WEAVING TALES: Anglo-iberian Encounters on Literatures in English [1 ed.] 1032447680, 9781032447681

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Weaving Tales

This collection of essays brings together a wide range of Spanish and Portuguese academics and writers exploring the ways in which our encounters with literatures in English inform our assumptions about texts and identities (or texts as identities) and the way we read them. Mapping, examining, reading and rereading, fashioning and self-​ fashioning and, especially, weaving appear as appropriate images that convey the complexity and the nature of creative writing. Such a metaphor has been fundamental for the history of world literature since the Roman poet Ovid included a tale in his Metamorphoses in which weaving, narration, uncertain identities and the risks of telling uncomfortable truths all figure prominently. As such, these essays trace the intertwined patterns that knit texts together, weaving identities as well as undoing them and, in the process, interrogating established and official truths. Paula García-​Ramírez is Associate Professor at the Department of English Philology at the Universidad de Jaén. She is a specialist in English-​ speaking postcolonial literature, with particular attention to African literature. Within this field of research, she has published several studies on authors including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, among others. Beatriz Valverde is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Philology at the Universidad de Jaén. She has been a visiting researcher at Loyola University Chicago, Georgetown University and Boston College. She has published articles in journals such as English Studies and European Journal of English Studies, and with Mark Bosco (Georgetown University) has also edited Reading Flannery O’Connor in Spain: From Andalusia to Andalucía (2020).

Angélica Varandas is Assistant Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the Department of English Studies of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon where she also teaches fantasy literature and science fiction in English and English descriptive linguistics. Her main area of research is English medieval literature and culture as well as medievalism. She co-​edited the book From Manuscript to Digital in 2020. She is also the author of two books published in 2012, Mitos e Lendas Celtas: Irlanda and Mitos e Lendas Celtas: País de Gales. With a colleague, she has just published the first Portuguese critical edition of the translation of Beowulf from the Old English (Assírio e Alvim, 2022). At the moment, she is the principal investigator of the research project English Studies Literature at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies and she is a member of the executive board of the same research centre. Jason Whittaker is a professor in the College of Arts at the University of Lincoln. He specializes in Romantic literature and the reception of William Blake, and his most recent books include Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake (2021) and Jerusalem: Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness (2022).

Routledge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature

This series is our home for cutting-​edge, upper-​level scholarly monographs and edited collections, focusing on literatures from Central America, South America, and the Iberian Peninsula. Books in the series are characterized by dynamic interventions and innovative approaches to established subjects and groundbreaking criticism on emerging topics in literary studies. The Intellectual and Cultural Worlds of Rubén Darío Kathleen T. O’Connor-​Bater Twenty-​First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America Edited by Cristián H. Ricci Inventing the Romantic Don Quixote in France Jansenists, Rousseau, and British Quixotism Clark Colahan Beyond sentidiño New Diasporic Reflections on Galician Culture Edited by Daniel Amarelo and Laura Lesta García Experiencing Time in the Early Modern Hispanic World After Apocalypse Ariadna García-​Bryce Weaving Tales Anglo-​Iberian Encounters on Literatures in English Edited by Paula García-​Ramírez, Beatriz Valverde, Angélica Varandas and Jason Whittaker For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​Routle​dge-​Stud​ies-​ in-​Latin-​Ameri​can-​and-​Iber​ian-​Lit​erat​ure/​book-​ser​ies/​RSL​AIL

Weaving Tales Anglo-​Iberian Encounters on Literatures in English Edited by Paula García-​Ramírez, Beatriz Valverde, Angélica Varandas and Jason Whittaker

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Paula García-​Ramírez, Beatriz Valverde, Angélica Varandas, Jason Whittaker; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Paula García-​Ramírez, Beatriz Valverde, Angélica Varandas, Jason Whittaker to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 9781032447681 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032447728 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003373834 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003373834 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Weaving Tales

ix xiii xiv

PA U L A G A R C ÍA -​R A MÍRE Z, B E ATRIZ VA LVE RDE, A N G É L I C A VARAN DAS AN D JA SO N WH ITTA K ER

1 Urizen now: Reading anew William Blake’s response to his times

1

A L C I N D A P I NH E IRO DE SO USA AN D JA SO N WHIT TAK ER

2 William Blake in Spanish popular culture and literature

18

M . C E C I L I A MARCH E TTO SA N TO RUN

3 (Re)reading classical mythology through the Aztec gods: Cherríe Moraga’s lesbian Mexican Medea

32

M A RTA V I L L AL B A -​L Á ZARO

4 From influence to response: Angela Carter’s selected novels come to terms with William Shakespeare’s tragedies 48 M A R I A J O S É P IRE S

5 P.D. James’ The Black Tower: “Almost Iris Murdoch with murders in it”?

65

J E S Ú S M . N I E TO GA RCÍA

6 Romanticism and heteronymic theory: John Keats and the poetics of Fernando Pessoa N U N O R I B E I RO

78

viii  Contents

7 Jennifer Egan and digital fiction after postmodernism

98

MAIRI POWER

8 Non Angli, sed angeli: The Christianization of the Anglo-​Saxons and the Dawn of Englishness

114

A N G É L I C A VARAN DAS

9 Exploring the outsider consciousness in a selection of stories by Alice Munro

131

P I L A R S Á N C H E Z CAL L E

10 Depiction of enforced identity in Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa—​the novel and the film

146

R I TU M O H A N

11 A transmodern reading of Joanna Kavenna’s Zed: Digital reason and the attempt to transcend Cartesian dialectics

156

J E S S I C A A L I A GA-​L AVRIJSE N

12 Hospitable loci: The spatialization of oppositional world views in eighteenth-​century women’s writings

172

Y O L A N D A C AB A L L E RO -​A CE ITUN O

13 “REMEMBEREST THOU ME?”: Violent women in Louisa Medina Hamblin’s “The Panorama of Life”

187

M I L A G R O S L ÓP E Z-​P E L Á E Z CA SE L L AS

14 Patriarchal orthorexia and embodied dissidence in contemporary feminist dystopias

203

A L M U D E N A MA CH ADO -​J IMÉ N E Z

15 Instapoetry and the transmodern paradigm: Transnational feminism in Nikita Gill’s work

220

A L E J A N D R O N ADAL -​R UIZ

Index

234

Contributors

Jessica Aliaga-​Lavrijsen is Assistant Professor at the Department of English and German philology at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). She has published several articles and a monograph on contemporary Scottish literature (The Fiction of Brian McCabe and (Scottish) Identity, 2013). Additionally, she has edited some collections and journals on trauma studies. More recently, she has edited a book on the transmodern (Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English, 2019), and she also published several essays and book chapters on transmodern science fiction (Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm, 2020). Her current research focuses on science fiction feminisms, with articles such as “Ectogenesis and Representations of Future Motherings in Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season” (2021). Yolanda Caballero-​Aceituno is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Philology of the University of Jaén (Spain), where she completed her PhD with a dissertation on Laurence Sterne’s narrative. She has published several articles and book chapters on this Sterne, eighteenth-​ century English literature, and literary education, which comprise some of her main research interests. She has also participated in two research projects about the representation of Muslims, Jews, and Spaniards in early modern English writings and is currently engaged in the analysis of the oppositional dimension of female literary works of the long eighteenth century. Paula García-​Ramírez is Associate Professor at the Department of English Philology at the Universidad de Jaén. She is a specialist in English-​ speaking postcolonial literature, with particular attention to African literature. Within this field of research, she has published several studies on authors including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, among others.

x  Contributors Maria José Pires is a researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, where she completed her PhD entitled “Dealing with Appetites: Angela Carter’s Fiction” (2013). She co-​ curated the exhibition The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories: Designing Perspectives, Challenging Boundaries (2017), where very diverse objects such as imaginatively designed pieces of furniture, and finely prepared and artfully plated foods were shown as creative readings of Carter’s stories. Milagros López-​Peláez Casellas holds an MA and a PhD from Arizona State University (US), and has been senior lecturer (University of Leeds and Coventry University, UK), and is currently Associate Professor at the Universidad de Granada (Spain). She has authored What About the Girls? Estrategias narrativas de resistencia en la primera literatura chicana (2011), as well as several articles on nineteenth-​century Latina writing in British, Spanish, and North American journals. Almudena Machado-​Jiménez holds a PhD from the University of Jaén, where she works as a lecturer at the Department of English Philology. She is vice president of the Association of Young Researchers on Anglophone Studies and is actively engaged in the field of English studies, working as an associate editor of international journals like Gaudeamus and The Grove. Working Papers on English Studies. Her research interests are gender studies, postcolonialism, and utopian studies, particularly the notions of sisterhood and motherhood in contemporary patriarchal utopias written by women authors. M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun holds a PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), during which time she worked as a member of the research group Discourse and Identity. Her recent publications include “ ‘Terrible Monsters Sin-​bred’: Blakean Monstrosity in Alan Moore’s Graphic Novels” (Palgrave Communications, 2019) and “The War ‘twixt Sun and Moon’: Evil and Gender in William Blake’s Early Illuminated Books and Alan Moore’s From Hell” (English Studies, 2020). Ritu Mohan holds a PhD in film adaptation studies and a masters in English and communication studies. He is Assistant Professor in English at the Rao Pahlad Singh Group of Institutions, affiliated with Indira Gandhi University, Haryana, India. He is editor-​in-​chief of the international journal Quote Unquote. He has more than 50 research publications and presentations in conferences to his credit. He has also co-​edited two books. His research areas are cinema, film-​adaptation studies and diaspora studies.

