bedford/St. Martin’s. 6 Maria’s mastery of both upper and lower case hand is another interesting argument that favours her fluidity as a character capable of social mobility. See Bianca F–C. Calabresi, “‘Alphabetical Positions’: Engendering Letters in Early Modern Europe”, Critical Survey 2002, 14 (1): 18.

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and that Ascham, famous tutor of Queen Elizabeth I, as well as other eminent humanists like Erasmus, promulgated (Kinney 2000, 38–40; Henderson 1983, 93–94; Jardine 1996, 86; Calabresi 2002, 10).7 “Of Imitation” is the title of Ascham’s treatise’s Book II and advocates the following of the great authors, the way “Virgil followed Homer,” or “Horace followeth Pindar” (Ascham 1904, 8).8 Interestingly, the villain’s occupation in Twelfth Night is that of a “handmaid” (1.1.24), therefore expected to apply the use of her hands at the service of Countess Olivia’s household. She is for example the one who serves “a stoup of wine” or “cakes and ale” to the reveling team in the house (2.3.12, 96), and her position as a “gentlewoman” makes her an intimate companion to Olivia (1.5.127). But her hand that throws a veil on her mistress’s face when the latter receives count Orsino’s messenger (1.5.129–130) is also the one that throws a veil on the meaning of words in the letter she pens. Maria’s status as a gentlewoman does not account for her literacy, because in Early Modern England, the servants’ labor did not exclude reading and writing skills. Indeed, copying texts was part of the era’s teaching methods, especially for young women, including female servants. The method obeyed certain rules and restrictions though. Indeed, women were encouraged to train in writing skills by copying or translating only religious and devotional works (Dowd 2009, 42). Maria’s composition of a love letter in lieu of her mistress is a secular and implicitly erotic endeavor that lies outside the limits of the sanctioned field of female literacy. By misusing her mistress’s “sweet roman hand” (3.4.25), Maria perverts the “transcendent status” that this body part, “the organ of labor,” acquires through the activity of writing (Goldberg 2003, 106, 116). The problematic aspect of the perfect duplication of someone else’s handwriting stems from the cultural assumption that in the human body, outward form and inner nature are bridged through the hand. In one of the explanatory sections to his edition of Twelfth Night in context, Bruce R. Smith expounds a seventeenth-century genre called “character books,” and specifies that, contrarily to its abstract modern sense, the 7 In a letter to Sturm (1550), Roger Ascham expresses his admiration of the Queen’s perfect copying of his handwriting: “When she writes Greek or Latin, nothing is more beautiful than her hand” (quoted in Kimball 2010, 191). 8 Even Castiglione advocates imitation (imitazioni) “without the whiche […] no man canne wryte well” (quoted in White 1965, 43). For a comparison between Castiglione and Ascham regarding the principle of imitation in learning, see White (1965, 43–47).

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word character has a strong metonymic significance in that period as “it plays on the original sense of the word as a written sign (from the Greek Charassein, to make sharp or engrave) whereby a person might be known” (Shakespeare 2001, 323). Character is thus used as synonym for handwriting and suggests also the person’s temperament or personality.9 By analogy, the hand is the bodily vehicle of the inner self with its deepseated convictions and motives. Former Archbishop Cranmer’s symbolic thrusting of his hand first into the fire is a famous case in point in early modern England, immortalized in John Foxe’s official document with visual iconographies, Acts and Monuments (1563). Indeed, on his public execution in 1556, the Protestant martyr punished himself for having signed the bill of recantation under Queen Mary, ostentatiously blaming his “infamous hand,” his “unworthy hand,” for “writing contrary to my heart” (Cummings 2013, 132; Palmer 1996, 94–96; Neil 1995, 40–41). Against this cultural background that enhances the symbolic value of the hand (Neil 1995, 40), critic Goldberg explains that Shakespeare’s plays explore the social function and (meta)physical import of the hand by putting forth the “equation of hand and character” (2003, 106, emphasis his). In King Lear, the Earl of Gloucester voices this cultural assumption as he incredulously questions the congruity between the shocking contents of the letter and his elder son’s temperament figured in his feelings and intellect: “My son Edgar? Had he a hand to write this? A heart and brain to breed it in?” (1.2.53–54). The latter are fused in his next inquiry that puns on the other meaning of the word character, namely handwriting: “you know the character to be your brother’s?” (1.2.58). Likewise, as she examines the forged letter at the end of Twelfth Night, Olivia admits that “this is not [her] writing/though […] much like the character” (5.1.325). Hence, to reproduce someone’s hand implies the appropriation of their personality and the usurpation of their ontological self. However, for the duplicitous villain, hand and character or nature may be disjoined. Pretending to defend his brother against his father’s dismay, Edmond makes a comment that unsettles the belief in handwriting as revelatory of inner feelings and state: “It is his hand, my lord, but I hope his 9 For an explanation of the word “character” in its relation to “handwriting” in Shakespeare and particularly in King Lear, see Palfrey (2005, 181–185). For a similar analysis with a focus on Twelfth Night, see Dolan (2014, 114). For a similar analysis with a focus on Hamlet, see Goldberg (2003, 308, 313).

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heart is not in the contents” (1.2.62–63). Edmond therefore conceives of the act of writing as a potential disguise of one’s true nature, a perception that runs against the humanist mindset of self-expression through the epistolary medium. Writing becomes rather an “invention,” the very word that Edmond uses in a self-congratulatory way (1.2.20), and that Malvolio, Maria’s victim in Twelfth Night, chooses to decry the villainous composition that has targeted him (5.1.312). Maria and Edmond invent a new subjectivity for Olivia and Edgar, respectively, by thriving on their own imagination, hence on inaccurate data and untrue feelings. They distort the sense of individuality that gained ground in early modern England while they inscribe themselves in the dynamics of the “inwardness topos ” that distinguishes the period (Maus 1995, 15). Indeed, the Renaissance in England is the age of humanism, marked by the rise of the individualistic verse in literature, mainly in the sonnet, and the acute sense of inwardness that characterizes it (Ferry 1983, 1–30; Sukic 2012, 32; Brigden 1994, 508). The genre flourished in Early Tudor England thanks to the influence of Petrarch, commonly hailed as the first modern man, and whose sonnets were introduced, translated, and imitated by the first practitioners, namely Sir William Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Petrarch was himself greatly indebted to Cicero the Roman rhetorician recognized as “the authority on individuality” (Eden 2012, 119–120). Cicero was indeed the first to establish the intimate discourse and self-expression through the genre of letter-writing, or epistula, which he distinguished from sermo, or conversation, the second form of the rhetoric of intimacy (1887, I.37). Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s personal letters to Atticus in the cathedral library of Verona in 1345 is deemed “a foundational moment in the historiography of the Renaissance” (Eisner 2014, 755) and believed to have set the tone for the growing interest in selfhood and the rhetoric of intimacy in Renaissance England (Eden 2012, 49–72, 124; Gilbert-Cooke 2014, 245–246). Along with the popular lyric genre of the sonnet with which it shares the peculiar traits of selfhood, introspection and self-expression, the letter— and the familiar letter in particular—becomes a fully fledged genre in the sixteenth century molded on the classical pattern of correspondence, namely the Ciceronian epistula or epistle (Del Lungo Camiciotti 2014, 22–23, 25). If Cicero’s personal letters to Atticus that fascinated Petrarch and the Renaissance readers illustrate the ancient writing practice, in particular,

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his famous treatise De Officiis or On Duties establishes the general philosophical and ethical background for the activities of the Roman citizens who seek to attain distinction, like Marcus his son, to whom the book is dedicated. This treatise was the first classical work ever printed in Europe and “was the most important of all Cicero’s works for Renaissance humanists” (Wells 2005, 9). One of the virtuous paths that this stoic philosophy prescribes in this book is the fostering of the self. Indeed, Cicero devotes a whole part to what he calls “peculiarities” that he believes each citizen ought to cultivate and enhance. He accordingly invites each man to “follow [their] individual nature” (1887, I.31). A few lines further, the advice hardly conceals a warning against the loss of selfhood and individuality in each of one’s actions: “imitating the nature of others, you abandon your own” (1887, I.31). Insisting on differences in character, proclivities, talents and specialties, Cicero deems unbecoming the desire to appropriate “another man’s peculiarities,” and enjoins each man to foster “which is most peculiarly his own” (1887, I.31). Cicero’s conception of letter-writing must be understood against this philosophical background. A public figure in politics and oratory, Cicero was also a pioneer in the technique of the intimate or familiar letter which the Renaissance writers rediscovered and elected as a model.10 Considering sincerity and self-revelation as chief requirements for letter-writing, Cicero confesses in one of his letters to Atticus: “I speak to you as to myself” (Cicero 1917, 305).11 Seneca, the other no less famous Roman stoic philosopher in Renaissance England, endorsed the intimate style called familiaritas, following thus in the steps of his master Cicero (Eden 2012, 39). In the same vein, King James I advised his son Prince Henry to produce a letter that would be “as well formed by your mind as drawn by your fingers” (Goldberg 2003, 114). As influential as this Roman background on the Renaissance minds was the topical polemic around religious faith and allegiances that arose in the wake of the English Reformation. With the passing of the Oath of Supremacy under Henry VIII, importance was given to the notions

10 Judith Rice Henderson attests that the humanists imitated the classical letter, following the structure and style of Cicero and Seneca, mainly. See Henderson (1983, 89–105). 11 On this letter and on Cicero’s concept of letter-writing in general, see Cole (1923, 352–359).

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of sincerity, authenticity and truthfulness and their antithetical meanings of insincerity, pretense, dissimulation and impurity. Brian Cummings observes that the word “sincere” entered the English language in the reign of Henry VIII and was tightly linked to the inner convictions and the Christian conscience and identity of the Protestants (2013, 96–97). The example of Cranmer’s crisis of conscience mentioned earlier is an illustration of the fact. The claims for sincerity were as strongly made at the other end of the religious spectrum too. The most prominent example is that of Mary Queen of Scots who challenged the evidence produced against her in 1586, in the case known as the Babington Plot designed to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I (Hutchinson 2007, 126–136). The latter’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham had intercepted all of the letters circulating between Mary Queen of Scots, Antony Babington and their supporters like the Spanish ambassador Mendoza. One of his maneuvers consisted of having an employee imitate Mary Queen of Scots’ handwriting and add post-scripts to one of her letters asking Babington for the names of the six gentlemen who were to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I (Whitaker 1790, 42–43; Dolan 2014, 115). During her trial, Mary Queen of Scots refuted the allegations held against her and raised the issue of forgery: “It is easy to imitate ciphers and handwriting” (Hutchinson 2007, 164). She also insisted on her integrity and her responsibility for what she wittingly produced: “I am not to be convicted but by my own word and writing” (Hutchinson 2007, 166). It is against this dense background that conflates the humanist tradition of self-expression in letter-writing and the topical religious tensions around personal faith and forgery of handwriting that the (mis)use of letter-writing on the early modern stage needs to be addressed. In critic Martin Scofield’s assessment, the common feature of letters in Shakespeare’s plays is their unreliability: “they are rarely the embodiment of sincerity” (1998, 38). In Twelfth Night and King Lear, Maria and Edmond, respectively, parody and pervert the sense of singularity and authenticity as they disown themselves in order to borrow and even appropriate another person’s style and identity. Their written texts place them along the Machiavellian lines of other Shakespearean villains who fashion the self by unfashioning and refashioning it. Becoming respectively Countess Olivia and Edgar, Maria and Edmond disrupt the Humanist sense of selfhood and interiority. Like Iago, they have “the role-player[s’] ability to imagine [their] nonexistence so that [they] can exist for a moment in another and as another” (Greenblatt 2005, 235).

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If, by his improvisations and verbal rhetoric, Iago invests “the principle of narrativity itself” according to Stephen Greenblatt, the other two villains literalize the narrative process that they materialize through their written pieces of fiction. They align themselves on Iago’s stance of “absolute vacancy,” that of “I am not what I am” (1.1.67)12 in order for them to write and feel as the person they are not (Greenblatt 2005, 236). The villains’ parasitism does not target only one other self. By absorbing the personality of their rivals, the schemers aim at attaining the latter’s class, and to be part of it. Indeed, “Edmond the base” does not transform into “legitimate Edgar” only (1.2.20, 16). He prays the gods to “stand up for bastards,” whom he represents, and who “shall to th’legitimate,” i.e., take his place, literally and symbolically (1.2.22, 21). The wording of the letter rests on “impersonal generalizations” (Hopkins 2002, 9) and the presumed author speaks more in the name of elder sons, using the general “our”/ “us” (1.2.46–47) than in the personal pronoun, and his reference to “our father” (1.2.50) comes as an illustration to his broad definition of “aged tyranny” (1.2.48). Actually, the letter draws on the cultural clichés around the law of primogeniture, with its two related subject matters, the policy that protects the elderly against the guardianship of their children, and the frustration of the elder sons who long for their inheritance. The non-systematic equivalence between order of birth and merit was a familiar issue in Shakespeare’s time and the negative traits of the elder son became stereotypical (Jamoussi 2011, 41–55). Similarly, being a “gentlewoman” yet still below Malvolio (Schalkwyk 2005, 87– 88) triggers Maria’s vengeful action against both the steward and the countess as she invests the role of the latter to ruin the former. She uses her mistress’s formulaic clichés and copies “her very phrases” (2.5.76), obviously from the official letters that she herself delivers to several addressees. She also seals the letter with her mistress’s Lucrece signet (2.5.76–77), another item which, although personal, remains accessible and therefore usable. Maria’s personal fiction is therefore strengthened and authenticated by the technical accessories and ready-made conventions that pertain to the aristocracy. Malvolio lists them indistinctively in his plea to Olivia: “You must not now deny it is your hand./ Write from it, if you can, in hand or phrase, /Or say ‘tis not your seal, not your invention./ You can say none of this” (5.1.310–313). As critic 12 All further references to this play are from the 2007 edition of Othello. The Moor of Venice. Texts and Contexts, edited by Kim F. Hall and published by Bedford/St. Martin’s.

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Dowd points out, all these formal elements “encode Maria’s transgressive ability to mimic the discourse of mastery” (Dowd 2009, 45). Besides, Maria exploits a culturally stereotypical theme, one that does apply to Malvolio’s personal case, but which is nonetheless a cliché: that of the slipping ground of service and desire between servants and masters, the former being often from the gentry and even from the nobility, hence the very thin distinctions between the two classes (Schalkwyk 2005, 87). The servants’ social mobility and aristocratic alliance is not so unusual, and Maria herself ends up forming an aristocratic match with Sir Toby, just as Countess Olivia and Duke Orsino are both infatuated with the gentle-born servant Cesario/Viola (Schalkwyk 2005, 90). Malvolio too has an illustrious example that comforts him in his fantasy about his love for his mistress being reciprocated: that of “the lady of the Strachy [who] married the yeoman of the wardrobe” (2.5.32–33).

“Grounds of Faith”: Addressing Belief in/to the Letter In his famous letter-writing manual De Conscribendis Epistolis (1534), the Spanish humanist Juan Lewis Vives describes the letter as “sermo absentium,” i.e., conversation between those absent (quoted in Henderson 1983, 105). His disciple, the humanist Erasmus, maintains the same idea in his Epistolae, insisting that letters are “intimate conversations between friends” (Jardine 1996, 78). The epistolary mode is indeed the equivalent to the conversational one (sermo) that Roman, and in particular Ciceronian rhetoric classifies as a tool equal in persuasive power to public oratory (contentio) although it operates in intimate circles, mainly in “gatherings of friends” (Cicero I.37; Remer 1999, 44; Henderson 1983, 90). Edmond in King Lear and Maria in Twelfth Night do manipulate their interlocutors by confessing to them intimate but untruthful accounts in order to offer them a means to corroborate their written evidence and hence to steer their reception and interpretation of it. But the major discursive form of the rhetoric of intimacy they employ to serve their ends is epistula itself. What is intriguing is how the effect of apocryphal writings contained within tropes of ambiguity and retention outweighs the one of direct exchange with straightforward disclosure. Before he chances upon the letter, Malvolio musingly hypothesizes his mistress’s infatuation with him by recalling Maria’s testimony: “Maria once told me she did affect me” (2.5.18–19). Although mediated, this

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alleged revelation is more straightforward than the cryptic “M.O.A.I. doth sway my heart” (2.5.90) that he broods over and that tempts him to “crush this a little” so that “it would bow to me” (2.5.114). A moment later, Malvolio is made to identity “who commended [his] yellow stockings and wished to see [him] ever cross-gartered” (2.5.123–124), and he shortly buttresses his guess by summoning up what can be but Maria’s untrustworthy report: “She did commend my yellow stockings of late, she did praise my leg being cross-gartered” (2.5.133–134). This comes out as sheer falsehood when the letter’s author confesses to her team: “He will come to her in yellow stockings, and ‘tis a color she abhors, and cross-gartered, a fashion she detests” (2.5.161–162). When he finally confronts his mistress, Malvolio does not give away Maria’s false reports in their private conversations, but rather puts the blame on the “clear lights of favor” contained in Olivia’s presumed letter (5.1.315). Like Malvolio, Gloucester trusts so much the “very opinion in the letter” (1.2.68) that he discards the opportunity of having “auricular assurance” and getting with no mediation a “better testimony of his [son’s] intent” (1.2.82, 74). Edgar’s presumed private opinion resonates with the significance that the new phrases “private interpretation,” “private judgment” and “private opinion” gained in sixteenth-century England where the distinctions between the public and the private became momentous (Cummings 2013, 140). Disclosing a private matter, the letter makes Gloucester brush aside immediacy of speech and “distrust the direct word […] The letter becomes the emblem of the illicit and dangerously mediate” (Burckhardt 1968, 242). Although they manifest in his exchange with his father, and precisely in his feigned reluctance to show the letter and spell out its contents (1.2.29–41) (Plett 2004, 426), Edmond’s dexterous rhetorical devices stand out in his penning of the letter. Used chiefly in intimate conversations by other Shakespearean villains, these devices are grounded in the tradition of the Vice figure and have for major facets dissimulation, aposiopesis and emphasis. Applying negatio, dissimulation claims plainness and clings to the refusal to speak. It is akin to aposiopesis, also termed reticentia, which consists of withdrawing meaning by breaking off the sentence in the middle, compelling the hearer to draw inference by themselves. As to emphasis, Quintilian explains it as “a deeper meaning than is actually expressed by the words” (1920, 259). While Richard III uses mainly dissimulation, Iago stands out as the foremost agile user of the three rhetorical devices, arousing Othello’s suspicions

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and itching his curiosity to know more and look for further hidden meanings to what he actually spells out.13 Ill-intentioned authors shape their letters accordingly since the meaning thereof is constructed dialogically, as writing entails reading, hence interpretation (Del Lungo Camiciotti 2014, 20). The desired effect is to solicit the recipient’s curiosity about likely implicature and to make them infer unstated meanings. Besides, the assumption that epistula is framed in intimacy and secrecy makes it premised on pathos, the language of affects that engages readers emotionally, more than is public or conversational oratory, and this trait urges the recipient to plumb the opaque parts of the messages (Cicero 1970, 67, 134). Interestingly, the recipient/reader of Edmond’s letter in King Lear is Gloucester whose name suggests glossa the Greek etymological root of the word gloss which means interpretation, explanation or paraphrase. As he symbolically dismisses the need for spectacles (1.1.34–35), Gloucester finds himself dependent on Edmond’s lenses, hence twice removed from the truth as he trusts both a phony letter and a fraudulent account of its circumstances. He is however unaware of the fact, as Edmond’s feigned protest that he “[has] not all o’erread” the letter (1.2.37) deludes him into thinking that he is the chief interpreter of it. The letter starts with a general comment on “aged tyranny,” hinting at the father who, being still alive, keeps the elder son from enjoying his heritage (1.2.45–49), it then suspends the idea in an aposiopetic way, gesturing toward further intentions: “come to me, that of this I may speak more” (1.2.49–50). Lastly, another piece of information or rather a hypothesis is broached, couched in cryptic language: “If our father would sleep till I waked him […]” (1.2.50). Gloucester repeats this rather puzzling image in which he immediately detects “conspiracy” (1.2.52), making redundant Edmond’s later justification of the intended parricide (2.1.44–45). As to Maria’s “obscure epistles of love” (2.3.127), they are paradoxical. The first part, written in verse cunningly leaves enough room for a speculative exercise on the part of the reader as to the identity of the “unknown beloved” (2.5.75). The double sealing, first of the paper and second of the “lips [that] do not move” (2.5.82) of the enigmatic first quatrain is a perfect instance of the diabolical rhetorical trio,

13 On reticentia and emphasis in Othello, see Vickers (1993, 82), Jacobsen (2009, 517); on dissimulation in Richard III , see Müller (1984, 37–59).

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emphasis-aposiopesis-dissimulation, that induces a secret message. Moreover, grappling with “not only ciphers and codes but an anagram as well” (Garber 2010, 30), Malvolio dwells on the puzzling sequence of the letters “M.O.A.I.” which he wishes to make “resemble something in [me]” (2.5.90–115, 100) (Robson 2011, 160). However, the prose of the second part with the prescriptions regarding the demeanor and the outfit the author demands of her addressee is very articulate. Critic Mallin observes that Malvolio does not commit any misprision, but that “[he] is actually reading correctly, insofar as he responds exactly as the source of the script intended” (1995, 179–180). He understands and abides by the text or rather writes his behavior anew for Olivia to read. For instance, his face is submitted to graphic transformations that overlap with Maria’s text as he purposely draws smiles on his paper-like-face: “He does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies” (3.2.58–59). Commenting on this ricochet effect of the letter, Lynn Maxwell underlines its double hermeneutical layer: “Maria’s usurpation of Olivia’s seal allows her to write Malvolio doubly; he becomes both the reader of her text and a second text that Olivia will read with disapprobation” (2019, 57). Next to the rhetorical devices they employ, the forgers exploit the religious faith of the recipients for the workability of their trap letters. If Malvolio’s leanings are known to his tormentor, who exposes him as “a kind of puritan” (2.3.115), Gloucester’s pertain to “pagan superstition” (Elton 1988, 147–170) as he shares with Malvolio a strong “belief in astrological determinism” (Hunt 1993, 281). The authors’ cynical position as “gull-catcher[s]” (Twelfth Night 3.1.150) toward “a credulous father” (King Lear 1.2.151), and “an affectioned ass” (Twelfth Night 2.3.121) takes on the form of a crusade on the readers’ “grounds of faith” (Twelfth Night 2.3.123). Being associated with the Catholic Virgin Mary, who, in the Bible is described as “handmaid of the lord” (Findlay 2010, 174), Maria relishes her trick as enforced religious conversion upon the Puritan Malvolio who is now “turned heathen, a very renegado” (3.2.52). As to Edmond, he mocks his father’s acknowledgment of the villainous letter as a manifestation of destiny through “heavenly compulsion,” “spherical predominance” and “planetary influence” (1.2.107–110). Maria confidently anticipates how Malvolio will understand the letter and invites her team to “observe his construction of it” (2.3.142). The Puritans’ approach of the scriptures they deem as a unique

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source of authority in matters of religion accounts for Maria’s assumption about her victim’s following of the contents ad litteram, “point device” (2.5.131) (Simmons 1973, 182). As expected from a precisian, a precise and punctilious Puritan, Malvolio “obey[s] every point of the letter that [Maria] dropped to betray him” (3.2.57–58), from the outfit to the demeanor and rhetoric that it stipulates (2.5.120–137). Moreover, he thanks Jove and his stars for having elected him as his mistress’s favorite candidate (2.5.137–138, 142). His belief in predestination makes him reach for the “self-serving providence” which critic Hunt describes as “the stereotype of the economic reward of the chosen” (Hunt 1993, 281). Neither “born great,” nor having “achieve[d] greatness,” he nonetheless recognizes himself among the fortunate ones who “have greatness thrust upon ‘em” (2.5.117–118). Gloucester’s religious faith too is shaped by the workings of a cosmic design, “a divine thrusting on” (1.2.110–111) in all earthly matters, and he accordingly reads his son’s alleged treachery as a visible sign of the portentous “eclipses,” the natural agents of a remotely active supernatural force (1.2.91), and as the outcome of “the prediction: there’s son against father” (1.2.97). In both plays, the written text comes across as God’s instrument, or even, in a more direct and puritanical perception, God’s hand (Hunt 1993, 288). “Thy Fates open their hands” (2.5.118) says explicitly Maria’s text, while it is her hand that “drop(s) in [Malvolio’s] way” (2.3.127) the letter, just as Edmond’s hand “throw(s) in at the casement of [his] closet” Edgar’s alleged letter (1.2.57). The forgers therefore vie with the author of destiny, making their victims, like Othello in reaction to Desdemona’s lost handkerchief presumably seen in her lover’s hands, take “Trifles light as air […] as proofs of Holy Writ” (3.3.339–341). Indeed, like Othello’s stubborn claim of the material token of intimacy, the handkerchief, Gloucester’s and Malvolio’s clinging to the handwritten text verges on devotion to the sacred book. Gloucester is bent on proclaiming the letter as “conspiracy” and on pronouncing his son as a “villain,” an accusation that he frantically repeats five times (1.2.68–71) and that he substitutes for his son’s name (1.2.96, 101; 2.1.37, 40, 76, 79). As to Malvolio’s reaction to Maria’s “dish o’ poison” (2.5.95), it is easily passed off as daemonic possession. In this regard, critic Goldberg comments: “The counterfeit hand possesses the upstart steward” (2003, 8). His obsession shows in his recitation of a few chunks of the letter, evidencing his rote learning of them. Maria has foretold the fact, having already witnessed similar practices in the “affectioned ass

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that cons state without book and utters it by great swaths” (2.3.121– 122) (Robertson 1996, 121). Memorization is a typical practice of the Protestants and Puritans’ ancestors, the Lollards, who, in order to avoid having any detectable material proof of their non-conformity to the established Catholic church, would memorize the gospels for their preaching and their prayers, a practice which earned them the nickname “walking books” (Green 2008, 63). The value invested in the written word resonates with the topical focus on the Word of God in Protestant Europe. Indeed, historian Ulinka Rublack explains how the early modern period saw the veneration of the believers shift to the Bible, as well as to protestant prayer-books, song-books and liturgical sayings. She explains: “For the Protestants, the Word itself could mediate protection and salvation, the highest sacred power” (Rublack 2017, 189). Besides, contesting the idea that Lutheranism is “a disembodied, interiorized religion of the word” (Rublack 2010, 144) concerned only with spiritual meditation and inner expression of faith, Rublack demonstrates how the materiality of the written texts stirred as much interest and veneration as cultic images and relics of saints in Catholicism. Protestants, like Catholics, preserved autographs, autobiographies and martyrs’ records and letters as sacred “grapho-relics” in Rublack’s terminology (Rublack 2010, 149–160; Rublack 2017, 191–192; Corens 2018, 172). But this testimony of faith, closely associated with CounterReformation as well as Protestant martyrs, did not have the inherent proprieties of secrecy and intimacy only, but could also suggest potential subversion (Corens 2018, 173–175; Schneider 2005, 92, 110). On the Shakespearean stage, the villains’ confidence about their letters generating absolute trust and devotional attention stems from the seditious aspect attached to it. In Twelfth Night, Maria’s “passages of grossness” (3.2.54) do not deter their recipient from making specious inferences and draw pseudo-logical conclusions. Likewise, in King Lear Edmond’s hasty downplaying of the letter as “nothing” (1.2.31) impels his father to turn it into a substantial something that he scrutinizes with the help of glasses (Burckhardt 1968, 242): “The quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself” (1.2.33–34). Repeating thrice “let’s see” (1.2.34, 42), Gloucester gropes for a dark and invisible, because initially nonexistent, message. This invisibility resonates again when, now blind, he comments upon the paper Lear urges him to read: “were all thy letters suns, I could not see” (4.5.135). Such activities involving interpretation

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of cryptic texts, deciphering of covert messages and elucidation of invisible lines represented an unprecedented source of anxiety in the context of Post-Reformation England. Indeed, the period was marked by the underground smuggling and circulation of secret correspondences, chiefly among the Catholic leaders of the Counter-Reformation, and their interception and even forgery by the sophisticated network of intelligence spies, commissioned by established authorities and Queen Elizabeth I. Several types of cryptography as well as invisible ink obtained from a variety of substances were common technologies used on both sides, by the Catholics in their clandestine communications, like Mary Queen of Scots or Jesuit Father Garnet (Daybell 2012, 166–178, 172; Hutchinson 2007, 120, 123–124), and by the spies, the double agents and their master himself, the protestant state intelligencer Sir Francis Walsingham (Hutchinson 2007, 16, 98, 123–124, 279). In one of her letters, Mary Queen of Scots reveals her mastery of the art of reading “in the blanks between the lines” of books with the help of specific substances like alum (Labanoff 1845, 268). Hence, across the religious spectrum, the personal letter has the peculiar status of a confessional and a confidential material document, and can paradoxically be unreadable or even invisible at first sight.

Conclusion In a surge of sympathy at the end of King Lear Edmond decides, “despite [his] own nature” (5.3.217–218), to cancel “[his] writ/ (that) is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia” (5.3.219–220). Urged to “send/[his] token of reprieve” (5.3.223), Edmond gives his sword (5.3.224), a personal weapon that he exchanges for his personal writing. But the attempt comes too late and testifies to the lethal effect of a text taken literally. Edmond’s forged letter has comparable consequences on his father who endures violent blinding and destitution, and whose “flawed heart” eventually bursts the moment he is reconciled with his wronged elder son (5.3.187– 190). Both the import and the impact of the revengeful written device are as palpable in Twelfth Night, accounting to a great extent for its reception as a dark comedy (Logan 1982, 226, 237). Kept in a dark cell on the false grounds of daemonic possession, Malvolio asks for “some ink, paper, and light” (4.2.88) to counter-write the allegations held against him and to prove his sanity. He claims the right to materialize his personal thoughts and self-defense through a manuscript. After his release, he

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publicly produces the text that has caused his torment but which he has kept about him as a talismanic proof of truthful confession from his mistress. He asks the latter to “peruse that letter” (5.1.309) indirectly avowing that he has studied it just as thoroughly. Having been “notoriously abused” (5.1.356), Malvolio leaves the stage, and possibly quits his service in the countess’s household, promising future revenge “on the whole pack of you” (5.1.355). Just as Edmond’s attempt to intercept his own death warrant on Lear’s and Cordelia’s life turns out inefficient, the tricksters’ dismissal of their plot against Malvolio as “sportful malice” (5.1.344) fails to allay its tragic effect. Hence, what letter-writing and forged handwriting demonstrate in both plays is the dangerous conjunction of the perverted humanist assets of the dexterous author, and layered assumptions of the recipient about the written text, its form, content, and implications.

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CHAPTER 10

Villainy as a Facet of Nietzsche’s Wirkliche Historie Prefigured in Shakespeare’s Richard II and Concretized in Brecht’s Man Equals Man and the Measures Taken Mariem Khmiri

Introduction Men of tradition can be described as the adepts of the cult of Apollo: always keeping track of infractions everywhere as villainy. They are therefore remarkably incapable to observe life in the full light of the necessary violence wherewith Nietzschean (among other) aestheticians have vanquished the Platonic duality of good and evil. My academic focus is partly instigated by my sensitivity to depicting Shakespeare as a precursor of Nietzsche’s Dionysian worldview as that luminous version of humanism. In my line of logic Richard II displays villainy as expedient to subvert the extant Platonic myth about the eternal life of souls the way

M. Khmiri (B) The Higher Institute of Applied Studies in Humanities of Sbeitla, University of Kairouan, Sbeitla, Tunisia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_10

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it is ingrained within the Christian time-consciousness. The same subversion is legitimated in Brecht’s The Measures Taken which exemplifies the importance of villainy (precisely the act of killing) for a realistic portrayal of man based on his frailties. In Man Equals Man, subversion comes into view when Gary Gay is invited to forsake his vocation as guardian of the Indian temple in favor of the “villainous” identity of a communist soldier. Villainy in the theater of the absurd is the explosion of man’s internalized rant at the plan of institutions to ossify his identity within a monumental frame of history. The same refashioning of villainy has already occurred in Shakespeare’s text in the king’s taunt at the communal obsession with the past. This article looks at Shakespeare’s history drama to test the inefficiency of history in the sense of a chronicle. What the Poet’s performance extends to is a prefiguration of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch through a congregation of characters who seek to give meaning to their identity when they unleash themselves from their national and religious past. Shakespeare has set the ground for the Nietzschean will to power as man’s topmost felicity and whose sole precondition is the liberation from time as Chronos. Shakespeare’s representation of English chronicles purveys a new sense of temporality whereby historical figures in demise ironically portend the crescendo of man’s will as a negative response to historical predeterminism. Contrary to its negative denotations as a dictionary entrance, villainy, in the theater of Brecht will also be revealed to be the antithesis of Esslin’s definition of the absurd as what he (Esslin) conceptualizes in terms of man’s lack of ethics. In this article, villainy in Brecht (and Shakespeare alike) will be celebrated as a Dionysiac revolutionary strike of the individual against the patrolling power of socio-political institutions of different sorts.

Villainy in the Measures Taken and Man Equals Man as the Killing of the Christian God The Measures Taken was written in 1929–1930: that is in the aftermath of WWI. We recognize its aesthetic worth within a scope that seeks to restore man’s sense of self from a wrecked world coupled with a larger-than-life religious discrimination during the Reichstag until its emasculation under Adolf Hitler with the Enabling Act of 1933.

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We also make out that the killing of the Christian God was the raison d’être behind the legitimation of manslaughter in Brecht’s The Measures Taken. As its title may suggest, the play disrupts the incorporation of man’s will into a Christian time-pattern. Hence the importance of villainy as the locomotive of action: also as the generator of a new dimension to the human beyond the worship of ideals. Brecht lets out an atheistic hoot into Christ’s command “Thou shalt not kill thy brother”—the command emblematic of a traditional sense of the past as monumental legacy: [W]hat is Needed to change the world: Anger and tenacity, knowledge and indignation Swift action, utmost deliberation Cold endurance, unending perseverance Comprehension of the individual and comprehension of the whole: Taught only by reality can Reality be changed. (Brecht 1977, 34)

Such was the conclusion reached by the control Chorus—or the judge—toward the end of Brecht’s The Measures Taken. The play closes on a verdict issued by the Chorus in favor of the four agitators who have killed their younger companion because he failed to hide his Russian identity during their mission to convert the citizens of Mukden into communism. Distortion of monumental history begins with the shocking discrepancy between the agitators who found themselves in the invidious position of having to kill one of their allies to save their own lives (on the one hand), and their confession to the chorus that what they did was to ensure the dissemination of “the Classics, the ABC of communism,” “class-consciousness to the oppressed” (Brecht 1977, 34) (on the other). The communist agitators presented their alibi such that they had to kill their own comrade or else the latter would fall into the trap set by the Chinese oppressors and then report on them: Pressed for time, we found no way out. Just as animals help their own kind We also wished to help him who Fought with us for our cause. For five minutes, in the face of our persecutors We deliberated in hope of finding a Better possibility. (Brecht 1977, 32)

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The agitators justify murder as a solution to what they described as a crisis of temporality threatening their revolutionary scheme with imminent failure. “Pressed for time” and within a lapse of “five minutes,” this communist group had to get rid of the contaminatory effect they risk if their young comrade stays alive. Killing is literally the measure taken by the agitators to guarantee survival to themselves and to their revolution. One may admit that killing—what seems to be as a moment of crisis affecting the dramatic clock in the play—is a hideous act. But this is only if we test this act against the platonic ideal of friendship and the Christian indictment of murder. In fact, what appears as a moral crisis is something organic to the internal texture of Brecht’s play within the ennobling purview of bulldozing monumental history at once. Brecht has an idiosyncratic way of deploying villainy so as to portray the vicissitudes of life from a new perspective on humanity beyond the traditional fixation on ethics. Brecht’s Weltanschauung seems quite impregnated by a new form of humanism whose sole agent is man in full defiance of his religious world. I find the background of Brecht’s cynicism to be Nietzschean more than anything else. Similarly to Nietzsche, Brecht’s new humanistic project is essentially a scoff at classic history. Regenerating human dignity in the logic of both is unleashed by a blasphemous Non Serviam in the face of the inherited conception of history based on the iconography of kings and priests: dead and alive. Adumbrations of Nietzsche’s historical sense (what Nietzsche himself defined as Wirkliche Historie) and of Brecht’s subversion of the ethical substratum of his society are powerfully available in Shakespeare’s fiddling with villainy as it occurs in Richard II . In The Measures Taken, Brecht represents villainy as prophylactic against a potential disruption of the temporal scheme designed by the Communist faithful. Villainy in the Brechtian sense is a vital ingredient of an idiosyncratic conception of historical time typical of the Communist group. Centuries prior to Brecht, history in Shakespeare is more of a pretext than a context. For both dramatists, history is maneuvered in such a way as to valorize the will of man. Their respective dramatization of history antagonizes the linear flux of temporality in favor of a subjective time-consciousness: “Freedom” the lot of you are best at bellowing, but I lose faith in “great events” as soon as they are surrounded by much bellowing and smoke. And just believe me, friend

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Infernal Racket! The greatest events – these are not our loudest, but our stillest hours. (Nietzsche 2006, 104)

In the fashion of Zarathustra, I will let down a shaft of light into the crisis of temporality typical of King Richard II as the kind of journey toward self-recognition: a journey defying the monumental worldview built on teleology (religious and political). Richard II is a case of the Poet’s disowning of temporality as the most salient manifestation of what Schopenhauer (a couple of centuries later) will dub the will of the world. The subjectivity of Richard II is a reaction not only to the villainy of his arch-foe, Bolingbroke, but also to history as a hitherto matter of reverence. Shakespeare’s aesthetic power aesthetic distinction in Richard II lies in the way he confides in the self (here victim of villainy in the conventional sense of dethronement ) paradoxically as a counterforce to the religious and political ideology of his time. By ideology, I refer precisely to the dehumanizing medieval history which comes into being simultaneously as it swallows the individual inside the larger will of society: ˇ Nietzsche’s Übermensch … come[s] into being, not through recognition by any corporate body, surely not by the state, but by purely subjective assertion of inner energy, whether that is configured as “faith” or as “inscription” of a higher law than applies in society upon tablets of the individuals’ own making. (Stewart 2010, 98–99)

This is how Stanley Stewart attempts to help us spell out the mystery of Shakespeare’s history drama as a rehabilitation of the individual away from the authority of the State: a rehabilitation which highly prefigures Nietzsche’s unhistorical Ubermensch. Richard II in the tower prison is no longer a monarch or politician: he is only a living relic of a past engagement: i.e., of a fossilized sense of history. A 20th century parody of the Nietzschean Ubermensch is dramatized in another absurdist play written by Brecht entitled Man Equals Man. Brecht is concerned with how to portray man’s alienation from his world. This alienation creates a feeling in man that he is outside the now-point of the present: therefore swept away from the stakes of history as should not be the case. In Man Equals Man, Brecht dramatizes the loss of identity when man is left with the only possibility to mime history by playing on its hallmarks and figures of prominence. In fact, the events take place in

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India in the post-WWI period; however, we do find Queen Victoria still as head to the commonwealth. In parallel with the violence exerted upon the historical timeline by this anachronism, Antony Tatlow observes in the text of Brecht (as in Shakespeare) a general performance of authority veering toward villainy: Shakespeare’s and Brecht’s plays bear the marks […] of a historical period of transforming or shape-changing violence. New forms of control over human activities are exercised by those who own “magic” upon those who do not. (Tatlow 2001, 24)

Tatlow adduces that “both embody comical and disquieting absurdities” (ibid) rendering man impotent in front of the violence of such expedients as the imposition of a new identity on Galy Gay by those wielding the power of their party apparatus. Tatlow offers insight that the assault upon Gay’s former identity is the kind of mutilation amplifying his actual state of servant (ironically) into that of “monster-servant” (Tatlow 2001, 25) within the larger communist machinery. The complexity of Man Equals Man lies in how it stages man’s problematic relation to his monumental history as a miniature of his deeper crisis of temporality. The setting is an Indian temple robbed by four British soldiers as a symbolic enactment of the crumbling of religions in the aftermath of the World Wars. However, what appears at first blush as usurpation of the sacredness of faith (therefore conventionally as villainy) is refashioned in Brecht’s artform into an efficient irony about the negative power of society. The latter is represented in Man Equals Man as the actual site of villainy where man is a mere puppet whose strings are pulled by others. This manipulation is sensed when one of the teammates, Jeraiah, is left behind while his friends manage to escape from the temple. To mend for the slot left by his absence, they will force the porter, Galy Gay, to adopt the identity of Jeraiah: thus to forsake the guardianship of the Indian temple. The absurdity arises from the ease wherewith identity is handled by Brecht so as to shake off the timeless sanctity of the religious temple in favor of the Communist timeframe or action plan: Galy Gay is refunctioned, transformed from the gentle messenger, sent to buy a fish for his wife, into a human fighting machine. The process of identity construction is taken out of perennial, mythical time and historicized. (Tatlow 2001, 26)

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Villainy perspires in Man Equals Man from Brecht’s derision at institutions as repressive: also at the temporalization of life according to an a priori sanctified design for society and its citizens. Brecht inaugurates a crisis of temporality through his uproarious irreverence of the emblem of faith—the Indian temple—therefore of teleological time as the most salient feature of religion. The play is about the conversion of a normal employee into a soldier. This transformation is also a metaphoric invitation to thwart the rectilinear trajectory of time. In this light, we find collective will (epitomized by the decision of the fugitive soldiers upon Galy Gay) colliding violently with the will of Galy Gay. Ironically enough, this collision cancels out the hypothesis that Galy Gay may refuse to change his identity on account of his so-called ethical or vocational principles (as guardian to the Indian temple). What remains above anything else is Brecht’s dramatization of a salutary kind of villainy which disconcerts the social hierarchy as much as the chronicle of temples: long venerated then quickly desecrated. Brecht is telling us that equality among mankind is a natural merit which has been corrupted since the advent of monotheism. Man Equals Man opens with a parody of the insuperable wall that has been erected between the theme of soldiership (as a unifying, national concern, on the one hand) and the petty mention of the fish in the glass jar (therefore of man’s private and individual concerns, on the other). Such is Brecht’s show of man’s inborn confusion about institutions: therefore of the villainous ways of society against the individuality of its subjects: WIFE: And then there are those soldiers who are the worst people in the world and who are said to be swarming at the station like bees […] GALY GAY: They would not want to harm a simple porter from the harbour. WIFE: One can never tell. GALY GAY: Then put the water on for the fish, for I am beginning to get an appetite and I guess I shall be back in ten minutes. (Brecht 1994, 3)

For all its dimness, the drama of the absurd is a vector of the happy truth about the likely reversibility of time once it dwells into the arable province of human thought. Esslin is aware of Brecht’s grappling with time in Man Equals Man through the purportedly villainous act affecting Gay’s identity as a symbol of man’s apostasy: “Mann Ist Mann anticipates the Theater of the Absurd in its thesis that human nature is not a constant, and that it is possible to transform one character into another

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in the course of a play” (Esslin 1961, 272). I opine that allowing for this flexibility of character is a manifestation of Brecht’s larger absurdist project which seeks to represent usurpation beyond the charge of villainy (therefore beyond the religious idea of sin) thanks to human will as the only decisive factor in transforming man’s socio-political universe.

Shakespeare’s Redefinition of Villainy: From Bolingbroke’s coup to the Strain of Monumental History Far from the moral question raised by Stanley Stuart about Bolingbroke’s seizure of the crown—historically deemed as villainy—, I entertain the more engaging reflection upon the problem of temporality in the historical play of Richard II . It is possible to analyze Richard’s current predicament in its aesthetic purport ironically as a rift within monumental history: therefore as the pretext of a new approach to historical time. Shakespeare can be hailed a forerunner of the theater of the absurd in his determination to portray man’s struggle against the crushing weight of ideology. Villainy is how I term the evil inflicted upon man by his political world in a play like Richard II . However, and for all its insoluble impression, the play does give tribute to the individual’s capacity to counter the negativity of his repressive world. This is the reading we are offered if we focus on the play’s aesthetic purpose as a poetic representation of man’s epic against the villainous monster, Time; that is beyond the souci of conformity to England’s historical records. By pointing out that he is a fossil of lost kinghood, Richard II is staving off the miserable now: not into a blissful past but into a negative state of affairs (dubbed monumental by Nietzsche): a state which keeps recurring as an extended living in the past. Nietzsche’s substantives like nostalgia, remembrance (or even forgetting ) do apply to the bitter truth about the king’s relation to his-story essentially as a pathological experience: For he learns to understand the expression “It was,” that password with which struggle, suffering, and weariness come over human beings, so as to remind him what his existence basically is a never completed past tense. If death finally brings the longed for forgetting, it nevertheless thereby destroys present existence and thus impresses its seal on the knowledge that existence is only an uninterrupted living in the past [Gewesensein],

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something which exists for the purpose of self-denial, self-destruction, and self-contradiction. (Nietzsche 1998, 3)

However, Nietzsche quickly redresses his argument by telling us that “forgetting belongs to all action” (Nietzsche 1998, 4). By this he means that man’s existence in time is not as obsessive as it tends to show itself. Man’s inborn critical relation to time turns out to be something positive if we take account of the human will in the process. Nietzsche makes it clear that counteracting the predicament of time depends on man’s ability to forget. In this sense, we understand that man needs to defend himself against the villainy of history where there is a concentration of societal—therefore ideological—hegemony over his person. Nietzsche’s unhistorical formula is such that living in the past should be interrupted by the individual’s commitment to the current stakes of his era. One truth about Renaissance chronicles, however, is that they hypnotize the people into blind reverence of their past as the very essence of national identity. The same dogma seems to have survived until the 20th century as in Brecht’s drama which comes out as a reactionary response to the persisting legitimation of old temples, norms and ethics. Against the ritualized recitation of history as sacred texts, Nietzsche’s eye is focused on eulogizing the individual who should have the stunt of thrusting himself into the foreground of history: a stunt whose sole condition is “to forget.” However, forgetting will be bound up with tension as much as the joy of daring to corrode the monochromatic surface of history. Tension and joy are therefore the twin poles between which true historical sense shapes itself. This is also the same duality offered by Brecht in Man Equals Man and The Measures Taken. There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which living comes to harm and finally is destroyed, whether it is a person or a people or a culture. (Nietzsche 1998, 4)

Nietzsche speaks of forgetting as a necessity. According to him, forgetting is what enables man to destroy for the sake of rebuilding from scratch. Forgetting (which appears to conformists as a villainous infraction of the linearity of history) is in fact a blissful haven from the burden of the past and the major step toward the Nietzschean “historical sense.” By the latter, Nietzsche refers to history as that part of man’s consciousness which is not obsessed with the past. Nietzsche’s philosophy on history

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provides the benefit of hindsight into Richard II’s relationship with time beyond the consideration of history as an elapsed glory. Synonymous with the word rumination (in the quote above by Nietzsche) is the exercise of cogitation. Nietzsche attempts to save history from the grips of passivity. This Nietzschean lesson has been predicted by Shakespeare in the dysfunction of Richard’s mind. In the very midst of his suffering, Shakespeare’s Richard II has taken an essential leap forward: it is the leap of being unhistorical: a Nietzschean coinage which says much if we test it against Richard’s complex rapport to the substantive time as shall be done right away. By unhistorical, Nietzsche refers to a mindful and creative reaction to the pull of monumental time. Nietzsche locates the danger of monumental time in the fixation on the past as a ceremonial and catechistic source of knowledge to be preserved and consecrated. He therefore calls for a daring sneer at the past if man is to prove himself a thinking zoon (of the kind we find for example, in Brecht’s Man Equals Man or The Measures Taken). Denying history is never fortuitous: it radiates—for Nietzsche—from the deeper conviction that man is superior to history: what Nietzsche refers to as the superhistorical man (Nietzsche 1998, 8). The same theory of history has been prefigured in Richard II: he is above history in a certain sense. Richard’s remembrance is never a one-way process. The defeated king sporadically shuttles back and forth between past and present. In the meantime, he becomes able to heal himself from excessive timeconsciousness by developing his proper defense mechanisms against the timeline as that obstacle that stands between him and his actual existence. In so doing, he departs from remembrance as sterile nostalgia into the stakes of the present as when (in his cell in the Tower) he snatches off the sword from one of his hired assassins and kills them at once. What appears as Richard’s villainous transgression of a political order (now fully in the hands of Bolingbroke) is nothing but a metaphoric revolution against the linearity of history—ironically heading toward his execution—thanks to the agency of his individual will albeit metaphorical. However, the confusion of Richard’s time-consciousness is only an impression. If we read the play as an outline for Nietzsche’s philosophy on history, we make out that the transposition from past into present (and vice versa) in the case of Richard II gives us a clear idea that he has certain mastery over his mental activity. He is far from the obsessive type who loses his mind in the nostalgia for his lost throne. On the contrary,

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Shakespeare portrays Richard II in terms of the mental elasticity wherewith this character is in full command over the duality of remembrance and forgetting. Richard II therefore anticipates the Nietzschean cogitating subject who is constituted in being unhistorical (even superhistorical, to borrow Nietzsche’s terminology). Shakespeare mandates a new mode of viewing history away from the unbroken linearity of a chronicle. This is Shakespeare’s representation of benign villainy antagonizing historical time. Landing on the territory of the human allows for a new touch upon the hitherto soulless historical records. This touch is nothing but the imprint of the will of the individual which enables him to disentangle himself from the umbilical connection to the world as will. Heralding the Nietzschean No in the face of historical time is a piercing truth about the Shakespearean dramatic exercise as our contemporary. Arresting was the fact that, instead of accrediting Shakespeare’s portrait of the king as an aesthetic response to the prescriptive villainy wherewith society asserts its historical hegemony, Marjorie Garber rushes toward interpreting the character of Richard II simply as a poet. She observes that—once in the Tower prison—he is actually into the shrine of his own imagination as the only source of truth to his entire existence: Where Richard does go is to Pomfret (Pontefract) Castle, the place where it will be possible for him finally to confront his insistent questions of identity, and to answer them in a riddling, philosophical fashion. His world has shrunk to a small space, a prison, and the even smaller yet infinitely larger world of his own imagination. (Garber 2004, 243)

The imagination of a king in demise is in sharp opposition to free will the way it will be decreed indiscriminately by Nietzsche in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1873) and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1882– 1885) indiscriminately. I am also saying that Richard II does not attract our attention as a man evincing feelings about good and evil or about the aloofness of the deities. He therefore does not fall under the category of poets. Besides, he does not evade the now into what Marjorie Garber calls “a world of his own imagination” (Garber 2004, 243). His self-authored crisis of temporality is a metaphoric cry against the villainous monumental stereotyping of history between past and present. If poets are in symbiosis with nature then it is this very nature that Nietzsche’s overman (one of

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whose bustiest silhouettes features in Richard II among other historical figures by Shakespeare) will set out to bombard: And if tender stirrings come to them, then the poets always think that nature herself is in love with them: And she creeps up to their ears to tell them secrets and enamored flatteries, the like of which makes them boastful and bloated before all mortals! (Nietzsche 2006, 100)

The character of Richard II is Shakespeare’s aesthetic response to the historiographic linearity of English chronicles. But he is also the type of character who resists the identity of a poet. Shakespeare employs royal characters in decline only to demystify man’s sightless relation to history as the cult of ceremonies, of icons and of ideals: therefore to undermine man’s compliance with the tradition. The same is true of Nietzsche who invites his contemporaries to take leave of their idolatrous rapport to history: to things past as perfect and exemplary and alerts them to the necessity of focusing on the present moment as the sole nexus connecting them to the world: History itself degenerates in that moment when it no longer inspires and fills with enthusiasm the fresh life of the present. Then reverence withers away. (Nietzsche 1998, 16)

He also distinguishes his Dasein as future-oriented above any other time reference: I am of today and of the past […] But there is something in me that is of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and of days to come. (Nietzsche 2006, 101)

This is what the case of Richard II (presenting an antecedent condition of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch) acquaints us with. His problem of temporality lies in the dramatic persona more than the historical figure. I am saying that Shakespeare has chosen to make his characters typically superhistorical. The withering away of Richard’s royal aura into the plainness of the philosopher is deeper than a revelation of man’s tendency to return to divine meditations in times of despair. On the contrary, Shakespeare’s Richard II (in my opinion) is as much atheistic as unhistorical. Richard’s “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground, / And tell sad stories of the

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death of kings” is nothing but a prefiguration of the Nietzschean rebuff of institutions and a tongue-in-cheek review of history as ideology. I would even deny from the scene its clichéd aspect as a ceremony of deposition (of a king formally commanded to take off his regalia). Richard, himself, is confessing that his identity has hitherto been mistaken: Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty, For you have but mistook me all this while. I live with bread, like you; feel want, Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus, How can you say to me I am a king? (3.2) (Shakespeare 2001, 2928)

From a Nietzschean point of view, the scene is a caricature of the villainous thrust of history. Nietzsche solicits a new reaction to time away from the antiquarian or monumental nostalgia for a past said to outdo our present. Nietzsche defines antiquarianism in parallel with monumental history except that antiquarianism veers more toward patriotism. Nietzsche presents antiquarianism as a dwarfish approach to history: one which copies from patriotism the adulation of national symbols. We make out that antiquarianism is more dogmatic than monumental history to the point that the former is an arrangement of the entirety of our sense of history into a gallery of antiques: an arrangement which repels any knowledge of history beyond patriotism. Nietzsche vilifies the antiquarian man as the brainless and unimpressive type for whom: the history of his city becomes […] the history of his own self … From time to time he personally greets from the far away, obscure, and confused centuries, the soul of a people as his own soul, with a feeling of completion and premonition, a scent of almost lost tracks, an instinctively correct reading even of a past which has been written over, a swift understanding of the erased and reused parchments (which have, in fact, been erased and written over many times). (Nietzsche 1998, 15)

Antiquarianism is pestilent as it drowns self-will into past and hereditary customs as the eternal truth. The picture of Richard II now as an “almsman” wishing for the primitive simplicity to “live with bread, like you; feel want, Taste grief” is an antiquarian lesson which takes frugality as a moral principle: a lesson we no longer need in modern times. Shakespeare’s depiction of dispossessed kings is an invitation to rewrite history

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by first disclaiming its condemnation of man to the barrenness, risk and scolding of a will exterior to his own: that is, to the villainous ways of an antiquarian time-consciousness. Nietzsche stimulates us into recognizing the villainous bonds of history as they transpire from a playscript (or a museum gallery): which are to be challenged rather than preserved: Antiquarian history knows only how to preserve life, not how to generate it … The fact that something has become old now gives birth to the demand that it must be immortal, for when a man reckons what every such ancient fact, an old custom of his fathers, a religious belief, an inherited political right, has undergone throughout its existence, what sum of reverence and admiration from individuals and generations ever since, then it seems presumptuous or even criminal to replace such an antiquity with something new and to set up in opposition to such a numerous cluster of revered and admired things the single fact of what is coming into being and what is present. (Nietzsche 1998, 17)

It turns out that Richard’s cries are imbued with a philosophical need for a rehabilitation of what Nietzsche will refer to as the plastic force in man: that force of growing in a different way out of oneself, of reshaping and incorporating the past and the foreign, of healing wounds, compensating for what has been lost, rebuilding shattered forms out of one’s self. (Nietzsche 1998, 4)

This plastic force has been traced with empyrean lines in Richard’s summon to Bolingbroke to bring him a mirror which the former then smashed into pieces. This part of the deposition scene is highly telling about Richard’s idiosyncratic reaction to the linearity of time: Richard II prefigures Nietzsche’s unhistorical man who is no longer satisfied with seeing things as they appear. Bolingbroke’s remark corroborates this very thought: RICHARD. Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport: How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face. BOLINGBROKE. The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed the shadow of your face. (4.1) (Shakespeare 2001, 2958)

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Marjorie Garber scrutinizes the scene as a faithful replica of Renaissance historical dogmatism: both monumental and antiquarian. She seems as a consequence to miss the jeopardy of transcending the national context of the plot into a motivation cause for Shakespeare’s larger reaction to history. Marjorie Garber remains within the narrow scope of Richard’s discontent about his cruel political world and skips the necessary exploration of the broken mirror in the deposition scene as an allegory of anti-historical iconoclasm: therefore of the necessary villainy wherewith the individual should fight the villainy of monumental history on the other side. Here is Marjorie Garber: In calling for a looking glass he is summoning the resources of history and chronicle, but in breaking that mirror, in throwing down the looking glass, he means to symbolize the breaking off of his contact with the world. (Garber 2004, 243)

Man no longer needs to revisit congealed images of his past to seek meaning to his present. The mirror-image of the king is therefore unnecessary for self-affirmation. Actually, breaking the mirror is a dramatic presage of Richard’s later wish to hammer out the walls of his dungeon. Richard’s words in the Tower prison display a critical time-consciousness whose scale has been enlarged to cover history according to a philosophical enquiry about self-worth more than the chronology of one individual king. Richard (the aesthetic figure) cries out into the world when his dethronement and detention grow insufficient to provide him with the answers for his dismay at the villainy inflicted upon him. The prison—as a result—is no longer to be construed as a miniature of Richard’s shrinking mind: it has to break its iron bars into a dignified symptom of the progress of the Nietzschean sense of history: I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out. (5.5) (Shakespeare 2001, 2978)

Showing Nietzsche’s iconoclasm ahead of its time and with supreme greatness is Richard’s metaphor of the hammer. This metaphor is loaded with the piercing symbolism of a powerful tool that will help Richard shatter the walls of his prison. Still, I speak not of “walls” in the physical

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sense but as another metaphor of the villainous authority of ideology: of anything which legitimizes infractions of a man’s freedom of mind. Beyond their poetic impression, Richard’s words are a mightier call to reread men’s history away from the cacophony of ideologies (political, religious, etc.) which have made Richard’s world so “populous” and hard to live in. Another deficiency in Garber’s comment is that even though she compares the mirror to the extant historical accounts about English monarchs, she does not signal the regenerative aspect of breaking this mirror. Saying that Richard meant to break off “his contact with the world” (Garber 2004, 243) actually deflects the scene from its historiographic import. I am saying that Marjorie Garber catalogues the scene within the niche of nihilism: which (in my opinion) is far from its real purpose. Ordering a mirror then breaking it to pieces is Richard’s reaction to the conditioning of his identity in a process which mimes the doctrinal terms of (what Nietzsche will refer to as) monumental and antiquarian historiography. The proof is that, even with his broken self-image on the looking glass, Richard (the historical figure) remains hooked on tales about kings and kings’ names. He cannot live outside the frame of kinghood: In winter’s tedious nights, sit by the fire With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales Of woeful ages long ago betid; And ere thou bid goodnight, to quit their griefs Tell thou the lamentable fall of me. (5.1) (Shakespeare 2001, 2961–2962)

Following are Richard’s words upon taking leave from his queen after Bolingbroke’s realized coup. His words explain why I chose to scrutinize an English king alongside his critical rapport to temporality: therefore to reveal the historical ideology (monumental and antiquarian) underlying this very critical rapport. Richard’s moral lesson begins with his deposition but never goes past the spectrum of kingship literally as the be-all and end-all of his identity. He (as a historical figure, I insist) emblematizes man’s entrapment inside the villainous constructs of political ideology: Crushing penury Persuades me I was better when a king. Then am I kinged again, and by and by Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke. (5.5) (Shakespeare 2001, 2979)

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Richard II is not only an English king: he is an aesthetic representation of a state of crisis much in consonance with the villainy wherewith the tissue of his socio-political context has long been woven for centuries. This is why I maintain that his wish to “hammer out” his dungeon should be read as corrective. By corrective, I mean that this wish should not fall under a lens that emphasizes the inquisitive search for a new identity. I am suggesting that we can resist this temptation at least while speaking about the king removed from power. Richard II should be read outside the narrow circle of character-plot and rather be zoomed out as a metaphor of a hitherto misread history and whose spur is the blind mania for kings as models of human perfection.

Conclusion The disjunction between villainy as an anti-moral concept (on the one hand) and the time-consciousness prescribed in literature by its Christian history (on the other) compels the vital infraction of the religious duality of good and evil in order to have a clearer view of aesthetics beyond the stigma of sin. Shakespeare suspected the interference of religious consciousness with his artwork and chose therefore to reconcile his text with the indispensable Dionysiac impulse as a pressing cultural requirement. Such was the case of Richard II among other history plays. I have shown how the performativity of villainy can at times transcend the enactment of scenes of torture in terms that humanize (never diminish) theater material. Shakespeare’s prefiguration of the Nietzschean sense of history has also reached out to the post-WWI period, precisely with Brecht. The crime of murder has been legitimated in The Measures Taken as a sign of party allegiance while it unfolds its other facet as the dramatist’s irony about monumental history. Villainy has also been deployed in Man Equals Man to disprove the interest in past relics (embodied in the Indian temple). In both cases, Brecht predefines the absurd as a villainous-yetnecessary act of revenge against man’s will-less idolatry which extends back to the advent of Christianity.

References Source Texts Brecht, Bertolt. 1977. The Measures Taken and Other Lehrstucke. Translated by Carl R. Mueller. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Brecht, Bertolt. 1994. Man Equals Man. Translated by Gerhard Nellhaus. London: Methuen Drama. Shakespeare, William. 2001. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. Edited by Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan. London: Thomson Learning.

List of References Esslin, Martin. 1961. The Theater of the Absurd. New York: Anchor Books. Garber, Marjorie. 2004. Shakespeare After All. New York: Anchor Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1998. On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. Translated by Ian C. Johnston. http://johnstoi.web.viu.ca//nietzsche/history.htm. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. Zarathustra: A Book for all and None. Translated by Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, Stanley. 2010. Shakespeare and Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Tatlow, Antony. 2001. Shakespeare, Brecht and the Intercultural Sign. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

PART III

Language, Race and the Dehumanization of the Evil Other in (Post)Colonial Moments

CHAPTER 11

Tituba’s Stairway: Representations of Tituba in Historical and Fictional Texts Danielle Legros Georges

Introduction A woman known as Tituba Indian was the first person to confess to having practiced witchcraft in what would be a series of witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts, during 1692. Much attention has been paid by historians, scholars, and literary artists to the backgrounds of most of the accused, their families, the judges, magistrates, and ministers involved in these trials. Very few contemporary documents exist, however, that tell us about Tituba’s background. Later historical and fictional works that do take Tituba on as a subject ascribe to her qualities she may not, and most likely did not have. Not until recently have there been attempts to explore the biographical information about Tituba, and to determine if what has been written about her is grounded in fact. Here are a few things we do know of Tituba: She was clearly not of European descent, as were most settlers of Salem Village at that period. Her contemporaries referred to her as Tituba Indian; Parris’s Indian

D. L. Georges (B) Lesley University, Cambridge, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_11

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woman; or in similar terms.1 We know that she was a slave of the Rev. Samuel Parris, a Salem Village minister who took her from Barbados to Boston. She was married to a man named John Indian, who was also a slave in the Parris household, and who may have also been brought by Parris from Barbados. The closest we get to hearing Tituba’s voice is through her deposition of March 1, 1691 (Boyer and Nissenbaum 1977, 747–749), in which she attempts to defend herself against charges of witchcraft. A good part of Tituba’s court testimony involves responses to questions regarding whether or not she had seen the devil and with whom she had seen him. Tituba acknowledged that “[t]he devil came to see me and bid me serve him” (Boyer and Nissenbaum 1977, 747). After making what was taken as a confession of witchcraft, Tituba was imprisoned. While in jail, Tituba recanted her confession (Breslaw 1996, 172).2 In October of that year, Tituba was granted a release from prison shortly after the Massachusetts Governor William Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which had been established to hear and determine witchcraft trials. Tituba, however, unable to pay her prison fines, remained in jail until April of 1693 when she was bought by an unidentified person for the cost of her jail fees. She was taken away from Salem. Nothing else is known about her after this point.3 There is no proof, despite her confession, that Tituba participated in occult activities. In all the contemporary accounts of what happened, no one suggests that Tituba told stories of witchcraft or voodoo (Rosenthal 1993, 14). Although the contemporary records describe her as Indian,

1 In “Examination of Tituba,” we see “Titiba an Indian Woman brought before us….” See Boyer and Nissenbaum (1977, 746–749). 2 Breslaw notes that Robert Calef, in his book More Wonders of the Invisible World states: “The account she [Tituba] since gives of it is, that her Master did beat her and other ways abuse her, to make her confess and accuse (such as he call’d) her SisterWitches, and that whatsoever she said by way of confession or accusing others, was the effect of such usage.” 3 Bernard Rosenthal, in a footnote to his article “Dark Eve” (1993, 31 n. 47), states:

“In a note at the end of her fictional work, a novel entitled Tituba of Salem Village, Ann Petry asserts that Tituba was sold to a weaver named Samuel Conklin, who subsequently purchased John Indian.” This assertion has not been verified. Elaine Breslaw, in Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem (1996), discusses the possibility of Tituba’s and John Indian’s having a daughter who was left in Salem, but this assertion also has not been verified.

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there is no proof that she was indeed Indian.4 It is possible that she was a Black woman or a person of mixed race, as some historical and fictional texts posit. This essay is an exploration of the process by which Tituba has emerged in the historical and literary imagination as a key figure in the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, given the fact that so little is known about her. This process by which Tituba becomes known to the twentieth-century reader, is one that vilified and rendered her a metaphor for the troubles in Salem in 1692. By the late twentieth century she had become a nexus from which to enter a discussion of the witchcraft crisis. This essay will show that it is Tituba’s status as a woman of color in seventeenthcentury America—in essence, a position in which she had little control over her contemporary representation—that allowed her to be so manipulated, and assigned mythical and imaginary qualities, in the subsequent historiographical record and literary imagination.5 Part I of my essay will explore this process. Part II will explore the metaphor Tituba had become by the mid- to late twentieth century; and Part III will explore two texts that deconstruct the metaphor, presenting a frame of reference for Tituba radically different from the one in which she has been historically vilified— a framework that not only takes Tituba as a subject, but accounts for the historiographical process in which Tituba has emerged as metaphor. I would like to point out that I am less concerned with determining exactly what race Tituba was, or unearthing either Tituba’s Indian or African or European roots than with tracking or following the process by which she was metaphorized. I am interested in what this process can tell us about how racial others are constituted in the European-colonialturned-American imagination. As I am interested in how Black people and people of color are metaphorized, the reasons for it, and how the European and general American identity is still invested in this metaphor. I am also curious about the strategies and texts that deconstruct the metaphor, in particular the metaphor that Tituba has become. As a result my essay pays special attention to Elaine Breslaw’s historical text on Tituba and Maryse Conde’s novel for their rejuvenative possibilities for subjectivity for Tituba and by extension for Black women and women of color living

4 I use Indian for the purposes of this paper, and understand that the terms Indian, First-Nation people, and Native American are also used. 5 By “America” I mean all of North America, South America and the Caribbean.

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in and against the histories and fictions embedded in the culture we inhabit in the twenty-first century. I realize that I may be charged with myself metaphorizing Tituba as representative of all Black women and women of color, but I believe that how I approached researching Tituba will help dispel this charge. This paper emerged out of my frustration at not finding work on, by, or about people of color in a colonial US literature class I took many, many years ago. My professor then suggested that I look into Tituba, a Black or Indian woman somehow related to the Salem witchcraft crisis. I did not know then that my search for Tituba would lead me from seventeenth-century court documents in Massachusetts, through the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is by accident that I came upon Tituba, a woman with whom I identify because I see myself as having gone through processes admittedly nowhere near as severe as hers, but at moments somehow not dissimilar in living my life as a Black woman in America.

Part I: Tituba’s Vilification Literary Representations of Tituba Given the lack of information about Tituba, it is surprising to see the various ways in which she is portrayed by both historians and literary artists. While most of the representations vilify Tituba’s character, often these descriptions incorporate little of the verifiable information we do have on Tituba. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1868 play Giles Corey of Salem Farms describes Tituba in his Dramatis Personae as “Indian Woman” (Longfellow 1988, 247). In the play, however, the character discusses being born in San Salvador (which doesn’t preclude Indian identity/ethnicity), but when asked about “[a] man all black and fierce” by another character in the play, Tituba responds by saying, “[t]hat is my father. He was an Obi man, and taught me magic” (Longfellow 1988, 257). Through this statement, Tituba becomes associated with Obeah, a religion of African descent practiced in the Caribbean. The African association is further developed with Tituba’s description of her father as “all black and fierce.”6 Longfellow makes Tituba an ambitious and vengeful 6 Not in the positive late twentieth-century/early twenty-first-century popular culture notion of “fierce”—unfortunately.

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slave who boasts, “I have the Evil Eye, and the Evil Hand…Thus I work vengeance on mine enemies” (Longfellow 1988, 249). Arthur Miller, writing in 1952, makes Tituba a Negro slave in his play The Crucible. Miller attributes to Tituba a “slave sense…that warned her, as always [that] trouble in the [Parris] house eventually land[ed] on her back” (Miller 1953, 8). In addition to giving Tituba a “slave sense,” he also gives the character speech markedly different from that of the play’s other characters. Although there are slight differences between the language of characters Parris and Hale, and that of Cory and Putnam, I suspect this distinction (between the two aforementioned pairs) was used by Miller to distinguish between the classes of the individuals; that is, between the “educated” ministers and the presumably “unschooled” villagers. With no other character in Miller’s play do we see such a deviation from standard English syntax as we do when we read the words of Miller’s Tituba. “I give she chicken blood” is Tituba’s response to a question as to whether she had given the children in the Parris household blood to drink.7 I want to underscore Miller’s deviation with Tituba’s speech by pointing to a fragment of what we have of Tituba’s “real speech” or the closest we get to her voice—her deposition of March 1, 1691. Her speech is juxtaposed with that of one of her questioners, Salem magistrate John Hathorne: (H) Titibe what evil spirit have you familiarity with (T) none (H) why do you hurt these children (T) I do not hurt them (H) who is it then (T) the devil for ought I know. (Boyer and Nissenbaum 1977, 747)

What becomes clear from this brief passage is that there is little (if any) difference between Tituba’s and Hathorne’s speech and, more important, that Tituba demonstrates a command of English syntax. Although presenting this segment of her deposition as evidence of Tituba’s proficiency in English is admittedly problematic since her testimony was recorded by a third party, it can be argued that this third party did not 7 This sentence also highlights Miller’s introducing the character’s exotic practice of drinking chicken blood, and her offering it to young children.

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share Miller’s view. My assertion is strengthened by two points historian Elaine Breslaw makes in her 1996 historical text, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. Breslaw states that part of why Tituba’s confession or story of having been visited by the devil was so credible to her Puritan questioners is that she (Tituba) “gave her story with sufficient sophisticated knowledge of Puritan practices to evoke recognizable images and emotions,” and that “[h]er choice of language, her metaphors, were in keeping with the ritual of Puritan confession” (Breslaw 1996, 161). Tituba was also believed, says Breslaw, because she was acculturated to Puritan ways, unlike Candy, another woman of color who was questioned in the trials. Not only was Candy unaccustomed to Puritan ways, but Candy’s speech—as also “seen” through the court records—according to Breslaw, was “an obviously non-standard English omitting prepositions, articles, and most verbs” (1996, 161–163). It is clear that those who recorded the speech of these women of color could distinguish between a woman of color who spoke English that matched or came close to theirs (the Puritans) and one who didn’t. The fact that Miller, in 1953, degrades Tituba’s speech suggests the extent to which he continues, or starts in a different vein (a linguistic one) in the twentieth century, the racial “othering” process begun centuries before. These examples serve as illustrations of Tituba’s vilification in literature. Longfellow exaggerates her suggested Africanness and deliberately links this identity to an evil and vengeful nature. Miller vilifies Tituba by exotifying her and degrading her speech.

Historical Representations of Tituba Charles W. Upham, in his 1867 text describes Tituba and her husband as the “two persons who may have originated the ‘Salem witchcraft’” and who “in all probability, contributed, from the wild and strange superstitions prevalent among their native tribes, materials which, added to the commonly received notions of the times…inflamed still more the imaginations of the credulous.” Tituba and John Indian also brought with them to Salem “systems of demonology,” according to Upham (1867, 2). Similarly, in 1902, historian John Fiske describes her as “the hag Tituba…half-Indian and half-Negro.” Further, according to Fiske, Tituba’s and her husband’s “intelligence was of low grade, but it sufficed

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to make them experts in palmistry, fortune-telling, magic, second-sight, and incantations” (Hansen 1974, 3–12). Historian Chadwick Hansen explores the lack of clarity regarding Tituba’s race in the historical record in his 1974 article entitled “Tituba’s Metamorphosis: Why American Intellectuals Can’t Tell an Indian Witch from a Negro.” According to Hansen, the representation of Tituba undergoes a metamorphosis in which her race changes from “Indian, to half-Indian, to half-Indian and half-Negro, to Negro.” The magic she is said to practice moves further away from English or European witchcraft practices to become associated with what has been considered exotic by writers and historians of European descent—practices that include Obeah and rituals involving chicken blood. Hansen suggests that Tituba’s metamorphosis from Indian to Negro is the result of racism, conscious or unconscious, on the part of historians, scholars, and literary artists who wrote about her. “The truth is, of course,” he writes, “that we live in a racist culture, and that we are all bound by it: some more, some less, but all of us in at least some ways in which we are thoroughly unaware.” He goes further to say, “White intellectuals, at least in recent years, have liked to think of themselves as free of racial prejudice, and have been hurt, and even angry, to hear themselves described by black militants as ‘phony white liberals’…we are not free of racism…” (Hansen 1974, 12). Here Hansen makes an astute comment, although unwittingly, about the nature of racism in America. Implicit in his text is the idea that American intellectuals are white (since the American intellectual is the one having the problem distinguishing “between an Indian Witch and a Negro”). The American intellectual remains American through the course of his essay but on the essay’s last page, suddenly becomes the “White intellectual,” before metamorphosing back into the American intellectual, as seen by the “we” of his “we are not free of racism” statement. Given Hansen’s establishment of the identity of American intellectuals as white intellectuals, anyone who holds an alternative view to that held by “American intellectuals” is not only not white, and not an intellectual, but a militant as well. Hansen’s essay, which is valuable to my paper, and which I believe to have been written in goodwill and as an attempt to tackle the thorny issue of racism relative to Tituba, reproduces the norms used by his literary and historical predecessors, reinscribing the values that threaten the cultural identity of people of color in general, and Tituba in particular. His use of the stereotyped American as white, and of blackness as militant metaphor disables a more critical evaluation of the complex issues

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underlying Tituba’s changing color on the historiographical and literary map. All three historians, Upham, Fiske, and Hansen, intentionally or unwittingly contribute to Tituba’s villification.

Part II---Tituba as a Metaphor for Trouble in Salem What becomes clear from the examined texts is that both historians in their examinations of representations of Tituba, and literary artists in their representations of Tituba have used the idea of race as means by which to identify not only—or not even primarily—Tituba, but themselves. Race has become a construct without which these authors cannot conceptualize themselves in the way that they do. If Longfellow’s Tituba, for example, has a father who is “all fierce and black,” then his other characters have fathers who are not all fierce and certainly not black. If Miller’s Tituba has a slave sense that warns her of trouble, then the other characters may be innocent of knowing that trouble was lurking. Likewise, from the historians, we see Tituba as the expert in things magical, as a realm for evil unknown to good settlers. What becomes evident is that the presence of Tituba, or any person of color, comes to signify everything that is not white—hence, the person of color becomes metaphor. Novelist Toni Morrison refers to the denotative and connotative blackness that African people have come to bear as “Africanism.” “Africanism,” writes Morrison, “is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny” (Morrison 1992, 52). This metaphor or constellation of ideas conflated into one referent provides an easy entrée into a discourse of chaos or crisis. The Salem crisis on its surface had nothing to do with race, but revolved rather around issues of religion, superstition, and above all envy and social strife. When we examine the crisis closely however, we realize that the crisis evolved ultimately into a crisis of identity for the Puritans—and for those writing about them. The “Africanist” metaphor facilitated, and continues to facilitate (as we will see below) the making sense of or justification of a brief but very ugly period of American history in which hundreds of innocent

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people were arrested, jailed (including a five-year-old who was imprisoned and held in chains for nine months), and divested of land.8 This is a period that saw communities violently shaken as neighbors and family members turned, with fatal results, against one another. In his 1993 essay “Dark Eve,” historian Bernard Rosenthal writes, “[i]n a land popularly imagined as born of religious freedom, a place of harmony where settlers and “Indians” ate turkey together, the Salem witch trials served mythically as a national fall [and were] disruptive to the idyllic myth of America” (1993, 13). With notions of identity encoded in race, it is easy to see how Tituba could be scapegoated for the Salem crisis. To signify Miller’s reference to Tituba’s “slave sense,” as soon as we see Tituba, we know that trouble is brewing. Rosenthal recognizes that Tituba has been scapegoated and metaphorized in his exploration of her appearance “in an overwhelming number of narrations as the central figure in the genesis of the witch trials” (1993, 10). Tituba, he points out, though among the first three women accused of witchcraft, did not participate in the accusations that further widened the net of the witch hunt. Tituba refused to name any other witches. If anyone should play the role of catalyst for the Salem witch trials, he argues, it should be Sarah Good, who “offered confirmation of witchcraft, since in defending herself she chose to accuse Sarah Osbourn of afflicting the accusers.” “This decision by Sarah Good,” he argues, “gave immediate credibility to the charges of witchcraft and set in motion a process that led to her own execution.” Rather than identifying an individual as the catalyst of the Salem crisis, Rosenthal points us to a conflict between the magistrates who were jailing people and the governor who was opposed to proceeding with indictments—thereby removing Tituba from her role as Salem witch crisis spark. The flaw in Rosenthal’s analysis is that he uses Tituba as an entrée into the social and political strife that informed the Salem crisis. Even as he attempts to deconstruct the framework within which Tituba emerged as “Dark Eve” or scapegoat, he perpetuates her position as point of departure by himself using her as point of departure—titling his article, and, simultaneously, “naming” Tituba “Dark Eve.” Although his article takes on the social conditions that exploded into the witch trials, his choice of title points a finger at Tituba as a possible source of trouble, or at very 8 It is no surprise that Arthur Miller (The Crucible) would connect the witch trials to the repression of the McCarthy era.

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least strongly associates her with the trouble in Salem. (Rosenthal could have easily chosen a fairly straightforward title such as “The Real Causes of the Salem Witch Crisis”). That Tituba then becomes the mythic or metaphoric Eve further implicates her in Salem, and throws her into the enormous and timeless Judeo-Christian world view and mythical space in which she morphs into the First Woman—the woman who, in consort with the devil, is responsible for man’s banishment from paradise, the source of all man’s woes, and the source of original sin. Rosenthal does not stop here, however. After Tituba has been rendered Eve, her “Eveness” is then qualified, or disqualified with the adjective “Dark.” Implicit in “Dark Eve” is the existence of a “normal” Eve who stands as mirror or anti-shadow to the shadowed or “other” Eve. As Hortense Spillers astutely points out in her article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book, “‘ethnicity’ perceived as mythical time enables a writer to perform a variety of conceptual moves all at once. Under its hegemony, the human body becomes a defenseless target for rape and veneration, and the body, in its material and abstract phase, a resource for metaphor” (1987, 66). In Rosenthal’s article Tituba’s body and self once again are inscribed with a variety of meanings that strengthen and support not her but the European and general American culture that sets itself against her. That Tituba serves as the central figure in the genesis of the witch trials in a number of fictional texts that take her on as subject is evidenced in her appearance as the first character in the texts. Miller uses her in this way in The Crucible. She is the first to speak in his play: TITUBA, already taking a step backward: My Betty be hearty soon? PARRIS, Out of here! TITUBA, backing to the door: My betty not goin’ die… PARRIS, scrambling to his feet in a fury: Out of my sight! She is gone. Out of my—He is overcome with sobs. He clamps his teeth against them and closes the door and leans against it, exhausted. Oh, my God! God help me! (Miller 1953, 8)

When his scene opens it is already full of tension, and we know that the ensuing scenes will involve death, or near-death, and fury—in essence, a crisis. Longfellow also opens his play Giles Corey with a scene in which we find Tituba in the woods gathering poisonous herbs and roots before reciting her monologue, full of suggestions of unpleasant things to come:

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Here’s monk’s hood, that breeds fever in the blood And deadly nightshade, that makes men see ghosts; And henbane, that will shake them with convulsions; And meadow-saffron and black hellebore, … I know them, and the places where they hide In field and meadow; and I know their secrets, And gather them because they give me power Over all men and women… (Longfellow 1988, 249)

To underscore the treatment of the particular character of Tituba in history, we can compare her historical treatment to that of Cotton Mather—another individual who has enjoyed the reputation of catalyst for the Salem witchcraft crisis in 1692. Rosenthal credits Charles Wentworth Upham’s 1867 book Salem Witchcraft; with an Account of Salem Village, and a History of Opinions in Witchcraft and Kindred Spirits (Salem Witchcraft) for laying the foundation for Tituba’s role as catalyst for the Salem crisis (Rosenthal 1993, 10). Nineteenth-century historian William Frederick Poole and twentieth-century literary historian Lawrence Buell similarly suggest that Upham is guilty of scapegoating—scapegoating not Tituba, however, but Cotton Mather.9 All three authors, Rosenthal, Poole, and Buell, agree that Upham’s book was one of the most influential works in shaping subsequent myths related to the Salem witch trials.10 In Salem Witchcraft, Upham draws both Tituba and Mather in an unfavorable light.11 We will remember that 9 “There is on every page of Mr. Upham’s writings in which he alludes to Mr. Mather an unaccountable looseness of statement in minor details; and they are errors which lead the reader, who has not sufficient knowledge of the subject to correct them, to a wrong estimate of Mr. Mather’s character” (Poole 1869, 47); “Upham suspected that Mather was ‘instrumental in causing the delusion in Salem; at any rate he took a leading part in conducting it’” (Buell 1986, 219). 10 “Charles W. Upham whose Salem Witchcraft… has served as the most influential work in shaping subsequent myth and history related to the Salem witch trials” (Rosenthal 1993, 10). Referring to Upham’s two volumes, Poole writes, “They have obtained a lodgment in all the minor and school histories; and the present generations of youth is taught that nineteen innocent persons were hanged… to gratify the vanity, ambition, and stolid credulity of Mr. Cotton Mather” (1869, 4). Buell writes, “Charles Wentworth Upham… in his lectures on Witchcraft [later incorporated in Salem Witchcraft ], the then definitive treatment of the Salem episode…” (1986, 219). 11 It strikes me as odd that I still cannot say Tituba and Cotton for equalizing effect as Tituba has no last name that we are aware of.