Contributors  xi Alejandro Nadal-​Ruiz is a research fellow at the Department of English and German Philology of the University of Zaragoza. In September 2019, he was granted a national competitive research fellowship (FPU) financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. He is currently enrolled in the doctoral programme offered by the University of Zaragoza and is writing his PhD dissertation on trauma and limit-​ case testimony in Jean Rhys’s modernist novels, under the supervision of Dr Bárbara Arizti Martín. His main research interests lie in modernist and postmodernist fiction, memory studies, trauma studies, and the rewritings of classical texts. Jesús M. Nieto García has been a member of the English Department of the University of Jaén since 1989. He is currently Professor of English Language and Literature and has taught a wide number of courses on English studies, both in graduate and postgraduate studies. His research interests are diverse, including, among others, the stylistics of drama and critical discourse analysis, mostly focused on twentieth-​century English literary texts. Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa is a doctor of English literature awarded by Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa with the PhD dissertation “ ‘As the Eye –​Such the Object’: Da Arte e da Ciência em William Blake (On Art and Science in W. B.)”. She is currently leading the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies research project Receiving | Perceiving English Literature in the Digital Age. Mairi Power is a third-​ year PhD researcher in English literature at the University of Glasgow. Her PhD project is entitled “Digital Identities: Technology and Selfhood in Jennifer Egan’s Fiction”. Her research explores representations of digitised bodies and the changing materiality of both humans and books within Egan’s fiction. Nuno Ribeiro holds a degree in philosophy (2007) and a PhD in philosophy-​ aesthetics (2012) from Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He is a specialist in Fernando Pessoa’s Archive and a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Study of Literature and Tradition (FSCH, UNL), with a scholarship (SFRH/​BPD/​121514/​2016) financed by the Foundation for the Science and Technology (FCT), under the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia (FSE). Mr. Ribeiro is the author of more than 20 books –​editions of his writing and studies –​about Fernando Pessoa’s work published in Europe, Brazil, and the United States, including Fernando Pessoa Entre Leituras e Poéticas (2021), Escritos de Vicente Guedes (Colibri, 2021), and “Fernando Pessoa leitor de Schopenhauer e o problema do livre-​ arbítrio” (Voluntas: Revista Internacional de Filosofia, 2020).

xii  Contributors Pilar Sánchez Calle is senior lecturer at the University of Jaén, where she teaches American and English literature. Her research focuses on contemporary English and North American literature, with special emphasis on the representation of gender, identity, and exile. Beatriz Valverde is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Philology at the Universidad de Jaén. She has been a visiting researcher at Loyola University Chicago, Georgetown University and Boston College. She has published articles in journals such as English Studies and European Journal of English Studies, and with Mark Bosco (Georgetown University) has also edited Reading Flannery O’Connor in Spain: From Andalusia to Andalucía (2020). Angélica Varandas is a medievalist who specialized in medieval English literature with a PhD about the influence of the bestiary in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer. She teaches at the Department of English Studies of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon. Her main area of research is English medieval literature and culture as well as medievalism, in which she has published several articles. She co-​edited the book From Manuscript to Digital (2020). She is also the author of two books published in 2012 for both academic and non-​academic readers: Mitos e Lendas Celtas: Irlanda and Mitos e Lendas Celtas: País de Gales. At the moment, she is the principal investigator of the research project English Studies Literature at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies and she is a member of the executive board of the same research centre. Marta Villalba-​Lázaro is associate lecturer at the University of the Balearic Islands. She holds an International PhD in philology (2018), a BA degree in law (1986), a BA in English philology (2013), and an MA degree in modern languages and literatures (2014). She developed her career as a lawyer and former partner in the law firm EY (1988–​2007). She is a member of the research group LITANGLO at the UIB. Jason Whittaker is a professor in the College of Arts at the University of Lincoln. He specializes in Romantic literature and the reception of William Blake, and his most recent books include Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake (2021) and Jerusalem: Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness (2022).

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Universities of Jaén and Lisbon (where we met for the first time) for developing different academic meetings. These encounters allow us to maintain a fruitful collaboration among scholars from the universities of Jaén, Lincoln, and Lisbon. In particular, we would like to thank Professors Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa and Jesús López-​Peláez Casellas for being the starting point of this project. We are very grateful they have shared their insights and experiences in this process.

Introduction Weaving Tales Paula García-​Ramírez, Beatriz Valverde, Angélica Varandas and Jason Whittaker

The Maeonian girl depicts Europa deceived by the form of the bull: you would have thought it a real bull and real waves. She is seen looking back to the shore she has left, and calling to her companions, displaying fear at the touch of the surging water, and drawing up her shrinking feet. Also Arachne showed Asterie, held by the eagle, struggling, and Leda lying beneath the swan’s wings. She added Jupiter who, hidden in the form of a satyr, filled Antiope, daughter of Nycteus with twin offspring; who, as Amphitryon, was charmed by you, Alcmena, of Tiryns; by Danaë, as a golden shower; by Aegina, daughter of Asopus, as a flame; by Mnemosyne, as a shepherd; by Proserpine, Ceres’s daughter, as a spotted snake. She wove you, Neptune, also, changed to a fierce bull for Canace, Aeolus’s daughter. In Enipeus’s form you begot the Aloidae, and deceived Theophane as a ram. The golden-​haired, gentlest, mother of the cornfields, knew you as a horse. The snake-​haired mother of the winged horse, knew you as a winged bird. Melantho knew you as a dolphin. She gave all these their own aspects, and the aspects of the place. Here is Phoebus like a countryman, and she shows him now with the wings of a hawk, and now in a lion’s skin, and how as a shepherd he tricked Isse, Macareus’s daughter. She showed how Bacchus ensnared Erigone with delusive grapes, and how Saturn as the double of a horse begot Chiron. The outer edge of the web, surrounded by a narrow border, had flowers interwoven with entangled ivy. (Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI.70–​102, translated A.S. Kline)

Ovid’s story of Arachne of Maeonia, who when challenged by the goddess Minerva to a competition in which mortal and immortal would display their skills in weaving scenes of the gods, forms a motif for this present collection of essays, which stems from a deceitfully simple set of assumptions about texts and identities (or texts as identities) and the way we read them. Mapping, examining, reading and rereading, fashioning and self-​ fashioning and, especially, weaving appear as appropriate images that convey the complexity and the nature of creative writing. In Ovid’s tale,

Introduction: Weaving Tales  xv weaving, narration, uncertain identities, and the risks of telling uncomfortable truths all figure prominently. As Ovid relates his story, weaving is first of all a means of narration: each of the tapestries created in the contest between the two tells different stories. Minerva’s begins the competition with a celebration of the glories of the gods, beginning with the court of Areopagus in Athens where the old dispute between Neptune and Pallas Athene was settled. Against such glories, however, Arachne depicts the crimes of the immortals which undermines the propaganda of the goddess. Deception is key to the scene, not least as Minerva first appears to Arachne disguised as an old woman, but the dangers of producing a narrative that contradicts those in power, demonstrating an alternative reality, is also demonstrated clearly: for her bold denunciation of the gods, for refusing to flatter the skill of Pallas Minerva, Arachne is transformed into a spider, although as the goddess makes clear this is also an act of pity as much as revenge: “Live on then, and yet hang, condemned one, but, lest you are careless in future, this same condition is declared, in punishment, against your descendants, to the last generation!” (VI.132). The etymological links between the textual and the textile are clear throughout English literature, and range from Beowulf’s weaving of words to George Eliot’s weaver Silas Marner or Charles Dickens’ tricoteuse Madame Defarge, to mention just a few celebrated instances. Yet that tracery of textual and textile in English literature is one that also is interwoven in European contexts. Ovid’s Metamorphoses was, famously, a recurring source of inspiration for Shakespeare, and his inspiration on writers in English has been repeated through the centuries, as Sarah Annes Brown demonstrated in her 1999 book, The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes. Arachne’s tapestry begins with the story of Europa, deceived by a bull, and as Latin texts were interwoven into the fabric of English, so those retellings in turn have been taken up by scholars in Europe. Consequently, these essays will trace the intertwined patterns that knit texts together, weaving identities as well as undoing them and, in the process, interrogating established and official truths. Indeed, identities have been exposed by twentieth-​and twenty-​first century criticism, perhaps more than ever before, as a fabrication, a constant Penelope-​like weaving and undoing, and this –​as with Penelope’s cunning trick –​always involved in a game of identities, as Homer and James Joyce so lucidly perceived. Thus, since the pioneering work of cultural semiotician Juri Lotman, we suspect that “a text is always a metonymy of a reconstructed integral meaning”, “a tissue of quotations” according to Roland Barthes (Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, Fontana Press, 1977, p. 146), and, for Julia Kristeva, “a narrative texture woven of strands borrowed from other verbal practices” (Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach