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Upham describes Tituba and her husband as “two persons who may have originated the ‘Salem Witchcraft’ and who brought with them “systems of demonology.”12 However, if one of them suffers more under Upham’s pen, it is Cotton Mather, who receives scathing treatment. Upham vilifies Mather with aspersion after aspersion: …he [Cotton Mather] circulated in his numerous publications as many tales of witchcraft as he could collect throughout. Old and New England, and repeatedly endeavored, after the delusion subsided, to escape the disgrace of having approved of the proceedings, and pretended to have been in some measure to oppose them, it can be too clearly shown that he was secretly and cunningly endeavoring to renew them during the next year in his own parish in Boston… (Upham 1867, 366)

Although Upham vilified both Tituba and Mather, the chief difference in their treatment, ironically, has little to do with Upham, and more to do with subsequent writers’ reliance on Upham’s text as the definitive source on the crisis in Salem. Although writers may have referred to Upham’s text for information on Tituba and Mather—sources like Poole and Buell presented accounts that deviated from Upham’s negative representation of Mather. Writers interested in Mather could go to Mather himself, via his diaries, to confirm or not this representation of his character. As a result, Mather has a larger moral scope within which to move, and can go from well-respected minister to villain. Tituba-as-metaphor, on the other hand, is limited to the role of villain and can move only within the scope of that identity. Tituba, unlike Mather, left no record herself. She had no literary defenders to leave a record in her wake, and as a result, her myth as a type of “dark Eve” went unchallenged for decades. I believe the reason Tituba had no literary defenders for so long was because she was a woman of color and an enslaved person living in seventeenth-century New England. As such she may not have been deemed worthy of attention beyond her role as a creature to be blamed, hated, feared, or objectified. For her contemporaries and subsequent generations of “American” writers to recognize Tituba’s life as worthy of documentation would have meant a questioning of the values upon which America was/is constructed. To document the Tituba who had, in 12 It is possible that Upham gives Mather more scathing treatment because he considered him more wily, which could be a function of a racist sensibility.

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fact, existed would have meant the loss of Tituba as metaphor; as someone with “no past,” as someone to whom certain motives could be ascribed; it would have meant the loss of a useful and easy literary device with which to propel plays or historical texts forward.

Part III---Toward a New Woman Breslaw’s Tituba One historian who begins to remove Tituba from the realm of metaphor is Breslaw (1992), who asks the questions—what race was Tituba, and where did she come from? In her 1996 book, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem, Breslaw puts forth the theory that Tituba most likely came from Barbados (possibly taken there after being kidnapped from the northeastern coast of South America), and provides evidence primarily from seventeenth-century Barbados censuses, Deeds, Wills and Testament records suggesting that Tituba was an Arawak Indian who lived in Barbados and was bought by Samuel Parris there before being taken to Boston and then Salem Village. Breslaw also explores the slave trade in South America of the day, which suggests a high probability of enslaved Amerindians existing in Barbados. Breslaw deconstructs the racial polarity of the framework in which Tituba-as-metaphor emerged by bringing to light “interracial alliances…[that] led to the absorption of resident Amerindians into a syncretic slave society…where separate slave identities [Indian and African] disappeared.” She writes that according to early deeds, “all slaves, including Amerindians…[were listed] under the rubric of ‘Negros.’”13 By unearthing these alliances and movements, Breslaw not only participates in recouping lost pieces of American history necessary to a better understanding of it but begins to dispel the “race” metaphor by pointing to culture as a paradigm more appropriate to understanding slave society where the imperative of slaves was to survive enslavement, producing cooperation among diverse peoples. Breslaw also hints at, although without stating explicitly, structures that would allow us to perceive Tituba’s literal journey from South America (possibly Africa)14 to Barbados to Boston to Salem, and her figurative 13 An interesting point in relationship to Hansen’s essay. 14 My assertion, since Breslaw’s evidence originating her in South America, although

compelling, is still circumstantial.

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journey from individual to metaphor, and en route back to individual within the context of what cultural critic Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic—a single, complex unit of analysis that can produce an explicitly transitional and intercultural perspective” (1993, 15). This perspective, which Gilroy identifies as stemming from “a cultural and political system that has been forced on black historiography and intellectual history by the economic and historical matrix in which plantation slavery was one special moment” allows us to better contextualize the life of one individual out of the millions whose lives were similarly circumscribed by these political and cultural forces (Gilroy 1993, 15). As Breslaw locates or historicizes Tituba and identifies the forces at play in Tituba’s life, she points us to the structures and ideas that would have informed Tituba’s background, her behavior in particular instances and her particular responses to events as they unfolded in Salem in 1692— directing us toward the notion of a subjective Tituba. “Tituba’s roles in that tragedy as both victim and willing participant; as both scapegoat and manipulator of Puritan fears,” writes Breslaw, “beg for re-examination” (1996, xix). Although I question Breslaw’s characterization of Tituba as a “willing” participant in the trials, Tituba is given a complexity not extant in the aforementioned texts, and an agency within a system authorizing her subjugation.15 With this notion of agency or subjectivity, Breslaw reads Tituba’s testimony as an awareness on Tituba’s part of Puritan mores, and as an act of resistance against her accusers, her master, and those trying her. In her “confession,” Tituba wove a fantastic story about the devil’s presence in Salem, which Breslaw says drew both from English folkloric conceptions of the devil (a Devil’s Sabbath, witches on brooms) and Indian and African conceptions of evil (a specter that changed shape from that of a man to a dog to a hog, hairy imps) and from her experience of Barbados (with yellow birds, etc.). She wove such a compelling tale to her examiners, contends Breslaw, that she was kept alive as a witness to the evil the Puritans were so intent on finding in Salem.

15 Particularly given the fact that two days before Tituba was arrested, she had been beaten by her master Samuel Paris, and instructed by him to confess to her witchcraft, and in the light of having recanted her confession—all of which Breslaw discusses in her book.

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More importantly, Tituba added a subversive element to her testimony. When asked if she’d seen the devil, she gave her examiners a description that could have easily fit her master Samuel Parris. When pressed for details on the devil’s consorts, she described individuals with the clothing and manners of the members of the elite and the clergy. “Tituba’s extraordinary message to her examiners,” writes Breslaw, “was to look among the elite for the evil beings.” The fact that the magistrates and court officials later did so represented a shift in contemporary perception of the type of person who could be branded a witch. Typically a witch came from the ranks of poor women or “often disagreeable, outspoken women, misfits who had been in trouble with their neighbors and the courts before” (Breslaw 1996, 139; see also Karlsen 1988). Witch-hunting sometimes had the social function of rooting these women and other dissidents from a particular community, and reinforcing social cohesion (Breslaw 1996, 142). Another way in which Tituba changed the nature of the witch hunts, argues Breslaw, is that she directed the search out of Salem, and pointed to Boston and surrounding towns as a possible source for evil. Typically witch hunts remained within the limits of a particular community, because “traditionally, the clergy had posited a diabolical presence within the community as an explanation for the decline of piety” (Breslaw 1996, 144, my emphasis). When Tituba told Salem that the enemy was not within but outside, she suggested to Salem inhabitants that their misfortune was not so much their own fault as that of outsiders—impersonal forces over which they had little control. The accusers and the magistrates then turned to neighboring towns and to strangers to blame for their misfortunes. Breslaw says that Tituba’s looking outside of both herself and her community for evil also reflected the Arawak Indian conception that evil did not stem from one’s village but that it came from outsiders. In any case, the accusers, magistrates and court officials followed Tituba’s lead in finding the devil in atypical places—among outsiders, clergymen, and elite white men and women. Why were the Puritans so ready to believe Tituba, and why did they follow the lead? The almost too obvious answer is because they wanted to. The years immediately preceding the crisis were years full of anxiety and fear for the Puritans. Between 1684 and 1691 the settlers faced the most severe threat to their control of their social and political life in the form of an Anglican priest, who on orders from England attempted to

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consolidate New England, New York, and New Jersey into one political jurisdiction that was to be tightly under English control. Add to this an extreme fear of Indians made worse by King Phillip’s War, which lasted between 1675 and 1676. This war of resistance mounted by New England Indians led to the death of thousands of English settlers (about a tenth of the current Puritan population).16 There was also renewed Indian warfare in 1690 and a drought in 1691 that severely jeopardized food supplies at the time. In the face of these recent hardships, it is not hard to see why the Puritans would believe that they had fallen from God’s grace. This fall from grace was exacerbated when Samuel Parris, Tituba’s master, and Salem minister, began preaching hellfire and brimstone sermons after Salem villagers voted in 1691 not to pay the taxes that translated directly into his minister’s salary (Breslaw 1996, 65–88). But again, why would Salem villagers believe Tituba’s fantastic stories about the devil in their midst, particularly when Indians were generally thought by the Puritans to be liars (Breslaw 1996, 65–88)? I contend that she was believed because she was perceived paradoxically as both acculturated and utterly alien. As pointed out earlier in this essay, Tituba spoke the language of the Puritans, having lived both in Boston and Salem in the Parris household and before that in another colonial household in Barbados. She was not, however, a Puritan. I turn to Hortense Spillers’ article to delineate the ways in which Tituba as a captive person of color or enslaved dark person may have been perceived by Puritans. Under the conditions that emerged from the African slave trade and in particular, the middle passage, slaves were rendered ungendered, and “one was neither female, nor male, as both subjects [were] taken into account as quantities” (Spillers 1987, 72). Gendering, according to Spillers, “takes place within the confines of the domestic, an essential metaphor that then spreads its tentacles for male and female subjects over a wider ground of human and social purposes.” Along the lines of this model, Tituba may have become gendered in her role as cook, house-keeper and child-rearer for the Parris household, but then degendered again as Indian. “Clerks in court records,” writes Breslaw, “often referred to Indians as ‘it’ or ‘that’ rather than ‘who,’

16 An interesting and little known fact about this war is that the Indian men and woman who survived the crisis of 1676 were shipped out by the settlers to the Caribbean and the Mediterranean to be sold into slavery.

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depersonalizing them” (1996, 72). Given not only a possible contemporary confusion as to her race but of her gender, Tituba could have been perceived as a dark entity, and as such a likely incarnation of evil. Who better, then, to testify to the presence of Darkness or evil, being made of the same clay, and, as it were, perfectly situated to provide expert testimony. Tituba, as we see, did not disappoint her accusers or examiners, and like Scheherazade, she wove a fictional tale that kept her alive.

Condé’s Tituba---I, Tituba What Breslaw does with history, Maryse Condé does in weaving her Tituba story, the 1986 novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (I, Tituba). I, Tituba serves as a gateway to representing Tituba in a way that transcends the limits of the historiological process in which Tituba had existed, been manipulated and risen as a nexus, an unmoving hub on the rotating wheel of the Salem crisis. Condé’s text constitutes an explicit consideration of the historical and literary texts and the realities conceptualized in them, and through it we begin to see Tituba in a new light. We have only to examine the novel’s title to recognize a radical shift in Tituba’s representation, and the frame of reference in which Condé will create it. By giving Tituba a voice with which to tell her own story as “I, Tituba,” Condé frees Tituba of her status as a victim and accords her a position of power while at the same time recognizing that it is through her association in the historical and literary imagination with the Salem witch trials that we are aware of her existence. Condé also makes reference through her title to Longfellow’s Giles Corey of Salem Farms. In Longfellow’s play we find Tituba setting the stage for the Salem crisis, gathering poisonous herbs in the woods, and reciting: …And with these I, Tituba, an Indian and a slave, Am stronger than the captain with his sword Am richer than the merchant with his money, Am wiser than the scholar with his books, Mightier than Minister and Magistrates… (Longfellow 1988, 249)

Longfellow engages his Tituba in a delusion of grandeur to further inscribe her slave status. Condé’s appropriation of these words represents

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a reversal of this function. That Condé’s book, I, Tituba, exists is a testament to Tituba’s ultimate survival and subjectivity; despite the captain and his sword, despite the scholar and his books, despite the minister and the magistrates, despite Longfellow, Miller, et al. If Tituba had not been scapegoated, we may have never known about her existence, which in fact is referenced by the second half of the book title, “Black Witch of Salem.” Condé does not, however, use Tituba as an entrée into a discussion of the Salem crisis. Since this novel is about Tituba’s life, the Salem crisis is a segment of it, but not one that defines or circumscribes Tituba’s existence. In the novel, narrated by the character Tituba, we see that Tituba has a childhood, an adolescence, and adulthood. She emerges as a full and complex person, who, on the one hand, expresses the wish to kill her mistress: “There was not room enough in this world for Susanna Endicott and me. One of us had to go and it wasn’t going to be me…” and on the other, mourns the death of her friend and cellmate (as Tituba awaits trial), Hester Prynne, a character appropriated from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter. In jail, the two engage in a “postmodern” discussion on the differences between white and black feminism (Condé 1992, 28)! The novel’s first paragraph reads, “Abena, my mother was raped by an English sailor on the deck of Christ the King one day in the year 16** while the ship was sailing for Barbados. I was born from this act of aggression. From this act of hatred and contempt.” Tituba’s identity is established on numerous levels in this short paragraph. Although no mention is made of race, we know that Abena is black and that Tituba’s father is a white English sailor. Tituba, then, is of mixed race. She is a child of Europe and Africa—and emblematic of the “New World” individual. The second powerful symbol used by Condé to establish the context in which Tituba will emerge is Abena’s rape. That Condé’s Tituba is “born from this act of aggression” echoes the historical Tituba’s birth at the hands of various authors who intentionally or unintentionally manipulated the character. This rape also speaks to European colonialism and imperialism, and to structures of historical male oppression of women. The rape thus symbolizes multiple instances of repression. The novel follows Tituba’s life, beginning with her childhood in Barbados. As a child, she sees her mother hanged, after which she is chased from the plantation where she is born. I have borrowed the

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following, a very good summary of the novel, from Pascale Bécel’s article “Moi, Tituba Sorciere…Noire de Salem as Tale of Petite Marronne”: [Tituba] is then raised by Mama Yaya, an old woman known and feared for her witchcraft, and learns the arts of healing and communicating with the invisible world under her guidance. After Mama Yaya’s death, she falls in love with John Indian, Susanna Endicott’s slave, and accepts being sold with him to a minister on his way back to New England. There Tituba is tried as a witch by the Puritan community, put in jail, then bought by a Jewish merchant, and returned to freedom. Back in her native Barbados, she joins a group of maroons led by Christopher before associating with Iphigene, the son of a legendary rebel named Ti-Noël. Tituba and Iphigene are denounced for preparing an uprising and hanged. From the invisible world, their role has now become to encourage rebellion among their people. (Bécel 1996, 608–614)

As Condé recounts Tituba’s life, her text references almost all preceding Tituba texts. In appropriating these texts, Condé subverts their power over Tituba’s life. It is Tituba who is allowed to say, and as she takes voice, her story unravels into what Pascale Bécel calls “a counternarrative to western historical perspectives on oppressed and colonized people” (1996, 609). In her construction of this counter-narrative, African and Caribbean sensibilities are harkened to and valorized. A dance Tituba goes to is thus described: Soon there was a circle around us. Wings grew on my ankles and heels. My hips and waist became supple. A mysterious serpent had entered me. Was is the primordial snake that Mama Yaya talked about so much, in the form of god the creator, or all things on the surface of the earth? Or was it he [John Indian] who was making me sway?

The dance can be seen as a classic possession within the context of Afro-Caribbean syncretic religious traditions The primordial snake here can be read as a reference to Damballah, the deity or lwa in the Haitian voudou pantheon; a deity that also exists in the Santeria and Yoruba religions. In her study delineating the cosmology of Haitian voudou, Maya Deren describes Damballah as “the ancient, the venerable father; so ancient, so venerable, as of a world before the troubles began” who “comes as a snake, plunging at once into the bassin [sic] of water

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which is built for him and then writhes dripping and inarticulate, upon the ground…the primordial source of all life wisdom” (1953, 115). In raising the deity (or more appropriately, having the god descend into Tituba’s body), Condé works within a world view alternative to the Judeo-Christian one that informed the Puritan world and which informs Western religious and cultural traditions. Condé’s Tituba gives voice to what can be read as a seventeenthcentury Black female subjectivity: There is no happiness in motherhood for a slave…throughout my childhood, I had heard slaves exchange formulas for potions, baths and injections that sterilize the womb forever and turn it into a tomb lined with a scarlet shroud.

And just as she references an earlier female subjectivity, Tituba speaks to us in twentieth-and twenty-first-century words and frames of reference, engaging us in discussions of feminism, the entanglement of the visible and the invisible world in the Caribbean, motherhood in general, and the danger of falling into patriarchal male visions of the world (white or black) among other topics. There has been much critical attention given to I Tituba. Articles that critically examine Condé’s book include Bécel’s article; Michelle Smith’s “Reading in Circles: Sexuality and/as History in I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem” (Callaloo, Volume 18, No. 3); Lillian Manzor-Coats’ “Of Witches and Other Things: Maryse Condé’s Challenges to Feminist Discourse,” (World Literature Today, Autumn 1993); and Mara L. Dukats’ “A Narrative of Violated Maternity: Moi, Tituba, sorciere…Noire de Salem,” (World Literatire Today, Autumn 1993). I will not repeat the work done in these texts, but point to them as evidence of the work generated by Condé’s text—a fictional text that takes on the life of a woman and the process in which she came to light, exposing the metaphor Tituba had become, and the contradictions of history, past and present—presenting us with a model of a subjective woman of color in America.

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References Bécel, Pascale. 1996. “Moi, Tituba Sorciere … Noire de Salem as a Tale of ‘Petite Marronne.’” Callaloo 18, no. 3: 608–615. Boyer, Paul and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds. 1977. The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692, Vol. 3. New York: De Capo Press. Breslaw, Elaine. 1992. The Salem Witch from Barbados. In Search of Tituba’s Roots. Essex Institute Historical Collections 128: 3–12. ———. 1996. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. New York: New York University Press. Buell, Lawrence. 1986. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press. Condé, Maryse. 1992. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Translated by Richard Philcox. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Deren, Maya. 1953. Divine Horseman: The Living Gods of Haiti. New York: Documentext/McPherson & Company. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hansen, Chadwick. 1974. “The Metamorphosis of Tituba, or Why American Intellectuals Can’t Tell an Indian Witch from a Negro.” New England Quarterly 47: 3–12. Karlsen, Carole. 1988. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman. New York: Penguin Books. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. 1988. “Giles Cory of the Salem Farms.” In Selected Poems, edited by Lawrence Buell. New York: Penguin Books. Miller, Arthur. 1953. The Crucible. New York: Penguin Books. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Poole, William Frederick. 1869. Cotton Mather and Salem Witchcraft. Cambridge: University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co. Rosenthal, Bernard. 1993. Salem Story: Reading the Witchcraft Trials of 1692. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spillers, Hortense J. 1987. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2: 64–81. Upham, Charles W. 1867. Salem Witchcraft; With An Account of Salem Village and a History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Spirits, Vol. 2. Boston: Wigin and Lunt.

CHAPTER 12

Colonial “Idea” and “Work”: The Evil in Marlow’s Heart of Darkness Ahmet Süner

There is no question that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a feat of literary realism. A subtle first-person narration launched by the brief voice of an unnamed narrator before being handed over to Marlow’s rambling voice, it is also a superb exercise in perspectival representation. There is nothing redeeming about the colonial world of darkness that Marlow depicts often in harrowing and awful detail. His relentlessly ironic gaze seems not to want to leave any note of hypocrisy, greed and evil in colonial practice unnoticed. The novella might therefore be understood as a condemning and critical reflection of the criminal foolery and evil of colonialism. Through Conrad’s use of Marlow’s perspective, we, readers, get a poignant picture of the colonial landscape, being made privy to the horrible realities that relate to the colonial business of ivory trade. As Frances B. Singh starkly notes, Through Marlow, we both learn and see that under Leopold’s [colonial] rule, people were forced to flee their villages, made to work even though

A. Süner (B) Ya¸sar University, Izmir, Turkey © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_12

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they were starving to death, and died of sicknesses; these images of human rights violations lead to and culminate in the presentation of Kurtz as a government agent who has preached and practiced genocide. This is the situation that Heart of Darkness presents, through fictional means, subjectively, impressionistically, and presciently. (Singh 2007, 200)1

The novella is indeed replete with realistic depictions of colonial evil, or more precisely, the evil of colonial agents conveyed through Marlow’s perspective.2 Conrad also deploys a Gothic mode of presentation in depicting the horrors of colonialism, which makes it possible to view the novella as an example of Gothic realism or realistic horror.3 All in all, Heart of Darkness must be lauded for the honesty and relative objectivity—for in all fiction, absolute objectivity is an impossibility—with which it depicts colonial evil. We owe it to Marlow’s sharp perception that no irony is lost about the terribly absurd, absurdly terrorizing presence of colonizers in a geography where they have no business or raison d’être. Marlow never tires of reminding us that colonial presence is a “fantastic invasion” and that the colonial representatives he meets are worthless,

1 The novel’s critical engagement with colonial realities has been noted by other commentators. Fetson Kalua, for instance, argues that “Conrad’s text can be seen as a critique of the colonial enterprise and its attendant idea of the civilizing mission” and he does this by disavowing “the idea of an ‘objective’ narrative voice” (2014, 13). According to Caitlin Vandertop, the novel clearly points to an ecological catastrophe “driven by driven by colonial economic practices that generate unnatural forms of waste and exhaustion” (2018, 684). Srila Nayak views the novel as an exposition of “the violent and mercenary nature of imperialism” as well as “an attack on the unitary Western self” (2012, 31). 2 Admittedly, Marlow does at times attributes a sense of horror to his physical surroundings, incomprehensible to him and other colonials. As Tony C. Brown notes, “in Marlow’s account…there can be observed an obscure oscillation between the horror as an effect of colonial intervention and the location of the horror’s cause as the environment itself” (2000, 17). The attribution of horror to the environment has led to the charge that Marlow and indirectly Conrad himself have stereotypically reduced African geography (the “snake-like” Congo River) to a place of immanent evil, an argument most effectively articulated by Chinua Achebe (1977). For viewpoints that oppose Achebe’s argument, see Fetson Kalua (2014), Fred Solinger (2008), and Michael Lackey (2005). 3 Jennifer Lipka, for instance, reads the novel “as a serious novel of horror, a prime example of the highest of British Gothic fiction” (2008, 26). Frances B. Singh notes that the novel’s “political horror” originates in “the conventions of the literary Gothic” (2007, 214). For the use of Gothic effects in the novel, see Susan J. Navarette (1993), and for the characterization of Kurtz as a specter, see Jorge Sacido Romero (2011).

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corrupt, hypocritical “pilgrims” of greed in the ridiculous, ill-fitting guise of enlightenment. Despite this critical force, however, there is something rather intriguing about Conrad’s representation of evil. In performing the critical feat of realism that I have mentioned, Conrad does not represent evil as something extrinsic or objective, “out there” in the physical world; rather, such evil is thoroughly reflected through and wrought with Marlow’s subjectivity. But the ambivalent position of Marlow’s voice vis-à-vis the colonial condition results in a fundamental conundrum and tonal ambiguity. For the most part of the narrative, we follow Marlow’s voice as it enables us to take a critical look into the colonial world, but there are also moments in the narrative when we feel that the same voice is uncomfortably close to colonial ideology. While the relentless irony in this voice positions Marlow in a morally higher plane than the corrupt practices of colonialism, there is a part of this voice, at odds with its ironic character, which cannot fully separate itself from colonial evil or move above and beyond it so to speak. As Benita Parry remarks, Marlow’s function as the ironic voice and disenchanted eye who disposes of imperialism’s pretensions and reveals the disjunctions between its noble rhetoric and its squalid practice is undercut by the oblique commentary…[in which Marlow] articulat[es] an impulse to discover positive qualities in a venture to which his society is dedicated. (Parry 1983, 27)

Conrad does offer a brutally realistic portrayal of evil, but in so far he offers it through Marlow’s perspective, he makes his reader struggle with the ambivalence of the latter’s voice, which oscillates between cutting irony and obscure attachment in relation to colonial ideas.4 4 For a detailed discussion of ambivalence in Conrad’s fiction, see Nursel Içöz ˙ (2005). ˙ Içöz suggests that such ambivalence might also be an authorial strategy: “as a writer, [Conrad] had to depend on the interest and sympathy of his readers, so he did not fully acknowledge his dark insight into colonialism. He had to be content with satirizing the evils of imperialism while hinting at admiration for its ideals (2005, 246). It must be noted that in several influential studies, Marlow’s ambivalence is at times directly attributed to Conrad: according to Edward Said, for instance, “Conrad’s tragic limitation is that even though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that ‘natives’ could lead lives free from European domination” (1994, 30). Similarly, Terry Eagleton argues that “Conrad neither believes in the cultural superiority of the colonialist nations, nor rejects imperialism outright. The ‘message’ of Heart of Darkness

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It is true that Marlow has not participated in any colonial evil—unless, working for a colonial concern whose business involves criminal practice automatically counts as one. On the surface, or rather, on the particular surface of the realistic novel that we read, we are led to see Marlow as “the good guy” in the midst of a colonialist nightmare. Conrad’s firstperson narration dictates, as perhaps all such narrations, that we identify to a large extent with Marlow’s point of view. Just like Marlow himself, who is captivated by Kurtz’ voice, we do become captivated by Marlow’s voice as it walks us through colonial horrors with ironic insight. But the first-person narration also implies the inevitable suspicion of unreliability, which, in the particular case of Heart of Darkness, results in what I have called a peculiar conundrum. For it is not Marlow’s acute, perspicacious vision directed at colonial practice that is worthy of suspicion, but his much less explicit worldview, i.e., his half-expressed, often obscure desires, yearnings and beliefs regarding colonial practice. In this chapter, I argue that despite appearances, colonial evil is not extrinsic to Marlow’s voice; it lurks in Marlow’s very subjectivity, in his very worldview. I draw out the implicit evil in Marlow’s vague colonialism by close attention to the muted concepts and ambiguous ideas constituting his worldview. In particular, I look at the curious ways in which Marlow expresses his views and desires regarding two concepts: (colonial) idea and work. I show how Marlow’s affective but uncritical formulations of “idea” and “work” reflect colonial ideology in unsettling ways, implicitly allowing for the justification of criminal, evil forms of colonial practice. Unquestionably, Marlow does see through the evils of colonialism but such seeing does not fully extend to his own subjectivity, nor does it transform into a shattering self-realization or radical insight that might lead to questionings of his commitment to “idea” or “work”. Among the many forms of colonial evil Marlow depicts, some of the most memorable and effective depictions undoubtedly relate to the figure of Kurtz, a station manager who goes terribly corrupt, engaging in criminal practices even by the largely criminal standards of the colonial “concern” he works for. Without any doubt, Conrad intended Kurtz to be representative of “supreme” evil perhaps most strikingly evidenced in an earlier draft of the novel, especially in a later scene with Marlow when he states “I have lived supremely—I have been dead and damned. … [expresses] a viewpoint which disturbs imperialist assumptions to the precise degree that it reinforces them” (2006, 135).

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Let me go. I want more of it. More of what? More blood. More heads on stakes. More adoration, rapine, murder” (Mulry 2017, 273). But in view of Marlow’s brief, more philosophical ruminations on the colonial situation, it is impossible to neatly separate him from Kurtz and attribute him an unequivocal moral superiority in contradistinction to the latter’s evil. While positioning himself outside colonial practice, Marlow still remains implicated in colonial ideology insofar as he remains committed to the self-contradictions and implicit horrors of his own thinking on colonialism, which Anne McClintock describes as “an ideology of interiority…attended by certain ideological consequences” (1984, 52). The truly evil Kurtz might then be viewed as the horrible embodiment of Marlow’s intimate theoretical inclinations and convictions. It is my contention that beyond the surface of the realistic novel with striking Gothic touches, there is a veritable Gothic romance with a proper supernatural conceit where Kurtz is the double of Marlow, who, despite his acutely ironic vision directed outward, remains blinded to the signs of his double in his own self, endlessly delaying the moment of recognition or insight. In drawing out the evil in the Marlow, I would also like to draw out this alternative Gothic narrative, unrealized yet implicit, hidden beneath the manifest surfaces of the realist novel that we are reading.

The Good Service Marlow’s ambiguous relationship with colonialism is reflected in the very first pages of the narrative where he is first introduced. He seemingly interrupts the unnamed narrator’s stream of consciousness in order to evoke a much older and darker history that harkens back to Roman conquest and colonization of England. Before Marlowe takes over with his narration, we read the inner voice of the unnamed narrator reveling in the magnificent memory of the Empire reflected on the Thames River. In a striking statement that points to Thames’ monumental significance as an imperial, national and racial symbol, “the old river…rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway heading to the uttermost ends of the earth” (Conrad 1990, 2).5 The narrator’s glorifying gaze omits all the horrors of colonialism to represent the “unruffled” river 5 All the following parenthetical references to Conrad’s text in this article refer to Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Toronto: Dover, 1990).

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as a static imperialistic icon. The rhetoric hints at personification: “the old river…after ages of good service” and “at the decline of day” retires to homeland with “tranquil dignity.” The description evokes the picture of a toiling, self-effacing patriarch, who has worked endlessly for its children or “the race that peopled its banks.” As a member of this grateful race, the narrator silently sings the river’s praises and does so by repressing colonial history. “The venerable stream” represents “the great spirit of the past,” with its colonial service emphasized for the second time: “its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea” (2). The contemplation consequently moves from a static depiction of rest and tranquility to the more dynamic memory of heroic men, ships and battles, and becomes simultaneously more jingoistic and selfcontradictory. “The nation is proud” of “the great knights-errant of the sea” such as Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Franklin, and in the subsequent simile, the names of the colonial ships are “like jewels flashing in the night of time” exemplified by the fittingly named “Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasures” (2). The simile reveals the narrator’s effort to attribute a noble standing and dignity to these ships through the metaphorical use of jewel-imagery as if they represented precious light in darkness. Yet this higher meaning is also debased and adulterated through the more literal reference to jewels, yielding or “returning” a much more mundane sense that invokes colonial interest, greed and materiality. This duality is apparent not just in the very name of Golden Hind, where the reference to a precious jewel is conjoined to the body part, but also in the narrator’s mundane reference to its spectacular return to England with sensual “round flanks full of treasures.” It continues in the strikingly incoherent and increasingly jingoistic reference to the colonial “men” of the past represented as “hunters for gold and pursuers of fame [who] all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire” (2). The unnamed narrator briefly recognizes colonial men for what they actually are (“hunters for gold and pursuers of fame”) before elevating them to an ideal plane where he disharmoniously unites images of crude power (sword, might) with those of spirituality and enlightenment (torch, sacred power). The “torch” appears an Enlightenment reference, and might refer to the project of carrying the torch of “civilization” to the colonized. Colonial men bear the sword and “often” the torch, revealing

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that the “sword” does not always accompany the “torch,” which may be interpreted as an admission of the priority of colonial greed and power in relation to any Enlightenment agenda. Brute force is the essence of the colonial game and the “torch” of colonial ideas is a frequent appendage. Even in this moment of eulogy, in which the colonial past of the Thames River is glorified, it is possible to observe an unsettling duality within colonial ideology between its material aspects and spiritual pretensions.6 It must be emphasized that while the rest of the narrative as told almost entirely from Marlow’s ironic point of view will take issue with such material aspects, laying bare the horrible realities of colonial practice, it will never give up entirely on its “spirit.” This is because Marlow cannot fully separate himself from the awe-inducing notions of colonial greatness articulated as “might” and “sacred fire” in the words of the first narrator. In fact, Marlow’s voice may just be a continuation of the colonialist voice of the unnamed narrator. The shift from the narrator’s contemplative gaze to Marlow’s spoken narration occurs when, foreshadowing the darkness of Marlow’s story, the narrator points to “the upper reaches” where “the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars” and Marlow starts to talk: “and this also…has been one of the dark places of the earth.” The latter’s speech evokes a much more distant past (“nineteen hundred years ago” (3)) when Romans started their conquest and colonization of England, remarking dramatically that “light came out of this river since—you say knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain.” On first sight, Marlow’s evocation seems to be challenging the first narrator’s point of view, revealing a different kind of colonial history beneath the flashy surfaces of “the monstrous city,” one in which England represents the colonized rather than the colonizer. His brief sketch of this “prehistoric” London, visited by Roman colonials powers for the first time, may surely be considered an ironic reversal: to a certain extent, his subsequent commentary stands in a relationship of contrast and opposition with the first narrator’s contemplation regarding the greatness of the Thames River and its colonial history. But the conjunctive “and” at the very point when his voice is first heard (‘and this also…has been one of the dark places of the earth”) also suggests that Marlow might indeed be 6 Abdulla Al-dabbagh refers to the novel’s persistent use of duality or “doubling effect” whereby “characters, events, and objects appear in a state of contradictory but unified unity” (2002, 76).

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continuing with the narrator’s reflection. He seems to be supplementing the first narrator’s perspective, marking it with his own spoken voice in a contrapuntal rather than contrasting manner. In recognizing that “light came out of this river since,” he suggests that the Thames River be looked incongruently and simultaneously as a place of both darkness and light. His gaze does reveal the dark history beneath, but it does not necessarily contest or break away from the imperialistic view of the first narrator who glorifies the river’s “good service” and dignified knights “from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin” (2). It must be emphasized that Marlow’s personal sympathies lie with the colonizers, or more precisely with the men in the “service” of colonization, without ever extending fully to the colonized even when the colonized are his English ancestors. While conjuring up the prehistoric London on the cusp of colonization, he asks his audience to “imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine…trireme in the Mediterranean” (3). This Roman commander finds himself in “the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke…Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages—precious little to eat for a civilized man” (4). The commander might have some rather humble professional interests, seeking promotion to the fleet back in his homeland (“at Ravena”). In briefly imagining the somehow naïve colonial commander uninitiated in “the mysterious life of the wilderness” and “the utter savagery” (4) that surround him, Marlow also conjures up a self-image with which he clearly identifies. Revealing the masculinist underpinnings of his worldview, he extols the commander and his men for being “men enough to face the darkness.” In what may be interpreted as a reformulation of heroic ideals, Marlow finds value in the mere existential state of confronting darkness or living “in the midst of the incomprehensible” (4). It is in this passage that we find the most direct expressions of Marlow’s problematic values regarding colonialism, betraying an essentially evil Marlow who hides his own ideological complicity with the worst kind of colonial practices by projecting it onto the figure of Kurtz in the rest of the narrative. As different from the first narrator whose values hint at an incongruous mixture between brute force and Enlightenment principles, between sword and torch, Marlow’s values here appear to sway toward the Enlightenment. Ironically, however, his ideas on colonization imply consequences far worse than the first narrator’s implication that colonizers may merely be motivated by “riches” or “fame,” or that they may use sheer brute force without holding any torch.

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In an effort to create some distance between himself and his imaginary Roman commander, who cannot have had any Enlightenment agenda in his colonial cause, Marlow has recourse to concepts more in harmony with the values of nineteenth-century colonialism. While the Roman commander would feel stunned by the incomprehensible surroundings in the primitive colony of England, a state which Marlow calls “the fascination of the abomination,” Marlow claims that his contemporaries or more precisely, contemporary colonialists would not have the very same experience: “none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency” (4). This “us” is the closest that Marlow comes to in admitting his covert identification with colonizers. Such identification appears incongruous given the rest of his narration where Marlow only talks about inefficient colonizers he met during his colonial employment. In evoking “us,” he must be implying an ideal kind of colonizer, akin to the aforementioned knights-errant, whose colonial “efficiency” he may comfortably identify with. In contrast, Marlow argues, the inefficient Romans “were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze…They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others” (4). Hinting at a substantial difference between ancient and modern forms of colonialism, Marlow distances himself from the former that he views as being based on “brute force.” He associates the colonialism of “brute force” with “robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness” (4). This is a strange observation: on the one hand, Marlow morally condemns the “brute force” brand of colonialism as representing robbery, violence, murder; on the other, he tempers his condemnation with an almost sympathetic tone for “men going at it blind,” underscoring the properness of their crimes in so far as they “tackle a darkness.” As I have noted earlier, Marlow’s sympathies essentially lie with heroic men—he has just praised them for being “men enough to face the darkness”—but there is a moment in this rambling discourse on colonialism where the same sympathies extend to the colonized albeit briefly. This happens when he observes that “the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much” (4). The sentence reads like a critique of colonialism, but considered in conjunction with the preceding reference to men tackling

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the darkness, it also reads as a reasonable explanation for their criminality. These men simply want to avoid a sight that is not “pretty”: instead of “looking at it too much,” therefore, they “go at it blind” (4). Marlow seems to have found a perfect reason for the criminality of the “brute force” type of colonizers: an aesthetic aversion to ugliness makes them all the more aggressive in their “conquest of the earth.” But the violent nature of this conquest remains unjustified without a worthy cause attached to it: as Marlow’s next and most problematic statement starkly indicates, “what redeems it is the idea only” (4). The unnamed narrator referred to the frequent (“often”) simultaneity of the sword and torch; similarly, Marlow makes the self-justification of colonial violence depend on an idea. Significantly, this redemptive idea, much like the aforementioned “efficiency,” is left in obscurity. Marlow’s following words fail to define this much desired “idea” further: “an idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea— something you can set up before, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…” (4). In comparison with the unnamed narrator’s reference to the torch, whose relation to the Enlightenment is unmistakable, Marlow’s “idea” as well as its distinction from “a sentimental pretence” are simply too vague. He does put an emphasis on the “unselfish belief in the idea,” but this does not render the idea itself unselfish. It is unclear whether Marlow is referring to Enlightenment values as ideological tools to be used for redeeming colonial conquest, robbery, and murder. In any case, Marlow appears less interested in the substantiality of the idea than colonial “men’s” relationship to it. For Marlow, these men must be sincere (“not a sentimental pretence”) and unselfishly devoted. “Something you can set up before” intimates that, as opposed to a celestial, otherworldly origin, Marlow recognizes the idea in question as originating in these men themselves, as something initially reasoned out as if it were a manmade religion. The last words in Marlow’s rumination makes it clear that the idea in question will be treated as some kind of religious deity: colonial men will “bow down before” and “offer a sacrifice to” it. A sincere, unselfish, resolute belief in such an idea, his words imply, will act as a semi-religious warrant for the redemption of all colonial crime. Marlow’s metaphysics is hollow, dangerous, and shockingly incompatible with the ironic way he looks into and critiques the colonial world in the following Congo River narrative. His utterly uncritical, suspiciously simple “idea” may partially reflect a nostalgia for England’s colonial

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past mentioned by the unnamed narrator, when “knights-errant” of the sixteenth century, i.e., the likes of Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Franklin, could be received uncritically and redeemed in the public eye for having done “good service.” These colonial heroes have served the “idea” and ideal of the British Empire, or, in the words of the unnamed narrator, they have served the “commonwealth,” “might,” and “the sacred fire” (2). But Marlow’s words also imply that he is “bowing down to” the idea of charismatic, mighty men convinced of their own righteousness, having “set up” an idea they sincerely believe in and could then use to seek redemption for their crimes. This is perhaps more likely the case given Marlow’s sustained fascination with the criminal Kurtz throughout the narrative and inclination to see him as different than all the other colonials represented as being foolish, ineffective, insincere and motivated by self-interest. Carola Kaplan perceptively notes the connection between the idea and Kurtz: [Marlow] maintains that the conquest of the earth is redeemed by “an unselfish belief in the idea…” Not only is this assertion undercut by the language of idolatry, but it prefigures evidence…that Kurtz’ belief in the idea of “humanizing, improving, instructing” leads to the most ruthless exploitation and most appalling idolatry of all, as Kurtz turns himself, the emissary of the idea, into an object of worship. (Kaplan 1997, 325)

There is no question that Kurtz is also motivated by the “idea” of self-interest, having managed to establish a thieving, murderous cult and kingdom around him. But all moral questions aside, he is greatly admired as a most efficient colonial, having amassed more ivory than all others combined. Marlow represents him primarily as a charismatic voice, fully, hypnotically and sincerely present in the moment he is speaking, without insinuating that he might be a prevaricator or a hypocrite. For Marlow, Kurtz appears unique also because he has proved to be both sincere and efficient as different than the other colonials: in an early commentary, Leonard Dean points to “Kurtz’ final honesty and self-knowledge,” observing that “Marlow is forced to prefer him to the evil hypocrisy of the pilgrims” (1944, 102). As Gordon Leah plainly states, Marlow “sees evidence of Kurtz’ malpractice, but the charismatic, eloquent Kurtz is clearly able to evoke intense loyalty and affection. When Marlow eventually meets him shortly before Kurtz dies, he is also in thrall to the man’s charisma…” (Leah 2016, 261). Kurtz has believed in something

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and given that Marlow is not very definite and does not seem picky about the exact nature of this “something,” Kurtz might be viewed as the very embodiment of Marlow’s colonial “idea.”

Marlow as a Colonial Worker In Kurtz’ figure, then, Marlow might be confronting the problematic, corruptible, and essentially evil nature of his own colonialism, which remains largely hidden; indeed, apart from the solemn, non-ironic references to the “idea” mentioned in the beginning of the narrative, we don’t get to hear about it. He conspicuously shifts to an ironic tone, which enables a forceful representation of the absurdly horrible realities of colonialism. But the shift also renders Marlow’s own standing in the narrative problematic and even self-contradictory. If Marlow, endowed with an insightful ironic gaze, could see perfectly through the fallacies of the colonial concern, why would he be a part of it? His motivations remain strikingly unclear except when he briefly mentions his boyish “passion for maps” and fascination with “all the glories of exploration” (5). Apart from his adventurous spirit, which he expresses in a rather understated manner, we see little that justifies his presence in Africa. In any case, Marlow does not seem to be motivated by any idea that he can “bow down before.” As he adamantly seeks an appointment with the colonial concern on the Congo River, he uses the connections of his aunt whose enthusiasm for colonialism he finds patently ridiculous and renders frequently ironic. In an enthusiastic letter to Marlow, the aunt deems his intention to work for a colonial concern “a glorious idea” (6). After he gets the job through her connections, he stops by her for tea and a chat, and is much disturbed when he realizes that she has been representing him to others as “an exceptional and gifted creature” (9). In the aunt’s eyes, Marlow tells us, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital…Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, living in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about “weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,” till

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upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the company was run for profit. (9–10)7

The passage gives the impression that even before he embarks on his colonial journey, Marlow well knows that the Enlightenment pretensions of colonial practices are nothing more than “rot” or “humbug.” He clearly looks down on the pedestrianism of the colonial discourse “let loose in print,” especially the kind that promises to educate the colonized, “weaning” them from “their horrid ways” and treating the colonial enterprise as a religion of sorts with spiritual workers, “apostles” or “emissaries of light.” He is emphatic that the company is run for profit, and any effort to associate it with higher ideals is farcical if not hypocritical. In view of the comments on England’s colonial past made by the unnamed narrator, the ironic Marlow here seems to associate himself strictly with those who are seeking “gold” and “fame,” i.e., some kind of “profit,” distancing himself from any kind of “torch.” As we have seen, however, besides this ironic Marlow, there is an idealistic Marlow who wants to set up and bow down to an “idea” while engaging in the trades of colonialism, criminal or otherwise. Curiously, this idealistic Marlow appears largely hidden from his ironic counterpart; Marlow’s ironic gaze is never allowed to lay bare the contradictions in his intimate beliefs. But contradictions are certainly there: one wonders, for instance, to what extent the aunt’s evocation of “a glorious idea” might be different from Marlow’s own vague but dearly held colonial “idea” in the passage on the imaginary Roman colonial. Marlow obviously wants to keep his “idea” separate from all the hackneyed ideas of Enlightenment origin that colonial discourse deploys. To a certain extent, this separation allows him to exercise what I have called his ironic gaze on colonial practices. When he learns about the fate of Fresleven, killed during an absurd fight with the natives over “two black hens,” he is not surprised at all8 : he conjectures that Fresleven “had been a couple of years already out there engaged in the noble cause…and he probably felt the need at last of asserting his self-respect in some way” 7 For an alternative understanding of this passage, as well as other commentary on the theme of “work” and “unemployment” in the novel, see Michael Sayeau (2006), especially p. 345. 8 For a symbolic analysis of the “black hen” scene, see Thomas Dilworth and Joseph Labine (2013).

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(6). The absurdity of the incident is dramatically at odds with the idealness of “the noble cause”; in sketching the situational irony, Marlow is consciously distancing himself from any colonial “humbug.” While recovering Fresleven’s remains in a deserted village, he wonders, again ironically, about the fate of the hens: “what became of the hens, I don’t know either. I should think the cause of progress got them, anyhow” (7). “The cause of progress” reiterates the sarcasm in “the noble cause”; in such statements, Marlow makes it very clear that he does not want to do anything at all with the Enlightenment discourse given its incompatibility with colonial realities. Indeed, Marlow never loses an opportunity to remark such incompatibility in an ironic manner. Finding himself in the nightmarishly chaotic environment of a company station with decaying machinery (“a wanton smashup”) and “objectless” blasting in the cliffs, for instance, he remarks that he was “a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings” (11–12). Having chanced upon a hellish mangrove where sick natives are left to die in abject conditions—he calls it “the gloomy circle of some inferno”—he sees “black shapes crouched…in all attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.” When a mine detonates, he ironically notes: “the work was going on. The work!” (14). His sarcastic evocation of “the work” underscores the essential emptiness of the signifier: nothing of value is being created or no work is actually being done. It is, however, Marlow’s own relationship with the “idea” of work that strongly implicates him in colonial ideology, placing him in an awkward position vis-à-vis his ironic and critical representation of “colonial work.” It must be emphasized that despite his effort to distance himself from the idea of being “one of the Workers, with a capital” (10), the humbug of the aunt’s colonial ideology, Marlow is indeed a firm believer in work and does an excellent job working for the colonial concern. Turning away from the worthless co-workers around him, whom he ironically calls “pilgrims” (21), he vigorously works on repairing the steamboat he is in charge of (25): …I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She [i.e. the boat] had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work, the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means. (25)

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The work on the boat is represented as both an intimate and sentimental affair: it makes Marlow “love her.” Reminiscent of colonial “good service” mentioned earlier, the boat serves him better than any “influential friend.” The language of amicability, intimacy, and love eclipses the actual “colonial” functions of the boat that will be used to fetch Kurtz and his abundant ivory loot later in the story. In emphasizing the intimate nature of “work,” Marlow turns it into a largely individualistic affair, obliterating its social consequences and repercussions. The language of “I” prevails in his enthusiastic description of work: the work on the boat serves “me,” enabling him to find out “what I could do.” The work itself may not be pleasant—and here, one might be reminded of the not-so-“pretty” sights colonizers blindly tackle—Marlow does not “like it” for what it is; he likes it for the possibility of self-expression that it allows for the individual. So when Marlow states that the boat had given him a chance “to come out a bit,” such “coming out” might in fact be interpreted as a reference to Romantic notions of subjective and individualistic expression. Just like the “idea at the back of it” that transforms colonialism into a meaningful, worthy affair, Marlow appreciates the idea of “work” (“what is in the work”) insofar as such an idea enables “the chance to find yourself.” This finding chiefly concerns an intimate reality (in Marlow’s words, “your own reality” and something done “for yourself, not for others”), a reality hidden in the individual’s unseen psyche, because, as Marlow makes it clear, it is “what no other man can ever know.” This secret individualistic reality unadulterated by “the mere show” comes out most prominently in his ideas on (colonial) “idea” and “work,” which he reduces to an affective, intimate relation to the self without tracing their social and moral consequences. Marlow therefore appears oblivious to the near-sightedness and the implicit self-focus in the intimate realities that he holds so dear. At times, this complicates his moral observations regarding colonial practice where he adopts his signature ironic tone. As he criticizes the men of Eldorado Exploring Expedition, for instance, he makes several scathing remarks: Their talk…was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe. (27)

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On first sight, this appears a forceful criticism of colonial practice, but in light of Marlow’s previous comments on colonial “idea” and “work,” its critical status becomes more ambivalent. These men are not heroes, but “sordid buccaneers” and immoral burglars; Marlow describes them as lacking heroic virtues such as “hardihood,” “audacity” and “courage.” Such criticism, however, concerns more the worthlessness of these men than colonialism as such: in a curious remark, Marlow tells us that the men of the Expedition did not have the things “wanted for the work of the world.” Once again, Marlow deploys “work” in an ambiguous way: “the work of the world” seems to carry an ideal sense, more likely referring to what work should be like rather than what it is. More specifically, it suggests the particular context of “colonial work,” which, Marlow’s remarks intimate, should be carried out in both heroic and ideal terms. There should be “foresight” and “serious intention,” yet the particular object of intention and foresight remains characteristically elusive. The same ambiguity also extends to the “moral purpose.” In what appears a condemnation of colonial greed, “to tear treasure out of the bowels of the land” becomes an unworthy cause or “desire” only when it is unaccompanied by a “moral purpose at the back of it,” which reiterates the wording of his previous remarks on the colonial idea (“an idea at the back of it”) (4). Despite its weighty enunciation, “moral purpose” appears nothing more than an idea that may be deployed to redeem colonial practice. “Work,” “idea” and here, “moral purpose”; all these vague ideas and the implicit idealizations in them find their horrible embodiment in Kurt, with whom Marlow is deeply fascinated. In one of the passages, in which Marlow expresses his fascination more directly, he relates Kurtz with the idea of work: “I was curious to see whether this man, who had come equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the top after all and how he would set about his work when there” (27). In a statement that demonstrates Marlow’s signal lack of specificity, what principally matters for him is Kurtz’s having “moral ideas of some sort” that may redeem his actions. In Marlow’s projection, Kurtz is indeed an ideal worker: he is skilled and efficient enough to climb to the top. Marlow looks forward to hearing about Kurtz’s colonial “work,” which, in his ambiguous and unsubstantial conception, is valuable to the extent that it enables a sincere and intimate relation to oneself (“the chance to find yourself” (25)).

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“Work” is mentioned shortly after when Marlow wonders about before he meets him, trying to imagine the kind of person the latter is. “Perhaps,” Marlow imagines, Kurtz “was simply a fine fellow who stuck to his work for its own sake” (28). Given that Marlow sees himself as someone who enjoys “work for its own sake,” colonial or otherwise, it is clear that he desires to forge an identification between himself and Kurtz. There is something “simple” and naïvely comforting about the image of fine, hardworking colonial fellows “sticking” to work, and there is hardly anything in Marlow’s worldview that would suggest that his longed-for “idea” or “purpose” is more substantial than the simple perfection of this image. Marlow is so enchanted with the simplicity of ideas that at another moment in the narrative when he chances upon a book left in a deserted hut in the jungle, he feels overjoyed at the simplicity of its merely being a book. The book entitled An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship is surely “not a very enthralling book; but,” Marlow tells us, “you could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages…luminous with another than a professional light” (34). The dull book is a perfect image of Marlow’s metaphysics: it represents “the right way of going to work.” Characteristically, this is not “right work” or “just work”; the rightness of the work seems an aesthetic attribute rather than a moral one. It is the sight of the book, and not its content, that amazes Marlow, whose metaphysics is as deep as his images. Unsurprisingly, what he finds even “more astounding” about the enchanting book is the sight of notes in the book’s margin. He hyperbolically wonders: “I couldn’t believe my eyes! They were in cipher!” Only later do we learn that a Russian seaman is the author of these notes. Marlow might not know Cyrillic letters but he surely knows the art of creating an affective image: “Fancy a man,” he tells his auditors, “lugging with him a book…into this nowhere [i.e. the jungle] and studying it—and making notes—in cypher at that!” (34). We do not have to bother ourselves with the book’s dull content or the indecipherable letters in the margins: we may simply appreciate the intimate, self-rewarding moment of work reflected in the image of a seaman studying a book in the jungle. Marlow’s formulations of “idea” and “work” all point to a lack of substance, or more precisely, of substantial values in his own subjectivity, a lack represented by Kurtz. In a passage that invokes the question of substance, Marlow examines his fascination with Kurtz and makes a revealing self-observation: “I had found out I had been striving after

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something altogether without a substance” (42). In Marlow’s imagination, Kurtz undergoes a substantial reduction: he becomes reduced to a mere voice (“he was very little more than a voice” (43)). We learn that this is because Marlow is essentially “striving after” Kurtz’ speech or his discourse: “I …became aware that…I had been looking forward to—a talk with Kurtz…I made the strange discovery that I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing” (43). Marlow’s reference to “discoursing” here must be understood with all the suggestions of what we have come to designate as “colonial discourse.” I have already pointed out Marlow’s estrangement from the Enlightenment agenda of the predominant colonial discourse, naming it “rot” and “humbug.” In this moment of self-revelation, where he “finds out” something about his desire and “becomes aware” of it, Marlow seeks a charismatic expression of his own private colonial discourse, which reduces colonial work to an intimate, affective relation with the “worker’s” self. Kurtz, for Marlow, is the voice that enables such an expression. While he recognizes his desire for Kurtz’ discourse, Marlow is not at all concerned about the evil of his colonial “actions”: The man presented himself as a voice. Not of course that I did not connect him with some sort of action. Hadn’t I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the agents together? That was not the point. (43)

It is rather curious why Marlow would want to brush away this progressively worsening list of actions that extends from mere collecting to swindling and stealing. His dismissive gesture suggests that he already considers the crimes of swindling and stealing to be indispensable hence unsurprising realities of colonial practice. He seems to be merely wondering whether an idea, or an ideal “discourse,” may redeem such realities, assuaging their unpleasantness for colonial workers like Kurtz. In the following, where he specifies the “point” of Kurtz, Marlow reframes his desire for discursive redemption in terms of “presence”: The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness. (43)

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The passage points to the instability of Kurtz’ discourse insofar as it is based on “a sense of real presence.” In a Romantic formulation, Marlow associates “the gift of expression” with “real presence.” Kurtz’ expression appear to make the ideas expressed immediately present; we learn, however, that the same expression also traverses opposite poles of being exalted and contemptible, bewildering and illuminating, of light and darkness. Paradoxically, then, what has “real presence” is an ephemeral and unstable discourse, or in Marlow’s previous words, “something altogether without a substance” (42). Through the figure of Kurtz, then Marlow confronts the instability and insubstantiality of his metaphysics, of the secretly colonial notions he uncritically holds so dear, including idea, work and purpose. These notions are emptied out and filled with the presence of Kurtz’ discourse, or remembering that Kurtz is little more than a voice, by Kurtz himself. Marlow is emphatic about Kurtz’ narcissism: You should have heard him say, “My Ivory.” Oh yes, I heard him. “My intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—” everything belonged to him…Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. (44)

At one level, this reads like a condemnation of Kurtz’ evil greed and hubris, with which “he had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land—I mean literally” (44). By “literally,” Marlow points to the fact of Kurtz’ having made himself adored by the natives, “presid[ing] at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites” (45). However, his reference to the “powers of darkness” as an external source, while being evocative, is less than effective. By all means, it is Kurtz himself who is the source of dark, evil powers resulting from narcissistic, halfbaked colonial ideas. He embodies the sort of ideas Marlow subscribes to, i.e., an “idea” one can set up himself and bow down to, or “work,” through which one’s self can come out a little. By negating the hypocrisy of the Enlightenment discourse, Marlow and Kurtz both fall back on the discourse of the self, which cannot help turning into a discourse of self-aggrandizement. In the lack of any social restraint, Kurtz turns to the darkness in his own self, which Marlow represents as resulting from loss of “innate strength” or “capacity for faithfulness” (45). Invoking the question of strength as a way to deal

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with darkness, he muses: “your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in—your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business” (45). Physical and psychological toil is ideally expended on an “obscure, back-breaking business” that invokes both the business of colonial trade and Marlow’s own “obscure” ideas on work. In theory, then, all internal powers (“inner strength,” the “power of devotion,” “capacity”) must be directed to something outside the self (“not to yourself”). But, to the extent that Marlow’s private musings underscore the intimate, selfrealizing moment of work while obscuring the idea that motivates such work, they invariably end up with a return to the self. Marlow’s contradictions regarding the origin of the idea, i.e., whether it should derive from the self or be outside it as part of “the work of the world,” may also be discerned during his reading of Kurtz’ pamphlet. He tells us that. [Kurtz] began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, “must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might as of a deity,” and so on, and so on. “By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,” etc., etc. (45)

The passage may be read as the exposition of the much-awaited “idea,” intention and purpose. Symptomatically, however, in the very moment that the idea attains some clarity in Kurtz’ formulation, Marlow appears impatient to quote it; hence we have “and so on, and so on” or “etc., etc.” There is certainly a sense of embarrassment for Marlow that such ideas inevitably are extensions, reformulations or reworkings of the colonial “humbug” he otherwise despises. Despite such affinity, Marlow is ecstatic about reading the pamphlet. It is obvious that his is not a very close reading as might be inferred from the way he reads Kurtz’ words. This is how he describes his reading experience: [Kurtz] soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. That was the unbounded eloquence—of words—of burning noble words. (45–46)

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In soaring with Kurtz, Marlow seems to be distracted from the act of reading. He cannot remember the “magnificent” peroration; yet, he manages to draw an allegorical image from it with a personalized “exotic Immensity,” possibly representing Africa, being “ruled by an august Benevolence” or Europe. The passage hints that Marlow is not actually reading the pamphlet just like he did not read the book on seamanship in the jungle. He is clearly less interested in the represented ideas—the ironic Marlow is always round the corner and, perhaps, already here in these very sentences, hinting at something inevitably clichéd and tired in the idealizations of the allegory. Instead, his main interest lies in sketching the moment in which the words are uttered or inscribed: we learn that Kurtz’ are “burning noble words” that displayed “the unbounded power of eloquence.” In much the same way he previously conjured up the image of the seaman in the jungle by drawing on the marvelous notes inscribed on the margins in cypher-like Cyrillic, Marlow now brings us to the intimate moment of Kurtz’ writing by drawing our attention to another note inscribed on the last page of the pamphlet, this time in his native English: There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as an exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic moment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: “Exterminate all the brutes!” (46)

This is a moment of absolute clarity and, one might say, a personal enlightenment. The reading of the pamphlet corresponds to what F. R. Leavis (1950) lauds as “the essential vibration” in Conrad’s fiction: such “essential vibration” he tells us “emanates from the interaction of the particular incidents, actions and perception that are evoked with such charged concreteness”; it contains “the inevitable immediate resonance of the recorded event” (177) and offers “a direct significant glimpse” (179). Leavis’ example for such “the essential vibration” and “charged concreteness” from Heart of Darkness is the scene where Marlow’s suddenly recognizes the heads on stakes at Kurtz’ station, which he had previously mistaken for ornamentation. This scene sharply contrasts with the other scenes in which Marlow’s comments appear to be “interpositions” or “intrusions.” “Hadn’t he,” Leavis wonders exasperatingly,

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“overworked ‘inscrutable,’ ‘inconceivable,’ ‘unspeakable’ and that kind of word already?—yet they still recur” (Leavis 1950, 177). It might be said that Kurtz’ note (“Exterminate all the brutes!”) performs the same way as the heads on stakes do in destroying or “blazing” the obscurity of Marlow’s images and ideologies in a flash of lightning; Marlow cannot hide behind the “inscrutability” of his ideas or take refuge in the comfort of their obscurity, and the statement “Exterminate all the brutes!” has the effect of a fateful “lightning.” This idea cannot be concealed or brushed aside with any “etc.” or “so on”; Marlow is now made to face its awful irony: the “terrifying” reversal from pleasing “altruistic” sentiment to evil genocidal intention. The passage is wrought with words referring to light (“blazed,” “luminous,” “lightning”) and this is the second time Marlow uses the word “luminous” in relation to writing. In the first use, he told us that the “humble” pages of the dull nautical book he discovered were “luminous with another than a professional light” (35). Marlow, of course, did not read the book, nor did he understand the Cyrillic cyphers in its margins; the luminosity there was merely an effect of his own imagination suggesting the picturesque beauty of “work” in the tame, pleasant image of the note-taking seaman. In contrast, Kurtz’ plainspoken note has the effect of the sublime: it is not only luminous but also “terrifying.” Personified, the “lightning”-like note “blazes” at Marlow; it is a destructive, burning force, an “en-lightning,” that comes from the outside, awakening Marlow from his moral stupor.9 In referring to the same passage, Michael Lackey argues that. What differentiates Kurtz and Marlow is that Kurtz, having been forced to follow his altruistic-sentiment moral ideology to its logical end, ultimately acknowledges what his philosophy implies. Marlow, on the other hand, lives in a state of denial. But this state of denial is precisely why he is so dangerous. (Lackey 2005, 38–39)

9 As Susan J. Navarette observes, “mesmerized by the “magic” of form, by the cadences and textures of language, Kurtz’s audience is lulled into an apathy that it cannot shake, even after it sees that such stylistic beauty may mask vile, ‘savage,’ and ‘uncivilized’ ideas. Only the report’s hastily appended postscriptum… signals a collapse into utter abjection” (1993, 294). Marlow is initially “mesmerized’ by “form” in the same way he is mesmerized by the form of his own ‘idea.’ It is “only” Kurtz’ note that provides an actual collapse of the idea into “utter abjection.”

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Both Marlow and Kurtz are complicit; while the one commits colonial atrocities, the other conceals them (Lackey 2005, 37). It is true that the starkness of Marlow’s admirable ironic sight, while relentlessly exposing the horrors of colonial realities, has largely eclipsed the complicity of his intimate worldview with colonial ideology. But the sublime moment in which he reads Kurtz’ words on the pamphlet rejects any “state of denial.” This, I believe, is a veritable moment of recognition, which finally comes like a lightning after being enshrouded in obscurity throughout the entire narrative: in Kurtz’s horrible note, Marlow recognizes the evil otherwise concealed in the “inscrutable” heart of his vague colonial ideas, in other words, his evil self.

References Achebe, Chinua. 1977. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” The Massachusetts Review 18: 14–27. Al-dabbagh, Abdulla. 2002. “Going Native: Conrad and Postcolonial Discourse.” English Language Notes 39, no. 4: 71–88. Brown, Tony C. 2000. “Cultural Psychosis on the Frontier: The Work of the Darkness in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Studies in the Novel 32, no. 1: 14–28. Conrad, Joseph. 1990. Heart of Darkness. Toronto: Dover. Dean, Leonard. 1944. “Tragic Pattern in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” College English 6, no. 2: 100–104. Dilworth, Thomas and Joseph Labine. 2013. “Two Black Hens in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” The Explicator 71, no. 1: 44–48. Eagleton, Terry. 2006. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso. ˙ Içöz, Nursel. 2005. “Conrad and Ambiguity: Social Commitment and Ideology in Heart of Darkness and Nostromo.” Conradiana 37, no. 3: 245–274. Kalua, Fetson. 2014. “Locating the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 26, no. 1: 12–18. Kaplan, Carola M. 1997. “Colonizers, Cannibals, and the Horror of Good Intentions in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Studies in Short Studies 34: 323–333. Lackey, Michael. 2005. “Moral Conditions for Genocide in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” College Literature 32, no. 1: 20–41. Leah, Gordon. 2016. “The ‘Saving Lie’ and the Saving Truth: Reflections on the Conclusion of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Theology 119, no. 4: 261–267.

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Leavis, F. R. 1950. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. New York: George W. Stewart. Lipka, Jennifer. 2008. “‘The horror! The horror!’ Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a Gothic Novel.” Conradiana 40, no. 1: 25–37. McClintock, Anne. 1984. “‘Unspeakable Secrets:’ The Ideology of Landscape in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 17, no. 1: 38–53. Mulry, David. 2017. “Manuscript Revisions and Omissions in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” The Explicator 75, no. 4: 271–273. Navarette, Susan J. 1993. “The Anatomy of Failure in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35, no. 3: 279–315. Nayak, Srila. 2012. “Two Narratives of Modernism in Heart of Darkness.” Conradiana 44, no. 1: 29–49. Parry, Benita. 1983. Conrad and Imperialism. London: Macmillan. Romero, Jorge Sacido. 2011. “Failed Exorcism: Kurtz’s Spectral Status and Its Ideological Function in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Atlantis 33, no. 2: 43–60. Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: First Vintage Books. Sayeau, Michael. 2006. “Work, Unemployment, and the Exhaustion of Fiction in Heart of Darkness.” Novel 39, no. 3: 337–360. Singh, Frances B. 2007. “Terror, Terrorism and Horror in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Partial Answers 5, no. 2: 199–218. Solinger, Fred. 2008. “‘Absurd be—exploded!’: Re-Membering Experience through Liminality in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Conradiana 40, no. 1: 61–70. Vandertop, Caitlin. 2018. “‘The Earth Seemed Unearthly’: Capital, WorldEcology, and Enchanted Nature in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Modern Fiction Studies 64, no. 4: 680–700.

CHAPTER 13

Caught in a Feudal Hang-Up: My Feudal Lord Mirroring a Villain and the Rebellion of a Pakistani Woman Humaira Riaz

Literature has broadened its sphere by addressing discursive practices, which illuminated its validity and practicality to life and the universe around. Traditional representation, however, has remained a strong area of literature particularly the role of ‘foil’ or antagonist whose performativity provides insight to understand his/her character. This chapter discusses literary representation of the antagonists in narratives as relational and performance theory best highlights their performative roles. Certain key principles significantly lead to the comprehension of performance theory; ‘presentation of self,’ ‘restored behaviour’ and ‘expressive culture,’ which embody social activity, rituals within the society and its conventions. ‘Systems of transformation’ are invariably different in every culture and historical movements; however, these remain the focus of attention in understanding the discursive behavior of a society and individuals (Schechner 2013, 74). Performance theory reworks the

H. Riaz (B) City University of Science & IT Peshawar, Peshawar, Pakistan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_13

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conception of performativity as its main strategy. Performativity, as Austin defined, ‘to say something is to do something’ (Austin 1962). As a postmodern concept, performativity permeates the structure of social, political and material world. It unquestionably forms power and knowledge. Postmodernism observes and studies culture as a commodity itself rather than the critique of the commodity; the idea, which blurred the boundaries between high art and popular art later ridiculed as low form of art. For Schechner, however, the former as firm foundation of modernism noticeably defined margins of reality and representation in ‘performance’ (2013). ‘Representational art of all kinds is based on the assumption that “art” and “life” are not only separate but of different orders of reality. Life is primary, art secondary’ (Schechner 2013, 116). Schechner categorized performances in two spheres; artistic and cultural performances. The first category understood all performing arts and literature whereas culture involved rituals, religious ceremonies, festivals and individual performances of race, gender, sexuality and class. For Schechner, real-life engagements and role plays are quite often indistinguishable, a thought similar to Shakespeare. Moreover, the actor or the ‘player’ is not single-handedly involved in presenting self-reliant performances but they practice their own strategies and circumstances to attain results of a specific goal. Their performances are necessitated by self-consciousness. For Schechner, ‘performativity is everywhere, in daily behaviour, in the professions, on the internet and media, in the arts and in the language’ (Schechner 2013, 110). Individuals thus are not being themselves, but playing a role quite often for social acceptability. Drawing on the foundational concepts of Schechner, in literature, Wallace Bacon (1914–2001), considered the performance theory to teach the performance of literature as a definitive act of modesty revealing life situations. For Bacon, ‘Our center is in the interaction between readers and texts which enriches, extends, clarifies, and (yes) alters the interior and even the exterior lives of students [and performers and audiences] through the power of texts’ (Bacon in Dailey et al. 1984, 84). Performance, therefore, is not limited to drama that was once considered to be the only medium of performance. Fiction in literature equally portrays individuals through their performance. Performance is considered to be the accomplishment and realization of an obligation. It requires commitment and freedom to engross the highest priorities; to feel connected to a mission or cause for building character. Performance is sustained through energy. When it comes to

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discussion of ‘energy’ in performance, fictional characters with ‘lowenergy’ run a terrible risk of failure among the readers as nothing great is accomplished without zeal. Zeal may well reinstate the word ‘energy’ here. Performance attains immortality when supported by zeal. It is the execution of action, which associates it with fiction in literature directly or indirectly representing writer’s imagination. Fiction quite often portrays characters which are immortalized because of their deeds and actions particularly performing their role in relation to other characters. Thus, performance is relational. Literary representation of the protagonists as a convention is best understood in relation to their foils whose position is elevated due to their performative roles. Virtue countered by vice or the inverse appears more firm and effective. Inclusivity and perception are primary reasons for making literary representation important. Representation is a vital approach to understand fiction. Asian English fiction, predominantly, is categorized as serious fiction characterizing profound social, religious and political commentary. Undoubtedly, reading Asian English fiction, writers are often canonized rather than the text. Politics of representation or gendered politics, representation in Asian fiction appears realistic in the context of resistance against the contemporary pervasive norms. Dominantly patriarchal, Asian society is not devoid of women who struggle for their fundamental rights. Within the Asian region, the structural systems of countries such as Pakistan portray women in the context of ethnic and gender stereotypes. For example, feudalism, a dominant social order of medieval Europe is the concurrent social phenomenon in twenty-first century Pakistan. Inherited from the British social system, the contemporary practice of feudalism in Pakistan where a labor or worker known as a vassal has to serve landlord’s land for a piece of land in return. It is also the foremost impediment restricting empowerment of women. It has found considerable representation in the work of arts. One such example is Tehmina Durrani’s memoir My Feudal Lord (1991), which shocked Pakistani readers with its representation of a powerful politician, Mustafa Khar, a feudal lord as a character described ‘evil’ by his deeds. Many sought the book as a rebellion of Pakistani writer and activist Tehmina Durrani, who exposed her husband Mustafa Khar as a villain in her memoir. Tehmina Durrani, born in an educated and influential family, was married to Anees Khan at the age of seventeen and bore him a daughter. She divorced him in 1976 and married Mustafa Khar

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following an affair and consequently gave up the claim of her daughter’s custody. After 13 years of marriage, she got a divorce from Khar. She detailed her grief and physical abuse in her autobiography My Feudal Lord (1991). Her parents disconnected any relation with her for the next thirteen years. She is lately married to Mian Shahbaz Sharif (politician/exCM Punjab) and has retained her maiden name Durrani. Her household displayed ‘everything is seen as an individual issue with only individual solutions’ (Kashtan 2017). Her conventional set up well demonstrated fundamental code of patriarchy, ‘separation, and control. The separation is from self, other, life and nature’ (Kashtan 2017). Profound approach to her book reveals that through the performative dictatorial role of her husband, Durrani achieves her purpose of leading the readers likely to develop an image of Mustafa Khar as a brute and villain. Undoubtedly, Durrani divulges her marital secrets at a time in Pakistan when women were expected to take the lead in performing domestic responsibilities that exclude them from participating in public life. Her narrative exposes the feudal lord whose character reveals his colonial powers disguised in feudalism. Following the conduit of radical feminists, Durrani revolts against the patriarchal system mindful of what consequences her actions may bring. The first part of the book shows Khar completely subdued by the charms of Tehmina Durrani. However, the second part focuses more on exposing his villainy once she abandons her husband and marries him. To exercise something as unconventional as writing a book, makes Durrani into a woman who exposes herself to be alleged immodest in the patriarchal context. Crime of betraying her husband, however, is conquered by punishment at the hands of Khar. It may also imply that oppression disintegrates individual to revolt. Even if the selected autobiography is regarded as a political propaganda, the fact is undeniable that women are victims of oppression and domination in Pakistani conventional society. Durrani, raised as a schizophrenic child, suffers from her follies but contends herself by revolting against the system which trapped her. Ideally her educational and social background privileges her to have an access to and lend her voice to the silenced women. Silenced women in a feudal society are conventionally restricted to domestic affairs, managing family and raising children. They are plunged into the games of marriage pushed around like chess pieces by their fathers and husbands, dependent completely on them. ‘Pakistan inherited the colonial legacy of authoritarianism’ (Ul-Hassan 2008) which remained a

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primary rule of feudalism. Durrani’s narrative unravels the story of an unconventional woman caught in a hereditary hang-up. Character portrayals ‘ultimately influence…audience’ (Bacon 1979). The character of the feudal lord Mustafa Khar in the narrative distinctly reflects a feudal society and its practices of women domination, marriage and domestic affairs. All these combine to exemplify him as a perfect villain. The present chapter emphasizes the performance of Khar; the antagonist in Durrani’s narrative understood through performance theory (Bacon in Conquergood 1985) and woman resistance is also perceived through Zolbrod’s (1992) concept of ‘Changing Women.’ The performative role of the antagonist Mustafa Khar in the narrative is best categorized as a husband, a feudal, a politician and a seducer. In all the roles, he appears to be the incarnation of devil, a villain who exercises power and control in all the domains of his life. His performative role remains relational.

Colonial Power Disguised in Feudalism Durrani’s narrative My Feudal Lord (1991) set against the postcolonial milieu indicates the undertones reflected in the Pakistani upper class society after independence in 1947. It questions various aspects of the social and cultural values adopted proudly by the ruling class and the bureaucrats. Mental slavery, an essential proponent of feminism, has remained the underlying theme of Pakistani society even after freedom from the British rulers. ‘Imposition of male values’ over female redirects Durrani’s narrative giving its readers a glance into the social and political scenario of Pakistan (Willis 1984). Her narrative is founded on actual feudal character displaying actions, which imitate British colonizers. Her autobiography encourages perspectives into a more general critical concept of woman’s position in Pakistani society. It exposes the feudal lord who appears to be the accurate incarnation of diabolic qualities exercising power and control. Control of ‘self’ and ‘others’ is pertinent to feudalism; an indissoluble part of colonization. India abolished its feudal system in 1953; unfortunately, Pakistani society sustained the plague. Feudal lords as the constituents of Pakistani patriarchal society, still work out gender segregation as an established norm within the system considering women inferior. The segregation violates the general rules of interaction between the genders. Durrani encounters the segregation distressing a Pakistani

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woman in her narrative transformed into a new woman owing to the villainy of her counterpart. My Feudal Lord (1991) is the story of a woman ‘doubly marginalized’ living in a postcolonial patriarchal society. She exposes Mustafa Khar and her marital secrets in a conformist chauvinist society, which may be called as the beginning of a new era in Pakistan. Pakistani fiction and poetry is rich in representational stories of woman oppression, however, exposing a real character credits Durrani for speaking against the evil overtly. Postcolonial oppressions, discrimination and male dominance in Pakistani society overpowered women and their full participation in the society. The situation of Pakistani woman in a postcolonial feudal society relates to the Navajo Myth of ‘Changing Women’ (Zolbrod 1992). The Navajo world is strictly gendered with male objects being characterized by a static reality (Witherspoon 1977). This static reality is identified with the rigidly structured Navajo ceremonial life, mostly male-dominated. Active reality is a reference to Navajo social and economic life and is defined by movement and change (Witherspoon 1977). The essence of such active reality is the changing woman with super qualities could bring change in the Navajo life. There is a hope that Pakistani women may attain the similar ‘utopian’ status in the contemporary Pakistani society.

Myth of Changing Woman According to Zolbrod (1992), concept of changing woman was introduced into the Navajo Creation story at a time of chaos and infertility. ‘The Emergence People in the fifth world had been terrorized by the Binaayee,’ or monsters, and so only First Man, First Woman, and their two young children survived. Without ‘Changing Woman’ the human race would have ended there. For four days, the mountain Ch’ool’i’i was covered with a dark cloud. One day, First Man decided to investigate and set out chanting an optimistic song. He climbed up the mountain and at the tip, right when lightning flashed and a rainbow showered him with vibrant colors, he found Changing Woman. He looked down at his feet where he heard a baby crying. However, he beheld only a turquoise figure. He recognized the likeness of a female who was no larger than a newborn child; surprisingly its body was fully proportioned like a woman’s body (Zolbrod 1992, 175). He brought the figurine back to First Woman, unsure to handle that. Changing Woman only

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remained with them for fourteen days, later they took her to a ceremony on Ch’ool’i’i, where Nilchi the Wind transformed her into a living deity, along with her sister, White Shell Woman, and corn. Later Changing Woman went into sexual union with the Sun and gave birth to a son named Monster Slayer. On the mountainside, Changing Woman and her sister were lonely and felt strange attractions toward different things. Desire of exploration kept them on the rock for four days with their feet to the east and legs spread comfortably apart. This way they could relax observing the sun making its path across the sky and shining its warmth fully upon them (Zolbrod 1992, 181). White Shell Women did the same thing in a shallow pool, letting the water flow around her. Sun rays and the water creating images of intercourse led the women to conceive in four days. In four more days they each delivered boys placed in traditional cradleboards by First Man. After Monster Slayer met his father the Sun, and eventually rid the world of monsters with his help, the Sun asked Changing Woman to move to a special house in the West with him. Zolbrod (1992) recreated the scene, stressing Changing Woman’s individuality as she asked for a special house in the West. Upon asking by the Sun, her reply suggested no matter how dissimilar they were, they were of equal worth. There could be no harmony in the universe as long as there was no harmony between them (Zolbrod 1992, 275). Through Changing Woman’s speech, Zolbrod successfully captured the tenuous, but essentially harmonious, relationship of Changing Woman and the Sun, after which every couple should model their relationship. Durrani’s narrative reflects her efforts to follow the relationship but fails to comply. Her life story parallels the struggle of changing woman, however, against her husband.

Khar Performs a ‘Husband’: The Villain Myth of changing women is pertinent to the situation of Tehmina Durrani and Mustafa Khar, however, the husband acts as an oppressor rather than a shelter. There is no harmony in their relationship thus their world is devoid of love and agreement. Durrani confesses explicitly how her idiocy leads her to fall victim to a feudal lord who exercises oppression inflicting physical and mental tyranny until she disintegrates. My Feudal Lord (1991) is divided into three parts. Each title is significant in providing the reader an insight into what the whole segment

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is about. The first part ‘Lion of the Punjab’ reveals the charisma and attraction of Mustafa’s personality. The title indicates Khar’s character as ferocious, in Austin words, an action in itself (1962). His moves and advances toward Durrani reflect conventional norms of patriarchal man seducing woman as a birth right. Discursive practices of bureaucracy i.e., clubs, gatherings, social interaction of men and women are remnants scavenged by the social elite class and Khar exercises it to influence Durrani’s marital position. Khar with his charisma debauches her eventually leading her to a troubled psychological and physical strain. I look beyond the stories at a very extra ordinary, charming but misunderstood man. Perhaps I chose to bury my head in the sand. I rationalized his countless marriages. (Durrani 1991, 76)

The second part of the narrative ‘Law of jungle’ confirms the character of Khar more performative, imposing physical and psychological torments upon his wife. Woman for Khar is ‘power, prestige and property,’ a commodity destined to be utilized and consumed. He drives her to anxiety and torture that poisons her love transforming into a fear. The agony, however, leads her to turn into a ‘Lioness’ (the Third Part) convincing herself to write an autobiography at the cost of her reputation and expose Khar as a brute and villain. She ‘decided to cast a stone at hypocrisy’ (Durrani 1991, 375). To voice her experiences and break the traditional silence. Khar’s diabolic attitude shapes woman identity grounded in (the) diverse experiences of endurance. ‘There will be a great imbalance in our strength if we fight because I am prepared to die and you are desperate to live’ (Durrani 1991, 379). Ironically, his brutal attitude rejuvenates his wife. There are various ways to make women invisible; to ignore them or to banish them. ‘Woman died again to remind the world that she had lived’ (MacDonald 2012). Durrani ‘a prisoner settled in a monstrous routine was a changed woman benefiting and speaking for the rights of other women folk’ (Durrani 1991, 158). Khar is represented as an oppressor of women; a man whom Durrani cherishes as a charismatic personality after her first meeting with time. He is a man at the extreme of self pride and arrogance.

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Once you were Begum Tehmina Mustafa Khar. Now you are just Tehmina Durrani. When you ring up people, you have to introduce yourself as my ex wife. (Durrani 1991, 374)

His first wife Naubahar proves to be a muse for Khar’s destiny and Durrani’s courage to write the book. ‘A woman will destroy you like you have destroyed me’ (Durrani 1991, 94). Khar’s villainy is foreshadowed in relation to his wives: If a husband turned out to be a brute, it was the wife’s duty to persevere until she changed his character. A broken marriage was a reflection of a woman’s failure. (Durrani 1991, 29)

Khar is the representation of a terrorist occupying sanctity and space of his wife who announced ‘Jihad’ against him; a movement to represent the silent majority to raise controversial issues that most people feel afraid to speak about. Her ‘movement spoke the forgotten language of truth’ (Durrani 1991, 382). Khar pledges her in marriage but she manages to survive dramatically. Khar’s role as an oppressor is illuminated in Durrani’s resistance. I stared at Mustafa and said ‘you’ have stripped me of everything. But from today you can never say that Tehmina is your wife. You lost me in the bargain. (Durrani 1991, 364)

Performativity of his character is equally expressive in relation to his wife Sherry who theorizes him suffering from an inferiority complex. He aims to overpower women from influential social groups to sustain power and access to elite class. Elite class combats feudalism considering it an old and conservative system. It may be assumed that Khar is aware of his lack of breeding and style and endeavors to dominate the structure that ‘ridiculed his origin’ (Durrani 1991, 95). Psychology defines an individual’s extreme actions are the reflection of several complexes in personality. In another instance, when Khar discovers Safia’s (his former wife) infidelity, he beats her without mercy and breaks several of her ribs. Even worse, he orders one of the maids to put ‘red chili powder into the vagina of poor Dai Ayesha … for not informing him of the affair’ (Durrani 1991, 94). The performativity of the scenes exposes him as a fiend and cruel.