xvi  Introduction: Weaving Tales to Literature and Art, translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1980, p. 91). If, again with Lotman, we admit the possibility that “the text is not only the generator of new meanings, but also a condenser of cultural memory” (Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, translated by A. Shukman, I. B. Tauris, 2001, p. 18)., then we should be able to consider it –​as the authors of this volume attempt to do –​“like a grain of wheat which contains within itself the programme of its future development […] not something given once and for all and never changing”. This volume begins with the specifically critical (or even philological) task of reading and rereading, interpreting and reinterpreting all sorts of texts, always through the lens of a polyphony of approaches and voices: English, Welsh, North American, Spanish, Portuguese or Galician. This weaving, inweaving and undoing of –​at times conflicting –​interpretations can also be perceived in the authors’ endeavours to cross the borders between “high” and popular cultures, national (involving linguistic and cultural) traditions, and generic inscriptions. Identities are especially prone to being shaped (or self-​styled), and these are the processes examined in the later part of this book. Here, the essays explore how in a Minerva-​ and Arachne-​like (or Penelope-​like) fashion, identities are built, destroyed and rebuilt anew. Among other topics, these chapters examine the epitome of heteronymic writing (as, for example, with Pessoa in his readings of Keats), the global voices involved in the production of African writing in English, or the historic construction of identities via literature and the word, from Anglo-​Saxon writing to twenty-​first-​century fiction. Such a volume as this cannot (and does not want to) ignore the special importance of current critical and theoretical debates about discursive constructions (weaving) of gender. As such, some of the essays engage, as with any study on women writing, with the construction of oppositional or alternative world views, transmodernism and transnational feminisms, the links between patriarchy and orthorexia, or the careful examination (the slicing) of masculinity in proto-​feminist writing. But, finally, these approaches also share a very special feature, one which makes them stand alone in the context of current examinations of literatures in English. They stem from a collaboration that –​like Arachne herself –​challenges the sign of these regressive times of fierce nationalisms. Weaving Tales: Anglo-​Iberian Encounters with Literatures in English is the result of a project begun in 2018 by the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies that aimed at developing research in English literature, from the medieval to the digital age, and on literary theory, criticism, and history. Entitled English Literature the World: From Manuscript to Digital | New Pathways, the project opened to a partnership between the University of Lisbon (Portugal), the University of Jáen (Spain), and the University

Introduction: Weaving Tales  xvii of Lincoln (UK) that joined in an international conference with the same name, held in Lisbon, and from which resulted a book, English Literature in the World, published in 2021 by Humus. The debates on the study of English literature continued in Jáen in 2020, with From Manuscript to Digital: Worldwide English Literature and Worldwide Literatures in English, a second international conference that again reunited scholars from several countries. These encounters highly contributed to the discussion on the status of English literary studies today and, at the same time, to the strengthening of the bonds between British and Iberian researchers in a post-​Brexit context. Even though the volume is not divided into different sections, our view is that the various chapters should follow a thread that leads the reader from rewriting texts to identity and gender. Doing so, we encompass the following explanation of the chapters that are included in our book. Starting with “Urizen Now: Reading Anew William Blake’s Response to His Times”, Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa and Jason Whitaker discuss Blake in “Urizen Now”. Sousa and Whittaker start from the traditional readings of Urizen to highlight its transhistoricity. Both defend the notion that this character is a key to understanding the essence of what is to be human in the several moments of Western history, in particular in our own times, stricken by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine that, springing from the Cold War, will most probably inaugurate a new world order. The necessity of (re)reading the classics becomes a leading aspect in the following chapters of this volume. In the particular case of M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun, in “William Blake in Spanish Popular Culture and Literature”, she focuses her attention on popular culture and Spanish tradition to explore Blake’s influence on popular culture in Britain and in Spain, and the meaning of poetic and literary allusions to Blake’s poetry, references, and intertextuality in both of these cultural contexts. Blake has often been seen as a patriotic literary symbol (consider the hymn “Jerusalem”), but these assumptions neglect Blake’s criticism of religion and power, the sedition trials and even Blake’s notion of authorship as a collaborative human creation. Under this scope, the presence of Blake’s poetry in Spanish literature is an example of his transnational possibilities and meanings, from Leopoldo M. Panero’s poetry to the lyrics of rock and roll band Héroes del Silencio, and even the Galician poetry and art of Placido Castro (1902–​1967) and Luis Seoane (1910–​1969). As a matter of fact, Marta Villalba-​ Lázaro discusses reviewing the Euripidean Medea through a contemporary play, Cherri Moraga’s The Hungry Woman (2001) in “(Re)reading Classical Mythology through the  Aztec Gods: Cherríe Moraga’s Mexican Medea”. Among the elements she discusses in her analysis are lesbianism, Chicano hybridity, and

xviii  Introduction: Weaving Tales Mexican patriarchy in Moraga’s play. She also analyses how Moraga’s play raises identity concerns from a mythological perspective through the Aztec gods and legendary infanticidal females. La Llorona, the Cicuahateo, la Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, or the Hungry Woman are presented as filicidal ghostly female figures who may have evolved out of a paradigm similar to Medea’s: women who do not purposely close their reproductive cycle and take revenge on children to achieve their own justice. A close reading of Mexican Medea show how Moraga (re)reads Euripides’ Medea through the Aztec gods raising identity, patriarchal and sexual issues, changing the ending of those mythical stories to bring about a new understanding of women’s condition within the still patriarchal and homophobic Mexican and Chicano societies. Focusing on Harold Bloom’s notion of influence, Maria José Pires establishes a dialogue between the tragedies of William Shakespeare and six of Angela Carter’s novels. In her chapter “From Influence to Response: Angela Carter’s Selected Novels Come to Terms with William Shakespeare’s Tragedies”, Pires examines how Carter, by acknowledging Shakespeare’s influence in her work, deliberately deviates from it, thus settling her anxiety caused by that influence. In his chapter titled “P.D. James’ The Black Tower: “Almost Iris Murdoch with Murders in it”?”, Jesús M. Nieto García explores the figures of Iris Murdoch (1919–​1999) and P.D. James (1920–​2014), two well-​ known women novelists with a shared historical background but who seem substantially to differ in terms of women’s role in society and other highly sensitive sociopolitical issues, as well as the way they approach fiction writing. Acclaimed as a major author, scholars describe Murdoch as an intellectual writer an expert in philosophy, while P.D. James is seen as an extremely popular writer, mostly of crime stories. Despite the apparently limited connections between the two writers, Nieto García focuses on James’ The Black Tower and on Murdoch’s The Bell to argue that there more similarities than we may first think, mainly in terms of themes, structure, and style. Nuno Ribeiro re-​ examines in “Romanticism and Heteronymic Theory: John Keats and the Poetics of Fernando Pessoa”, how Pessoa is deeply indebted to English Romanticism and particularly to the poems by John Keats. By exploring the concept of heteronomy and Keats’ notion of the “chameleon poet”, Ribeiro traces the possible parallels between Pessoa and Keats in the genesis of Pessoa’s heteronymic theorization. Mairi Power discusses in “Jennifer Egan and Digital Fiction after Postmodernism”, how Egan distorts the traditional way of producing fiction by experimenting with new technologies and digital materials, focusing on an analysis of A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and Black Box (2012). Power maintains that Egan not only creates new reading

Introduction: Weaving Tales  xix styles but also situates American fiction in the new digital landscape. She also illustrates Egan’s important contributions to the current landscape of fiction and to the legacy of postmodernism. In her chapter titled “Non Angli, sed angeli: The Christianization of the Anglo-​Saxons and the Birth of Englishness”, Angélica Varandas discusses Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People to defend the idea that this text consists of the very first attempt at creating an ideal of nationhood, based on biblical history, thus containing the roots of what would become English nationalism and the sense of Englishness. Female identity becomes an issue in “Exploring the ‘Outsider Consciousness’ in a Selection of Stories by Alice Munro”, by Pilar Sánchez Calle. She discusses Munro’s use of the first-​person narrative to bring her characters to the reader in a realistic way. Using the first-​person point of view enables Munro to reconcile the narrator with his/​her past or present. The result is the creation of individual characters that are bound to the general human condition with whom most readers can connect. An analysis of how some of Munro’s protagonists frequently feel outside the mainstream in socioeconomic and gender situations is made in a selection of stories. We find women and girls who don’t want to perform traditional female roles, non-​traditional teachers whose methods are punished by the small town narrow-​minded mentality, and old people being an embarrassment. Thus, Sánchez Calle explores a corollary theme around which many of Munro’s stories are constructed: the outsider consciousness. Equally, cinema is a powerful medium to display realistic issues that affect society as literature does. There have been film-​makers who have used cinema as tool of protest against injustice and to sensitize the masses. Many critics, however, consider that the film adaptations of literary texts result in the loss of the essence of the original work and even the best of film-​makers are unable to show on the screen different underlying layers that constitute a text. In this context, Ritu Mohan’s chapter, “Depiction of Enforced Identity in Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa –​The Novel and the Film”, intends to critically analyze the film adaptation of Mahasweta Devi’s novel Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa by Govind Nihlani to demonstrate how screen adaptation of literary texts depicts the enforced identity of a tormented mother. Written against the backdrop of the political upheaval of Bengal, India, in 1974, Devi’s Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa is a documentation of the trauma of fragmented identity due to the power dynamics of a patriarchal society. His chapter therefore assesses how far the film director has been successful to put up on the screen the journey of self-​discovery and identity of the mother, and whether or not the film captures the spirit of the book while portraying the trauma of political violence. Jessica Aliaga-​Lavrijsen, in her chapter “A Transmodern Reading of Joanna Kavenna’s Zed: Digital Reason and the Attempt to Transcend