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Khar’s performativity reflects the actions of a patriarch wounding self respect and dignity of his wife who in response considers insults as personal private matters and hopes to work the situation out. Khar’s presence drives Durrani to fright; however, she adheres to the alleged paramount of dignity. She confesses how her love transforms into fear. Khar frequently ridicules her ‘lost face,’ which she considers to be the punishment of unfaithfulness to her first husband. She finally understands Sherry’s (Mustafa’s former wife) dilemma—‘by the minute [she] became like her (Durrani 1991, 106). Khar’s actions are also narrated as Karma. The narrative explicitly describes the malicious actions of Khar forcing his wife not to be silently ostracized spectators even though lords and bureaucrats are idealized as bona fide figures in the society. Khar is successful in isolating her from all her relations. He forces her into silence. He influences her to ‘learn to live in crisis and was trained to cope with uncertainty’ (Durrani 1991, 253). He frequently assures her of his sincerity. Tehmina you must never fear me. You must talk to me about everything; whenever you want to I always love you and be kind to you. (Durrani 1991, 89) He expected her ‘to accept Mustafa’s interpretation [of Quran] without question’. (Durrani 1991, 107)

Khar Performs a ‘Feudal Lord’: Incarnation of Devil There is a fantasy of a feudal lord as an exotic, tall, dark and handsome man, with flashing eyes and traces of quick-tempered gypsy blood. Images of him parrying thrusts with the fiercest of swordsmen and riding off into the sunset on his black steed set the pubescent heart aflutter. He is seen as a passionate ladies man and something of a rough diamond, the archetypal male chauvinist who forces a woman to love him despite his treatment of her. (My Feudal Lord, Writer’s note)

The writer’s note explains the reception of feudal lord in Pakistani society. Khar is exposed as ‘complex ridden’ feudal landlord, exasperated on hearing her writing a book. She reminds him of his earlier

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ridicule, ‘Well Mustafa! Now the world will know you only as Tehmina Durrani’s ex husband (Durrani 1991, 382). Khar’s conduct makes his complexes conspicuous, exposing his irrational villainous actions. He is a conventional feudal physically abusing his wives as his conception of masculinity. I did not know how long the beating lasted. It could have been ten minutes; it could have been two hours. The intensity made it an eternity. (Durrani 1991, 103)

Distress due to feudal system prevails upon in rural areas of Pakistan. The system literally use women like animals, meant to rear children and carry household. A member of elite social class, Durrani shows compliance to her husband. Khar keeps her in a distressful period of fourteen years of mental and physical chastisement, which consequently compels her to rebel. My humiliation at his hands was relatively less than if I exposed it to other. I was mortified by the thought of publicity. Fear of the indignity made me cringe. I was conditioned to believe in the concept that image is the paramount thing. (Durrani 1991, 104)

If the contemporary Pakistani feudal system is compared with the nineteenth century feudal and capitalist baron system, heartlessness of barons created ‘space for communist’ and the lack of compassion for ordinary people seemed to have created ‘space for Islamic extremism’ (Kristof 2009). Importance of autobiographies of female writers under the postcolonial effects was a great help in shaping an ‘identity grounded in [the] diverse experiences of endurance (Boehmer 1995, 225). One discovers in Durrani’s narrative the feudal lord exercises social psychological power to subdue his wife as land and property for thirteen years. ‘To talk about women’s rights in a feudalist society is to show red rag to male chauvinist feudal bulls’ (Khan 2011). My Feudal Lord (1991) illustrates Pakistani woman’s purposeful ignorance and unawareness to be dominated by their lords in all life affairs. Predominantly, feudal lords consider the seclusion of woman inside the household. In the system, a woman is required to seek permission to leave house for a purpose and must be accompanied by a male family member. Concept of woman

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mobility varies in different regions of Pakistan, which ‘proves to be a particularly formidable to closing gender gaps’ (Khan 2011). Khar is a feudal exposed to the modern world with his own philosophies. He keeps his wife suppressed and cloistered and also demands her to be his companion at the same time, which reveals man’s psyche using women as he wants (Durrani 1991, 107). ‘I became incapable of thinking logically indeed I was afraid to think’ (Durrani 1991, 108). Khar’s exploitation of Durrani instigates her to voice her misery ‘yet not daring to speak in order to keep her marriage. But for how long? The subaltern is learning to speak.’ She is trapped… fallen into the classical trap of the Pakistani marriage. The goal is marriage and once achieved, the further is a life of total subordination. I had no power, no rights, no will of my own. (Durrani 1991, 100)

Khar promises sanity after every beating and humiliation and she like a conventional Pakistani woman believes the crises are over soon. Khar uses her first marriage ‘as a stick to beat’ her of being capable of infidelity (Durrani 1991, 106). This was a feudal hang- up: his class believed that a woman was on instrument of man’s carnal pleasure. If the woman ever indicated that she felt pleasure, she was a potential adulteress, not to be trusted. (Durrani 1991, 107)

The narrative portrays feudal lord crushing women’s sensuality. Khar making love to his wife illustrates his wife’s anguish controlling her impulses that may infuriate him. Khar choosing the direction for her life, disgusts a potential thoughtful woman. For a feudal, it is criminal to grant woman liberation. Feudal has the right to punish his wife. It illustrates feudalism is the chief obstruction in the way of women empowerment. Women’s mobility is closely associated with issues of purdah (veil) and izzat (honor). Seclusion of women within the household is the ideal form of restricted mobility. Women to date cannot ‘challenge the veiling and segregation system in Pakistan’ (Riaz 2012). The readers find Khar as an incarnation of feudalism who finds pleasure and pride in humiliating his wife to the extent of stripping her naked and brainwashing his children ‘completely strip [ing] her out of his life, this was the difference between man and woman’ (Durrani 1991, 373). His

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actions caused her to reveal her marital truths. ‘A closed society considered it obscene for a women to reveal her intimate secret, but would not silence be a greater crime? (Durrani 1991, 374). She decides to cast a stone at the hypocrisy of Khar to break the traditional silence.

Khar Performs a ‘Politician and Seducer’: ‘Law of Jungle’ Many readers have construed the narrative as a political propaganda fabricated to achieve certain personal aims. Many aspects of the narrative are well identified with real life stories. The second part of the autobiography reveals in its title ‘Law of the jungle’ Khar’s savagery. Here the readers find Khar, the feudal as a politician and infidel husband at his best. His performativity reflects zeal to immortalize his actions. The text interacts with readers to supplement, expand, and clarify the ‘interior and even the exterior lives’ of Khar and Durrani (Bacon in Dailey et al. 1984, 84). Khar’s role appears to fulfill the obligations his feudal background has imparted on him. The book reflects despairingly a woman enjoying the position and status of a renowned politician’s wife, however, her private life mirrors control of a lord negating the existence of a woman. It implies the sexual oppression profoundly ingrained in social structure as ‘coercive power’ (Beasley 1999). He backed off and sat in an armchair. He watched as I slowly began to remove my shirt…I felt blood drying on my swollen lips and nose. With trembling fingers, I pulled off my underclothes. (Durrani 1991, 164)

Sexual domination in patriarchal discourse considers sex instrumental in power assertion rather than mutual physical affinity. For Khar Durrani is his ‘last duchess,’ a product ‘in whichever way the owner/master deems fit’. Such episodes ‘crippled her spirits,’ as she feels humiliated awfully (Durrani 1991, 165). It is the routine conduct of Khar, the ‘daily behaviour,’ which describes him within the diabolic constraints who treats her irrationally though he is neither sick nor unreasonable. If his character is compared to the famous iconic image of Bronte’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights , probably love is overshadowed by the discursive practices of both the characters, which determine their roles as villains. For

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Durrani, as was for Catherine. ‘There was not one iota of self esteem left. The shame had burned it down to ashes. I was exposed as nothing’ (Durrani 1991, 165). In the character depiction of Khar, real life engagements, and role play becomes indistinguishable (Schechner 2013). The narrative has attributed Khar sexual oppression as a ‘fundamental form’ of his personality (Beasley 1999). His character portrays the attributes as a matter of pride. He joins politics to represent and support peasants. His is a traditional family where peasants are slaves to his will and women bound to household analogous to crop. Both are silent spectators to the will of their ‘Lord and from the Lord.’ Khar’s ‘bouts of violence and insanity’ characterize his efforts in bringing back Durrani to Pakistan form England in the name of rescuing Pakistan from military control. He plays the role of a successful politician. He constructs an ideological affinity to persuade his wife to return. Khar also portrays a seducer, enticing Adila, his sister in law but his wife protects him against the accusation. She is a ‘prisoner’ and yields to ignore the infidelity of her husband to save family honor. Khar like other feudal lords ‘thrive and multiply on silence.’ Colonial powers disguised in feudalism and hundred years old patriarchal conventions embodied in Khar augmenting his wife’s resistance. ‘There had been too many false starts towards freedom. This time my decision was irrevocable’ (Durrani 1991, 357). His wife turns into his reflection. ‘What have you become! Tehmina? I returned a confident smile and chide, ‘I have become You, Mustafa’ (Durrani 1991, 361–362).

Conclusion The study concludes how fiction encourages new insight into more general critical concepts of Feudalism as evil incarnation denying women’s position in Pakistani society. The character of Khar embodies ‘presentation of self,’ reinstates his behavior as a feudal to expose feudal culture. His performative role provides glimpse into Pakistani feudal activity, rituals, and its conventions. The feudal lords aware of their lack of breeding and education try to make their entry in the elite class and attract the females planning to subjugate them after marriage. Role of the feudal lord is evaluated to highlight dynamism of patriarchy active in Pakistani social system and if a woman raises her voice against the feudal lord, she is

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branded with many labels as being inconsistent and infidel. As a convention, Khar inspires a woman ensnaring her into vows of sincerity and once conquered forces her into mental and physical agony. He performs the role of a playboy trapping her former husband, engaging him to date his wife. Fighting the villain in her real life, Durrani earned the name of adulteress in Pakistani newspapers. However, My Feudal Lord reflects Pakistani patriarchal society with lords as diabolic heroes. Khar performs all roles for social acceptability. Many aspects of the book can be identified with the real-life stories. The study is significant to highlight villainy of feudal through performativity which happens to be a milestone in the development of women’s status in a conservative society and a hope for the ‘utopian’ state, which aims to ignore all the gender differences and levels the rights of men and women. Representation of ‘art’ and ‘life’ are not only separate but of different orders of perpetuating reality. The narrative as an ultimate performance of modesty reveals real-life situations of Mustafa Khar and Tehmina Durrani. Khar’s performative role as a ‘foil’ elevates Durrani’s marginalized self.

References Ahmed, Zia. 2013. “Postcolonial Feminism and Pakistani Fiction.” International Research Journal of Arts & Humanities (IRJAH) 41, no. 41: 1–20. Austin, John Longshaw. 1962. How To Do Things With Words (William James Lectures). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bacon, Wallace A. 1979. The Art of Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Beasley, Chris. 1999. What Is Feminism? An Introduction to Feminist Theory. London: Sage. Boehmer, Ellek. 1995. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conquergood, Dwight. 1985. “Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance.” Literature in Performance 5, no. 2: 1–13. Dailey, Sheron J., Wallace A. Bacon, Ted Colson, Dwight Conquergood, Marion Kleinau, and Thomas O. Sloane. 1984. “Forum: Issues in Interpretation.” Literature in Performance 5, no. 1: 83–92. Durrani, Tehmina. 1991. My Feudal Lord. Lahore: T. Durrani. Kashtan, Miki. 2017. “Why Patriarchy Is Not About Men.” Psychology Today, August 4. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/acquired-spo ntaneity/201708/why-patriarchy-is-not-about-men.

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Khan, Momina. 2011. “Feudalism—The Death of Women Rights in Pakistan.” NEWS Pakistan, October 18. http://www.newspakistan.pk/2011/10/18/ feudalism-the-death-of-women-rights-in-pakistan/. Kristof, Nicholas. 2009. “Feudalism in Pakistan.” New York Times, August 1. http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/feudalism-in-pakistan/. MacDonald, Myra. 2012. “The Woman Who Died Twice; Pakistan and Acid Attacks.” Reuters, March 26. http://blogs.reuters.com/pakistan/2012/03/ 26/the-woman-who-died-twice-pakistan-and-acid-attacks/. Riaz, Amber Fatima. 2012. “Architectures of The Veil: The Representation of The Veil and Zenanas in Pakistani Feminists’ Texts.” PhD dissertation, University of Western Ontario. Schechner, Richard. 2013. Performance Studies: An Introduction. London/New York: Routledge. Ul-Hassan, Taimur. 2008. “Authoritarianism in Pakistan.” Journal of Political Studies 15: 1–23. http://pu.edu.pk/images/journal/pols/Currentissue-pdf/ Roots%20of%20authoritarianism%20in%20Pakistan-KU.pdf. Willis, Ellen. 1984. “Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism.” Social Text 9, no. 10: 91–118. Witherspoon, Gary. 1977. Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Zolbrod, P.G. 1992. Diné Bahane’: The Navajo Creation Story. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

CHAPTER 14

Good Versus Evil in Max’s Lucha Libre Adventures Series (2011–2020) by Xavier Garza Amy Cummins

Introduction to Author Xavier Garza A Mexican American author, artist, and educator born in 1968, Xavier Garza grew up in in the border community of Rio Grande City in Starr County, Texas, located on the border with the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico (Cummins, Sanchez, and Severn 2018, 10). Garza holds an undergraduate degree in art from the institution that became the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and a graduate degree in art history from the University of Texas San Antonio. He considers himself a “Chicano artist” and storyteller, and he credits his family and Mexican American artists and writers as influences (ASU Hispanic Research Center 2013). Residing in San Antonio, Texas, Garza teaches art and art history to secondary and college students. Garza provides illustrations as well as the narrative for most of his books, which are published by Cinco Puntos Press in El Paso and Arte Público Press in Houston, Texas. He wrote

A. Cummins (B) University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, TX, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_14

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sixteen books for children and young adults between 2004 and 2020. Garza’s books use varied genres and formats, from children’s picture storybooks to novels and story collections for intermediate or middlegrade readers. His fiction crosses classifications of realism, adventure, horror, supernatural mystery, and folklore. The wrestlers of lucha libre—Mexican freestyle wrestling—are a recurring topic in Garza’s fiction. His picture book Lucha Libre: The Man in the Silver Mask, A Bilingual Cuento (2005) prefigures the later Maximilian series; the protagonist is a boy who loves lucha libre and whose uncle is a luchador, and the rules of play are explained during the course of the action. Garza also wrote and illustrated a counting book on luchadores, The Great and Mighty Nikko (2015). Max’s Lucha Libre Adventure series (2011–2020) targets intermediate readers ages 8–12. The series has four novels through 2020: Maximilian and the Mystery of the Guardian Angel (2011), Maximilian and the Bingo Rematch (2013), Maximilian and the Lucha Libre Club (2016), and Maximilian and the Curse of the Fallen Angel (2020). The bilingual publication opens Garza’s books to a wide audience. Garza writes the original text in English, and the translation into Spanish is provided by scholars selected by his publisher, Cinco Puntos Press for this series. The dual-language books in the Maximilian series vary in length from 202 to 235 pages, and between 20 and 27 chapters, printing the English and the Spanish versions on facing pages. The present analysis interprets only Garza’s English edition of the narratives and does not cover the translations, which were done by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite with Carla González Campos for the first book, Francisco Vargas for the second book, and Luis Humberto Crosthwaite for the last two books. Garza’s pen-and-ink drawings open each chapter. Garza’s illustrations portray luchadores, the audience at live matches, and adolescent characters, capturing the energy and visual appeal of lucha libre. Like lucha libre itself, Garza’s books inspire fans from all ages and walks of life.

The Craft of Lucha Libre and the Fame of Luchadores Transcending boundaries of sport and genre, lucha libre is a popular phenomenon. Within the formats of professional wrestling, lucha libre is considered a “sports spectacle” or “an athletic performance practice”

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rather than traditional athletics (Mazer 1998, 4). It takes place on a borderline among “the normally separable categories of sport, theater and ritual” (Levi 2008, 8). Lucha libre sometimes functions as theater of resistance mocking a corrupt political system. Lucha libre has been interpreted as artistic text, with the luchadores (wrestlers) as artists and their luchas (matches or bouts) as works of art that “create a special reality more real than the one we normally see and live” (Gabara 2000, 288). Art photography documents luchadores’ elite status and uniqueness (Grobet 2008; Venville 2012). Creating a persona, the mask is essential to popular fascination with wrestlers who are enmáscarados. Distinctive, colorful costumes with masks indicate character identities. Writer Ximena Rojo de la Vega Guinea describes how masks in lucha libre build on “the rich traditions of masks in Mexico’s indigenous and mestizo cultures” and represent “the act of becoming another while remaining oneself” (2018, 111). Masks can also be interpreted as satirizing the government and evoking archetypal struggles. Anthropologist Heather Levi expresses that “the mask serves as a metonym for the genre itself” (2008, 134). Donning the mask transforms “the wrestler-actor into the character” (113). The mask symbolizes the honor of the enmáscarados and creates the reason “for attacks on that honor and for its defense” (134). Garza’s character Rodolfo calls the mask “a luchador’s greatest weapon” (2011, 110). The face beneath the mask must not be seen or connected to the role, for “a wrestler thus unmasked is disempowered” and often, the role retired (Levi 2008, 115). The celebrated character of a masked luchador differs from other formations of fame in contemporary culture. The reception and notoriety are limited to his or her persona in the ring. While roles extend outside the ring in that wrestlers will appear publicly as the alter egos, after they remove the costuming, wrestlers no longer inhabit the famous role; or rather, they mask the famous character beneath an everyday identity. This contrasts to celebrities for whom the role is as much or more about the private life than about the career; for a luchador, the renown resides in the professional role, and the mask separates the two identities. Because success requires audience response, wrestlers connect with fans and collapse divisions between the hierarchical positions of the celebrated name and the everyday fan. While lucha libre began much earlier, wrestlers started using masks in the 1930s (Rojo de la Vega Guinea 2018, 110). The rising use of masks at mid-twentieth century “coincided with the advent and growth

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of the wrestling movie” and the creation of “iconic status” around masked characters such as El Santo (The Saint), Blue Demon, and Huracán Ramírez (Levi 2008, 112). Approximately three hundred lucha libre films, a genre of low-budget action movies featuring real wrestling stars, were made between 1952 and 1983. The Mexican films encouraged “sportslike interactivity” among viewers, who could be “loud, opinionated, or even openly hostile to the screen” (Rauber Rodriguez 2020, 44). As film success intertwined with wrestlers’ reputations in the ring, wrestlers were recruited to films, which expanded their fame and “elevated the flesh and blood wrestler to a mythic status” (Levi 2008, 191). Movies made the wrestler larger than life, as in the case of El Santo, star of over fifty films— and as one of Xavier Garza’s favorite enmáscarados, an influence on the Guardian Angel. Although scholars fault the positioning lucha libre films received in the United States and Canada (Rauber Rodriguez 2020), the films retain significance. Lucha libre developed as live performance, and mass media built its popularity. Because lucha libre initially was not televised in Mexico, the style of free wrestling developed through “displays of acrobatics and agility,” almost like “a theater in the round that further emphasized the visual, gestural, three-dimensional aspects of performance” (Levi 2008, 192). Its return to Mexican television in the early 1990s gained a new audience of “an emerging middle-class fanship” encompassing all ages (204). Television provided access to a broadening range of fans, and promotional marketing increased. Lucha libre fans enjoy comic books, magazines, and memorabilia such as souvenir masks, keychains, figurines, posters, and more collectibles. Classic matches and films are available for viewing. Lucha libre is a recognizable element of global popular culture. Lucha libre combines a version of the authentic (wrestling as sport) and the artificial (wrestling as performance). Luchadores work with each other, not against each other. Central to wrestling is “a tradition of cooperative rather than competitive exchanges of apparent power between men” (Mazer 1998, 4). The outcome is known by participating wrestlers, with many moves planned and practiced in advance, akin to staging a performance. In professional wrestling, the term kayfabe refers to fictional and scripted aspects of the show. Heather Levi describes gleaning “the public secret of the fixed ending” during her training as a luchadora although “at no time in the course of that training did any wrestler, trainer, or fellow trainee ever explicitly communicate to me the fact that

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lucha libre was fixed” (2008, 28, 31). Audience members join in the experience and enjoy a willing suspension of disbelief. Advance planning does not remove the athleticism and skill of creating the narrative for which wrestlers combine techniques and choreographed moves with improvisation and free-form. The punches land, and holds cause pain. What wrestlers do is real even though they plan outcomes in advance. Joaquin “Tempest” Anaya states in Maximilian: “Whether the outcome of a match is predetermined isn’t the point. What matters is that you bring the crowd to its feet, that you make them chant your name” (Garza 2011, 98). The actors know their roles and collaborate to achieve an impressive performance for the fanáticos. Fans understand the format for play in a match: técnicos (symbolizing heroism or the good) battle rudos (symbolizing villainy or evil). Técnicos and rudos are analogous to faces and heels in other professional wrestling styles. The referees are participants in the drama, pretending not to see rule violations, and thus connoting “the inevitable failure of the representatives of authority in the ring to assure a fair fight and a just end” (Mazer 1998, 153). The fiction that the referees do not observe violations escalates the drama. Yet ultimately, it is known but not discussed that “the true power lies not in the ring at all but rather in the hands of the promoter whose contract with a wrestler includes the right to dictate his success or failure” (153). This understanding gives rise to the belief that wrestling is life, and life is, like wrestling, a perpetual struggle, especially for marginalized people. In Garza’s series, descriptions of matches are vividly narrated through the adolescent narrator’s perspective. The heightened drama upholds the title of Max’s Lucha Libre Adventure Series because matches are described vividly in each book. The way Max narrates the wrestling action as a ringside observer draws readers into the athleticism and theatricality. Because Maximilian usually does not know the planned outcomes and because the books convey the texture of watching much-anticipated bouts, Garza does not refer directly to how winners are determined by owners and promoters rather than on the basis of athletic merit. Nor does Garza reveal the full extent to which ring officials are part of the play, as the series preserves the fiction that officials do not see misdeeds. Max’s Lucha Libre Adventures books provide wish fulfillment for folks who want to be wrestlers. Max’s uncle Lalo gains a career in lucha libre. Even the adolescents get to wrestle on stage. At the end of the fourth

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book, Max and his fellow members of the Lucha Libre Club—adolescent relatives of successful wrestlers—appear to be given only one day’s notice that they will be onstage participants in the wrestling action that concludes the career of Rodolfo as the Guardian Angel (2020, 170). In reality, wrestlers of any age would have prepared precisely for what needed to happen. But the book presents the event as surprising like an observer would experience it. Max, his brother Robert, Paloma, and four friends enter the ring and help the Guardian Angel to defeat the Fallen Angel in an emotionally resonant moment.

Tío Rodolfo as the Guardian Angel: Even a Champion Has Regrets Iconic in the ring and onscreen, the idealized persona of the Guardian Angel exists on a level above everyday reality. Almost forty years before the series, Max’s great-uncle Tío Rodolfo gave up his origins and let his family believe he had died. After a chance encounter at a match in San Antonio, Rodolfo chooses to reveal himself and reunite with his surviving relatives. Rodolfo visits Rio Grande City to explain how he became El Ángel de la Guarda, who symbolizes good when battling adversaries in the ring. The expectation to remain near home oppressed young Rodolfo, who always wanted to travel and see the world. According to family lore, Rodolfo “was a dreamer” whose “head had been filled with dreams of fame and fortune” (Garza 2011, 82). Rodolfo’s older brother Antonio— Max’s grandfather—wanted Rodolfo “to pull his life together” but ended up pushing him away (84). Rodolfo explains to Max that Antonio had been “like a father” after their father died when Rodolfo was young; the community admired Antonio for taking responsibility, because Antonio “sacrificed his own plans for the sake of the family” (202). But Rodolfo refused to stay in the south Texas borderlands and bear responsibility to support the family: “I had dreams of my own. I wanted to travel to big cities, to see the world. I wanted to make my mark in the world even if I had no idea how” (202). These words coming from a successful, wealthy adult sound convincing to a young reader and validate Rodolfo’s choice. The series lets Rodolfo get away with his choice to pretend he was dead and disregard his family. Rodolfo left Texas with a friend who returned years later without him, reporting that Rodolfo got killed in a knife fight in Monterrey, a large city in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, famous

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for lucha libre. The truth was that Rodolfo recovered from the stabbing, and Tempest Anaya trained him to be a luchador. Rodolfo tells Max he disappeared because people judged him when he left town and felt that he abandoned the family, so he made it true. Rodolfo claims he chose as a wrestling identity El Ángel de la Guarda because of respect for his older brother Antonio, as Rodolfo used to call Antonio “my guardian angel” (Garza 2011, 202). Despite this esteem, Rodolfo allowed Antonio and all of their relatives to believe he had died. Although this course of action, compounded over forty years, renders the Guardian Angel morally suspect and blurs the boundary between good and evil, Rodolfo ultimately compensates for the betrayal. Machismo, a debated cultural value in Mexican American male culture, poses another conflict for Tío Rodolfo. Machismo carries diverse meaning about masculinity, both positive and negative, and can connote qualities such as nurturance, hard work, and taking care of one’s family (Mirandé 1997). Psychologists analyze that Mexican American men perceive separate dimensions of machismo, with traditional maleness associated with being “aggressive, sexist, chauvinistic, and hypermasculine” (Arciniega et al. 2008, 29). The value of “caballerismo,” or chivalry, is described as having “emotional connectedness” and being “nurturing, family centered, and chivalrous” (Arciniega et al. 2008, 29). Garza’s series endorses caballerismo, the favorable dimension of this perspective on masculinity, particularly through the characterization of Lalo, Max’s younger uncle. But if expectations of men include providing for one’s family and protecting or defending them (Mirandé 1997), Rodolfo arguably deserted duty when he let them think he was dead and pursued a career behind the mask. Although it has been astutely noted that the book Maximilian and the Mystery of the Guardian Angel “underscores the closeness of family in the Latino culture” (Naidoo and Quiroa 2016, 63), the book and series demonstrate furthermore that individuals chafe against expectations and resist obligations. Rodolfo relinquished his family even before he began wrestling. He was wandering without a job when happenstance led him into the knife fight and subsequently to fortuitous mentorship into wrestling. For four decades, Rodolfo neither communicated with his family nor sent them money. There was no anonymous paying of rent, mortgages, or bills, no secret creation of a college fund, and no surprise gift of an appliance, nor do any characters in the book ever voice they would have expected such things. But to some contemporary readers,

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Antonio bore all the responsibility, and Rodolfo was derelict in duty. No matter what else Rodolfo achieves, he cannot erase this abandonment. Dramatizing the conflict that can arise between pursuing personal dreams and respecting family obligations, Xavier Garza suggests that being a guardian angel goes beyond vocation and should involve family, even as the series validates the self-actualization Rodolfo pursued. It is never too late for redemption. Rodolfo missed out on family members’ lives and let his parents and siblings die without suspecting he still lived. If not for the coincidence of seeing his relatives at the wrestling match, it is unknown whether he would have made contact. The surviving family members generously welcome Rodolfo back with joy in a variation of the Biblical parable of the prodigal son. Rodolfo wants to make up for his long absence. He organizes a fundraising wrestling match for their church, bringing top competitors who come to the small border town to support a friend. Rodolfo trains Max and an older nephew, Lauriano, known as Lalo, and helps Lalo to get a well-paid career. While in the first book, Rodolfo sees Lalo get married, in the fourth book, Rodolfo himself marries the woman he had loved in the distant past, Maya Escobedo, who played Silver Star. Rodolfo announces that marriage is why he is retiring, but his advancing age is as much of a factor for concluding his wrestling career (Garza 2020, 196). Rodolfo revels in the glory of his career yet laments abandoning his family. He tells Max’s mother, his niece Braulia, “I regret not being there for you and Lalo growing up. I regret not having been there when my brother and sister died” (Garza 2011, 86). He voices his guilt now that he is mature: “I’ve often wondered myself if I made a mistake, choosing lucha libre over having a family. When I was younger it didn’t matter much to me, but now…” (Garza 2013, 170). Trailing off suggests selfawareness that he has missed too much. Rodolfo admits, “I’m the greatest luchador in the whole world when I’m wearing my mask, Max, but who am I when I take it off?” (2013, 170). Yet it seems that if he had it to do over again, Rodolfo probably would have done mostly the same—just perhaps not let himself be believed dead by his blood—for the Guardian Angel could never have existed if Rodolfo had not left Rio Grande City. Even if Rodolfo as a private person has doubts, the Guardian Angel persona is bold and powerful. He is aware of his status as “the greatest luchador in the world” (2013, 106), according to Max’s adoring view as protagonist. The Guardian Angel does not need any pretense of humility. Rodolfo freed himself from all constraints by striking out on

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his own, gaining liberation from social expectations. Rodolfo’s professional success can be interpreted as showing that Mexican Americans should be unwilling to settle for anything less than equal opportunity, full civil rights, financial success, and power. Rodolfo is a powerful leader in his field and a world champion wrestler. Although Garza has numerous scenes of wrestlers cooperating with each other outside and inside the ring, he does not display owners’ making decisions about who wins or loses. This renders the Guardian Angel even more autonomous and dominant. Rodolfo’s ambitious desire represents being true to oneself, and young readers identify with his goal of self-determination. Further excusing Rodolfo’s desertion, a flashback chapter enhances the impression that Rodolfo was destined for greatness; told by Max’s mother, “The Story of el Diablo” portrays Rodolfo as the “big football hero” valiantly rescuing Braulia, age twelve, and her future husband, Ventura, from an angry bull by leaping atop it and then, once thrown, tricking the bull into attacking a fire hydrant and being rendered unconscious (2016, 56). Rodolfo’s greatness deserved to be seen on the international platforms of the ring and screen. Rodolfo’s stardom accentuates the fact that his uncertain quest did not merely earn him a living but made him wealthy and renowned. His masked image appears in movies, murals, billboards, and magazines. Max has seen his movies such as The Guardian Angel versus the Invaders from the Planet Mars. When Rodolfo tells a fake story to explain the situation to a gullible family friend, he copies the scenario from his movie The Guardian Angel versus the Crime Syndicate (2011, 106). The family rides on Rodolfo’s private plane, and Max and his friends visit the movie set where the Guardian Angel’s newest film is being made. Even if Rodolfo committed a malevolent act by leaving his family and faking his death, earthly success has been his reward.

Inheriting Roles: Who Will Be the Next Guardian Angel? In lucha libre, character identities may be conferred from parent to child or godparent to godchild. Masked roles are often inherited, and the wrestler chooses the successor. Thus, the mask makes a luchador “appear to efface time” because the role may continue through generations (Levi 2008, 118). Some classic wrestlers have successors who carried on the name, such as El Hijo del Santo, Huracán Ramírez Jr., and Blue Demon

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Jr. Levi points out that “The person who dons a classic mask may not, in fact, be the son or nephew of the original, but it is conventionally expected that he will be” (2008, 119). Max seeks to follow his uncle as the Guardian Angel. The fictional Rodolfo links to the real wrestler and actor El Santo, who inspired the character of the Guardian Angel. His real name was Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta. El Santo’s youngest son, Jorge Guzmán Rodríguez, became El Hijo del Santo, the Son of the Saint, whose son continued the name for a third generation. El Hijo del Santo recollects: “I was about eight when I realized that El Santo, my favorite movie hero, was also my dad…. I remember sitting there with my dad when, all of a sudden, he puts on the mask!” (Grobet 2008, 297). Unlike El Santo, Rodolfo has no children. Max thinks about his great-uncle: “As the Guardian Angel, he has thousands and thousands of fans, but there is one thing he does not have: The Guardian Angel has no successor. He has no son to carry on the name of the Guardian Angel” (Garza 2011, 200). Max’s fixation on lineage permeates the series. He resents someone outside the family line potentially usurping the name when the Fallen Angel rises. Max already idolizes the Guardian Angel for years before discovering his great-uncle Rodolfo created and inhabits the role. Online in Instant Messenger, Max’s screen name is “Guardian Angel 2,” and he wears the mask in his profile picture (Garza 2013, 183). For a costume dance at school, he dons the costume of the Guardian Angel, proud of its authenticity, because Rodolfo tells his nephew, “it was made by the same person that makes all of his own Guardian Angel masks and capes” (22). Max perceives life like a wrestling match, as when he thinks during a difficult situation: “If ever there was a time for the Guardian Angel to make a daring last-minute rescue, this was it” (130). Max identifies even more closely with the Guardian Angel after discovering his blood relation to the luchador and becoming close with him. Far from resenting his great-uncle for disappearing long ago, Max increases in his admiration. The series rewards Max’s ambition and dedication to wrestling. Max trains throughout the series during which he also grows up, starting at eleven years old in the summer before sixth grade, and ending at age fourteen with the start of ninth grade. While Max is too young to join the career professionally, he is on his way to it. Max confides to Rodolfo that he wants to fill the role of the Guardian Angel, and the first book closes with Rodolfo’s foreshadowing: “That will be the happiest day of my life” (2011, 206). In the fourth book, Max helps the Guardian Angel

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to defeat the Fallen Angel as they use the signature move “the Hand of God”: “Together we lift the Fallen Angel up into the air and bring him crashing down to the canvas, hard” (2020, 192). After winning, the Guardian Angel addresses the crowd about his retirement and appears to be unmasking before the arena goes dark, thus preserving his identity. When the lights return, Max is alone in the ring, holding the Guardian Angel’s mask aloft. A spotlight on Max implies that Max could inherit the role and fight as the Guardian Angel, but Max may also symbolize any young aspirant. The crowd chants “ANGEL! ANGEL! ANGEL!” (200). Max reflects that although his uncle is retiring from the role, the Guardian Angel is “still here with us. He lives on in me. He lives on in them,” through the fans and the wrestlers (202). The icon endures.

Gender Issues and Lucha Libre Royalty While exploring masculinity is a prominent aspect of this series, Garza demonstrates that lucha libre can be by and for both men and women and includes multiple women characters. Max’s mother, Braulia, speaks truth to Rodolfo’s power. Sonia Escobedo shifts from a jealous ex-girlfriend to a mentor and leader. Max’s fellow Club-member Spooky (daughter of Dogman Aguayo), his older sister Rita, and his first love Cecilia Cantu contribute to the plot. Among prominent women wrestlers in the series are Maya Escobedo as Silver Star and her daughter, Sonia Escobedo, as the Masked Lady or Masked Damsel. Max reflects that after Rodolfo’s retirement, “Where is it written that the new Guardian Angel has to be a guy?” (2020, 52). The fourth book in particular includes numerous illustrations of women and girl characters. Paloma’s characterization grows until she becomes a major character and Lucha Libre Club leader as well as taking on the role of Max’s girlfriend. Being “lucha libre royalty” is crucial to Paloma’s identity (2013, 144). Wrestling prestige affects Max’s romantic life when Paloma moves to his school and pursues him both because she genuinely likes him yet also because they are both family members of famous luchadores. Paloma reveals to Max her wish of becoming a luchadora like her aunt Sonia Escobeda, who wrestles as La Dama Enmascarada. Paloma later discloses that her father was Flama Roja, the Red Flame, who suffered back injuries then became a costume designer for the Guardian Angel and other stars (2016, 90). Max reveals to Paloma his goal to become the Guardian Angel, which makes her the first person after Rodolfo that Max tells.

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Max and Paloma talk often about family heritage, and Paloma delights in saying, “Lucha libre is in our blood” (2013, 142). Paloma is as much of a wrestling fan as Max. She develops into a fully rounded character and the “official chairperson” of their Lucha Libre Club for two years (2020, 131). Max’s romantic triangle with previous girlfriend Cecilia is left open-ended because he still holds feelings for her too. Characterization of Paloma’s aunt, Sonia Escobedo, dramatizes the permeable line between good and evil because La Dama Enmascarada changes from a rudo to a técnico. Sonia is a former girlfriend of Lalo and a luchadora originally from Monterrey. She owns a restaurant called “The Back Breaker Haven,” which has so much memorabilia on the walls that it is “a shrine to the lucha libre superstars of the past and the present” (2011, 133). After a melodramatic display when she runs a truck into the church during Lalo’s wedding to Marisol, the jealous Sonia transforms into a positive figure. Sonia emerges from semi-retirement to wrestle in the fundraiser to repair the church building she ruined. Her wrestling performance during the match mirrors her inner change of character in forgiving Lalo. In her role as la Dama Enmascarada, Sonia switches sides from rudo to técnico and enables the Guardian Angel to keep his mask and win the match (192). The transition from rudo to técnico, which El Santo himself made in 1962, symbolizes the triumph of good over evil. La Dama Enmascarada continues to wrestle as a técnico in later books, and her niece Paloma aspires to be strong and successful like her. Further continuing the motif of lucha libre royalty, book four reveals that Sonia Escobedo is the daughter of Maya Escobedo—the woman Rodolfo once loved, lost, and finally marries when he is in his sixties. Another character who changes sides is Vampire Velasquez, who in the third book suddenly bites Dogman Aguayo’s neck and helps the Guardian Angel to defeat the Mayan Prince (2016, 182). Outside of his role, Velasquez is a close friend to Rodolfo and even the best man in his wedding. Such role shifting shows how the performativity of good and evil, of técnico and rudo, is fundamental to lucha libre and to Garza’s series. Through Garza’s literary craft, the matches are public enactments holding symbolic meanings for Max’s world. The meteoric rise of Max’s young uncle Lalo instantiates a wishfulfillment element of upward mobility. After being trained by Rodolfo, Lalo achieves great success as El Toro Grande, The Mighty Bull, with wrestling as his livelihood. Highway billboards announce the upcoming

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championship when El Toro Grande and El Ángel de la Guarda will battle the rudos. After winning, Lalo reflects: “Just a few months ago I was unemployed, and now I am half of the world tag team champions” (2013, 160). But Lalo’s success does not make him abandon his values. Being of a new generation, Lalo’s needs and priorities differ from Rodolfo’s. Lalo’s wife Marisol announces their pregnancy, and Lalo says that having a baby is “the greatest thing that ever happened to me” (2013, 164). The family does not exactly decide in advance that Lalo will not continue touring after their child is born. While Marisol is seven months pregnant, Lalo breaks his leg in landing badly after a jump from the steel cage, so he and Rodolfo return early from their wrestling tour in Japan (2016, 34). Fortunately, Lalo continues his livelihood, thanks to Rodolfo’s help, as a commentator and scriptwriter for lucha libre, thereby staying part of the action without relinquishing his most valued role of parenting his daughter, Allison Rose. Lalo tells Max he does not want to be the next Guardian Angel because he would not be willing “to risk losing” his family (2020, 58). Lalo occasionally still plays the role of El Toro Grande, such as during Rodolfo’s final match in the fourth book. The series presents Lalo as a new model of masculinity. Being a Guardian Angel in real life requires more than showmanship, skill, and fame; it is about responsibility, service, and love.

The Fallen Angel of Catemaco Functioning as a doppelganger for Rodolfo, the Fallen Angel of Catemaco (El Ángel Caído de Catemaco) is a new challenger who bears both resemblance and opposition to the heroic figure of the Guardian Angel. The term doppelganger applies when characters are mysterious doubles, twins, or mirror images. Professional wrestling regularly uses doppelgangers who are morally opposite. The Fallen Angel gets introduced when Max, Rodolfo, Vampire Velasquez, and Robert are watching a televised match. He wears a mask and costume that are an inversion of the Guardian Angel with different colors, “a black mask with grey flames instead of the traditional silver mask with embroidered orange flames” (Garza 2020, 42). Furthermore, the Fallen Angel employs one of the Guardian Angel’s signature moves, a “finishing maneuver” known as “the Hand of God,” an act of treachery that causes Velasquez to indict the Fallen Angel: “that young punk is trying to steal your character” (42). Perhaps because of the suspension of disbelief about the workings of roles and feuds, Maximilian

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does not recognize that his uncle may have been consulted about the new character. Rodolfo determines that his last match should be against a version of himself. The battle between the Guardian Angel and the Fallen Angel offers a version of the good and evil dichotomy that is inherent in wrestling and further dramatized by character roles who change from villain to hero, from rudo to técnico. The Guardian Angel is always on the side of good and has such a beneficent image that the Fallen Angel must represent the other extreme. The Fallen Angel appears as “the living embodiment of pure evil” and gets introduced with music that sounds “demonic” (2020, 176). Max explains the contrast between these two roles: “While the Guardian Angel seeks to protect the innocent, the Fallen Angel’s desire is to crush them under his heel. Where the Guardian Angel is a symbol of light, the Fallen Angel is the darkness that seeks to usurp it” (180). The stark dichotomy has appeal with the hope that justice will prevail although the rivals could be two sides of the same coin. While the stage persona of the Fallen Angel of Catemaco is a “villain” and a “monster” (2020, 180), the young man who plays the role holds great respect for the Guardian Angel. Garza unfolds this revelation cleverly through a conversation when Max is backstage visiting Lalo where he works as a commentator at the Lucha Libre Azteca television studio. Max encounters a muscled wrestler named Rigoberto practicing before an interview for his voice and gesture in the declaration: “I will crush you” (88). Rigoberto tells Max that when growing up, his favorite luchador was the Guardian Angel, and he and Max discuss their favorite films and facts about their hero. Max thinks, “It seems I’ve found somebody as knowledgeable about the Guardian Angel as I am” (92). Only when Rigoberto puts on his mask in order to be interviewed does he mention that he will combat the Guardian Angel himself. Max realizes he has been talking with the Fallen Angel. This moment surprises Max while pointing to the professionalism of wrestling and the mutual respect that luchadores have for one another when planning performances. The Fallen Angel’s characterization hints at the falseness of the binary opposition between good and evil. The Fallen Angel battles against the Guardian Angel and appears to threaten his legacy, but in fact Rigoberto respects him in the utmost and bolsters his reputation. Despite a public identity that opposes the Guardian Angel, the Fallen Angel is built upon admiration. Relating this to Rodolfo’s own life choices, the Guardian Angel could be seen as himself a Fallen Angel, cast out from heaven and home

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by his own decision, who returns into the fold, thus becoming a Guardian Angel decades after he has been already playing the part.

“Only Legends Live Forever” Max’s Lucha Libre Adventures series by Xavier Garza demonstrates the performative nature of virtue set against villainy. Wrestling scenarios in which técnicos combat rudos, including the battle of the Guardian Angel versus the Fallen Angel, suggest the need for heroes; or perhaps identity is unfixed, and the dichotomy of good versus evil is illusory or permeable. As wrestling shows that character roles are enacted, not innate, lucha libre animates the constructedness of identity. While the scripted basis of lucha libre matches may undermine autonomy, characters hold individual power for self-making, such as Rodolfo who wields great power in his industry and the members of the Lucha Libre Club. Garza’s line drawings in every chapter focus primarily on masked wrestlers and protagonist Maximilian and also include supporting characters and fans, illustrating the collaborative enterprise. The history of lucha libre as a popular entertainment and spectacle along the borderlines of theater, performance, and athletics adds to an appreciation of Garza’s achievement in his book series. Wrestling represents life struggles. In the universal lucha of good versus evil, the side of evil can feel more persuasive than the side of good, but good ultimately triumphs, and it is possible to change sides. The referees will not ensure justice, for life is unfair. Even if owners determine wins and losses, the match is worth playing, and the teamwork deserves respect. Onstage matches showcase a heightened version of the everyday toils of people who will continue to watch and participate in the performance. Garza raises several characters as plausible successors for the role of the Guardian Angel and implies but does not establish definitively that it will be Max. Even Rodolfo’s appearing to end his run could be an illusion. The last lines of the final chapter, titled “Only Legends Live Forever,” refer to the book series as well as the heroic character. Max says the Guardian Angel “lives on in the hearts of every child who will one day put on that silver mask with embroidered orange flames and pretend to be him. The Guardian Angel lives, and one day he will return!” (2020, 202). Readers trust that the series will continue and extend Max’s Lucha Libre Adventures. Xavier Garza’s writings will endure and continue to find readership.

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References Arciniega, G. Miguel, Thomas Anderson, Zoila Tovar-Blank, and Terence J. G. Tracey. 2008. “Toward a Fuller Conception of Machismo: Development of a Traditional Machismo and Caballerismo Scale.” Journal of Counseling Psychology 55, no. 1: 19–33. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.55.1.19. ASU Hispanic Research Center. 2013. “Xavier Garza: Heroes to Love and Remember.” YouTube video, 16:08, March 7, Executive Producer: Gary D. Keller, Producer: Melanie Magisos. https://youtu.be/UOmd8MeBGhI. Cummins, Amy, Amelia Sanchez, and Christine Gonzales Severn. 2018. “Legends in the Making: Contemporary Writers for Children and Young Adults from the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.” Dragon Lode 37, no. 1: 9–15. Gabara, Esther. 2000. “Fighting it Out: Being Naco in the Global Lucha Libre.” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 26: 278–301. https://www.jstor. org/stable/41432962. Garza, Xavier. 2005. Lucha Libre: The Man in the Silver Mask: A Bilingual Cuento. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press. ———. 2011. Maximilian and the Mystery of the Guardian Angel. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press. ———. 2013. Maximilian and the Bingo Rematch. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press. ———. 2015. The Great and Mighty Nikko. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press. ———. 2016. Maximilian and the Lucha Libre Club. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press. ———. 2020. Maximilian and the Curse of the Fallen Angel. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press. Grobet, Lourdes. 2008. Espectacular de lucha libre. Miguel Hidalgo, Mexico City: Trilce Ediciones. Levi, Heather. 2008. The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mazer, Sharon. 1998. Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Mirandé, Alfredo. 1997. Hombres y machos: Masculinity and Latino Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Naidoo, Jamie Campbell, and Ruth Quiroa. 2016. “Beyond calaveras and quinceañeras: Fostering Bilingual Latino Students’ Identity Development with Culturally Relevant Literature.” In Multicultural Literature for Latino Bilingual Children: Their Words, Their Worlds, edited by Ellen Riojas Clark, Belinda Bustos Flores, Howard Smith, and Daniel Alejandro González, 50–68. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Rauber Rodriguez, Emily. 2020. “El Santo vs. Mystery Science Theater 3000: Lucha libre’s Transnational Journey into American Popular Culture.” Velvet Light Trap 85: 43–52.

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Rojo de la Vega Guinea, Ximena. 2018. “Wrestling with Masculinity: Exóticos in Lucha Libre.” In Identity in Professional Wrestling: Essays on Nationality, Race and Gender, edited by Aaron Horton, 109–119. Jefferson, MO: McFarland. Venville, Malcolm. 2012. Lucha Loco: The Free Wrestlers of Mexico. New York: Rizzoli Universe.

PART IV

Obsessed Avengers, Revenants and Vampires in the British and American Romantic Moments

CHAPTER 15

Melville and Ford: Ahab and the Duke John Price

Franklin’s man is a frugal, inoffensive, thrifty citizen, but savors of nothing heroic. (Emerson 1903–1921, 12:255) The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. (Lawrence 1920, 66)

Romanticism is steeped in symbolism. Dark Romanticism, however, is concerned with the fallibility of the symbol. In Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick,1 there resides the paramount example of ambiguous imagery—the whiteness of the whale, which is simultaneously all colors and no color. Equally contradictory is Melville’s monomanical sea captain 1 To some extent, Melville based Moby-Dick on the real-life events of the Essex, a

whaler which was sunk by a whale in 1820. In the 2010 documentary Into the Deep, the narrator says that the Essex “whose dark and dreamlike voyage would haunt the memory of American whaling for generations to come, give rise to one of the most remarkable works of literature ever created by an American, and, like whaling itself, raise large and searching questions about the relation of human beings to each other, to other species and to the planet.” Furthermore, Into the Deep states that in Moby-Dick, Melville would create “an allegory of the human condition and a riveting parable, both bright and dark, of the reckless expanding American republic.”

J. Price (B) University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Eau Claire, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_15

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who is both god-like and ungodly.2 The enigmatic Captain Ahab occupies the liminal space between hero and villain. As such, Melville’s Ahab projects the epitome of American exceptionalism in all its strengths and weaknesses. Just as the Romantic hero would evolve from the work of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper into the gloomier Byronic hero, so too would classic Hollywood see a transformation in the hero of the Western genre. Similar to the descent of Romanticism into darkness, as represented by Ahab, the cinematic Western hero would also mature from the simplistic white-hat image of silents and early talkies to fictional characters that are ironically both admirable and diabolic. In both cases, the aggrandized American hero is injected with the notion of flawed exceptionalism. There are numerous parallels between American whaling and the westward movement. In the documentary, Into the Deep, marine biologist Michael Moore even points out a cause-and-effect relationship; “The wealth that was generated by the Yankee whalers fueled the expansion of this country. So that out of the banks of New Bedford … came the necessaries to head west.” Both whaling and the westward movement are representations of the American identity and can be linked to Benjamin Franklin’s creation of the intrepid individual.3 Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea (2000), sees certain national traits as epitomized in whaling: It was an endeavor that inspired so much of what would become the defining characteristics of America … there is violence, there is a spiritual sense of destiny [and] … at the center of it, is this bloodlust for the hunt … that’s the definition of America. (Into the Deep, 2010)

In Philbrick’s description of American whaling, we plainly hear the language of Manifest Destiny. The connection is more than just historic and economic. Philbrick suggests it is also a poetic one: “The poetry of whaling … is the deepest and darkest poetry of America” (Into the Deep, 2010). 2 “He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man” (Melville 1988, 79). 3 In 1775, Edmund Burke praised the entrepreneurial spirit of American whalers who

outdo the rest of the world (Burke 1807, 31–32), and when the world craved whale oil, “of 900 whaling vessels of all nations in 1846, 735 were American” (Olson 1947, 19).

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The language of the wilderness is at the heart of the Western and of Moby-Dick, and from it derives concepts of national exceptionalism. “Fate in Moby-Dick and Manifest Destiny … are kindred constructs” (Dimock 1991, 204).4 The American pursuit of wealth and of conquest was both a civilizing force and an unhinging one. Indeed, Jane Tompkins strikingly and alluringly describes the Western as, “Thriving on physical sensation, wedded to violence, dominated by the need for domination, and imprisoned by its own heroic code” (1992, 5). The individualism of such a code is on display when Ahab, challenged that his quest will not bring the wealth that is expected of whaling, gestures to his heart and replies that it “will fetch a great premium here!” (Melville 1988, 163). Furthermore, the darkest implication of the conquest of the wilderness is that “the Other in the Western forms a cultural threat” (Mitchell 1996, 135). This is an issue which is at the core of John Ford’s (1956) The Searchers. In this film, Ford creates the screen equivalent of Ahab in Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and introduces racism into the Western screen persona. Both Ahab and Ethan are incarnations of that same driving pioneer spirit that is central to American exceptionalism in both its virtues and flaws, and transgresses the borderline between courage and insanity. As William Sedgwick explains, “Human greatness carries heavy penalties” (1944, 101). This is due to the symbiotic relationship between creation and destruction, which is an appropriate description of both whaling and the Westward Movement. With both Ahab and Ethan, the obsession with the quest is their defining characteristic, and obstacles are to be vanquished. This work is intertextual and interdisciplinary and as such is well suited to examine the duality of good and evil. This exploration bears witness to the heavy influence the “frontier” played in defining the American

4 In 1950, Henry Nash Smith saw the ocean and the west as competing narratives: “The early visions of an American empire embody two different, if often mingled conceptions. There is on the one hand the notion of empire as command of the sea, and on the other hand the notion of empire as a populous future society occupying the interior of the American continent” (12). However, by 1998, Tony Tanner saw a clear connection between whaling and Manifest Destiny: “The conquest of the continent … [including] the dark depredations and expropriations on which America built itself … saw a return to conditions associated with an archaic, ‘heroic’ age – the raw individualism, the violence, the brawling and boasting, the storytelling, the superstitions, the unsocialized conditions of life … all these were to be found on the American frontier as on the American whaling ship” (ix).

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character, revealing a less than symbiotic relationship between Man and Nature, and asserts that the ambiguity of heroism and villainy is the hallmark of both American Romanticism in literature and more modern incarnations of the classic Hollywood Western. In their “heroes,” Melville and Ford bring forth a true depiction of American exceptionalism, equally deserving of both admiration and condemnation.

The Narratives The most obvious connection between Melville’s novel and Ford’s film is the plot, but The Searchers and Moby-Dick bear similarities beyond just the obvious monomaniacal quest and its inherent distortion of the hunter. While The Searchers ’ narrative is much more relentless than MobyDick’s, the former seldom taking time for reflective digression as Melville does, the resemblance between the two storylines is nonetheless readily detectable. Melville’s epic relates the inexorable search by a whaling captain for one very specific whale, which has taken the captain’s leg on a previous voyage, and clearly parallels Ford’s film. The Searchers, set in Texas, presents the story of Ethan Edwards who returns to his brother’s homestead after the American Civil War. While Ethan and other settlers are out investigating rumors of a Comanche rising, his brother and his brother’s family are all killed in an Indian attack, all save the youngest girl Debbie (younger—Lana Wood, older—Natalie Wood), who has been abducted by the Comanches. The kidnapping leads Ethan on a relentless search for Debbie. Ahab’s search for Moby-Dick takes the crew of the Pequod on a three-year journey; Ethan and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), a relative only by adoption, strive for five years to find Debbie. Ethan’s commitment is every bit as monomaniacal as that of Captain Ahab. In fact, in The Searchers, Ethan states what could be Ahab’s creed: Injun will chase a thing until he thinks he’s chased it enough. Then he quits. Same when he runs. Seems like he never learns there’s such a thing as a critter that’ll just keep comin’ on. So we’ll find ‘em in the end, I promise ya. We’ll find ‘em … just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth.

Ethan’s vow is nearly identical to Ahab’s vow: “I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up” (Melville 1988, 163). Both Ethan and Ahab are “critters that’ll just keep comin’ on,” and

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with both men, the quest will indeed take many “turnin’s of the earth.” Ahab’s steadfast dedication, or obsession, with the quest is echoed in The Searchers, when Ethan is asked, “You wanna quit, Ethan,” and his stoically curt response is, “That’ll be the day.” Like his literary counterpart, Ethan’s task also becomes warped and unnatural. Ethan becomes consumed with the idea that as Debbie grows up, she will become a squaw—a fate, which in Ethan’s eyes, no White woman should live through. The girl he has set out to save becomes the woman he is out to kill. What Charles Feidelson says of Ahab’s quest is also accurate of Ethan’s: “As the mood of the voyager alters, from love to hate, the world of the Emersonian journey changes from hospitality to malice, and the ‘living act’ becomes an act of defiance” (1953, 34). The twisted nature of Ahab’s goal is well rebuked by the words of the First Mate, Starbuck: “Vengeance on a dumb brute … that simply smote thee from blindest instinct … To be enraged with a dumb thing … seems blasphemous” (Melville 1988, 163–164). Ethan’s change from seeking to save Debbie to seeking her death seems equally “blasphemous.” For both characters, what is natural and what is unnatural is of no significance. “Consumed by his monomania, Ahab ultimately projects his own uncontrolled ego on the universe” (McLoughlin 2003, 74), as does Ethan Edwards. Both Ethan and Ahab display what Lewis Mumford describes as “Man’s heroic defiance of brute energy” (1929, 187), albeit a tainted heroism.

The Environments In both Moby-Dick and the cinematic Western, setting and hero are inseparable. Notions of frontier and wilderness have always played a key role in the development of the American identity. As Frederick Jackson Turner writes, “The advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe” (1920, 4).5 Certainly one of the greatest national distinctions is that both Ahab and the Western hero see nature as adversarial, not the communing relationship between Man and Nature

5 This sentiment was also expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson who stated, “Europe stretches to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond” (quoted by Foerster 1928, 29). Indeed, after the War of 1812, national self-assertion, the Monroe Doctrine and raw Jacksonianism, all meant that “America was becoming Americanized; and the further west it went the more truly American it then became” (Bradsher 1968, 281).

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as espoused by the early British Romantics. The cinematography of the Western employs the wilderness in the same way that Moby-Dick employs the ocean. The landscape of the West, in all its harsh beauty and its seemingly relentless challenges to humans, is as central to the development of the Western hero as is the vastness of the ocean to whalers. Ford’s visual use of Monument Valley reminds us of Melville’s prose.6 From the very opening shot of The Searchers, the relationship between civilization and the wilderness is visually established. The Searchers is filmed in VistaVision, the widescreen process pioneered by Paramount in 1954, and yet the story opens with a limiting shot within a shot. Most of the screen is in complete darkness, but a door opens to reveal the brilliant Technicolor landscape outside. The sliver of color is further impeded by the silhouette of the woman who has opened the door. The wilderness, nature, is constrained by civilization both in its domesticating structures and by “us,” who observe it from a viewpoint of separated comfort. The silhouette doorway is used again, and even more powerfully, when Ethan returns to the decimated homestead following the Comanche raid. In a similar manner, we are reminded very early in Moby-Dick that civilization to a man, and specifically an American man, is confining. A spirit expressed by Ishmael in the very first paragraph when he tells us that whenever he feels like “deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats—then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can” (Melville 1988, 3). Ishmael expresses the spirit of the Western that resides in modern audiences—an attraction to the uncivilized by that impulse which yearns to be wild. Furthermore, in The Searchers, Ethan first appears as an unrecognizable dot, lost in the expanse of the wilderness, just as Melville meditates on the image of the Pequod as a speck lost amid the vastness of the ocean. Like a whaling vessel, the Western hero seems visually overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of nature. Both, however, come to thwart nature and to shape it to their will. Ahab and Ethan are both at odds with nature, but so are the other whalers and settlers who surround them. Their uniqueness is that they

6 “To a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs … swim the hugest monsters of the sea … there you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves … a sublime uneventfulness invests you” (Melville 1988, 156).

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are simultaneously at odds with civilization. Both Ahab and Ethan are lost between two worlds—society and nature. The Western hero never seems at home in town, as the opening doorway shot of The Searchers reminds us. Indeed, upon seeing Ethan, the captain of the Texas Rangers exclaims, “Well, the Prodigal Son returns.” Ahab likewise tells us that of his forty years as a mariner, he has only been at home for three. Yet both the settlers and the whalers highly value these two men. Ahab and Ethan are both loner and leader. When Starbuck questions the validity of the quest, Ahab emphatically responds, “The crew is with me.” Ahab’s role within the group, his natural leadership, appears indestructible. Starbuck finds himself in danger of being outside the group, because he cannot answer the all-important question which defines the group, “art not game for Moby Dick?” (Melville 1988, 163). In The Searchers, the captain of the Rangers tells Ethan to “Let them [the Comanches] carry off their hurtin’ dead.” Ethan, however, continues shooting after the retreating Indians until the captain knocks down Ethan’s rifle. Ethan erupts, “That tears it. From now on you stay out of this. All of you. I don’t want you with me. I don’t need you for what I gotta do.” The rescue party then dwindles to only two, Ethan and Martin. Like Ishmael, Martin is puzzled by his own, almost blind following of his leader. Like Ethan, who shuns the larger group, Ahab shuns the many passing vessels without extending the helping hand that the code of the sea requires. Both Ethan and Ahab draw men to them, but also keep them at a distance. While the distorted quest seems to make Ahab and Ethan stand out from other whalers and other settlers, they are in fact their culture writ large. How can Ahab’s vengeance against one whale be madness when his industry hunts whales to near extinction? How can Ethan’s hatred for Indians be the racism of a single extremist when Manifest Destiny itself seems genocidal? In one sense, at least Ahab and Ethan, as opposed to the rest of their society, are honest about their vehemence. In addition, both the Western hero and the whaler provide a necessary societal function, albeit a transient one. They are needed, respectively, for the settling of the West and for providing oil to fuel industrialization. One day, however, the West will be “settled” and another source for oil will be found. Richard Chase calls Ahab “the culture hero … who kills the monsters, making man’s life possible … and exploits himself out of existence” (1949, 41). The destiny for these heroes is obsolescence. The struggle of the individual against the wilderness is also closely linked to traditional notions of masculinity. The appeal to masculinity,

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as projected by the Western into the myth of the West, is summarized nicely by Louis L’Amour, “It was a hard land, and it bred hard men to hard ways” (1955, 15). What is true of the Western and masculinity is also true of Melville: What makes Moby-Dick so exhilarating is its extravagant plunge into the manly American mind: its zest for exploration, its awe at pain, its rapture at the hunt … its craving for dominance. (Leverenz 1989, 305)

Ahab is also the competent “hero,” who, like the lone Western hero, meets a challenge with an “exigency only he understands” (Tompkins 1992, 144). In the Hollywood Western, John Wayne become synonymous with this tough, manly demeanor. No single figure better links these attributes of national identity and masculinity than Wayne, who American audiences knew not just as a Western star but also as the hero of countless World War II movies. The implication, from what Richard Slotkin called the “soldier/cowboy persona” (1992, 512–513), suggested that the same rugged individualism that allowed Americans to “tame” the West, would also allow them to crush the specter of German Fascism and Japanese Imperialism. Unlike the typical Western hero, however, the screen persona of John Wayne in The Searchers is much darker.7 Ford, more than any other director, created the iconic image of the Duke, it is totally appropriate that he used that persona to create an enigmatic update in The Searchers. In The Searchers, not only is the issue of racism explored in a way no earlier Western had done, but it gave the Duke a character to portray with as many unattractive as admirable traits. In Moby-Dick, Melville defines Americanness in terms of “bristling polarities” (Reynolds 1988, 288). Similarly, the Western hero embodies the great paradox of Romanticism itself in which the “imagination redeems, but it also destroys” (McLoughlin 2003, 73). The idea that good and evil, light and dark, are inexorably intertwined in any identity, personal or cultural, was at the heart and soul of American Romanticism. While there are certainly European progenitors to Ahab, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it

7 It could also be argued that Howard Hawks was the first to darken the screen persona of John Wayne in the 1948 Western Red River. In this film, Wayne’s character’s courage is also overshadowed by his pride and even cruelty. Hawks’ morphing of the Duke’s persona may be seen as an embryonic Ethan Edwards.

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is Melville’s monomanical captain who takes arrogance and pride to a unique level; “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me” (Melville 1988, 164). The “Americanness” of Ahab, his distinction from the European Byronic hero, is that he is more focused and determined and less “moody.” Ahab embodies a liminal zone where heroic confidence and blasphemous hubris are indistinguishable. Ahab and Ethan Edwards are neither villain nor tragic hero, which makes them the quintessential American hero. The question is, however, “How far can a hero go and still be a hero?” (Slotkin 1992, 464).

Of Heroes and Villains Heroism, and for that matter villainy as well, is a question of perspective and one moment in The Searchers underscores this subjectivity. At one point, Ethan and Martin come upon an Indian encampment where the women and children have been slaughtered by the Cavalry. This kind of “white” atrocity was previously unknown in a Hollywood Western, and a particularly pointed condemnation for Ford, who created a trilogy, Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), glorifying the Cavalry. So, while Ethan is meant to be seen as a particularly twisted personality, we are reminded that his seemingly barbaric actions are in fact perpetrated by the more “civilized” forces of westward expansion as well. Likewise, Ahab’s apparent bloodlust seems insane, yet the industry he is part of produces wholesale slaughter of whales on a regular basis. Furthermore, we must begin to ask if the Comanche slaughter at the beginning of the film is analogous to the sins of “civilization.” In this case, the hatred in Scar, the Comanche chief, and Ethan’s hatred are mirror impulses. If so, then perhaps Ethan sees himself in Scar and Ahab also sees himself in Moby-Dick. It is also possible to question if other characters are the true heroes of these narratives.8 Obviously, Martin, like Ishmael, is the one through whose eyes we live this tale. This connection between Ishmael and Martin is made even clearer when Martin begins to narrate, via letters home, a large portion of their

8 Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker remind us that “until the 1950s, Ahab was regularly regarded as the hero” (1992, 23). In 1929, Lewis Mumford saw Ahab as pitted against the “malice of the universe” (184), a tragic hero who “in battling against evil, with power instead of love … becomes the image of the thing he hates … [and thus loses] his humanity in the very act of vindicating it” (186).

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quest. However, as the yin to Ethan’s yang, Martin is also analogous to the role served by Starbuck. In one letter home, Martin describes an event that he admits he cannot understand, much like Ishmael’s comprehension often fails him. Martin and Ethan come upon a herd of buffalo and Ethan begins to shoot all of them. Martin tries to stop him, but, as usual, Ethan cannot be stopped. Ethan intends that the buffalo be unavailable as food for the Indians that they are trailing. This is a highly destructive conforming of nature to a myopic, individual self-interest. This reminds us that Ahab sees his pursuit of Moby-Dick as superseding the ship’s purpose of bringing home as much whale oil as possible. This point, however, also reminds us, despite his Ishmael-like role as first-person narrator, that Martin projects a viewpoint more reminiscent of Starbuck. In any case, Martin, Ishmael and even Starbuck all seem incapable of completely resisting their charismatic leader. Tony Tanner points out that two characters common to the epic format are a secondary hero, who is like us, and the major hero, who is distanced from us and from all (1998, x). According to Tanner, if Starbuck, Ishmael and Martin are heroes, they are at best secondary heroes. They are insignificant without a man of action like Ahab or Ethan. The heroic status of Ahab and Ethan rests on their suffering. “To the extent that he [Ahab] transcends it, finds ‘greatness’ in suffering, he is a tragic hero” (Sewall 1959, 104). Indeed, in Melville’s world there is “no mistaking the instinctive supposition that sorrow was a nobler emotion than joy” (Geist 1939, 50). Like Ahab, Ethan has “a crucifixion in his face” (Melville 1988, 124). There is an unspoken, yet visually suggested, backstory with Ethan, which brings a personal tragedy to his rage and mirrors Ahab’s angst. In the case of Ethan, he has not had his leg taken by an adversarial force, but the last remnants of a family, including a woman with whom, we are led to believe, he was once in love. This is suggested by the restrained embrace between Ethan and his sister-in-law, both when he first returns and later when he departs with the initial search party. We also see her, in a moment of solitude, fondling Ethan’s coat. Her choice must have been to marry the more steadfast brother over the roving spirit that was Ethan. In a similarly constrained manner, in one of his more human moments, Ahab relates the family connections he has left behind (Melville 1988, 543–544). Whether the loss of a leg or of one’s family, Melville makes clear the close relationship between suffering and insanity, “His torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad” (Melville 1988, 185). It is impossible to dissociate

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these two heroic attributes. “Grief and Greatness, suffering and heroism: these were to Melville, inseparable” (Geist 1939, 44), and “through his suffering Ahab is ennobled … suffering and heroism were concomitant … Melville would leave no doubts of Ahab’s magnificence” (Geist 1939, 47). Indeed, Martin never seems capable of separating his great respect for Ethan from that “something” in Ethan’s eyes that he associates with insanity. Despite their suffering, these heroes are required to restrain their emotions. Restraint of emotion is the price required for getting the job done. The Western hero must undergo what Tompkins calls the “mortification of feeling” (1992, 215). Although Ahab is given to moments of verbosity, he also displays “his ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing, shroud sort of talk” (Melville 1988, 93). Ahab, in his duality, is both given to wordy discourse as well as extended periods of reclusiveness. In this, Ahab is similar to the taciturn Western hero, in whom “there is very little free expression of the emotions. The hero is a man of few words who expresses himself through physical action” (Tompkins 1992, 39). The opposite disposition is exemplified by Martin who does not possess the restraint necessary to deal with the realized probability of an Indian attack. He rushes back toward the homestead despite Ethan’s warning that the horses must be fed and rested first. What seems, on the part of Ethan, to be callousness is pure pragmatism, yet we see in his face, a level of emotion that John Wayne is seldom called upon to demonstrate in movies. He too wishes to race back, but he knows what must be done. It is the closeup of Ethan unsaddling his horse and looking after the departing Martin that shows the emotion which seethes beneath the traditionally stoic Western hero. The one emotion that neither Ethan nor Ahab ever hide is their hatred, and it is this emotion that dictates their ultimate fate. Even at his final moment, Ahab curses, “To the last I grapple with thee; from Hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee” (Melville 1988, 571–572). It reminds us of how Ethan’s ultimate goal is to kill his only surviving relative. The depths of Ethan’s racism, and its distinction from other settlers, is clearly on display when Ethan shoots out the eyes of a dead Comanche. In so doing, he is indulging the beliefs of his enemies. Ahab knows whales as Ethan knows the Indians. The complete understanding of their adversaries is matched only by their hatred. Ethan does not believe what the Indians believe, but in order to strike at them in their deepest held convictions, he is willing to “play in their ballpark.”

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Ethan possesses a visceral hatred for the Indians, just as Ahab does for one very specific whale. Indeed, in a paraphrasing of Ahab, we can see Ethan saying, “be the Indian agent, or be the Indian principle, I will wreak that hate upon him.” Newton Arvin’s description of Ahab aptly fits the hero of The Searchers: “He is our hatred ennobled, as we would wish to have it, up to heroism” (1950, 171). The most prominent element of Ethan’s racism is his fear of miscegeny. This issue certainly predates cinema: “Two of [James Fenimore] Cooper’s consistent concerns … race and women” demonstrate a moral duality which can be seen “to be so characteristic of the American literary imagination” (Porte 1969, 8). Ethan’s all-consuming motivation is as old as the earliest Narrative Captivities in American literature. Slotkin points out that the myth of the captive narrative contradicts reality in the sense that the quest for rescuing the “intact” captive conflicts with the fact that ex-captives often became outcasts once they were “rescued.” “The woman is only the nominal objective or excuse. His [the hero’s] true and only objective is to kill the Indian” (Slotkin 1992, 467). The most revealing miscegenistic moment for Ethan is when he and Martin visit the Calvary fort where the army holds female captives retrieved from the Indians. The women sit on the floor exhibiting various displays of lunacy. Their catatonic behavior leads one of the soldiers to comment, “Hard to believe they’re white.” Ethan’s response, repugnant to our modern sensibilities, is “They ain’t white no more.” Ethan begins to leave the room but stops and glares back at the afflicted ex-captives. The camera dollies in on his anguished and angered face. The camera move is extremely intrusive and joined with Ethan’s expression is unnerving. The camera move is reminiscent of the move Ford employs to first introduce John Wayne in Stagecoach, and, while reminding us of the original Western hero’s image, it also forces us to realize this film’s alteration of that image. Although Martin stands as contrast to Ethan’s extremism, as does Starbuck to Ahab, we do glimpse this miscegeny in others. When Martin tells his long-waiting girlfriend that he and Ethan are leaving again, she responds, “It’s too late. She’s a woman grown now.” She refers to Debbie as “the leavings of a Comanche Buck?” With fire in her eyes that matches Ethan’s, she tells Martin not only what he already knows, that Ethan will put a bullet in Debbie’s brain, but also her own evaluation that Debbie’s mother would have wanted him to do so. Ford wants us to remember that despite the loner quality of Ethan’s contempt, his bigotry is not unique. However, both Ethan and Ahab hate because of an unnatural view of

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existence and a perversion of the proper relationship between Man and Nature, and by extension, between humans as well.

Of Whales and Indians This comparison of Ahab’s hate to Ethan’s hate requires that we realize that in Ahab’s world the whale is just another aspect of the wilderness and the same is true of native inhabitants in Ethan’s world. Just as “the White Whale represents the beauty, savagery, and mystery of nature” (McLoughlin 2003, 63),9 so too, in the Western, is the Indian seen as just another force of nature—a river to cross, mountains to overcome, heat and cold, draught, or famine. To underscore the previous contention, and solidify the comparison between Moby-Dick and The Searchers, we need only take a passage (Melville 1988, 184) from Melville’s novel and substitute the word whale with Indian, and the name Ahab with Ethan: The [Indian went] before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning … All that most madness and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy [Ethan], were visibly personified and made practically assailable in [the Comanches]. He piled upon [them] the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down. In the stereotypical Western of classic Hollywood, however, Indians are not the “bad guys.” Indeed, most classic Hollywood Western have a “white” villain. It could be argued that to dehumanize is even more racist than to vilify, but Indians in classic Hollywood Westerns “functioned as props, bits of local color, textural effects. As people they had no existence … [just] a particularly dangerous form of local wildlife” (Tompkins 1992, 8). In a similar sense, the average whaler, unlike Ahab, does not hate the whales that they slaughter; they are simply a means to an end—an obstacle to progress. The struggle with the wilderness, then, is a conflict with the Other. Arvin describes Ahab as “the image of murderous destructiveness 9 “The White Whale is the symbol of that persistent force of destruction, that meaningless force, which now figures as the outpouring of a volcano or the atmospheric disruption of a tornado” (Mumford 1929, 185).

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directed outward against the Other” (1950, 170), a description equally appropriate for Ethan. Yet something more is at work in these two texts. The whalers’ attitude toward whales is not Ahab’s and the settlers’ view of Indians is not Ethan’s, at least not to the same degree. Ethan and Ahab have deeper purposes. They pursue that which lies “beyond the masque,” a Platonic concept of evil,10 not realizing, or simply not caring, about the evil they may be fostering within themselves. The whale and the Indians are those upon whom Ahab and Ethan project their inner demons. There are many places in Moby-Dick where Melville makes references to the indigenous peoples of North America,11 the Pequod itself is named after a long-vanished Indian tribe, and, at one point, Melville even compares the inside of the whale’s head to a wigwam (1988, 334), but the near annihilation of whales and native Americans is best summed up in language which evokes imagery of both. Melville asks “whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff” (1988, 460). Whether force of nature or agent of evil, the fates of whales and Native Americans seems the same.

From Hell’s Heart The temporal and emotional climax of The Searchers provides what at first seems a deviation from Moby-Dick. Ethan brutishly tracks down Debbie, while Martin futilely rushes to catch up and prevent Ethan from killing her. However, in Ethan’s moment of “stabbing from hell’s heart,” unlike Ahab, he relents, takes up his niece in his arms and poignantly says, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” Interestingly, this highly dramatic juncture is shot from inside a cave, looking out at the landscape, much like the very opening shot of the film. Thus Ethan and Debbie play out this moment of pathos in a “doorway.” Just as the doorway in the opening shot represents

10 Is this, however, only Ahab’s vision of the world? Melville himself describes the whale as “invested with natural terror” and possessing of “intelligent malignity” (1988, 183). This language seems to move the whale from force of nature to agent of evil and legitimizes Ahab’s revenge. To the same extent, does Ford’s use of an iconic Western star make Ethan’s racism more palatable? 11 In “Red Blood, White Bones: The Native American Presence in Moby-Dick,” Laurie Robertson-Lorant (2003) asserts that Moby-Dick contains many such allusions.

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a portal, a liminal space between civilization and the wilderness, so too the cave opening suggests a threshold of reality and something beyond, some other layer of existence that is neither wilderness nor civilization. Despite a superficial divergence in narrative conclusion, this moment is quintessential Melville. Like all American Romanticism, the exact meaning of the endings of both The Searchers and Moby-Dick are ambiguous and call into question the value of the symbol. Is Ethan’s change of heart merely classic Hollywood’s need for a happy ending? Does it ruin the comparison between The Searchers and MobyDick? The answer to the first question is most probably yes. Although the film certainly breaks many barriers, a fatalistic finale might well have been one iconoclasm too many. However, the answer to the second question is a resounding no. Even though Ethan does not follow his quest for vengeance to his own demise, his bitterness and monomaniacal hatred have left him unfit for life among what remains of his family.12 The last shot is a duplicate of the first, through the doorway of a homestead, dark inside, bright expanse of nature outside. Debbie, Martin, Martin’s girl, and her parents, all enter the house, but Ethan can only watch them. He then turns, the same isolated figure he began as, and walks away from civilization, swallowed up by the wilderness as Ahab is by the ocean. “Having hardened himself to do murder, he can no longer open his heart to humankind” (Tompkins 1992, 220). Ahab fails. Ethan only succeeds because he relents in his obstinacy while Ahab does not. Ethan, however, is no less a tragic figure: The Western hero’s silence symbolizes a massive suppression of the inner life. And my sense is that this determined shutting down of emotions, this cutting off the self from contact with the interior well of feeling, exacts its price in the end. (Tompkins 1992, 66)

In both Ahab and Ethan, extreme individualism precludes the normality of home. The price may be death, in the case of Ahab, or ostracization, in the case of Ethan, but, in either conclusion, it is a total displacement, that which Melville calls “the desolation of solitude”

12 It can also be argued that both Ford’s film and Melville’s book end with the suggestion of redemption. Both Martin and Ishmael survive their descent into the hero’s world of madness and hate, and are able to retain their humanity despite their proximity to derangement.

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(Melville 1988, 543). In George Stevens’ 1953 Western Shane, the idea of the Western hero not belonging is stressed when the title character states, “There’s no living with a killer.” Ahab and Ethan are both killers, killers of natural objects, killers of the natural order, and ultimately killers of their own humanity.

Summary The evolution and ultimate demise of the Western, so long a staple of classic Hollywood, is a perfect representation of the changing attitude toward the myth of the West. The passing of classic Hollywood, the receding role of the studio system, the distortion of the traditional narrative style, went hand in hand with transformations in social and political conventions.13 Despite all these contributing factors, the role The Searchers played in altering the Western hero cannot be understated. Similarly, Melville forever changed the idea of the hero in American literature. The question that both Ahab and Ethan leave is whether or not a disregard for the bonds of what nature and society dictate can actually be seen as a strength, and more specifically an American strength. In The Searchers and Moby-Dick, “the instinctive need for order and meaning seems mainly to be confronted by meaninglessness and disorder … goodness and evil, beneficence and destructiveness, light and darkness, seem bafflingly intermixed” (Arvin 1950, 183). The ruthlessness that undeniably trampled many also resulted in a nation whose use or misuse of Nature created a power in the New World that was eventually the only force that could save the Old World from itself.14 This is the national dichotomy as embraced by both Melville and Ford.

References Arvin, Newton. 1950. Herman Melville. New York: W. Sloane Associates. Bradsher, Earl L. 1968. “The Rise of Nationalism in American Literature.” In Studies for William A. Read: A Miscellany Presented by Some of His Colleagues and Friends, edited by Nathaniel M. Caffee and Thomas A. Kirby, 269–287. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press. 13 Compare the 1962 film How the West Was Won with its praise for westward expansion, especially in the epilogue, to a film like Little Big Man only eight years later. 14 Winston Churchill’s famous speech to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940.

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Burke, Edmund. 1807. “Conciliation with America (22 Mar. 1775).” In The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 2, 17–82. Boston: John West. Burns, Ric, dir. Into the Deep: America, Whaling and the World. 2010. New York: Steeplechase Films. Chase, Richard. 1949. Herman Melville: A Critical Study. New York: Macmillan. Dimock, Wai-chee. 1991. “Ahab’s Manifest Destiny.” In Macropolitics of Nineteenth Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, edited by Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritro, 184–212. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1903–1921. Centenary Edition: The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 12 vols. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin. Feidelson, Charles, Jr. 1953. Symbolism and American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foerster, Norman. 1928. “Factors in American Literary History.” In The Reinterpretation of American Literature, edited by Norman Foerster, 23–38. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Ford, John, dir. The Searchers. 1956. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Geist, Stanley. 1939. Herman Melville: The Tragic Vision and the Heroic Ideal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker. 1992. “Introduction.” In Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, 1–38. New York: G. K. Hall. L’Amour, Louis. 1955. Heller with a Gun. New York: Bantam. Lawrence, D. H. 1920. Studies in Classic American Literature. London: Martin Secker. Leverenz, David. 1989. Manhood and the American Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McLoughlin, Michael. 2003. Dead Letters to the New Word: Melville, Emerson and American Transcendentalism. New York: Routledge. Melville, Herman. 1988. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851). Edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mitchell, Lee Clark. 1996. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mumford, Lewis. 1929. Herman Melville. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Olson, Charles. 1947. Call Me Ishmael. New York: Grove Press. Porte, Joel. 1969. The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Reynolds, David S. 1988. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf.

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Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. 2003. “Red Blood, White Bones: The Native American Presence in Moby-Dick.” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 1, no. 3: 379–390. Sedgwick, William Ellery. 1944. Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind. New York: Russell & Russell. Sewall, Richard B. 1959. The Vision of Tragedy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Slotkin, Richard. 1992. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Atheneum. Smith, Henry Nash. 1950. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tanner, Tony. 1998. “Introduction.” In Moby-Dick, vii–xxvi. New York: Oxford University Press. Tompkins, Jane. 1992. West of Everything. New York: Oxford University Press. Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1920. The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt.

CHAPTER 16

Naught Beyond: A Phenomenology of Ahab’s “Madness Maddened” Bill Scalia

In his “Quarter-Deck” speech in Moby-Dick, Ahab says of the relation between appearance and reality, “Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough.” Ahab makes this distinction between the empirical and transcendental within the condition of his monomaniacal purpose; Ahab says that he is “madness maddened.” Ahab’s discourse, seven statements explicating “his” whale, contains not only a propositional content, but also constitutes a performative act; his discourse not only says something, but does something in that saying. The “doing” is, in a particular sense, the doing of evil: Ahab contravenes creation by his subversion of the relation between language and reality, the disruption separating Ahab’s refigured concept of the whale from a referent whale. My paper will explore the dimensions of Ahab’s “naught beyond” statement in the context of Heidegger’s ontological considerations of Being, language, and poetry (focusing particularly on his writing before the “turn”). I will argue that Ahab’s discourse begins as an attempt to convince Starbuck to affirm his singular purpose, but deflects into a

B. Scalia (B) St. Mary’s Seminary & University, Baltimore, MD, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_16

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poetic statement; being has its locus not in the world (or, the facticity of the whale), but in Ahab’s symbolic associations with the whale, which he subsequently vacates with the “naught beyond” statement. This act is evil in that Ahab wills to subvert the created order; he does so via his madness, his willed ability to recreate the whale not as a “dumb brute,” but as itself a willed agent, opposing him. Ahab’s qualification “‘tis enough” seals himself, and the Pequod, inside his condition. Seven sentences constitute what I will refer to as “Ahab’s discourse”: All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. (Melville 1988a, 164)

In this passage, Ahab creates a zone of semiotic instability, between signifier and signified, and creates a whale made of language, emptied of the white whale’s referent in the empirical world.