xx  Introduction: Weaving Tales Cartesian Dialectics”, inquires further into the notion of identity with her analysis of Kavenna’s Zed (2019). In her examination of this novel, Aliaga-​ Lavrijsen focuses on the transformation of reality in the last decades with the use of technological advances regarding the digitalization of our everyday. Transmodernity, a term that encapsulates the change of paradigm taking place after the 1980s, has altered our perception of space, as well as of the self/​selves, since the development of the internet and virtual reality have allowed the coexistence of multiple superimposed realities in the same instance. In this vein, this chapter examines the representation of this “newspace” and the implications it has for the construction and interrelation of self/​selves in Zed, as well as the creation of a new artificial-​intelligence-​engineered language more in tune with the novel’s ongoing transmodernity’s “hegemony of digital reason” and quantum physics. Yolanda Caballero-​ Aceituno, through her chapter “Hospitable Loci: The Spatialization of Oppositional World Views in Eighteenth-​ Century Women’s Writings”, delves into the current critical and theoretical debates about discursive constructions of gender, focusing on women’s writings in the long eighteenth century. Caballero-Aceituno argues that women, in their writing activity, created spaces hospitable to their emancipatory ideals, engendering at the same time oppositional world views that questioned the validity of male-​biased discourses. Despite patriarchal offences against this movement, women writers intensely participated in public debates about the construction of personal identities and the role of the individual in society. As Caballero-Aceituno notes, women writers advocated the democratization of enlightened ideals and offered in their works alternative ethical paradigms according to which participation in the public sphere, sociability, and female agency were explicitly identified as key constituents of women’s happiness. In line with the ideas examined by Caballero-Aceituno, in “REMEMBEREST THOU ME?”: Violent Women in Louisa Medina Hamblin’s The Panorama of Life, Milagros López-​ Peláez Casellas explores the figure of Louisa Honore Medina Hamblin (1813–​1838), a writer who by her early death, at age 25, had become the first European-​ born US dramatist to earn a living exclusively from her literary work. What is more, she was the first dramatist in the history of US theatre to have seen her plays enjoy long runs. López-​Peláez Casellas focuses her analysis on Hamblin’s short fiction, stories filled with women emotionally and physically wronged by men. López-​Peláez Casellas argues that these female characters evolve from being easily manipulated by men to becoming strong, self-​confident, violent, and vindictive. Even though some of these stories inevitably end with death, violence appears as one useful proto-​feminist tool that serves to exclude abusive men from women’s lives.

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Introduction: Weaving Tales  xxi Violence also appears in Almudena Machado-​Jiménez’s “Patriarchal Orthorexia and Embodied Dissidence in Contemporary Feminist Dystopias” which presents patterns of behaviour in which contemporary feminist dystopias depict eating disorders as utopian transgressive acts. In the traditional discourse of utopian narrative, defective women are depicted with the need to overcome these physical flaws, as a reflection of their immaculate conduct. However, many contemporary patriarchal utopias present eating disorders and physical alterations as potential transgressive acts to defy the established utopian body. This dissident corporeality baffles the audience as, though a visible form of resistance when their voices are not heard, it willingly flirts with death. Refusal to comply with the beauty ideals leaves them as outcasts and even becomes a form of dissidence. In the traditional discourse of utopian narrative, defective women are depicted with the need to overcome these physical flaws, as a reflection of their immaculate conduct. Particularly, the authoress focuses on the figure of the young female rebel, whose liminal identity is lost during puberty. She disgusts her body in the process of self-​discovery towards womanhood: it is what comes along with her biology, what forces her to abandon agency and innocence and become a beautiful abject object. Finally, Alejandro Nadal-​ Ruiz explores in “Transmodern Paradigm: Transnational Feminism in Nikita Gill’s Work”, how the British writer of Indian origin Nikita Gill has become one of the most widely known Instapoets with nearly 600,000 followers and 350 posts. Her work attempts to challenge the dominance of grand narratives by rewriting them from a transnational, feminist perspective. In doing so, Gill empowers hitherto invisible heroines and creates a new twenty-​first-​century mythology that reflects the dialogic social network characterizing our global age. Moreover, her poetry’s dissemination via Instagram enables for an interaction between a multifarious readership that follows a network-​ like model. This chapter aims to explore Gill’s Instapoetry as representative of this transmodern paradigm, especially as regards the construction of a forum where feminist consciousness is debated globally and where there are no longer hierarchies. Therefore, a selection of Gill’s feminist Instapoems is close-​ read, with an emphasis on how myth rewriting translates into the creation of a network of horizontal relationships that enhances the interpersonality and borderlessness of feminism.

1 Urizen now Reading anew William Blake’s response to his times Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa and Jason Whittaker The idea that William Blake created a key—​a composite poetical key—​ to our understanding of both the world and of human existence has fascinated both of the present authors since the 1980s when we began reading his works closely. Indeed, Blake seems to indicate as much when one of his Four Zoas, the prophet Los, declares in Jerusalem: “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans /​I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create /​So Los, in fury & strength: in indignation and burning wrath /​Shuddring the Spectre howls” (10.20-​23, E153, see Figure 1.1). In 1980, Leopold Damrosch, Jr. offered a clear but concise interpretation of the Zoas in Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth: “the four living creatures who together make up the human psyche and the imaginative universe.” (53–​4) As such, Los and Urizen may be read as two opposing Zoas who lead Blake’s tensely balanced system. In 1978, W.J.T. Mitchell’s Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry provided the following incisive reading of Urizen: “not a man ‘representing’ reason, or a man dominated by the faculty of reason; he is reason, a particular mode of consciousness” (1982, 117). On the other hand, in Kathleen Raine’s Blake and Tradition (1968), Los had been described through an evocative comparison with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definition of primary imagination, as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (cited in Raine, vol. II, 143). These two fallen Zoas, Urizen and Los, are the protagonists of The [First] Book of Urizen, as represented in Figure 1.2. In this image, Urizen is depicted on the left side of the plate, Los on its right side as if mirroring each other. In the 1990s, as part of his General Editor’s Preface to the Blake Trust series of facsimile and scholarly editions of Blake’s Illuminated Books, David Bindman explained that the project would conclude with publication of the sixth volume dealing with the so-​called Urizen Books (6), Jerusalem having been the first to be published in 1991. Additionally, the DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-1

2  Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa and Jason Whittaker

Figure 1.1 Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion (Copy E, plate 10), composed 1804–​c. 1820, printed c. 1821, relief and white-​line etching with hand colouring on paper, ink colour orange, Yale Center for British Art, Prints and Drawings, Paul Mellon Collection.

Reading anew William Blake’s response to his times  3

Figure 1.2 The First Book of Urizen (Copy A, plate 14), composed 1794, printed 1794, relief etching, colour printed with hand colouring on paper, ink colour orangish yellow ochre, Yale Center for British Art, Prints and Drawings, Paul Mellon Collection.