The Nineteenth-Century Philosophical Romance A novel, broadly conceived, is an extended prose narrative that articulates a world. A novel names a world, and by that naming brings a world into being. That is, the “world” of a prose narrative has being by the instance of this naming. The condition that naming brings forth is obviously aesthetic, but is also, on a more essential level, ontological. Prose narratives create worlds in different ways; the manner in which a novel brings forth a world has to do less with epistemology (the truth of a world) than with ontology (the being of a world). In other words, the form of a novel is concomitant with the being, the essence, of the world it creates. The philosophical romance, the form of the novel preferred by Melville after his first two travel/adventure narratives, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), privileges ontology over epistemology. The novel subgenre of romance was the dominant prose fiction form of the nineteenth century until the post-war advent of literary realism. Romance differs from the novel, broadly considered, in that while the novel recounts the concerns

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of the specific, lived experience of individuals, the romance tends toward the metaphysical. The romance form considers questions of being more than questions of fact. The philosophical romance extends from local to metaphysical concerns, offering no set resolution to the problems it introduces and elaborates. As such, the philosophical romance is concerned with language, naming, and questions of meaning and interpretation, as all of these aspects triangulate the relationship between “world,” reader, and text, or, in other words, a process of relating the empirical with the personal, the internal. As Melville noted in The Confidence Man (1857), “It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie” (1988b, 206–207). Moby-Dick is especially, and self-consciously, concerned with language. Melville opens the novel not with the well-known first line of Chapter 1, “Loomings”—“Call me Ishmael”—but with “Etymology” (of the word “whale”) and “Extracts,” as well as an introduction in recognition of the “sub-sub librarian” who has (ostensibly) compiled the “Extracts,” and thus performed the research for the book. In addition to foregrounding the book’s focus on language, these introductory pieces allow Melville to frame the book as a meditative reflection on meaning and being (we should keep in mind that Moby-Dick is a memory narrative, recounted by Ishmael long after the fact). The introductory pieces also serve to suggest that an assemblage of data, a mere recounting of the facts of an experience, do not necessarily add up to the meaning(s) an experience holds for an individual, nor how that individual might find him or herself located in relation to the experience, and thus the world. One of Ishmael’s concerns in the book is how, or whether, his narrating his experience, to paraphrase Emerson, gives him back to himself. Thus the philosophical romance concerns self, being, and naming, essential ingredients for authentic selfhood.

Reading Ahab and Ismael: Performance and Audience As Eric Peterson and Kristin Langellier note, “Performance turns up in narrative studies at the confluence of two ways of understanding narrative: that is, narrative is both a making and a doing – both poiesis and praxis …” (2007, 205). Their argument is grounded in Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller”; Benjamin writes, “…the storyteller takes what he tells from experience – his own or that reported by others. And he in turn

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makes it the experience of those listening to his tale” (1968, 87). We are tempted to apply this definition to Ishmael; he is recounting the story of his experience for his readers. Benjamin’s essay in particular works out a distinction between oral narrative and written narrative (the epic and the novel). However, Benjamin goes on: What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature … is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling on particular…. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life’s fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of living. (1968, 87)

By “counsel,” Benjamin means the communicability of experience: “In every case the storyteller is a man who has council for his readers…. [C]ouncil is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding” (1968, 86). Ishmael is devoid of such council; we may read Ishmael as a sort of novelist (broadly conceived), isolated in his memory of the events he continues to try and make sense of. Ahab, by this reckoning, is closer to the storyteller— but his council is perverse. In narrating Ahab’s quarter-deck speech, Ishmael surrenders himself to Ahab as “storyteller.” Benjamin’s distinction is important in that Ishmael’s tale is written. Peterson and Langellier continue to qualify narrative as. an object, work, or text that is imagined, fashioned, and formed…. This turn to performance as a kind of “making-to-do” suggests … understanding narrative as a doing and not only a making. This understanding is evident in explorations of the behaviors, habits, practices, which enact, execute, or do narrative. Such explorations discover how narrative functions in the conducts, activities, or events which constitute, realize, and form it. Narrative, understood in this way, emerges from the lived realities of bodily conduct rather than the recognition, representation, or recounting of past experiences. Narrative designates a site for doing work and play, for engaging the pleasures and powers of discourse, for challenging and confirming possible experiences and identities. (2007, 206)

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Given this qualification, we may read Ahab as the storyteller in the scene which I am considering. Ahab’s storytelling agency depends on his authority (both his office as captain as well as his self-assumed ontological authority) as namer, shaper, maker; Ahab’s naming of the whale is also an embodiment of the whale, a grounding that allows a bringingforth of the whale. Thus, the effect of Ahab’s discourse is to name a condition out of an experience, to bring a new agent to the awareness of Dasein; this naming is, as we will see, an act of poetizing. Ahab is making by doing (and conversely, doing by making): the doing, being “speaking” the whale, brings the whale to the awareness of Dasein by the act of naming. Ahab’s discourse is performed for the crew of the Pequod (Ishmael included) for a specific purpose: to have the crew agree to join his hunt, not for the contracted, mercantile purpose (killing as many whales as possible), but in hunting one specific whale, Moby-Dick, the whale that has “dismasted” Ahab. Ahab wins over the crew with little trouble, but meets opposition in the person of his first mate, the pious Quaker Starbuck, who understands a distinction between willed agents (humans) and unwilled creation (the whale). Ahab must win over Starbuck to have the assent of the entire crew. Melville composes Ahab’s address to the reader in the first person; Ishmael vanishes behind the veil of omniscience. Mark Edelman Boren correctly notes that readers (and critics) have too easily accepted Ishmael’s view of things, that “there is an unquestioned epistemological alignment with Ishmael” (2000, 1). Though we may “sense an ironic distance between Melville and Ishmael,” such a reading strategy undermines the uniqueness of Ahab’s performative speech: “When we stop looking through the eyes of a lowly sailor who must have everything explained to him, and who must pathologically interpret his world to feel adequate to it, the rest of the text dramatically changes: the objects of Ishmael’s study … mean differently” (Boren 2000, 1, emphasis added). Reading the text through Ishmael’s narration is unavoidable; the text is narrated from Ishmael’s memory of events and perceptions and is (we suppose) subject to the fits of time, necessity, and memory. Ishmael recounts Ahab’s speech, and is thereby in the position of mediation. As readers we trust Ishmael’s account to be accurate, or at least faithful to the story Ishmael wishes us to hear. (In that sense, Ishmael is also between propositional content and performance – but, while Ishmael’s narrative is epistemologically verifiable to some degree, Ahab, I will argue, is wholly inventing the whale he will

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hunt, severing his whale from the referent whale in the material world.) In the passage under consideration, Boren’s point is that, reading Ahab outside of Ishmael’s perspective, “it becomes clear that Ahab serves as a center of a highly developed epistemology that competes with and eludes the narrator’s comprehension” (2000, 1). The distance between Ishmael and Ahab is evident in Ahab’s discourse: Ahab extends meaning, and meaning-making, beyond the point that Ishmael seemingly does not fully understand (Ishmael never comments on this event directly, but merely reports it; afterward, Melville shifts to Ahab’s first-person interior monologue, which is out of Ishmael’s reach). As Boren comments, “Ishmael cannot see that Ahab belongs to an epistemological system constructed on how meaning materially invests language and how language performs that meaning” (2000, 2). True, but I would like to investigate the mechanics of Ahab’s meaning-making, as well as consider what it is that is being “materially invested.” Ahab’s specific audience is Starbuck, who opposes Ahab on grounds both contractual: I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market. (Melville 1988a, 163)

and moral: “Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.” (Melville 1988a, 163–164)

Starbuck’s epistemological system is grounded in the created world: a whale is a whale; here the “is” indicates the sovereign authority of God over His creation. Evil might be considered a subversion of God’s sovereignty. The “is” locates the whale within this created order, whose authority rests on Starbuck’s religious certitude. In his discourse, Ahab will manipulate the function of the verb, shifting from a figurative equivalence to a naming of a new condition. As Heidegger writes in Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” “‘Naming’ means: to call to its essence that which is named in the word of poetizing, and to ground this essence in the

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poetic word. Here, ‘naming’ is the name for poetic telling. Such telling, in being a naming, receives a unique vocation that does not allow itself to be straightforwardly transferred to other poetry or other poets” (1996, 21).

World In Hölderlin’s Hymn, Heidegger names “world” as “the entirety of what is actual, including its ground and cause” (1996, 17). This general definition subsumes the elements of “world” under our consideration: its facticity, its ground, its epistemological verifiability. In order to consider Ahab’s discourse as poetic performance, I would like to consider, from a Heideggerian perspective, a phenomenology of poetic experience within a triangulation of world/language/being. As Heidegger writes in Being and Time, “Dasein achieves a new status of Being towards a world which has already been discovered in Dasein itself. This new possibility of Being can develop itself autonomously; it can become a task to be accomplished…” (1962, 90). Being is entangled in the relation between self and world. He writes in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, “World exists – that is, it is – only if Dasein exists, only if there is Dasein. Only if world is there, if Dasein exists as being-in-the-world, is there understanding of being, and only if this understanding exists are intrawordly being unveiled as extant and handy. World-understanding as Daseinunderstanding is self-understanding. Self and world belong together in the single entity, the Dasein” (1982, 297). Unveiled is an important concept here in that it touches upon how Being locates and perceives other beings. Mathew Abbott writes that, for Heidegger, “World is the opening at the heart of the human being that forms the condition of the possibility of phenomena, the historically conditioned horizon of understanding that is constitutive for the equipmental contexture in which Dasein apprehends particular entities” (2010, 497). Abbott is writing here about Heidegger’s attempt to sidestep the question of the external world, but the relationship to language is important; as Cristina Lafont argues, “the facticity of Dasein consists in being-in-the-world, and the world as a ‘whole of significance’ is therefore of a symbolic nature” (qtd. in Abbott 2010, 499). And, as Abbott notes, “the crucial Heideggerian claim that the condition of our possibility of our access to entities is an a priori perfect system of understanding (the ‘always already’) is intelligible only if we take understanding to be linguistically constituted….

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On this model language is what structures the world; it makes possible my experience of it as intelligible” (2010, 499). Again, in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger writes, “the world comes not afterward but beforehand, in the strict sense of the word. Beforehand: that which is unveiled and understood already in advance of every extant Dasein before any apprehending of this or that being, beforehand as that which stands forth as always already unveiled to us” (1982, 165). That is, the world as a priori is only available to us as intelligible, and expressible, because it is structured linguistically. As Andrew Inkpin notes, “Heidegger’s conception of the world is clearly a phenomenological one, a conception of the world attuned to how it appears to agents” (2016, 28). As Dasein itself is a part of this structure, language is key to our perception of both the world and of being.

Language For Heidegger, language is an act of clearing space for Being to emerge; “wording,” in this sense, allows Being to come to the awareness of Dasein and, as such, is a part of the structure of Dasein itself. The equipmental function of language is that of disclosure; but, as Inkpin writes, “On the one hand, the Heideggerian term disclosure suggests that language genuinely reveals or uncovers what is around us just as it is. On the other hand … Heidegger’s phenomenological conception of world refers to the world as experienced…. [T]he expression ‘being in the world’ marks genuine and direct contact with our surroundings such as there is no principled gap between the way the world appears to us in the perspective of our projects and the way the world is ‘in-itself’” (2016, 233–234). “Projecting,” writes Heidegger, “is the release of a throw by which unconcealedness submits and infuses itself into what is as such” (1971a, 73). Heidegger’s phenomenology thus finds experience (referent) in a world. In On the Way to Language, Heidegger writes, “If it is true that man finds the proper abode of his existence in language – whether he is aware of it or not – then an experience we undergo with language will touch the innermost nexus of our existence. We who speak language may thereupon become transformed by such experiences…” (1971b, 57). An experience with language, Heidegger asserts, may be transformative if “it draws our attention to our understanding to our relation to language, so that from then on we may keep this relation in mind” (1971b, 58). That is, we understand the experience as an experience with/of language, or we

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might say, the materiality of language. Language’s equipmental function in the world dissolves into the purpose for which it is used; language, in this sense, is instrumental and communicative, but language also has the possibility of breaking the world apart to reveal something of the world that we have not seen so revealed. This unique function of language is the poetic function. Abbot writes that “for Heidegger, poetic language is potentially transformative in a way that philosophical language is not. This is because it can produce a particular ‘experience with language,’ where an ‘experience’ is something that overwhelms and transforms … we endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it” (2010, 506). So, how does this transformation take place? What, in Ahab’s discourse, is the poetic function of language?

Poetry Mikel Dufrenne writes that “Philosophy speaks, whereas literature names. Literature restores the primordial task of the word, which is to cause Being to appear before us and immediately present the phenomenon to us instead of waiting for it to be revealed in an ever-confused and equivocal perception” (1987, 109). Regarding this sense of phenomena, Jean-Paul Sartre writes that “the being of an existent is exactly what it appears…. It does not point over its shoulder to a true being which would be, for it, absolute. What it is, it is absolutely. For it reveals itself as it is The phenomenon can be studied as described as such, for it is absolutely indicative of itself ” (1956, 4). For Heidegger, poetry is a “bringingforth” of these phenomena (2017, 41). Abbott notes that, for Heidegger, “the poet’s task is to invite things into a presence in which they viscerally bear upon us” (2010, 508). Though poetry may take on specific forms, form is not conditional upon the act of making poetry, or the “bringingforth” act of poetizing. Heidegger is more interested in the process than the product; we might say that, for Heidegger, the process is the product, since the product (the poetic utterance) stands outside the structure of the world which it nonetheless reveals. Poetizing is an act apart from the equipmental use of language and is apart from philosophizing, though all language acts are part of the world linguistically structured, and as such are part of Dasein. Abbot writes, the poetic experience that so obsessed the late Heidegger is best understood as an experience of the emergence of something that lies on

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the boundary of the linguistic/equipmental world of Dasein…. [T]he late Heidegger’s philosophy of poetry consists less in the ‘reification of language’ than in an attempt to show how a certain experience with it can lead the human to the material edge of its linguistic encasement: the very fact of the world as that which can never form a part of it. (2010, 493–494)

In its equipmental usage, language disappears into its purposive function. Heidegger notes that one condition of a word is that it brings being to awareness, but a word itself does not have being, or constitute being; rather, language is part of being’s structure. Language discloses the world but does not itself have being in the world. Language in this sense calls to mind Heidegger’s description of a tool whose being is concealed within (but not by) its purpose. For example, a hammer’s being is only engaged through its purposive (instrumental) use as a hammer, such that we are not aware of the tool’s being as anything (by design) but a tool. The distinct being of the hammer comes to our awareness if the hammer breaks; in that case, the hammer no longer is (or has being as ) a tool, since it can no longer be used as a tool. The hammer now calls attention to itself as being, albeit a being that is no longer present-at-hand. The broken hammer reveals the thing-ness of the hammer. Language, however, is more mysterious than a tool. Language differs from tools in the sense that language is part of the structure of being, not a tool designed uniquely for a particular use; language calls being to awareness. For Heidegger, a fact of language (and of Dasein) is its embeddedness in the world as experienced. Language is a means for humans to have access to the world, to make the world intelligible. Intelligibility marks our understanding of the world, necessitates that understanding, and makes the world present to being. Poetic language, as opposed to equipmental language, perspectivizes the world of a particular Being. A poem, Heidegger argues, is a suspension of the world such that language becomes available as language. For Heidegger, there is no fundamental “gap” between sign and signifier, between a word and a thing toward which a word points. The world, and Dasein, are linguistically structured for humans; language is part of Dasein’s structure, that which makes the world, “always already,” intelligible, through speaking. In poetic discourse, language speaks as language, and the subject is in the realm of linguistic self-awareness. Poetic statements are not proof statements or query statements, but are evocations,

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namings, of experience; the experience in this case is the experience of language as language, as part of the shared structure of world and Dasein: “Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance. Only this naming nominates beings to their being from out of their being. Such saying is a projection of the clearing, in which announcement is made of what it is that beings come into the Open as” (Heidegger 1971a, 73). A poem is not an exemplum of tropes, rhymes, forms (though poetry may utilize these devices); poetry penetrates the world and opens it to the presence of Dasein as language. For Heidegger, the poetic word sheds its concealment in use and reveals itself to Dasein as itself. Poetic language suspends the world to become available; as well, poetic language frees Dasein from its entanglement in the world as experienced. Poetic language, standing outside of the world, is self-determining: “Projective saying is poetry: the saying of world and earth, the saying of the arena of their conflict and thus of the place of all nearness and remoteness of the gods. Poetry is the saying of the unconcealedness of what is…. Projective saying is saying which, in preparing the sayable, simultaneously brings the unsayable as such into a world” (Heidegger 1971a, 74). The figuring power of the poem, the “site” (ort ), occurs not in the form of the poem but, in John Lysaker’s words, in the poem’s “gathering power,” in its accumulating force, focused toward the edge of linguistic encasement. This site is not the poem, nor is it being; the site brings the poem into its own occurrence. That is, the site opens the world for the poem, for the overdetermination of the poem’s language. As Lysaker writes, “that which gathers the language of the poem into its poetizing, enabling it to poetize in its characteristic manner, occurs within the language of the poem. In seeking [a site] one must travel through the language of the poem because the language figures itself as it occurs; it is an event of autofiguration” (2002, 29). The poetizing of language penetrates the world and allows language to figure itself as a process of this poetizing. As Dufrenne writes, “the meaning of literary language is, so to speak, that it has no meaning; it does not designate a concept, it generates an object” (1987, 111). Thus, language loses ordered referentiality, the ontological gap between in-itself and for-us is elided, and the subject stands face to face with the language of the poem. Poetry as an act penetrates the world and opens it to the presence of Dasein as language. The act of poetizing retrieves the originary act of wording, the emergence of Being in the space cleared by wording. As Dufrenne writes, “The meaning carried by [poetic] discourse is not signified, it is expressed….

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Here language is driven back to its origin. Here signs are not yet arbitrary; they somehow imitate the object they refer to and conjure up its presence instead of being merely representational” (1987, 123). Key to this concept is the expression “perspective of our projects,” which is to say, intention—that is, how we “mean” the world as an extension of our projects (or, projective saying), and how Being emerges into the awareness of Dasein. This concept will be key in assessing Ahab’s discourse as poetic.

Ahab’s Discourse Ahab responds to a specific audience, within a specific context and situation. He is able to sway the crew to his purpose, but meets resistance in Starbuck, the first mate. While Starbuck recognizes Ahab’s rhetoric immediately—“I come here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance” (Melville 1988a, 162)—Ahab must escalate his rhetoric to meet the challenge. To do so, he cannot convince Starbuck merely by the force of his considerable will; Starbuck requires a deeper consideration of the ontology of reality. The local context for Ahab’s discourse opens with Starbuck’s objection to the single purpose of Ahab’s quest, or we might say Ahab’s singular evil: “To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous” (Melville 1988a, 164). Ahab’s response—“Hark ye yet again – the little lower layer”—opens the discourse. The discourse concerns, principally, three characters: Ishmael, who has never seen a whale; Starbuck, who has seen many whales but not the white whale; and Ahab, who has been “dismasted” by the white whale. The first statement of the discourse sets an empirical/transcendental model the Christian Starbuck would understand: “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks” (Melville 1988a, 164). Starbuck recognizes that the whale struck Ahab from pure instinct. The expression “pure instinct” locates the being of the whale as in-itself: the whale has being for its own purpose; the whale lacks reason and reflection. For the pious Starbuck, this is part of the design of the world, so that to strike a dumb brute is blasphemous, an affront to creation, in which a whale, in its essence, is incapable of such a reasoning act. Ahab, we must assume, recognizes the in-itself quality of other whales; the Pequod does hunt and kill other whales, to Ahab’s indifference. But Ahab’s white whale is a framed whale, a spoken whale, a whale made of language. For Starbuck, the whale is

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only a whale, a thing. We might note that Starbuck refers to the whale as “dumb”—that is, not speaking—and possessing only “blind instinct” – blind, not reasoning or perceiving. The whale, for Starbuck, is unwilled, incapable of a supposed evil act (such as the “dismasting” of Ahab). That an attack on this particular whale seems blasphemous places the whale, and all whales, in God’s sense of order. Ahab’s first statement opens an interventionist dialectic between “visible things” and “masks.” The second statement furthers this model: “But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask” (Melville 1988a, 164). This statement clarifies the dialectic between the “still reasoning thing” and the “unreasoning mask”; that is, the mask is neutral (principle); the agency for any act is concealed, but leaves its features on the material. Ahab qualifies a living act, an undoubted deed; he suggests an affirmative causation for the appearance of the world. This is, so far, a generic accounting of the structure of the world; Ahab has not yet directed his simile on a specific object. The third statement asserts an action in the form of a condition: “If man will strike, strike through the mask!” (Melville 1988a, 164). This “striking” is an act of will, an act of a reasoning thing. The condition sets forth that in striking at an agent, man must break through the material, revealing the presence of agency. The fourth and fifth statements name a condition derived from Ahab’s earlier simile, but are more specifically focused: “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me” (Melville 1988a, 164). In this accounting, Ahab is the prisoner; the white whale is a prison. But what does the prison enclose? If the prison formed by the whale occludes Ahab’s freedom, then freedom for Ahab is retributional justice. Even so, for Ahab, destroying the wall is to destroy the whale and (we assume) the “still reasoning” agent that reveals itself in the whale. In addition, this statement contains the first use of “is,” important to the rhetoric of this passage. “Is,” in this usage, is not a metaphor but a naming of a condition. As Heidegger claims in Hölderlin’s Hymn, when Hölderlin writes “the poet is a river,” he is not equating the poet with an aspect of a river or drawing a comparison between metrical writing and flowing (for example). For Hölderlin, the river is an enigma; in Heidegger’s terms, “The river is the locality of journeying. Yet the river is also the journeying of locality” (1996, 33). This locality, in the poem, is the place

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where humans find their home: “Here, however, we wish to build. / For rivers make arable / The land” (qtd. in Heidegger 1996, 4). All this is to illustrate that Ahab, likewise, is not creating a metaphor; indeed, there is no referent for Ahab’s specific whale. The white whale is not like that wall, nor is it equal to the wall. A whale that is like a prison wall would seem to suggest a whale that is a prison, in which Ahab is contained. But this is not the case. The whale, in its function and identification for Ahab, is in fact a wall—a blockage, a personified obstruction. “Prison wall” is an attribute of the whale Ahab is constructing, is performing, making by doing/speaking the whale. Referring to Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s hymn “The Ister,” Karen Feldman notes that “The statement ‘the poet is the river’ can be read as not a logical statement but instead as an evocation of pathos and effect, as an attempt to render the listener or reader receptive, namely to another thinking besides that of constative, descriptive thought” (2004, 164). The statement “The whale is that wall, shoved near to me” is also an evocation. While Ahab seems to be creating a figurative expression, comparing the whale to the wall, the condition “shoved near to me” specifies the function of the whale/wall, evoking a specific condition not accountable in space and time. The whale as prison wall locates the whale as a prison: not in the sense that Ahab is enclosed within it, but rather that his freedom is compromised by it. His figure shifts the ground of both prison and whale in such a way that they only share in common only one specific function of a wall: separation and blockage. The sixth statement is crucial to the discourse, for it is this statement that deflects the discourse into poetry: “Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond” (Melville 1988a, 164). The discourse to this point has been predicated upon the separation of agent and principal, of word and thing, of reality and appearance. There is a self-determining seemliness to this model; the world is as it appears, though that appearance is a metaphor for a divine will, an act of creation and execution. But this sixth statement undercuts the model: if there is no “beyond”—if there is no agency behind the mask—then the world is only masks, only appearance, and is thus not determined at all. Ahab’s statement is founded in the essential equation “there’s naught”: there is nothing. How can “nothing,” no/thing, be “there”? If there is no thing, there is no being; the statement is voided of being, and is thus not a there; the “there-ness” of the world is lost. This is not concealment, but lack. Ahab here posits a void; such a lack is brought to awareness, to intelligibility, by a word, or an

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expression: “naught beyond.” As Heidegger argues, a word has no being, but presents being to our awareness. The being that is presented to us via Ahab’s formulation is a being of no/thing. We are left with only language that presents to our intelligibility an experience of language separate from the world. We are at the edge of the linguistic entanglement of world and Dasein. Language here brings to mind Heidegger’s broken tool; it suspends the world to disclose itself as language. A tool is equipmental and only functions so far as it remains unobtrusive to the user; when the tool breaks, it calls attention to it itself away from its usage and presents itself as itself to the user—thus it is void of its intention, and separate from its being-in-the-world. The second usage of “is” here is in the contraction “there’s”: “Sometimes I think [there is] naught beyond.” Or, restated, ‘Sometimes I think that beyond naught is there.’ But again, how can nothing be present, or “be” at all? Nothing here is not an absence of being, but a presence of the space for being to emerge. If there was something beyond, Ahab would be an idealist; he would identify the physical whale with the idea of “whale.” But since Ahab is creating the whale from his own language, he requires no referent in the ideal. If any referent may be identified, it is Ahab himself. In Chapter 99, “The Doubloon,” as Ahab takes his turn at interpreting the images on the doubloon, he associates every image with an aspect of himself: There’s something ever egotistical in the mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here, – three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and the victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab…. (Melville 1988a, 431)

However, later, in Chapter 132, “The Symphony,” Ahab says, What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own, proper, natural heart I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, or God, that lifts this arm? (Melville 1988a, 545)

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“All is Ahab”; yet, “is Ahab, Ahab?” Ahab is embodied in the images he perceives; aspects of tower, volcano, predatory fowl are all constitutive of Ahab. Yet Ahab, in the second passage quoted, seems not to be constitutive of himself; that is, self has been emptied in the displacement toward concepts Ahab has invested in images. Ahab is naught beyond his monomaniacal will, embodied by his speaking, just as Ahab’s whale is an embodiment of Ahab’s will; the act of creating a malicious, willed agent (the white whale) from his own madness, his singular purpose, constitutes an act of evil in that the absence of will (the whale) is subverted by a malice of will (Ahab’s whale) not located in the supposed agent, but in the monomania of Ahab’s madness. Through Ahab’s speaking, Ahab’s whale is distinguished from Starbuck’s whale. Ahab’s whale has not only a similar manic purpose, but an exact purpose matching Ahab’s. Ahab, in this creation, has elevated the in-itself whale to a for-itself whale (the contradiction is another madness), a whale with malice. Ahab has spoken a whale that is also Ahab; the whale is a spoken Ahab, just as Ahab speaks the whale. The two can only exist in relation, as it is such that the whale does not exist at all except in Ahab’s speaking. Ahab’s specific whale is a whale made of language, made present by the experience of language as language, via poetic experience. Abbott writes, Heidegger’s experience with [poetic] language is an experience of temporary breakdown, where language draws attention to itself, and thus stops ‘working’ in the usual way. This is why he points out that language only functions to the extent that its essential nature remains veiled…. Poetic language … is not perfectly ‘clear’ and refuses the ideal of transparent inconspicuousness so as to remain and linger on the page. It is a broken language that erupts out of equipmentality, forcing Dasein into a confrontation with its sonorousness, its material qualities…. [P]oetic language is language that foregrounds its ‘thingly character’, drawing attention to itself as a material thing. (2010, 507)

Broken language has this in common with the broken tool, emerging out of its equipmentality. But, poetic language, as Abbott writes, “is more fundamental than the broken tool,” because the broken tool is not transformative to Dasein: “the difference between poetic experience and the mute experience of breakdown it so closely resembles consists in the elements of surprise and astonishment inherent in the former” (2010,

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508). Rather than being a mere tool, “language is what gives structure to the world: it makes possible my experience of it as intelligible” (Abbott 2010, 499). For Heidegger, the ontological nature of the world is that it is always already revealed to us, in every existent Dasein. Ahab’s “naught beyond” statement is a statement of ontological breakdown; this break is a surprise, perhaps even to Ahab. While Ahab clearly means to communicate a concept to Starbuck, this equipmental communication deflects to poetic with the “naught beyond” statement. For Heidegger, the use of symbolism as a trope introduced metaphysics into the world, since the symbol creates a split between the thing symbolizing and the resultant symbol, which constitutes a relationship between a thing and an idea. Ahab undercuts the metaphysics of symbolism as a language trope, the carrying-over of content from one sign to another. Instead, Ahab’s discourse becomes one of autofiguration: language brings the whale into specific being for Ahab since, in the case of the “naught beyond,” there is nothing for the whale to be in the world. Inkpin writes that “the expression ‘being-in-the-world’ marks genuine and direct contact with our surroundings, such that there is no principled gap between the way the world appears to us in the perspective of our projects and the way the world is ‘in itself’” (2016, 234). Key to this concept is the expression “perspective of our projects”: our projects, projection, intention. Language, according to Heidegger, does not systematically distort our view of the world; Inkpin writes that “when we are wrong about the world, or in our understanding of language, there is no profound philosophical reason that makes such errors necessary. Instead, we are failing to understand something that lies before our eyes, a failure for which we bear the responsibility rather than having an underlying ontological or metaphysical excuse” (2016, 246). It is significant to note that Ahab’s specific whale disappears into the world when Ahab is destroyed; the whale survives the experience as a thing, a whale “in-itself.” The evil perceived in the whale disappears when the agent who willed that evil is destroyed. The seventh statement of the discourse asserts and intensifies Ahab’s madness: “But ‘tis enough” (Melville 1988a, 164). The whale Ahab perceives as erupting from the equipmental world, the whale “initself” emerging into Ahab’s awareness as material being, justifies not its own purpose, but Ahab’s. As noted, Heidegger replaces the empirical/transcendental difference of the world with an ontological difference.

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Ahab, too, has exacted such a change, with the “naught beyond” statement; here, he asserts his awareness. He says to Starbuck, “I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him” (1988a, 164). The madness, we might say, is Ahab’s monomaniacal purpose, intentioned in the form of the white whale. Ahab’s madness, which we learn as part of his backstory in Moby-Dick, is a result of his original dismasting. Ahab’s madness as captain of the Pequod moves in two directions. He cannot remain in the depths of madness in which he descended after the original accident; he must remain rational enough to command his crew and steer his vengeful voyage. While his madness is his monomaniacal will, his madness maddened is his performative act of evil: creating a malicious, willful whale from his madness in order to sate his maddened will. In addition, we see the final use of “is”: “But [it is] enough.” We might restate this as ‘Enough it is,’ or ‘Enough is it.’ In any case, subject and predicate in this statement are equally empty. “Enough” suggests capacity, but the “it” is empty, even in its rhetorical effect; the antecedent of “it” seems to be the “naught” of the previous statement, but this is meaningless. The “it” is Ahab’s malicious will, which may also be the “unknown but still reasoning thing” manifesting itself “from behind the unreasoning mask.” We might summarize the effect of Ahab’s poetic discourse by quoting from Abbott: [I]n the emergence of language characteristic of poetic experience, something comes to be experienced by Dasein that exceeds every form of knowledge. After all, what is imparted here is precisely not a fact about the world (a “state of affairs”) that could itself be expressed more or less accurately with a corresponding propositional claim. This fact is absolutely singular: it is a fact of the world, not a fact in the world. Thus it isn’t quite that the world appears in poetic experience with a vividness that undermines all doubt, but that what appears here is of a wholly different order from the dialectic of doubt, belief and knowledge. (2010, 510)

Throughout Moby-Dick, Ahab is speaking the whale; that is, through language saying itself through Ahab’s thinking—which constitutes the “site” of his poetic utterance—he is disclosing a specific whale, bringing

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into being a whale made of his saying. Following Heidegger, two points might be emphasized: a word has no being, but a word—specifically, the practice of Saying—presents that which is said as Being. This is the nature of Ahab’s whale, which has being according to the presenting forth of Ahab’s poeticizing. And, since the structure of language is a part of the structure of Dasein, this Saying is always present, as Ahab is situated historically, as a Being in time. But more, the whale is elevated by this process (“site”) to Being for-itself. That which Karen Feldman claims about Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s hymn is true as well for Ahab’s discourse: The hymn accomplished itself and that for the sake of which it exists on one gesture. The ‘what’ that is told in the hymn and the ‘how’ of its telling are one. Hence in the hymn the noun and verb are one; for the word of the hymn celebrates and is the celebration, tells and is in one gesture, without any pointing toward something else, without recourse to any outside, and without separation the being of the celebrating from the being of what is celebrated. (2004, 162)

It is no surprise, then, that Starbuck, for whom this poeticizing is initially intended, does not recognize this whale, as it is only disclosed by Ahab for Ahab. In Sartre’s qualification of being, for Starbuck, the whale is being in-itself: it acts from “blindest instinct” and is not compromised by choice or will (as Sartre might say, the whale is not “condemned to be free”). Ahab, of course, is free, Being “for-itself:” Ahab is required to choose, to execute will, and be contained within the contingencies of choice. However, by ascribing malicious will to the white whale, Ahab elevates the whale, in his perception, to Being for-itself; in turn, Ahab’s monomaniacal purpose becomes a self-enclosing contingency. In that sense, Ahab compromises his own Being for-itself, creating in effect a closed circuit between himself and the white whale. It might be said that, in the elevation of the whale to Being for-itself, Ahab attempts to move beyond subjectivity. But his awareness of this act—expressed as “‘tis enough”—is Ahab’s monomaniacal madness maddened. This maddening results in particular rhetorical inversions, realignment of signs with their symbolic (we might say sacramental) authority. At the Council of Trent (1545–1563), the Catholic Church formulated the doctrine of ex opera operato, which determines how the language of a sacramental act brings the sacrament itself into being. This is not to say that Ahab (or Melville,

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for that matter) is pointedly referencing the Church. But clearly, Ahab is appropriating sacramental language, and a sacramental attitude, from the authority of his own malicious will; subverting the divine and adverting evil. (Melville cited the Latin oath—“I baptize thee not in the name of the Father but in the name of the Devil”—as the book’s “secret motto” in a letter to his ideal reader, Nathaniel Hawthorne.) In Chapter 113, “The Forge,” Ahab oversees the tempering of the harpoons’ points: ‘I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give as much blood as will cover this barb?’ holding it high up. A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes. The punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale’s barbs were then tempered. ‘Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diabolic!’ deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood. (Melville 1988a, 489)

Ahab, in this scene, performs a consecration, a baptism. The iron is anthropomorphized as a living thing, devouring “the baptismal blood.” This baptism is not a cleansing of sin and a rebirth in Christ, but an infusion of blood and complete depravation. The authority for this sacramental embodiment comes not from a certitude of faith (“Is it I, or God, that lifts this arm?”) but a certitude of will (“all is Ahab”). As Ahab has spoken the whale, he has made that whale present to his body. When Ahab is speaking the whale he is speaking the whale at a distance, has been speaking the relation between the whale and Ahab. So, when Ahab comes into contact with the whale, the spoken whale has closed the relation; we might say that Ahab has exhausted his speaking. Thus exhausted, there is, in his madness maddened, no more to be spoken. Ahab does not survive, because at the moment of contact—when in fact Ahab is lashed to the whale—Ahab no longer exists.

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References Abbott, Mathew. 2010. “The Poetic Experience of the World.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 18, no. 4: 493–516. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken. Boren, Mark Edelman. 2000. “What’s Eating Ahab? The Logic of Ingestion and the Performance of Meaning in Moby-Dick.” Style 34, no. 1: 1–24. Dufrenne, Mikel. 1987. In the Presence of the Sensuous: Essays in Aesthetics. Edited and translated by Mark S. Roberts and Dennis Gallagher. Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press International. Feldman, Karen S. 2004. “Heidegger and the Hypostasis of the Performative.” Angelaki 9, no. 3: 157–167. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial. ———. 1971a. “On the Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1971b. On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper Collins. ———. 1982. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Revised edition. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington/Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 1996. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” Translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2017. Introduction to Philosophy—Thinking and Poetizing. Translated by Philip Jacques Braunstein. Bloomington/Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Inkpin, Andrew. 2016. Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Lysaker, John T. 2002. You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Melville, Herman. 1988a. Moby-Dick, or The Whale: The Writings of Herman Melville, Volume Six. Edited by Harrison Hayford, Herschel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle. Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library. ———. 1988b. The Confidence Man: His Masquerade: The Writings of Herman Melville, Volume Ten. Edited by Harrison Hayford, Herschel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library. Peterson, Eric E., and Kristin M. Langellier. 2007. “The Performance Turn in Narrative Studies.” In Narrative—State of the Art, edited by Michael Bamberg, 205–214. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press.

CHAPTER 17

Seductive Female Villains and Rhetoricians in The Monk and Zofloya; or, The Moor

Hediye Özkan

When Matthew Lewis published The Monk (1796), it became the bestseller of the day and got the attention of the critics. Inspired by Lewis’s novel, Charlotte Dacre, under the pseudo name Rosa Matilda, wrote Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806) which caused controversy due to its subject matter centered on female sexuality. Making woman the subject rather than the object, Dacre challenges the male-villain in Gothic tradition as well as attempts to reverse the gender expectations through masculinized Victoria, whose “strong though noble features, her dignified carriage, her authoritative tone—her bold ness, her insensibility, her violence; [are] so utterly opposite to the gentle Lilla,” an ideal feminine type (Dacre 1806, Vol. III, 6). However, like the male protagonist Ambrosio in The Monk, Victoria is cast down into an abyss, which raises questions about Dacre’s pro-feminist standpoint and Victoria’s nonconformist role in the novel. Dacre “attack[s] on women’s heavily and problematically circumscribed role in the cultural imaginary” through Victoria who “functions as

H. Özkan (B) Aksaray University, Aksaray, Turkey © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_17

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a powerful, sexually desiring female subject” (Davison 2009a, 157) but becomes the victim of Zofloya’s insidious seduction. Although Lewis’s purpose of creating Matilda is not to comment on the social position of woman, Matilda becomes the symbol of power and a stronger female figure than Dacre’s Victoria. Examining the seductive rhetoric and performativity of villainy along with the shifting discourse between the protagonists and demonic figures, this article discusses how Matilda establishes as well as sustains her autonomy over male subjectivity while Victoria’s strong feminist traits transform into submissive characteristics.

Matilda---A Mutable Villain Scholarship about The Monk particularly focuses on the repressed sexuality of the male protagonist Ambrosio, through whom Lewis directs a harsh criticism toward Catholicism. Underlying the historical significance of the novel and its anti-Catholic sentiment, Daniel P. Watkins (1986) proposes that sexual and religious issues of the society are at the center of the story. Similarly, Steven Blakemore inspects the religious and sexual inversions which “illuminate the linkage between misogyny and the feminine, Catholic ‘Other’ in eighteenth-century Protestant discourse” (1998, 522). While Wendy Jones (1990) traces the relationship between desire and narrative by examining the novel through psychoanalytic lenses, Barry Doyle argues that The Monk is about desire that “can in no way be comfortably diagnosed or analyzed” (2009, 61). The existing criticisms make a valuable contribution to our understanding of The Monk; however, their focus is not Matilda, an overlooked character, who denies the value system of patriarchy as well as religious and social structures of society. Therefore, my analysis centers on Matilda, a progressive character, a seductive villain, and an articulate woman whom patriarchy is fearful to see. In The Monk, Matilda reverses gender roles by gaining dominance over Ambrosio through her effective/eloquent speech and persuasive/rational manipulations. Under the influence of Matilda’s discourse, the protagonist Ambrosio, whose “knowledge is said to be the most profound, his eloquence the most persuasive” (Lewis 1907, 9) accepts Matilda’s guidance and submits to a position where he can no longer use his rhetorical skills against her. According to Aristotle, rhetoric is “a counterpart of dialectic” and “the faculty of discerning the possible means of persuasion in each particular case” (1926, xxxi). Rhetoric can be used by

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virtuous or wicked people for good or bad purposes, which can cause great benefits or harm. A true rhetorician, on the other hand, “must also be acquainted with all the different forms of argument, and know what particular forms of it are likely to be effective as instruments of persuasion in each particular case” (Aristotle 1926, xxi). In the beginning of the narrative, Ambrosio, a virtuous model for Madrid, is depicted as a talented orator, whose auditors “hung with delight upon the consoling words of the preacher; and, while his full voice swelled into melody, they were transported to those happy regions which he painted to their imaginations in colors so brilliant and glowing” (Lewis 1907, 11). The listeners “find their attention irresistibly attracted while [Ambrosio] spoke, and the most profound silence reigned through the crowded aisles” (Lewis 1907, 11), and when he reflects on “the enthusiasm which his discourse had excited,” Ambrosio becomes dizzy with pleasure, uttering, “How powerful an effect did my discourse produce upon its auditors! How they crowded round me! How they loaded me with benedictions, and pronounced me the sole uncorrupted pillar of the church” (Lewis 1907, 27). Although Ambrosio boasts about his talent and mesmerizing narrative, Matilda proves that she is a better rhetorician than Ambrosio by revoking his subjectivity and shaking his private and public authority with her persuasive discourse and systematic manipulations. Ambrosio’s tragic downfall is the product of Matilda’s carefully crafted plan, which paralyzes Ambrosio’s sociability and agency. This plan imprisons Ambrosio into Matilda’s feminine and sexual domain while releasing her from the restrictions of social and religious systems by eliminating class and gender hierarchies. Matilda blurs gender boundaries in order to deconstruct the class system, where white man has power over woman in the eighteenth century. Parallel to her performative rhetoric, Matilda forms a mutable discourse through her body, which creates a nonverbal discourse that helps her enter Ambrosio’s subject of interest. Writing on gender performativity, Judith Butler claims, “Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure” (1988, 531). Under the disguise of a young man, Matilda draws Ambrosio’s attention as Rosario, whose heart “in the abbot’s society, seem[s]to be at ease,” and “an air of gaiety pervade[s] his whole manners and discourse” (Lewis 1907, 29). Matilda interprets and practices gender as Butler claims, “Bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self” (1988, 519).

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Before using words, Matilda communicates with Ambrosio in a young man’s body and identity. In Rosario’s body, Matilda is implicitly “destabilizing the fixed gender-identities required by patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality” (Cooper 2006, 26). Rosario builds a homosocial relationship with Ambrosio based on mentorship and friendship. As Butler argues, “gender is in no way a stable identity… rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts ” (1988, 519). Matilda constructs her new identity as a young novice by performing and rehearsing masculinity in the convent. When Rosario “speak[s] to [Ambrosio], he insensibly assume[s] a tone milder than was usual to him and no voice sound[s] so sweet to him as did Rosario’s” (Lewis 1907, 30). Using Ambrosio’s affection as an opportunity, Rosario gradually prepares Ambrosio for the upcoming confession about his true sex and identity. Before revealing who he is, Rosario tells a story of his so-called sister trapped in an unrequited love. Rosario uses the story as an analogy and intends to arouse sympathy in Ambrosio’s heart to manipulate his judgment when he says, “in flattering accents ‘I am a woman!’” (Lewis 1907, 43). The unexpected confession startles Ambrosio who attempts to leave; however, Rosario wants him to “listen” and declares, “I am Matilda, you are her beloved,” a reference to the unrequited love story (Lewis 1907, 43). Shocked and confused, Ambrosio becomes “amazed, embarrassed, and irresolute,” indicating his lack of resolution and counter argument against Matilda’s confession. He finds himself “incapable of pronouncing a syllable” and remains silent, suggesting how Matilda’s performative accomplishment drastically deconstructs Ambrosio’s perception about gender. Seduced easily due to sexual ambiguity and illusion created by Matilda, Ambrosio contemplates: May I not safely credit her assertions? Will it not be easy for me to forget her sex, and still consider her as my friend and my disciple? Surely her love is as pure as she describes… she strove to keep me in ignorance of her sex; and nothing but the fear of detection and my instances would have compelled her to reveal the secret. She has observed the duties of religion not less strictly than -myself; she has made no attempt to rouse my slumbering passions, nor has she ever conversed with me till this night on the subject of love. (Lewis 1907, 49)

Ambrosio, a thirty-year-old virgin, vulnerable, ignorant, and a strict “observer of chastity that he knows not in what consists the difference

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of man and woman” (Lewis 1907, 9), is feminized and easily seduced by aggressively masculine Matilda and her artful method of argumentation. In the second part of the narrative, Ambrosio metaphorically takes the role of “fallen” woman in Matilda’s arms and forgets “his vows, his sanctity, and his fame” (Lewis 1907, 69). Gradually improving in her plan, Matilda complicates the concept of identity and self-definition by using audial and visual components, which strengthen Matilda’s rhetoric and serve for her to maintain dominance over Ambrosio. When Ambrosia becomes sick, Matilda takes care of him in his room. During that time, she does not let Ambrosio produce a counter argument against what she has already decided—to stay in the convent. Upon her decision, she warns Ambrosio, saying, “Hush, father, hush! You must not talk” (Lewis 1907, 55). Whenever Ambrosio is about to talk, she silences him, saying, “Hush, father, hush! You must not talk,” and wants to “amuse [him] with [her] harp” (Lewis 1907, 56). In Ambrosio’s room, Matilda transforms into a musician from a “young novice.” Moreover, she becomes a singer when she sings a ballad, which conveys her feelings and ideas in an indirect, melodious, and subtle way. She is mobile, unstable, and constantly mutates by switching from one gender/identity to another. While she sings, Ambrosio is dependent and submissive and “listened with delight; never had he heard a voice more harmonious; and he wondered how such heavenly sounds could be produced by any but angels. But, though he indulged the sense of hearing” (Lewis 1907, 58). He closes his eyes with the intoxication of her sweet voice, which creates the assumption that he falls asleep. Despite the risk of waking him up, Matilda gives a monologue near his bed and continues talking about Madonna—the picture in Ambrosio’s room. Ambrosio however, “lost not a syllable of this discourse; and the tone in which she pronounced [the] last words pierce to his heart” (Lewis 1907, 60). He follows her attentively while Matilda confesses, “I formed the project of conveying to you my picture. Crowds of admirers had persuaded me that I possessed some beauty, and I was anxious to know what effect it would produce upon you” (Lewis 1907, 61). Matilda gains another identity through Madonna, which problematizes the boundaries of self in order to impose herself on Ambrosio. As she reveals her true sex in Rosario’s body and identity, Matilda uncovers who Madonna is and transgresses the concepts of sex, gender, and identity. Through the artistic elements such as music, painting, and oratory, Matilda not only controls Ambrosio’s eyes and ears but also his consciousness.

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Besides visual and audial discourses, Matilda uses different elements of language, tone of voice, accents, questions, and equivocations in order to convince Ambrosio and place him in a position, where he becomes a passive listener, while she is an active speaker. Discussing the style of the rhetoric, Aristotle states that “It is not sufficient to know what to say; we must also know how to say it” (1926, xl). For Aristotle, delivery “is chiefly concerned with the management of the voice, and the employment of the tones and rhythms” (1926, xl). Matilda adorns her language and delivery style with various techniques and tricks. Although, Ambrosio occasionally gets “an opportunity of recollecting himself,” one of Matilda’s “declaration has so much astonished [Ambrosio]” who says, “I am at present incapable of answering you. Do not insist upon a reply” (Lewis 1907, 62). Matilda’s communication skills disable the talented preacher, who “was named confessor to all the chief families in Madrid; and no one was counted fashionable who was enjoined penance by any other than Ambrosio” (Lewis 1907, 190). Matilda also reminds him of “the lively enthusiasm, which [his] discourse created” and continues, “Oh, how I drank your words! How your eloquence seemed to steal me from myself! I scarcely dared to breathe, fearing to lose a syllable” (Lewis 1907, 44). While “his discourse was always received with the same approbation,” he cannot find words to defend himself against Matilda. They gradually switch the roles when Matilda becomes his guide as Ambrosio articulates, “I have need of an adviser, and a confident: in you I find every needful quality united” (Lewis 1907, 212). Eventually, he completely surrenders, promising, “I yield! Matilda, I follow you! Do with me what you will” (Lewis 1907, 216). Demonically and sexually possessed, Ambrosio acknowledges Matilda’s authority over Ambrosio whose choice of Matilda as his advisor might be the maternal substitution (Doyle 2009, 63). Raised in a convent without knowing his mother, Ambrosio articulates his desire for a guide who can provide him the domestic security. It also indicates how Ambrosio ironically elevates Matilda’s statues from a “fallen woman” to an “advisor” or “master.” Although “some of Lewis’s opinions regarding gender roles were conservative and even sexist” (Brewer 2004, 193), he performs the opposite by assigning a woman as an advisor to a man.

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Victoria---A Persuasive Villain Scholarly attention about Charlotte Dacre’s novel, Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806) particularly focuses on feminine eroticism (Dunn 1998, 308), which provides a significant contrast to her contemporaries. Besides, Dacre and female authorship (Moreno 2007), function of music (Noske 1981), literary masochism (Sigler 2015), absent mother (Anolik 2003), mothers and lovers (Haggerty 2004), slavery and revenge (Scotland 2009), the importance of Venice as an urban space, and self and city (Donovan-Condron 2013), and how Zofloya is drawn from The Monk’s Faustian narrative and adopts master–slave dialectic (Davison 2009b) are some of the topics examined by scholars. Keeping valuable criticism about Zofloya in mind, my discussion follows a different path by focusing on Victoria’s persuasive discourse and rhetoric which allow her to assert the feminine autonomy deconstructed by Zofloya toward the end of the narrative. Similar to Matilda, in the beginning of the narrative, Dacre’s female protagonist Victoria is depicted as libidinous talented seducer/villain, who “manages to persuade everybody around her, both male and female” (Moreno 2007, 425) through her persuasive rhetoric. “Artful” Victoria “bent[s] upon gaining the ascendancy in whatever she engaged” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 5), implying her feminine desire and agency. Even the Count, notoriously known as a womanizer, dares to seduce not the selfconfident Victoria but her mother. Victoria becomes “the deity to which the house looked up: her word was law throughout; and to dispute the smallest of her wishes, would have been deemed amounting to sacrilege” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 33). Berenza, the lover and later husband of Victoria, “listen[s] with delight and surprise to the independence of spirit” when Victoria challenges her mother and Count Ardolph about their relationship (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 86). However, seeing Victoria’s cruel attitude toward her own mother leads Berenza to reanalyze his feelings about her. Realizing his inner conflict, Victoria “determine[s] on regaining his esteem,” by “[a]approaching her weeping mother, therefore with a conciliating air,” which eliminates Berenza’s negative thoughts about Victoria (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 88). “Artful Victoria” knows how to turn a destructive situation into her advantage and achieves to regain Berenza’s respect through her persuasive skills.

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Victoria uses rhetorical skills to manipulate people in order to discard the limitations forced upon her agency. For example, imprisoned in Signora’s house, Victoria seeks the ways in which she can trick Catau, who has the key for the door which leads into the woods—freedom. Seeing hesitant Catau, Victoria approaches her and says, “I understand you, Catau, …. but you know there could be nothing wrong in rambling now and then about the wood, and, supposing the Signora has forbid it, how could it ever become known?” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 152). With the help of her cunning rhetoric, Victoria gets the keys for the door, and when they are both outside, she asks, “‘Catau, canst thou tell now in which direction lies the city of Venice?’” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 160). Victoria takes advantage of Catau’s naivety and gains her trust by luring her with a “kind and condescending manner” in order to acquire the information she needs. Victoria wants her to “listen” and continues, “Now these are the pacific terms which I propose to you,” in a censoring manner, “Should you be questioned as to whether I am gone, swear, what is true, that you cannot tell” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 165). Victoria prevents Catau from speaking the truth by imposing her own discourse. This censorship makes “Catau trembled like a leaf in the gale: the firmness and decision, with which she had been addressed, left her not the power of reply” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 166). In the disguise of a maid, Victoria uses her effective communication skills to convince a gondolier for a ride to Venice where Berenza lives. As a response to the gondolier who demands money for his service, she says, “I have no money, friend; but I have a lover in Venice, and if thou wilt convey me thither, the blessed Virgin will ever send thee luck” which arouses sympathy in his heart (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 178). Being away from his lover due to her parents, the gondolier identifies with Victoria and “conceived a fellow feeling for her” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 179). Like Matilda, Victoria crosses class boundaries by acting as a common girl rather than an aristocratic woman. This new identity provides her a new space, freedom, and mobility within society, promoting certain gender roles for upper-class women. As she gains mastery over Catau and the gondolier, Victoria dissuades Berenza, who desires to “modify the strong features of her character into the nobler virtues” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 198). For Berenza, “Victoria [is] beneath his roof, voluntarily in his power, he had leisure to revise and amplify on those errors” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 198). However, Victoria with her “strong and resolute mind, capable of attempting anything undismayed by consequences,” protests being the mistress of Berenza

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and convinces him to marry her (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 220). Victoria does not simply let Berenza define her position, but rather she takes the control by transforming her status from an ephemeral mistress to an official wife. Believing the influence of different speech techniques, she is aware that “it would be necessary and politic to answer his sincere and honorable love at least with an appearance equally ardent and sincere” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 225). Berenza feels “as if under the impression of her dream,” while Victoria’s eloquent rhetoric makes him surprised and “deprived of the power of speech” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 229). Moreover, “His senses became confused, when, seizing wildly in his arms the artful Victoria, he exclaimed, in hurried accents—”Thou art mine!—Yes, I now know that thou art mine” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 229). Victoria accomplishes reversing Berenza’s plans by attaining her autonomy. “Proud of her achievement,” Victoria is sure “that her lover should not recover from his delusion” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 229). Berenza is convinced and “more attached to Victoria: his scrupulous doubts, his reserves, wholly vanished” (Dacre 1806, Vol. I, 231). Victoria elevates her social position from a mistress to a wife by gaining the control over Berenza through her seductive discourse. She has a “complete and powerful” domination “over his mind” so that Berenza “was no longer the refined, the calculating philosopher, but the yielding devoted lover” (Dacre 1806, Vol. II, 81). Instead of being mold, Victoria resists hypocritical male morality and shapes Berenza’s perception about marriageable woman through her cunning speeches and effective manipulations. Although Victoria persuades everyone around her, breaks boundaries, and rejects limitations, she cannot challenge the rhetoric of Zofloya, the servant of Henriquez (Berenza’s brother), who has “a gentle,” “harmonious voice,” and talks in “a sympathizing,” and “honied accents” (Dacre 1806, Vol. II, 143, 148, 156, 175). When Zofloya speaks, “Every uneasy feeling of Victoria’s bosom vanishes” (Dacre 1806, Vol. II, 156). Being aware of his talent, Zofloya says, “If I speak on, you will not bid me cease; you will not shrink, Signora,” who cannot say anything, but her “only answer was an expressive smile and gesture, “one of the first signs of Victoria’s passivity (Dacre 1806, Vol. II, 163). Zofloya’s speech has mesmerizing effects that “the most agreeable sensations fluttered through her frame, … his silver tones sung on her ear in thrilling cadence” (Dacre 1806, Vol. II, 158). This manipulation performed by words gradually captivates Victoria under Zofloya’s authority. Like Ambrosio, who constantly seeks Matilda’s guidance, Victoria desperately seeks Zofloya’s

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advice, saying, “Can you instruct me? Can you arrange? Can you direct the confused suggestions of my brain?” (Dacre 1806, Vol. II, 152). Victoria is convinced that Zofloya’s “words are big with meaning; they contain more than meets the ear!” and proceeds, “Quick, and tell me, boldly, all you would say” (Dacre 1806, Vol. II, 149). Due to her semiincestuous monomania for Henriquez, Victoria asks for Zofloya’s, the Satan’s help, claiming, “Say, say quickly—what consolation canst thou offer in return” (Dacre 1806, Vol. II, 161). As Zofloya fuels Victoria’s desires and is “Half frantic with joy at the meaning contained in his words,” Victoria continues, “Speak on then, Zofloya! Your words are magic, they soothe my soul, and I feel hope!” (Dacre 1806, Vol. II, 163). Victoria “subjects herself to Zofloya’s dominion” (Scotland 2009, 125) by undertaking a submissive role as opposed to her independent character in the beginning of the narrative. The independent self-confident woman is replaced by desperate Victoria. Her transformation problematizes Dacre’s exploration of femininity and representation of strong woman figure who challenges social and cultural norms. However, we still see feminine desire and sexuality in the novel since Victoria does not give up on her sexual desires. “Artful” Victoria gradually takes a passive and subversive role in her relationship with “wily” Zofloya, whose voice “like the sweet murmuring sound of an Aeolian harp, swept by the breath of the zephyr” (Dacre 1806, Vol. II, 184). These sweetest sounds are like “the tremulous vibration of a double-toned flute, sounding as it were from a distance; its lovely melody by turns softened and agitated her” (Dacre 1806, Vol. II, 239). She expresses her passivity and desperateness, claiming, “My soul is indeed disturbed, and unless thou wilt assist me, I am lost” (Dacre 1806, Vol. II, 243). Victoria declares Zofloya as the only authority who can help her, which erases her autonomy. Although Victoria is an “independent female resisting male morality and the male shaping of her character” (Dunn 1998, 316), she allows Zofloya to direct, mold, and control her. She requests him to “Speak, speak Zofloya; if you have aught to suggest, withhold it not an instant from me” (Dacre 1806, Vol. III, 66). Zofloya is ready to be the mentor of Victoria, saying, “Come then, in a gay and conciliating tone, come, let me lead you out” (Dacre 1806, Vol. II, 229). Dacre attempts to subvert ideal femininity and cultural norms through Victoria; however, the female protagonist gradually becomes dependent by submitting to Zofloya’s commands and “experiencing a horrifying shift in status from that of master to slave” (Davison 2009a, 156). Although

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Dacre challenges the victim protagonist convention of the Gothic genre, Victoria cannot escape from being initially a slave to the Satan, disguised as servant Zofloya, and a victim in the end. As effective speakers, both Ambrosio and Victoria surrender to their seducers’ systematic manipulations and eloquent rhetoric. If we consider demon Matilda disguised as a human, Lewis’s strong female character transmits more feminist messages than Dacre’s Victoria, who becomes the victim of the Satan and is cast down into the abyss, which is what cultural norms set for marginal women. While Ambrosio is resistant to Matilda’s rhetoric to an extent, Victoria is completely open to receive Zofloya’s discourse, gradually imprisoning her into unlimited desires. Ambrosio and Victoria share the same fate and end up in darkness in exchange for their passions. In the end, Matilda’s and Zofloya’s evil and seductive rhetoric controls the agency and subjectivity of Ambrosio and Victoria. Despite the dreadful ending, where Victoria is stuck into domestic territory, Dacre’s Victoria still provides a critique about “Victorian” values by being lusty, aggressive, transgressive, and masculine. However, this would not be enough to rescue Victoria from being murdered like a criminal, suggesting the unavoidable situation, where unconventional women are going to end up in the Romantic era. What happens to the victim protagonist Victoria at the end of the narrative is Dacre’s social commentary on the circumscribed role of woman in the eighteenth-century society. Both The Monk and Zofloya challenge the male-villain tradition in the Gothic genre by portraying strong, articulate, and transgressive female villains/seducers and their repressed passions. The subversive female villains and critique of socio-cultural sex/gender system of the eighteenthcentury society situate both of these pivotal works within Female Gothic tradition that functions as a literary device to underscore the progressive and feminist agendas and brings a new perspective and revision to Gothic literature.

References Anolik, Ruth B. 2003. “The Missing Mother: The Meanings of Maternal Absence in the Gothic Mode.” Modern Language Studies 33, no. 1/2: 24–43. Aristotle. 1926. The Art of Rhetoric. Translated by John Henry Freese. London: William Heinemann. Blakemore, Steven. 1998. “Matthew Lewis’s Black Mass: Sexual Religious Inversion in The Monk.” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 4: 521–539.

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Brewer, William D. 2004. “Transgendering in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.” Gothic Studies 6, no. 2: 192–207. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4: 519–553. Cooper, Andrew. 2006. “Gothic Threats: The Role of Danger in the Critical Evaluation of The Monk and The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Gothic Studies 8, no. 2: 18–51. Dacre, Charlotte. 1806. Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century. London: Longman. Davison, Carol M. 2009a. History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. ———. 2009b. “Getting Their Knickers in a Twist: Contesting the ‘Female Gothic’ in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya.” Gothic Studies 11, no. 1: 32–45. Donovan-Condron, Kellie. 2013. “Urban gothic in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya.” European Romantic Review 24, no. 6: 683–697. Doyle, Barry. 2009. “Freud and the Schizoid in Ambrosio: Determining Desire in The Monk.” Gothic Studies 2, no. 1: 61–69. Dunn, James. 1998. “Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence Author(s).” Nineteenth Century Literature 53, no. 3: 307–327. Haggerty, George H. 2004. “Mothers and Other Lovers: Gothic Fiction and Erotics of Loss.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16, no. 2: 157–172. Jones, Wendy. 1990. “Stories of Desire in The Monk.” ELH 57, no. 1: 29–150. Lewis, Matthew G. 1907. The Monk. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Moreno, Beatriz G. 2007. “Gothic Excess and Aesthetic Ambiguity in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya.” Women’s Writing 14, no. 3: 419–434. Noske, Fritz. 1981. “Sound and Sentiment: The Function of Music in the Gothic Novel.” Music & Letters 62, no. 2: 162–175. Scotland, Sara D. 2009. “The Slave’s Revenge: The Terror in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya.” The Western Journal of Black Studies 33, no. 2: 123–131. Sigler, David. 2015. Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism: Gender and Psychoanalysis, 1753–1835. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Watkins, Daniel P. 1986. “Social Hierarchy in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.” Studies in the Novel 18, no. 2: 115–124.

CHAPTER 18

Dressed to Kill: Manipulating Perceived Social Class Through the Con of Clothing in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Fiction Sabrina Paparella

The creation of a villain starts with their very appearance; to fully read a villain, you must read their means of self-presentation. In the pages of a novel, as in life, clothing is performative, and it’s utilized here by the fictional to create a fiction of their own. The elegant villain evokes the same fear as the con man: that beneath the well-dressed appearance lies sinister intent; that words spoken and promises made may be as easily shed as the clothing they wear, to be changed at will; a false identity. Clothing is the con, used by the wearer as a sleight of hand to lure the viewer in by what should be regarded as desirable: beauty, social influence, and wealth. The mutability of clothing, and its ability to mimic, allows the user to bypass class boundaries, but not without repercussions. If class standing can be flimsily replicated with a simple disguise, the legitimacy of this

S. Paparella (B) Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_18

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social fabric is thrown into question. When characters use the illusory nature of clothing to blur social boundaries, the villain is created. In this piece, we’ll explore not so much the “born” villain but the complex protagonist cultivated into the villainous piece by piece with every item worn. We’ll explore three works whose central characters rely on their mode of dress to climb into the upper echelon: Heathcliff of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , Dorian Gray of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Jay Gatsby of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. These “villains,” whether deemed such by their peers or the narrator, utilize clothing as a con to present a background contrary to their reality. Ultimately, it’s their disregard for class bounds that leads to the dapper antagonists’ undoing, and their clothing serves as a smoke screen to a fractured identity that speaks in half-truths.

The Mutability of Clothing and Reinvention If the power of clothing lies in its ability to cultivate an identity, then it can rewrite the past and allow the wearer to manifest their own vision of the present. In short, clothing is a practice in reinvention. Heathcliff and Gatsby are born into the working class and, as adults, step into new social castes. Clothing is a powerful, malleable tool used to cement their identities in a new social world, emphasizing how much of identity is perceived through the physical. Guiding a conversation on social behavior as performance is Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which, through the metaphor of theater, highlights the presence of performance in human behavior both as individuals and within larger social groups. He names clothing, along with intangible characteristics such as sex, age, race, posture, and speech patterns, as “vehicles for conveying signs,” referred to as “appearance” (Goffman 1959, 24). Appearance then works in tandem with manner to make up an individual’s performance. Goffman writes of performance, “A status, a position, a social place, is not a material thing to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well-articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is nonetheless something that must be enacted or portrayed, something that must be realized” (Goffman 1959, 75). Reinvention encapsulates a knowing self-reconfigurement to step into an alternative social group.

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To understand Heathcliff’s reinvention as an adult, we begin with his introduction as a child adopted into the Earnshaw family. Nelly, the family’s caretaker, recounts Heathcliff’s arrival to Wuthering Heights: We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy’s head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child, big enough both to walk and talk; indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand. I was frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors; she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house. (Brontë 2011, 35–36)

The family’s fear brims at the qualities that mark Heathcliff as their social opposite: he speaks in a foreign tongue, he’s dressed in rags, and his ethnic and national backgrounds are left ambiguous. We glimpse an orphaned child roaming through life with disadvantages that have left him barely tethered to survival; disadvantages no less assuaged by the cruel behavior the Earnshaws exhibit at Heathcliff’s arrival. Brontë has the reader endure witness to his mistreatment as a child to retain sympathy for a character who will be fashioned into a villain as an adult. We can compare this to the introduction of an adult, self-made Heathcliff by Mr. Lockwood, the novel’s frame-narrator, who is an outsider to the isolated world of Wuthering Heights: “But Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living. He is a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire; rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose” (Brontë 2011, 5). Lockwood describes Heathcliff as having, in dress and manners, the appearance of a gentleman. He carries himself as a social peer to Lockwood and has learned to conduct himself within this society, utilizing clothing as a tool of conformity. There remains in Lockwood’s description, however, a current of unease when it comes to aspects of Heathcliff’s appearance that serves as a supposed contrast to his class and will feed into the myth of Heathcliff as villain. The reader is given an even more detailed account of Gatsby’s past than Heathcliff’s hazy background prior to landing on the doorstep of Wuthering Heights. Gatsby’s reinvention is a study in the self-made man:

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James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen … when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee and informed Cody that a wind might catch him…. I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself…. He invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-yearold boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. (Fitzgerald 1974, 100)

Gatsby’s jersey is an article of clothing that will be directly mirrored with the bespoke shirts he later shows Daisy and Nick. To say it’s Jay Gatsby’s jersey, however, is a misnomer—it belongs to James Gatz and is symbolic of his character prior to his reinvention. The jersey is torn, due to repeated use in physical labor, while his durable canvas pants are likewise made to hold up to blue-collar work, matching his parents’ occupation as farmers. In short, his clothing paints a working-class background at odds with his reinvented self: Jay Gatsby. The name change further cements the idea of reinvention, a rechristening of the self to fully inhabit a new form. It’s worth noting that the revelation of Gatsby’s former identity is only given after the reader—through Nick—has come to trust this character. The villain’s past remains opaque because villainy isn’t supposed to have sympathetic motivations—the villain is meant to be disliked. Fitzgerald provides a background once the reader is encouraged to see the villain as multi-dimensional. To know the adversity he has faced is to humanize him, and it’s only after Fitzgerald has made us certain that Gatsby isn’t the man rumors say he is that we get a background that makes him sympathetic. It’s precisely because neither of these characters, Gatsby nor Heathcliff, are traditional villains whose pasts we can access and grasp at for strands of authenticity. After all, to their peers, it’s their ambiguity that serves as the catalyst for their perceived villainy. Gatsby uses the malleability of clothing to its fullest, having not a singular reinvention but multiple from his start as Midwestern farm boy James Gatz to the entrepreneurial Jay Gatsby, his manner of dress changing with each leap. In his turn from sailor to soldier—the mid-steps

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prior to his ultimate transformation—he’s able to cross the boundary into the Fays’ social world and meet Daisy, relying specifically on the transformative power of the uniform. Gatsby’s clothing here is used as a sleight of hand, lending him movement within his identity. The uniform is a particularly powerful article of clothing, especially to the villain, because it serves as a badge of belonging, visually connoting one’s space within a social sphere. What separates Gatsby’s use of the uniform from a “true” villain is that he isn’t using the uniform to imitate a soldier—he is a soldier. The identity isn’t a false one, but he does intentionally utilize the social blank slate the uniform provides to pass over the threshold of class and ease his way into the Fays’ social circle. Gatsby’s final persona is, as we meet him, the Jay Gatsby Nick meets at his party. This Gatsby is meticulous in manner, speech, and appearance: He’s “picking his words with care” (Fitzgerald 1974, 50). His hair looks as though it were “trimmed every day” (Fitzgerald 1974, 51). Gatsby’s selfpresentation is so rehearsed that Nick—and the reader—initially struggle to find meaningful authenticity in this meticulously crafted persona. This rehearsed aspect to Gatsby’s manner is what will continue to draw suspicion from the wealthy social group he seeks to impress and is a manner of self-presentation that Goffman names as an “unmeant gesture”: “The performer may act in such a way as to give the impression that he is too much or too little concerned with the interaction. He may…appear nervous, or guilty, or self-conscious” (Goffman 1959, 52). While the reader, guided by Nick, comes to understand Gatsby beyond the front of his performance, the distrust of the social group will continue to plague Gatsby for the duration of the novel, marking him, to the others in the book at least, as “villainous.” Dorian participates in a manner of reinvention singular from that of Gatsby and Heathcliff and will continue to be our outlier here as the only proven murderer and most aptly villainous figure. Dorian is in and outside of his social world, accepted by his peers but internally alienated by his own guilt. While Gatsby and Heathcliff use clothing to prove themselves to their peers, Dorian adopts clothing that furthers a lifestyle into the decadent and remorseless. Dorian’s clothing proves its malleability, becoming more outrageous as his crimes escalate. Our initial introduction to Dorian is as a young man, almost childlike in his naiveté. He’s described by Lord Henry, Dorian’s soon-to-be personal idol, as “… certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely

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curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him” (Wilde 1995, 33). The repeated description of his “purity” is the starting point for his reinvention into the corrupt figure depicted in the portrait. Dorian’s dress first changes with his “mad wish” to the portrait that “he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins” (Wilde 1995, 105). Dorian’s wish to absolve himself of responsibility for his actions is as much a part of his villainy as the crimes themselves. The morning following the deal, Dorian is seen “throwing on an elaborate dressing-gown of silk-embroidered cashmere wool,” highlighting the beginning of an increasingly self-indulgent lifestyle (Wilde 1995, 109). The morning after Dorian kills his friend and mentor Basil, his most severe crime in the novel, his clothing is again emphasized: “When the half-hour struck, he passed his hand across his forehead, and then got up hastily and dressed himself with even more than his usual care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his necktie and scarfpin and changing his rings more than once” (Wilde 1995, 175). Dorian is more discerning with his wardrobe than usual, compelled by the notion that to preserve the physical image is to preserve the soul, his clothing obscuring his crimes in the same manner as the portrait, positioned as part of an act to cover a crime. Another description of Dorian’s clothing follows after he blackmails a friend into disposing of Basil’s body: “That evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large button-hole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady Narborough’s drawing-room by bowing servants. His forehead was throbbing with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his manner as he bent over his hostess’s hand was as easy and graceful as ever. Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part” (Wilde 1995, 187). Clothing is integral to the façade, even empowering Dorian in his crimes. He relies on his appearance to charm the society around him, accompanied by perfect manners befitting his act as an ideal socialite and gentleman. If Dorian does feel guilt, he has suppressed it. Here, he’s enlivened by the act and feels powerful in his falseness.

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Like Gatsby, Dorian uses the mutability of clothing to shrug in and out of social circles, but he’s the only one to utilize clothing falsely, specifically in a scene where he visits an opium den. It’s our only overt villain here who uses clothing in an entirely disingenuous manner: “As midnight was striking bronze blows upon the dusky air, Dorian Gray, dressed commonly, and with a muffler wrapped round his throat, crept quietly out of his house” (Wilde 1995, 195). The ease with which Dorian is able to jump in and out of different identities is a luxury only the wealthy are granted. Gatsby and Heathcliff, born into the working class, do not possess the same social maneuverability, emphasizing that a harsher journey awaits those hoping to ascend the social ladder.

Clothing as Proof of Belonging As the power of reinvention shows, clothing is a visual symbol of wealth and status, as “proof” of class belonging. The visibility of wealth is crucial, as Thorstein Veblen writes in his essay The Theory of the Leisure Class, and is part of the “conspicuousness” shown in regard to the display of both leisure time and material goods: “In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence” (Veblen 2007, 29). For Heathcliff and Gatsby, clothing serves to not only cement their belonging but also shroud their former identities, guarding them against the disbelief of their peers. Their clothing, particularly for Gatsby, is an imitation of how they perceive the wealthy to look and dress. As Goffman writes in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, there is no guidebook given for how one is supposed to manifest the appropriate markers of class or any one social group: “When the individual does move into a new position in society and obtains a new part to perform, he is not likely to be told in full detail how to conduct himself, nor will the facts of his new situation press sufficiently on him from the start to determine his conduct without his further giving thought to it” (Goffman 1959, 72). Heathcliff and, especially, Gatsby give thought to how exactly they will best “prove” themselves as legitimate members of a group they have been striving to join since boyhood. The power of appearance is most evident for Heathcliff when he returns to Wuthering Heights after Cathy’s marriage to Edgar Linton, where the pronounced difference in Heathcliff’s countenance as an adult elicits an immediate response from his childhood acquaintances. His

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return is performative, leveraging the power of appearance to prove himself as Linton’s equal. Nelly, the primary caretaker at Wuthering Heights, describes Heathcliff in similar terms to Lockwood’s description: I distinguished a tall man dressed in dark clothes, with dark face and hair…. A ray fell on his features; the cheeks were sallow, and half covered with black whiskers; the brows lowering, the eyes deep set and singular…. I was amazed, more than ever, to behold the transformation of Heathcliff. He had grown a tall, athletic, well-formed man, beside whom my master seemed quite slender and youthlike. His upright carriage suggested the idea of his having been in the army. His countenance was much older in expression and decision of feature than Mr. Linton’s; it looked intelligent, and retained no marks of former degradation. A half-civilized ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified, quite divested of roughness, though too stern for grace. (Brontë 2011, 90–93)

As with Lockwood’s description of an adult Heathcliff as “a darkskinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman,” Nelly also notes Heathcliff’s dark clothing, and the “darkness” of his appearance takes precedence over all other descriptors; it lends Heathcliff a sense of seriousness and even foreboding in the eyes of the surrounding characters while also conveying a sense of mourning: the loss of Cathy to Linton (Brontë 2011, 5). The change in Heathcliff’s appearance goes beyond clothing. Both Nelly and Lockwood note Heathcliff’s posture and demeanor, his “handsome” figure and “dignified” manner. This is a Heathcliff who has learned not only how to dress but how to carry himself in genteel society. We get again an echo of Goffman’s assertion that appearance and manner are linked qualities of performing status, a “pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished and well-articulated” (Goffman 1959, 75). Veblen, in his account of “conspicuous leisure,” similarly names manners as “in part an elaboration of gesture” used to “show that much time has been spent in acquiring them” (Veblen 2007, 35). Heathcliff’s physical strength is frequently contrasted with Linton’s, demonstrating the differences in their upbringing. Heathcliff’s “upright carriage” and athletic build are indicative of someone who has performed physical labor since childhood, again owing to his working-class roots, while the repeated mentions of frail health underscore Linton’s pampered,

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lethargic lifestyle. There is even a reference to the physical labor Heathcliff performed as a child that Linton still associates him with: “My master’s surprise equalled or exceeded mine; he remained for a minute at a loss how to address the ploughboy, as he had called him. Heathcliff dropped his slight hand, and stood looking at him coolly till he chose to speak” (Brontë 2011, 93). Heathcliff, with his elegant manners and confident demeanor, is a powerful presence here, and Linton’s noted surprise cements Heathcliff as a reenvisioned, fully evolved figure that’s a far cry from the vulnerable child we’re introduced to. Heathcliff is reintroduced as a threat not only to the Lintons’ marriage but to their social order, with his remade appearance and demeanor as proof of that belonging. As Veblen elaborates in his essay, “refined tastes, manners, and manners of life are a useful evidence of gentility, because good breeding requires time, application, and expense, and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are taken up with work” (Veblen 2007, 36). Heathcliff’s new air of refinement serves to further distance him from his laborious past. Unlike Heathcliff, whose primary concern is impressing Cathy, Gatsby has a greater, all-encompassing preoccupation with how he is perceived, evident in one of his first questions to Nick: “‘What’s your opinion of me, anyhow?’” (Fitzgerald 1974, 66). This admission of concern makes him sympathetic, self-doubt bubbling beneath the dapper demeanor despite his success, leading to proportionately bolder displays of wealth than Heathcliff. One of the novel’s most famous scenes combines the performativity of wealth with clothing: He opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high. “I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.” He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender

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and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. “They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.” (Fitzgerald 1974, 94)

Clothing is powerful here, imbued with an unspoken meaning that moves Daisy to tears. The shirts are a potent symbol of Gatsby’s newfound wealth and how he has diverged from the Jay Gatsby Daisy knew in the past. They serve as physical proof that Gatsby has departed from the soldier she first loved, and Daisy Buchanan is likewise no longer the memory of her younger self, the beloved Southern belle Daisy Fay. There is a mourning of youth and yesteryear here that plays on one of The Great Gatsby’s central themes: time is irreversible, and the present can never be melded into the form of the past. This scene also shows how clothing gives Gatsby the freedom to adopt whatever persona he’d like, his wardrobe immaculate in its sheer diversity of color, fabric, and pattern. It’s the uniform of the “Oxford man,” his repeated point of reference, which manifests itself in his imported English clothing. He may not have been born the Oxford man, but he can step into that identity by stepping into its clothing.

“An Oxford Man! He Wears a Pink Suit”: Disbelief from Peers Despite their best efforts to conform in both looks and mannerisms to their peers, Heathcliff and Gatsby are nonetheless cast as villains. Clothing, among other displays of wealth, isn’t enough to shield these men, and their surrounding social circles detect inauthenticity in their self-presentation. What were markers of belonging are the same qualities that backfire, seeming hollow to their peers. Goffman writes of this imitative gap that’s sensed by the wider social group: “When we think of those who present a false front or ‘only’ a front, of those who dissemble, deceive, and defraud, we think of a discrepancy between fostered appearances and reality” (Goffman 1959, 59). Instead, the lack of family names coupled with their hazy pasts make their displays of wealth seem imitative and emphasize the importance of family lineage within each society.

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Gatsby puts in a tremendous effort to acclimate to his social sphere, and the surrounding society is carefully tuned into his outward expressions of wealth. After all, they are the primary benefactors of his lavish, performative parties. Gatsby’s use of entertainment, along with his clothing, to prove his wealth falls under the umbrella of “conspicuous consumption,” which Veblen names in his essay as “a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure” (Veblen 2007, 53). He then uses entertainment to “sufficiently put his opulence in evidence,” as his wealth is so extraordinary he needs others to be “witness to the consumption of that excess of good things which his host is unable to dispose of single-handed” (Veblen 2007, 53–4). His actions, however, are read as contrived, even deceitful. Among the small talk at Gatsby’s party are discussions around his “real” identity and the repeated rumor of Gatsby killing a man: “Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.” A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly. “I don’t think it’s so much that,” argued Lucille sceptically; “it’s more that he was a German spy during the war.” One of the men nodded in confirmation. “I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,” he assured us positively. “Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.” As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.” (Fitzgerald 1974, 45)

The gleeful gossip around Gatsby’s past casts him in a villainous light, whether as spy or murderer. The spy, in particular, as noted by Goffman, carries with them the notion of a “false guise,” a “performer” (Goffman 1959, 145). While the details of Gatsby’s supposed villainy are debated, there’s a consensus that Gatsby must be a criminal: “‘He’s a bootlegger,’ said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. ‘One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew

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to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass’” (Fitzgerald 1974, 62). This passage highlights their brazen willingness to use Gatsby’s belongings while regarding him as an enemy. Ultimately, it comes down to their perception of Gatsby’s background; it’s his blank history that prevents Gatsby from fully crossing over into their world, and here, name and background mean everything, a social “system of rank and grades” that Veblen refers to as the “inheritance of gentility” (Veblen 2007, 54). If you aren’t native to this society, you will be singled out and villainized: “Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man.” A dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away. “However, I don’t believe it.” “Why not?” “I don’t know,” she insisted, “I just don’t think he went there.” Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl’s “I think he killed a man,” and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. (Fitzgerald 1974, 50–51)

Goffman similarly speaks to the legitimacy of a social performance and sensed falsehood: “Sometimes when we ask whether a fostered impression is true or false we really mean to ask whether or not the performer is authorized to give the performance in question” (Goffman 1959, 59). Gatsby is not the “Oxford man”; his persona does not fit this symbol of inherited wealth. So if Gatsby isn’t the Oxford man, if he isn’t old money—but he is moneyed—then the presumption is that he reached that position through villainy. Even Nick’s suspicions are initially raised by the Jay Gatsby persona, emphasized in the first meeting he and Nick have alone: “And then came that disconcerting ride. We hadn’t reached West Egg Village before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished and slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-colored suit” (Fitzgerald 1974, 66). We’re shown a crack in his mannerisms, emphasizing Jay

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Gatsby as a persona, one that Gatsby is struggling to uphold. This scene is the peak of suspicion toward Gatsby, who then proceeds to tell Nick a clearly fabricated account of his past: “I’ll tell you God’s truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the middle-west—all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.” He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him, after all. (Fitzgerald 1974, 66–67)

Fitzgerald has Gatsby tell an obvious lie that initially casts doubt on his character. There is a discrepancy here between Gatsby’s appearance and behavior, with the suit mentioned at the forefront. Gatsby isn’t his usual polished persona, and the suit stands in contrast to his nervous words and mannerisms, more costume than clothing. Gatsby even carries physical proof to supplant his lies: a photograph of him at Oxford and a medal he received in Montenegro. These props serve a purpose. They are more than just proof of his stories; they are proof of belonging, rectifying the past and encouraging Gatsby’s place within a new social world. Both Goffman and Veblen single out the symbolic social potency of uniforms and insignia, which Veblen refers to as “trophies” whose use “develops into a system of rank, title, [and] degrees” (Veblen 2007, 34). Gatsby’s lies soon prove to have a more complicated intention behind them, as Nick realizes as the two grow closer. Gatsby’s inability to lie with ease signals his integrity rather than his immorality, and as we better get to know Gatsby, we begin to see a man who feels his only choice is to create a more palatable past for a social circle that forces the lie. Gatsby’s most emphasized article of clothing comes in the form of another suit, this time a bright-pink one that is worn throughout the notable ending scenes of the novel, where several plot points come to a head. Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan, regards Gatsby’s mannerisms and dress with contempt, and the pink suit, in particular, is an object of derision. In a conversation with Jordan Baker, Tom says:

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“I said I’d been making a small investigation of his past.” “And you found he was an Oxford man,” said Jordan helpfully. “An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.” “Nevertheless he’s an Oxford man.” “Oxford, New Mexico,” snorted Tom contemptuously, “or something like that.” (Fitzgerald 1974, 124)

Tom’s criticism of Gatsby’s clothing directly precedes an altercation between the men in which several of the qualities that make up Gatsby’s persona are called out one by one. Tom asks him about his use of the phrase “old sport,” has him elaborate on his past as an Oxford man— which, it turns out, Gatsby really did attend, if only for five months—and the conversation ultimately leads to a confrontation about Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship. Gatsby may have the ability, the wealth, to dress and speak and entertain outlandishly, but he does not fit Tom’s idea of what constitutes “noble tastes,” to take from Veblen, who writes, “In order to avoid stultification he must also cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and the ignoble in consumable goods…. He must know how to consume them in a seemly manner” (Veblen 2007, 53). This exhibition of noble tastes is one that, to Tom, Gatsby lacks. If Gatsby is a character preoccupied with proving his social status, Tom Buchanan is hyper focused on proving his masculinity, spurred on by an aggression that is foiled with the mild-mannered Gatsby. The pink suit serves a singular contrast between the men, symbolizing Gatsby’s role as a transgressive character, and garish in Tom’s eyes with its feminine coloring, an offense to a man preoccupied with notions of masculinity. It’s the very opposite of the refined “Oxford man,” and in his conversation with Jordan, Tom makes an explicit distinction between what the Oxford man is meant to embody and what the pink suit conveys instead. The Oxford man symbolizes tradition: compliance with gender expectations, class distinctions, and the preservation of social norms. The pink suit, in contrast, pushes against notions of decorum—like Gatsby, whose very presence throws their presumed social hierarchies into doubt. Tom even

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makes a direct correlation between Gatsby’s ability to come up in this world and the toppling of social structures that his success implies: What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyhow?” They were out in the open at last and Gatsby was content. “He isn’t causing a row.” Daisy looked desperately from one to the other. “You’re causing a row. Please have a little self control.” “Self control!” repeated Tom incredulously. “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out…. Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.” Flushed with his impassioned gibberish he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization. (Fitzgerald 1974, 132–133)

Gatsby being “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” has overstepped a class distinction that Tom argues will lead to the dissolution of other social structures: family, marriage, and even race. Gatsby’s presence throws into question how distinct these so-called social distinctions really are if they can be easily duplicated and reenacted by an outsider. As Goffman writes, “The more closely the impostor’s performance approximates to the real thing, the more intensely we may be threatened, for a competent performance by someone who proves to be an impostor may weaken in our minds the moral connection between legitimate authorization to play a part and the capacity to play it” (Goffman 1959, 59). The scene ultimately leads to the novel’s climax: Daisy and Gatsby leave, Myrtle Wilson is struck by their car, and Gatsby sees Daisy for the last time as their relationship dissolves. The pink suit again takes center stage the first time Nick sees Gatsby after witnessing the accident scene. Nick at this point is unaware that Gatsby was not the driver of the vehicle, and again clothing is highlighted when Gatsby is put in a villainous light: I hadn’t gone twenty yards when I heard my name and Gatsby stepped from between two bushes into the path. I must have felt pretty weird by that time because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his pink suit under the moon.

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“What are you doing?” I inquired. “Just standing here, old sport.” Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation. For all I knew he was going to rob the house in a moment; I wouldn’t have been surprised to see sinister faces, the faces of “Wolfshiem’s people,” behind him in the dark shrubbery. (Fitzgerald 1974, 146)

Everything about Gatsby is marked as sinister here as Nick feels betrayed by a man he thinks is exactly who the rumors have said he is. But the pink suit is also utilized once again in the last description Nick gives of Gatsby before his death and after Gatsby has given Nick an honest account of his past: “His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption— and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them goodbye” (Fitzgerald 1974, 158). The pink suit is no longer a gleaming, ominous sign in the dead of night but a bright spot illuminated in daylight. Gatsby’s suit carries with it the same contradictions as the man who wears it, at once gorgeous and ragged, befitting a man viewed as corrupt yet unheeded in his ambitions, a dreamer. Gatsby is not alone in the continual doubt over his character and the connection to appearance. Heathcliff encounters a similar suspicion over his sudden wealth that is also tied into his blank past and physical attributes that mark him as an outsider: “Rich, sir!” she returned. “He has, nobody knows what money, and every year it increases. Yes, yes, he’s rich enough to live in a finer house than this; but he’s very near—close-handed; and, if he had meant to flit to Thrushcross Grange, as soon as he heard of a good tenant he could not have borne to miss the chance of getting a few hundreds more. It is strange people should be so greedy, when they are alone in the world!” (Brontë 2011, 33)

Heathcliff is wealthy, but unlike Gatsby, he isn’t generous with his money, and he has no care for impressing the society he’s in. Achieving his wealth serves two purposes: to impress Cathy, who has passed away at

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this point in the novel, and to prove himself Edgar Linton’s superior, not only to Linton and his other acquaintances but to himself. It isn’t merely that Heathcliff achieved his wealth quickly that spurs the suspicion of others. The question is beyond how Heathcliff got his money—it’s why Heathcliff. Why is Heathcliff, a man of no social currency, whose appearance—particularly in regard to his race—the one to achieve independent financial success? Heathcliff’s race plays a pivotal role in almost any mention of his appearance and the suspicion it raises around his wealth, cementing him as a non-“native” member of Wuthering Heights. When we receive a description of Heathcliff as a child, his ethnic differences are at the forefront: his darker coloring is noted, his language is foreign, and he’s referred to by Mrs. Earnshaw as “that gipsy brat” (Brontë 2011, 35). These are the beginnings of Heathcliff’s portrayal as a villain, but Heathcliff is far from villainous here. He threatens the Earnshaws’ sense of hierarchy within disparate social spheres, which they believe should remain separate and distinct, and he will eventually become Mr. Earnshaw’s favorite, even over his own son, upsetting notions of bloodlines and inheritances. He disturbs the enclosed world of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, two seemingly isolated settings that characters repeat are void of visitors and resistant to outsiders. Heathcliff is regarded as a trespasser, and he is treated abysmally, spat on by Cathy and only very begrudgingly given a place to sleep at Mr. Earnshaw’s insistence. He may not yet be a villain to the reader, but the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights have already marked him as dangerous. The Lintons’ reactions to Heathcliff mirror that of the Earnshaws’, similarly casting Heathcliff into the light of a villain based on his appearance. As with the Earnshaws, the Linton family gathers around Heathcliff to study him, unaccustomed to seeing strangers: “Don’t be afraid, it is but a boy—yet the villain scowls so plainly in his face; would it not be a kindness to the country to hang him at once, before he shows his nature in acts as well as features?” He pulled me under the chandelier, and Mrs. Linton placed her spectacles on her nose and raised her hands in horror. The cowardly children crept nearer also, Isabella lisping—

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“Frightful thing! put him in the cellar, Papa. He’s exactly like the son of the fortune-teller that stole my tame pheasant.” (Brontë 2011, 48)

Heathcliff is described as a villain, echoing Mr. Earnshaw’s introduction of Heathcliff to the family as “a gift of God, though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil” (35). Even when the Lintons finally do recognize Heathcliff as the Earnshaws’ adopted son, he’s still regarded as evil: “Oho! I declare he is that strange acquisition my late neighbour made, in his journey to Liverpool—a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway.” “A wicked boy, at all events,” remarked the old lady. (Brontë 2011, 49)

The ambiguity in his background is stressed here, along with him being nonetheless “wicked.” Cathy, however, is treated with considerable kindness, as the Lintons recognize her as one of their own: “Mrs. Linton took off the grey cloak of the dairymaid which we had borrowed for our excursion, shaking her head and expostulating with her, I suppose; she was a young lady, and they made a distinction between her treatment and mine” (Brontë 2011, 49). Cathy’s dairymaid cloak improperly labels her class here, and it’s removed in the presence of class peers to reaffirm their equality. The difference in treatment the Lintons show Cathy and Heathcliff emphasizes the contrast in their social standing. Cathy has been acting—and is dressed—in a manner “below” her class status; Heathcliff, by associating with Cathy, is overstepping the boundaries of his class. Cathy is experiencing here the same ease of social mobility as Dorian Gray when he visits opium dens dressed in a purposely unassuming and plain manner. It also highlights a recurring theme that villainy is more associated with the socalled false ascension up the social ladder than working down it, an idea visited by Goffman: “Mythology and our popular magazines, in fact, are full of romantic stories in which the villain and the hero both make fraudulent claims that are discredited in the last chapter, the villain proving not to have a high status, the hero proving not to have a low one” (Goffman 1959, 60). Heathcliff is well aware that his economic and ethnic standings don’t fit this society’s definition of a gentleman, and he pinpoints what Linton

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has in appearance that he doesn’t: “I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!” (Brontë 2011, 55). The light hair and skin, dress, and behavior are bundled up as all constituting the markings of a gentleman. Also note that part of this status of gentleman is the guarantee of inherited wealth, as there’s no doubt to Heathcliff that Linton will be “rich.” Heathcliff contrasts each of these qualities. It will continue to be the perceived incongruence between how Heathcliff looks and his eventual earned wealth that will always have him pegged by the white upper class as fraudulent and untrustworthy. Brontë goes to lengths to make it known that Heathcliff was unjustly villainized as a child and that the inhabitants of the Grange and Wuthering Heights create the villain he becomes as an adult. Dorian, ironically enough, is again the outlier as the only tried-andtrue villain who doesn’t face persecution from his peers. He is not only welcomed in this social world but admired because of his appearance and background. Dorian is never mentioned as being villainous or devilish or suspected of “killing a man” despite being the only one of the three who undoubtedly does kill a man. The only party here who knows of Dorian’s misdoings and can mark him as villainous is Dorian himself, which he tracks in the changing portrait. If The Picture of Dorian Gray remarks on the decadent vapidity of a wealthy circle preoccupied with outdoing the next person, then Dorian uses clothing to not only impress the crowd but also to distract from his crimes. In one scene, we learn how “on one occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared at a costume ball as Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France, in a dress covered with five hundred and sixty pearls. This taste enthralled him for years, and indeed, may be said never to have left him. He would often spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various stones that he had collected …” (Wilde 1995, 149). The pearl coat is a purposeful display of wealth that solidifies not merely belonging to but influencing this crowd. Unlike Gatsby and Heathcliff, Dorian doesn’t need to prove his wealth because he was never overstepping class bounds to begin with—he is born into this society and wins their admiration with ease. In fact, he gains a reputation as a sartorial figure: “His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to time he affected, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of

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the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him only half-serious fopperies” (Wilde 1995, 143). By the story’s end, Dorian’s identity is inseparable from his clothing. When he meets Basil for the last time, it’s precisely by his clothing that Dorian’s recognized: “I thought it was you, or rather your fur coat, as you passed me. But I wasn’t quite sure. Didn’t you recognize me?” (Wilde 1995, 160). Dorian’s calculated investment in appearance, and the fact that he’s never alienated because of it, speaks to the superficiality of the social circle he inhabits, a world that echoes the portrayal of the wealthy in The Great Gatsby. In this social circle, Dorian is undeserving of reprimand because he’s simply playing his natural role as part of the born elite; he’s not seen as being an imitator donning jewels and outfits he doesn’t have the credentials to wear; he is entitled to them because of his class and is never regarded as a villain because he’s an insider to this crowd.

Decadence Dissolved: The Repercussions Ultimately, the “villain” is found out, his smoke screen is revealed, and there are repercussions for his perceived transgressions. While the immediate punishment here is death for all three men, the consequences extend to something more personal. None achieves the end goal that encouraged him to take up his persona from the start—neither Gatsby nor Heathcliff achieve their dream of regaining a cherished figure of their past. However, because Heathcliff and Gatsby never truly cross over into the villainous, their endings are not without an undercurrent of hope. Gatsby remains an outcast to the society he sets out to impress, but there is value in being estranged from a community with no redeeming qualities, or, as Nick expresses before Gatsby’s death, he’s “worth the whole damn bunch put together” (Fitzgerald 1974, 157). Despite his inability to become fully immersed within a group, Gatsby as an individual earns his position and wealth, and his success as a self-made man is a celebration of his resourcefulness and the potential to transcend the social structures one is born into. Heathcliff’s death is also more complex than a sad end to an unfulfilled life. In fact, Heathcliff, following Cathy’s passing, is at his happiest shortly before death, and when he dies, it’s peacefully by the window that Cathy’s ghost is said to haunt. The windows—the barrier to Cathy—are thrown

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open, and the book leaves us with rumors that Cathy’s and Heathcliff’s spirits have been seen roaming the moors together. To the reader, Heathcliff’s and Gatsby’s roles as villains have been complex, and ultimately sympathetic, despite the unfavorable view taken by so many of the surrounding characters. We recognize that their crimes have had to do in part with their disadvantaged beginnings, and so their deaths are more meaningful than the supposed villain reaping his punishment. Dorian, the only one not regarded as a villain by surrounding characters, has the most painful death. Not only does he die unfulfilled and isolated, but he also becomes, in appearance, what was seen in the portrait: the physical façade that he worked so hard to keep pristine evaporates in an instant, bringing into reality the transience of youth and appearance. Dorian has to meet an unforgiving end because he is a seemingly unrepentant villain who must pay for his unjustified transgressions. It’s the truth reflected in the portrait that Dorian aims to destroy, but his crimes can only be absolved through death. His appearance, one characteristic keeping him tethered to respectability within his society, is withdrawn like a mask, and his misdoings are revealed as he becomes his own grim reaper. As we have seen with Gatsby, Heathcliff, and Dorian, clothing can be easily manipulated; it can create or conceal. The very nature of dress is performative, constructing a fabric of meaning around these characters’ lives that can be worn and interpreted at a glance to convince and beguile. Creating an alternate identity, shrugging off the past, and stepping into a new future are as easy as stepping into a new suit. There is, however, a crucial complication: clothing isn’t fully in the power of the wearer. Two paths of interpretation converge in regard to appearance: that of the wearer and that of the beholder. Clothing is enriched with signals of meaning that are open to interpretation and may diverge from our intentions. The villainous labels foisted upon Gatsby and Heathcliff are evidence of that, and the reception Dorian receives in contrast—although his use of clothing is no less calculated—shows how self-expression can be met with hostility if it’s interpreted as out of bounds for that particular wearer. If there is a single way to sum up the complexity of clothing, it’s in a garment’s ability to be a visual symbol of identity as the wearer conceives of it, and that identity may be at odds with the viewer’s interpretation. When a clash between the two manifests itself, the villain is born.

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References Brontë, Emily. 2011. Wuthering Heights. New York: Signet Classics. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 1974. The Great Gatsby. New York: Bantam Books. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. Veblen, Thorstein. 2007. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilde, Oscar. 1995. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Signet Classics.

CHAPTER 19

Supernatural Doppelgangers: Manifestations of Villainy in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights Tammie Jenkins

The Gothic has appeared in literature since its popularization in the nineteenth century with groundbreaking texts by Mary Shelly (Frankenstein), Lord Byron (Manfred), Horace Warpole (The Castle of Otranto), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) (Hannon 2018, 227; Oates 1982, 10; Qualls 2006, 51). Their works introduced readers to exotic characters and places where the supernatural, death, and violence overlapped in nuanced ways. With roots in romanticism and medievalism, Gothic fiction explores topics of death, romance, and horror while featuring characters that have intense emotions (Almeida 2011, 49; Baldellou 2012, 148; Beer and Horner 2003, 271). Such texts featured narratives that depicted the hidden aspects of human nature where vengeance, rage, and villainy influence a character’s behavior based on the place and appearance of their personal dwellings. In literature

T. Jenkins (B) Baton Rouge, LA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_19

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homes are a physical foundation for its characters while invoking feelings of peace, safety, and affection for readers. These structures in literary works give bibliophiles a glimpse into the lives of their characters and serves as a site for social exchanges among characters. Framed by the writer’s creative design, homes in Anglophone literature are dwellings that show boundaries between their inhabitants and the outside world. Rarely, do authors of such texts consider how homes influence the behavior of their characters and vice versa. Novels such as The Haunting of Hill House and The House Next Door present the home as a dwelling that interact paranormally with their residents. While older texts such as Tom Jones, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and Wuthering Heights , create spaces where the supernatural, doppelgaingers, or villainous characters interact with one another or their surroundings in ways that transform their respective residences into sites where diabolical activities thrive (Dibavar and Ahmadzadeh 2018, 2). This enables the home to shift from a physical foundational structure to that of a character with the ability to interrelate with other characters. The conversion of the home from residence to character is an attribute that Emily Bronte employs in Wuthering Heights as she uses the language of her day to paint a literary picture of how the homes in Wuthering Heights at as supernatural doppelgaingers responsible for the behaviors or actions of her human characters. The primary residences in Bronte’s text are Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. These homes present readers with dichotomies that depict the social and hierarchical underpinnings for the characters of Heathcliff, Hindley Earnshaw, Catherine Earnshaw, Edgar Linton, and Isabella Linton. Studying the writing style of Emily Bronte, Moussa Pourya Asl found that Bronte uses enigmatic patterns and repetition to build her character’s narratives and lived experiences. Bronte developed exotic, supernatural villains whose spatial settings affected their morale decisions; hence, symbolizing their internal struggles and anxieties. These are techniques that were famously integrated in early Gothic fiction in texts by Ann Radcliff (The Mysteries of Uldolpho), Matthew Lewis (The Monk), and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights featured villainous anti-heroes with their actions shrouded in mystery, violence, and the supernatural. Considered a literary classic, Wuthering Heights has withstood the test of time as new generations engage in Emily Bronte’s narratives from multiple points of view. This essay examines the homes in Wuthering Heights as locations of iniquity.

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Utilizing relevant excerpts from Wuthering Heights , I explore how the novel’s principle homes drive the deeds of its inhabitants. I use intertextuality theory as my conceptual framework to excavate and articulate the ways that Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange impact the actions of their respective residents. Additionally, I use narrative analysis as my qualitative research method, to check how the descriptions of each house manifest through the mannerisms of the text’s main characters (e.g., Heathcliff, Hindley, Catherine Earnshaw, etc.). Employing the following guiding questions: How does Bronte present manifestations of villainy in the novel? What types of behaviors the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange show? In what ways are these houses presented as supernatural doppelgangers? First, I give a brief description of the exteriors of each home. Next, I discuss how Bronte integrates the nefarious actions of her characters into her text. Then, I describe the behaviors or actions exhibited by the residents of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Finally, I explain how the homes in the novel serve as supernatural doppelgangers beyond tradition definitions. Houses in literature are physical dwellings framed by design, with boundaries that direct the characters behaviors and actions while setting the mood in the text. The two main residents featured in Emily Bronte’s novel are Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Built in the 1500s, Wuthering Heights is a converted farmhouse and is the home of the Earnshaw family and later, Heathcliff an orphan child who is informally adopted by the family. Heathcliff begins his new life “as unwanted, with the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights against him” (Przybylowicz 2013, 6) and he is cruelly treated, especially by Hindley Earnshaw, well into his young adult years (Krebs 1998, 42). Wuthering Heights is a weathered home with small high windows, fireplaces buried deep in its walls, and somber residents that make the home unwelcoming to visitors. Surrounded by wind damaged trees and bad weather, Wuthering Heights is a haunted home plagued by memories of dwellers past and the actions of inhabitants’ present (Carroll 2008, 243). An inhospitable environment, Wuthering Heights’s residents lack emotional boundaries which enable them to harbor callous, unprincipled, and manipulative deeds (e.g., Catherine Earnshaw marrying Edgar Linton). Located in the valley where the weather is calmer, Thrushcross Grange is a beautiful well-lit manor with large rooms, crimson walls, white ceilings with gold trimming, chandeliers with silver adornments, and large windows (Carroll 2008, 243). The estate is welcoming to visitors and the tenants are pleasant characters

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with good gentile mannerisms (Przybylowicz 2013, 8). A large estate with open windows that are visually accessible from the outside, Thrushcross Grange is the home of the Linton family who are spoiled, cowards; yet gentile people with positive dispositions (Przybylowicz 2013, 15). These homes represent dichotomies that depict the social and hierarchical underpinnings of the novels main and supporting characters. They are places where memories dehumanize and secrets haunt Bronte’s characters as well as their homes (Almeida 2011, 50). As supporting characters Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange drive the plot of the story by serving as markers of their inhabitants’ socioeconomic statuses and locations of iniquity. The physical appearances of the homes influence the mannerisms, behaviors, and actions of their inhabitants. Wuthering Heights depicts unsophisticatedness, violence, and mental instability while Thrushcross Grange represents civility, innocence, and upward mobility (Varghese 2012, 48). Each home is modeled after nineteenth-century Victorian houses and their residents display to varying degrees the morals of Bronte’s period. Both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange are located on the Yorkshire moors. These homes are four miles apart, symmetrically situated to one another, and each becomes the property of Heathcliff, in the novel. The integration of the Gothic tradition, in Wuthering Heights , enabled Bronte to use the intersubjective interactions between the Earnshaws, Lintons, and outside world in the context of Heathcliff’s diabolical nature. Bronte blends the domestic novel with gothic fiction to set up her characters identities as extensions of their respective residences. However, publicly Bronte paints the outward appearances of the Earnshaw and Linton families through her description of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, respectively. These characters endeavor to establish their self-hood through their interactions with other characters as represented by their residence (Boghian 2009, 7) These homes are representational spaces where inhabitants rely on their situated knowledge and emotions to justify their “dastardly acts” and to depersonalize other characters (Przybylowicz 2013, 7) Wuthering Heights includes traditional traits associated with the Gothic fiction genre such as mystery, terror, death, and violence which is exemplified through Bronte’s descriptions Wuthering Heights’s and Thrushcross Grange’s outer exterior and internal decorations (Krebs 1998, 49). The villain in literary works is a character that is often pitted in opposition to a heroic figure or protagonist in an author’s narrative. Such attributes prompt readers to despise the evil doer and cheer for the

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underdog. Replacing the gothic trope of master/servant with stories of trauma, vengeance, and death, Bronte develops exotic, supernatural villains whose spatial settings influence their external behaviors. This is an approach that Bronte rewrites in Wuthering Heights by presenting neurotic characters with unorthodox realizations that readers perceive as “fragmented presentation[s] of reality” teetering on the continuum of villain/hero through their actions and their residential affiliations (Asl and Madani 2014, 46). The primary residences Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange physical appearances depict the outward representations of the innate villainy of their respective residences such as the Earnshaw’s including Heathcliff are unrefined and crude while the Linton’s are erudite and scholarly. Drawing on Przybylowicz’s description of villainy as “otherness … [that] is not understood,” I explore how the houses in Wuthering Heights act as manifestations of wickedness through the deeds of their inhabitants (7). The first act of villainy occurs when Mr. Earnshaw returns from a trip to Liverpool with a young, orphaned boy he names Heathcliff. Heathcliff’s arrival at Wuthering Heights unleashes the villainous nature of the other residents. Recalling the day Mr. Earnshaw returned with Heathcliff, Nelly Dean, their maid, describes not only her reaction but also that of Mrs. Earnshaw. Nelly Dean states, I was frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad? (Bronte 2004, 36)

Heathcliff’s addition to the Earnshaw home released the innate villainy in Mrs. Earnshaw who endeavored to express her disdain for the child. Mrs. Earnshaw referred to the boy as “that gipsy brat” (Bronte, 36) while questioning Mr. Earnshaw’s rationale for bringing the child to Wuthering Heights to live. Mrs. Earnshaw’s inability to accept the previously unnamed adolescent as a new family member is reflected in her use of the word “brat,” however, the word “gipsy” reinforces the ethnic foreignness of Heathcliff (Bronte 2004, 36; Krebs 1998, 41/46). Nelly Dean echoes Mrs. Earnshaw’s sentiments in her referring to the child as “it” a term used in a gender-neutral context in Standard English conversations (Bronte 2004, 36). The unwelcoming atmosphere at Wuthering Heights is highlighted by Mrs. Earnshaw’s wish to “fling it [Heathcliff] outdoors” (Bronte 2004, 36) a reaction that reverberated by the

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Earnshaw children Hindley and Catherine as well as the Linton family at Thrushcross Grange. Mr. Earnshaw’s decision to bring Heathcliff to Wuthering Heights as a surrogate son sets off a chain of events in which Heathcliff’s otherness leads to his victimization by Hindley Earnshaw and later, Edgar Linton (Przybylowicz 2013, 8–10). Heathcliff’s origin story is repeated by Mr. Linton on the day that Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff sneaked off to Thrushcross Grange where Catherine is viciously attacked and injured by Linton’s dog. At Thrushcross Grange Mr. Linton describes Heathcliff as “that strange acquisition [his] late neighbor made, in his journey to Liverpool—a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” (Bronte 2004, 49). Mr. Linton’s villainy as relayed through the words “strange” and “acquisition” indicates that Heathcliff is an unusual person with distinct non-traditional Eurocentric features (Bronte 2004, 49). Mr. Linton continues his assessment of Heathcliff by referring to him as a “Lascar,” an “American,” or a “Spanish” (Bronte 2004, 46); hence, signifying Heathcliff’s possible ethnicity as well as the term “castaway” placed Heathcliff in the lower epsilon of society. In Wuthering Heights villainy is a product of rejection, otherness, and wickedness in which the residents in each home dehumanize one another. Wuthering Heights is a home where residents harbor “extremes of emotions” in which the victim becomes the victimizer as in the case of Heathcliff (Neilson 1993, 74). Relying on parallel tropes Bronte presents villainy as an epistemic peculiarity in which Heathcliff’s exotic features area views by the Earnshaw’s and Linton’s as an anomaly. Due to his perceived difference, Heathcliff was ostracized, abused, and discarded by those charged with caring for him which contributed to his wish to gain control of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange as an adult. The acts of villainy he endured (e.g., verbally; physically; emotionally) were based his proximity to the residents and their homes which contributed to their actions or behaviors. The inhabitants of Wuthering Heights are strong-willed people who are wild at heart. This is displayed by Catherine Earnshaw walking around the estate barefoot. Like her informally adopted brother Heathcliff, Catherine loves to escape to the moors where they spend their time fantasizing and enjoying their freedom. Their behaviors are interrupted by the tyrannical rages of Hindley Earnshaw who has inherited Wuthering Heights after the death of their father. Upon his return to the estate Hindley makes life difficult for Heathcliff through acts of dehumanization and physical abuse. Whereas Catherine fares a bit better than

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Heathcliff, once Edgar Linton develops a fondness for her, which Hindley intends to exploit to gain ownership of Thrushcross Grange (Althubaiti 2015, 203). Analyzing the behaviors of Bronte’s characters in Wuthering Heights as human nature, Joseph Carroll discovered that their conduct was the result of their biological relationships and other kinship bonds (Carroll 2008, 242). Carroll concluded that such deeds were transferable based on context and situation in the novel. The fluidity of manners become clear when Isabella adopts mannerisms associated with Wuthering Heights once she becomes romantically interested in Heathcliff. Nelly Dean recalls that day Isabella grew cross and wearisome; snapping at and teasing Catherine continually, at the imminent risk of exhausting her [Catherine] limited patience. (Bronte 2004, 99)

The growing relationship between Heathcliff and Isabella contributed to the rivalry that developed between Catherine and Isabella. Feelings of jealousy caused Isabella to become “cross and wearisome” toward Catherine as Isabella began questioning Heathcliff’s interest in Catherine as a potential mate (Bronte 2004, 99). Such actions hurled by Isabella against Catherine only fueled the want of Heathcliff to hide his love for Catherine and openly pursue Isabella. Heathcliff uses Catherine to gain access into Thrushcross Grange and pursue a now eighteen-yearold Isabella Linton. Following a seemingly casual conversation, Heathcliff learned from Catherine that Isabella Linton was heir apparent to Thrushcross Grange upon the death of Edgar. Heathcliff woos Isabella, who falls in love and marries Heathcliff much to Edgar’s dismay. Initially, Isabella was attracted not only to Heathcliff’s charismatic traits, but also his physical appearance as a stark contrast from her family. Upon their return to Wuthering Heights, Isabella experienced verbal, emotional, and physical abuse at the hands of Heathcliff. These acts of villainy drives Isabella to question Heathcliff’s motives in marrying her. In a letter to Nelly Dean, Isabella ask “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” (Bronte 2004, 133). Isabella’s infatuation with Heathcliff ends once they return to Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff embodies the personification of the darkness surrounding the home leading his new bride to decide whether he is “a man,” “mad,” or “a devil” (Bronte 2004, 133). The reader is privy to the rationale behind Isabella’s desire to enter a relationship with Heathcliff. Isabella

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wanted to separate herself from her brother, Edgar, his authoritarian rules. Although Heathcliff performs many acts of villainy, Bronte gives circumstantial justifications through the behaviors of her characters and their residential locations. Like their homes, the Earnshaw and Linton families hold their memories and related secrets close as they exhibit behaviors associated with their home’s exteriors and classist expectations. For instance, after enduring years of brutal treatment, Heathcliff departs from Wuthering Heights only to return three years later a new man. Prior to leaving, Heathcliff was an illiterate young man, but upon his return, he displays gentile mannerism and wears attire associated with affluence after acquiring wealth from an unspecified source. Although Heathcliff’s outward appearance and oral expression has become refined, the residents at Thrushcross Grange, his internal monologue mirrors the “emotional violence” he experienced at Wuthering Heights (Carroll 2008, 246). Even though Heathcliff has mastered the qualities of the upper epsilon of society his innate attributes are that of an unwanted child raised at Wuthering Heights (Krebs 1998, 42; Przybylowicz 2013, 10). This inner longing to belong propels Heathcliff to re-establish his friendship with Catherine Earnshaw in hopes of obtaining Thrushcross Grange from her husband, Edgar Linton. The physical appearances of the houses influence the behaviors of their inhabitants. Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange are, respectively, transfixed with not only markers of their inhabitants’ socioeconomic statuses, but also by the behaviors of their immediate ancestors acting as supernatural doppelgangers through the mirrored actions of their residents. The use of the supernatural such as ghosts, magic, and doppelgangers are elements that one expects in contemporary horror films or on popular television shows like The Conjuring, The Originals, and Us. But, in literature these attributes are relegated to the written page and are often overlooked by readers as they endeavor to engage in the narrative and understand the author’s point of view. The Gothic fiction introduced villainous men into Anglophone literature where residences are gloomy dwellings that take on a life of its own and sometimes influences the attitudes of its inhabitants. In the context of Wuthering Heights , depicts the supernatural in the personalities and outside appearances of the characters beyond the implied spectral occurrences. Their interactions and locations serve as doppelgänger where duality employed by Bronte to create polarities between contrasting counterparts such as Wuthering

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Heights/Thrushcross Grange, Catherine Earnshaw/Isabella Linton, and Heathcliff/Edgar Linton (Rosenberg 2014, 2). Each home is disturbed by the actions of their residents’ past and present. Bronte’s inclusion of nostalgia and reverence is reflected in the ways that Thrushcross Grange becomes more like Wuthering Heights once Heathcliff inherits the property. These relationships are revealed in the burial site for Catherine Earnshaw, Edgar Linton, and Heathcliff. On the property connecting Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange three headstones on the slope next [to] the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in heath; Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff’s still bare. (Bronte 2004, 323)

The death and legacy of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange rests near the moors where “three headstones” (Bronte 2004, 323) signify the burial sites for Edgar Linton, Catherine Earnshaw, and Heathcliff. Their graves are on a “slope” (Bronte 2004, 323) marking the change in the dynamics of these characters and their interactions with their homes. Entombed on the property line, Catherine Earnshaw’s sepulcher sits between that of her husband Edgar Linton and friend Heathcliff. This placement indicates that Catherine Earnshaw belonged to both houses physically, mentally, and spiritually. However, her tomb is grey implying that Catherine Earnshaw was a neutral character; hence, suggesting that her ghost was now the mediator between Edgar Linton and Heathcliff. On the side nearest Thrushcross Grange, Edgar Linton’s burial chamber resides where “moss” (Bronte 2004, 323) has begun “creeping up its foot” shows that he has been dead for some time and that the area surrounding him was balanced. The tomb closest to Wuthering Heights was that of Heathcliff whose grave was so fresh that it was “still bare” (Bronte 2004, 323). The triangular entombment of Edgar Linton, Catherine Earnshaw, and Heathcliff shows that an unnatural relationship exists between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The dichotomies of these homes are multiplicitous and changes as their inhabitants shift. Under the ownership of Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange are supernatural doppelgangers where Heathcliff’s cruel and vengeful acts force other characters to mirror his lived experiences. This allows both homes to become supernatural doppelgänger because they are haunted by the spirits of the dead as well as the desires of the living.

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The Gothic traditions are reimagined by Bronte through her verbal construction of the primary residences of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Bronte recreates the exterior of both homes in ways that match the mannerisms of the characters who live there with each representing the best or worst aspects of their abodes. A model of wickedness, Wuthering Heights (the home) was a converted working-class dwelling acquired by Heathcliff upon the death of Hindley Earnshaw. Wuthering Heights is a home with a history violence, cruelty, trauma, and death whose tenants were but emotionally stunted people. Whereas Thrushcross Grange is a space of resolution serving as a catalyst for change, a home-place for Edgar and Isabella Linton where they were nurtured by their parents. Yet the interplay between the two homes and the exploits of their played a pivotal role in the resolution of Bronte’s narratives. From the arrival of Heathcliff until his death, Wuthering Heights was a source of conflict among residents and non-residents. Heathcliff is a subversive character whose socioeconomic status enabled him to transcend Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange in life but marginalized him in death. The cycle of vicious behavior and physical violence repeated the status quo that began with the Earnshaw’s making Heathcliff feel unwelcome and continued through Heathcliff’s acts of domestic violence against Isabella Linton. The difference between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange is polarized by their physical appearance and the mannerisms of their inhabitants. Evidence of the interconnectivity between these homes is portrayed as intermarriages and transferable ownership via inheritance.

References Almeida, Amy E. 2011. “Wuthering Heights: Curioser and Curioser.” The Trinity Papers (2011): 49–67. Althubaiti, Dr. Turki S. 2015. “Race Discourse in Wuthering Heights.” European Scientific Journal 11: 201–225. Asl, Moussa Pourya, and Azarbaijan Shahid Madani. 2014. “Recurring Patterns: Emily Bronte’s Neurosis in Wuthering Heights.” International Journal of Education & Literacy Studies 2: 46–51. Baldellou, Marta Miquel. 2012. “Passion Beyond Death? Tracing Wuthering Heights in Stephanie Meyer’s Eclipse.” Journal of English Studies 10: 147–173. Beer, Janet, and Avril Horner. 2003. “This Isn’t Exactly a Ghost Story: Edith Wharton and Paradic Gothic.” Journal of American Studies 37: 269–285.

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Boghian, Ioana. 2009. “The Metaphor of the Body as a House in 19th Century English Novels.” Styles of Communication 1: 1–13. Bronte, Emily. 2004. Wuthering Heights. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics. Carroll, Joseph. 2008. “The Cuckoo’s History: Human Nature in Wuthering Heights.” Philosophy and Literature 32: 241–257. Dibavar, Sara Saei, and Shideh Ahmadzadeh. 2018. “Playing Safe: The Writer Behind the Text of Wuthering Heights.” Advances in Language and Literary Studies 5: 1–8. Hannon, Adele. 2018. “Othering the Outsider: Monstering Abject Bodies in Wuthering Heights.” Otherness: Essays and Studies 6: 221–241. Krebs, Paula M. 1998. “Folklore, Fear, and the Feminine: Ghosts and Old Wives’ Tales in Wuthering Heights.” Victorian Literature and Culture 26: 41–52. Neilson, Heather. 1993. “The Face at the Window: Gothic Thematics in Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, and The Turn of the Screw.” Sydney Studies 19: 74–87. Oates, Joyce Carol. 1982. “The Magnamity of Wuthering Heights.” Critical Inquiry 9: 1–11. Przybylowicz, Samantha. 2013. “(Dys) Function in the Moors: Everyone’s a Villain in Wuthering Heights.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 14: 6–20. Qualls, Barry V. 2006. “Victorian Border Crossing: Thinking About Gender in Wuthering Heights.” In Approaches to Teaching Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, edited by Sue Lonoff de Cuevas and Terri A. Hasseler, 51–59. New York: The Modern Language Association of America. Rosenberg, Anat. 2014. “Liberal Anguish: Wuthering Heights and the Structure of Liberal Thought.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 69: 1–25. Varghese, Lata Marina. 2012. “Stylistic Analysis of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.” IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Studies 2: 46–50.

PART V

A World of Dark Secrets: Espionage, Silent Wars, and the Threat of Nuclear Annihilation in the Post-World War Moments

CHAPTER 20

Debating ‘the Nuclear Evil’ in U.S. Nuclear Fiction Inna Sukhenko

Introduction After depicting the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, its premises and aftermath in Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster (Higginbotham 2019), Adam Higginbotham was being interviewed for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Stover 2019). In that interview he was discussing the misconceptions and myths about Chernobyl, the pitfalls of technological hubris, and his personal perception of nuclear energy as a potential weapon in the context of climate change agenda. Stressing the subjectivity of estimating the Good and the Bad in that interview Adam Higginbotham highlights that ‘…nobody is that black and white – nobody is a pure hero, nobody is a pure villain’ (Stover 2019). His words confirm the long-term philosophical debates about the correlation of the goodness and the evil where the latter one is distinguished as imperfection of the being. With the view to situating evil-debating issues within nuclear narrative, we intend to clarify the definition of evil, referring to narrative studies.

I. Sukhenko (B) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_20

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Susan Neiman in her Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Neiman 2015) tries to define the peculiarities of the evil by stressing that ‘…to call something evil is to say that it defies justification, and balance. Evils should not be compared, but they should be distinguished. One way to do so is to make victims into accomplices’, where she highlights the true nature of the evil, aiming at destroying moral distinctions themselves (Neiman 2015, 286). Trying to distinguish the evil’s nature, she concludes that ‘To seek a frame in which to set evil is to seek something less than a full theoretical explanation of it’ (Neiman 2015, 301) by highlighting ‘If designating something as evil is a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world, it’s that effect, more than the cause’ (Neiman 2015, 9). In her attempt to define the evil, Neiman distinguishes metaphysical evil, natural evil and moral evil, by stressing that, evil is the product of will: ‘Restricting evil actions to those accompanied by evil intention rids the world of a number of evils in ways that made sense. Less clear were the concepts of willing and intention themselves’—Neiman highlights, ‘What begins as evil is always revealed to end as its opposite’ (Neiman 2015, 279), which underlines dualism as a main feature of evil in interpreting it. The issue of the essence of evil is debated in the frameworks of various social and philosophical concepts (with the focus on what is meant in the field of philosophy of science by Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, Lawrence, Leibniz, Durkheim, and Weber, Heidegger, Zižek) (Yarkeev 2015, 45) that there is no such thing as an absolute evil in technology, while coming back to the debates about to a case-by-case weighing of advantages and benefits against disadvantages and threats. Especially such reflections are related to the issue of evaluating ‘the nuclear’ in the scales of ethics within the social and philosophical discourse of the Nuclear Age (Pickrell 2016). The term ‘radioactive evil’ was launched by Dupuy, who emphasizes ‘the empowerment of evil with respect to the intentions of those who commit it’ (Dupuy 2012, 49). Aurélien Portelli in his ‘What Cultural Objects Say About Nuclear Accidents and Their Way of Depicting a Controversial Industry’ (2017) tries to distinguish the sources of the radioactive evil in some cases of the Nuclear Anthropocene (Schuppli 2016, 112)—‘…In the case of Hiroshima, evil comes from the intention to commit evil, while in the case of Fukushima, evil comes from the intention on the part of industrial actors to do good’ (Portelli 2017, 43). In this paper I am focusing on studying the implication of the nuclear (radioactive) evil in its cultural and social representations of nuclear

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energy, giving rise to the socio-cultural and social-technical shifts in reconsidering the perception of the nuclear energy-related issues (ones referring to nuclear power plants’ functioning). I intentionally do not focus on the academia’s reflections on the nuclear evil, coming from nuclear weapon industry and policy, because the contemporary nuclear discourse requires the strict separation of ‘nuclear war’ narrative and ‘nuclear energy’ narrative, which have the different policies of their implications and the different messages in nuclear discourse: when a nuclear war is narrated as an absolute evil (Avery 2017, 4), nuclear energy and nuclear power (mainly represented as ‘Atom for Peace’ policy) is still a subject of debates (Aref 2018). Despite the fact that the debatable work Nuclear Weapons: An Absolute Evil (December 20, 2017) by John Scales Avery includes chapter Against Nuclear power Generation, the scholar regards nuclear power as a potential atomic bomb—‘…it will only be a matter of time before they [a nuclear power plant or poorly-guarded fissionable material] will be used in terrorist attacks on major cities, or by organized criminals for the purpose of extortion’ (Avery 2017, 139). My paper is focused on researching the literary and cultural dimensions of ‘the nuclear evil’ in these U.S. writing practices (from the late Cold War up to the present), covered by the post-Chernobyl Age, with the emphasis on the ethical aspects of nuclear energy-related issues and nuclear energy policy in the post-traumatic society. The paper is focused on studying the literary implications of ‘the nuclear evil’ in depicting a nuclear power plant explosion (the Chernobyl disaster, in our case) and its aftermath in North American fictional works such as Frederik Pohl’s Chernobyl (1987), Andrea White’s Radiant Girl (2008), and Orest Stelmach’s The Boy from Reactor 4 (2011). The paper intends to study the implications of ‘the nuclear evil’ in the contemporary U.S. nuclear fiction, which helps to frame the cultural and social parameters of the unbiased perception of nuclear energy as a concept which impacts public acceptance of nuclear technology.

‘Scientific Findings, Some Lending Themselves to Evil, Some to Good, and Some to Both’: On Subjectivity of Scientific Findings The social consequences of scientific knowledge implications result in launching the issues of norms, values, moral, and ethical aspects, which

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define the functioning of science under circumstances when scientific knowledge can be used as both for the benefit and for the destruction of the contemporary society. The existential tradition of the twentieth century launched the multisided debates about the prospects for the technogenic development of mankind with the focus on the negative consequences of technical innovations which are related to the loss of the value of life, by neglecting the moral values under overwhelming partnership of man and technology. The philosophers of the past constantly debated the power of technology over a human as well as trying to enlighten the issue of the power of science, but less attention was paid to the concern about the consequences of the scientific exploration of the environment. The motive of possibility to turn scientific knowledge into an instrument of power, known since Nietzsche’s time, was strengthened in the 1960s by Foucault, who launched ‘power-knowledge’ doctrine, further developed in the field of social technologies. The informational intellectual technologies and artificial intelligence provide the background for reconsidering already shaped thoughts about the threat of technology for human life, about the prospects of losing spirituality under the expansion of technologies and equipment, about the loss of moral values in the world, shaped by the previous thinkers. Even in the biblical reflections of the negative impact of scientific knowledge on humanity were in the focus of those times’ debates. Ecclesiastes, the canonical wisdom books in the Old Testament of most denominations of Christianity, stresses that ‘…For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow’ [Ecclesiastes 1:18], which underlines the most complicated epistemological problem of social consequences of introducing scientific knowledge into social practice: by obtaining knowledge about the environment, humans use it to change the nature and make their lives more comfortable, but their attempts result into evil and destruction. Being rooted in Socrates’s idea about the continuity of knowledge and virtue, The Age of Enlightenment encouraged his ethical rationalism with its principle that ‘the mastery of knowledge raises human’s morality’, but faced its utopianism and made ones doubted romantic ideals of Enlightenment, which later resulted in the critique of the positive influence of knowledge on social progress, made by Rousseau (Yarkeev 2015, 45), who highlighted the negative consequences of scientific progress, arguing

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that evil lies in civilization itself, the development of which leads to an artificial and degenerate life. Already the results of the XIX-th scientific development in Europe brought the noticeable and dangerous factors, defining the restriction of human’s freedom and suppression of a human by equipment, militarization of the society, formation of megacities with poor ecology and the alienation of a human from the natural environment, separation of science from citizens’ needs and interests. It is the image of Frankenstein, a scientist from Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus (1818), who explicates the problem of the social consequences of the creative introduction of science into life, is regarded in the world cultural space as an denotation of a human’s ability to artificially create forces beyond the mind control, with the reference to scientific knowledge as one of such forces whose action is unpredictable. Referring to Potnitseva, Frankenstein is a literary implication, personifying a real threat that the lack of responsibility for scientific achievements carries for human consciousness and humanity in a whole (Potnitseva 2008, 16). For more than two centuries the reflections on Frankenstein’s image have revealed not only the issue of the social and moral responsibility of a scientist, but also defined the problems, stemmed from debating the possible political, economic and social mechanisms to counter the demonization of science and the growth of human’s fear of unpredictable results of scientific achievements. Shelley’s Frankenstein, a scientist, created his own monster, who intends to take revenge if humans forget about the responsibility for their actions, while stressing the fact that any scientific discovery should be a subject not only to the court of reason, but also to the court of morality, without reckless application into practice. The objective assessment of scientific achievements in their historical consideration can be slanted to both positive and negative issues. The 20s scientific achievements contributed to establishing the science-based way of thinking, further encouraging the development of scientology as a set of beliefs and religious practices. As well as the 20th scientists highlight the idea about fears and dangers, caused by the reflections on unpredictability of the consequences of fast introducing scientific discoveries into real practice. Being scientistic, technical, nature-focusing and market-oriented, the twentieth- century technogenic civilization experienced a general and systemic crisis of moral principles and values against the background of global problems of techno-sphere, artificial intelligence, computer virtual

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digital reality, various technological and environmental disasters, dehumanization of the society. Having created a technical world, a human created a real threat to the very existence of a human on the planet. It is a discovery of radiation and further development of nuclear technologies, that were a turning point in the twentieth-century science philosophy development, regarded as an era of philosophical reassessment of values, including a significant reconsideration of the social, semantic and value formation status of science in the twentieth-century society and culture. Since the moment of its discovery and within the times of various forms of its application, ‘the nuclear’ as a concept has gone through the multisided and multidisciplinary debates, swinging between ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ and being defined as ‘the debatable’ (Aref 2018, 3) in Nuclear Anthropocene, launched on July 16, 1945 (Trinity Atomic Bomb test, Los Alamos, US) and defined as the nuclear epoch, referring to the way in which ‘nuclear fission released man-made radionuclides into the environment through fallout, providing a radiological time-stamp of the start of the nuclear age’ (Carpenter 2016, 116), and distinguishing how nuclear energy and nuclear energy-related issues shape values, beliefs and priorities in the contemporary energy-dependent society. Even Oppenheimer, a father of the first atomic bomb, confessed that ‘..we have made a thing, … that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing ’, a thing in which the ‘elements of surprise and of terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei’ (Wallace 2016, 42). Being involved in the process of creating ‘the nuclear evil’, Oppenheimer himself and his other colleagues considered the atomic bomb as an implication of his ‘peril and promise’ of total war or perpetual peace (Wallace 2016, 43). Already in 1957, before a cheering audience of 50,000 young Sokka Gakkai members, J¯ osei Toda (a teacher, a peace activist, and the second president of Soka Gakkai—Japanese Buddhist religious organization) declared nuclear weapons as a primary result of implementing ‘the nuclear’ to be an absolute evil (Avery 2017, 187)—‘their possession does not increase anyone’s security; that their continued existence is a threat to the life of every person on the planet; and that these genocidal and potentially homicidal weapons have no place in a civilized society’ (Avery 2017, 37). In his The Fate of the Earth (1982) Jonathan Schell, an antinuclear activist, offered a model for innocence in scientific innovation—‘Scientific findings, some lending themselves to evil, some to good, and some to both, simply pour forth from the laboratories in senseless profusion,

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offering the world now a neutron bomb, now bacteria that devour oil, now a vaccine to prevent polio, now a cloned frog’ (Schell 2000, 105). By that he promotes the idea of neutrality of scientific achievements by underlining the ethic of implementing scientific findings. Thus, the fact of understanding that the consequences of scientific and technological progress are possible and necessary to foresee and take them under control even at the initial stages of new technology development, launches the necessity to reconsider scientists’ imaginaries about scientifictechnical and socio-economic progress.

The ‘Invisible Evil’ Radiation is invisible, as experts say—‘Radiation is energy in the form of waves (beams) or particles. Radiation waves are generally invisible, have no weight or odor, and have no positive or negative charge. Radioactive particles are also invisible, but they have weight (which is why they are called a particle) and may have a positive or negative charge. Some radiation waves can be seen and felt (such as light or heat), while others (such as X-rays) can only be detected with special instrumentation’, as explain the members of the Health Physics Society, a nonprofit scientific professional organization whose mission is excellence in the science and practice of radiation safety, in their recent Radiation Answers Project (n.d.). The similar factual precise definition of radiation is used in Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster (2019), devoted to depicting the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion (April 25, 1986): ‘Radiation is invisible and has neither taste nor smell. Although it is yet to be proved that exposure to any level of radiation is entirely safe, it becomes manifestly dangerous when the particles and waves it gives off are powerful enough to transform or break apart the atoms that make up the tissues of living organisms. This high-energy radiance is ionizing radiation’ (Higginbotham 2019, 33). But what transfer these invisible particles into ‘an invisible evil’, ‘an invisible enemy’, and even ‘an invisible monster’? ‘It was a nuclear explosion that had released invisible waves of radiation that incapacitated and killed without warning or mercy’ (Plokhy 2018, 107). Portelli in his ‘What Cultural Objects Say About Nuclear Accidents and Their Way of Depicting a Controversial Industry’ researches radiation as a cultural object which is regarded as a product of social representations (2017, 143). Due to his ideas, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant

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explosion together with its societal consequences caused a representational crisis, where radiation is a cultural object, which is both a product of social reality and an agent involved in creating societal representations and structuring the society—‘A whitish vapor, full of radioactive particles, spreads over the scene. This represents the “invisible evil”. It emphasizes the deviousness of the threat, and calls into question the reliability of our senses and reality’ (Portelli 2017, 143–144). The lack of nuclear awareness about the nature of nuclear energy, the level of secrecy at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant initially shaped the total adoration and excitement, concerning the process of nuclear technology as a representation of magic unknown forces, depicted by the writers in their novels which are under study here: Although I had recently learned that science, not magic, ran the station, the process still didn’t make sense to me. Papa had explained that the individual rods in a nuclear reactor’s core contained atoms of nuclear fuel. As the fuel nuclei split, they produced energy. This heat energy boiled water to create steam. The steam turned generators to produce electricity. But this explanation failed to answer my basic question: How could something invisible turn on my lights? (White 2008, 34)

But the Chernobyl nuclear accident, marking the Nuclear Anthropocene’s shift, reshaped the cultural agents of nuclear culture and twisted the public perception of ‘the nuclear’: from excitement to fear and uncertainty. Such perspective on ‘the nuclear’ makes it as a symbolic implication of the ‘invisible radioactive evil ’—huge (‘the invisible cloud of radiation had traveled thousands of kilometers since its escape from the carcass of Unit Four’ [Higginbotham 2019, 33]) and overwhelming (‘but invisible particles of radiation, which drove out the inhabitants but spared most of the vegetation, allowing wild animals to come back and claim the space once built and inhabited by humans ’ [Plokhy 2018, 12]). Describing the near-by Chernobyl territory as ‘as horrible as it is radiant ’ (Portelli 2017, 145), the paradoxical situation launches the controversial character of nuclear technology in the post-accidental time and gives birth to the beautiful ‘invisible radioactive evil’: It’s calm all around me. These places suggest pleasure… But I’m at Chernobyl! How can I reflect this improbable situation? Only through scientific artifice…. What’s in front of me, what I’m drawing is not the truth! I don’t see the disaster… How can I draw the invisible? (Lepage 2012, 163)

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My throat was parched, and the milk looked delicious. Regretfully, I put my cool glass down on the floor. I knew if I drank it that I would be drinking radionuclides. I still wasn’t exactly sure what these invisible particles were, but I had all the proof I needed that they were bad for me. (White 2008, 167)

Radiation fear and post-Chernobyl uncertainty are based on the lack of information and awareness (‘[they] remained unaware of the invisible dangers around them: soldiers lounged in the sun close to the reactor, smoking cigarettes and stripped to the waist in the summer heat ’ [Higginbotham 2019, 205]) and on the lack of crisis situational regulations (‘The invisible cloud was greeted with confusion and panic’ [Pohl 1987, 100]). All together they enlarged the unknown uncontrolled danger (‘He wondered if anyone had told those firemen that it was not only heat and smoke and burns they faced, by the invisible, lethal storm of radiation that billowed up at them with the smoke’ [Pohl 1987, 37]) and created the image of radiation as an invisible monster (‘…the invisible monster had slipped away, leaving them ignorant of its size and intensity. Their measurements revealed only its tail ’ [Higginbotham 2019, 144]). As the history of humanity is the space for fights, the space of moving from one evil to other one, because any action results into inter-action (Descombes 1998, 19), any change under such circumstances is regarded by the society as an atrocity, an evil, and any change leads to oppositional actions, implemented in fighting with an enemy—with radiation as an invisible enemy, in the Chernobyl’s case: …his task as one of preparing for a landing by a military unit with orders to defeat a new and invisible enemy – radiation. (Pohl 1987, 179) Soviets fought admirably a battle against the invisible enemy that could not be named because censors banned discussion of Chernobyl fallout. (Brown 2019, 213) We know that the invisible enemy is eating away inside us like a worm, said General Nikolai Antoshkin, whose helicopter crews fought to extinguish the nuclear inferno. For us, the war continues, and, little by little, we are slipping away from this world. (Higginbotham 2019, 272)

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Formed by the Chernobyl social reality, such public readiness to fight with radiation shaped the image of the invisible enemy in the perception of those who intentionally or accidentally were involved in the post-Chernobyl spatiotemporal frames.

The Materialization of Evil The role of fiction is not limited in depicting the image of a single subject, problem, or event, but raising a new—literary—image, which can be an embodiment of typical features, principles through abstraction, generalization, idealization, materialization in the text body. That is considered to be the main point in any writer’s efforts to create their own fictional philosophical and aesthetic reality through cognition, comprehension, transformation, and artistic interpretation. Such embodiment in the fictional text is represented by the impossibility to distinguish what is the goodness and the evil as moral values and their implementation as human, social, natural phenomena. Both the goodness and the evil can be represented in a simultaneous and interrelated way. The goodness and the evil are so interconnected in the given fictional text, but that does not mean that it is senseless to study the theoretical and practical approaches to distinguishing the goodness and the evil in fictional writings. The materialization of evil is based on Tartu semiotician’s theory of the duality of the discreteness of semiotic spaces and their verbal representations, where Lotman’s semiotic universe is one of the levels, strata, and hierarchies based on the foundation of dualisms which begin with the axiom that ‘against the background of nonculture, culture appears as a system of signs ’ (Lotman and Uspenskij 1978, 211). Such duality is regarded as a specific phenomenon of human nature, which expresses not a feature or substance, but a contradiction, arising from the specifics of human existence (North 2006, 249), because this duality is ‘the essence of a human’s existential contradiction’. Neiman in her Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy supports the statement about duality of evil within modern reconsideration of the goodness and the evil: ‘The claim that evil is easier to portray than goodness has become a cliche´, but literature gives us surprisingly few examples of pure and radical evil’ (Neiman 2015, 278). Nuclear fiction—fictional works on the nuclear energy-related issues (mainly, nuclear technologies, nuclear power industry, nuclear power

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plant explosion and its aftermath, nuclear waste management, etc.)— supports the idea of such duality through the process of materialization where the issue of evaluating the good and the bad (or the debatable) about nuclear energy is reflected on the literary imaginary of a nuclear power plant. In Chernobyl fiction under study here we have the duality as a literary image of a nuclear power plant—even before and after the nuclear explosion. While depicting the pre-accident days, the writers in their novels almost on the first pages of their works emphasize the enormous power of the nuclear power plant construction, which is supposed to be a separate city, representing the power of the Soviet achievements in nuclear science and technology and making the Soviet people proud of their being involved in producing the ‘magic energy’: Chernobyl was not merely a power plant, it was nearly a city. …The bound book of aerial photographs taken during construction that showed the immense power plant as it grew, layer by layer… The plant itself was only one structure in a municipality of storage spaces and workshops and administration offices…. to make Chernobyl perfect. (Pohl 1987, 3) …the station was a magical factory that made energy out of nothing. (White 2008, 22)

The writings under study here—by Pohl, White, Stelmach—intend to explain the specific character of the city: it was built for supporting the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s functioning, whose residents were sent there from all the Soviet republics by the Soviet government’s decision. This emphasis on the specificity of the city residents’ pool is made, on one hand, to underline the significance of the nuclear power plant as an energy-production enterprise for the whole Soviet Union. But on the other hand they intend to highlight an easy possibility of the transformation from excitement to fear for those who are without roots, without an ‘identity’ myth, without the ethical background—those, who are easy to be manipulated in shaping a new Soviet identity. The writers emphasize the fact that all the city residents were connected to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant—‘…Virtually every adult resident worked at the station’ (White 2008, 99), which made its residents proud and thankful for living in this ‘paradise’ area—nearby the nuclear power plant:

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Papa’s job insured a good living for our family. Now that I was older, I understood in this sense the station truly was magical. We were all deeply grateful to the government for selecting our area as the site for the most up-to-date and modern power station that the Communist world had ever constructed. Since unlike conventional power plants, nuclear fission didn’t create ugly clouds of black smoke, we assumed that our paradise would remain unspoiled. (White 2008, 22) The station’s pay is ten times higher than anywhere else in all of the Ukraine. (White 2008, 23)

The writers highlight the unbelief and shock of people, who were so proud of their involvement in the energy-production process and their trust to the government even after the Chernobyl accident happening: His father’s power station could not have blown up! It was the very latest triumph of Soviet technology, with all the safety features his father had been proud to display to him as they toured the giant plant. It was too big and too magnificent to explode! (Pohl 1987, 43) But just as Papa believed his beloved country was the greatest in the world, he continued to insist that his government would protect him. (White 2008, 133)

Andrea White in her Radiant Girl describes a slow process of changing the image of the nuclear power plant in the protagonists’ perception after the post-nuclear accident days—the shift from pride of ‘the latest triumph of Soviet technology’ to fear, uncertainty, distrust, doubt: Before that night, I had been suspicious of the station. Now, living just forty miles away, I was certain that I had a right to be afraid. (White 2008, 108) This night, I had grown tired of never speaking about the things that were most important to me as well an hiding my fears. “Boris died at the station,” I said. (White 2008, 96) It was the summer before the eighth grade. Although I had begun to doubt the wisdom of Papa’s job at the station, I confess I never turned down a single one of the many gifts paid for by his good wages. (White 2008, 95)

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I felt conflicted. I wanted to go, but no one seemed to realize that the station was dangerous. So I just shrugged. (White 2008, 113)

The writers show their readers a slow process of shifting the public perception of a nuclear power plant from excitement and pride through doubts and fears to hatred, related to the power plant which is becoming the implication of the materialized ‘nuclear evil ’ in the Chernobyl context: …the plant was in mortal peril and he could not do anything else. (Pohl 1987, 31) He lowered his voice, which sounded sad. “We can’t undo the contamination. Mankind can only wait for thousands of years for the various radioactive molecules to lose their evil power.” (White 2008, 60) Papa sounded so self-satisfied that I just wanted to hurt him. “I hate the station.” He hurried over and drew so near that I could see the stubble on his face. “What did you say?” “It could kill us all!” I cried. “Ungrateful girl!” Papa yelled. (White 2008, 121) In my imagination, the station had become a dark fortress, an evil emerald city with a terrifying fireball on the throne commanding people to do its bidding and the consuming them. (White 2008, 145)

But even after gaining the full understanding that the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is an implementation of ‘the invisible nuclear evil’, carrying death and ruining the previous hopes for ‘paradise’ life, the protagonists of the novels continue to support its functioning and regarding it as a source of their livelihood: Papa’s fist hit the table. “How can you fail to understand the opportunity?” (White 2008, 95) My bedroom was not a granny or a teen room, just a nondescript, modern space. I had a brand-new desk, an oak bureau and a new bed fitted with soft sheets, all paid for by my father’s wages at the station. (White 2008, 99)

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How could I have been so stupid? Papa wasn’t an overzealous patriot. He worked at the station to pay for the Moped and jewelry he thought I liked so much. (White 2008, 139)

Juraku Kohta tries to explain such shifts in the public perception of nuclear energy—‘The sequential regulatory actions have made operators and manufacturers impoverished by never-ending review process while public trust has not been effectively recovered in proportion to their efforts. It could be interpreted that regulation fulfills the public will to punish “evil” nuclear industry instead of legal prosecution process’ (Kohta 2017, 162). So, in the novels under study here the materialization of evil in the image of ‘a nuclear power plant’ makes the leitmotif of incomprehensibility and mystery of ‘the invisible evil’ more visual and material. But even after gaining its visible appearance though implementing in the image of a nuclear power plant, the nuclear evil still remains a mystery with its dual nature—both taking lives and provides a living. The duality of the literary imaginary of the nuclear power plant here comes back to the archaic features of the flamen, who is endowed with the ability to turn into a whirlwind and fly through the air, as well as manage the clouds, just being the ‘master of the rain’ with the clear reference both to the Christian mythology (Elijah, the Prophet) and the pagan mythology of the Eastern European areas. Such representation of a nuclear power plant clarifies its uniting and encouraging role in the post-Chernobyl society, which not only makes the nuclear power plant as a protagonist of the novels, but refers it as a connection between gods (related to those decision-makers in the nuclear energy-production in the Chernobyl context) and the public, whose life is directed by the nuclear power plant. In addition, the nuclear power plant—before and after the accident—performed the regulatory functions in that area’s community. It is the nuclear power plant that controls the observance of certain behavior norms, which can be identified as a regular link between the almost universally prevalent perceptions of ‘supernatural’ forces that cause disease, and social norms, governing the behavior. Such ideas effectively function as a mechanism of social control and a way to maintain social order. So, the nuclear power plant is regarded in the novels under study as a source of evil after the nuclear accident. But its primary image of ‘the manifestation of the triumph of nuclear technology’ is still strong, which explains the dual nature of a nuclear power plant, regarded both as a hero and a villain.

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The Soviet Bureaucracy as a Source of Evil In a wider meaning, the literary imaginaries of the nuclear evil overcome the limits of a nuclear power plant and overwhelmingly spread over the Soviet bureaucracy, which is depicted in these novels as a parasitic organism that is not able to be a barrier of the reasonable mind and a presenter of the general interest. The total trust to the Soviet government shapes the public pride for the Soviet technological progress and industrial achievements. These lines carried electricity from the station to the rest of the Ukraine. Seeing that web stretch on, I realized that the station generated so much power, that the government would never allow it to close. (White 2008, 142) We were all deeply grateful to the government for selecting our area as the site for the most up-to-date and modern power station that the Communist world had ever constructed. (White 2008, 22)

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion is regarded by the writers as a failure of a dictatorial and bureaucratic Soviet government, encouraging the suffocating social apparatus of the Soviet bureaucracy. The Soviet government has to fight evil manifestations, because it is one of its functions. But instead of that the Soviet bureaucracy implements evil itself while becoming a new source of evil. They sipped and nibbled impassively as they listened to Smin’s recitation of the virtues of the Soviet nuclear power system, the unflagging devotion with which they were carrying out the decisions of the 27th Party Congress, and their unfailing success in achieving their Plan goals. (Pohl 1987, 2) Precisely. When Gorbachev was in power in the eighties, the KGB siphoned off six hundred billion dollars into shell accounts—in places as far away as Ireland and Las Vegas—so the party bosses could control Soviet resources no matter what happened with. (Stelmach 2013, 94) The Soviet government gives order: biological resource are dispensable. The liquidators who work on the reactor call themselves biorobots. Like dispensable machines. (Stelmach 2013, 133)

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The shift from public trustworthiness to total distrust, represented in the novels under study here, is explained by duality of a bureaucracy as a phenomenon itself. Referring to Hegel’s statement, a bureaucracy is defined as the main part of the society, that includes the state consciousness, education, and professionalism. And any officials are the main background of the state’s functioning in terms of education and intelligence. Another point of view on bureaucracy is represented by Marx, who defined it as a social parasitic organism, the result of social class antagonisms and contradictions, and the materialization of political alienation, to his mind, bureaucracy is an absolute evil (Ibrahima 2013, 3). Thus, the writers of the novels, which are under study here, emphasize that the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident happened due to stupidity of those officials who make decisions, influencing the society’s life of the community of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s nearby area: …it reminded me of the stupidity of the top officials at the station. For three whole days, the government had tried to keep the accident a secret from the world. For several weeks, the managers still officially clung to the delusion that the disaster was only a ‘trifling incident, with no lasting damage. (White 2008, 121) But that, too, was impossible to believe! Yes, certainly, the CIA or the Chinks, they were quite capable of blowing up a power plant simply to inconvenience the Soviets. But there was no way such a thing could have been possible without the concurrence of everyone in the main control room-and to believe that was as preposterous as to believe in simple, crass, spectacularly gross stupidity. (Pohl 1987, 44)

But the trust in the officials’ decision was so high, that the protagonists try to find other explanations for the current events at the nuclear power plant—sabotage: Smin refused to believe that anyone in the Chernobyl plant could have been that arrogantly stupid. It was almost easier to accept the possibility of that word that had not been much heard in the Soviet Union in recent decades: sabotage. (Pohl 1987, 44)

The Soviet bureaucracy turns the state power into a tool for implementing unreasonable plans, neglects its citizens’ lives, gives false guidelines imposing on the society’s activities—useless, or even harmful, and

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profitable only for the Soviet bureaucracy. It is particularly the writers’ perspective on the Soviet bureaucracy reflecting the view on the Soviet policy, described by the President Ronald Reagan, who branded the Soviet Union an ‘Evil Empire’ in his speech about the nuclear issues proposals at the convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida (May 8, 1983), and further cooling already chilly relations between the White House and the Kremlin—‘…I urge you to beware [of] the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all, and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and, thereby, remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil’ (Glass 2018). In the novels under study here—by Pohl, White, Stelmach—the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident was not only the materialization of ‘the nuclear invisible evil’ but also the demonization of the Soviet nuclear policy in the late Cold War and beyond.

Conclusion The hot debates about the positive and negative societal consequences of discovering radiation, its good and bad influence on humanity coincide with the long-term discussions about the role of technology and technical innovations in the society, which result in launching the issues of norms, values, moral, and ethical aspects of scientific knowledge for the benefit and for the destruction of humanity. The nuclear energy-related issues have gone through the multisided and multidisciplinary debates, swinging between ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ and balancing as ‘the debatable’ within the Nuclear Anthropocene with the dominating perception of ‘the nuclear’ as the ‘invisible radioactive evil’, related to the loss of the value of life, neglecting the moral values within nuclear technology’s policy in the late Cold War age. The focus on studying the implication of ‘the nuclear evil’ in its cultural and social representations of nuclear energy gives rise to the socio-cultural and social-technical shifts in reconsidering the perception of the nuclear energy issues, related to the debates about the ‘Atom for Peace’ policy within the late Cold War discourse. The nuclear narrative, shaped by the Cold War policy, went through some changes after the well-known statement by Derrida about ‘fabulously textual’ component as a dominating one in characterizing the nuclear discourse in general (Derrida 1984, 20).

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But the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion encouraged the separation of ‘nuclear war’ narrative and ‘nuclear energy’ narrative, which has the different policies of their implications as well as the different messages in nuclear discourse: when a nuclear war and nuclear weapons are narrated as an absolute evil, nuclear energy and nuclear power are still ‘the debatable’ (Avery 2017, 4). The emphasis on studying the literary implications of ‘the nuclear evil’ in these U.S. novels (by Pohl, White, Stelmach), depicting the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, its premises and aftermath, helps not only to distinguish the transformations of ‘the nuclear evil’ in these U.S. writing practices but also to highlight the ethical aspects of nuclear energy-related issues and nuclear energy policy in the post-traumatic society of the late Cold War, which define the cultural and social parameters of perception of nuclear energy as a concept for further impact on public acceptance of nuclear technology in general. The novels under analysis here confirm the long-term debates about the materialization of evil—the literary image of ‘a nuclear power plant’, represented in these novels, makes the leitmotif of incomprehensibility and mystery of ‘the invisible radioactive evil’ visual and material. The materialization of the nuclear evil in the literary image of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is characterized by its duality which reflects the issue of evaluating the good and the bad (or the debatable) about nuclear energy. The novels under analysis here emphasize the duality as a literary dimension of a nuclear power plant in the novels— even before and after the nuclear explosion, as it is described in the given writing practices. The Chernobyl nuclear power accident, as it is represented in the novels, reshapes the cultural agents of nuclear culture and changed to the public perception of ‘the nuclear’: from excitement to fear and uncertainty, embodied into radiation as a symbolic representation of the controversial character of nuclear technology giving birth to the beautiful ‘invisible radioactive evil’. Such dual representation of a nuclear power plant clarifies its uniting and encouraging role in the society, which not only makes the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as a protagonist of the novels, but refers it as a connection between gods (related to those decision-makers in the nuclear energy production in the Chernobyl context) and the public, whose life is directed by the nuclear power plant. In addition, the nuclear power plant—before and after the Chernobyl catastrophe—performs the regulatory functions in that area’s community. It is the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that controls the observance of certain behavior norms, which can

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be identified as a regular link between the almost universally prevalent perceptions of ‘supernatural’ forces that cause disease, and social norms, governing the behavior for further social control and a way of maintaining the social order of the community. While depicting the pre-accident days, the writers in their novels almost on the first pages of their works emphasize the enormous power of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant construction, which is supposed to be a separate city, representing the power of the Soviet achievements in nuclear science and nuclear technology and making the Soviet people proud of their being involved in producing the ‘magic energy’. The writers—Pohl, White, Stelmach—intend to explain the specific character of the city: it was built for supporting the functioning of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, whose residents were intentionally relocated there from all the Soviet republics. This emphasis on the specificity of the city residents’ pool is made to underline the significance of the nuclear power plant as a Soviet energy-production enterprise as well as to stress an easy way for the transformation from excitement to fear for those who are without indigenous roots, without the background for identity formation. The writers highlight the unbelief and shock of those people, who were so proud of their involvement in nuclear energy-production process and their trust to the government after the Chernobyl accident happening. The novels depict an unexpected process of changing the literary image of the nuclear power plant in the protagonists’ perception after the nuclear accident—a shift from the excitement and pride of ‘the latest triumph of Soviet technology’ through doubts, fears, and uncertainty to hatred to the power plant which is the implication of the materialized ‘nuclear evil ’. But even after gaining the full understanding that the nuclear power plant is an implementation of ‘the invisible nuclear evil’, carrying death and ruining the previous hopes for ‘paradise’ life, the protagonists of the novels continue to support its functioning and regarding it as a source of their livelihood. So, the nuclear power plant is regarded in the novels under study as a source of evil after the accident. But the primary image of the manifestation of the triumph of nuclear technology is still strong, which explains the dual nature of a nuclear power plant, regarded both as a hero and a villain. Even after gaining a visible appearance in the image of a nuclear power plant, the duality of evil remains its dominating feature. The literary imaginaries of the ‘nuclear evil’ on the pages of the novels, which are under analysis here, go beyond the literary implication of a nuclear power plant and spread over the Soviet bureaucracy, which is

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depicted in these novels as a parasitic phenomenon that is not able to be an agent of the reasonable mind. The total trust to the Soviet government shapes the public pride for the Soviet technological progress and industrial achievements is ruined by the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, regarded by the writers as a failure of a dictatorial and bureaucratic Soviet government, encouraging the suffocating social apparatus of the Soviet bureaucracy. The writers of the novels emphasize that the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident happened due to stupidity of those officials who make decisions, influencing the society’s life of the community of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s nearby area, and highlight the fact that instead of fighting with the nuclear evil’s manifestations, the Soviet bureaucracy spreads evil itself while becoming a new source of evil. The novels by Pohl, White, Stelmach not only depict the duality as a characteristic feature of the literary implication of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, regarded as the materialization of ‘the nuclear invisible evil’ against the background the demonization of the Soviet nuclear policy in the late Cold War and beyond.

References Aref, Lana. 2018. “Nuclear Energy: The Good, the Bad, and the Debatable.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/ assets/docs_f_o/nuclear_energy_the_good_the_bad_and_the_debatable_508. pdf. Avery, John Scales. 2017. Nuclear Weapons: An Absolute Evil. http://eacpe.org/ nuclear-weapons-an-absolute-evil/. Brown, Kate. 2019. Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Carpenter, Ele. 2016. “Shifting the Nuclear Imaginary: Art and the Flight from Nuclear Modernity.” In Cold War Legacies: Legacy, Theory, Aesthetics, Vol. II: The Persistence of the Nuclear, edited by John Beck and Ryan Bishop, 116–133. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1984. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Diacritics 14, no. 2: 20–31. Descombes, Vincent. 1998. Modern French Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. 2012. “Un Paradis Habité Par Des Meurtriers sans Méchanceté et des Victimes sans Haine: Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima.” Ebisu 47: 49–57.

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Glass, Andrew. 2018. “Reagan Brands Soviet Union ‘Evil Empire.’” Politico, March 3. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/08/this-dayin-politics-march-8-1983-440258. Higginbotham, Adam. 2019. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ibrahima, Dama. 2013. “The Bureaucratic Phenomenon: Classical Concepts.” Modern Research of Social Problems 6, no. 26: 604–617. Kohta, Juraku. 2017. “Why Is It So Difficult to Learn From Accidents?” In Resilience: A New Paradigm of Nuclear Safety: From Accident Mitigation to Resilient Society Facing Extreme Situations, edited by Joonhong Ahn, Franck Guarnieri, and Kazuo Furuta, 157–168. Cham: Springer. Lepage, Emmanuel. 2012. Un Printemps à Tchernobyl. Paris: Futuropolis. Lotman, Yuri M., and Boris A. Uspenskij. 1978. “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture.” New Literary History 9: 211–232. Neiman, Susan. 2015. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton Classics. North, Winfried. 2006. “Yuri Lotman on Metaphors and Culture as SelfReferential Semiospheres.” Semiotica 161, no. 1/4: 249–263. Pickrell, John. 2016. “Introduction: The Nuclear Age.” New Scientist, September 4. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9956-introduction-the-nuclearage/. Plokhy, Serhii. 2018. Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. New York: Basic Books. Pohl, Frederik. 1987. Chernobyl. New York: A Tom Doherty Associates Book. Portelli, Aurélien. 2017. “What Cultural Objects Say About Nuclear Accidents and Their Way of Depicting a Controversial Industry.” In Resilience: A New Paradigm of Nuclear Safety: From Accident Mitigation to Resilient Society Facing Extreme Situations, edited by Joonhong Ahn, Franck Guarnieri, and Kazuo Furuta, 137–156. Cham: Springer. Potnitseva, Tetania. 2008. Mpi Uolctonkpaft Xelli: Pocledn iz clavnogo pokoleni [Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: The Last One of the Glorious Generation]. Dnipropetrovsk: DNU Publishing House. Radiation Answers Project. n.d. Health Physics Society. Accessed 25 June 2020. https://www.radiationanswers.org/radiation-introduction/typesof-radiation.html. Schell, Jonathan. 2000. The Fate of the Earth and the Abolition. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Schuppli, Susan. 2016. “Trace Evidence: A Nuclear Trilogy.” In The Nuclear Culture Source Book, edited by Ele Carpenter, 110–121. London: Black Dog Publishing. Stelmach, Orest. 2013. The Boy from Reactor 4. Las Vegas: Thomas & Mercer.

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Stover, Dawn. 2019. “The Human Drama of Chernobyl.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 5. https://thebulletin.org/2019/05/the-human-drama-ofchernobyl/. Wallace, Molly. 2016. Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. White, Andrea. 2008. Radiant Girl. Houston: Bright Sky Press. Yarkeev, Aleksey V. 2015. “Conceptualization of Social Evil in Structures of Objectivity and Subjectivity.” Hayqny eegodnik Inctityta filocofii i ppava Upalckogo otdeleni Poccicko akademii nayk [Scientific Annual Journal of the Institute and Philosophy and Law of Ural Department of Russian Academy of Sciences ] 15, no. 1: 45–59.

CHAPTER 21

The Evil Gaze of the State and the PostHuman Interrogator in 1984 Sadok Bouhlila

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn

Our world, fraught globally with violence and terror, is nowhere better (or worse) represented than in the somber outlook and “sinister aesthetics”1 of current literature, where the divide between the ethical ideals and brutish villainy remains neatly drawn. Similarly, this pessimistic vision of the world is widely resonant in recent scholarly publications. “Evil” politics of totalitarian domination and propagandist perversion are matters of the day in contemporary global cultures, which are pregnant, as Aaron

1 The phrase is borrowed from Slotkin 2017.

S. Bouhlila (B) University of Manouba, Manouba, Tunisia

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_21

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Santesso puts it, with a hallucinating revenance of “fascist energies and ideas” (Santesso 2014, 156).2 To my mind, no other genre would more vividly portray the concept of villainy, or radical evilness, than dystopian fiction. Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury and Anthony Burgess, to name but a few anti-utopian writers, have provided us with haunting pictures of villains who have stayed with us long after closing their books and influenced a myriad of other writers especially in contemporary science fiction. Zamyatin’s “God Leader” in We, Huxley’s “Our Ford” in Brave New World and Belial in Ape and Essence, Ray Bradbury’s “Chief Fireman” in Fahrenheit 451 are villains in their own right inspired in great part from Dostoievsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov. However, it is Orwell’s O’Brien in 1984 who perhaps best crystallizes the dystopian villain in his various protean shapes and posthuman stances. I will argue that it is mostly due to the character of O’Brien that 1984 has become the generic landmark for modern dystopia. The current essay will purport to examine in depth the “encounter” between Winston Smith and O’Brien in the Ministry of Love which will lead to the revelation of truth through physical and mental torture, unveiling a posthuman dimension unsuspected hitherto by Winston. If both characters, torturer and victim, are drained out of their humanity, it is O’Brien who gleefully justifies the dehumanization of truth as a necessity to create a “new man.” In shedding light on O’Brien’s role as the villain in the novel, I will have recourse to Hannah Arendt’s writings on the “Banality of Evil” as well as to Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual in the process of hegemony formation and an unlikely runner-up in the person of the French philosopher Michel Onfray, whose latest book, Théorie de la dictature (2019) focuses in great part on the importance of Orwell as a political thinker. Needless to say that one of the most enduring features of Orwell’s legacy is his extraordinary insight into totalitarianism. A close witness of the rise of fascism in Europe and of Stalin’s atrocities in the former Soviet Union, Orwell found the inspiration and subject matter of his last two novels in the deleterious atmosphere of postwar Britain which he recreated with a haunting realistic fervor. In his endeavors “to 2 See also the concept of fascism and/as ‘evil’ in Butter (2009), where the author examines the world’s fascination with the figure of Hitler who becomes a recurrent trope in the American literary imagination. For a thorough understanding of the concept of evil, see Koehn (2005).