4  Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa and Jason Whittaker editor of The Urizen Books, David Worrall, rightly emphasized that the series for the first time put “before readers faithful and affordable editions in the form in which Blake himself first conceived and presented them” (7). As regards the Urizen Books themselves, Worrall began by pointing out that Blake produced six illuminated books between 1793 and 1795 which have every appearance of having been intended to form a more or less co-​ ordinated project of poetic inquiry into the origins of man, religion and the development of political, sexual and social systems. He continued to explain that the first three books, America (1793), Europe (1794), and The Song of Los (1795), “present a mythical history based upon a continental theme (…) the latter being sub-​divided into sections called ‘Africa’ and ‘Asia’.” Finally, he identified the other three books, collected in The Urizen Books—​The First Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Los (1795), and The Book of Ahania (1795)—​as all concerning “myths of creation which develop more largely the characters of the autocratic Urizen and the rebellious Los who figured in the ‘continental’ books” (9). Joseph Viscomi’s Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993) contributed decisively to the argument about Blake’s printing methods, defending that the artist’s “idea of the illuminated book (…) shifted from a text-​ centered to an overtly pictorial artifact” (xxiv), as we can observe in plate 10 from Jerusalem (Copy E) and plate 14 from The First Book of Urizen (Copy A), digitally reproduced above in Figures 1.1 and 1.2. Indeed, when viewing those images it is even possible to appreciate the former in terms of Viscomi’s interpretation of the Blakean printing process “in which writing is drawing and drawing is writing” (23), an interpretation later developed in Blake and the Idea of the Book: “by being written freely and autographically, the script remained sensual but unaffected” and, “like the language of the great Romantic conversation poems, it visually creates the intimacy of a personal, expressive voice” (59). Finally, the digital reproductions of Blake’s printed works, offered by The William Blake Archive, had a decisive impact on the development of Blake studies at the turn of the twenty-​first century, taking much further the pioneering project of the Blake Trust series of facsimile editions of the Illuminated Books referred to above. In its “About the Archive” section, we can read a very brief but quite informative description: A free site on the World Wide Web since 1996, the Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly

Reading anew William Blake’s response to his times  5 disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility.1 More than a century and a half after his death, the technologies of reproduction had finally caught up with Blake’s production processes, allowing readers to begin to view the entire corpus of his highly original and extremely varied illuminated books in a way that approximates his original texts. In The Apocalyptic Sublime (1986), Morton D. Paley had already considered Blake one of the “major practitioners” of this original English “type of art,” as in his A Breach in a City: The Morning after the Battle. Paley observes that the apocalyptic sublime was developed “from the late eighteenth century through the Victorian period” (1), and that the theme of Blake’s watercolour is “a city suffering the visitation of divine wrath ‘as a fulfilment of the prophecy of Revelation’ ” (73). Finally, he concludes: “The apocalyptic themes and images of Blake’s early drawings are also to be found in the etched designs of the 1790s. This is especially true of (…) America (…) and Europe,” the frontispiece of America being “a variant of A Breach in a City” (74), shown in Figure 1.3. Such a poetic form of reading our world (“poetic” as derived from “poiesis,” that is creative action) interrelates in an unstable manner visual and verbal images: the watercolour A Breach in a City: The Morning after the Battle (c. 1784) and the full-​page printed design on the frontispiece to the illuminated book America a Prophecy (1793); the composite plate 14 of The First Book of Urizen (Copy A), which combines (although it may be divided into a smaller upper part dominated by the verbal images, and a larger lower part by the visual image) tightly interwoven printed designs and printed handwritten words, a case in point being that of the italic serif capital T opening ­chapter 4 or the closely handwritten plate 10 of Jerusalem, framed only by a narrow border of almost leafless, spiky branches of trees rooted in a barren landscape, but reaching skywards where the script appears to have been written. In Blake’s work as draughtsman, engraver, poet, painter and thinker, the corresponding different traditions converge, being interactively modified, and enabling him to transcend his own historical period. Born in 1757, in London, Blake had the Poetical Sketches conventionally printed in 1783; among them was “Gwin, King of Norway” which, like America, “tells essentially the story of a simple struggle between rulers and ‘oppressed.’ ” (1977, 22) This comparison was made by David V. Erdman in Blake: Prophet against Empire (first published in 1953), as a way to demonstrate “how largely Gwin is an imaginative interpretation of the American Revolution,” to illustrate “the continuity and development of Blake’s revolutionary sympathies,” and finally “to give proper emphasis

6  Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa and Jason Whittaker

Figure 1.3 America. A Prophecy (Copy M, Plate 1, Frontispiece), composed 1793, colour-​printed relief etching in brown with pen and black ink and watercolour on moderately thick, slightly textured, cream wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Reading anew William Blake’s response to his times  7 to the central importance in his life and works of the events of the 1770’s [the American and the French Revolutions]” (1977, 22). In “Gwin” as well as in America, according to Erdman, Blake is warning kings, nobles, and bishops that if they go on “binding the nations, oppressing the poor, and ravaging the countryside with war, the result must be revolt.” The following quatrains from the ballad are particularly expressive: The land is desolate; our wives And children cry for bread; Arise, and pull the tyrant down; Let Gwin be humbled. (…) Their wives and children, weeping loud, Follow in wild array, Howling like ghosts, furious as wolves In the bleak wintry day. “Pull down the tyrant to the dust, “Let Gwin be humbled,” They cry; “and let ten thousand lives “Pay for the tyrant’s head.” (ll. 9-​12, 25-​32, E417-​8) Violence does indeed generate violence: the violence of the rulers cannot but generate the violence of the oppressed. Their wives and children, weeping loud, Follow in wild array, Howling like ghosts, furious as wolves In the bleak wintry day. (emphasis added) In the second quatrain just quoted again, the rhyme interconnecting lines 2 and 4 brings emphasis to this Blakean principle—​of his time and for all time—​through “array” (qualified by “wild,” which is amplified by the two comparisons of the following line), and “day” (qualified by “bleak wintry” in a hyperbolized form. Moreover, in Erdman’s words, Urizen is first identified as the “god of war” (29) exactly in America, the illuminated book which, like the conventionally printed poem “Gwin, King of Norway,” “tells essentially the story”—​I wish to add the word “everlasting” here—​the everlasting story “of a simple struggle between rulers and ‘oppressed’ ” (22). ***

8  Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa and Jason Whittaker It is a fact that Blake’s works are his readings, his highly, and utterly diverse “imaginative interpretation[s]‌” (Erdman 1977, 22) of the world and the human existence as seen by this Londoner, from the mid-​eighteenth to the third decade of the nineteenth century, much influenced by the events of the 1770s and minutely analysed in Erdman’s Blake: Prophet against Empire. Indeed, Blake himself declared in a letter to Revd Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799: “As a man is So he Sees. As the Eye is formed such are its Powers” (E702). Nevertheless, it is also a fact that Blake’s works are the readings of each of them “per se” and/​or as part of an ever-​changing whole reconstructed by every particular reader, and every subsequent particular reading, ever since they were first composed and/​or published by their author, until now, and into the future, in a never ending rereading process. Already in 1986, in Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality, Nelson Hilton wrote: “At the beginning of the 1970s the student of Blake confronted the trilithon of Northrop Frye’s genius of archetypal symbols, David Erdman’s social critic, and Kathleen Raine’s ventriloquist of the ‘hidden tradition’ ” (1). Hilton proceeds by tackling the inescapable conundrum of canonicity: “These interpretations (…) had the general effect of making Blake and the study of Blake acceptable, and of establishing his longer poems as masterpieces within the received traditions of Western literature,” the obvious conclusion being that “it is not an author alone who is canonized, or the works, but new ways of reading” (2). Finally, his line of thinking reached its apex: “the act of inclusion within a canon requires innumerable acts of silent exclusion (of interpretations of works as well as of works themselves) that define the boundaries of acceptable academic fields and of discourse within those fields” (3, original emphasis). Let us add that such acts of silent exclusion are absolutely un-​Blakean or Urizenic in the light of Saree Makdisi’s characterization of this Zoa proposed in Reading William Blake (2015): “Urizen (…) can be thought of as the embodiment of the baleful logic of command and dictatorship, almost literally its condensation into a single body” (39). The plurality of meanings intrinsic to Blake’s works has to be taken seriously, says Hilton, although this “does not imply that the text can mean anything we want it to mean, any more than it can mean only what Blake intended it to mean.” He goes on to explain: “even though Blake’s burning bright signifiers can give rise to a range (…) of meanings, the myriad ways they do so illuminate and can be illuminated by our attempts to frame them” (6). Considering “the material nature of Blake’s books and the printing methods he used to print them,” Makdisi further specifies in Reading William Blake (2015): “The experience of reading them (…) straddles the line between turning the pages of a conventional book and looking at a series of individual prints or paintings” (8), On the other hand, that very material nature prevents us from submitting to his

Reading anew William Blake’s response to his times  9 works’ “unilateral dictates,” or from treating them as sacred objects “to be decoded according to a set of interpretive principles revealed only to (or by) a (…) scholarly hierarchy.” At the end of the 1980s in her study “ ‘As the Eye—​Such the Object’: da arte e da ciência em William Blake” [on art and science in William Blake], Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa was also rejecting any form of hierarchical fixed interpretations of Blake’s works: its form (that of the Four Zoas) expresses once more Blake’s continuous hesitation, previously emphasized in relation to The [First] Book of Urizen, between the need to organise (systematise) his meanings, so that he may make himself more easily clear, and the necessity of disorganising them (of preventing them from becoming systematic) in order to impede the transformation of his visionary myth into an allegorical one, that is a to explicit one, thus stopping to force the reader to make, according to Blake, the indispensable interpretative effort. (396–​97; our translation) During the last months of 2020, in the context of an appalling global health crisis with unpredictable economic and social consequences, a first draft of a part of this chapter was conceived by Sousa as a plenary lecture to be given at the II International Conference: From Manuscript to Digital: Worldwide English Literature and Worldwide Literatures in English (University of Jaén, December 2020). Now, at the beginning of 2023, various international perceptions of an impending multifaceted global crisis are reinforced by war in Ukraine, at the crossroads of Europe and Russia, the bloodiest European conflict since the 1990s Balkan wars. Thus, our readings of Blake’s Urizen and Los are certainly shaped by the tumultuous times we are living through, although we endorse Sibylle Erle’s critical principle, pointed out in “To See the Worlds of a Grain of Sand: Blake and Reception” (2022), that Blake cannot be contained despite increasing access, and this applies to understanding his person via biographies and his works via the Blake Archive (…) The danger, as Eaves suggests, is that the desire for comprehension (in a Urizenic kind of way) can become a compulsion that prompts us to select from Blake what fits, so that he can be understood. (12) Such a “Urizenic kind of way” of reading invokes Makdisi’s finale of Reading Blake: “Blake rejects the narrow, confined ‘knowledge’ of confined individual selfhood, which his work allows us to recognize as the very basis of modern economic and political formations.” The emphasis should