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make political fiction into an art”3 Orwell came close to developing a theory of dictatorship as the French philosopher Michel Onfray contends in his Théorie de la dictature (Onfray 2019, 9). Strongly expressing the view that he considers Orwell’s political thought as “one of the most important today” (my translation), Onfray puts Orwell’s work on a par with Machiavelli’s The Prince, La Boetie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire, Hobbes’s Leviathan and Rousseau’s Contrat social. Onfray believes that because Orwell chose the novel 1984 and the animal fable Animal Farm, his work was glaringly neglected by what he terms “institutional thinkers” (Onfray 2019, 9) (my translation). Onfray notes that, surprisingly, Hannah Arendt does not mention George Orwell, in her seminal Origins of Totalitarianism (1951–1983), nor does she mention him in her complete works or correspondence. In his book, the French philosopher highlights seven principles that make up what he believes to be Orwell’s theory of dictatorship (2019, 12–13): (1) the destruction of freedom, (2) the impoverishment of language, (3) the abolition of truth, (4) the suppression of history, (5) the negation of nature, (6) the propagation of hatred, and (7) the aspiration to empire (my translation). With regard to the last item, Onfray notes that it requires “the formatting of children, administering the opposition, governing with the elites, enslaving thanks to progress and dissimulating power. Who can argue that we are not there yet?” (2019, 13), he concludes. 1984 bears all the generic hallmarks of a dystopian novel. The gloominess of the atmosphere, the endemic shortage of food and basic commodities, the drabness of the interior, the foul smells, the lack of individuality, in addition to the constant, stifling surveillance of the inhabitants of Oceania, are part and parcel of the anti-utopian paraphernalia. If we add to this, the presence of Winston Smith, a dystopian rebel whose confrontation with O’Brien, the evil representative of the state, leads to his defeat and final surrender to the doctrine of the Party, it is not difficult to see why the book has turned out into a cult story whose fortunes vary depending on the shifting horizons of expectations of generations of readers. Written some 70 years ago, the novel has not yet exhausted its transformative potential. 3 In his book Why I Write (2004), he wrote “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

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Much has been said and written about the “Socratic dialogue” between Winston and O’Brien first in O’Brien’s flat and later in the Ministry of Love and especially in the much feared Room 101. If like all Socratic dialogues, the one between Winston and O’Brien necessarily concludes with the victory of the dystopian villain, it is a rare feat that the victim too, in this case Winston, does not come out fully unscathed at the end of the process, which is not something Orwell possibly intended when writing the book, but more of that later. I will argue in this essay that O’Brien owes as much to the classical image of the tormentor/torturer that Orwell knew so well from the time of the sinister trials and purges under Stalin and fascist rule in Europe, as to the posthuman interrogator endowed with an ideological mission of bringing about the advent of a lifeless new humanity. In both cases physical pain is necessary to carry out the “change” making Orwell’s antiutopia more “convincing” than Huxley’s Brave New World, for instance. Totalitarianism which was made possible only by the massing of a very large group of people in urban spaces, requested from its executioners a less mundane vision of life. Himmler, one of the foremost conceivers of the final solution describes how he recruited and trained his SS soldiers by convincing them that everyday problems were of no importance and what mattered were only “ideological questions of importance for decades and centuries” (Bergen 1998, 26). Hannah Arendt emphasizes the blind loyalty requested from Nazi officers: “[T]he disturbing factor in the success of totalitarianism is … the true selflessness of its adherents. … To the wonder of the whole civilized world, he may even be willing to help in his own prosecution and frame his own death sentence if only his status as a member of the movement is not touched…. Identification with the movement and total conformism seem to have destroyed the very capacity for experience, even if it be as extreme as torture or the fear of death.” (Bergen 1998, 27)

Part III of 1984 shows amazing similarities with Arendt’s analysis of the totalitarian mind. O’Brien whose mind “contained” that of Winston tells him in Room 101 that the party’s rule is “for ever” (Orwell 1975, 211). The rest of their dialogue is even more chilling as O’Brien reveals the real motivations behind the party’s rule: “The party seeks power entirely for its own sake…. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to save guard a revolution; one makes

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a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power” (214). Anticipating, as he always does, Winston’s unsaid queries, O’Brien asks: “Can you not understand Winston that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. … The individual only has power insofar as he ceases to be an individual” (199). Once again Arendt’s words strike a disturbing echo with O’Brien’s as he explains to Winston that the price of “sanity” is “utter submission,” “if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal” (200). Describing the workings of the totalitarian state, Arendt identifies what she terms: “Pseudomysticism” as the main feature of the state’s bureaucracy since “the people it dominates never really know why something is happening, and a rational interpretation of laws does not exist, there remains only one thing that counts, the brutal naked event itself. What happens to one then becomes subject to an interpretation whose possibilities are endless, unlimited by reason and unhampered by knowledge.” (In Bergen 1998, 31)

With the brutal annihilation of the political in Oceanian life, O’Brien signals to Winston the gradual advent of the new Party man whose domination over humanity will soon be complete as the Party laws extend not only to the sex instinct, language, and history but also to matter and the laws of nature: “And remember that it is for ever…. The heretic the enemy of society will always be there so he can be defeated and humiliated over again. The more the party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism,” says O’Brien (Orwell 1975, 214). In her Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt, too, blames the disappearance of the political for the unbridled development of totalitarian thought and praxis as culminating in the Final Solution in Nazi Germany (Bergen 1998, xi). Similarly, O’Brien’s lunatic ramblings, negating the existence of the laws of gravity in the Ministry of Love, first meet with an opposition from Winston before he relinquishes his sanity following the third and final stage of his “reintegration” when all capacity for critical (political) thinking is destroyed in him. Prior to reaching the final stage of

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his conversion to the Party’s doctrine, however and despite his constant awareness of his intellectual inferiority to O’Brien, Winston provides us with a rare glimpse of his tormentor’s “exaltation”: “The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm was still on his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston; he is not a hypocrite; he believes every word he says. What oppressed him was his consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. Could it be true that O’Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad” (Orwell 1975, 205). In a letter written in June 1949, Orwell provides us with a justification for what prompted him to write his final novel: “1984 was a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in communism and fascism. … I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw out these ideas out to their logical consequences” (Orwell 1993, 565). He added that he intended the book primarily as a warning and not an anticipation novel. If O’Brien is firmly cast in the villain’s role, even Winston himself is not spared in the novel’s relentless attack on intellectuals. After all, Winston, the rebel is also simultaneously a master forger capable of rewriting old articles from The Times into Newspeak with great skill, earning him the compliments of O’Brien. What saves Winston in the eyes of the reader is Orwell’s clever use of the 3rd person limited omniscient narrator which creates at times an “uncomfortable” closeness between them. The latter ends up, not only identifying with Winston, but also sharing his hopes, pain and suffering and most of all, forgiving him for his “small” sins of self conceit and intellectual pride. I will argue that in Orwell’s last opus, the reader by bearing witness to the scene of torture is also in a sense complicit. As Jennifer Ballengee claims: “Whether in cases of actual or fictional torture, the communication of meaning via torture corresponds to the witnessing of the body in pain by an audience that responds to the spectacle” (Ballengee 2009, 6). The reader’s voyeurism engendered by the graphic torture scenes in Room 101 is likely to circumvent the author’s intentions and elicit from readers a myriad of reactions ranging from identification to pathos. Raising the issue of the representation/scene of torture, Ballengee writes that “torture creates yet another level of ambiguity in an already vexed chain of communication. In addition to the resistance of the body and of pain to linguistic or logical communication, the visual image complicates communication because it may suggest multiple possible

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meanings at once” (Ballengee 2009, 9). If the rhetorical potential of torture is undeniable its results (subduing the victim and eliciting information from him/her) are far from effective. By refuting one of the main consequences of torture, namely, martyrdom and by dismissing Winston’s seditious deeds as “trivial,” O’Brien casts himself in the role of the posthuman torturer whose goal is to extirpate the roots of critical thinking and thus dissent in Oceanian society. What lingers long after closing the book, is the scene of torture itself, whose prolonged enactment is necessary for the manufacturing of total consent from Oceania’s citizens. In this protracted rhetorical persuasion and the bodily violence that accompanies it, Winston’s judgment is gradually flawed until it is destroyed. The puerility of the party’s aim to elicit total obedience and its abhorrence of difference, contrasts with the means put in place to achieve this goal. In this destructive “mindgame,” intellectuals are kings but also victims. In any case they are the only ones who can fathom the intricacies of doublethink with a clear conscience. This sickness of the intellectuals has attracted the attention of a number of thinkers, but nowhere in modern fiction has it been so thoroughly treated as in 1984. Gramsci observes that in modern capitalist society the category of the intellectual has undergone “an unprecedented expansion,” something Bourdieu will expand on in the 80s and 90s calling for the advent of a new kind of intellectual—that of “the critical collective intellectual” (Bourdieu 1998, 7). Incidentally, Gramsci was referring to the bureaucrats, a category of individuals Orwell knew very well and despised and whom he associated with political parties. Needless to say that 1984 is replete with party intellectuals whose physical appearance is always demeaning. Winston appears to us in the first pages of the novel as a frail man with a varicose ulcer under his right ankle, he pants as he climbs the staircase to his flat and is told off by the gym instructress during the morning physical exercise. His neighbour, Parsons, is a middle-sized man who has a boyish appearance, that “of a little boy grown large.” Syme, the linguist, has a youthful and rather silly feminine voice, he is a small man with “large protuberant eyes.” The man working at the fiction department appears as totally dehumanized and utters words which are just audible but which cannot be understood which Orwell dubs as “duckspeak,” Ampleforth, the poet, who was vaporized because he omitted the word “god” in one of his translations of

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Wordsworth’s poems into Newspeak, is a “mild, ineffectual dreamy creature” with “hairy ears.” Only Mr. Charrington finds solace in Winston’s eyes as the perfect image of an old, retired ‘traditional intellectual’, both knowledgeable about the past and cultivated. Unfortunately for Winston, those features are only a mask hiding the real face of a ruthless thought police officer. However, it is O’Brien, whose powerful mind overwhelms Winston from the beginning to the end of the novel, who best understands Winston aptly telling him that he “only had himself to blame” (Orwell 1975, 192). O’Brien deftly tells him that it is his lack of humility that has led him astray from the ‘sanity’ of the collective rule of the party (200). In doing so, O’Brien reminds him that there is no place in Oceania for the traditional intellectual whose dilettante attitude and intellectual curiosity will only make him a ‘parasite’ (Gramsci). Only the Organic Intellectual finds praise in O’Brien’s words, the party intellectual who is conscious he serves the collective cause and not the individual cause. Like in Gramsci, the role of the Organic Intellectual is ultimately to exert control on the traditional intellectual and assimilate them. Now, whether Orwell had read Gramsci or not, is a moot point. Orwell had certainly read Marx, Engels and Lenin and was sufficiently aware of the situation following the Russian revolution to parody and satirize it so thoroughly in 1984. The inclusion of large excerpts from the ‘Book’, albeit as a parody, testifies to his awareness of the intricacies of historical materialism and of Marxist terminology which he never really espoused, despite his undying faith in socialism. Another aspect of Orwell’s wariness of intellectuals in 1984 is ‘Doublethink’, the capacity to hold two simultaneous and often contradictory thoughts at the same time, and the party’s technique to keep reality in check. “Even to understand the word doublethink involved the use of the word doublethink” (Orwell 1975, 25). The mental agility involved in the daily use of doublethink is the stuff of intellectuals who like to play with words and ideas often drawing up blueprints for social change and who are capable of the worst deceit once they start believing in certain ideas. There is no doubt that intellectuals who espouse a political cause singlehandedly and uncritically, are dangerous and untrustworthy for Orwell. In a letter to H. J. Wilmett, he writes: “Intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole, the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most

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of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc., so long they feel that it is on ‘our’ side” (Orwell 1978, 178) In the same volume, he adds that “if Stalin were to recognize the London Government, the whole British intelligentsia would flock around him like a troop of parrots” (262). In light of this statement, written a few years before Orwell completed 1984, it is safe to assume that Orwell’s last novel should be read against the backdrop of his distrust of British intellectuals and their ambivalent attitude to fascism and later to Stalin, during and in the aftermath of the Second World War It is clear to see that Orwell drew his inspiration for concepts like ‘doublethink’, ‘thought crime’, ‘thought police’, and ‘ownlife’ among many others, from the muddled and what he considered as dangerous positions of the English intelligentsia, whom he felt had reneged on true socialism. Similarly to Gramsci, Orwell believed that intellectuals did have a role to play in society, however he was wary of their shifting allegiance and their lack of selflessness. He probably would not have shared Gramsci’s revolutionary ideals of the organic intellectual facilitating the advent of a proletarian hegemony, however he did believe and acted upon it that intellectuals should speak truth to power, regardless of the stakes involved. As we pointed out earlier on in this paper, the society of 1984 is run by inner party intellectuals but also outer party members who have set up and are constantly ‘perfecting’ the totalitarian cast in which Oceania’s citizens are entrapped. Contrary to what a surface reading of the novel might lead us to think, it is not Big Brother who rules the system even if his posters and pictures are omnipresent. To the question: “Does Big Brother exist?” (208) O’Brien answers Winston evasively making it clear that Big Brother’s biological existence does not matter as much as his symbolic importance. Big Brother in the novel bears great similarity with the Lacanian, “Name-of-the-father.” In this sense, Orwell’s totalitarian society only has the trappings of a classical dictatorship especially when it comes to the use of torture and the constant monitoring of its citizens. I will argue that because it is primarily conceived of a sordid mind game with no hedonic message whatsoever attached to it, “If you want an image of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever” (Orwell 1975, 215), it also bears a distinct posthuman connotation. In his What Is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe writes that “posthumanism comes before and after humanism:

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before in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world, the prosthetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival mechanisms (such as language and culture)” (Wolfe 2010, xv). As a matter of fact, Winston finds out, before and after Room 101, that the dystopian body is fashioned by technology as much as the dystopian mind is fashioned by technicity. The ergonomics of the dystopian interior centered around the telescreen, the storage and transformation of archives in which Winston is involved in at work and his treatment at the hands of O’Brien and the men with the white coats in Room 101 with their intricate dials and sophisticated psychological torture as evinced by the rat scene, is laden with posthuman details, which only add to the complexity of Orwell’s work. At times the reader is astonished at Winston’s resilience as he undergoes O’Brien’s torture methods and the painful interaction with technology. Gradually, it becomes clear however, that the change induced in both Winston’s body and mind will lead to the loss of his persona as exemplified in the final “mirror scene” when he is confronted to an image of himself he fails to identify with (Orwell 1975, 218–219). The transformation is so drastic that he can only ‘mourn’ his former self which paves the way for his further transformation into a lifeless puppet. Wolfe argues that “human beings are a general mix of malleability and resistance4 together producing differing effects of dispositions and capability according to context and condition” (Wolfe 2010, xiv). Given the necessary interaction of Man with artificial intelligence, economic contingency, technology, and medical progress, the need to shift from an outdated anthropocentric view to “a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and

4 The American philosopher and biologist, Donna Haraway who approaches the posthuman condition from the standpoint of materialistic feminism entrenched in AngloSaxon culture, also bases her critique of traditional humanism on the latter’s residual essentialist traces which oppose an original human nature to an artificial environment (IA being a case in point) which is seen as being as destructive or at best corruptive. Similarly to Cary Wolfe she considers the human body as malleable, hybrid and subject to transformation. “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality”, she writes (1991, 150).

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evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon,” is more than ever called for (xv–xvi). If it is not impossible to imagine the positive consequences of the advent of a fully fledged posthuman man in the not too distant future, it is also possible to conceive of the abominable consequences of the perversions the postmodern era might lead us into. Michel Onfray for one does not exclude what he terms “a new type of totalitarianism” (Onfray 2019, 12), a more “plastic one” (idem) in line with contemporary technology which is turning the world into a surveillance society where big data is monitoring all our moves and craves, something Orwell could never have imagined in his time. A voluntary submissiveness on a planetary scale whose consequences we can anticipate and yet prefer to turn a blind eye to and whose technologically induced blissful reverie resembles the taking of “soma” in Huxley’s Brave New World. Despite its naturalistic drabness, 1984 well illustrates the perverse effects of a posthuman world ruled by an oligarchy of intellectuals and elite. “We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them,” O’Brien tells Winston (Orwell 1975, 205). “We convert him (the heretic), we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world” (205). In trying to press on Winston the eternal rule of the Party, O’Brien has abandoned any sense of individuality and is submitting himself and his victims to the mass rule of the party. In 1984, the new emergent “mass man,” to use Hannah Arendt’s terminology, is a “modern barbarian” living within the city. For Arendt, while “masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited, obtainable goals” (Bergen 1998, 145), it is their loyalty to the nation which makes them cling to their identity. Arendt’s remarkable analysis of Hobbes’s invention of the Leviathan “conceived for the benefit of the new bourgeois society as it emerged in the seventeenth century” (142) as a delegation of power to ensure the need for security of the individual feeling threatened by his fellowmen, fits with the enforcement of the rule of Big Brother in 1984. Arendt proceeds to show how this “delegation of power and not of rights” which incidentally became one of the tenets of the nineteenthcentury liberalism, perniciously grew into the advent of the mass men in the twentieth century and twenty-first century, as well. Orwell’s prescience in “theorizing” totalitarianism (Onfray 2019), albeit in

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fictional garb, is truly remarkable especially when it comes to the ‘spectacle of torture’ he offers to his readers in the third part of the novel. As O’ Brien reveals to an increasingly penitent Winston, “the party is not interested in the stupid crimes you have committed, the thought is all we care about” (Orwell 1975, 203). The infliction of pain is the sole locus of the representation of power on the body of the victim. In this sense, it becomes essential. The confession holding no interest whatsoever, so much as the administration of pain which leads to the total annihilation of the mind and ultimately of the self. Winston’s constant look at the dial during the torture scenes in the Ministry of Love is revealing of his desire to escape physical pain even if it means recovering a different identity in conformity with his torturer’s aims. Unlike traditional torture scenes such as in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, O’Brien combines a mixture of physical pain and argumentation to coerce Winston into accepting the Party’s vision. It is only when he understands “why?” that Winston is “cleansed” of his “heretic” thoughts and finally subdued into the Party ideology. In my examination of the posthuman dimension present in 1984, I am aware that I have not entirely given justice to Cary Wolfe’s otherwise rich and engaging reflection on how to “re-imagine subjectivity” in a posthuman society in his What Is Posthumanism?5 Instead, I focused more on the perversions to which posthumanism, just like humanism prior to it, are liable to and whose contours can be seen in 1984. In my mild disclaimer, I need to point out to the performative and rhetorical destruction of truth in Orwell’s novel which bears extraordinary similarities with historical events both in the twentieth and twentieth centuries. As we have examined before, the combination of the narrative and the visual is one of the distinguishing marks of Orwell’s fiction, but where does the performance of evil in 1984 stand in this respect? It is true that in his time Austin in How to Do Things with Words had postulated that literary utterances should be considered as ‘derivative’, ‘parasitic’ and ‘non-serious’ in comparison with other speech acts. However, we have come a long way since the theoretical debate sparked

5 Amy Ratelle makes the following cogent point when she writes that: “By linking animal

studies to systems theory, and proposing art as a way to change traditional conceptions, he paves the way to reimagining subjectivity as something not exclusively human. Wolfe ultimately answers ‘what is posthumanism?’ not by looking back at what it has been historically, but at what it could be if cultural artifacts were produced by those no longer invested in maintaining human superiority”.

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by Searle, Derrida, and Judith Butler to name some of the theorists who considerably enlarged the concepts of performativity and performance to redraw its boundaries around the notions of identity, political culture, sexuality and gender. Loxley contends that “In recent years the concept of performativity has become a prominent feature in the broader academic field of performance studies. This discipline is itself a fairly recent invention: only in the last two decades or so has it achieved the institutional status and paraphernalia of an established area of study” (Loxley 2007, 139). Loxley seems to dismiss the assertion that performativity “would therefore mean only the rather general quality something might have by virtue of being a performance” (140). I will add that by freeing performativity from the constraints of the stage alone, it ushers it into the realm of the real. It has often been argued that all of Oceanian society represents the stage where the performance of evil is enacted in 1984, however it is in the Ministry of Love and especially in its infamous Room 101 that the latter is revealed in its plain horror. More than a space, Room 101 which stands in opposition to the “Golden country,” epitomizes the novel’s dramatic climax as the sorry spectacle of Winston’s dehumanization can be seen but mostly read as a rhetoric of terror which confronts him to his worst fears and nightmares and leads him to betray what he cherishes most. After his treatment in Room 101, his’ rebirth’ as a ‘normal’ oceanian citizen in the Chestnut café, is witnessed by the reader as that of someone henceforth capable of believing the fictions the party instilled in him, and thus incapable of searching for the truth. But the question lingers, how close/far are we, readers from the doomed Winston? Harari contends that we are living in an era of “post-truth” (2018, 231). In fact, he goes as far as writing that “Homo sapiens is a posttruth species whose power depends on creating and believing fictions” (idem) and that for reasons of political correctness, we are compelled not to admit that the major world religions have been spreading ‘fake news’ for thousands of years (231). During one of Winston’s flaneries around a derelict, war-ravaged districts of Airstrip one, he is made to reflect on the principles of Ingsoc, Newspeak, doublethink, and the mutability of the past: “He felt as though he was wondering in the forests of the sea bottom... He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature was on his side? And what way of knowing that the

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dominion of the party would endure forever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” (25)

For those of us who still see irony in Orwell’s three slogans, it might be useful to reminisce the chilling words of the slogans the Nazis had placed at the gates of the notorious death camps of Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald: “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work makes you free). According to Padfield, the message “Arbeit Macht Frei” “was devoid of irony, it was intended for the two groups of occupants of the camps: the prisoners and the guards. It told the prisoners that the compulsions they live under are not compulsions imposed by the power of the police, but the necessity of the destiny of the Reich that carries the future of the world, and for which they, the prisoners, are destined to work and die as the only way they can redeem themselves as sub humans” (Bergen 1998, 26). With its professed desire to outdo both the Russian communists and the German Nazis in establishing an everlasting dictatorship capable of squeezing all life out of its citizens, the Party’s cryptic slogans increasingly gain more currency in Winston’s mind as the story unfolds toward his inevitable demise. O’Brien’s rugged features, unassuming manners, and charming conversation in the first two parts of the novel well illustrate Arendt’s writings on the banality of evil. It also underscores Austin’s belief that words far from being only descriptive do have an influence on things. Austin writes that “to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it” (Austin 1962, 6). In distinguishing between performative and constative utterances, he expresses the view that “the performative should be doing something as opposed to just saying something” (132). In light of what has been stated before, to contend that 1984 is mostly a performative text would be a truism. Orwell’s use of the English language and his ambivalent attitude to its superiority and the need to protect it from decay, instilled in his prose a distinctive propensity to

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empirical details and a realistic acumen he used as tools for his ‘rhetorical persuasion’. As 1984, makes clear, if the members of the inner party are better off than those of the outer party, enjoying bigger, more comfortable flats and the freedom to shut off their telescreens, they still do not indulge in luxury and are not exposed to the corruption of money. The exercise of power seems to be the sole object they crave for. However, just like Eichman (Bergen 1998, ix–xv) their seeming banality hides ruthless personalities totally enslaved to the Party’s ideologies and solely committed to break any resistance among the people of Oceania. As Arendt puts it: “To call evil banal is to offer not a definition of it but a theodicy. For it implies that the sources of evil are not mysterious or profound but fully within our grasp. If so, they do not infect the world at a depth that could make us despair of the world itself. Like a fungus, they may devastate reality by laying waste to its surface. Their roots, however, are shallow enough to pull up” (233). Herein lies the importance of Orwell’s warning(s) in 1984. I argue that if his first warning was addressed to his postwar fellowmen who witnessed and identified with the squalor and drabness of an impoverished postwar England where shortages and rationing were the order of the day, his second warning was addressed to a larger audience living as we do in a society much further removed in time and space than the one he lived in. If Hobbes had anticipated the individual’s surrender to that state Behemoth (Leviathan) meant to shield the individual from the potential dangerousness of his peers (Homo homini lupus ), Orwell’s imagination conceived that tacit bond well beyond the premises of bourgeois liberalism to our digital times where our march toward virtual nihilism is hailed as progress and where “archive fever,” to use Derrida’s terminology is seen as restricting our individual freedom faster than we realize. One does not have to be endowed with deep essence pessimism to make the comparison between the rule of Big Brother and that of the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) which are competing to buy and sell our private information in a world where “each click on the mouse begets a golden coin in their purse” (Onfray 2019, 193). Like in 1984, the advent of the posthuman world they are heralding is bound to raise concerns, all the more so as the world’s elites have joined the movement toward a new imperium based on the new surveillance mechanisms.

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Onfray6 doesn’t hide his distrust of the new posthuman/transhuman societal model lying in store for us. Dubbing this new so-called progress “a regression,” he writes that “only a small number of privileged people will take advantage of this posthumanism while down below the multitude will suffer from this state of affairs” (2019, my translation). He further warns us that “these new slaves, these new proletarians will be transformed into a reservoir of ontological detached pieces” while “the collective intelligence will be harnessed by this new swarm of people with full powers” (197). It is my view that Orwell’s warnings will continue to resound well beyond our posthuman times, whence the importance of his political thinking even as it is fraught with ambivalence, as I have argued elsewhere. That his vision strikes a discordant note with the optimism of the dormant/acquiescent masses is only a testimony to his prescience and insight. He would undoubtedly have agreed with Machiavelli more than five centuries ago when he wrote: “But men have so little judgment and foresight that they initiate policies that seem attractive, without noticing any poison that is concealed. Therefore, a ruler who does not recognise evils in the very early stages cannot be considered wise; this ability is given only to few” (Machiavelli 2019, 50). However, unlike Machiavelli, Orwell’s awareness of the abuse of power made him conceive of frightening alternatives to the enlightened ruler, a testimony to how much the Hobbesian “bond” between ruler and ruled, has been breached over time. Sadly, the advent of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, as well as that of the age of the GAFA in our troubled digital times, can only vindicate his vision.

References Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ballengee, Jennifer R. 2009. The Wound and the Witness: The Rhetoric of Torture. Albany: SUNY Press. Bergen, Bernard J. 1998. The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and the Final Solution. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

6 I am fully aware that my reference to Onfray’s work is likely to raise other issues that cannot be discussed within the framework of this article. One is his critical stance vis- avis theoretical constructs and his inclination toward empirical conclusions, and the second is his reticence to the Maastricht treaty, constitutive of the European Union.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Contre-feux: propos pour servir à la résistance contre l’invasion néo-libérale. Paris: Liber-Raisons d’Agir. Bradbury, Ray. 1981. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon & Schuster. Butter, Michael. 2009. The Epitome of Evil: Hitler in American Fiction, 1939– 2002. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. 1978. The Brothers Karamazov. Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ———. 1978. The Brothers Karamazov. Vol. 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Harari, Yuval Noah. 2018. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. London: Penguin Random House. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge. Hobbes, Thomas. 1981. Leviathan. London: Penguin Classics. Huxley, Aldous. 1977. Brave New World. London: Granada. ———. 1978. Ape and Essence. London: Granada. Koehn, Daryl. 2005. The Nature of Evil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Koestler, Arthur. 1976. Darkness at Noon. London: Penguin Books. Loxley, James. 2007. Performativity. London: Routledge. Machiavelli, Niccolò. 2019. The Prince. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Onfray, Michel. 2019. Théorie de la dictature. Paris: Robert Laffont. ———. 1975. 1984. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ———. 1978. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 3: As I Please, 1943–1945. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ———. 1993. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ———. 2004. Why I Write. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Ratelle, Amy. “Review of What Is Posthumanism? by Cary Wolfe.” MediaTropes eJournal 3, no. 1: 147–150. https://mediatropes.com/index.php/Med iatropes/article/view/15753/12846. Santesso, Aaron. 2014. “Fascism and Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 41, no. 1: 136–162. Slotkin, Joel Elliot. 2017. Sinister Aesthetics: The Appeal of Evil in Early Modern English Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zamyatin, Yevgenni. 1978. We. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

CHAPTER 22

Wicked Speech and Evil Acts: Performativity as Discourse and Murder as Responsibility in Curtain—Poirot’s Last Case (1975) and Speedy Death (1929) Federica Crescentini

Introduction According to narratology stories represent forms of illusion and knowledge and teach us about the world (Culler 2000, 91–92); on this subject E. M. Forster (1927, 64) has observed that even wicked characters suggest more comprehension of human race. Since “the literary utterance […] creates the state of affairs to which it refers” (Culler, 96), the literary text is performative through its characters, through the potential criticism of real life occurrences and through the reflections it inspires in the readers as well. Therefore the category generally labeled as villains, if developed with care, might raise moral and psychological questions, ethical doubts and a kaleidoscopic examination of the concept of “Evil” also referring to the historical period in which these characters exist.

F. Crescentini (B) Urbino, Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_22

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Two novels in particular, published during the first and second half of the Twentieth century, Speedy Death (1929) by Gladys Mitchell and Curtain—Poirot’s Last Case (1975)1 by Agatha Christie, show various degrees of wickedness, performed by the designated villains and alarmingly present in the actions of other characters as well, included those of the detectives. Considering that the latter in the Golden Age detective fiction used to represent order and justice, the twist and the ambiguity in their role are meaningful. Therefore they question systemic evil practices and systemic surveillance which risk to become part of the same category, instead of being opposing and complementary concepts commonly related to “Good” and “Evil.” Hence the following chapter observes Evil and villains in all their forms and identities and their performativity, in two novels which represent the end of the career for Poirot and the beginning of detection for Mrs. Bradley. The choice of presenting the most recent text at the beginning of this study is due to the fact that it possesses the most cunning culprit of the two.

Curtain: Poirot ’s Last Case The performativity of Evil is represented with various methods in the last adventure concerning Poirot written by Christie. Since the incipit this novel shows a nostalgic feeling and a sense of déjà-vu which might recall the Nietzschean concept of eternal return applied to detective fiction and to the story of Poirot and his friend Hastings in particular. The setting in fact is once again Styles Court, home of the first crime solved by the Belgian detective. Thereby the place already provides a connection with murder and an atmosphere of impending doom: through the comments of certain characters the text reflects on a theme commonly linked with evil, that is superstition. This concept amplifies the events of the present by triggering memories of the past and is useful in order to notice that the crimes perpetrated at Styles are not merely relegated in the temporal unity of the novel; they have deep roots in the past of the house and in the past youth of the main culprit. Indeed a feeling of unhappiness is apparently haunting the initially beautiful place, which in the aftermath 1 Published in 1975 but written during World War II (Jessica Gildersleeve, “Nowadays: Trauma and Modernity in Agatha Christie’s Late Poirot Novels,” Clues 34, no. 1, Spring 2016, 103).

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of the Second World War has become a guest-house where people of different social classes converge for different reasons, thereby creating a fertile and unsuspicious humus for the villain; therefore he hides among them without seeming out of place. The author creates an almost perfect persistent offender, who is identified by Poirot but cannot be arrested due to the lack of legal proofs against him. Deceitful manipulation and perversion emerge through his technique: he does not perform in person the act of murder and the text points out that his victims are more than the people who have actually been killed. As a consequence the story shows a chameleon-like villain who influences other characters, inducing them to become human puppets, instruments of his sadistic desire to destroy human lives in every possible way. His name is Stephen Norton.

Leading Villain: Stephen Norton The novel is narrated through the perspective of Captain Hastings, who notices from the beginning a grey-haired man: he limps, stammers slightly and has field-glasses to admire birds. According to other characters he is a “nice fellow,” “ineffectual,” “inoffensive,” and “inconspicuous” (Christie 2002, 13, 23, 57, 107). Nonetheless, he is the perfect criminal and the principal villain of the story, an example of pure cruelty and of absence of pity, mercy and remorse. His modus operandi is wickedly brilliant and Christie inserts references to Othello and Julius Caesar by Shakespeare and to John Ferguson by St. John Greer Ervine in order to display clues to the readers. Nevertheless, the constructed “face”2 of Stephen Norton tends to elicit a certain sympathy on the part of both readers and characters, due to his inability in speech (result of the stammering and of the false naivety of his words) and to his slight disability in movement. He is also subject to illness when he sees blood: all these features concur to create the illusion of the innocent man, the kind, friendly, and seemingly fragile good listener. His character makes readers remember that double-faced, underhand people are not merely relegated to fiction, albeit the ability of Norton presumably belongs only to fiction. “As a rule, we go about with masks […] looking honest, and we are able to conceal ourselves all

2 “A person’s public self-image” as defined in Yule (2011, 129).

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through the day” (Fatout 1997, XVIII): this statement by Mark Twain is particularly apt to describe the mischievous Stephen. Observing other people from behind his mask, he focuses on their weaknesses and then provokes them with cunning speech acts, carefully created to appear as naïve; Poirot isolates five murders connected with him and admits that other cases exist which have not been detected. The first victims at Styles Court are the Luttrells, who run the guesthouse. Since Mrs. Luttrell regularly humiliates her husband in front of their guests, Norton performs several remarks about being bullied, marriage, and shooting accidents with raised voice but clumsy attitude, thus conveying the impression of being merely inappropriate and silly. “Norton laughed. ‘Marry and settle down? And suppose his wife bullies him.’ […] He tried to catch [words] back, hesitated, stammered, and stopped awkwardly. It made the whole thing worse” (Christie, 117–118). The above-mentioned quotation shows how the locutionary act communicates more than is actually said, highlighting the gestures and modes of communication. In this case the illocutionary force is an illusion, since behind the humorous prediction-warning appearance it hides the true communicative purpose: hit the pride of Colonel Luttrell and amplify his anger toward his wife. The illocutionary force, generally meant to be recognized, in this case is meant to be misunderstood as a sad remark. Indeed although it resembles an apparently infelicitous speech act, it actually has the necessary felicity conditions for the perlocutionary effect desired by Norton to be performed by the hearers: general dismay and, above all, an outburst of anger on the part of the victim. While pretending to perform a joke and a gaffe, Norton is actually leading Colonel Luttrell toward his mental and moral breaking point and the result, the perlocutionary effect, is the attempted murder of Mrs. Luttrell via shooting accident. Overall, as the text explains (Christie, 283) the victims are the person who physically commits the crime, the human being who is killed or injured and the people dearest to them. Poirot describes this strategy which allows the “performativity as discourse”: “[Norton] knew the exact word, the exact phrase, the intonation even to suggest and to bring cumulative pressure on a weak spot!” (Christie, 261). Society, except for Poirot, do not realize the very essence of the villain, hence he is reckoned a good man until his death. “Abnormal psychology” (Knepper 2005, 71) is thus inserted by Christie in her later novels and Curtain is one of the narrations which “provide some striking examples of criminals motivated […] by evil passions” (Knepper, 71).

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Norton is the exemplification of “how to do things with words” as well3 : he manages to claim victims through a clever use of speech acts and speech events, creating murderers and deaths to satisfy his lust for tragedy. Psychology is fundamental in his depiction, he represents part of the human degeneration of the Twentieth century and the sad and dangerous consequences of intellectual and emotional abuse. His mother bossed him, his contemporaries mocked him and he had a weak personality; Poirot affirms: “he was an addict of pain, of mental torture. There has been an epidemic of that in the world of late years” (Christie, 264). As Knepper (2005, 81) points out, works by Christie are “a window on the social history of Britain in the twentieth century.” In this perspective the statement of the detective resonates through the narrative and displays a clear and direct reference to a social problem developing especially during and after the World Wars and still contemporary: mental fragility, sadism, cruelty, irreparable damage, further described by another character, who talks about the “twilit people” (Christie, 107–108). They are the maimed, grey figures and broken-down gentle-people, all victims of the World Wars and of their economic, mental and social consequences; to them, happiness is unattainable, hope is ceased and their lives have been deprived of a bright future. Nobody is happy at Styles Court, which becomes the fulcrum of the expression of pain, restriction, and resignation after the catastrophic events of Twentieth century. These frustrations signal the starting point of a condition where almost all characters are easily influenced by evil, developing their potentiality for homicide. Thus they mirror reality and the consequent inference is that people in real life are as corruptible as them: here fictional human beings show that under certain situations, criminals are circumstantial.

Circumstantial Murderers Although Colonel Luttrell deliberately shoots his wife, he also deliberately avoids killing her, establishing the ultimate victory of sincere love against the ethical confusion brought by fury and cruelty. Consequently, an urge for new crimes emerges in the foremost villain. It is important to remember along the story that according to the detective, no person would have committed murder if Norton would not 3 The expression refers to the title of a series of lectures given by J. L. Austin, “How to do things with words”.

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have influenced them; this theory relates in particular to Arthur Hastings, the first circumstantial murderer. First of all he is persuaded by Norton to believe that his daughter Judith must be saved from the seducer Allerton; filled with hatred he proceeds to plan what he reckons a perfect homicide. Considering that through all the novels by Agatha Christie, Hastings has been described as a honest, positive character albeit stupid, it is evident the powerful extent reached by the skilled manipulation performed by Norton. Therefore even the middle-class social group who considers itself morally righteous might prove evil when its weaknesses are severely hit. In the end Hastings appears as an example of the frailty of society and of its “moral relativism.” Moreover, although Poirot prevents Hastings from killing Allerton, his cher ami unconsciously eliminates Mrs. Franklin, another circumstantial criminal who under the influence of Norton tried to poison her husband. Infelicitous marriage is a recurring theme in Christie: in Curtain it affects both husband and wife, who have new love interests. Religious and moral concepts, far from being pilasters of society, are now reduced to mere obstacles of true desires: the progressive deterioration of values is clearly evinced through the crisis which allows Stephen Norton to create villains. Those values, the text shows, have been betrayed from the beginning, since the expectations of Mr. and Mrs. Franklin about one another were wrong even before marriage. Therefore the crisis of traditional norms and values has distant roots and culminates when circumstances (unhappy couple) meet the trigger (potential lovers) and the “amplifier” (Norton). The outcome is an emotional and psychological atomic bomb which destroys lives even without eliminating people, possibly transforming them in suspects in crimes: Judith, who loves Mr. Franklin, risks to become investigated for murder because, since the death of Mrs. Franklin was considered as suicide, Norton was not satisfied: “He wants […] suspicion, fear, the coils of the law” (Christie, 277). Another example is the character of Elizabeth, who feels tainted and does not truly live her life because her sister has been driven by Norton to kill their abusive father. The story thereby displays an intricate chain of causes and consequences, where all the characters are infected by evil, and the detective executes Norton in order to save other lives: “I, who do not approve of murder […] have ended my career by committing murder” (Christie, 261). Therefore the symbol of Good, logic and of restored justice, the devout man, finally evolves in a role commonly labeled as criminal and

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thus, as he admits in the above quote, he betrays one of his principles. Consequently Poirot lets himself die; the contrast between his ideology and his ultimate deed is described by a monologue in a farewell letter to Hastings: “I do not know […] if what I have done is justified […] But […] In a state of emergency martial law is proclaimed” (Christie, 283). Hence the villain has succeeded in performing murder through other people and the Belgian who values human life commits “murder as responsibility.” Despite its negativity, the situation is almost poetic in its development: the wicked speech of one character annihilates many lives while the mental and physical self-sacrifice of an opposite character stops this process of destruction. Through Norton and Poirot, Christie defies “readers to contemplate evil as a powerful, passionate and predatory force and to understand the necessity and limitations of human justice that may tempt a detective to become a ‘Nemesis’ to protect the innocent” (Knepper, 81). This performativity interrogates the cardinal points of every society: what is good and what is evil? In this respect it reveals a similarity with the fundamental question of the ontological detective story studied by Gomel (1995, 346), “what is it?”. In the end Poirot achieves an act of expiation, confiding again in his moral and religious beliefs: he remits himself to God admitting that he still does not know if his deed can be considered justifiable, showing humility. His sacrifice balances his negative choice and avoids a possible negative opinion of him on the part of the readers. In his last quest Poirot represents and enhances the failure of traditional justice and surveillance in protecting innocents and arresting evil, and the ambiguous meaning of “ethics” and “moral code” when life itself, personal interests and affections are menaced. In order to perform his duty without being discovered, he pretends to be more ill than he actually is, deceiving everyone as Norton does. He uses false clues to provoke a verdict of suicide regarding the death of Norton; nevertheless he decides to shoot him in the center of his forehead, provoking in Hastings an association of ideas with the brand of Cain. Although Poirot is famous for his obsession with symmetry, his deed might be considered as a sort of condemnation toward the criminal. With his behavior he does not acquit himself therefore he maintains his positive “face”; however, his concern is not shared by the minor villains of the story.

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Minor Villains On the opposite side with respect to the beliefs of the detective, the author displays the voice of science through the characters of Judith and Mr. Franklin. A thoughtful choice on the part of Christie is the debate about euthanasia, cleverly developed by Norton in order to irritate young Judith, who as a result expresses questionable ideas about life and death, seemingly shared by her employer doctor Franklin. According to Judith, life is not sacred and euthanasia is a decision that people with clear minds should take about the useless lives of other people, who should be eliminated: “Only people who can make a decent contribution to the community ought to be allowed to live. The others ought to be put painlessly away” (Christie, 148). She also declares that some people are like leeches and in this sense the text creates a clue linked to Norton and to one of his victims, Mrs. Franklin: she stubbornly forces her husband to satisfy her desires by pretending various degrees of illness, recognized by Poirot as neurotic. The beliefs expressed by Judith, albeit not concretely developed, are definitely unsustainable and suggest serious considerations on the role of science into human lives and on the role of homicide as well. Moreover the concept of “justified” elimination of human beings resonates like an echo of the horrors perpetrated during World War II, giving an impression of Judith as a cold, arrogant and negative character. She also reckons brave a young girl who, unwittingly affected by the craftiness of Norton, killed her own abusive father in order to protect her sisters. Thereby she claims the admissibility of a “moral relativism”: considering her view, Poirot would be completely justifiable. In addition, the abusive father was mad but not sufficiently insane in the medical perspective. What Judith declares elicits questions about what madness is and what pure cruelty is. Is being wicked a symptom of insanity, or is it merely a shape of personality? It could depend on its quality and degree. Moreover, not all madness leads to bad deeds. To what extent can cruelty be condemned by the law? The scientific perspective is linked with law, however, both institutions fail in front of the underhand emotional and psychological manipulation, a moral crime which results in legal, scientific crime albeit without the necessary scientific and legal instruments to prove the guilt of Norton. These themes are still contemporary and psychological abuse is an example of a crime still difficult to prove. As far as this vicious circle is concerned, doctor Franklin openly supports the right to kill by stating that according to him, about eighty

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percent of the human race ought to be eliminated because life would be better without them (Christie, 76). It is inevitable thereby to associate the ideas of Judith and doctor Franklin with eugenics, which predicated that “the ‘unfit’ of the race […] needed breeding out” (Bernthal 2016, 132). The reactions of other characters to the claims conveyed by Mr. Franklin and Judith are merely polemical; interestingly, the only person who seems horrified is Norton, who maintains his innocent, positive face in front of the others. This particular stimulates reflections not only about the power and the outcome of good acting, but also on the almost remissive attitude of Poirot and Hastings, apparently good members of society, in front of a cynical and cruel discourse. Society here is shown as ineffective in defending its values because it is secretly deserting them. In conclusion in fact Poirot does what Judith only preached. Furthermore, Arthur Hastings does not agree with the doctor, nonetheless he tries to kill Allerton, whom he reckons a villain since Allerton is married, has many stories with other women and is responsible for the suicide of a pregnant girl. Considering this contrast, the plot underlines that Evil lies even behind the strenuous moral ideas of a positive character and not only in the controversial and openly malicious behavior of Allerton. Performativity indicates Good and Evil as interacting and merging forces rather than being separated and contrasting. It also shows that despite their scientific convictions, nor Judith nor doctor Franklin actually practice what they state. Nonetheless after the sudden mysterious death of Mrs. Franklin, her husband affirms that he is not interested in knowing what happened (Christie, 217), which emphasizes his coldness toward his wife and, possibly, his suspicion on Judith and a clear approval of the demise of Mrs. Franklin. In refusing to divorce her he sticks to certain values, not religious but related to honoring his promise to her; his satisfaction when she dies questions the very sense of keeping these values, going beyond mere hypocrisy and interrogating the meaning of values in society, which seem at this point only an obstacle to personal happiness. In conclusion, true evil in Curtain is created through discourse and it obtains results using suspicion and the bodies of other people. Villainy is as subtle as the technique developed by Norton and nor words nor deeds appear worth of trust. This leads readers to understand that evil characters perform also an almost total insecurity, duplicated by the fact that not only appearances lie, like the kind manners of Norton, but speech acts as well. Do the characters know who they really are? Enlarging the question, do people know who they are or, like Hastings, they might be surprised

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from what they are capable of, if properly “provoked”? Performativity of evil characters reflects on the questioning of personal identity, beliefs and the very motives of these beliefs. Positive personalities become villains and villains are killed, victims of a reversal of roles which reflects the confusion and uncertainty in the post-war society of Twentieth century; similar features are present in the first novel by Gladys Mitchell, Speedy Death.

Speedy Death Mrs. Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley appears for the first time in 1929 and her debut represents in many ways a similar and opposite counterpart with respect to the last adventure of Poirot. According to Paul Peppis, Speedy Death is an example of popular modernism and exposes “repressive ideology, especially its enforcement of compulsory heterosexual marriage, bourgeois gender roles, and respectable (hetero)sexual identities” (Peppis 2017, 122). The aforementioned topics are explored through leading and minor villains. All the characters gather in Chayning Court, a country house whose owner, Mr. Alastair Bing, is celebrating his birthday. Soon the readers will discover that among the middle-class, educated social group hide no less than three murder perpetrators. At the beginning the plot appears quite simple and almost linear, whereas it reveals twists and multiple layers as the story unfolds: the true mystery to be solved relates to what has happened to the culprit of the first murder, one of the foremost villains.

Leading Villains The “speedy death” of the title refers to the guest Everard Mountjoy, an explorer who dies suddenly while having a bath. Despite his manly clothes, manners and voice, the corpse found is female: at first the group is not able to believe the simplest inference that the dead is Mountjoy. Nevertheless, when evidence proves the identity of the victim, her closest friend Carstairs asks himself how he could possibly have ignored the reality. Thus Mitchell here shows in retrospective gender as a performance, a theme connected with a theory later proposed by Judith Butler in 1990. Indeed the first victim created her male gender by her own acts, allowing other people to perceive and identify her as a young man. The situation becomes more peculiar when despite the discovery of her

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biological sex, the characters continue to refer to the explorer with masculine pronouns, immediately correcting themselves afterwards. Therefore hidden behind the surface, “non-normative sexuality, gender unconventionality, and dissident subjectivity are integral to that world of bourgeois country house parties” (Peppis, 123). Moreover, the fact that Everard Mountoy has deceived the lady of the house and daughter of Alastair, Eleanor Bing, by becoming almost officially engaged to her covering her biological sex, suggests a reflection on the part of the readers about the villainy of the first victim. Deceiving someone is a “face threatening act” (Yule, 130) and by voluntarily damaging the “face” of a young woman, should the first victim be considered as the first culprit? According to Carstairs the most likely explanation for the unsustainable act is the need for money and in that case, it is possible to include Mountjoy within the ensemble of the villains in the novel. On the contrary, Mrs. Bradley believes she might have loved Eleanor. Interestingly, the real name and thus the original identity of the explorer is never discovered nor searched for. It remains unspoken, undetected, a true mystery and it does not seem to create any interest nor curiosity, even in Carstairs (showing his shallowness). Finally the motives of Everard remain ambiguous “despite the genre’s tendency to resolve all mysteries and reveal all motives,” (Peppis, 127) thus proving the modernism of the novel. The second culprit in temporal order is the killer of Mountjoy: Eleanor Bing, the only person in Chayning Court who had a strong motive to eliminate the troublesome guest. This character along the story pronounces speech acts non-linear with the circumstances, in a degenerative escalation which affects both discourse and actions, soon revealing her guilt. Contrary to Norton in fact, she is detected by other characters long before the conclusion. In addition to her fiancée, even Eleanor represents the “compulsory repetition of gender norms that animate and constrain the gendered subject” (Culler, 103): she precisely embodies the role of the woman of the house, impeccable, prim and controlled. Nevertheless, her mental and physical chains break when unbeknownst to the others she realizes that her fiancée is a woman; incapable of facing a scandal she drowns the truth (the naked female body of Mountjoy) and the other characters become involuntarily conniving when they refuse to confront her. Paradoxically the biological sex of the victim is hidden from Eleanor in an attempt to protect her from the shock of reality, whereas the peril is Eleanor herself. At the beginning of the novel her character is constructed

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through a “reported performativity,” that is mostly through what others say about her, and her first direct speech concerns the guest who had no dinner: “‘I hope he has not been taken ill’ remarked Eleanor solicitously” (Mitchell 2014, 10). She then suggests her father to see “if all is well,” performing a perfect lie and thus hiding her crime. Her manners and words are polite and composed, creating a model role: nonetheless, through the eyes of the others she is shown as boring and drab. Therefore villains are defined by the authors through their performativity and by other characters as well, through their appearances: Eleanor appears inappropriately calm and controlled, while Norton in Curtain results timid and unlucky in the eyes of others, disguising himself better then Eleanor. After the explicit declaration of death of the guest, the latter surprises everyone with her calmness: “‘I think we might repair to the drawingroom now’, she remarked quietly” (Mitchell, 17). Since she performs an indirect speech act with a commissive function without the appropriate conditions, she behaves as if nothing strange has happened and therefore she produces the starting point of the gradual unveiling of her murderous tendencies, since she is evidently untouched by the death of her lover; additionally as Mrs. Bradley points out, almost all the people in Chayning Court have homicidal tendencies: this statement is useful to widen the range of possible suspects and to define the nature of the characters (the only exception in the house full of potential killers is Carstairs). As the story unfolds the speech acts pronounced by Eleanor contrast with her savage actions; the dialogues of the other characters about her are fundamental in revealing her true nature, because as her brother points out, she never gives herself away (Mitchell, 48). It is possible to compare the clash between words and deeds in order to discover the level of her breakdown: behind the politeness of her discourse she hides extreme violence, which emerges in outbursts of anger. For example, she purposely throws down a clock because she is jealous of its owner, a young attractive woman. Through actions of this kind Eleanor shows her passion for one of the guests, Bertie, who has refused more than once her pleas for marriage. Despite his reactions she is determined to eliminate the unaware competitors for his attentions, Dorothy and Pamela: she attempts to kill both, failing only due to the intervention of Mrs. Bradley. The control of speech on the part of Eleanor thus hides and suggests what is lurking underneath her physical and mental appearance: a basically unbalanced woman, frustrated and craving for a love she will never obtain. After being discovered while trying to murder a rival in love, “Eleanor fought […] while from

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her lips […] there poured forth a stream of the most foul and abominable filth which ever disgraced the name of language” (Mitchell, 224). Thus, speech becomes savage as well when the truth is unequivocally revealed. Therefore in her case performativity has an uncanny duplicity and results in a nervous breakdown with a paradox: Mrs. Bradley declares mad the killer of Mountjoy, however, she also states that a specialist would not certify Eleanor as insane because, paradoxically, “she’s only dangerous when anybody takes a liking for Bertie Philipson” (Mitchell, 229). Peppis pointed out that Mountjoy is a “victim of the fury of a repressed, humiliated and deceived woman but also of a conservative, intolerant, and repressive society” (127). Following this perspective it is possible to regard Eleanor herself as a victim of the same society and she is further punished with death, two times, at the hand of two circumstantial villains.

Circumstantial Murderers But I sprang over the sill like a cat, and rushed at the girl, and with a terrific feeling of savage joy – I could have laughed and laughed aloud for the sheer, hellish pleasure of it! - I held Eleanor’s head under water, while the two taps beat a devil’s tattoo in my brain as they splashed crazily into the bath!

Likewise Norton, the leading villain becomes the victim when Miss Bing is found drowned in the bath in a similar revival of the first crime. The quotation mentioned above, uttered by Bertie, demonstrates that he is a culprit and a villain in gestures and words, since he confesses without any remorse. Although he is not a protagonist he functions as circumstantial villain, that is the result of the performance of another character. Thereby, again similarly to Curtain, villains inspire villainy in those who already have homicidal tendencies. Carstairs for example chooses to avenge the death of his friend Mountjoy with detection, while Bertie decides to protect Dorothy by eliminating Eleanor. To his annoyance, however, Miss Bing is found in time to be reanimated, only to die again and ultimately in the bath, poisoned. Despite the irony in the repetitions and variations on the “death in the bathroom” theme, a third criminal is present in the house: Mrs. Bradley debuts both as amateur detective and as culprit in Speedy Death. From the beginning

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she is depicted as a strange, clever and sarcastic woman “thoroughly modern—even modernist” (Peppis, 124). She detects the killer through the use of psychology and her diagnosis of the causes of the mental breakdown experienced by Miss Bing is Freudian (Peppis, 129). Mrs. Bradley shows duplicity through a voice which contradicts her appearance, and she pronounces several remarks which recall the scientific view later exposed in Curtain. In fact the final twist shows her motive and her extremely personal treatment of the word “murder”: “‘I had no personal feeling in the matter […] It was […] a logical elimination of unnecessary, and, in fact, dangerous matter” (Mitchell, 308). The psychoanalyst actually reveals her cold-blooded crime justifying her action without any regret and her words are similar to those of Judith in Curtain. Moreover, her decision of placing the corpse in the bathtub where the victim killed Everard is a symbol of mocking attitude and of vengeful condemnation, the latter echoed by the brand of Cain cast by Poirot on Norton. With her words she changes the perspective on what she has done, gaining even the approval of almost all characters, police included. Her reference to Eleanor not as a person, but as a “dangerous matter” is an interesting manipulation and the respective chapter of the novel is logically entitled “Points of View.” Since the psychoanalyst in the conclusion escapes conviction, Peppis (131) emphasizes that Speedy Death violates fundamental rules of the Golden Age whodunit: detectives are not murderers and the latter are always punished; this novel also queries and queers “the Manichean morality and bourgeois status quo that golden age detective fictions typically re-establish in their conclusions” (Messent 2013, 23). Notably, through her discourse the author enhances what might be called a “different perspective on elimination” which recalls the aftermath of the World Wars. “I did not, in the everyday […] sense of the word murder Eleanor Bing, I merely erased her, as it were, from an otherwise fair page of the Bing family chronicle” (Mitchell, 308). In opposition to this unsustainable definition, Mitchell provides the words of the law when the judge refers to murder as “causing the death of another intentionally and by your wilful act” (Mitchell, 304). Moreover, the Bing family chronicle is not as fair as Mrs. Bradley describes it and the woman, arrested by police, pleads herself not guilty during the trial, although she privately admits to have intentionally caused the demise. This atypical detective stimulates moral and intellectual thoughts relating to one of the possibly oldest and controversial questions of human existence, the justifiability of homicide. At this point it is useful to recall that Curtain suggested reflection on the

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same topic and on a related one, euthanasia, in addition to the elimination of “Evil” in order to protect the innocents. The latter is performed by Mrs. Bradley, who reckons herself the only person with enough intelligence to escape a guilty verdict. She explains: “We are all murderers […] Some in deed and some in thought. […] Morally, there is no difference at all […] Some have the courage of their convictions. Others have not” (Mitchell, 106). Similarly Poirot in Curtain will affirm: “In everyone there arises from time to time the wish to kill—though not the will to kill ” (Christie, 260). Although she refuses connivance by deciding to investigate the death of Mountjoy, the psychoanalyst implicitly produces connivance to her personal advantage, by using a seemingly scientific reasoning to justify her choice of killing Eleanor, hence showing that irony and paradox are part of the story and of villainy. Contrary to Poirot, Mrs. Bradley has no moral doubts about her crime. These two characters, a man and a woman, perform the same action with the same motive, but with opposite attitudes and consequences about it. The overall effect is a complementarity where villains and “villained,” victims of each other, reflect issues created by Twentieth century events and inspire debates about them: birth control, sustained by Bradley, euthanasia recalling eugenics, openly estimated by Judith, religious and moral values underlined by Poirot, mirror the different opinions and deeds toward Life. Even superstition is part of the stories: the psychoanalyst affirms to sense something very queer about Chayning Court, as some characters do in Curtain about Styles Court. A small detail in the latter recalls Speedy Death as well: in the last adventure of Poirot, a Mrs. Bradley is arrested, tried and convicted for killing her husband. The detective created by Mitchell, however, is absolved because, as in the cases of Norton, Poirot and Eleanor, decisive legal proofs are not present. Therefore in both novels evil characters highlight faults and failures of institutions such as law, science and society: in doing so they are supported by minor villains.

Minor Villains The story features a number of characters who, despite not being completely evil, expose wicked faults such as excessive egotism, disinterest for others, and moral opportunism: as a matter of fact the death of Miss Bing represents a positive event for the majority of people, including her

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family. Her brother Garde and his friend Bertie happily approve of the crime and of the courage of Mrs. Bradley, while Ferdinand Lestrange, her lawyer, and son, celebrates his mother; Carstairs, who claimed to believe in turning the culprit to the police, actually accepts her deed. Therefore those who refused to be conniving with regard to the murder of Mountjoy, in conclusion become complicit in the homicide of Eleanor without qualms. Thus moral condemnation of murder is applied only to that of Mountjoy and to the possible victims of Eleanor, whereas the killing of the latter is embraced almost as a blessing. Her father Alastair is not devastated by grief, even though she has passed her life enduring the role of his housekeeper and secretary, adding frustration to her already loveless life. Instead of participate in the inquest in fact Mr. Bing secretly escapes in order to avoid his own responsibilities: a young maid in his house is pregnant with his child. The scandal, already known to Eleanor, contributed to unbalance her mind in addition to the lies of Everard and to the presence of Bertie. Therefore Eleanor might be considered as a victim of the egotism and disinterest of her father and brother and all her frustrations lead her to madness: totally opposed to modern Mrs. Bradley, Miss Bing highlights the entrapment of single young women of that society in their own family circle. A minor typology of wickedness is shown in Ferdinand Lestrange, who ironically holds no particular interest in the safety of his mother and is more focused in his own professional success as a lawyer. To Mrs. Bradley and to Ferdinand this seems a natural feeling, nevertheless the effect on the reader is disquieting and provokes reflections on the kind of relationship between mother and son. It also suggests thoughts on family ties, not always achieving what they are conventionally supposed to. As if these elements were not enough, in the conclusion the psychoanalyst reveals to an unaware Carstairs that he has been her accomplice in covering her guilt: she has hidden the poison by taking advantage of his trust in her. Nevertheless, the man accepts the role put on him without protesting and he seems almost honored: this proves that throughout the novel, as far as moral and justice are concerned, all the characters let their personal feelings decide who is worth helping, whose death needs revenge and connivance, and for whose death it is right to be happy. Fictional absence of impartiality duplicates and possibly denounces its counterpart in real life, especially considering its publication in the interwar period. For these reasons almost every character in Speedy Death proves a villain or an accomplice in crime, similarly to Curtain, inspiring abiding

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reflections on the issues they create through their different but successful performances. Among all, the best performativity belongs to Norton, Poirot, and Mrs. Bradley.

Conclusions Speedy Death and Curtain have been written by two successful writers of the Twentieth century; Agatha Christie and Gladys Mitchell subverted the classic rules of detective fiction and illustrated the situation of their times through their novels. In particular the principal and circumstantial villains studied in this chapter are complementary and help to reflect on significant issues from different points of view: scientific, moral and even religious. The detective novels create two opposite types of villains, one mentally insane and one extremely cunning, obtaining however the same result: two personalities who kill, affect the judgment of other characters and cannot be legally condemned, therefore are eliminated by “good” detectives. The multiple layers of the plots display situations in which evil is part of almost all characters, albeit in different ways and degrees. As Moretti (2005, 136) states: “Murderer and victim meet […] because they are fundamentally similar. […] The victim […] has asked for it: because of his shady past and because he wanted to keep secrets.” He also argues that in detective fiction murder is a punishment for those who do not adapt to the concept of normality (Moretti, 137): Norton, Mrs. Franklin, Mountjoy, and Eleanor are examples and symbols of this concept. Poirot and Mrs. Bradley, on their part, are different as well from the traditional “norm of detectives.” The characters prove their wickedness in several ways challenging justice, culture, morality, and the value of Life; consequently detectives fall into the abyss where villain lie and even though they act to protect innocence, their deeds are objectively criminal. Their performativity accomplishes a reflection which links science to the concept of responsibility toward life and inspires the following question: does performing evil deeds or speech acts necessarily mean to be evil? The behavior of Poirot and Judith demonstrates that a shade of ambiguity exists about the answer. As far as Mrs. Bradley is concerned, she recalls the idea expressed by doctor Franklin that the concepts of guilt and innocence, of good and evil are personal, relative and opinions about them vary according to the century (and to society).

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The above-mentioned representations of villains suggest that duplicity (including what is hidden and what is unknown) is part of every character: along the Twentieth century “Evil” has become a systemic practice, developing even in intimate relations and with sadistic flavor, and the systemic surveillance of “Good” has started to vacillate in its initial integrity, becoming part of what it tries to fight. While it is difficult to be “good” in the strict sense of the term, it is extremely easy to become a villain, as the following timeless quote demonstrates: “Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you” (Nietzsche 2002, 146). The words of Nietzsche resonate through these villains and tragically pertain to the period in which the stories are set. Significantly, Poirot states “Everyone is a potential murderer,” (Christie, 206) almost echoing Mrs. Bradley; accordingly, evil performers, detectives included, create a mirror of their times and confront vital topics of that era which are still contemporary: psychology, the degree in which science may damage life instead of preserving it, moral relativism, religion, and decaying society. In conclusion the two novels outline an unexpected paradox of the concept of “Evil,” associated with its performers and with performativity, constructing opposite cases of wicked utterance initially perceived as naivety, evil deeds masked with polite dialogue and alleged “legitimacy” of negative gesture. Performativity thereby functions also as social criticism and allows the readers to reflect on what kind of performance (discourse or acts, and what typology of them) defines a villain as such, according to the following questions: “what is guilt and what is evil? What is good and what is innocence?”. It possibly inspires broader investigations: what does “being good” actually mean? Does it coincide with performing good acts (and to what extent, specifically?), or with merely not performing deeds considered as evil? What is the significance of “being a good person”? Has it the same meaning of “being a valuable individual”? At first several traits might be indicated, however, the issue is more complicated than it seems and should not be trivialized nor considered as a rhetoric question. The answers in the novels remain ambiguous and subject to relativity, as the performance of the characters demonstrate. For example, the behavior of Eleanor in Speedy Death results in the promptness of some characters to kill her, risking death penalty, to prevent her from hurting other people. Thereby Mrs. Bradley, smart enough to avoid capital punishment for them and herself, is regarded as the savior of the situation. Does it

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represent “being good”? Additionally, performativity of evil characters in Speedy Death and in Curtain reminds readers of a consideration developed by Umberto Eco (2014, 576): “[…] books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party.” Therefore the ultimate outcome of the interconnection between performativity and the literary representation of these evil characters is to “act beyond the written text”: they denounce evil in its multiple forms, as evident, hidden or unknown; they inspire reflections on the exposed topics as present in our existence as well, not only in the world created by the text. The novels show that society has become so corrupted that in certain circumstances the only way to stop evil is to kill, therefore transforming the agents of justice in agents of death. Moreover the conclusions of both novels, rather than offering a new order, seem to focus on the absence of the principal villains, leaving the reader with a gloomy aftertaste. Overall performativity of villains evokes that even in real life “being good” is often complicated especially when our personal happiness is at stake, while its opposite is easily reachable by acting evil or by not intervening at all: in many situations we turn out to be almost all villains, in various and different shades and degrees.

Bibliography Austin, John Langshaw. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bernthal, James Carl David. 2016. Queering Agatha Christie. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Christie, Agatha. 2002. Curtain—Poirot’s Last Case [1975]. New York: Harper. Culler, Jonathan. 2000. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction [1997]. New York: Oxford University Press Inc. Eco, Umberto. 2014. The Name of the Rose [1980]. New York: Mariner Books. Fatout, Paul, ed. 1997. Mark Twain Speaks for Himself . West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Forster, Edward Morgan. 1927. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt. Gildersleeve, Jessica. 2016. “Nowadays: Trauma and Modernity in Agatha Christie’s Late Poirot Novels.” Clues 34, no. 1 (Spring): 96–104. Gomel, Elana. 1995. “Mystery, Apocalypse and Utopia: The Case of the Ontological Detective Story.” Science Fiction Studies 22, no. 3 (November): 343–356.

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Knepper, Marty S. 2005. “The Curtain Falls: Agatha Christie’s Last Novels.” Clues 23, no. 4 (Summer): 69–84. Messent, Peter. 2013. Crime Fiction Handbook. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Mitchell, Gladys. 2014. Speedy Death [1929]. London: Vintage Random House. Moretti, Franco. 2005. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms [1983]. London: Verso. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2002. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peppis, Paul. 2017. “Querying and Queering Golden Age Detection: Gladys Mitchell’s Speedy Death and Popular Modernism.” Journal of Modern Literature 40, no. 3 (Spring): 120–134. https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.40. 3.08. Yule, George. 2011. Pragmatics [1996]. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 23

Host of Otherness: The Trope of the Urban Space Habitat and the Concept of Evil in Contemporary Science Fiction Media Mark Filipowich

The tensions between host and guest are premised on a core, irreconcilable distinction between the two. Villainy as a performance or as a deviant moral ontology only holds currency in contrast with a notion of heroism. Whatever the villain’s diegetic form, a villain is recognizable to audiences as a distortion of virtue. The bad guy is a moral waste by-product1 of the audience’s assumed virtues, powerful enough to be genuinely threatening but necessarily subordinate to the heroic ideal.2 We have to recognize who the villain is, and instinct has us hope for the villain’s unconditional and total defeat. Villainy, this chapter contends, exists in the unresolvable, contentious nature between a city’s citizens and its guests—that is, by the unwelcome or illegitimate Others who seep in and corrupt the people in it. The intellectual conception of the city hinges on a distinction 1 See Woltmann, this collection. 2 See McCambridge, this collection.

M. Filipowich (B) Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_23

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between who belongs and who does not: physical locations hold semiotic value, which in turn ascribes value of people in such spaces and the authorial value to write meaning into space. In this context, cities require a kind of villainy to emerge as tension from the host–guest relationship. Using Anachronox, Mass Effect, and Valarian and the City of a Thousand Planets, this chapter contends that the science fiction trope of the urban space habitat offers audiences an intellectual tool that may both trap them into the confrontational thinking embedded in urban relations and offer them solidarity-building schemas for existing in the modern city. Like the city, human and political bodies only function when their constituent parts operate in harmony: Walter Benjamin…postulates a perennial feedback between the environment of the material culture and minds within it, commencing with the primordial origins of humankind, and ultimately yielding modern cityform. It is the internal dynamics within the composite of mind-city, as a perpetual interaction between an urban reality and visions of utopia, which stamps its mark upon contemporaneous urban contours and dispositions. (Akkerman 2014, 766)

In viewing the city as a compression of human relations, the dynamics of hospitality are helpful tools for understanding how the distinction between host and guest is upheld in that “the limits, borders, boundaries of the body (politic), its relations of inside/outside, friend/enemy, native/alien are exactly what is in question in the metaphor of the immune system” (Mitchell 2007, 281). The dynamics of the urban body are further complicated by the fact that cities are systems especially interested in upholding the sanctity of private property. Cities are increasingly central to the popular imaginary, especially at the height of late and post-industrial growth in the twentieth century and afterward. I choose fiction as a site of analysis because of its capacity to reproduce and undermine colonial identities (Palmateer Pennee 2012, 77) and I choose science fiction in particular because of its interest in renegotiating liminal identities in the social imaginary (Wallace et al. 2016). Although fiction has abstracted the tensions in urban spaces as sites of civilization, prosperity, and industry for several centuries, and the city itself has an established history as a site for political symbolism, imagination and action (Keith 2009, 539), cities are of special fascination to science fiction written in post-war reconstruction, civil rights movements,

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environmental conscientiousness, decolonization, artificial and networked intelligence and many other struggles that have characterized advanced modernity and globalization in recent decades. Science fiction, with its (in)capacity to imagine alternative modernities and alternative intersubjective relationships, is uniquely situated to describe a version of what Derrida’s unconditional or absolute hospitality might look like. For Derrida, “Absolute [or unconditional] hospitality involves neither the governance of duty nor the payment of debt” (Westmoreland 2008, 3) that always carries the possibility of violence (Westmoreland 2008, 7). Outer space remains an imagined “land” of total hostility and strangeness and is appropriately characteristic of Edward Relph’s notion of space as “amorphous and intangible” (cited in Pieber 2017, 41) or otherwise unknown (or unknowable). These are locations without meaning and, in the case of science fiction, outer space signifies (as best as can be done) that which cannot be described. Yet anxieties of hospitality in the city and the total alien vision of outer space converge in the trope of the urban space habitat, a city fully populated that exists in total isolation among the cosmos. The urban space habitat is an extreme representation of urban centers on Earth: that is, they are an intensely concentrated sense of place in a vacuum where there can be no place, only the infinitely undefinable space that unravels like Derrida’s chain of infinite signification. As much as any terrestrial city, the urban space habitat is a city marked by sky scrapers, public and administrative spaces, classed neighborhoods and industrial centers alone in space, protected by a semipermeable force field. Unlike space stations in many works of science fiction (or space stations in real life), which require a small, highly specialized crew to keep operational, the urban space habitat is marked by its vastness, its disindividuated modernist functionality, its hollowed-out mines and repurposed labor sites or even streets and blocks that physically rearrange and disorient residents. The symbolism of these speculative spaces provides an opportunity to see how actual urban subjects reproduce, relieve, or undermine expectations of hospitality between those with difference written onto their bodies. These cities are the only survivable oasis in a vacuum of inhospitable outer space. The power that shapes their design is directed by a “host” group that defines itself in opposition to the stranger or the alien. To be hospitable in the first place, there must be an Other with and agreed upon criteria of difference (Simmel 2010, 11). At an administrative level, Otherness is reducible to which traits define citizenship:

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An individual was recognized by how he appeared before the law, what status he held in the polis. The foreigner was placed inside the law, under the law, essential to the law. The foreigner occupied an integral space within the city. Indeed, the foreigner was essential because he provided that to which citizens could compare themselves. From a phenomenological standpoint, one could claim that one’s identity is only understood in relation to others. Citizens understand themselves in relation to others, to foreigners. (Westmoreland 2008, 2)

In the case of cities, foreignness and belonging can be divided by an outsider status, but also at the level of neighborhoods. But in the urban space habitat the city itself is a life-sustaining island floating in an infinite, inhospitable void. The residents and visitors of urban space habitats are at once at home and always floating amidst absolute hostility. The city is at once necessary for human (and alien) life to exist, but the always imbalanced relations of power create a setting where “The indiscriminate use of sophisticated surveillance technologies [breeds] an urban culture of mistrust and punishment…by which different sections of society are classified and evaluated” (Amin 2010, 2). As necessary as the city—and social cohesion within it—is to survival in these texts, these stories can’t imagine a version of city life without also centering the tension between the subject and Other not only as necessary, but necessarily in conflict. Like a more general Derridean fascination with binary opposition, the categories of both host and guest—who is, ultimately the Stranger, the Other—are codependent and inversely defined. Although power can be levied by either party in a variety of ways, the barrier between them is impermeable and each category only has semantic value in total opposition to the other: It is worth remembering that Derrida’s conception of hospitality is not grounded in a strict code that can determine in advance who is worthy of sheltering and who is to be banished…. By keeping open the space of encounter, Derrida stresses that every culture has the capacity to be hospitable to the other (to receive them without question), and also to colonize the other by receiving them as a guest (to confine their admission through rules that confirm the authority of the host). (Claviez 2013, 146)

The core distinction between host and guest is one of fluctuating power, with each party potentially exposed to violences from the other.

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Yet as interactions between bodies, it is pertinent to consider the materiality of how bodies are physically arranged. Power is expressed in where the host’s body is relative to the guest’s; the meaning of power is consecrated by where each body can be found. The threshold separating where the host is at home and where the guest becomes an alien is created largely in how the meaning of place is gradually assigned and agreed upon by its residents. Henri Lefebvre deploys the term “social space” to refer to an area “where everything—people and objects as well as signs and symbols— congregates and interacts with one another. Social spaces have histories that result from the cumulative actions undertaken in these spaces” (Pieber 2017, 40; Ujang and Zakariya 2015, 711). This place of public activity at once is home to those who define it but it belongs to nobody. Social space—or more simply, “place”—is a gathering point of shared meaning, whether it exists materially as a town square, a nation, a website, a community or otherwise, place contrasts with the neutral, as-yet-empty signifier “space.” Place is created and maintained communally, but its meaning shifts: literacy of a place’s meaning establishes who belongs and also who is foreign to it. The tensions of hospitality are always present in cities, which are understood largely through a sense of place, where meaning is inscribed and rewritten by inhabitants of a town, neighborhood, or street’s social power. The physical design of cities classify and coordinate host and guest, physically directing where the Other can exist and what material conditions the Other may live in. Cities can be tools of enclosure, condensing rural patriarchy into a tighter and more surveilled geography; but cities also allow citizens to attempt to mutually aid one another to varying degrees of success (Smith 2017, 22, 24–26; Merrifield 2013, 3). In other words, the spatial methods of controlling bodies may also empower them. Establishing who belongs demands a convention of hospitality: recognizing that there are Others requires conventions of how to treat “Them” and cities provide some solidarity-building potential to inoculate citizens from state-encouraged prejudices (Claviez 2013, 2–3). Likewise, the city has been an emblem of civilization and visions of the ideal city traceable to Plato, who paralleled it with human soul and his vision of the universe (Akkerman 2014, 757). Speculations of ideal city as “body politic” go back to antiquity and tied the urban body as much to celestial bodies as human bodies (even if occasionally as in parody) (Akkerman 2014, 761). At an abstract level the city is a speculation of an

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ideal universe modeled after the human body microcosmically and human society at large macrocosmically. Theories of urban space point both to the isolating potential of cities (Tonkiss 2005, 11) and to the intimacy they normalize between strangers, particularly strangers from different ethnic groups (Jacobs 1969, 56). Contact with the Other is a central concern when considering social life in urban spaces. One feels compelled to always be cordial toward and guarded against a myriad of strangers, a tension that is seldom neatly resolved in general policy as Ash Amin argues: “While the beliefs of multiculturalism cautioned against vilifying difference (but often fell short of seeing the stranger as equal) and those of universalism made light of it (often at the expense of strongly held values among different communities)” (Amin 2010, 13). But regardless of how this tension is managed in actual cities, fiction provides a space of play where hopes and anxieties associated with the Other can present themselves in a more distilled way so audiences can more easily point to methods of political practice. It may not be possible, or even for the best, that one accept the Other as oneself, but it is necessary to accept the Other somehow for the city to function, and fiction may offer an illustration of what that acceptance could look like in an idealized form. Subjectivity is created from historical conditions which are, according to David Harvey, both interrupted and prevented from calcifying again under modernity. Modernity “not only entails a ruthless break with any or all preceding historical conditions, but is characterized but a never-ending process of internal ruptures and fragmentations within itself” (Harvey 1989, 12). Urban life in a ruthlessly regimented modernity is prone to erasing the history that produces subjecthood and prevents conditions from being historicized to form a new kind of subjectivity. Whether or not so stringent a modernity exists in material reality, the urban space habitat, as an imagined extreme projection of modernity allows us to speculate about what the consequences of that kind of historical collapse into a concentrate space might look like. At the same time, the urban space habitat is also an emblem of postmodernity as an artifact that transcends limitations of material and labor, not only because they are fictional locales but also within their texts they act as metonyms for the figures that populate them: “By surrendering to an abstract entity called ‘the people,’ the populists cannot recognize how manifold the people happens to be…” (Harvey 1989, 76). Intentionally or not, the urban space habitat functions to isolate human activity in a single, white hot atom of survivable

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conditions enveloped by an unknowable hostile outer space, a gesture which collapses subjectivity and precludes subject-formation (modernity), while also taking pains to abstract an implicitly understood multitude into a uniform “people” (postmodernity). Here we see both the effort to collapse and a willful ignorance of how expansive and varied Otherhood is inside the city and in that contradiction there is possibility for exploring alternate possible modernities. Indeed, the exercise of pointing to the markers and processes of Othering can be methods for novel modes of subject-production: the literary and the national remain categories and modes of productivity and reproductivity. Together, they constitute both historically developed (and therefore immanent) and temporally imminent sites for arguing that culture represents not only the bounds and parameters of identity but also the less bounded but equally crucial processes of identification. National literary cultural expression has been both a source of and a response to colonization: as such, postcolonial literary studies are necessarily a methodological hinge between what is possibly the end of a malign cultural nationalism and the beginning of perhaps a more benign globalization. (Palmateer Pennee 2012, 3)

These cities abstract the process of modernism’s transition into postmodernism, they imagine a habitat organized first around shepherding people into efficiently distributed pens and later overtaken by highly aestheticized land-use managed by the dominant class. Yet they also provide an opportunity for critique and speculative possibility. By calling attention to the constraints on city life that the trope makes literal it becomes possible to explore what new ways one can exist outside those constraints or how to mobilize subject-formation for a more pro-social life. There is little imaginative room in the urban space habitat for what Iris Young calls “mutual intersubjective transcendence” (Young 1986, 10) that treats solidarity as a heterogeneous process of recognizing difference across subjects and groups (Young 1986, 13). Sociocultural cues come to shape subject and the city becomes a tangible part of the subject’s experience (Pieber 2017). This trope has become more common in recent decades, especially in science fiction videogames. Anachronox (2001) and the Mass Effect series (2007–2017) offer examples of texts that use the urban space habitat as a critical lens for viewing the tensions of hospitality in urban modernity. These instances offer a basis of comparison for another instance of

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outer space urbanism in the 2017 film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. These texts offer a good illustration of how the dynamics of hospitality operate in the fictional context of an urban space habitat while also providing audiences an opportunity to examine how the city is a contradictory site of greater solidarity and suspicion. Because they are videogames, Anachronox and Mass Effect offer their audience, their players, some opportunity to explore the gamut of host–guest relations embedded in the city: however, because they are written texts imbued with their own historical and cultural ideologies, the “gamut” is still constrained by what the authors believe is possible and necessary for a functional city. Meanwhile, Valerian attempts to constrain the city to its more idealistic possibilities: as a film with a more structured narrative delivery is better positioned to demonstrate to audiences in a more organized way the emancipatory possibilities of urban life but fails in an interesting way because it is too caught up in maintaining the host–guest binary. In its fiction, the titular city of Anacronox 3 is a prehistoric relic left by a lost civilization. When the game’s plot begins, it is occupied by the galaxy’s various alien species. The player-character (PC), Sylvester “Sly” Bucelli, is a human managing a detective agency on the space station, solving a chain of mysteries and ultimately learning more about the titular space station and the ancient engineers who built it. Although the game’s tone is darkly and often absurdly comedic, it nonetheless has a lot of fear toward modernity and urban alienation. Anacronox’s streets change shape throughout the day, its residents organize their lives around the station’s massive shifting gears and pistons, build homes and infrastructure into the mysterious machinery. The game hastily points to Sly’s incompetence as a detective and his mounting debts to both criminal and legitimate organizations across the city. In the first hour of play, Sly gets in a fight with a local gangster which serves as a combat tutorial for the player. However, unlike most game tutorials, even though the player learns the mechanical demands of how to fight, the battle is unwinnable. The PC is unusually vulnerable for a videogame hero but, more importantly, Sly’s vulnerabilities are tied to modern urbanism. Sly is introduced in an unplayable scene where he is thrown out of his second-story office by a group of 3 The city’s name is a gaudy portmanteau of “anachronism” and “noxious.” Several times the game explains in dialogue or in flavor text found throughout the world that this name translates to “poison from the past”.

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debt-collectors, his early antagonists are gangsters and corrupt officials. In this scene the agency afforded by the game contributes to the aesthetic construction of meaning. As argued by Janet Murray, Computer-based journey stories offer a new way of savoring…a pleasure that is intensified by uniting the problem-solving with the active process of navigation. On a computer the dramatic situation of capture and escape can be simulated by keeping the player within a confined space until the solution to a puzzle is found. (1998, 139)

However, in the situation of Sly’s first fight with a gangster—the one that is supposed to teach the player how to fight off gangsters—the puzzle’s only solution results in Sly getting beat up and dragging his feet to the next plot point. Navigation opens up windows of possibility but are resolved in the luckless protagonist remaining luckless, which is especially significant given that this sets the story’s tone and teaches the player about the kind of world they inhabit. Furthermore, the aliens and monsters Sly has to fight are threats not because they are alien or monstrous, but because they are so familiar. Sly is justly afraid of these creatures because they want his money and will break his things to get it: their being literal monsters is cosmetic. Difference collapses in this context because familiarity poses danger and the Otherness of these figures is benign. Likewise, Sly’s companions are absurd combinations of the mundane and the outrageous. Among the more noteworthy are his former secretary is a murder victim whose consciousness has been uploaded to a small drone that serves as the game’s user interface, a planet-wide direct democracy that voted to shrink to human-size and join Sly’s team, a washed up superhero made unemployed by his comic’s cancellation. Again, the alienness of their character is surface-deep, the slights they’ve suffered under modernity collapses their differences and fits them into a familiar mould. And although Anachronox is not the game’s only setting, it is the central hub which connects the player and their team of oddballs and misfits to the other locations, the other lands of other possibilities, and it is urban space habitat cum city cum urban mode of living that highlights and emphasizes the game’s contradictory tensions. By doing so, Anachronox demands that its player wallows in the consequences of failure in order to succeed. Like most mainstream media, failure in videogames is treated as a null-space that

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holds no real meaning: it is simply to be avoided. Yet, failure as a condition, like all conditions in a binary, contains its own significations and possibilities for re-interpretation or experiencing in a different way: …Rather than a dreaded process, failure serves as a way of being that confronts norms of human behavior, subverts the narrative of “growing up,” and destabilizes systems of hierarchical knowledge like the university, reproduction, and anthropocentrism among others…. The role of low theory within this model is identifying unexpected an often overlooked texts that represent “failures.” It Is not a process meant to solidify but rather to unhinge, reading failure not as just a particular conquered moment within a text but a repeatedly subversive undercurrent. (Youngblood 2017, 214)

Likewise, Anachronox deals in failure as a condition and explores the binaries assumed in modern life, most especially the power relations between host and guest. Players “win” in Anachronox and Sly wins in Anachronox the city by unhinging and subverting the regulatory assumptions woven into the fabric of urban life. In addition to the power negotiated between the host and guest, the relationship between them is always mediated by the Uncanny, a familiarity between self and Other but with their differences emphasized and made grotesque to justify power imbalances between them. The Uncanny figures as “the doppelgänger, the automaton, the monster, the ghostliness of ordinary people” (Simpson 2013, 7) that shows a version of the self made frightening and dangerous. In Anachronox, urban modernity is a literal shifting mechanism that breeds placeless citizens; the city is necessary for life but it invites colliding contradictions. Sly’s recruits encapsulate these contradictions: his secretary is made immortal when she separated from her body and trapped in a cursor to perpetually serve her employer (and the player); Democratus is a planet inhabited by a race of philosopher kings so committed to due process they are rendered inept by democracy’s failings; Paco was a hero dedicated to helping people until his comic stopped selling and his revenue stream ran dry. In all of these figures, the outrageous and otherworldly is annihilated by the banal modern mechanisms of precarity, bureaucracy, and public relations. Difference and alternate possibilities are constrained by the states disciplinary mechanisms. The city of Anachronox is under constant physical restructuring, roadways are said to change as one travels on them. The

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Canadian dollar4 becomes the intergalactic standard currency by an algorithmic anomaly that annihilated every other currency’s value, randomly leaving the loonie the lone survivor. Materials, systems, and even subjects and their values shift faster than human processing for reasons outside human reasoning. These all speak to general anxieties toward urban life found in encounters with the Uncanny (Mitchell 2007, 913–914). But outer space is a true Other with no traces of a recognizable self. The alien species of space fantasy each bear some earthly characteristics, even those who represent something hostile and uncomfortable about human experience, but outer space is truly separate from human experience since human life is impossible in space without a space habitat to provide a facsimile of earth. The urban space habitat in Anachronox does not only centralize encounters with the Uncanny, it is the only encounter that is possible because survival outside it is impossible. The dark humor and softly despairing mood of Anachronox is an openly pessimistic view of the possibility for hospitality in urban modernism. The urban space habitat of the text is rife with hostility and confusion. The two major urban space habitats in the Mass Effect series, the Citadel and Omega, also present hospitality as the battleground for city life, but do so in a more ambivalent way than Anachronox. After learning the game’s basics, each of the first two Mass Effect games relocates the player character, Shepard,5 to (respectively) the Citadel and Omega. The Citadel is an intergalactic embassy for the different space faring species of the galaxy and Omega is a mined-out asteroid outside the Citadel’s jurisdiction maintained by a crime lord and her mercenary armies. The two stations are foils for one another in many ways, visually the Citadel is bathed in a cold, futuristic blue light and Omega glows a stoplight-red, the Citadel’s wide spaces and gardens are organized and well-tended while Omega’s cluttered walkways lead from ersatz housing to arms dealerships. The Citadel opens with Shepard learning due process, listening to diplomats from other species bemoan political favoritism or petitioning for government investigation into some matter of concern 4 In dialogue money is referred to as loons or loonies, after the Canadian one-dollar coin. 5 Shepard’s gender, appearance, given name and, to a limited extent, personality, are all customizable by the player but throughout I will refer to Shepard with feminine pronouns to reflect my own experience with the game.

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or other. Omega’s central area is a nightclub overseen by the mobboss administrating the city and its operations from the VIP booth. The Citadel, etymologically, is a “little city” that refers to fortresses and other sites of state-sanctioned power, while Omega ominously refers to finality and end. If the Citadel represents what Akkerman calls “an Apollonian expression of urban masculinity” that “has promoted and upheld automatism in human behaviour” (Akkerman 2014, 774, 779) than Omega is its Dionysian foil. Omega is housed inside an asteroid hollowed out by mining operations and abandoned after tapping its most valuable resources. As a former labor site exhausted of its use and left to the morally and physically sick, Omega an ill body-politic. The Citadel is a site of legitimate authority and Omega isn’t but both “…represents a territorialization of powers of governance and social organization but depends on a sentimental sense of its own identity (a city imaginary)…” (Keith 2009, 550) even if their identities are set up to contrast with one another. Unlike Sly, Shepard is not a resident of either of these cities, she is a guest who is free to leave (and, in fact, due to the nature of her adventure, she must) even if, like Anachronox, all roads seem to connect to one or the other of Mass Effect ’s urban space habitats. She is a spectator who tours the official centers of each location as a representative of both legitimate and criminal organizations with enormous power over everybody she encounters. Authority in the city comes with proximity to what is recognizable and difference is contained (Keith 2009, 553). Shepard complicates the process of Othering in the fiction as a tourist and someone removed who can “objectively” assess the city, its citizens, and the meanings they produce. But this very objective objectification stands in for an even broader process of categorizing who is moral and legitimate and who is an outsider to contain. Interestingly, as a perpetual guest she works to validate a status quo and her presence in lands Mass Effect communicates as too alien restores a “natural” orderliness. As Shepard, the player proceeds through the game’s plot by accepting and resolving missions from different people in the galaxy from aboard her spaceship. Like Star Trek (which Mass Effect takes much of its inspiration from), Shepard and her crew are at home aboard their starship, a vessel of constant transition. Shepard’s adventures exposes her to a myriad of Others who perform their Otherness in exchange for her progress through the plot. In the Citadel and Omega, Shepard is a ghetto tourist who legitimizes urban racial sequestration of the landscape (Keith 2009, 543) simply by possessing the power she does in a universe built for

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her exploration. As both a representative of state and anti-state politics, her paradoxical position as that of a perpetual guest who always recognizes established power and calcifying the dichotomy between those who belong and those Others on the outside. In Mass Effect Shepard is representative of both Citadel and Omega violences. Omega is a violent assimilative city and the Citadel is a gentrified rainbow multicultural assimilation. This is not unconditional hospitality. Whether from legitimized or illegitimate violence, Shepard participates in the absorption of difference. In the case of the Citadel, different species are called to represent themselves before a panel made up of the galaxy’s military, education, and espionage classes: life in the Citadel buries difference in a kind of anti-social discourse: Politics aims at the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity; it is always concerned with the creation of an “us” by the determination of a “them.” The novelty of democratic politics is not the overcoming of this us[slash]them distinction—which is what a consensus without exclusion pretends to achieve—but the different way in which is established. What is at stake is how to establish the us[slash]them discrimination in a way that is compatible with pluralist democracy. (Mouffe 1999, 755)

The ruling figures welcome other species to participate in galactic affairs but only on the terms that best suit those already in power. Politics in Mass Effect is assimilationist, resembling the kind of rainbow multiculturalism that maintains the binary between self and Other and sets the conditions under which the Other may be welcomed. Omega, while a district made entirely of Others, is a society of the abject—criminals and refugees. Although life on either the Citadel or Omega is framed as far more positive than life on Anachronox, the Mass Effect series is undeniably critical of urban modernity, positioning the Citadel and Omega as two irreconcilable extremes of what the city can look like. In both these texts, the urban space habitat is used as a symbol to explore the theoretical consequences of city living in heightened modernity. These two cases reflect the two most common ways that hospitality by way of the urban space habitat trope is used to either condemn the city as an impediment to prosocial life or as a structure too complex to provide it under its existing conditions. While the urban space habitat more generally can effectively represent the tensions of hospitality in the modern urban center, what

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distinguishes Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is that the film directly states that unconditional hospitality is possible in the city. The film is transparent about the emancipatory potential of cities: it is where Others can co-exist harmoniously, preserve their differences, and sustain a milieu of mutual respect. The villain of the film is a navy admiral who threatens a particular species of squatters whose survival evinces a war crime he committed earlier in his career. The admiral is treated as an anomaly and, therefore, a threat to the city’s otherwise presumed mutual hospitality. The comparison between most uses of the urban space habitat trope with its use in Valerian is worth making because even when urbanism and space exploration are imagined as net positives in some examples, these texts tend to be ambivalent toward urbanism, where Valerian is deliberately utopian. The City of a Thousand planets is not only functional, it is supposed to be an ideal place of unconditional hospitality because it assertively welcomes difference—some city districts are ecologically structured to allow nonhuman life for, among others, robotic life and a species of aquatic aliens. Yet the film still portrays the same failures and classist anti-sociality as most portrayals of the urban space habitat. All may be welcome enough to navigate around any physiological difference—even imagined ones—but the shape of the city is still one with gang violence, state corruption, and persecution of war refugees. Indeed, the admiral positioned as a threatening aberration in the City of a Thousand Planets still gets to be an admiral with privileges and duties unmistakably tied to war. Valerian’s failure to deliver on its promise of the city as a hospitable place speaks to a larger inability to imagine unconditional urban hospitality in science fiction and, thus, the genre’s inability to reconcile with Otherness. Villainy in these science fiction stories is a vital organ sustaining the city and the city is the exclusive and necessary habitat for the creatures within it. Valerian stands out among other uses of the trope because it does not deal in the anxieties of the modern city. Valerian is interested in the city as a site of hospitality, not as a complication of it. Other instances of a fictional urban space habitat demonstrate familiar urban suffering, even those that ultimately seem to be more sympathetic to city life still take class-conflicts for granted. Still, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets does not succeed in demonstrating absolute hospitality. Valerian replicates urban class violence not as a critique—cities are where the film claims unconditional hospitality is possible—but because it is not possible to imagine city life without also imagining urban violence. The film may

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prove Derrida right that hospitality must always be conditional and that difference must always be Other and it speaks to a desire to imagine hospitality in the total alienation of outer space. Whether unconditional hospitality is actually not possible or if it is simply now outside the scope of human imagination is not an answerable question, but Valerian does effectively encapsulate the problem of hospitality in urban modernity. But while the previous examples treat villainy and conflict as natural processes of hospitality in modernity, Valerian suggests early on that unconditional hospitality is possible and functional in an urban setting. Yet from sceneto-scene, tension is created by imbalanced power dynamics stemming from host–guest relationships. The film speaks to the urban anxieties of heightened modernity much more than its source material (the French graphic novel series Valérian and Laureline). But what makes the film adaptation interesting is that, initially at least, it seems to resist anxiety. The City of a Thousand Planets in the film is the result of several thousand species of alien connecting space crafts to an ever-growing space station until the vessel becomes an intergalactic embassy of sorts. The film implies that this city is functional and that even the most alien of aliens can be unconditionally welcomed. Yet there is also an undercity, the heroes face violence inside the city and the film’s villain is a military officer with authority legitimized by the city’s political systems. The plot can only happen by escalating recognizable urban tensions. It is significant that Valerian explicitly tells the audience that the urban space habitat that serves as its setting represents the utopian potential of cities but cannot imagine the city without its well-established violences and corruption of modern cities. Valerian demonstrates how powerful the boundaries of host and guest are and how limited the capacity even in the most outlandish fictions fail to envision a kind of city free from the kinds of violence familiar to heightened modernity. These fictional cities have important implications for how the host and guest relate to one another as “Self” and “Other.” These urban spaces are defined either by a ruling class’s banishment of the Other or they place characters in constant contact with an Other, that is conveniently segregated into separate locales. Whether populated by a myriad of different creatures or by a single dominant class that is (or resembles) human, these texts either strive to eliminate Otherness by homogenizing urban experience (Amin 2010, 5) or by paralleling the residents of the urban space habitat with true hostile alien-ness of outer space. In either case,

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these texts reflect a general inability for audiences to envision a kind of hospitality that exists outside of a competition for power. Although it is a very specific trope, the urban space habitat does allow the anxieties of Otherness and hosting to play out in a unique way. Because cities in these texts are imagined in a hyper-stylized postmodernism surrounded by inhospitable space, their play with what hospitality is is especially salient. Hospitality in these texts is treated as a literal necessity to survival: without the space habitat there can be no life, while also familiar power dynamics of fragmentation and classification are also woven into the core of how these cities are imagined. The fictions of these examples provide us with a striking example of how irreconcilable the tensions between selfhood and Otherness are in the contemporary imaginary and the representation of urban space as necessary and fraught with conflict speaks to contemporary anxieties toward modernist and advanced capitalist city life.

References Akkerman, Abraham. 2014. “Platonic Myth and Urban Space: City-Form as an Allegory.” University of Toronto Quarterly 83, no. 4: 757–779. Amin, Ash. 2010. “Cities and the Ethic of Care for the Stranger.” Lecture presented at the Joint Joseph Rowntree Foundation/University of York Annual Lecture 2010, University of York, February 3, 2010. Claviez, Thomas. 2013. The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible. New York: Fordham University Press. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Jacobs, Jane. 1969. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Keith, Michael. 2009. “Urbanism and City Spaces in the Work of Stuart Hall.” Cultural Studies 23, no. 4: 538–558. Merrifield, Andy. 2013. The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest Under Planetary Urbanization. Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation 19. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2007. “Picturing Terror: Derrida’s Autoimmunity.” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 2: 277–290. Mouffe, Chantel. 1999. “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?” Social Research 66, no. 3: 745–758. Murray, Janet Horowitz. 1998. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Palmateer Pennee, Donna. 2012. “Literary Citizenship: Culture (Un)Bounded, Culture (Re)Distributed.” In Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and

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Canadian Literature, edited by Cynthia Sugars, 75–85. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Pieber, Darryl. 2017. “A Place for Locative Media: A Theoretical Framework for Assessing Locative Media Use in Urban Environments.” Master’s thesis, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. Simmel, Georg. 2010. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Blackwell City Reader, 2nd ed., 11–20. Chichester, UK/Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Simpson, David. 2013. Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Michael P. 2017. Explorations in Urban Theory. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Tonkiss, Fran. 2005. Space, the City and Social Theory: Social Relations and Urban Forms. Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity. Ujang, Norsidah, and Khalilah Zakariya. 2015. “The Notion of Place, Place Meaning and Identity in Urban Regeneration.” Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences 170 (January): 709–717. Wallace, Ryan, Roseann Pluretti, Gideon Lichfield, and Aubrie Adams. 2016. “Future Im/Perfect: Defining Success and Problematics in Science Fiction Expressions of Racial Identity.” International Journal of Communication 10: 5740–5748. Westmoreland, Mark. 2008. “Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality.” Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy 2, no. 1: 1–10. Young, Iris Marion. 1986. “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference.” Social Theory and Practice 12, no. 1: 1–26. Youngblood, Jordan. 2017. “‘I Wouldn’t Even Know the Real Me Myself’: Queering Failure in Metal Gear Solid 2.” In Queer Game Studies, edited by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw, 211–223. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

PART VI

Good Criticism of Evil Art: Studying Evil in Revisionist Academic and Cultural Moments

CHAPTER 24

Busting Binaries: Beyond Evil in Youth Literature, a Consideration of Emezi’s Pet E. F. Schraeder

A number of multidisciplinary and longitudinal studies have established that empathy levels and social concern for others are declining among young adults (Twenge 2017; Twenge et al. 2012; Konrath et al. 2011). The declining empathy rates correspond with current education and library efforts to cultivate pro-social activities and civic engagement (Hylton 2018; Borba 2016; Dolby 2014; Chau 2012). In addition to examining possible causes, many sources focused on strategic ways to address this trend from an interdisciplinary lens, including techniques for teachers, librarians, parents, and others working with children and young adults (Mirra 2018; Reiss 2018; Phillips 2017; Segal 2017; Hibbin 2016; Stout 2015; Perrault 2012). These emerging interests contextualize widespread efforts that integrate empathy-building projects with youth in mind, and I suggest that binary-busting YA speculative literature may contribute to these efforts. I look to Awaeke Emezi’s Pet as an example

E. F. Schraeder (B) Cleveland, Ohio, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_24

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that redefines the monstrous and urges readers toward more complex moral reasoning.

Literature and Empathy Some studies have begun to explore emotional intelligence skill sets and empathy measures among avid readers (Junker and Jacquemin 2017; McCreary and Marchant 2017; Kidd and Castano 2013; Greene 1995). Far fewer projects have explored empathy levels among readers of speculative fiction or the prospective impact among readers of speculative fiction on empathy. With an eye toward facilitating an understanding of the role speculative fiction may play in these efforts, I offer an analysis of the destabilizing construction of “monstrosity” in Emezi’s Pet that aligns with and may enrich conversations about speculative texts’ value in empathy-building. Here I will investigate such potentialities, exploring practical methods for text engagement that facilitate empathy-building techniques with regard to speculative fiction analysis, confining my primary considerations to Emezi’s Pet . While I suspect many speculative texts would provide comparable approaches to complicating monstrosity, I limit attention to Pet to restrict the scope of analysis. This textual analysis centers themes that confront assumptions about evil as they relate to empathy and social awareness. I begin with a consideration of terms and approaches, then move into variables of Pet ’s landscape that construct a morally relevant universe for considering a non-binary approach to evil. In conclusion, approaches to center this analysis in diverse settings is addressed. Terms and Reading Strategies I use the term speculative fiction broadly to include texts that include events, characters, and possibilities that fall beyond the bounds of reality. I center the reading strategies of African American feminist literary scholar Schalk, whose lens balances intersectional considerations of race, (dis)ability, gender, and sex, with a focus on speculative fiction. Schalk describes speculative fiction as a “generally an under-theorized genre” that remains viewed as “fun” or “an indulgence” (2018, 19). Schalk’s insights examine the ways in which domination, exploitation, oppression, and opportunities for empowerment are situated in speculative fiction.

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With this in mind, Schalk’s work facilitates clarity and criticism of SpecFic’s possibilities and power. For Schalk notes that SpecFic is not simply “nonliterary, mainstream fluff” or “silly escapist texts marketed toward youth;” instead, she recognizes how such trivializations minimize interpretations of the genre’s transformative and radical potential (2018, 117). The potential for moral breadth and depth in SpecFic is notable, and sometimes occurs within fictional texts themselves. As Patrick Ness describes in the classic, award-winning middle grade book, A Monster Calls, “humans are complicated beasts … your mind will contradict itself a hundred times a day … Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both” (2011, 191). This discussion describes complex and nuanced reasoning similar to moral thinking. No simple, snap judgment, moral reasoning invites reflection on complexities and encourages nuanced understanding and prioritization of values and needs that is well matched to the kinds of complex realities constructed in many SpecFic texts, including Pet . For instance within Pet, readers are introduced to a world that residents believe is without evil and without monsters. Only through careful consideration do readers discover, through Jam’s keen awareness, that circumstances and situations may appear innocent while hiding a deeper, more unsettling realities. Additionally, Jam encounters a creature that challenges her perception of what constitutes “monstrosity.” Though Schalk considers how SpecFic may “challenge assumptions about the definitions of and boundaries between” to unpack social constructions of identity, Emezi’s Pet demonstrates the boundary-breaking potential of how this approach may apply to a contextual understanding of good and evil (2019, 117–118). I suggest the relevance of Pet in terms of empathy development is tied both to its applicability to real-world concerns and to its general strength in providing morally sound alternatives to binary thinking. In terms of caring about other people, if youth readers are able to engage in reflection and consideration of topics that exist in possible worlds such as those crafted within speculative stories like Pet , such imaginative skills may similarly equip them with tools to relate to other people, including those who are nothing like themselves. This premise unlocks the keenly liberatory potential unique to the genre. As Schalk aptly describes, for readers who are themselves members of marginalized communities, “this can mean imagining a future or alternate space away from oppression” (2018, 2).

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Speculative fiction, unencumbered by realism, invites the reader into new worlds and realms that often go beyond direct experience, redefining the bounds of what and whom it is possible to care about. If learning to care for people outside direct experience and social groups requires imaginative leaps, then speculative fiction may well be an essential genre to explore and build empathic capacity. Further, Pet seems to closely align with Freire’s assessments of texts with high pedagogical value. A keenly liberatory book, Pet ’s narrative constructions resist and counter oppressive assumptions and paradigms throughout. In Pet , readers discover an evident tendency toward complicating and resisting dominant social scripts, which may help readers “perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform” (Freire 2000, 31). With this in mind, one learns to evaluate the social contexts of the story’s heroes, villains, and victims considering whether or not the tale replicates or disrupts dominant and oppressive real-world social hierarchies. That’s neither an impossible task, nor a complicated one; though it requires serious ongoing attention. Such a critical stance may also deepen engagement and participation among diverse kinds of readers. By encountering opportunities to define their own viewpoints, readers may begin to recognize the value of their own critical interpretations, and develop the tools to question dominant and oppressive paradigms of thought—both within the text and within the world around them. Ultimately, such text handlings and interpretations are as deeply personal as they are socially relevant. As a broad genre with a long history, speculative fiction is often deservedly critiqued for its lack of representative diversity (Thomas 2018, 2019). Despite valid criticisms for failing to reflect diverse populations in many mainstream texts, speculative fiction has also remained a space of critical importance for imagining and reimagining diverse social justice issues and human rights (Oziewicz 2015). Within the Pet world, readers will find meaningful social differences, including racial identity and expressions gender identity that dominant narratives often marginalize as “other.” In Pet, the trans narrator of color, Jam, clearly holds the moral center of the book, challenging authority figures, peers, and an otherworldly being, when guided by conscience. Since the real world is a place where trans youth in general and trans youth of color in particular face very real, often life-threatening dangers, the world of Pet offers a liberatory alternate possibility. As Pet ’s guiding voice and hero, Jam’s

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heroic status pointedly rejects and counters the dominant and oppressive social narrative of trans-victimhood with a character who offers leadership, insight, and moral authority. Reading with critical race theory and feminist approaches in mind to guide reflection, discussion, and analysis of Pet , the text becomes a window into radically reimagined moral universe. This is why I suggest entering conversations about Pet with essential questions (EQs) that relate to moral themes raised in the book to guide these interpretations and include possible starting points (Appendix A). As tools to facilitate high level learning, EQs are easily aligned with empathy-building strategies and socially relevant pedagogy (Fox 2014). Similarly, Schalk’s framing methods suggest reading to examine how a text “shifts our taken-forgranted social norms … and makes unconscious preconceptions about (dis)ability, race, and gender more readily apparent” (23). Schalk links the transgressive power of SpecFic precisely to the construction of alternate worlds that are unconstrained by oppressive dynamics and power structures, because “the author sets the rules of their fictional worlds” (23). Critical analysis of how literary texts may reflect, disrupt, and/or challenge structural inequalities, strengthens readers’ abilities to identify these issues, reflect on them, begin to care about them in the text, and ultimately connect the themes to issues in the real world. Methods for textual analysis that are informed by critical race theory such as these, go beyond comprehension of plot, character, and story; this enhances their ability to interrogate themes of moral relevance and their subsequent social implications. To unpack the moral themes of texts, encourage readers to examine social themes and engage in analysis of extremes and oppression via speculative fiction thought experiments that deploy an exaggerated interpretation of past and/or current events. Engaging in reflections, readers may notice similarities and differences facilitates interpretations of “complex and nuanced representations” (Brown et al. 2014, 85). The hyperbolic premisses of speculative fiction texts facilitate a look into what extreme situations deliver. A close reading of Pet encourages reflection on the monstrous-looking being and the real threat, a theme at the core of breaking down an initial reaction against monstrosity as evil.

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Beyond Binary: Pet Rather than relying on an oversimplification or surface account of evil, what one finds in Pet is a nuanced, socially relevant analysis of good and evil that is contextually rooted. The character Pet looks evil—an otherworldly, metal-winged being with horns that travels magically in space and emerged from a painting. But Jam doesn’t face threats from Pet. Instead, Pet is the character who helps Jam discover the real monsters. The real monsters are in plain sight, but hidden by delusions of “normalcy.” In Pet , readers will find a chilling mirror to the real world, where some trusted authorities and family members linger in plain view. In Pet, real monsters are those who exert power over the vulnerable and hurt children. In the world of Pet , evil doesn’t “look” like anything and real evil is complicated. Real evil is located in behaviors that harm, not surfacelevel differences. So the visually perceived “monster” is neutralized, and true evil is revealed as something associated with cruelties and hypocrisies. When a family wants to dismiss a child’s plea for help or refuses to listen, Jam identifies the real moral failure. Jam questions the moral authority of a family that would ignore an adult’s harm to children for sake of keeping things “normal” on the surface, and thus discovers real evil, pondering, “How could a family do something like that?” (179). Perhaps in Pet , evil is to monster what empathy is to morality, meaning, the action. For empathy is not an innate trait, but a social skill that can be grown and developed, activated or numbed, like a muscle. Part of what encourages empathy, in fact, is talking about empathy (Borba 2016). If talking about moral issues and empathy increases sensitivity and awareness, then looking for ways to consider moral issues that emerge in texts like Pet may also open possibilities for readers to obtain greater social understanding. To this end, reader preparation via reflection or discussion questions could aim to cultivate questions that frame issues in terms of moral themes as well connecting themes with social realities to which they relate. Emezi exposes the weaknesses of binary thinking about good and bad people and the social invisibility of child abuse in Pet . Instead of simple cookie-cutter answers to moral problems, Emezi’s Pet offers a rich, layered text with multiple themes ripe for moral analysis. A story about revolution, imagination, stagnation, hope, and empowerment, Pet is a middle grade to young adult book suitable for multiple reading levels.

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Specifically, Pet confronts the possibility of sexual violence and incest within a seemingly utopian environment; in this treatment, the author explores how superficial understanding often misses deeper truths. Further, the relatively positive outcome (ending the violence to a child) depends on the assistance of a being who seems monstrous and threatening. Pet, a horned creature that comes to life from a painting with metal feathers and huge claws, helps Jam bring attention and resolution to the problem of evil in the text (Emezi, 2019, 29–33). This complex portrayal pushes readers well beyond narrow assumptions about good and evil. There are many social themes in text with clear connections to contemporary issues, specifically family violence, and underlying themes relating to intellectual freedom also appear, as the narrator attempts to discover truths hidden by the adults in charge. As noted, the main character Jam is trans-identified, and she is not excluded, but warmly supported by family and friends. Not a story about being trans or coming out as trans, Pet instead offers a story about busting binaries, generally, breaking down concepts like good and evil, male and female, monster and angel. As such, a trans narrator enhances the truth of fluidity as an alternate to strict either-or reasoning. Throughout, Jam is uniquely positioned not as an object of sexualization or violence, but as an agent of action. This also disrupts a dominant, oppressive construction of trans characters as “tragic,” and creates an alternate storyline of trans heroic action. Since trans youth of color face high rates of bullying, violence, homelessness, sexual violence, assault, and other risks, as a young trans narrator of color, Jam’s leadership and status as a moral authority is socially significant. In Pet , Jam disrupts, rejects, and redefines all those oppressive storylines. Jam is never reduced to victimhood or relegated to subject status. Jam is advanced to the role of agentic moral actor: interpreting complexities, investigating truths, exploring adult indifference and ignorance, and exposing hidden violence and evils, the moral center of the novel, Jam guides readers through the fictional city of Lucille, where no monsters are left, having been defeated and removed by angels. Instead of easy answers, the simple binary of right and wrong is interrogated throughout the text by Jam, who seeks more information and eventually aids someone who looks like a monster (Pet) in discovering child abuse persists in this supposedly idyllic locale. When Jam’s mother states, “Monsters don’t look like anything … That’s the whole point. That’s the whole problem,” she introduces a

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key insight that is taken up throughout the text (12). Readers of Pet are consistently challenged to check their assumptions about who is good, who is bad, and what the monstrous really is. Jam advocates for the importance of questioning authority and official views, including institutionalized views. For instance, in an early conversation of the book while Jam is researching angels, their friend Redemption describes religion as “made up things used to scare people so they could control us better” (2019, 4). This complex moral sensitivity is handled by Emezi with precision and readily accessible language. While violence and sexual abuse is alluded to, there is no graphic representation, but a suggestion of past pain. This authorial choice is a critical aspect of the world-building. For the land of Lucille is described as one of black and white. Evil has been supposedly driven out by angels, but this oversimplification misses the complexities that dwell beneath the surface. This insight in the world of Pet is equally applicable and relevant in the real world. Readers learn in Pet to challenge binary thinking and consider the unseen, assumed, and ignored. Emezi’s characterization of Jam is as layered as it is powerful. Constantly questioning authority, Jam remains critical of the tacit acceptance of their world as safe. Sensitive and highly empathic, Jam correct adults with unspoken caveats like “there are no free monsters in Lucille … that we know of” (2019, 18). The positioning of a trans narrator of color between these clearcut social interpretations of good and evil is, in and of itself, worthy of attention, for Jam’s knowledge and experience transcends binaries. The heroic status of the narrator as socially valued family member and friend also disrupts and challenges the more dominant paradigm of de-valued positioning and victimization. Jam’s complexity transcends contemporary transphobia and creates an important alternate narrative within the imagined world through character differences that are reflected in highly meaningful ways. Further, the speculative content of the story relates directly to the social themes that confront assumptions about who is good and safe, who is helpful and dangerous. These nuanced layers of meaning render Pet an ideal choice for consideration, replete with complex, nuanced attention to moral themes. Emezi’s interrogation of morality also exists on the level of interpersonal analysis in the text. For example, at one point Jam faces a decision to hide or reveal the possibility that their friend Redemption’s house is where the monster is hiding. Jam elects to conceal the truth, and worries

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it has “broken their friendship” (157). The morality of lying, then, is taken up contextually, as well, rather than as a rule that is always binding. Throughout the text, Jam is portrayed as contemplative, reflective, and active. These traits are all associated with strong moral reasoning and empathy. That portrayal also deepens and draws reader attention to the discomfort involved in navigating serious moral concerns. Jam explicitly contemplates what it means to do “hard things” and asks Pet, “how do we know we’re doing the right thing?” In response, Pet says “There is no right thing … there is only the thing that needs to be done” (160). As such, Pet’s answer makes room for nuanced, contextual understanding. Calling for reflective response and the ability to prioritize needs, Pet advocates for careful attention to details and to what is known “in your heart” rather than swift, thoughtless resolution (161). Moreover, Pet’s expressed reliance on inner guidance and willingness to trust Jam’s heart draws reader attention to the importance of personal reflection. When confronted with a reality that Jam does not want to be true, Jam contemplates the challenges associated with going “against what you usually believed” and expresses persistent hope that Pet is mistaken about what’s happening and who the monster (2019, 160–163). When Jam firmly stops Pet from observing the exchange between Moss and Redemption, their moral certainty is a foundation of that decision. Even when Pet insists, “the identification is a crucial part of the hunt,” Jam holds their ground and insists that such an invasion of privacy is wrong (163). Jam’s moral agency and the importance of morality, generally, is reinforced by the fact that in this instance, Pet defers, rather than overriding concerns as he could given his supernatural powers. Jam’s decision is informed by a commitment to principle (privacy) and a belief that their friend will trust them with the truth. This act of faith on Jam’s part contradicts a powerful being, if not an authority (Pet), and enables Jam to remain the moral compass of the text. While confronting limiting ideals of the monstrous, Emezi’s Pet carefully reformulates the parameters of good and evil, a technique similar to Schalk’s notion of “defamiliarization,” or distancing readers from assumptions (114). In a world where binary thinking so often corresponds with hierarchies and oppression, the binary-busting layers of Pet make room for deeper moral analysis through contemplative and reflective attuning to the salient features of contexts within the text. By repositioning good and evil as not readily, easily, or physically recognizable Pet emerges as a radically insightful text about morality. In a world that brings

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a fantastic, metal-winged creature out of a painting to stop a hidden violence to youth, Emezi writes outside the binary of monster-angel. Considering the social realities of historical marginalization, individuals are often excluded from moral consideration when described as monsters, animals, or evil; the othering-act of dehumanization is central to the basis for and continuation of such exclusion. Pet ’s radical ethics of an inclusion offers an anecdote to exclusionary ethics based on hierarchies and binary thinking. The world of Pet expands considerations beyond surface attention (like all those who looks like a monster are bad) and beyond group-membership (anyone who is in Lucille is good) and power-holding status (Pet listens to Jam even when he could overpower her). Instead, Pet exemplifies what it looks like to take on wider considerations and advocates for greater inclusion in the moral domain. The result is a world where readers find shattered binaries of good and evil and profoundly deepened possibilities for empathy.

Conclusions Considered as a book for book clubs, class use, personal reading, or family discussion, Pet clearly offers numerous paths to challenge a simplistic understanding of a good–evil binary. The value of Pet in the context of building moral reasoning and empathy skills hinges on its relation to and resistance of oppressive paradigms and oversimplified binary interpretations of the world like that associated with the concepts of good and evil. Using carefully crafted discussion facilitation strategies, reflection prompts, and morally themed questions, it seems clear that Pet and likely other SpecFic texts could be used to promote empathy-building pro-social behaviors.

Appendix A Essential Questions, Pet 1. Jam considers “what it means to do hard things” throughout the text (160). What hard things does Jam encounter? Do you agree with their interpretations? Why/why not? Purpose: discuss moral issues in text. Assess Jam’s priorities and reader’s priorities.

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2. Pet defers to Jam’s moral judgment, encouraging Jam to rely on what she knows in her heart. Do you think morality can be felt in the heart? What does that mean to you? Was there a time when you knew something was right or wrong in your heart, and that helped you make a moral decision? Do you think moral reasoning comes from within individuals or from external rules? Purpose: discuss personal concepts and decision strategies about moral reasoning. 3. Why do you think Jam makes the decision to conceal the truth from Redemption? Purpose: discuss contextual details; assess priorities: special obligations to friendship (loyalty, fidelity, truth-telling) and protection from harm. 4. Is it wrong when Jam conceals the truth from Redemption about what may be happening in his house? Why/why not? Purpose: discuss contextual details; assess priorities: obligations to protect a friend from harm or obligation to truth/honesty. 5. Jam states she feels like she is “spying” in Redemption’s house (160). Is it wrong when Jam enters Redemption’s house without his knowledge with Pet? Why/why not? What makes it okay or not okay, in your opinion. When Jam refuses to follow Redemption into Moss’ room with Pet, does her priority change? Purpose: discuss contextual details; assess priorities: privacy over the obligation to truth/honesty.

References Borba, M. 2016. Unselfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World. New York: Touchstone. Brown, P. C., H. L. Roediger III, and M. A. McDaniel. 2014. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, MA: Belmont Press. Chau, J. 2012. “Millennials Are More Generation Me Than Generation We.” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 15, 2012. https://www.chronicle. com/article/Millennials-Are-More/131175. Dolby, N. 2014. “The Future of Empathy: Teaching the Millennial Generation.” Journal of College and Character 15, no. 1: 39–44. Emezi, A. 2019. Pet. New York: Make Me A World.

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Fox, M. 2014. “Enabling Gender-Inclusivity in LIS Education Through Epistemology, Ethics, and Essential Questions.” Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 55, no. 3: 241–250. Freire, P. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Greene, M. 1995. Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Hibbin, R. 2016. “The Psychosocial Benefits of Oral Storytelling in School: Developing Identity and Empathy Through Narrative.” Technology, Pedagogy and Education 34, no. 4: 218–231. Hylton, M. E. 2018. “The Role of Civic Literacy and Social Empathy on Rates of Civic Engagement Among University Students.” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement 22, no. 1: 87–106. Junker, C. R., and S. J. Jacquemin. 2017. “How Does Literature Affect Empathy in Students?” College Teaching 65, no. 2: 79–87. Kidd, D., and E. Castano. 2013. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.” Science 342, no. 6156: 377–380. Konrath, S. H., E. H. O’Brien, and C. Hsing. 2011. “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 15, no. 2: 180–198. McCreary, J. J., and G. J. Marchant. 2017. “Reading and Empathy.” Reading Psychology 38, no. 2: 182–202. Mirra, N. 2018. Educating for Empathy: Literacy Learning and Civic Engagement. New York: Teachers College Press. Ness, P. 2011. A Monster Calls. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press. Oziewicz, M. C. 2015. Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction: A Cognitive Reading. New York: Routledge. Perrault, A. M. 2012. “Caring for All Students: Empathic Design as a Driver for Innovative School Library Services and Programs.” Knowledge Quest 40, no. 4: 16–17. Phillips, A. 2017. “Understanding Empathetic Services: The Role of Empathy in Everyday Library Work.” The Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults 8, no. 1: 1–27. Reiss, H. 2018. The Empathy Effect. Louisville, CO: Sounds True. Segal, E. A. 2017. “Social Empathy as a Framework for Teaching Social Justice.” Journal of Social Work Education 53, no. 2: 201–211. Schalk, S. 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stout, C. J. 2015. “The Art of Empathy: Teaching Students to Care.” Art Education 52, no. 2: 21–34. Thomas, E. E. 2018. “Toward a Theory of the Dark Fantastic: The Role of Racial Difference in Young Adult Speculative Fiction and Media.” Journal of Language and Literacy Education 14, no. 1: 1–10.

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Thomas, E. E. 2019. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York: New York University Press. Twenge, J. M. 2017. iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—And Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—And What That Means for the Rest of Us. New York: Atria. Twenge, J. M., K. J. Campbell, and E. C. Freeman. 2012. “Generational Differences in Young Adults’ Life Goals, Concern for Others, and Civic Orientation, 1966–2009.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102, no. 5: 1045–1062.

CHAPTER 25

On the Performance of Villainy and Evil in Joker (2019) Kelvin Ke Jinde

The Rise of the Comic-Book Villain The comic-book film genre is often treated like a bête noire not only inside but also outside academia. Its popularity has led scholars as well as filmmakers to lambast the genre as a populist and derivative form of cinema. Indeed, the genre is not only considered to be a bastion of capitalist entertainment (Hassler-Forest 2012) but that it also perpetuates narratives that reinforce sexism (Pennell and Behm-Morawitz 2015), racism (Hunt 2019), and nationalism (Dittmer 2012). Even a heavyweight director like Martin Scorsese has gone on record to say that a comic-book film is not really “cinema.” For the director, that is because comic-book films are predictable and do not take risks in their storytelling. Indeed, Scorsese argues that comic-book films “lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist” (Scorsese 2019, para. 18). These sentiments are not exactly surprising because a comic-book film is usually not interested in the same kind of stories as art or auteurist

K. Ke Jinde (B) Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_25

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cinema. Rather, a comic-book film has its own specific concerns and interests. Broadly speaking, a comic-book film is more concerned with directness and simplicity than it is with subtlety and complexity. And while some might prefer films that are more subtle and more unpredictable, it does not mean that subtle and unpredictable films are necessarily superior in terms of moral or artistic worth. Rather, what it means is that the concerns and interests of art or auteurist cinema are just different from the concerns and interests of a comic-book film. Comic-book films are often criticized because of three things; (a) they are just special effects extravaganzas, that (b) offer a simplistic story of good and evil, and (c) that they are infantile stories created for children. Like what fast food does for the body, comic-book films are considered to like fast food for the mind in terms of not offering much in the way of intellectual stimuli and enrichment. But even though comics, much like films, rely on “amplification through simplification” (McCloud 1993, 30), it does not necessarily mean that comic-book films are definitely juvenile and artless in nature. But while such sentiments continue to circulate inside and outside academia, others offer a more conciliatory view by arguing that comicbook films do play a positive role in society. Indeed, Chris Yogerst argues that “[t]here is something greater going on, something that transcends politics, and it has everything to do with virtue and morality” (Yogerst 2017, 16). To be sure, the film scholar David Bordwell writes that audiences should not expect coherent or complex discussions of socio-political issues in films since the demands of drama necessitate simplification. He reminds us that, “More often, I think, filmmakers pluck out bits of cultural flotsam opportunistically, stirring it all together and offering it up to see if we like the taste. It’s in filmmakers’ interests to push a lot of our buttons without worrying whether what comes out is a coherent intellectual position” (Bordwell 2012, para. 46). But regardless of one’s point of view when debating the value of comicbook films, one would be remiss not to recognize that while a comicbook film may or may not fulfill the criteria set forth by Martin Scorsese, comic-book films have tried their best to address important issues in their stories. Issues such as discrimination in the X-Men films (Fawaz 2011), adolescence in the Spiderman films, guilt in the Batman films, and even issues about heroism and social responsibility in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films (Acu 2016) have all been touched upon if not explored in their respective film series. So, despite whatever misgivings one might

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have about the comic-book film, one can still find important innovations that are produced by them. To that effect, it is argued here that one of them is the complexity of the villain. Using the Jungian concept of the shadow to examine Green Goblin in Spiderman (2002), Michaela Meyer’s employment of mythic criticism reveals the complexity of the villain. More specifically, Meyer argues that Green Goblin is not a one-dimensional villain. Rather, the Green Goblin is very much another side of Norman Osborn’s character and doubles as Osborn’s shadow archetype. As a result, Meyer encourages us to “view shadows as an extension rather than shadows as ‘other’” (Meyer 2003, 521). Indeed, Meyer points out that Green Goblin and Osborn share a relationship that is very similar to Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde or Bruce Banner and the Hulk. But unlike the latter two groupings, where one persona takes over and represses the other, Norman Osborn and Green Goblin reside in one conscious body. They even interact and dialogue with each other. Meyer’s reading shows that duality is not only a problem for superheroes but that it also poses a problem for supervillains. This problem can also be seen with the Joker. Joker is a comic-book supervillain created by Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and Jerry Robinson on April 25, 1940, for the DC Comic series, Batman. As the nemesis of the superhero Batman, Joker is often portrayed as a criminal mastermind with an irrelevant and sadistic sense of humor and attitude toward life. Possessing no superhuman abilities, the character of Joker is usually depicted with a visual appearance of bleached white skin, green hair, and bright red lips—a disfigurement that is often attributed to an incident in his past where he had fallen into a tank of chemical waste before becoming a supervillain. Joker’s first cinematic appearance came about in 1989 with Tim Burton’s Batman. It is with Jack Nicholson’s performance that gave the viewer a glimpse into the criminal life of the character when he was Jack Napier before becoming the supervillain known as Joker (Hanna 2019). The viewer is shown the events leading up to the moment where Napier falls into a vat of acid before becoming the iconic character. But while Nicholson’s Joker is simply an amplification of Napier’s criminality, the film nonetheless allowed the viewer to see a personal side of the villain as a character. In Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance as the character, on the other hand, negated

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the need for a back story. Indeed, the mysterious background of the character made him more unpredictable and inscrutable. But there was always still a hint of a personal side as Ledger’s Joker kept referencing past events in his life as if to suggest that his actions were shaped by them (Sterritt 2019). Indeed, even Jared Leto’s Joker, to a certain extent, presented a gentler side to the character by emphasizing his romance with Harley Quinn (Dockterman 2016). But despite these efforts to flesh out the character, Joker was always played up as just the bad guy in those films. And that should not come as a surprise because Bruce Wayne/Batman was always the leading character whereas Joker was always just a supporting act. But what is of more importance is that with the numerous interpretations of Joker over the years, the ground was slowly being cleared for an opportunity for someone to take on and develop the character as a leading character in its own solo story. With Todd Philips’ Joker (2019), the character is given just such an opportunity to be fleshed out into a dynamic and complex character. So, moving away from Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar win as the character, it is perhaps timely to reflect on not just his performance as the character but also how villainy and evil are developed through the exploration of different personalities and selves through the character.

Performing the Tragedy of Villainy and Evil The film charts the corporeal and mental transformation of the main protagonist Arthur Fleck as he lives and works in Gotham City. Set in a non-descript past but most probably America in the 1970s, the film is set in a world that is in decline—economically, politically, socially, and culturally. Indeed, Arthur lives in a world where many people are increasingly becoming disillusioned and disenfranchised about their lives and prospects in Gotham City due to an increase in wealth inequality and class conflict. Indeed, decline and decay permeate throughout the visual depiction and mood of Gotham City in the film. Economic decline is evidenced by the decaying infrastructure of the city (e.g., public housing, trains, streets, etc.), the shutting of public and community services, and a lack of good quality jobs for the working class. Political decline is evidenced by a political situation in Gotham City where the ruling class and elites are increasingly disconnected from the rest of society (as embodied by Thomas Wayne). Social decline is evidenced in the way families are broken or dysfunctional (as embodied by Sophie who is a single mother). Cultural

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decline is evidenced when celebrity and entertainment become the only source of emotional release and happiness for the average citizen (as embodied by Murray’s late-night talk show). But decline and decay are also articulated through Arthur’s story in the film. Firstly, Arthur suffers from long-term mental issues such as being afflicted by suicidal tendencies and depression. Secondly, he has to take care of his ailing mother—which understandably drains away his time and energy. Thirdly, his personal and romantic life is affected by his own mental and familial situation. Last, Arthur finds himself constantly being bullied or taken advantage of because of his generally easy-going and gentle character. As a result, Arthur is generally presented as a character who is merely a means of helping someone else to achieve their own objectives without considering his feelings, wishes, or thoughts in the first place. While some would consider Arthur to be fortunate to have been adopted by Penny as an orphan, it is clear from the film that Penny actually treats him more like a companion and caretaker rather than someone to love and nurture as a son. Indeed, Arthur’s mental and social condition can be attributed to the physical and mental abuse that was engendered by Penny’s neglect and detachment as a mother to him. Indeed, the motif of negligence continues on with Arthur’s interactions with his counselor. Instead of carefully listening and paying attention to his needs, Arthur’s counselor treats him more like another action item on her work list. To that effect, she may be a professional counselor but she seems that she is also an overworked and underpaid working professional who has too much on her plate—so to speak. Indeed, she is also one of the many who are disenfranchised and disillusioned by life in Gotham City when even she tells Arthur that “they don’t give a shit about people like you Arthur. And they don’t really give a shit about people like me either.” Bullying shows up in Arthur’s interactions with his supervisor and colleagues at work. Indeed, Arthur is constantly being bullied at work— such as when Randall tries to sell him a gun for personal protection (despite the inherent risks in possessing and bringing firearms into the workplace), or when Arthur has to reimburse work damages even though he was robbed by a bunch of street thugs while on a work assignment. Even Arthur’s appearance on Murray’s talk show was but another way of being used as a figure of ridicule and entertainment. Indeed, these incidents collectively show the ethics and actions of a capacious and careless society.

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But more importantly, these events show how living in such an environment can strip a person of their individuality and agency as a person and drive them to become estranged, disempowered, and isolated from the rest of society. But while Arthur eventually succumbs to nihilism and violence in the film, he is actually an optimist who tries not to let the bad things and tragedies in his life change his optimism about having a better future for himself. So, while it is true that Arthur does not lead a happy or fulfilling life, and that people do bully and take advantage of him, he nonetheless maintains a sense of optimism about his life—such as when he tries to be a comedian or when he imagines having a fulfilling relationship with Sophie or even when he imagines that he is the illegitimate son of Thomas Wayne. Indeed, inasmuch as Arthur appears to be deluded and lost in his fantasies, he is nevertheless deluded and lost in positive and optimistic fantasies. To be sure, Arthur’s life is marked by tragedy. In fact, it is marked by a succession of them in the film. The first of these is the abuse he suffered as a little boy under Penny’s watch. We learn in the film that Penny was actually complicit in Arthur’s abuse by her boyfriend as a young boy. Indeed, this particularly chilling information is revealed in a harrowing scene at the asylum where Arthur is told by an attendant that he was found chained to a radiator and without food by the authorities when he was aged just three years old. Second, Arthur’s mother (herself afflicted with psychosis and narcissistic personality disorder) repeatedly lies to him—even going so far as to insinuate that Thomas Wayne (father of Bruce Wayne) is his father, which naturally propels Arthur to confront Wayne about his parentage. Unfortunately, Thomas Wayne was not particularly sympathetic to Arthur’s situation and revealed the truth about Arthur’s tragic childhood in a curt if not contemptuous manner. Third, Arthur’s lack of talent is exposed to public humiliation after Murray Franklin, a famous talk show host, broadcasts an unflattering performance of Arthur’s stand-up routine to the world. Fourth, Arthur’s courtship of Sophie Dumond, his neighbor, turns out to be a one-sided fantasy that he had imagined in his head. Lastly, Arthur loses his job after accidentally dropping his gun on the floor while in the middle of a work assignment at a children’s hospital. But despite all of these negative events and people in his life, Arthur still maintains his optimism and positivity about life—even going so far to nurture and pursue his dream of becoming a comedian (notwithstanding his talent or lack of it).

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But everyone has a breaking point and Arthur’s comes when he is pushed to his limits after encountering a group of young men on the subway—who we later learnt in the film were young bankers who just happened to be on their way back home after a night of partying. After boarding the train, the men began to harass everyone on the train. But not before they turned their sights on Arthur and turned their attention toward him. They become increasingly hostile after Arthur started to laugh uncontrollably due to his nervousness of being confronted by them. Not realizing that Arthur has a condition, the men decided to viciously attack him and continued to do so even when Arthur was knocked to the ground. As a result, Arthur had no choice but to pull out his gun to defend himself. However, the moment soon turned into a chilling situation where Arthur uses his fear and rage to take revenge on his attackers. Indeed, the subway scene encapsulates not only the victimization of Arthur as a person who is constantly being bullied by the people of Gotham City but also how bullying can trigger violent and tragic outcomes. But it is important to remember that Arthur does not suddenly become a killer. Rather, his outburst is the result of having endured numerous humiliations and bullying over a significant period of time. Indeed, Arthur is at once a victim and the consequence of someone who is pushed to his limits in Gotham City and it is a tragedy because Arthur is forced to become someone that he does not want to be in life. It is therefore important to realize that the film actually shows not so much the origin story of the Joker character but it also shows how Arthur is forced to become another person in order to survive in his world. But it is important to also realize that the Joker is not the only persona created by Arthur to cope with his reality. Indeed, it is only one of many in a process of trying out and playing around with different versions of the desired and ideal self.

Performing the Multiple Self Through the Mask and Costume According to sociologist Erving Goffman, when people enter into social interactions, they make a great effort to present their desired image of themselves to others. This social self is an adaptive self that shifts and changes according to the appropriateness of the social situation. This includes adjusting or correcting any inconsistent actions, words, gestures, or mannerisms to maintain the harmony of a social and expressive order

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with other people in social interactions (Goffman 1978). It is thus clear to see that social performances have a kind of intention to them. If this idea of the social self—particularly in terms of how a person has different faces for different situations and interactions with others—is true, then it is logical to assume that people adopt different ways of moderating and modulating their speech, mannerisms, and actions to match the occasion to achieve something or to impress someone with their desired image of themselves. If that is true, then it is possible to think that the self is not necessarily a fixed entity but that it possesses a fluid and dynamic quality, albeit working within certain boundaries and limitations of the actor’s interests, preferences, and personality traits. And by deciding to put their ‘best foot’ forward in social situations, the actor is putting themselves in a position where they not only have to constantly present an image of themselves but also have to constantly perform the most desired presentation of themselves in social situations. As a result, it also makes sense to think that such an actor is constantly self-regulating in terms of their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors—a self-reflexive performance. So, just as Judith Butler argues that gender is performed (Butler 2011), can it also be argued that being a villain and doing evil deeds are themselves kind of performative? Could it be that villainy and acts of evil are not necessarily natural but things that are socially constructed and engendered? Indeed, can one find one’s true self by becoming evil and doing evil deeds? To be sure, by no means is it suggested that evil or evil men do not exist. Rather what is explored and argued here is that villainy and doing evil, in the case of the Joker, are engendered through and by the performative self through the navigation and exploration of adopting different personas and masks. And it is argued that just as mask-wearing underpins the superhero, it also underpins the villain. More importantly, the mask does not only hide the wearer’s identity but it also allows the wearer to express themselves—whatever that expression may be in the end. Take, for example, Kal-El, who uses Clark Kent as a disguise and a mask to hide his identity in the human world. The mask of Clark Kent is not just a mask to hide Kal-El, but it is also employed to fit in with the social norms of the times. Clark Kent thus symbolizes what Kal-El feels will allow humans to accept him as part of the human race. His speech, mannerisms, and interactions with others in the Clark Kent costume are not only his disguise but public and social performances of normalcy and

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everydayness. But Kal-El’s demeanor changes once he changes into the Superman suit. Fundamentally, Kal-El is still the same person, but he behaves and talks differently depending on not only the social situation but also on the choice of his disguise and costume. This duality is more acute when we look at Bruce Wayne as Batman. The public image of Bruce Wayne is that of a playboy billionaire, which makes him part of the elite. But once Bruce Wayne changes into the Batsuit, his eccentric and conceited persona changes into a forbidding but uncompromising persona. But this idea of duality is seldom highlighted in supervillains. That is because villains are normally considered to be just cannon fodder for superheroes—they are just something for superheroes to do. Concordantly, the Joker character in Batman (1989), The Dark Knight (2008), and Suicide Squad (2016) has always been portrayed or at least conceptualized as a bogeyman for the superhero; his only goal is to wreak havoc and cause chaos for the established order. As Bane (Tom Hardy) tells another character during the opening scene of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012), “No one cared who I was until I put on the mask.” Indeed, Arthur Fleck, like Kal-El, Bruce Wayne, and Bane, discovers that no one is interested in them as a person. Instead, it is only after they have transformed themselves by literally putting on another skin that others take notice of them. Thus, it is suggested that if one wishes to make an impact on wider society, what is important is not what the mask represents to the wearer but rather what the mask represents to the world. Mask-wearing is then an activity that involves a relationship between the mask object, the performative aspects of wearing it, and its sociocultural reception and interpretation of it by other people. To be sure, the transformative force of a mask is something that has been understood by many cultures around the world. Masks are typically used in human society as a form of celebration or for religious purposes (Mack 1994). But they are also employed in cultural and artistic activities, as can be seen in Venetian carnivals or classical Greek theater (Wiles 2007). But while masks are also often used as stand-alone objects, they are also often used as part of an overall package with associated bodily movements, gestures, and other assorted actions to deliver a complete performance. Thus, masks and costumes are best understood in terms of how they function as a unit in a performance.

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In Arthur’s case, the clown mask is used as a kind of personal mask. This is not surprising because the clown persona helps Arthur to hide his melancholy from the world. But the mask also functions as a public mask. It helps Arthur to convert pent-up anger and disillusionment into overt aggression and nonchalance. But his mask also plays a third role, one that he has little control over, and that is how other people perceive him. Indeed, other people’s perception of his persona divides Gotham City into two camps: one that sees him as evil, and another that sees him as a symbol or figurehead of societal resistance against the elite. These differing perceptions lend themselves back to the idea of duality on two levels. The first layer of duality is between Arthur Fleck and his persona as Joker. This layer shows how the disappointments and character flaws of Arthur are transformed into motivation and gaudiness by his adoption of the Joker persona. This then feeds into Arthur’s playing of the Joker character as a physical extension of his damaged psyche. The second layer is the duality between two main groups where one group sees the Joker persona as evil and the other sees the Joker as a kind of heroic resistance against the rich and powerful. While both groups accept that Joker is someone who is violating the law and disturbing the peace, the former rejects his action whereas the latter welcomes them. Indeed, the Joker character reveals a dichotomy that not only exists within Arthur Fleck but also a dichotomy that exists between the haves and have-nots in the city. Like Arthur, who adopts the Joker persona as a way to channel and project himself for his purposes, the haves and have-nots of Gotham City project themselves onto the character and what the character means and represents to them. But while the Joker, as a character, functions as both a personal and public mask for Arthur, the Joker has also become a public symbol for two other groups of people in the story. But these two groups use and see the character in different ways. One group sees him as a menace whereas another group sees him as a hero. One group sees him as a threat to the status quo, the other sees him as a liberating force. But the question of whether Joker should be considered to be an evil or heroic character is not something that is answered in the film. Rather, it can only be answered by whoever is asking that question—particularly in terms of how they see themselves in a society. Are they the haves or are they the have-nots? Do they have power to change their lives are do you not have the power to do so? To answer these questions, it would depend not only on the socio-economic status and position of the people of Gotham City but it

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would also depend on the socio-economic status and position of whoever is asking them in the first place. Hence, Joker becomes a character that destabilizes fixed ideas about evil and villainy by emphasizing complexity and multiplicity of human identity and performance.

The Many Faces of Arthur Fleck The social self is a kind of public performance. But while ordinary people are not necessarily performers in the traditional sense (like thespians or film stars), Goffman suggests that we do engage in performance when we enter into social settings. Indeed, this social self involves a social performance that is directed toward an immediate and fluid social situation where there is a performative self, a social stage, and a viewing audience. This idea of real-life acting, along with dressing up and looking the part, is a kind of impression management as well as emotional labor. While impression management means a process of making a good impression with others in a social situation (Riggio 2013), emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of doing a job (Wilkinson 2018). We can see this process in the opening scene of the film. The film opens with Arthur getting ready for work. This is what Erving Goffman talks about in terms of seeing a performer or person backstage. Backstage is where the individual prepares, rehearses, and calibrates his routines and desired actions, words, and expressions—mostly for an intended audience. And it is in this first scene where we get to see the difference between the real emotional state of Arthur in his private moments and the suppression of his emotions when he becomes a performer for the public. The opening scene immediately establishes the processes of the performative and social selves of the character. As the film fades from black, we see Arthur sitting before a dressing mirror and preparing to put on his clown makeup for a work assignment. But as he proceeds to paint his face, he stops and finds it hard to continue his preparation. He is clearly upset about something. What follows is a telling but disturbing moment when we see Arthur forcing himself to smile by pulling on the sides of his mouth to simulate the actual act of smiling. It is here that we get to see a snapshot of how emotional labor is encapsulated by the actions of Arthur as he forcefully manipulates his facial expression. Indeed, the gap between his real emotional state and forced performance is so wide that it

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creates a twisted and distorted expression—a foreshadowing of the Joker persona. This contrast between the backstage and frontstage selves and the emotional labor involved is further played out when the film then immediately cuts to a moment where we see him at work on the streets of Gotham City and playing his part by prancing about and making merry faces to entice people for a sales promotion. This contrast perfectly encapsulates the often-hidden process of managing other people’s impressions by suppressing the personal in favor of achieving professional goals. This negation and erasure of Arthur’s individuality is reinforced when Arthur is forced to chase after a group of young men after they had stolen his signboard. But after catching up with the group, he is beaten up by them until he is left lying unconscious on the ground. To them, he is just a “clown,” someone who is de-personalized and de-individualized as a person. Indeed, this scene encapsulates the reality of Arthur’s life as a victim of Gotham City’s dysphoria and malaise. The scene then cuts to one where we see Arthur sitting in session with his counselor. It is here where Arthur wonders out loud, “Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?” Unimpressed, or perhaps weary herself, the counselor replies, “It is certainly tense. People are upset. They are struggling, looking for work. These are tough times.” While the lines do not give away details about the circumstances that plague Gotham City, they nonetheless provide a context that alludes to a social, economic, and political malaise that is troubling the city and her citizens. This malaise is perhaps reflected by Arthur’s increasingly dark sense of humor when his counselor reads out a journal passage written by him: “I just hope my death makes more cents [sic] than my life.” And while Arthur resorts to violence by the end of the film, what is important to note is that he initially tried to contain his “madness” by doing something about it—in this case, he pleaded to have more medication because, he says, “I just don’t want to feel so bad anymore.” The close arrangement of these three scenes succinctly shows not just the story of a man trying his best to cope with an uncaring world but they also show how he is slowly shaped by the conditions of his world. But they also show two sides to Arthur’s character. Indeed, we can say that they show him wearing two types of masks in different situations: a public mask that he wears during social interactions (gentle, nice, and decent), and a personal mask that he wears in his personal life (moody, melancholic and suicidal). And this contrast between the public and private face repeats throughout the film. Indeed, we see Arthur play and perform seven

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different versions of himself in the film—including the Joker persona. And by playing these seven personas, it must be seen that Arthur is not necessarily suffering from a kind of dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality disorder. Rather, like an actor trying on different interpretations of a character, Arthur is playing out and trying out what he could be by being different persons. As William Shakespeare reminds us, All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts. (Shakespeare, n.d.)

With Gotham City as his stage, we can see that Arthur cycles through a wheelhouse of personas to cope with the increasingly depressing conditions of his professional, social, and personal life. This rotation requires Arthur to adopt the appropriate demeanor and actions to fit the chosen persona. These adjustments can be seen in the subtle changes in his dressing, manner of speech, affectations, and interactions with other characters. Indeed, we see Arthur cycling through a series of seven personas throughout the film. His repertoire includes (a) the dutiful son, (b) the collegial colleague, (c) the sturdy lover, (d) the upcoming comedian, (e) the anti-hero, (f) the evil villain, and, finally, (g) the victim. And in all of these personas and the scenarios that he finds himself in, we can see subtle changes in his character. To be sure, the character does suffer from mental health issues and is also afflicted with a condition called pseudobulbar affect (uncontrollable laughter), and these are major contributing factors to his mental deterioration and descent into violence. But it can be argued that while Arthur does suffer from all of these conditions, he does not let them curtail or limit his desire to engage productively and constructively with the wider world. As the dutiful son, he takes care of his ailing mother—even going so far as to bathe and feed her daily. To cheer her up, he tries to maintain an upbeat disposition whenever he is with her and shares her love of watching Murray Franklin on the television. Furthermore, his desire to become a comedian is also partly because he wants to please his mother. As the collegial colleague and worker, he tries to get along with his colleagues (such as Randall), even if they tend to make fun of him. As

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the lover, Arthur imagines that he is in a stable and romantic relationship with Sophie. But, as revealed in the film, their relationship is purely a figment of his imagination. It is repeatedly shown in the film that Arthur is constantly being taken advantage of, bullied, and snubbed as a person in his life. Despite his love for his mother, it turns out that Arthur was physically and psychologically abused as a young child while Penny looked the other way. Randall blamed Arthur for the gun accident at the children’s hospital even though he was the one who gave Arthur the gun. Arthur’s supervisor even docked his pay for the loss of his work tools even though Arthur was robbed on the job. Lastly, while Arthur imagined that Murray the late-night talk show host would love him and “give it all up in a heartbeat to have a kid like you,” the real Murray decided to humiliate and berate him on live television. But it is important to realize that Arthur uses his imagination not only as a site to escape his miserable life but also as a site to practice and rehearse what he hoped he could achieve for real in his everyday life. This is important because it shows that Arthur is not just day-dreaming for its own sake but is using his imagination and fantasies in a productive and constructive manner. It is quite revealing to realize that none of Arthur’s fantasies entails death, murder, or gore. Rather, all of them are wish fulfillments and positive endings. Indeed, Arthur uses his imagination to practice what he would do in his desired image and life. In performance, rehearsing is generally a social and group activity whereas practicing is something that is done on your own. We see this contrast between practice and rehearsal when we see Arthur practice his entrance and interview on Murray’s talk show in his living room. In this scene, he goes through different facial expressions, sitting postures, gestures, voice tones, and talks as if he was engaging in a conversation with Murray. By rehearsing with “Murray” on the television, he imagines the audience cheering and reacting to him. As interesting as the scene may be, we slowly realize that what Arthur is really practicing and rehearsing is his plan to commit suicide on live television. But like most things that he wished he could achieve in real life, Arthur fails to carry out his plan. Instead of being funny and charming, the real interview quickly becomes an emotionally charged and volatile once Arthur confesses to everyone on live television that he was responsible for the death of the three young men on the subway. Instead of receiving empathy or sympathy from Murray or the studio audience, Arthur finds

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himself berated and belittled by them. This resulted in a rant where Arthur reveals the reasons for his actions by saying that “everybody just yells and screams at each other. Nobody’s civil anymore. Nobody thinks what it’s like to be the other guy.” Despite his rage, we can see that Arthur is also frustrated and dejected of not being understood as a person by someone he thought would be the one that would understand him the most. So, when Arthur is dismissed off the air by Murray, Arthur does the only thing that makes sense for him at that moment. Like he says, “what do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash?” Indeed, the scene reaches a crescendo as Arthur takes out his gun and shoots Murray dead in front of everyone. But while it should have been a cathartic moment for the character, it does not feel like one because Arthur once again fails to do what he wanted to do in the first place—which was to kill himself on live television. So, even as Arthur sits down after killing Murray and not knowing what to do next, this particular moment encapsulates the character as someone who is always doomed to fail in his pursuits. Indeed, even as he dons a new mask and a new persona, Arthur cannot escape from himself.

Crying, Smiling, and Laughing Donald Pollock writes that “the mask works by concealing or modifying those signs of identity which conventionally display the actor, and by presenting new values that, again conventionally, represent the transformed person or an entirely new identity” (Pollock 1995, 584). Indeed, we can see how wearing a mask helps Arthur Fleck shed his own skin. That is because Arthur wants to be anyone else except Arthur Fleck. But more than anything else, he desires recognition and affirmation as a person. As Arthur confesses in one scene after becoming the Joker, “For my whole life, I didn’t know if I even really existed. But I do, and people are starting to notice.” Social psychologist Abraham Maslow writes that human needs can be organized into a hierarchy with five basic categories: (i) physiological (i.e., food, water, and sleep), (ii) safety (i.e., safe and predictable environments), (iii) love and belonging (i.e., social and personal relationships), (iv) esteem needs (i.e., prestige and feeling of accomplishment), and (v) self-actualization (achieving one’s full potential) (McLeod 2020). As a result, it is possible to see that Arthur’s fantasies and craving for

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celebrity—whether as a stand-up comedian or as a villain—is motivated more by a need to become the best of himself than it is to be famous for its own sake. So, by being the Joker, it allows Arthur to not so much to hide as a person but it also allows him to become a new person with a new persona and a new identity. But it is also important to note that while Arthur does eventually become Joker, it is Joker who gets all the attention. Co-opted by the people of Gotham City as a socio-political symbol, Joker becomes more important than Arthur as a character. Indeed, Joker is made to represent two kinds of things in the film; (a) evil and villainy from the perspective of the establishment and civil society, and (b) resistance against the system from the perspective of the disenfranchised citizens of Gotham City. As a result, the idea of the Joker straddles in-between good and evil or villainy and heroism. But symbolic ambiguity can also occur in real life where different people have different views about things like masks, costumes, and symbols. We can certainly see this with the Guy Fawkes mask used by the Anonymous group in the digital world (see Anonymous Hackers 2020), the black mask worn by protesters in Hong Kong (Friedman 2019), and, to a certain extent, the Yellow Vest movement in France (Le Goff 2020). While some people might see protestors as criminals and disturbing the peace, others see them as heroes in resisting the dictates of the ruling classes. Thus, the same group of protestors can either be considered to be heroes or villains—depending on how one sees the group. More importantly, the same set of masks, costumes, and symbols used by them are viewed differently by different people. And regardless of one’s point of view regarding protests, differing views about them reveal or at least suggest that what a mask and costume mean to someone is highly dependent on their economic as well as socio-political position in society. Nevertheless, the use of masks and costumes does three things for the wearer; (a) they imbue the wearer with a sense of anonymity by masking individuality, (b) they constitute a visual performance, and (c) they allow the wearer to form solidarity and unity. According to Michael S. Merrill, “[t]he masking ritual, then, is the means by which performers and participants can, under the auspices of culturally accepted practices, safely step from behind their personae to reveal their essential self by immersing themselves in the mythic divine represented through the transforming power of the mask” (Merrill 2004, 16). Indeed, the mask has a communicative capacity that “offers

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an opportunity for subjects to construe their relationship with power” (Riisgaard and Thomassen 2016, 94). But the irony is that Arthur never intended to be a political statement or symbol. He said as much in the film when he refutes Murray’s assertions on his talk show. All he wants is to be happy, purposeful, and affirmed as a person. And while Arthur unwittingly becomes a sociopolitical symbol for Gotham City, he is also the product of a dystopian society that has not only abused but has also decided to abandon him. And even as Arthur becomes a kind of a cult hero for the protestors, his is perhaps not an isolated story but one that is commonly shared with the people of Gotham City. In the penultimate scene in the film, we see Arthur in the middle of a counseling session in jail, laughing to himself. This is followed by a brief cutaway shot that shows a young Bruce Wayne standing beside the bodies of his dead parents, a tragic event that will eventually force him to create his own alter ego to fight crime in Gotham City. But when asked about his thoughts, Arthur only replies that we “wouldn’t get it.” Lastly, while this article has focused on performativity rather than on morality, it is important to emphasize that Arthur does maintain a loose sense of morality when he is Arthur Fleck. Other than Penny’s murder in the hospital where he appears in the guise of Arthur Fleck and slowly turns into Joker as he smothers her to death, other acts of violence and murder are only enacted when he is either in half or full makeup and costume as the Joker (e.g., the subway shooting, Randall’s death, and Murray’s murder). These changes—prompted by makeup and costume changes—show that Arthur is not only a consummate performer but he is also never really confused about who he is or what persona and character he is supposed to play at any given time. While it is true that Arthur is a highly controlled person (or repressed one), it is also clear that he is also a highly creative and disciplined individual in terms of creating and practicing the desired actions and dialogue of whatever persona he wished to perform at any given social situation. His ability to switch between Arthur Fleck and the Joker shows that he has control over himself—if not over his reactions to other people. But, more importantly, it is clear that Arthur finds that the Joker persona suits him best because it is a natural extension of his desire to be a comedian as well as being a natural transition from working as a commercial clown to become the Joker character.

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If anything, Joker challenges our expectations about the formation of a villain. By problematizing the assumption that villains are born and not made, the film presents a story about a character who turns himself into a villain by playing around with different personas. Indeed, the film unpacks not only the theatricality and spectacle of the comic-book villain by going backstage to see what is going on, but it also emphasizes the performativity of villainy by revealing the process of how an actor practices, rehearses, and experiments with different presentations, makeup, and costumes to get the desired performance. So, while it was inevitable that someone as ostentatious as Joker would go on to become a social and political symbol in the film with his crimson and yellow costume, green hair, and white clown face, it must also be remembered that Joker is also the creation of its alter ego. Indeed, the character is as much a product of its environment as it is a product of the fractured mind of its performer.

References Acu, Adrian. 2016. “Time to Work for a Living: The Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Organized Superhero.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 44 (4): 195–205. https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2016.1174666. Anonymous Hackers. 2020. Anonymous Hackers. Accessed June 20, 2020. https://www.anonymoushackers.net. Bordwell, David. 2012. “Nolan vs. Nolan.” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema, August 19. http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/08/19/ nolan-vs-nolan/. Butler, Judith. 2011. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Dittmer, Jason. 2012. Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Dockterman, Eliana. 2016. “From Mad to Suicide Squad: The Evolution of Harley Quinn.” Time, August 5. https://time.com/4438824/harley-quinnevolution-joker-suicide-squad/. Fawaz, Ramzi. 2011. “Where No X-Man Has Gone Before!’ Mutant Superheroes and the Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy in Postwar America.” American Literature 83 (2): 355–388. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1266090. Friedman, Vanessa. 2019. “The Colour of Protests.” The New York Times, October 29. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/style/29china-banblack-clothing-hong-kong-protests.html. Goffman, Erving. 1978. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Harmondsworth.

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Hanna, Anastasia. 2019. “‘Batman’ 1989: A Look Back at Jack Nicholson’s Joker.” MXDWN , October 3. https://movies.mxdwn.com/feature/batman1989-a-look-back-at-jack-nicholsons-joker/. Hassler-Forest, Dan. 2012. Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age. Lanham, MD: John Hunt Publishing. Hunt, Whitney. 2019. “Negotiating New Racism: ‘It’s Not Racist or Sexist: It’s Just the Way It Is’.” Media, Culture and Society 41, no. 1: 86–103. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0163443718798907. Le Goff, Clement. 2020. “Yellow Vest, Rising Violence—What’s Happening in France?” World Economic Forum, February 27. https://www.weforum.org/ agenda/2020/02/france-protests-yellow-vests-today/. Mack, John, ed. 1994. Masks: The Art of Expression. London: British Museum Press. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press. McLeod, Saul. 2020. “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” Simply Psychology, March 20. https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html. Merrill, Michael S. 2004. “Masks, Metaphor and Transformation: The Communication of Belief in Ritual Performance.” Journal of Ritual Studies 18, no. 1: 16–33. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44368668. Meyer, Michaela D. E. 2003. “Utilizing Mythic Criticism in Contemporary Narrative Culture: Examining the ‘Present–Absence’ of Shadow Archetypes in Spider-Man.” Communication Quarterly 51 (4): 518–529. https://doi. org/10.1080/01463370309370171. Pennell, Hillary, and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz. 2015. “The Empowering (Super) Heroine? The Effects of Sexualized Female Characters in Superhero Films on Women.” Sex Roles 72: 211–220. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11 199-015-0455-3. Pollock, Donald. 1995. “Masks and the Semiotics of Identity.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1 (3): 581–597. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 3034576. Riggio, Ronald E. 2013. “The Dangerous Art of Impression Management.” Psychology Today, October 25. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ cutting-edge-leadership/201310/the-dangerous-art-impression-management. Riisgaard, Lone, and Bjørn Thomassen. 2016. “Powers of the Mask: Political Subjectivation and Rites of Participation in Local-Global Protest.” Theory, Culture and Society 33 (6): 75–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327641 6651685. Scorsese, Martin. 2019. “Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.” The New York Times, November 4. https://www.nytimes. com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-marvel.html.

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Shakespeare, William. “Speech: ‘All the World’s a Stage’.” Accessed June 20, 2020. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56966/speech-all-the-wor lds-a-stage. Sterritt, Ryan. 2019. “A Look Back at Heath Ledger’s Joker from ‘The Dark Knight’.” MXDWN , October 2. https://movies.mxdwn.com/feature/ a-look-back-at-heath-ledgers-joker-from-the-dark-knight/. Wiles, David. 2007. Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy: From Ancient Festival to Modern Experimentation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilkinson, Sophie. 2018. “Why Was Everyone Talking About Emotional Labour in 2018?” BBC News, December 24. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/art icle/5ea9f140-f722-4214-bb57-8b84f9418a7e. Yogerst, Chris. 2017. “Superhero Films: A Fascist National Complex or Exemplars of Moral Virtue?” Journal of Religion and Film 27, no. 1: 1–34, Article 37.

Filmography Ayers, David, dir. 2016. Suicide Squad. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. DVD. Burton, Tim, dir. 1989. Batman. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. DVD. Nolan, Christopher, dir. 2008. The Dark Knight. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. DVD. Philips, Todd, dir. 2019. Joker. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Film.

CHAPTER 26

“Making Our Work of Art a Masterpiece”: The Aesthetics of Evil in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope Brennan Thomas

Alfred Hitchcock’s first Technicolor film, Rope (1948), explores the proposition of murder as a privileged art reserved for the intellectually superior. The film is loosely based on Patrick Hamilton’s play of the same name, which itself was inspired by the 1924 Leopold-Loeb murder case in which two University of Chicago students murdered a young boy to prove their criminal brilliance (Carr 1984). Rope displays many cinematic unconventionalities that, although incongruous with its decidedly more conservative elements, are worth noting, from its attractively ornate setting to its unusually long takes ranging from four to ten minutes. Still, while Rope is an admirable example of Hitchcock’s stylized filmmaking, its style supersedes its substance. Hitchcock appears to have been so preoccupied with conveying the experiment of murder for its own sake in an experimental way that he dodges the questions of murder’s aesthetic value. Can murder be an art, as several of Rope’s characters allege? Is murder the privileged act of the truly superhuman? Because of its long takes and confined setting, Rope should have been a perfect

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vehicle for answering such strange, uncomfortable questions (Allen 2003, 169). Surprisingly, however, it is not. Just as the film’s two villains fail to commit the perfect crime, Hitchcock fails in his endeavor to construct the perfect representation of murder committed for art’s sake. Revolutionary as its technical achievements may have been, Rope is a standard morality play that reinforces societal conventions of good and evil with a blunt certainty that undermines its unconventional filming approach. The simplicity of this moral discussion is unfortunate because Rope’s stylistic features, from its set design to its long sequences, though not unprecedented (Salt 1977, 47), are remarkable for the early post-WWII era. One of the film’s most impressive and unsettling elements is its setting. The film takes place in a spacious penthouse, which is quite fitting since this sort of stylized apartment dwelling came to symbolize the “mystique” of the “rich and powerful” (Jacobs 2007, 268) in American cinema. This particular penthouse commands a breathtaking view of New York City’s skyline, which includes such landmarks as Radio City Music Hall and the Empire State Building, locating it in the lively and posh hub of Manhattan. It is in this space of metropolitan elegance that the penthouse’s tenants, Brandon (played by John Dahl) and Philip (played by Farley Granger), commit their murder of David Kentley, a friend and former classmate, within the film’s first minute. The murder itself is tastefully done, if unrealistically quick and stiff. For the few seconds viewers are able to glimpse the still-living David, his head is thrown back in a waning scream, his mouth so widely agape that one can see the fillings in the actor’s teeth. As soon as his screams stop, however, his mouth closes and his head slumps forward. He is dead, which Brandon wordlessly confirms by placing his hand over David’s chest to feel for a heartbeat. Finding none, he then instructs Philip to place the body inside the living room’s most prominent piece of furniture—a cassone just large enough to accommodate a human body. Because the murder occurs in the gloom behind closed curtains, the apartment takes on the uncomfortable, almost suffocating qualities of a tomb—which it literally is. Dave Kehr compares the claustrophobic apartment to “a Chinese-box confinement … inside of which is an oppressively close apartment set, inside of which is a wooden chest, inside of which is a corpse” (2011, 11). Because the cassone cannot be locked, there remains the possibility that some other person might open it. This possibility increases exponentially when it is revealed that the two murderers will soon be hosting a party, assisted by their housekeeper, Mrs. Wilson,

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for the decedent’s parents, fiancée, and friends in the very room where David’s body now lies. Thus, when Brandon opens the curtains to reveal the early evening skyline, the sense of claustrophobia is not banished. The men are entombed in their apartment with David’s corpse unless they manage to rid themselves of it, which they intend to do by carrying the body out to their car after the party and disposing of it in a remote area. Until then, they and the rest of the audience are trapped inside, waiting to see whether the rest of their crime will be executed or foiled. What transpires over the next eighty minutes is the gradual unraveling of what appears to have been the perfect crime. At the two-minute mark, the murder has been committed and there is no visible evidence that any sort of crime took place—no blood, no fingerprints that cannot be explained, no signs of a struggle. There is also no reason for any of the soon-to-arrive guests to suspect that something horrible has happened to David, let alone that Brandon and Philip are responsible. In the dim apartment, with the curtains closed and the lights and sounds of the city muted, their murder seems undetectable. Philip begs Brandon to keep the lights off and “stay, just this way” for a while longer, as though sensing that the only way they can fully get away with their act is by keeping everything and everyone, including themselves, in the dark. Without the scrutiny of illumination, perfection is still achievable. Yet for anything to be truly art, notes D. A. Miller, “it must be marked with an intention, even a solicitation, to be recognized as one” (2013, 2). Thus, clues of Brandon and Philip’s crime are slowly revealed by Brandon, all pointing to his desire for recognition of his criminal brilliance. As soon as the curtains are drawn back and the early evening light pours into the room, these clues begin to appear, the first being the rope Philip used to strangle David dangling from the chest’s lid, which sends the former into a near-panic as he recognizes the potential for discovery and second-guesses their carefully planned act. Cracks appear in Brandon and Philip’s relationship as well, starting with Philip telling Brandon that he would rather have strangled him than David before weakly recanting, “I obviously can’t take it as well as you” (emphasis added). While Philip seems frightened of what he and Brandon have done, referring to their murder as “it,” Brandon characterizes their crime as “a work of art.” Viewing murder from this artistic angle rather than a legal or moral one, Brandon decides to elevate their artwork to a “masterpiece” by serving their dinner guests from the chest containing David’s body. He describes

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the party as the “inspired finishing touch” to prove their intellectual superiority over others too simple to appreciate murder’s artistic potential. To further distinguish themselves from their ordinary guests, Brandon has also invited their brilliant former teacher, Rupert Cadell (played by Jimmy Stewart), who Brandon believes will understand their aesthetic vision of murder and even applaud their execution of it. Long before Rupert appears on screen, his teachings are already being presented as a fascinating and perplexing moral exercise. Can killing solely for the experiment of doing so ever be justified? Rupert had argued that it can be for the sake of art: To distinguish one’s superiority, one must eliminate what is inferior with ruthless but artful precision. The achievement of artistic greatness supersedes concerns for the physical body; an individual’s short physical life is insignificant compared to the life of a masterpiece appreciated long after its creator is dead. It is a philosophy to which Hitchcock himself may have subscribed. According to the film’s trivia summary posted on the site IMDB.com, during Rope’s filming, one of the massive Technicolor cameras rolled over and crushed a crewmember’s foot; rather than stopping filming to attend to the man’s injuries, his crewmates gagged him so his screams wouldn’t ruin the take, which was later used in Rope’s final print. If this alleged story indeed happened, the parallels between the strangled David and the muffled crewmember, while obviously accidental, exemplify the collateral damage of art. For the artist’s vision to be fully realized, the ordinary man’s life is made expendable. Moreover, as most artists cannot fully realize their visions without some assistance from others, they must recruit sympathetic parties toward their causes. Just as Hitchcock himself had not crushed the crewmember’s foot or gagged his screams (if this event had even occurred), Brandon does not personally strangle David to death. That act is Philip’s, the actual murderer, who regrets his involvement in the murder almost immediately after committing it while still acting on Brandon’s command. Hitchcock’s own directorial style is an amalgamation of the two murderers’ sensibilities. Like Brandon, Hitchcock was a fastidious planner, always making sure everything was in its proper place. In fact, well before shooting had begun on Rope, Hitchcock had meticulously planned “every movement of the camera and the actors on a blackboard ‘with a football skull practice’” (Jacobs 2007, 274). Yet his sensibilities as a filmmaker demanded that his directing style serve the film’s story, just as Philip’s light touch on the piano serves the musical compositions he plays to entertain the party guests. To accomplish the full vision of Hitchcock’s

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storytelling, therefore, requires the discipline to plan with a heavy-handed manner and play with a soft, delicate one. Such is Hitchcock’s reconceptualization of evil: the twin talents of planner and player. The charismatic director Brandon provides vision and guidance for the evil act, which the dedicated performer Philip carries out despite his personal reservations. These dichotomous perspectives—Brandon’s confident visionary desiring admiration and Philip’s reluctant acolyte fearing discovery— supply much of the film’s tension for the first act. Brandon wants recognition for his perfect planning in killing for aesthetic reasons because he lacks artistic talent. Philip, by contrast, wants to undo their crime because he fears what he might lose. Unlike Brandon, Philip is a gifted artist, a pianist preparing for his debut concert at Town Hall. To be caught and convicted for David’s murder would destroy his chances to achieve fame through artistic means, something Brandon can never do. Because Philip has what Brandon longs for, their relationship is unbalanced; Brandon is the dominant force, with Philip either acquiescing to his demands or asking permission to deviate from them. Philip, as the one who executes Brandon’s plan, is clearly the more artistically capable, thereby rendering Brandon (who is unable or unwilling to execute the plan himself) impotent with frustration. This impotence is cheekily expressed when Brandon fails to open a phallic-looking champagne bottle. After nearly thirty seconds of watching Brandon fumble with the cork, Philip grabs the bottle from Brandon (one of the few times Philip wrests control from him) and in one quick gesture pops it open. He then hands it back to the chagrined Brandon. The scene insinuates that artistic ineffectuality has cast Brandon in the role of thinker and director, while Philip, though less willing, is more capable as the performer. As the frustrated artist-turned-director, Brandon is hardly a murderer for whom audiences could feel much sympathy. Though his needs for acceptance and even self-actualization are understandable, one cannot understand the maniacal depths to which Brandon goes to prove that he belongs among the intellectually elite. Even Philip acknowledges that Brandon operates on a set of principles different from his own. When Brandon begins setting food and dishes atop David’s temporary coffin for the upcoming dinner party, Philip becomes horrified by the prospect of eating from the young man’s grave, until he realizes this might be their best chance of concealing their crime. “At least this way no one will try to open it,” he says, referring to the now-covered cassone. Brandon’s derisive laugh indicates that he is not thinking of legal matters at this point,

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but of artistic ones. To fully realize their experiment, they must explore its macabre possibilities—the consumption of food (life) atop a tomb of now stiffening, putrefying flesh (Miller 2013, 5). Showing a murder done for its own sake is a daring thing to do, and Brandon and Philip’s experiment with murder—killing solely for the sake of killing—is singular. As their teacher Rupert later points out, murders committed for profit or passion are commonplace. To kill for the sake of killing, however, is the work of a different species—something not entirely human. This aesthetic murderer had been enigmatic to the American public until the infamous trial case of Leopold and Loeb, in which two students killed a young boy purely for the experiment and excitement of doing so—and to prove themselves intellectually superior. Brandon, too, seems motivated by such concerns. He prides himself on his perfect planning, whether parties or murders, but recognizes the limitations of such gifts. Planning is the work of an architect or a caterer, not the artist. After lamenting his own lack of talent, however, he consoles himself by stating that “murder can be an art, too.” Brandon’s comment also reveals his desire for artistic transformation through murder. Once he and Philip have fully realized Rupert’s teachings through their actions, they will have elevated themselves to an artistic plane that cannot be touched by those who have not proven their superiority over inferior beings. Throughout much of the film’s first half, Hitchcock’s unconventional filming style complements the unconventionality of Brandon and Philip’s murder. The uncomfortable closeness to death is exacerbated by Hitchcock’s use of extended shots, the longest of which is nearly ten minutes. With such shots, argues Jacobs, “Hitchcock even entrapped the audience and made it complicit in the murder” (2007, 274). Because none of these shots are interrupted to give a particular character’s point of view, the camera serves as “a mobile peephole detached from any of the characters, so that the audience [can]not see that peephole as replicating one subjective point of view” (Nadel 2014, 122). Thus, the audience cannot view the murder from the perspective of the murderers, the victim, or even the party guests. Rather, they must slip on the perspective of the pure spectator, observing the film’s events as curious onlookers who, despite their proximity to the body (which is positioned nearest the apartment’s imaginary fourth wall facing the camera), are discouraged from aligning with any particular character. Still, even as the party guests begin to arrive—first David’s former friend Kenneth, then David’s fiancée, Janet, and his father and aunt, Mrs.