10  Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa and Jason Whittaker here be put on the word “selfhood” as synonymous with the fallen Urizen. On the contrary, according to Makdisi, Blake “affirms (…) the joyous life of the prolific: life as an infinitely generative variety of re-​makings, re-​imaginations, re-​becomings (…) a life of endless making; a life in which art and life itself are truly indistinguishable” (126), that is, art and life in the light of Los “Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems” (Jerusalem 11.5, E154). Andrew Dubois declared, in his introduction to the anthology Close Reading (2003), that it was intended “to represent and undercut” what he and Frank Lentrichia took “to be the major clash in the practice of literary criticism in the past century: that between so-​called formalist and so-​called nonformalist (especially ‘political’) modes of reading.” According to him, the common ground of these two modes of reading “is a commitment to close attention to literary texture and what is embodied there.” The two keywords in this case are “texture” and “embodied,” the literary text/​ texture being the body which gives voice, literally or metaphorically, to a particular interpretation of the world and human existence. And then, in a tone of wishful thinking, Dubois concludes: “We like to imagine an ideal literary critic as one who commands and seamlessly integrates both styles of reading” (ix). It is our firm conviction that Blake’s works and Blake studies are in an ideal position to continue inviting all types of readers to that common ground of the prolific. Sheila A. Spector published in 2020 The Evolution of Blake’s Myth, in which she introduces the notion of “image act,” especially enlightening in the context of our own speculations: The unit of discourse, referred to here as the image act, is the individual picture or the engraving plate. Each, potentially, can be the result of the interaction among three different manifestations of consciousness: the narrator, responsible for the verbal portion; the visualizer, for the pictorial component; and the compositor, for the coordination of the two into a unified and coherent image act. The terminology is intended to avoid the misconception that the verbal portion speaks for the entire plate, as well as to indicate that the relationship between the verbal and visual is determined by an ur-​consciousness that transcends the limits of both material mediums. Within this context, the conventional tropes are adapted for their use in image acts. Of these the most significant is enjambment. In poetry, enjambment, which is identified in terms of the line, signifies the technique of creating a rhetorical effect through the use of run-​ons, designed to undermine the expectations of end-​stops. By analogy, Blake uses enjambment between plates as well as between mediums within plates, to problematize the expectation of the image

Reading anew William Blake’s response to his times  11 act as a whole, or any of its component parts in particular, as self-​ contained units. (xii, original emphasis) Our first note on this concept of “image act” would be that it appears too verbal-​centred, despite the fact that Spector calls misconception the conceptualization according to which “the verbal portion speaks for the entire plate.” The second topic to be debated can be easily associated with a central problem addressed in Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-​Century Art, Music and Culture (2012), edited by Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly, and Jason Whittaker. In the book’s introduction, the “tension between aura and technology” (2) both in relation to Blake’s works and to Blake studies is duly underlined: Blake’s own process combines the mechanical printing press with handwriting and drawing on the plate and hand-​finishing on the print, and reproductions by others also combine facsimile and original work: the lithography of the Yeats edition allowed for mass printing but required hand re-​drawing of each image, and the Trianon facsimiles aspired to be close copies, yet, handmade with care, craft, and expensive materials, are unique works of art in themselves (and are treated by libraries as treasures). This tension between aura and technology can be traced throughout a long and complex reception history, through the Victorian period into modernism and beyond, but has been further accentuated over the past 10–​15 years by the broader possibilities of digitalization and web dissemination. (1–​2) These tensions between aura and technology have always existed in relation to Blake’s art and production. As Jerome McGann observed in his A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism: When Blake assumed the roles of author, editor, illustrator, publisher, printer, and distributor, he was plainly aspiring to become a literary institution unto himself. Unfortunately, he could not also assume the role of one crucial component of that institution as it existed in his period: the reviewer. As a consequence, his work reached only a small circle of his contemporaries. Also, his productive processes were such that he could not mass produce his works, so that his fame, his full appreciation and influence, had to wait upon his death. (47)

12  Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa and Jason Whittaker As McGann goes on to point out, the reproduction of Blake’s work was in turn influenced by other technological vagaries, not least that until the end of the twentieth century, standard editions such as Geoffrey Keynes’ and David Erdman’s complete editions focused on reproducing the verbal rather than the graphical components of Blake’s art. Indeed, until the creation of the Blake Archive in the 1990s, reproductions of the illuminated books tended to be restricted to expensive facsimiles. While the formation of the Archive drew full attention to the virtuality of Blake’s works in terms of a common conception of that term in relation to digital technologies, the creation of a virtual Blake archive was a process that built up over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as much a product of print as digital technologies. Throughout the reproduction of the illuminated books via facsimiles—​often using processes that to begin with, were almost as expensive and complex as Blake’s own techniques—​and textual print editions, there is the formation of a “virtual Blake,” as Roger Whitson and Jason Whittaker observe in William Blake and the Digital Humanites, beginning with the selections of Blake that were collected by William Rossetti for Alexander Gilchrist’s famous Life of William Blake: [T]‌he principal objective in Rossetti’s selection was to make Blake as “accessible” as possible, so that Rossetti selected mostly lyrical poetry of a non-​“metaphysical” kind (…) Alongside this selection, drawn mainly from Poetical Sketches and Songs of Innocence and of Experience, was a section entitled “Poems Hitherto Unpublished,” which included a large number of lyrics from Blake’s Notebook, as well as The Book of Thel and selections of Blake’s prose (…) The overall effect of the structure was to provide a readily available collection of those poems that had already garnered some attention, as well as to extend and emphasize Blake’s lyrical talents with poetry that had not been read, and to offer some insight into Blake’s theories of the arts in particular. (33–​4) Just as the concept of the “image act” complicates our understanding of the typical reception of Blake’s works in terms of a reliance on verbal responses to his poetry instead of the illuminated plate in which much of his work was presented, so being aware that we are working with a virtual Blake (or, indeed, Blakes) draws attention to the fact that as readers engaging in a complex reception history, the texts we always deal with are adumbrated by a series of historical and material conditions. This is, of course, true of all writers, but with Blake the peculiarities of his production techniques highlight the assumptions we frequently take for granted when reading a book: Blake’s illuminated art, like those illuminated manuscripts of the medieval period which served so often as his models, refuses the

Reading anew William Blake’s response to his times  13 simple act of interpretation from left to right, top to bottom. As an image act, it demands to be seen as a graphical whole as well as a temporal, verbal series of words. It is via this act of reading as illumination that we began to evade the Urizenic strictures that Blake identifies elsewhere in his works, his so-​called “books of brass” where meaning is fixed, stable, dead. If we are inviting readers, then, to engage in that common ground of the prolific, then a considerable element of this invitation comprises not simply the reading and recognition of all aspects of Blake’s production of meaning as part of the image act, but to realize that we are also producing meanings out of Blake in the constant evolution of virtual Blakes. This, as we shall see, places particular ethical as well as political considerations upon us: we are not, to repeat the earlier point made by Hilton, suggesting that Blake’s texts can mean anything. However, Blake himself seems very strongly as an author to invite engaged and dialectical readings of his works. As he wrote first of all in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Without Contraries is no progression” (E34), and in his contrarian readings of John Milton, classical authors and the Bible, he offers a model for later approaches to his own works. Milton may have famously been “a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” (E35), but Blake equally expected his own readers to actively construct responses to his texts. In a letter to the Reverend Dr Trusler in 1799, he explained: But I hope that none of my Designs will be destitute of Infinite Particulars which will present themselves to the Contemplator. And tho I call them Mine I know that they are not Mine being of the same opinion with Milton when he says That the Muse visits his Slumbers & awakes & governs his Song[.]‌ (E701) Blake was fully aware that his work required active construction of meaning on the part of his audience: the complexity and apparent obscurity of Blake’s art and writings demands that readers rewrite him, just as he rewrote Milton—​“tho I call them Mine I know that they are not Mine.” In his letter to Dr Trusler he continues: That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act. I name Moses Solomon Esop Homer Plato. (E702) This is not merely an act of reinterpretation that Blake invites us to, then, but rather one of co-​creation: Blake does not intend to hand on fixed systems

14  Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa and Jason Whittaker of meaning, but rather to prompt us to create our own systems inspired by his artistic activity. This is an activity that is, to use Blake’s most famous contraries, an act of experience as much as of innocence, and nowhere is this more evident than in one of his most famous lyrics, the stanzas beginning “And did those feet” taken from the Preface to Milton a Poem: And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon Englands mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen! And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my Arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire! I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land. (E95–​96) These lines are more famous today as the hymn “Jerusalem,” although Blake himself reserved that title for his epic poem published after Milton, that is, Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion. Within their immediate context, these stanzas serve as a rallying cry but one which is emphatically pacifist and a rejection of violence: “Shakspeare & Milton were both curbd by the general malady & infection from the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword” (E95). And yet, less than a hundred years after his death, those words were to become a literal rally to violence. When Sir Hubert Parry was commissioned by Robert Bridges to set the stanzas from Milton to music, the aim was to create an anthem for the movement Fight for Right, a propaganda group formed by Sir Francis Younghusband in order to maintain the morale of troops in the face of continued attrition caused by fighting on the Western Front. As Younghusband wrote in 1918: After the first outburst of enthusiasm there was special difficulty, in Great Britain, in maintaining keenness for the war. Our homelands were not invaded, and after the first few weeks there was little chance that they ever would be. It was, therefore, actually harder for the mass

Reading anew William Blake’s response to his times  15 of the British people than it was for the Frenchmen or Russians to feel to the full the necessity of fighting. (iii) The answer to this problem? A rousing hymn by Parry which would inspire all who heard it of the rightness—​the necessity—​of continuing the war against Germany. That Blake’s words, which were engraved in 1804 explicitly as a statement opposing all war could be used entirely against their original purpose is one of the most fascinating, and also dispiriting, examples of the manipulation of works of art in the service of propaganda, one which remained in full force throughout the twentieth century and had a part to play in the Brexit referendum of 2016. The outright rejection of Urizenic, fixed systems of meaning had instead mutated, through the hymn “Jerusalem,” into a closed, patriotic message that brooked no opposition. It is relatively easy to trace the process of how this happened by considering the series of virtual Blakes that were created throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The desire to repackage Blake for easier consumption by a Victorian audience—​a necessary act by Rossetti and Gilchrist to recuperate him from the obscurity into which he had fallen—​resulted as we have already seen, in Blake’s lyrics being stripped away from the more complex “metaphysical” works. In this instance, it meant that well into the twentieth century the stanzas beginning “And did those feet” were regularly republished without the accompanying Preface. With this surrounding context, it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to consider Blake’s lines as anything but a call to pacifism and a rejection of militarism, yet by the end of the nineteenth century, his words were regularly being reprinted as an exemplar of patriotic poetry, as in H.C. Beeching’s 1893 anthology, A Paradise of English Poetry. It was but a short step for those lines to transition to Robert Bridges’ The Spirit of Man, published in 1915, as an example of the England that needed to be fought for against “Teutonic” despotism. In this instance, the inversion of Blake’s meaning is relatively easy to trace: the original image act as part of an illuminated Preface to Milton a Poem is decontextualized, removed from its pacifist setting and, through the technological conventions of printing in various anthologies, begins to operate as a separate, atomized text, one whose meaning can be easily co-​ opted to a radically different cause. Yet the recuperation of Blake’s words to an explicitly militaristic, nationalist cause was problematized from almost the very beginning—​by Parry himself. Parry’s setting of “And did those feet” was immediately recognized as a masterpiece on its first performance at the Queen’s Hall on 28 March 1916, at an event organized by Fight for Right. Prior to the performance by a choir of three hundred singers conducted by Henry Walford Davies,

16  Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa and Jason Whittaker Bridges took the opportunity to address the audience, calling for “an irresistible front united in the principles of order, and right and devoted patriotic duty,” before introducing Parry and telling the audience that “I asked my friend Sir Hubert Parry to compose a setting of Blake’s poem for us. He has done so and we shall hear it tonight for the first time” (cited in Whittaker, 80). Yet Parry’s disquiet with the jingoism of Younghusband’s movement was growing. Although he conducted the hymn for the ladies of the Albert Hall Choir in March 1917 as part of a call in favour of national service for women, by May of that year he had withdrawn his support from Fight for Right. Rather than a jingoistic song against the Germans, Parry preferred it to be sung at a suffrage demonstrate concert in 1918, writing shortly afterwards to Millicent Fawcett: Thank you for what you say about the “Jerusalem” song. I wish indeed it might become the Women Voters’ hymn as you suggest. People seem to enjoy singing it. And having the vote ought to diffuse a great deal of joy too. So they would combine happily. (cited in Whittaker 85) This short account of the transformation of Blake’s poem over the space of a very short time, from a militaristic hymn to one in support of women’s voters, demonstrates the politically charged processes which drive the reception of texts. Although he was the author of Songs of Innocence, very few of Blake’s poems are truly innocent in their circulation, and a century after Parry set it to music, “Jerusalem” in particular has become one of the most contested of his texts, alternating between left and right as an expression of national consciousness. Removed from the context of the illuminated image act, one which challenges the reader with mental fight, so it would seem all too easy to fix Blake’s words in a particular, Urizenic moment, the words determined by those who shout (or sing) loudest. This, however, is never the end of Blake’s art and poetry: just as Blake constantly invites us to rewrite him as we read him, as he in turn rewrote Milton, so those who create using his words and images also enter into his dynamic, contrary vision. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Jesús López-​Pelaez Casellas for inviting them to give plenary lectures at the II International Conference From Manuscript to Digital: Worldwide English Literature and Worldwide Literatures in English (University of Jaén, December 2020). They also would like to thank Inês Sousa-​Lima for assisting me in the revision and editing of this chapter.

Reading anew William Blake’s response to his times  17 Note 1 https://​blake​arch​ive.org/​sta​ticp​age/​archi​veat​agla​nce.

Works cited “About the Archive.” The William Blake Archive, edited by Morris Eaves et al., 2017, https://​blake​arch​ive.org/​sta​ticp​age/​archi​veat​agla​nce. Ault, Donald. Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton. University of Chicago Press, 1974. Bindman, David. Preface. The Urizen Books, edited by David Worral, Princeton UP, 1998, pp. 9–​15. Clark, Steve, Tristanne Connolly, and Jason Whittaker, editors. Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-​Century Art, Music and Culture, Palgrave, 2012. Damrosch, Leopold. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton UP, 1981. DuBois, Andrew. Introduction. Close Reading, edited by Andrew DuBois and Frank Lentricchia, Duke UP Books; Illustrated ed., 2003, pp. 1–​40. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet Against Empire. 1954. Dover, 1977. Erle, Sibylle. “To See the Worlds of a Grain of Sand: Blake and Reception.” Blake/​ An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3 (Winter), 2022, pp. 1–​29. Hilton, Nelson. Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality. U of California P, 1986. Makdisi, Saree. Reading William Blake. Cambridge UP, 2015. McGann, Jerome. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. U of Virginia P, 1992. Mitchell, W.J.T. Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Princeton UP, 1978. Paley, Morton D. The Apocalyptic Sublime. Yale UP, 1986. Pinheiro de Sousa, Alcinda. “As the Eye—​Such the Object”: da arte e da ciência em William Blake. 1988, University of Lisbon, PhD dissertation. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Spector, Sheila A. The Evolution of Blake’s Myth. Routledge, 2020. Viscomi, Joseph. Blake and the Idea of the Book. Princeton UP, 1993. Whitson, Roger, and Jason Whittaker. William Blake and the Digital Humanities. Routledge, 2013. Whittaker, Jason. Jerusalem: Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness. Oxford UP, 2022. Worrall, David, editor. The Urizen Books. Princeton UP, 1998.

2 William Blake in Spanish popular culture and literature M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun

William Blake in English popular culture The idea of Blake as an author has generated multiple mythologizations derived from the interpretations of biographers and later authors who coloured the historical Blake with their own ideas. Alexander Gilchrist’s biography attempted to make Blake’s poetry and art more widely known, but he also created an image of Blake as a solitary mystic (Clark and Whittaker 7). Charles Algernon Swinburne and other late nineteenth-​century authors created a totally different “decadent reading of Blake” mainly based on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), where they saw a celebration of sin (Larrissy 2). Postmodernist writing reinterpreted Blake as a “poststructuralist writer whose complex prophetic works deconstructed any sure ideological meaning” (Clark and Whittaker 7). Angela Carter or Salman Rushdie, for example, “wish to use him as a playful, iconoclastic figure of subversion, yet (…) also (…) a writer who retains sufficient individuality and authority to repay more traditional forms of homage” (Clark and Whittaker 7). The counterculture in the British Isles, Ireland and North America from the 1960s to the present reinterpreted Blake yet again. Aldous Huxley, influenced by Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Blake, and other writers (Allen Ginsberg and others), created a reading full of “Modernism, surrealism, symbolism and the influence of popular culture” (Larrissy 91). They adopted Blake in quotations, allusions and art as a figure that is both canonical and marginal, authoritative and rebellious. Alongside this rebellious conception of Blake as a poet of the devil’s party, however, the twentieth century also saw him reconfigured as a patriotic poet, most notably through the reception of his Preface to Milton (1811), “And Did Those Feet,” as adapted to music by Hubert Parry. This piece is more commonly known as “Jerusalem,” as set to Edward Elgar’s 1916 arrangement, today famous as the version played at the Last Night of the Proms, although the hymn was widely adopted in politically charged ways (see Whittaker, “Mental Fight” 263). DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-2