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Atwater—audiences are initially cued to identify more with the remorseful Philip than any of the guests, save Mr. Kentley. Unlike Brandon, Philip becomes increasingly distressed as the evening wears on. He drinks more heavily, begins to sweat profusely during discussions of David’s whereabouts, and gradually detaches himself from the other guests. While Philip occasionally looks to Brandon for guidance, he also rails against his partner’s attempts to control his behavior. When Brandon berates Philip for drinking too much, Philip forcefully pulls himself away, whispering in a threatening tone, “Don’t you ever again tell me what to do and what not to do” (emphasis added). Clearly, the “again” implies that Brandon has frequently ordered Philip around as a parent might order a child. It seems likely that while in this state, Philip had agreed to Brandon’s murder. Every mention of David Kentley by the other party guests disturbs Philip, particularly when David’s aunt, Mrs. Atwater, mistakes Kenneth for her missing nephew, which causes Philip to break his champagne glass and cut his hand. For a moment, he literally has blood on his hands, which he has done to himself without any sense of thought or awareness. The wound is quickly bandaged, however, and a few minutes later vanishes when Philip begins playing the piano for the guests. The cut’s disappearance, far from an editing mistake by Hitchcock, suggests that Philip’s musical talents are both a distraction and a refuge from his culpability in David’s murder. Clearly, he feels guilty, even as all outward signs of his guilt disappear. As a result of his appearing “genuinely distraught,” argues Peter Dellolio, “there is some viewer identification with Philip” (2008, 97). While Philip may be more relatable than Brandon, his role as David’s killer prevents him from being Rope’s most sympathetic character. That role goes to the deceased David Kentley, whose absence causes the other guests, particularly David’s father and fiancée, considerable anguish as the evening sky darkens. Because his death and the discovery of his body bookend the film’s events, David’s “visual absence throughout the film [is rendered] even more meaningful” (Diehl 2013, 35). David is described by the other characters as “polite” and “punctual,” as well as gentle and understanding; audiences learn from his fiancée’s private conversation with Kenneth that she felt comfortable with David because he accepted her without pretense or expectations. Thus, as Dellolio observes, “David’s death is made that much more unsettling for the viewer not from knowing him as a character but from being exposed to those in his life who loved him” (2008, 87). In fact, David’s name is spoken far more in the script than any other character’s name, including that of Rupert Cadell, whose

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role in the young man’s murder is kept morally and legally ambiguous throughout much of the film. During the buildup toward Rupert’s long-awaited arrival, the film’s infrequent cuts and panning shots across the apartment’s darkening skyline (a technical marvel of the era) serve to enhance the film’s ghoulish undertones as the guests gather expectantly around the cassone for food. Both Rupert’s characterization and Hitchcock’s camera direction work in tandem during these eerily long shots of party guests drinking champagne and speculating about David’s whereabouts. Rupert’s entrance into the apartment’s living room interrupts one of these speculations. When the camera pans to the room’s doorway, Rupert is already standing in it, so the exact moment when he entered the apartment cannot be determined. What he might have seen or heard prior to the other characters’ noticing him is never revealed. Initially, the other dinner guests are entranced by Rupert’s candor and ability to dominate Brandon, who up to this point has controlled the party’s rhythm. Rupert immediately wrests control from Brandon, first by mocking Brandon’s excited stutter and then by irksomely demanding to know why he and the other guests must eat their dinner from the chest. He also responds to Janet’s coy wordplay with an inquisitive insult, rebuffs the attempted civilities of David’s aunt, and insinuates to David’s father that he was unable to teach his dullard son anything at prep school. Although these awkward moments are laughed away, the guests, and by extension the audience, are made increasingly uncomfortable by Rupert’s intriguingly off-center moral balance. Like a more sophisticated version of Brandon, Rupert seems to be operating with a set of unconventional principles that allow him to move more freely about the room than the other guests (most of whom remain anchored to their dining positions) and to say whatever he wants to whomever he wishes. Rupert’s principles and their influence on impressionable minds like Brandon’s and Philip’s become the topic of conversation once their dinner of chicken and vegetables is served. As the guests eat, Rupert lightly suggests that murder may present a panacea to society’s problems, from poverty and unemployment to waiting in line for theater tickets or dinner reservations. These views are superficially considered by David’s aunt, Mrs. Atwater, who finds Rupert’s proposition of murder “such a divine idea!” until she realizes that “we’d all be murdering each other!” Rupert rejects this concern, arguing that if murder were to be elevated

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to a true art form, it would be reserved for the intellectually superior— the artistically sensitive murderer. When Rupert defines murder’s artistic merits—“After all, murder is, or should be, an art,” he tells the party guests—Brandon leaps at the chance to prove that committing murder is incontrovertible proof of one’s superiority over lesser beings. Clearly, he wants Rupert to see him as belonging to that intellectually superior group that includes Philip (because of his musical talent) and Rupert (because of his philosophical gifts). The three of them, argues Brandon, are of such rarefied stuff that they do not need to follow the laws of good and evil that govern the rest of humankind. They are above such laws, part of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “superman” group, and so can shrug off the yokes of societal and moral obligations. With this conversation, audiences are led to wonder just how morally responsible Rupert might be in David Kentley’s murder. Although Philip is the one to strangle David on Brandon’s orders, Rupert had given Brandon the moral justification to kill. Since this justification extends from Rupert’s philosophy of life and death, which he had shared with Brandon during his impressionable school years, doesn’t this make Rupert culpable as well? One would certainly think so, given the attention Rupert’s ideas attract from the other guests, who (except for Mr. Kentley) also agree that murdering anyone who inconveniences them is perfectly justified. “If it suits your purpose,” Mrs. Atwater laughs, why not? (One must wonder whether Rupert, given more time with these guests, might have turned them into acolytes as zealous as Brandon.) Yet Rupert extends murder beyond practical purposes. Murder isn’t “one of the seven lively [arts],” he concedes, but its aesthetic value must be recognized. Any murder committed for its own sake rather than for profit, passion, or revenge should serve an artistic agenda. The “superman’s” murder is a masterpiece of its own. In one sense, it allows the superior human being—the murderer—to feel alive in the face of death, just as Brandon felt overwhelmed with exhilaration right after killing David. In another sense, the “superman’s” murder rids the world of one of the vast number of inferior beings incapable of seeing things from the superior being’s perspective. Only one person questions this thinking, the dead boy’s father, Mr. Kentley, who points out the parallels between this immoral philosophy and Hitler’s justification in exterminating millions of so-called inferior beings. When Brandon attempts to disassociate himself from Hitler by stating that he would have gladly murdered Hitler (though for his

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stupidity rather than his immorality), Mr. Kentley shuts down the conversation, horrified by Brandon’s (and to a lesser extent, Rupert’s) flippant disregard for human life. Brandon briefly attempts to enlist the aid of his former teacher to regain the upper hand, but Rupert balks, as the rhetorical exercise has clearly risen to a level of tension he finds neither satisfying nor reasonable. This is where the film’s exploration of the aesthetics of evil falters. Rupert, noting to Brandon how “hard” he is “pushing” his views of murder on the other guests, asks him, “You’re not thinking about doing away with a few inferiors, are you?” There isn’t any concern or alarm in Rupert’s tone, and when Brandon grins and answers, “Who knows?” Rupert reciprocates with a smile. As far as the former schoolteacher is concerned, the dinner conversation has been nothing more than a heated debate. Thus, he and Brandon—muse and murderer—detach from each other for the next several scenes, essentially ending any further conversation of murder as a justifiable act. While Brandon tends to the guests’ coffee and dessert service, Rupert snoops about the apartment for clues to David’s whereabouts, eventually settling on Philip as the latter tries to distract himself with music and liquor. Rupert interrogates Philip about David as a garden-variety detective might interrogate an uncooperative witness—with sly, indirect lines of inquiry that cause Philip to stumble over his lies. This sequence is fraught with tension, but of a kind much different from the dinner scene, the central question no longer being the philosophical “Can murder be art?” but the simpler and more familiar “Will they be caught?” concern. This shift in the film’s source of tension cuts out the audience from any further discussion of murder. The increasingly distressed look on Philip’s face reflects his fears of being found out rather than his guilt over David’s death, and thus the audience comes to identify with him less and less as the film reaches its climax. By the film’s conclusion, Philip has simply become one of two “practitioners of a nihilistic thrill-kill” (Humbert 2010, 88). Moreover, because the intellectual pursuit of murder as art has been ended for the audience well before Rope’s conclusion, the rest of the film feels largely predictable as a result. Rupert eventually determines, through the discovery of David’s hat in the hall closet, that his former student had indeed been killed in the apartment. When he confronts Brandon about his “ugly murder,” Rupert denies his own culpability, telling him, “You’ve given my words a meaning I never dreamed of,” and insisting that, far from appreciating the aesthetic value of Brandon’s

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actions, he finds them pitiless, cruel, and cowardly and vows to seek justice for David’s death. If anyone does change in the film, it is Rupert, from philosophical cynic to moral crusader, and therefore he should be the film’s protagonist. However, given that he doesn’t arrive until the 28-minute mark (of an 80-minute film) and his misanthropic views inspired Brandon and Philip to commit murder, Rupert’s transformation is not wholly convincing— at least, not as Hitchcock’s camera has told it. With more careful pacing and a deeper exploration of the sensibilities of right and wrong, good and evil, the film’s gradually building of tension might have peaked at the film’s climax rather than midway through the dinner scene. Additionally, if Rupert’s transformation had involved his recognition of his role in David’s death, the film’s sense of claustrophobia might have been more difficult to escape. Instead, the film ends on a Hollywood trope, with Rupert forcing Brandon to see the ugliness of his murder while denying any part in its authorship. David’s body is freed by Rupert, but “the struggle,” notes Kehr, “has been too easy, the freedom too cheaply bought” (2011, 12). With greater ambiguity about the characters’ sensibilities of right and wrong, as well as the audience’s perceptions of life and death and their purpose, this “struggle” Kehr refers to might have been hard-won and ultimately worth the fight. Rupert instead identifies with the inferior masses whom Brandon and Philip, as intellectually superiors, would prey upon. When Brandon asks Rupert what he intends to do, Rupert disavows his own individual intellectualism in favor of his alliance to goodness and order: “It’s what’s society is going to do… And I can help.” The closing shot of the film shows Rupert sitting next to the chest that still entombs David’s body, holding a gun he had wrestled from Philip, which rests protectively over the chest’s lid. Whether this final act is meant to protect the deceased man’s dignity or preserve the evidence is unclear, but what is clear is that Rupert, now as close to the audience as possible and (with his back to the camera) facing the same direction viewers face, is aligned with the masses—the intellectually inferior—against the two self-identified superior murderers. They, meanwhile, have returned to their respective arts for solace: Brandon to his penchant for parties, as he helps himself to one more drink, and Philip to his music, as he plays his favorite tune for the last time. With the camera pulling back from this final frame and thus moving away from Brandon and Philip, Hitchcock appears to be distancing

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himself from their murderous exercise. The two villains have been immobilized, with their former teacher literally holding them at gunpoint while they wait for “society” to arrive and discover their act. The escalation of wailing sirens overpowers all other sounds, including Philip’s pianoplaying, while the lights darken to reveal a two-toned color pallet of glowing red and blue-green, symbolizing the approaching police vehicles. The film’s last line, uttered by a defeated Philip, speaks to this certainty: “They’re coming.” Who “they” is should be abundantly clear: law enforcement—society—is coming. By the scene’s final setup, with Rupert’s gentle, almost satisfied caress of the chest containing the decedent’s body, Hitchcock seems to be convincing viewers to want this outcome. In response to the film’s central moral question—Can murder for its own sake ever be artful?—Hitchcock’s response is as resolute as Rupert’s in Rope’ s final moments. Both player and director argue that murder can never be aesthetically or philosophically justified, even if the intended victim is somehow judged to be inferior. Moreover, when those like Rupert who speculate on such questions are confronted by others’ murders, they will see how ugly and morally reprehensible murder is. One cannot fault Hitchcock for making such an argument, especially in the Hays-Code-governed Hollywood atmosphere of the early post-WWII era. Yet considering how painstakingly Hitchcock’s setup of this murder is, from his careful design of the apartment’s layout to the actors’ choreography to allow maximum mobility of the camera, Hitchcock’s final response to that question of murder—that despite our individual pursuits, we all have “an obligation to the society we live in,” as Rupert tells Brandon—seems so simple as to render the whole experiment meaningless. Speculations about why the film failed in its initial release (though it has since garnered critical acclaim and an extensive following) have placed the blame on Hitchcock’s poor choice of subject matter for such an experimental film; the casting of Jimmy Stewart, who many critics have argued lacked the sinister depth of the manipulative Rupert (Carr 1984); and the film’s homosexual undertones, which most American audiences in 1948 chose to ignore. Yet perhaps most damning of all, argues the film’s screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, is Hitchcock’s “failure of nerve” (Rivero, 2005). Hitchcock did not fully commit to the idea of murder for experimentation, just as he couldn’t fully commit to a wholly experimental style of filming for Rope. As noted by Tania Modleski, “Rope is famous for

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aspiring to appear to be filmed in one take, although it does contain cuts, and even its ‘masked’ cuts do not entirely disguise themselves as cuts, just as, in the end, Brandon and Philip fail … to keep their crimes hidden, thereby of course also failing to commit the perfect crime” (2016, 148). During several of the film’s most tense moments, such as the pivotal dinner scene, when murder’s artful qualities are being seriously mulled over by the principal cast, Hitchcock breaks this tension with an unmasked cut rather than maintain focus on its anxious characters. Another ill-timed conventional cut deflates the tension of the film’s penultimate sequence. Up to this point, Brandon and Philip seem to have gotten away with their crime, with Rupert and the other guests having left the apartment to look for David. When Rupert returns, insisting he lost his cigarette case (clearly a ruse), Brandon recognizes the teacher’s challenge for more discussion and obliges him, first by asking Rupert where he believes David might be and then encouraging Rupert to restage their crime as he would have done it. Just as Rupert’s eyes (through the camera’s point of view) pan over to the cassone, however, Hitchcock cuts away to Rupert’s face, who notices with growing alarm that Brandon appears to be carrying a gun in his pocket. At this point in the film, Rupert’s tone and pitch shift from speculative to purely emotional—first fear, then anger, and, upon discovering David’s body, horror—as he distances himself intellectually from his two former students and their murder. This conventional cut, which takes place at the 59:44 mark, is arguably the most critically salient in defeating Rope’s experimental purpose because it also cuts Rupert off from his own moral culpability in David’s murder. From this point onward, Rupert rejects any kind of intellectual discussion with Brandon and forces the cassone open. Horrified by the sight of David’s body, Rupert insists to Brandon, “There must have been something in you from the very start that let you do this thing”— something that Rupert himself lacks, as he could never take the life of another human being. Yet Rupert had spent the better part of the film musing that he could murder, would even condone laws protecting the superior man’s right to murder, and could appreciate its artfulness. If nothing else, murdering a few inferiors would simplify life for everyone else, himself included. Rupert’s fascination with the rhetorical exercise Brandon presents to him when he asks him how he would murder David also renders Rupert’s proclamations of justice and decency hollow. Rupert’s refusal to accept any responsibility—moral or otherwise—for David’s murder isn’t a fatal flaw. Rope is still a highly entertaining film,

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and for most Hitchcock fans and critics, it remains one of his better ventures, albeit not quite on par with Notorious or Vertigo. The very qualities that could have realized this experiment more fully—namely, a more probing look into the murderer’s mind and the elimination of all conventional cuts (of which there are five)—are also the very qualities Hitchcock anticipated his contemporary audiences rejecting. Thus, he presents basic, familiar definitions of good and evil as standards by which to judge all human behavior rather than exploring how such concepts are shaped and blurred by the individual’s interpretations of them. The film’s conventional treatment of morality may have been more palatable for audiences back then or even today, but a more daring, experimental exploration of the film’s themes of evil and art, as Hitchcock almost allowed himself to do, would have lingered much longer in the public’s consciousness, raising questions well worth asking with no clear-cut answers.

References Allen, Richard. 2003. “Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense Theory and Practice.” In Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, edited by Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, 163–182. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Carr, Jay. 1984. “Hitchcock’s Rope Notable for its Claustrophobia.” Boston Globe, June 5. Dellolio, Peter J. 2008. “Filmic Space and Real Time in Rope.” The Midwest Quarterly 50: 87–101. Diehl, Heath A. 2013. “Reading Hitchcock/Reading Queer: Adaptation, Narrativity, and a Queer Mode of Address in Rope, Strangers on a Train, and Psycho.” Clues 31: 33–43. Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1948. Rope. Transatlantic Pictures. Humbert, David. 2010. “Desire and Monstrosity in the Disaster Film: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 17: 87–103. Jacobs, Steven. 2007. The Wrong House: The architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Kehr, Dave. 2011. When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, D. A. 2013. “Hitchcock’s Understyle: A Too-Close View of Rope.” Representations 121: 1–30. Modleski, Tania. 2016. “Remastering the Master: Hitchcock After Feminism.” Literary History 47, no. 1: 135–158.

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Nadel, Alan. 2014. “Alfred Hitchcock.” In Fifty Hollywood Directors, edited by Yvonne Tasker and Suzanne Leonard, 118–127. New York: Routledge. Rivero, Enrique. 2005. “Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection.” Variety, October 30, 2005. Salt, Barry. 1977. “Film Style and Technology in the Forties.” Film Quarterly 31, no. 1: 46–57.

CHAPTER 27

Textual Evil and Performative Precarity in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho Nicky Gardiner

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? (Ellis 1991, 377)

Introduction This question posed by Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’ infamous 1991 novel American Psycho is perhaps more complex than it first appears. To many readers, and particularly the novel’s initial reviewers for whom Bateman is “the embodiment of evil in its most unfathomable and debased form” (Serpell 2010, 48), the answer is likely a resounding: yes, to both. Indeed, considering Bateman’s thoroughly twisted mentality and monstrous deeds such a distinction might seem nothing more than a laughable splitting of hairs, an insincere attempt at deriving philosophical import from an otherwise purposeless litany of depraved acts. And yet, at

N. Gardiner (B) University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_27

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the heart of Ellis’ text lurks an undeniable ontological ambiguity, a preoccupation with the tentative distinctions between “being” and “doing.” Responding to his girlfriend Evelyn’s accusation that he is “being a lunatic”, Bateman responds “what do you mean being?…I fucking am one” (Ellis 1991, 333, original emphasis). Elsewhere, however, Bateman refers to himself as a “rough resemblance of a human being” (282) fundamentally devoid of essence: “there is an idea of Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory…I am simply not there” (376–377, original emphasis). At different moments throughout the novel, then, Bateman is depicted as both pure essence and pure performance, rendering his status as “an embodiment of pure evil” (Storey 2005, 58) more ambiguous than it initially appears. It is not only the ontological essentialism of Bateman’s evil that is debated in such scenes, but also that of the text itself. Forcing the reader to inhabit its anti-hero’s violent, misogynistic and materialistic mindset, American Psycho’ s first-person mode of recitation invites parallels between Bateman as a character and the novel as his textual extension. Appearing just two pages prior to the line quoted in the above epigraph, Bateman’s reflection that “surface surface surface was all that anyone found any meaning in” (375) is commonly read as a testament to Bateman’s psychological superficiality and, synecdochically, as a meta-textual manifesto articulating American Psycho’s underlying aesthetic credo (Serpell 2010, 60; Giles 2006, 163; Mandel 2008, 14; Murphet 2002, 51). Enticed into a state of meta-textual reflection, then, the reader is invited to extend the question “is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?” to the novel itself as a potential performative agent. This question of American Psycho’s textual performance of evil is no less complex than that of its main character. The novel’s gratuitous depiction of Bateman’s unpunished murders brazenly undermines judiciary authority and aesthetically revels in its transgressive antics. From a certain perspective, this renders its simple narrative recitation as “a criminal act itself” (Thomas 2003, 9). In this sense, American Psycho certainly performs evil (at least in a discursive sense), but does this performance make it an evil novel in and of itself? Put differently, does American Psycho’s discursive performance of evil necessarily condemn it as a perpetrator of evil that materially re-inscribes and re-enforces the actions it depicts? Or is there, perhaps, a parodic quality at play that enables the text to become more than the sum of its evil deeds, allowing it “do” one thing, yet “be” another? At both the level of character and composition, it is this

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uncertain relationship between “being” and “doing” that forms American Psycho’s narrative engine, problematizing its status as a text that both parodies and perpetuates the violence it describes. In doing so, American Psycho’s textual representation of evil becomes a vehicle through which the limits of parody and performativity are explored. Although Bateman is considered by some to be “one of the most evil characters in literary history” (Murphet 2002, 49) and several studies have explored the representation of evil in American Psycho (Serpell 2010; Kilbourn 2005; Heyler 2000; Mailer 1991), rarely do such analyses consider the extent to which the text itself has been perceived and construed as an evil literary artifact. Therefore, this chapter looks to consider this latter form of “textual evil”; that is, American Psycho’s status as an evil literary object, how this “evil” is constructed within its initial critical reception, and how it manifests in the novel’s aesthetic strategies of complicit critique. It is worth keeping in mind that such critical themes are not limited to the text currently under investigation. The notion of performative accountability—that is, the extent to which a fictional work might be deemed to complicity perpetuate the acts it depicts—is a common feature in the analysis of texts that have been deemed transgressive, obscene or otherwise “evil.” Of course, the term “evil” is a versatile signifier, highly dependent on socio-historical context and relative moralistic frameworks. However, while the extent to which certain texts depict evil is contingent on such contexts, the categorization of a text itself as evil is more specialized. Rather, the particular notion of evil as applied to literary texts in themselves generally falls into the category of “evil-ascontagion,” a particular formulation popularized in the late nineteenth century (Wallen 2011, 76), but still present today (70). Within this context, evil is construed as the processes by which the critical faculties of “susceptible individuals” is overwrought by the manipulations of a malevolent external force (75), in this case the literary text. As indicated by Carr and Davis in “The Lure of Evil” (2007) and Rafter in “Evil Literature” (2013), this mode of literary condemnation based on corruptive potential remains present in contemporary debates, particularly those regarding children’s literature and modern censorship. With this framework in mind, “textual evil” might be understood as a literary work’s capacity to, subconsciously or otherwise, influence or compel its readers to replicate certain acts or experience certain affects that the dominant socio-historical context deems undesirable or taboo.

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Inherent within such debates surrounding textual evil and literary corruptibility lies a host of presumptions surrounding the limits of discursive performativity, the constitutive capacity of signification and its potential to construct, perpetuate or otherwise bring into being the practices it represents. Put simply, critical positions on the extent to which texts representing evil might themselves be considered “evil texts” implicitly involve a range of suppositions and presumptions about discursive performativity and its effective limits. Furthermore, such issues surrounding a text’s performative accountability are exacerbated in the case of parody, when the extent to which the discursive display of certain activities either reiterates or undermines the worldview it articulates acquires an interpretive and aesthetic, as well as moralistic, significance. As such, American Psycho’s turbulent critical reception as a text that both represents evil and potentially perpetuates evil situates it as a strategic subject through which to evaluate the intersection of textual evil and performative accountability. In pursuing such an analysis, this chapter does not so much ask what performativity might reveal about the nature of evil, as what evil might reveal about the nature of performativity. In the following sections, American Psycho’s hostile critical reception will be explored in order to clarify the three dominant forms of evil that have been associated with Ellis’ novel: consumerism, violence, and performative precarity. In doing so, this chapter argues that the critical controversy generated by the novel can be seen to index a particular anxiety regarding the destabilization of the boundaries between complicity and parodic condemnation. This response will then be contextualized through Judith Butler’s contemporaneous works on performativity. Following on from the work of Moya Lloyd (albeit while advancing a slightly altered rhetoric), it will be argued that in Gender Trouble (1990) Butler solidifies the subversive prowess of parodic performativity (that is, the ability of hyperbolic recitation to undermine the dominant script it parodies) by conceptually separating it from the notion of performative invocation (the constitutive power of discourse) on which it is ultimately dependant. Finally, the chapter will explore how American Psycho’s particular brand of “textual evil” collapses this tenuous distinction between parodic performativity and performative invocation, exposing a “performative precarity” in which subversion can never be entirely disentangled from re-enforcement.

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Ellis’ True Offense: American Psycho ’s Critical Reception At the time of publication American Psycho’s critical reception was overwhelmingly negative, the text being “almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment” (Brien 2006). Nevertheless, some critics such as Fay Weldon (1991), Nora Rawlinson (1991), and Anna Quindlen (1990) praised American Psycho’s use of satire as a fresh and affecting “epitaph for the 80’s” (Quindlen 1990). From this perspective, the evil evidenced by Bateman’s violence is figured as an ontological metaphor for the implicit economic violence of late twentieth-century consumer capitalism. This parodic framework simultaneously identifies and domesticates the source of evil within Ellis’ novel by establishing a critical distance that renders it recognizable and hence containable (Abel 2001, 57; Freccero 1997, 55). While relatively few critics mounted this defense on American Psycho’s original release, it is worth noting that this satirical reading has become more popular in recent attempts to rehabilitate the novel, with critics such as Heise arguing that “American Psycho translates for readers the massive social costs of neoliberal economics into a terrifyingly intimate experience of violence by a psychotic subject who embodies neoliberal theory and performs it through his repeated acts of disembowelment” (2011, 135).1 More prominently, however, many early reviewers accused the novel of glamorizing and perpetuating the (often gendered) violence that it represents (Page 1991, 51; Hindmarch 1991; Brannon 1993). Refusing to indulge the parodic pretensions of Ellis’ text (Abel 2001, 39), much of the novel’s condemnation revolves around a, somewhat simplistic, reading in which, as Freccero notes, “representation is construed as advocacy, figuration is construed as performativity” (50). This is particularly true of the radical feminist contingency of the novel’s detractors, such as Baxter and Craft who claim that the novel essentially functions as “just another ‘How-To-Kill-Women’ manual for that ever-growing special interest group: the good ol’, all-Amerikan misogynists” (248, SIC).

1 See also Lee 2013, Hume 2011, Colby 2011, etc. This rising acknowledgment of the text’s satirical dimension is both exemplified (Abel 2001, 57) and perpetuated (Eldridge 2008, 23) in Mary Harron’s widely acclaimed cinematic adaptation (2000). However, as we shall see, a purely satirical reading of Ellis’ text is, in many ways, as simplistic as those which absolutely refuse to engage with its parodic orientation.

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As indicated by Freccero’s comment, within this very literal reading it is performativity itself which constitutes the threat of American Psycho and grounds it as an evil text. Eclipsing the distinction between representation and enactment, such critiques emphasize American Psycho’s discursive performativity to implicate it in the content it depicts. Of course, the insistence that representations of violence serve to incite and legitimate violence is a somewhat simplistic gloss of both Austinian and Butlerian notions of discursive performativity, but this is nevertheless the notion of the concept that appears to circulate within such critiques. Although American Psycho was certainly subject to both a domesticating parodic reading and a simplistic performative reading, a closer analysis of the novel’s contemporaneous reviews reveals a slightly more nuanced and, I think, interesting position. In fact, the majority of critics who derided the book on release do not so much overlook its potential satirical aspirations, but rather argue that its satire is hampered by aesthetic and imaginative feculence (Moore 1990; Sheppard 1990; Smith 1991; Rosenblatt 1990; Plagens 1991; Mailer 1991; Stiles 1990; Iannone 1991; Lehmann-Haupt 1991). For these critics, Ellis’ text is “negligible” (Smith 1991), “disgusting” (Sheppard 1990), “lame” (Rosenblatt 1990) or, perhaps most damning of all, “simply not written well” (Mailer 1991, 124). Such criticisms argue that the novel’s aesthetic failures necessarily fatally undermine its parodic potential by implicating the text within the same logic it supposedly condemns. As Iannone states, “the catastrophic inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity that turns the novel into an example of the very disease it purports to diagnose” (1991, 52). Essentially, this position, which acknowledges American Psycho’s potentially parodic aspirations but claim that it fails to deliver due to artistic and imaginative incompetence, occupies a precarious middle-ground between the satirical and performative readings outlined above. What is at issue, here, is not so much that the novel represents evil or that it advocates and incites evil, but rather that it uncomfortably blurs the distinctions between critical articulation and advocacy. American Psycho may not be the first novel to do so, but what is extraordinary, here, is the extent to which this relatively innocuous aesthetic feature receives the full weight of American Psycho’s critical opprobrium. For example, R. Z. Sheppard states that “to write superficially about superficiality and disgustingly about the disgusting and call it, as Ellis does, a challenge to his readers complacency does violence to his audience and to the fundamental nature of his craft”

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(1990, 100, my emphasis). Similarly, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt argues that “Mr Ellis’ true offence is to imply that the human mind has grown so corrupt that it can no longer distinguish form and content” (1991, my emphasis). In these instances, the violence and offense caused by Ellis’ blurring of parody and reiteration surpasses, if not equals, that caused by his depictions of Bateman’s evil deeds. Put simply, the novel’s tendency to destabilize the boundaries between performance and representation, expression and subversion is attacked with an acerbic contempt as if it were, itself, a source of evil. Furthermore, as indicated by the sheer quantity of original reviewers who adopt this stance, it is this broader form of “textual evil” that structures and preoccupies the critical hostility that American Psycho originally received from the literary establishment. This critical position might be explained in two ways. Firstly, the extreme content of Ellis’ novel fundamentally “elevates” the discourse, encouraging his reviewers to engage with the American Psycho’s in a particularly intense and hyperbolic register. By talking about extreme violence, the novel receives extreme violence in response (consider, for example, Roger Rosenblatt’s aggressively titled review article, “Snuff This Book!” [1990]). In this sense, it might be argued that the novel’s rhetoric performatively infiltrates and structures that of its reviewers, compelling them to hyperbolize their aesthetic responses (Butler 1993, 242). Secondly, this hyperbolic reaction also indicates an extreme apprehension about the precarity by which parodic performativity might be distinguished from simple replication, the degree to which the satirical reiteration of a dominant code might be seen to support rather than subvert that code. The discomfort indexed by these elevated responses to American Psycho’s aesthetic of complicit critique taps into and articulates a wider cultural anxiety surrounding the parodic possibilities of performativity itself in the late twentieth century. As we shall consider in the following section, the early work of Judith Butler plays a key role in both expressing and obscuring this anxiety. Lying at the intersection between performative invocation and parodic performativity, American Psycho’s indeterminate position between expression and subversion exploits this anxiety in order to induce its unsettling affect. For its original reviewers, it is this exploitation that constitutes American Psycho’s textual evil. As such, American Psycho’s cultural significance might be seen to derive from its narrative exposure of the fragility of parodic performativity. Collapsing the boundaries between expression and subversion, Ellis’ novel pushes parody to its limits, problematizing its efficacy as a mode of

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political critique. Furthermore, American Psycho’s graphic extremity infiltrates and elevates the surrounding discourse, resulting in a surprisingly lively and impassioned debate regarding such parodic limits within the subsequent critical backlash.

Polysemous Performativity: Invocation, Parody, and Precarity As Judith Butler retrospectively notes in her 1999 introduction to Gender Trouble (1990), the term “performativity” is a slippery, polysemous term that acquires different meanings depending on where, when and by whom it is deployed. Indeed, within Butler’s own work the term has undergone continuous revision in response to misinterpretation, critique or developments in understanding (1999, xv). The particular account of this fecund term that will be evoked within the present chapter is greatly influenced by Moya Lloyd’s critical genealogy of performativity as it appears in the early master works of Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993). In her illuminating essay “Performativity, Parody, Politics,” Lloyd charts the diminishing political efficacy of performativity throughout these texts, leading her to state that “the idea common to some readings of Gender Trouble, that dressing up tout court will lead to…gender transformation is downplayed in Bodies That Matter” (1999, 205). However, whereas Lloyd primarily criticizes this transition, claiming that Butler’s more ambivalently subversive model of performativity “confuses, rather than clarifies” (1999, 210) its political efficacy, I would argue that the “confusion” induced by this revision is both productive and necessary. Pace Lloyd, I would contend that Butler’s changing conception of performativity strategically muddles the clarity and purity of nominally “transgressive” or “subversive” acts in a manner that prompts a critical encounter with performative precarity. In doing so, what is lost in political efficacy is gained through a more nuanced account of the dangers of subversive acts being recuperated and commodified within a late-capitalist context (Butler 1990, xxii–xxiii). For Lloyd, this changing concept of performativity is facilitated by an initial separation of two interrelated phenomena in Gender Trouble— which we will term “performative invocation” and “parodic performativity”—and their ultimate collapse in Bodies That Matter. Elaborating on the work of Foucault in The History of Sexuality (1990), Butler refers to

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performative invocation as “the constitutive power…of representational claims” (1990, 6) to regulate and construct the political institutions and subject positions (here, gendered difference) that they ostensibly work to describe. In response to what she views as the omnipresent inescapabilty of performative invocation’s discursive power (Butler 1990, 7), Butler contends that it is only with the internal subversion of constitutive speech acts through hyperbolic recitation that such acts might be resisted (42). The “parodic performativity” of these hyperbolic recitations reveals discourse’s constitutive (rather than simply reflective) operations, exposing the artificiality of any notion of a pre-discursive ontological essence (192). There is, however, a certain recursive cyclicality to such acts of parodic performativity. After all, in the same moment that hyperbolic recitation exposes the constitutive powers of discourse, it simultaneously reveals its own constitutive power as a further re-inscription (Lloyd 1999, 202). Somewhat paradoxically, the revelation itself becomes implicated in what is revealed. Although Butler tentatively acknowledges this tendency (1990, 189)—keen as she is to emphasize parodic performativity’s subversive potential—her prose ultimately obfuscates this characteristic, with generalized claims such as: “parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identity” (188) or “the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between [performances], in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition” (192, SIC). As Lloyd goes on to argue, Butler’s exaggerative prose results in the subsequent appropriation of performativity by certain “voluntarist” subsections of the queer and feminist community, “predicated on the ambiguity in Butler’s work concerning the connections between performance and performativity” (1999, 209). This ambiguously delineated relationship between performance and performativity—or, within the terminology advanced in this chapter, between parodic performativity and performative invocation—leads to a particular notion of parodic performativity disseminating gender politics of the early to mid-90s. For example, within the works of theorists such as Martin (1992), Hawkes (1995), and Bell et al. (1994), parodic performativity is configured as “inherently subversive” (Lloyd 1999, 198), a non-problematically liberating and transgressive medium through which discursive power can be resisted.

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It is against this backdrop of glamorized parodic subversion that American Psycho is released. As such, the hostility directed at its emphatically compromised satire takes on a new dimension. After all, the threat of American Psycho is not simply limited to the barbaric acts of misogynistic violence it depicts, but an assault upon the very satirical strategies by which gendered difference might be resisted. For example, Naomi Wolf identifies American Psycho as a particular example of how “violence against women, once transgressively handy as a way to epater those bourgeoisie, is now the same burghers daily luncheon meat” (1991, SIC). From this perspective, Ellis’ novel becomes an emblematic participant of a wider cultural trend in which parody is recuperated and denigrated as an effective mode of political resistance. It is, perhaps, for this reason that feminist critiques of the novel in the early 90s often refuse to even acknowledge the text’s satirical potential for fear that it might pollute a powerful tool with which to subvert gendered discourse. As such, American Psycho’s performative precarity not only furnishes the reader with brutal representations of female abuse, but also starts to dismantle the theoretical apparatus by which such abuse might be resisted. Evil indeed.

‘I’m Not the Boy Next Door, I’m a Fucking Evil Psychopath’: American Psycho’s Performative Precarity As we have considered, in Butler’s early work and the cultural politics of the early 90s the potential elision of performative invocation and parodic performativity is minimized. However, it is precisely this elision—or “performative precarity”—that is emphasized in American Psycho. As we saw earlier, the majority of the text’s initial reviewers identify this emphatic propensity to replicate the situations it critiques as a source of textual evil. Therefore, a certain defensiveness regarding the political utility of parodic performativity might be seen to inform these early rejections of Ellis’ work. However, while I am not interested in uncovering Ellis’ authorial intentions or rehabilitating his literary credibility, I would like to maintain that it is precisely this dynamic by which the text constantly threatens to descend from critique to reiteration that makes American Psycho such an enduring, challenging, and, at times, remarkable text. Contrary to satirical readings which regard the novel as pure parody or performative readings

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which frame it as a mere extension of the evil logic it depicts, I would like to consider several of the aesthetic strategies through which American Psycho generates ambivalence toward its own (emphatically compromised) mode of critique. I contend that this ambivalence productively confronts its reader with the limitations and possibilities of parodic performativity, the necessary complicity of dissent and the threat of performative invocation. That is, rather than purely condoning the images and mentality it represents or purely critiquing such representations, American Psycho’s performative precarity explicitly dramatizes the possibilities and limitations of performance-as-critique. Neglecting how this reflexive skepticism operates as the text’s primary representational strategy, a reading that reduces the text to parody is as reductive as a reading that condemns it as immoral. A prominent means by which American Psycho indexes performative precarity at the level of discourse is through its indeterminate deployment of sarcasm. Throughout the text, the general indistinguishability between subversive and authentic uses of language is narratively foregrounded by the characters’ constant inability to differentiate between sarcasm and genuine statements. For example, Bateman is unable to determine whether Christie is making a sarcastic comment (Ellis 1991, 283), whether Van Patten in speaking “timidly [or] (mock-timidly)?” (317) or if his acquaintances are feigning ignorance for comic effect (318) while simultaneously boasting that “I’ve perfected my fake response to a degree where it’s so natural sounding that no-one notices” (156–157). This indeterminacy is frequently exaggerated to maddening intensity, such as when Bateman’s deadpan statement “I have no idea who Gregory is” is met with the response “‘I adore your sense of humour’…but she’s serious, not joking. Evelyn really is paying me a compliment” (122, original emphasis). In this deceptively complex exchange, Bateman’s admission is confused for sarcasm and is met with a sarcastic comment which is interpreted as genuine (which it potentially is, although the reader is only granted Bateman’s unreliable narration as evidence). In such moments, the disorientating omnipresence of sarcasm not only indicates the idolization of cool detachment endemic to late 80s commercial culture, but also exposes the precarious nature of parodic performativity, as the characters seem perpetually oblivious to whether their companions are speaking in jest or in earnest. As with parody, such instances involve the inversion of signifiers to denote their opposite—as adoration becomes recoded as disdain—but as this process becomes indistinguishable from

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genuine signification the discursive apparatus by which these meanings are produced themselves break down. Saturated with the overbearing potential for sarcasm, in American Psycho’s verbal exchanges signification becomes de-regulated, de-localized and ultimately disconnected from either meaning or intention.2 This parallel between the indeterminacy of sarcasm and the novel’s own dramatization of performative precarity through textual evil is perhaps most clearly telegraphed in Bateman’s frequently ignored or misunderstood confessions. In these instances, his genuine admissions to brutal acts of criminal harm are regularly brushed aside as jokes or simply ignored, paralleling the reader’s potential uncertainty as to the critical stance that the novel takes on its apparent glorification of violence. Bateman’s frequent outbursts that “I’m a fucking evil psychopath” (20), that he wanders what a woman’s “head would look like on a stick” (92) or that he wants to “pulverize a woman’s face with a large, heavy brick” (313) are reliably received with alarming indifference and good humor. Perhaps most memorably, the novel’s closing moment of potential retribution is bathetically deflated as Bateman’s full confession to his lawyer, Carnes, is interpreted as nothing more than an amusing joke (357). As Simpson states, “in the world of American Psycho, superficially slick but hollow characters such as Carnes are too self-absorbed to listen to another’s words and too vapid to realize their content” (2000, 151, SIC). This constant display of evident yet unacknowledged evil seems to warn the reader that its own depiction of evil is something more than simple mockery, while, simultaneously, the farcical incredibility of the obliviousness demonstrated by the recipients of Bateman’s confessions indicate that its depiction is a little less than real. American Psycho’s indeterminate use of sarcasm to linguistically foreground the precarity of parodic discourse is supplemented by the novel’s wider mode of recitation, the “notoriously dispassionate narrative voice” (Mandel 2008, 14) characteristic of “blank fiction” (a subgenre that fuses “an emphasis on the extreme, the marginal and the violent” [Annesley 1998, 1] and a “blank, atonal perspective” [2]). This non-affective and indifferent narrative mode refuses any overt condemnation or approval of 2 This dynamic climaxes in the novel’s final scene which depicts a chaotic heteroglossia of glib, meaningless idioms such as “just say no” (211) and “life sucks and then you die” (211) that dissolves discourse into “random fragments of linguistic connection that break apart as quickly as they form” (Simpson, 153).

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the evil acts it depicts, exacerbating the ambiguity surrounding the stance that the reader is being encouraged to take. Consequently, within American Psycho’s blank fiction, the relative lack of overt textual clues “puts all obligation for interpretation on the reader” (Hume 2011, 121) and forces them to divine parodic intention based more on faith than concrete textual evidence. Although there are occasional episodes of buffoonery or farce that more clearly advocate a satirical orientation—for example, the comic misrecognitions of “Another Night” (309–315)—the most prominent strategy that Ellis deploys is one which renders this orientation most precarious; that is, the strategy of “hyperbolic cataloguing,” the extended recitation of items and activities that structure the novel’s representation of murder and consumerism alike. Take, for example, the instances of excessive cataloguing in which Bateman describes the contents of his lavish apartment (15–17), his wardrobe (35–36) or his musical preferences (72–74) in excruciating detail. In these moments, Bateman’s excessive referential pedantry raises the possibility of a parodic authorial intention, but in a manner that resists explicit confirmation. Mimicking the breathless superlatives of infomercials and promotional brochures, the novel’s depiction of Bateman’s commodities evokes a register in which exaggeration is second nature, making it increasingly difficult to identify whether its hyperbolic tone signifies realistic recitation or parodic amplification. Indeed, where exaggeration can be seen to take place is not so much at the level of register, but at the level of magnitude, as Bateman’s ceaseless cataloguing of consumer products extends up to seven pages at a time. Here, parody is insinuated through quantity, but remains ambiguous through quality, inducing a confusion of the extent to which critique might be seen to occur. Similarly, the text’s exhaustive circulation of designer names is contrasted with the seeming interchangeability of personal names to lampoon popular obsession with status symbols as a dehumanizing process while at the same time participating in the cultural elevation of these very symbols. While Bateman himself suffers from frequent misrecognition and regularly exhibits an inability to correctly identify his colleagues, he never has such trouble identifying their clothes and the associated designers: “someone else has on a suit tailored by Anderson and Sheppard. Someone who looks like Todd Lauder, and may in fact be” (Ellis 1991, 210). The abundance of these branded names elevates their products to super-human entities, thereby diluting and eventually

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obscuring the individuals who wear them. However, while this continuous reiteration implicitly critiques consumerism’s elision of personal identity, it also potentially serves the economic interest of the brands in question by maintaining product visibility and awareness in the mind of the reader-consumer. Through such techniques, American Psycho’s use of excessive referentiality as a satirical strategy becomes virtually indistinguishable from product placement. The repeated deployment of excessive cataloguing as a narrative trope therefore complicates the reader’s easy identification of a parodic orientation and constantly threatens the possibility of promoting, rather than critiquing, Bateman’s lifestyle. As mentioned previously, the evil acts of violence displayed and enacted by American Psycho is regularly justified and contained as an ontological metaphor for the economic and social violence inflicted by predatory consumerism, particularly in more recent criticism. And yet, as we have seen, even within its depiction of the evils of capital accumulation and reification, Ellis’ novel occupies a precariously interstitial position, as his satirical send up of the Wall Street elite’s banal preoccupation with appearance, status and commodities constantly threatens to transform into a perverse adoration of the commercial system it appears to undermine. Just as the creation, publication, and circulation of Ellis’ novel within the literary industry of the late twentieth century demands participation in the very capitalist system its parodic function critiques, so too do the text’s aesthetics demand a reflexive complicity in the networks of meanings it condemns. It is also germane to note that American Psycho’s relentless descriptions of murder, torture and post-mortem mutilation employs the same representational method of hyperbolic cataloguing (Annesley 1998, 14). Depicting Bateman’s murderous activities and the corporeal viscera of his desecrated victims with the same encyclopaedic intensity as its material catalogues, the text’s gleeful gaze similarly threatens to collapse parody into advocacy by covertly endorsing the proceedings it documents. That is to say, so outrageous and lingering are the novel’s torturous depictions, that their representation in and of itself potentially run the risk of advocacy (a sentiment exploited by simplistic performative readings). Here, American Psycho’s relentless corporeal gaze threatens to undermine the critical distance by which the reader might safely localize and contain the perverse acts to Bateman and the social logic he supposedly represents.

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The complicity of the text’s representational vigor is exacerbated by the fact that Bateman’s violent episodes often incorporate scopophilic practices—such as the videotaping of victims (Ellis 1991, 162)—that threaten to collapse the distance between the text and the actions it depicts. At the same time, the emphasis placed on Bateman’s role as both spectator and perpetrator of his horrifying deeds implicates the reader as complicit in the act of violence. The extremity of the text’s depiction resituates the reader as voyeur rather than a detached witness, assaulting but also potentially thrilling the reader. They are, after all, encouraged to derive a reluctant pleasure from such scenes through contrast between “its boringly slow passages of endlessly repeated details of Bateman’s life and the speeded-up interruptions of violent outbursts” (Abel 2001, 45). And yet, of course, the relief and release of these intensely charged scenes inevitably give way to the same predictable ennui and “clinical flatness of tone” (Abel 2001, 49) that characterizes Bateman’s material cataloguing. As such, the prolonged spectacles of torture and mutilation that mark the reader as both accomplice and victim (Mandel 2008, 11) to Bateman’s evil deeds, seemingly perpetuate the violence they depict in a manner that both alleviates and reiterates the evils of consumer capitalism. In doing so, the novel’s scenes of torture and abuse are permeated by a double logic that creates an uncertain distance between the reader and the image as one of ambiguous condemnation and consent.

Conclusion As this brief consideration of American Psycho’s aesthetic strategies indicate, the very feature that many of the novel’s early critics identify as its compromising failure, its entanglement of expression and subversion, might in fact be understood as its core narrative strategy, in which the concept of parodic performativity is problematized. Furthermore, this initial critical reception might be historically contextualized as symptomatic of a moment in which parodic performativity constitutes a prominent tool of political resistance, especially among queer and feminist circles. As such, American Psycho’s original designation and rejection as an “evil text” can be better understood, and perhaps resisted, when considered within its intellectual context. Nevertheless, despite the extremity of this initial critical backlash against American Psycho, history appears to have retroactively bestowed

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the novel’s emphatically complicit critique with a certain degree of legitimacy. In response to subsequent criticism and the excessive extension of parody as a politically resistive panacea, Butler would come to revise the concept of parodic performativity in her 1993 text, Bodies That Matter (Lloyd 1999, 204). In her famous analysis of Paris is Burning, she explicitly states that “drag is not unproblematically subversive” and details how the parodic recitation of master-scripts might simultaneously perpetuate, rather than ridicule, those self-same discourses and ideologies (Butler 1993, 231). In fact, the emphasis Butler places on this revision of parodic performativity is not insubstantial, dedicating the text’s concluding paragraphs to an explanation that performativity describes this relation of being implicated in that which one opposes, this turning of power against itself to produce alternative modalities of power, to establish a kind of political contestation that is not a ‘pure’ opposition, a ‘transcendence’ of contemporary relations of power, but a difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure. (242, SIC)

Echoes of American Psycho’s complicit critique can certainly be heard reverberating throughout this closing paragraph. And so, with a certain irony, the feminist critique that American Psycho’s performative elements constitute its textual evil once more regain a certain legitimacy. However, the notion of performativity advanced here is not the discursive constructivism of performative invocation, or the unbridled subversion of parodic performativity, but the Janus-faced ambivalence of performative precarity. As we have seen, for the majority of the novel’s original critics, American Psycho’s “textual evil” is located in its staging of expression and subversion’s irreducible entanglement and parody’s implicit continuation of those logics it aims to undermine. And yet, in light of Butler’s later comments, perhaps there is a certain value to the foregrounding of this conflation. Perhaps this unsettling precarity provides a necessary confrontation with the ethical aporia of artistic subversion and the tenuous conceptual models by which it might be differentiated from the dominant discourses it attempts to undermine. Perhaps by inducing an uncomfortably intimate encounter with the impossibility of non-complicit subversion, American Psycho unrelentingly showcases the “difficult labour of forging a future from resources inevitably impure.” In other words, perhaps Ellis’ evil text is not so evil after all.

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References Abel, Marco. 2001. “Judgement Is Not an Exit: Toward an Affective Criticism of Violence with American Psycho.” Angelaki 6, no. 3: 137–154. Annesley, James. 1998. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture, and the Contemporary American Novel. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Baxter, Tara, and Nikki Craft. 1993. “There Are Better Ways of Taking Care of Bret Easton Ellis Than Just Censoring Him.” In Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography, edited by Diana E. H. Russell, 245–253. Buckingham: Open University Press. Bell, David, Jon Binnie, Julia Cream, and Gill Valentine. 1994. “All Hyped Up and No Place to Go.” Gender, Place & Culture 1, no. 1: 31–47. Brannon, Robert. 1993. “Torturing Women as Fine Art: Why Some Women and Men Are Boycotting Knopf.” In Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography, edited by Diana E. H. Russell, 239–245. Buckingham: Open University Press. Brien, Donna Lee. 2006. “The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment.” M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture 9, no. 5. https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.265. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge. Carr, David, and Robert Davis. 2007. “The Lure of Evil: Exploring Moral Formation on the Dark Side of Literature and the Arts.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 41, no. 1: 95–112. Colby, Georgina. 2011. Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Eldridge, David. 2008. “The Generic American Psycho.” Journal of American Studies 42, no. 1: 19–33. Ellis, Bret Easton. 1991. American Psycho. London: Picador. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage. Freccero, Carla. 1997. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics 27, no. 2: 44–58. Giles, James Richard. 2006. The Spaces of Violence. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Harron, Mary, dir. 2000. American Psycho. United States: Lions Gate Films, 2015. DVD. Hawkes, Gail. 1995. “Dressing Up—Cross Dressing and Sexual Dissonance.” Journal of Gender Studies 4, no. 3: 261–270.

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Rosenblatt, Roger. 1990. “Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away With Murder?” New York Times, December 16, 1990. Serpell, C. Namwali. 2010. “Repetition and the Ethics of Suspended Reading in American Psycho.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 51, no. 1: 47–73. Sheppard, R. Z. 1990. “Books: A Revolting Development.” Time, October 29, 1990. Simpson, Philip L. 2000. Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Smith, Joan. 1991. “Chainsaw by Gucci, Rats by Rive Gauche.” The Observer, April 18, 1991. Stiles, Todd. 1990. “How Bret Ellis Turned Michael Kornda into Larry Flint.” Spy, December 1990. Storey, Mark. 2005. “‘And as Things Fell Apart’: The Crisis of Postmodern Masculinity in Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘American Psycho’ and Dennis Cooper’s ‘Frisk’.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47, no. 1: 57–72. Thomas, Ronald R. 2003. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallen, Jeffrey. 2011. “Falling Under an Evil Influence.” In Promoting and Producing Evil, edited by Nancy Billias, 69–96. New York: Rodopi. Weldon, Fay. 1991. “Now You’re Squeemish?” The Washington Post, April 28, 1991.

Index

A Act, 17, 20, 23, 51, 65, 66, 73, 77, 78, 96, 100, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112–115, 125, 127, 129, 131, 132, 135, 136, 145, 162, 164, 167, 177, 194, 198, 212, 223, 228, 245, 251, 255, 267, 271, 281, 282, 285, 288, 289, 291–294, 296, 298, 299, 319, 320, 341, 393, 394, 397, 401, 402, 404, 407, 409, 416, 439, 440, 448, 452, 455, 461, 465, 467–469, 474–476, 482, 495 Ahab (Captain), 264–278, 281–287, 289, 292–300 American, 58, 62, 64, 183, 187, 188, 190, 192, 193, 243, 249, 263–268, 270, 271, 274, 277, 278, 342, 353, 374, 382, 432, 466, 470, 476, 485 Anachronox (video game), 412, 417–423

B body, 23, 24, 34, 38, 45, 46, 48, 50, 51, 56, 57, 59, 62, 95, 96, 100, 113, 123, 127, 128, 133–135, 139, 143, 190, 200, 208, 232, 272, 300, 305–307, 320, 360, 378, 382, 384, 401, 412, 415, 416, 446, 447, 461, 466–468, 470, 471, 475–477 Bronte, Emily, 239, 338–346 C character, 3, 5–8, 17–19, 24, 26, 29, 38, 40, 50, 63, 64, 71, 75, 77, 79, 82, 83, 92, 96, 97, 100, 102, 105, 106, 108, 109, 112, 113, 118, 121–127, 129–133, 135, 136, 140, 142, 144, 146, 162, 167, 168, 171, 172, 184, 185, 188, 190–192, 198, 205, 209, 227–232, 234, 235, 239, 240, 244–246, 249, 251–257, 264, 266, 267, 270–272, 278, 292, 296, 304, 310, 312, 313,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Zouidi (ed.), Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7

501

502

INDEX

316–318, 322, 327, 328, 330, 331, 335, 337–341, 343–346, 358, 361, 368, 369, 374, 391–393, 395–408, 419, 421, 425, 432, 435–438, 447–449, 451, 453–457, 459–462, 465, 470–472, 475, 477, 482, 483, 491, 492 Chernobyl (Ukraine), 351, 353, 357–370 Christian, 4, 5, 10, 17, 26, 39–41, 43–49, 51, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 82–85, 132, 147, 162–164, 177, 190, 292, 364 Christie, Agatha, 392–399, 405, 407, 408, 491 city, 60, 80, 173, 209, 243, 248, 250, 309, 310, 361, 363, 369, 383, 411–426, 437, 448, 449, 451, 454, 456, 457, 460, 461, 467 class, 6, 47, 56, 58, 80, 141, 148, 184, 228, 231, 234, 235, 237, 238, 240, 246, 305, 310, 315–317, 319, 321, 322, 328, 329, 332–334, 346, 366, 383, 396, 400, 417, 424, 425, 440, 448, 460 colonial, 55–58, 60–64, 66, 67, 184, 196, 203–222, 225, 230, 237, 240, 412 comics, 140, 246, 419, 445–447, 462, 491, 493 concept, 7, 10, 38, 39, 71, 74, 86, 91, 123, 146, 177, 228, 231, 232, 237, 276, 281, 287, 291, 292, 297, 307, 353, 356, 368, 374, 385, 391, 392, 398, 407, 408, 447, 486, 488, 495, 496 connivance, 405, 406 Conrad, Joseph, 203–207, 223 contemporary, 25, 55–58, 65, 66, 82, 121, 122, 141, 171, 181–183,

195, 197, 211, 229, 232, 237, 245, 249, 344, 353, 354, 356, 373, 374, 383, 395, 398, 408, 426, 437, 438, 478, 483, 496 culture, 16, 25, 38–41, 56, 63, 64, 66, 67, 184, 187, 190, 193, 227, 228, 240, 245, 246, 249, 269, 356, 358, 368, 373, 382, 385, 407, 412, 414, 417, 453, 489, 491

D death, 5–11, 17, 33, 48, 51, 64, 75–77, 79, 80, 93, 95, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 115, 116, 127, 156, 173, 190, 196, 198, 199, 204, 251, 267, 277, 300, 330, 334, 335, 337, 340–343, 345, 346, 363, 369, 376, 386, 394–400, 402–409, 456, 458, 461, 468, 470, 471, 473–475 detective, 392, 395–398, 403–405, 407, 408, 418, 474 different, 4, 5, 17, 29, 40, 41, 48, 59, 61, 92, 97, 105, 123–126, 130–134, 174, 183, 185, 186, 209–211, 213, 215, 227, 228, 233, 238, 241, 255, 265, 282, 305, 308, 309, 311, 321, 353, 368, 384, 393, 404, 405, 407, 409, 414, 416, 420–423, 425, 446, 448, 451, 452, 454, 456–458, 460, 462, 469, 470, 474, 482, 488 discourse, 10, 13, 57, 73–75, 82, 121, 126, 131, 145, 149, 188, 211, 215, 216, 220, 221, 239, 273, 281, 282, 284–287, 289–292, 294, 297–299, 304, 305, 307–311, 313, 352, 353, 367, 368, 394, 399, 401, 402,

INDEX

404, 408, 423, 484, 487–492, 496 Durrani, Tehmina, 229–241 E Eco, Umberto, 25, 409 Edmund (character), 125 English, 4, 15–20, 38, 42–46, 48, 71–76, 78, 81, 83–85, 126, 133, 134, 142, 146, 147, 162, 172, 176, 177, 185–187, 194, 196, 198, 210, 223, 229, 244, 324, 341, 380, 381, 386 Everyman, 3–13 evil, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19–22, 26, 27, 31, 33, 34, 38–48, 57, 71, 91–97, 99, 102, 103, 106, 108, 115, 117, 124, 140, 161, 168, 171, 177, 185, 186, 188, 194, 195, 197, 203–207, 210, 213, 214, 220, 221, 224, 225, 229, 232, 240, 247, 249, 254, 256, 257, 265, 270, 271, 275, 276, 278, 281, 282, 286, 292, 293, 296–298, 300, 313, 332, 340, 351–360, 363–370, 373–375, 384–387, 391, 392, 394–397, 399, 400, 405, 407–409, 432, 433, 435– 440, 446, 448, 452, 454, 455, 457, 460, 466, 469, 473–475, 478, 481–487, 490–496 experience, 5, 22, 24, 30, 32, 33, 82, 92, 94, 95, 194, 211, 222, 247, 248, 283–285, 287–289, 291, 295–298, 417, 421, 425, 434, 438, 483, 485 F faith, 9–11, 13, 24, 39–41, 43, 45–48, 51, 73–75, 78, 82, 83, 118, 126,

503

146, 147, 152–154, 165–167, 222, 300, 316, 380, 439, 493 Faustus, 16–34, 72, 75, 78–81, 83–85 feudal, 140, 229–233, 236–241 fiction, 40, 46, 49, 51, 148, 204, 205, 223, 228, 229, 232, 240, 244, 247, 282, 283, 315, 337, 338, 340, 344, 353, 360, 361, 374, 375, 379, 384, 392, 393, 407, 412, 413, 416–418, 422, 424, 432, 434, 435, 492, 493 film, 55, 56, 62–65, 246, 251, 265, 266, 270, 271, 274, 276, 277, 418, 424, 425, 445–451, 454–458, 460–462, 465, 466, 468–472, 474–478 Fitzgerald, Francis Scott, 316, 318, 319, 323–330, 334 form, 6–8, 26, 27, 29, 31, 41, 49, 57, 59, 62, 64, 66, 72, 77, 82, 84, 94–96, 99–101, 113, 127, 134, 140–143, 145, 149, 152, 156, 164, 195, 199, 224, 228, 238, 240, 247, 275, 282–284, 289–291, 293, 298, 318, 324, 327, 357, 411, 412, 416, 445, 453, 460, 473, 481, 483, 487, 492

G games, 16, 23, 25, 26, 28, 30, 83, 131, 132, 209, 230, 269, 381, 418, 419, 421, 422 Gatsby (character), 316–319, 321, 323–330, 333–335 gender, 56, 59, 63, 122, 197, 228, 229, 231, 238, 241, 303–308, 310, 313, 328, 341, 385, 400, 401, 421, 432, 434, 435, 452, 488, 489

504

INDEX

guilt, 75, 100, 109, 113, 117, 126, 191, 250, 319, 320, 398, 401, 405–409, 446, 471, 474

H Heathcliff (character), 239, 316–319, 321–324, 330–335, 338–346 hero, 17, 25, 76, 114, 126, 213, 218, 241, 251, 252, 256, 257, 264, 266–274, 277, 278, 332, 341, 351, 364, 369, 418, 425, 434, 454, 460, 461 hijab, 55–57, 60–62, 66, 67 historical, 40, 41, 46, 51, 56, 57, 59, 72, 73, 82, 106, 116, 123, 129, 132, 162, 164, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172, 175, 176, 181, 183, 186–188, 191, 193, 194, 197–199, 227, 287, 299, 304, 355, 380, 383, 384, 391, 416–418, 440, 495 history, 4, 7, 43, 47, 49, 50, 73, 82, 122, 134, 162–166, 168–177, 188, 191, 193, 194, 197, 200, 207–210, 243, 257, 326, 346, 359, 367, 375, 377, 381, 395, 412, 416, 434, 483, 495 Hitchcock, Alfred, 465, 466, 468, 470–472, 475–478 human, 6, 13, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30–33, 39, 48, 62, 65, 66, 85, 91–94, 96, 99, 101, 105, 122, 123, 143, 163, 164, 166–169, 171, 177, 190, 196, 204, 232, 265, 268, 272, 275, 284, 285, 287, 290, 294, 313, 316, 337, 338, 343, 354–356, 360, 381, 382, 386, 391, 393–395, 397–399, 404, 412, 414–416, 418, 420–422, 425, 433, 434, 466, 470, 473, 474, 477, 478, 482, 487

I idea, 3–7, 13, 58, 60, 66, 91, 93, 94, 97, 114, 149, 151, 154, 168, 170, 187, 188, 194, 204–206, 209, 210, 212–225, 228, 248, 267, 270, 278, 295, 297, 307, 318, 322, 328, 332, 354, 355, 357, 361, 364, 374, 378, 380, 397–399, 407, 452–455, 460, 472, 473, 476, 482, 488, 491 identity, 10, 49, 50, 60, 62–64, 74, 75, 78, 85, 99, 102, 122, 126, 129, 130, 141, 147, 150, 151, 162, 163, 165–167, 169, 171–173, 176, 177, 183, 184, 186–189, 192, 198, 234, 237, 245, 249, 253, 256, 257, 264, 267, 270, 306, 307, 310, 315, 316, 318, 319, 324, 325, 334, 335, 361, 369, 383–385, 400, 401, 417, 422, 433, 434, 452, 455, 457, 459, 460, 489, 494 image, 4, 39, 49, 56–64, 67, 74, 81, 92, 123, 132–134, 136, 151, 154, 175, 186, 204, 208, 219, 223, 224, 230, 233, 236, 237, 239, 251, 255, 256, 264, 268, 270, 271, 274, 275, 295, 296, 320, 355, 359–361, 364, 368, 369, 376, 378, 380–382, 451–453, 458, 491, 495 individual, 5, 7, 9, 11–13, 57, 74, 75, 92, 146, 162, 165, 167–170, 174, 175, 185, 189, 191, 194, 195, 198, 217, 227, 228, 230, 235, 249, 257, 264, 269, 272, 283, 284, 316, 321, 334, 358, 377, 379, 380, 383, 387, 408, 440, 445, 455, 461, 468, 475, 476, 478, 483, 494

INDEX

J Joker, the (character), 447, 448, 451–457, 459–462 K King Lear, 140, 141, 144, 147, 149, 151, 152, 154–156 Kurtz (character), 204, 206, 207, 210, 213, 214, 217–225 L language, 4, 15, 19, 43, 84, 85, 96, 98, 106, 110, 114, 126, 128, 131–134, 147, 151, 185, 186, 196, 217, 224, 228, 235, 244, 264, 265, 276, 281–283, 286–292, 295–300, 308, 331, 338, 375, 377, 382, 386, 403, 438, 491 life, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 17, 22, 23, 31, 33, 38, 48, 64, 72, 75, 79, 80, 82, 85, 93, 95, 97, 99, 100, 123, 128, 132, 140, 155, 156, 161, 162, 164, 167, 174, 184, 192, 194, 195, 198–200, 210, 227, 228, 230–233, 237–241, 244–248, 252, 253, 255–257, 263, 265, 269, 275, 277, 284, 315, 317, 323, 329, 334, 339, 342, 344, 354–356, 363, 364, 366–370, 376, 377, 386, 391, 395–399, 405–409, 413, 414, 416–418, 420, 421, 423, 424, 426, 434, 437, 447–451, 455– 460, 468, 470, 471, 473–475, 477, 492, 495 literary, 16, 26, 39, 41, 47, 108, 121, 122, 124, 140, 181, 183, 184, 187, 188, 191–193, 197, 203, 204, 227, 229, 254, 267, 274, 282, 291, 309, 313, 338, 340,

505

353, 355, 360, 361, 364, 365, 368–370, 374, 384, 391, 409, 417, 432, 435, 483, 484, 487, 490, 494 literature, 4, 15–17, 25, 26, 38–45, 48, 50, 75, 81, 121, 122, 145, 177, 184, 186, 227–229, 263, 266, 274, 278, 284, 289, 313, 337, 339, 344, 360, 373, 431, 483 London (England), 132, 209, 210, 381

M Macbeth, 71, 105–107, 113–116, 118, 119 Malvolio, 141, 145, 148–150, 152, 153, 155, 156 man, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 16, 18, 20, 25, 29, 33, 39, 63, 64, 67, 75, 80, 85, 92, 93, 95, 101, 126, 143, 145, 146, 162–177, 182, 184, 190, 194, 210, 213, 216–220, 232–234, 236, 238, 254, 256, 266–269, 272, 273, 275, 276, 284, 288, 292, 293, 305–308, 315, 317–319, 322–328, 330, 331, 333, 334, 343, 344, 354, 374, 377, 379, 382, 383, 393, 394, 396, 400, 405, 406, 456, 457, 468, 469, 472, 475, 477 Marlow, 203–207, 209–225 Marlowe, Christopher, 15–24, 26–34, 38, 50, 71, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79, 83–85, 121, 124, 207 mask, 224, 245, 249–257, 293, 294, 298, 335, 380, 394, 452–454, 456, 459, 460 Melville, Herman, 263–273, 275–278, 282, 283, 285, 286, 292–295, 297, 299, 300

506

INDEX

Mephistopheles, 15–18, 20–34, 78, 83, 84 mind, 5, 11, 16, 18, 20, 21, 31, 33, 57, 62, 64, 66, 81, 83, 84, 94, 98, 131, 139, 146, 170, 175, 176, 283, 288, 290, 295, 309–311, 329, 355, 365, 366, 370, 374, 376, 378, 380–384, 386, 398, 406, 431, 433–435, 446, 462, 472, 478, 483, 487, 494 Mitchell, Gladys, 265, 392, 400, 402–405, 407, 412, 421 modern, 8, 11, 25, 30, 33, 34, 38, 39, 41, 44–46, 48, 50, 56, 71–73, 83, 84, 121–123, 125–127, 134, 143–145, 147, 154, 173, 211, 238, 266, 268, 274, 360, 362, 363, 365, 379, 383, 404, 406, 412, 418, 420, 423–425, 483 moral, 3, 6–11, 13, 17, 40, 42, 43, 48, 78, 82, 84, 91, 93, 102, 126, 133, 134, 164, 168, 173, 174, 176, 192, 207, 213, 217–219, 224, 274, 329, 340, 352–355, 360, 367, 391, 394, 396–399, 404–408, 411, 432–440, 446, 466–468, 472, 473, 475–477, 486 murder, 20, 77, 81, 96, 100, 101, 107, 108, 113, 115, 126, 164, 177, 207, 211, 212, 277, 392–397, 400, 402, 404, 406, 407, 419, 458, 461, 465–477, 482, 493, 494 Muslim, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 48, 55–67, 72–75, 78, 84, 85 N narrative, 4, 17, 25, 26, 38–41, 44, 47, 48, 50, 58, 60, 65, 136, 148, 204, 205, 207, 209,

210, 212–214, 219, 225, 227, 230–234, 236–241, 243, 244, 247, 265, 266, 271, 274, 277, 278, 282–285, 304, 305, 307, 309, 312, 313, 337–340, 344, 346, 351, 353, 367, 368, 384, 395, 418, 420, 434, 435, 438, 445, 482, 483, 487, 492, 494, 495 nature, 11, 12, 18, 20, 28, 30, 46, 47, 56, 80, 93, 97, 101, 103, 105, 108, 109, 119, 122–126, 132, 134, 135, 143–146, 155, 167, 171, 186, 187, 195, 204, 212, 214, 217, 222, 230, 257, 266–269, 272, 275–278, 287, 296, 297, 299, 316, 331, 335, 337, 340, 341, 343, 352, 354, 355, 358, 360, 364, 369, 375, 377, 382, 402, 411, 422, 446, 484, 486, 491, 493 nemesis, 32, 77, 397, 447 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 162, 164, 165, 168–176, 354, 408, 473 novel, 25, 59, 182, 183, 197, 198, 204, 206, 207, 209, 215, 244, 263, 266, 275, 282–284, 303, 304, 309, 312, 315, 317, 319, 320, 323, 327, 329, 331, 338–340, 343, 358, 361, 363–370, 374, 375, 378–381, 384–386, 392–394, 396, 400, 401, 404–409, 417, 425, 437, 481–487, 490, 492–496 nuclear, 351–353, 356–358, 360–370

O Orwell, George, 374–384, 386–388

INDEX

P past, 25, 49, 117, 119, 162, 163, 165, 168–173, 175–177, 193, 200, 208, 209, 213, 215, 250, 254, 284, 316–318, 323–325, 327, 328, 330, 334, 335, 339, 345, 354, 380, 392, 407, 418, 435, 438, 447, 448 people, 4, 31, 44, 56, 58–60, 64, 72, 91, 93, 95, 97, 102, 103, 111, 117, 123, 167, 169, 173, 183, 184, 187–189, 193, 199, 203, 232, 235, 237, 247, 249, 257, 268, 275, 276, 305, 310, 318, 327, 329, 330, 340, 342, 346, 361–363, 369, 376, 377, 380, 387, 388, 393–400, 402, 405, 408, 411, 415–417, 420, 422, 433, 434, 436, 438, 448–456, 459–461 performance, 4, 8, 11, 57, 61, 62, 110–119, 122–125, 127, 130–135, 162, 166, 227–229, 231, 241, 244, 246, 247, 254, 256, 257, 283–285, 287, 316, 319, 326, 329, 384, 385, 400, 403, 407, 408, 411, 447, 448, 450, 452, 453, 455, 458, 460, 462, 482, 487, 489, 491 performative, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112–114, 117, 122–126, 128– 133, 135, 136, 227, 229–231, 234, 240, 241, 257, 281, 285, 298, 305, 306, 315, 322, 325, 335, 384, 386, 391, 452, 453, 455, 482–484, 486–492, 494, 496 performativity, 177, 227, 254, 304, 394, 397,

63, 106, 107, 140, 228, 235, 239, 241, 305, 323, 385, 392, 399, 400, 402, 403,

507

407–409, 461, 462, 483–491, 495, 496 pet, 431–440 play, 3, 5–8, 10, 11, 13, 16–24, 26–31, 33, 34, 45, 57, 60, 62, 76–85, 92, 96–100, 102, 106– 108, 111–113, 115, 117, 123, 125, 126, 128–132, 134–136, 139–142, 148, 163–165, 167, 168, 170, 184, 185, 189, 190, 194, 197, 240, 244, 247, 273, 276, 284, 320, 329, 380, 381, 416, 418, 426, 432, 446, 454, 456, 457, 461, 465, 466, 469, 472, 482 Poirot, Hercule, 392–400, 404, 405, 407, 408 political, 56, 58, 61, 62, 64, 66, 75, 78, 79, 92, 106, 109, 111, 112, 115, 118, 122, 132, 140, 165, 168, 170, 174–177, 189, 194, 195, 204, 228–231, 239, 245, 278, 355, 366, 374, 375, 377, 379, 380, 385, 388, 412, 416, 421, 425, 446, 448, 456, 460–462, 488–490, 495, 496 power, 13, 26, 29, 31, 32, 41, 43, 44, 55–58, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, 72–75, 77, 82, 83, 85, 93, 95, 96, 99, 106–110, 112–119, 122, 123, 125, 129, 132, 133, 136, 149, 154, 162, 165, 166, 177, 191, 197, 199, 208, 209, 221–223, 228, 230, 231, 234, 235, 237, 239, 240, 246, 247, 251, 253, 257, 271, 278, 284, 291, 304, 305, 310, 311, 316, 319, 321, 322, 335, 351, 353, 354, 357, 358, 360–370, 375–377, 381, 383–388, 399, 413–415, 420, 422, 423, 425,

508

INDEX

426, 433, 435, 436, 439, 440, 454, 460, 461, 484, 489, 496 Prospero (character), 106, 107, 109–113, 116–118 psycho, 481–488, 490–496 R race, 44, 56, 58, 65, 66, 183, 187–189, 193, 197, 198, 207, 208, 228, 232, 273–275, 316, 329, 331, 367, 391, 399, 432, 435, 452 reading, 3, 10, 13, 44, 73, 143, 151, 152, 155, 168, 200, 207, 222, 223, 229, 283, 285, 286, 294, 299, 381, 432, 435, 436, 440, 447, 485, 486, 491 relationship, 7, 22, 24, 25, 45, 57, 58, 61, 62, 66, 74, 82, 83, 85, 108, 122, 123, 126, 129, 135, 170, 193, 207, 209, 212, 216, 233, 264–268, 272, 275, 283, 287, 297, 304, 306, 309, 312, 328, 329, 343, 345, 406, 412, 413, 420, 425, 447, 450, 453, 458, 459, 461, 467, 469, 483, 489 responsibility, 6–9, 18, 28, 96, 100, 103, 147, 248, 250, 255, 297, 320, 355, 397, 407, 446, 477 Richard II (King), 165, 168, 170–174, 177 Richard III (King), 38, 48, 124, 125, 129, 133, 135, 150 role, 5, 13, 25, 56, 57, 60, 66, 78, 80, 92, 100, 102, 106, 110, 112–114, 116, 117, 124, 126–130, 132, 134–136, 147, 148, 189, 191, 192, 196, 199, 227–231, 235, 239–241, 245, 251–257, 267, 269, 272, 278, 303, 307, 312, 313, 328, 331,

334, 374, 401, 446, 487,

346, 360, 364, 367, 368, 378–381, 392, 396, 398, 402, 406, 420, 432, 437, 454, 469, 471, 472, 475, 495

S Salem (Massachusetts), 181–186, 188–199 self, 9, 11, 13, 31, 46, 59, 92, 94–96, 99, 102, 122, 127, 130, 140, 144, 146–148, 162, 165, 174, 188, 190, 204, 207, 210, 217, 220–222, 225, 227, 230, 231, 234, 236, 240, 241, 277, 283, 287, 294, 296, 305, 307, 309, 318, 324, 329, 378, 382, 384, 420, 421, 423, 425, 451, 452, 455, 459, 460 Shakespeare, William, 38, 45, 71, 82, 83, 99, 105, 107, 116, 121, 123, 129, 130, 132–135, 140, 141, 144, 147, 148, 161, 162, 164–166, 168, 170–177, 228, 393, 457 Shepard (Commander), 421–423 social, 14, 41, 47, 55–58, 60, 67, 80, 83, 92, 114, 122, 141, 142, 144, 149, 167, 188, 189, 195, 196, 217, 221, 227–232, 234, 235, 237, 239–241, 251, 278, 304, 305, 311–313, 316, 317, 319, 321, 323–329, 331–334, 338, 340, 352–358, 360, 364–370, 380, 393, 395, 396, 400, 408, 412, 414–416, 422, 423, 431–438, 440, 446, 448, 449, 451–453, 455–459, 461, 462, 485, 494 society, 4, 11, 13, 32, 49, 61, 105, 140, 164–167, 171, 193, 205, 227, 229–232, 236, 237,

INDEX

239–241, 265, 269, 278, 304, 305, 310, 313, 317, 320–322, 324–326, 330, 332–335, 342, 344, 353–359, 364, 366–368, 370, 377, 379, 381, 383–385, 387, 394, 396, 397, 399, 400, 403, 405–409, 414, 416, 423, 446, 448–450, 453, 454, 459–461, 472, 476 space, 8, 13, 57, 59, 84, 119, 123, 125, 128, 129, 133, 136, 171, 190, 235, 237, 264, 277, 288, 291, 294, 295, 309, 310, 319, 338, 340, 346, 355, 359–361, 363, 376, 385, 387, 412–419, 421–426, 433, 434, 436, 466 speech, 19, 45, 85, 111, 150, 185, 186, 209, 220, 233, 278, 281, 284, 285, 304, 311, 316, 319, 367, 384, 393–395, 397, 399, 401–403, 407, 452, 457, 489 stage, 11, 12, 15, 21, 23, 38, 51, 71, 72, 75, 77, 79, 83, 85, 96, 111, 114, 117, 123–126, 129–132, 135, 136, 140, 147, 154, 156, 166, 197, 247, 256, 329, 357, 377, 385, 388, 455, 457 Stukeley, Thomas (Captain), 76–82, 86

T text, 3, 6, 8, 14, 17, 20, 43, 57, 85, 143, 147, 152–156, 162, 166, 169, 177, 183, 186–188, 190, 192–194, 197, 199, 200, 204, 207, 228, 229, 239, 244, 245, 276, 283–285, 337–339, 360, 386, 391–394, 396, 398, 409, 414, 416–418, 420, 421, 423–426, 432–440, 482–486, 488, 490, 491, 493–496

509

time, 4–7, 9, 16, 17, 21, 22, 29–34, 38, 40, 42, 43, 50, 64, 71, 75, 97–99, 102, 106, 114–116, 119, 126, 128, 133, 140, 142, 148, 162, 164, 165, 167–171, 173, 174, 190, 196, 197, 208, 209, 214, 223, 224, 230, 232, 234, 238, 240, 246, 251, 252, 266, 268, 285, 291, 294, 295, 299, 306, 307, 318, 321–325, 327, 329, 333, 334, 338, 342, 345, 353, 354, 358, 376, 380, 382–384, 387, 388, 400, 403, 416, 449, 451, 452, 456, 457, 461, 473, 475, 485, 493, 495 Tituba, 181–200 trickster, 17, 43, 47, 92–103 V values, 7, 11, 14, 41, 44, 80, 84, 96, 97, 141, 144, 154, 187, 192, 210–212, 216, 219, 231, 249, 255, 269, 277, 304, 313, 334, 353–356, 360, 367, 396, 397, 399, 405, 407, 412, 414, 416, 421, 432–434, 440, 446, 459, 465, 473, 474, 496 villain, 15, 17, 19, 21, 27, 33, 72, 77–79, 84, 100, 103, 105–107, 110, 112–117, 124–128, 139, 142–144, 153, 192, 229–231, 234, 241, 256, 264, 271, 275, 303, 304, 309, 313, 315–319, 321, 331–335, 340, 341, 351, 364, 369, 374, 376, 378, 393– 395, 397, 399, 403, 406–408, 411, 424, 425, 445, 447, 452, 457, 460, 462 villainous, 24, 77, 80, 98, 105–109, 111–113, 117, 118, 140, 145, 152, 162, 167–171, 173, 174, 176, 177, 237, 316, 319, 325,

510

INDEX

329, 331, 333–335, 338, 341, 344 villainy, 16, 19, 21, 22, 24, 34, 71, 77, 78, 84, 86, 106–110, 113, 115–119, 127, 141, 161–169, 171, 175, 177, 230, 232, 235, 241, 247, 257, 266, 271, 304, 318, 320, 325, 326, 332, 337, 339, 341–344, 373, 374, 399, 401, 403, 405, 411, 412, 424, 425, 448, 452, 455, 460, 462 violence, 16, 24, 33, 59–61, 63, 64, 67, 74, 75, 107, 112, 113, 128, 161, 166, 211, 212, 240, 264, 265, 303, 337, 338, 340, 344, 346, 373, 379, 402, 413, 423–425, 437, 438, 440, 450, 456, 457, 461, 483–487, 490, 492, 494, 495

W Western, 10, 40, 58, 59, 61, 199, 200, 204, 264–271, 273–278 white, 39, 48, 49, 60, 63, 65, 187, 188, 195, 198, 200, 264, 271, 274, 275, 282, 292–294, 296, 298–300, 305, 329, 330, 333, 339, 351, 382, 416, 438, 447, 462 witch, 21, 31, 75, 115, 189–191, 195, 197, 199 Witcher, The, 16, 25, 26, 34 woman, 38, 49, 57–60, 62–64, 67, 84, 181–184, 186, 190, 192, 196, 199, 200, 214, 230–241, 250, 254, 267, 268, 272, 274, 303–308, 310–313, 401–405, 492

work, 6, 9, 11, 16, 21, 32, 40, 55, 57, 62, 64, 67, 73–75, 81, 92, 93, 96, 100, 106, 121, 123, 131, 133, 140, 141, 143, 146, 181, 182, 184, 185, 191, 200, 203, 206, 214–222, 224, 229, 231, 236, 245, 246, 249, 256, 263– 265, 276, 284, 313, 316, 318, 323, 337, 338, 340, 353, 360, 361, 365, 369, 375, 382, 386, 388, 395, 413, 433, 448–450, 455, 456, 458, 459, 467, 470, 472, 483, 484, 487–490 world, 6–8, 12, 13, 16, 25, 28, 40, 43, 64, 65, 67, 72–74, 80, 85, 94, 96, 100, 107, 114, 123–126, 128, 129, 135, 162, 164, 165, 167, 168, 171, 172, 175, 176, 190, 198–200, 203, 205, 210, 212, 217, 218, 222, 228, 232–234, 237, 238, 248, 250, 251, 254, 255, 264, 267, 269, 272, 275–277, 282, 283, 285– 295, 297, 298, 316, 317, 319, 320, 326, 327, 329–331, 333, 334, 338, 340, 352, 354–357, 362, 365, 366, 373, 374, 376, 382, 383, 385–387, 391, 395, 401, 409, 418, 419, 433–436, 438–440, 448, 450–454, 456, 457, 460, 473, 492 writing, 3, 6, 40, 45–47, 57, 82, 140–147, 149, 151, 155, 156, 185, 188, 191, 223, 224, 230, 236, 257, 281, 287, 293, 305, 338, 353, 360, 361, 368, 374, 376, 385, 386 Wuthering Heights, 239, 316, 317, 321, 322, 331, 333, 338–346