William Blake in Spanish popular culture and literature  19 In 1981, for example, after the fall of the USSR, the hymn was used in Chariots of Fire, a film in which neoliberal and nationalist values have often been read (263).The themes of triumph and heroism were set in the context of sports, but clearly supported the dominant ideology in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain (264).While the film does not glamorize war and portrays British diversity, it proposes Englishness as the solution to all differences (265). “Jerusalem,” then, has been interpreted both as a hymn of class war and of reconciliation (266). Its jingoistic uses were exploited, parodied and subverted by post-​punk musicians like Test Dept (266) and The Fall. In the 1990s, with their economic growth and conciliatory political panorama, “Jerusalem” became again an English symbol in sports (269), but after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, when far-​right groups such as the British National Party (BNP) abandoned their old anti-​ Semitic rhetoric to focus on Islamophobia (270), there were new attempts to change its meaning. Blake’s mythology has strong Semitic elements. For this reason, it did not appeal to the BNP until their shift away from anti-​ Semitic discourse (270). In several public events involving BNP leaders in 2000 and 2005, “Jerusalem” was appropriated as a rousing tune (272), until in the end, the media began to associate it with the far right, leading in 2006 to the BNP being warned by the Birmingham authorities that playing “Jerusalem” could be considered incitement to hatred. Although Blake’s intentions may have been very different, “Jerusalem” has ceased to belong only to him since it was adapted to music (273). As Slavoj Žižek says about the use of Lohengrin for both the totalitarian leader and the humble Jewish barber in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, “with music we can never be sure” (The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema). Despite these patriotic associations, Blake’s work has always had anticolonial aspects that belie the perception that Blake sang for a jingoistic England. Blake’s radical political beliefs and antinomian approach to religion made him attractive, from the nineteenth century onwards, for Republicans, anarchists, and socialist utopians like Swinburne and William James Linton, who used Blakean imagery in his Broadway Ballads (1876) (Dent and Whittaker 75–​7), or later, David Jones’ countercultural version of nation in Anathemata (1952) (Dent and Whittaker 80–​2). For these authors, the inquiry into the origins of Britain was a means to find the link to European and global heritage (83). The sedition trials Blake was subject to also question the popular image of a patriotic Blake that upholds conservative, traditionalist, and monarchic values. The incident took place when a drunken soldier, Schofield, refused to abandon Blake’s yard, upon which Blake forced him out; Blake was accused of treason for (allegedly) exclaiming “Damn the King” (see Gilchrist, 193–​ 94) and making other seditious statements during the altercation. Blake’s notion of authorship and creation as a product of the

20  M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun labour of all humanity throughout the ages, and not of a single nation or of the genius of an individual that guides it, also differs from the idea of a Bardic Blake. The notion of Self-​Annihilation that we see in Milton, a Poem suggests that a complacent view of the individual (author or nation) generates imposition and domination. Blake’s project had always been universalist, even if from an English perspective: They came up to Jerusalem; they walked before Albion In the Exchanges of London every Nation walkd And London walkd in every Nation mutual in love & harmony Albion coverd the whole Earth, England encompassd the Nations, Mutual each within others bosom in Visions of Regeneration; Jerusalem coverd the Atlantic Mountains & the Erythrean, From bright Japan & China to Hesperia France & England. Mount Zion lifted his head in every Nation under heaven: And the Mount of Olives was beheld over the whole Earth: The footsteps of the Lamb of God were there: but now no more No more shall I behold him[.]‌ (J 25:41–​51, E170) Jason Whittaker and Shirley Dent have commented about this passage that “Albion covers the earth because he is truly international, holding all other nations as ‘mutual’ friends rather than enemy territories to be colonised” (84, original emphasis). Contemporary artists have focused on these aspects to support their own resistance to exclusionary ideas of nation. Dent and Whittaker mention Derek Jarman, a sexual dissident and prophetic artist (84) who dedicated his film Jubilee (1978) to “all those who secretly work against the tyranny of Marxists fascists trade unionists Maoists capitalists socialists etc (…) who have conspired together to destroy the diversity and holiness of each life in the name of materialism (…) For William Blake” (Jubilee qtd. in Dent and Whittaker 84). Ironic references to imperialism and English history and pastoral are put at the service of the search for a new English identity (85). Blakean apotheosis has been analysed recently as a form of criticism of hegemonic power, as a way to exalt a popular and communal experience of nationhood beyond its institutional forms (Fallon, Blake 20). A suggestive example could be Alan Moore’s novel Jerusalem (2016), in which Moore composes a visionary portrait of Englishness through the Northampton working class, its characters, its children, its artists, its rebels, misfits, and the marginalized. All of them have their apotheoses in the novel and transcend into the spiritual dimension of the town “Mansoul,” akin to Blake’s imaginative realms corresponding to real places like London/​Golgonooza. Blake himself is present in the

William Blake in Spanish popular culture and literature  21 chapter titles inspired in lines from “Jerusalem”; his aura also peppers the narrative: he is mentioned as inhabiting London at the time the character Ernest Vernall paints the ceiling of St Paul’s Cathedral and a vision strikes him insane; he is a symbol of the transmission of mad, prophetic rebellion (similar to the likes of William Butler Yeats and John Clare), while an entire chapter is dedicated to another character who is tricked by Moore’s alter ego Alma Warren into researching the relationship between Blake and her. Blake and “Jerusalem” act as the link between the idea of nation, the apotheosis of the townspeople, and the world of visionary art and otherworldly experiences. Blake in Spain: traditional Englishness or countercultural icon? Despite early transmissions, such as José Joaquín de Mora’s Meditaciones Poéticas (1826), based on Blake’s engravings for Robert Blair’s The Grave, Spain’s multiple episodes of “conservatism and censorship” (Flores 155), such as the absolutist reign of Ferdinand VII between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the Francoist dictatorship between the 1940s and the 1970s made it difficult for the works of a radical artist to be translated and appreciated (155). The first time Blake was translated into Spanish was in 1915, with “Ah, Sunflower!” translated by Antonio Balbín de Unquera, as part of an anthology of English verse (156). The reception of Blake in Spain increased at the turn of the twentieth century and in the 1920s, with the Generation of ‘98, a literary movement led by Miguel de Unamuno based on principles akin to those of the European Romanticism. Blake reception also spread in the 1970s, allowed by the end of the dictatorship and the development of English studies in Spain (155). Pablo Neruda’s 1934 translations of Visions of the Daughters of Albion and The Mental Traveller (159) are among the most important. They were directly translated from Geoffrey Keynes, even if with the aid of Pierre Berger’s and André Gide’s French adaptations (159), and it included G.K. Chesterton’s introductory remarks. Juan Ramón Jiménez and Luis Cernuda derived their Blakean inspiration from this edition of Blake (159), and it was an important source for the reception of Blake in Galicia. It was the first to feature visual images from the British Museum collection of Blake prints: the title page of Visions, the illumination from “The Argument” and “Albion Rose” (159). Cernuda translated poems by Blake while he was in exile in the US in the 1940s and 1950s and studied Blake extensively, expressing a critical point of view similar to those of M.H. Abrams and Northrop Frye; although the connection with these authors is still unclear, he did read other Anglophone scholarship on Blake (164–​65).

22  M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun The Galician poet José Ángel Valente could be also counted among writers in Spanish with Blakean influence. He owned a copy of Tiriel, now found at the library of the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. He studied Luis Cernuda and his interest for English poetry, attributing to the influence of Blake what he named the “poetry of meditation” in Cernuda (Rodríguez Fer 421). This is a different view of Blake more as a mystic than as a decadent, like that which permeates Leopoldo María Panero and the lyrics of Héroes del Silencio. In 1935, Agustí Esclasans published the first Catalan translation of Blake’s Marriage (Flores 160). The project of translating major works of European literature, including Blake, into regional languages, was interrupted by the civil war, and was not resumed until the end of the dictatorship (160). Many intellectuals from Galicia, in the northwest of Spain, continued their activities in exile, from the United Kingdom (like Plácido Castro) or Argentina (like Luís Seoane) among other countries. A particular image of Blake had influenced all these authors at this time. Salvador de Madariaga had compared Spanish popular poetry to Blake in 1920 for Blake’s pure and innocent individualism (…) his courageous and lofty amorality (…) [the] virility of his idea of love, so free and so chaste, and (…) his almost mystic feeling of reality (…). Blake is the poet whose spiritis in closest sympathy with the spirit of Spain and her people. (…) Blake’s world is the same as that of the Spanish coplas [ballads], midway between the human soul and nature. (Madariaga qtd. in Flores 163; trans. by Flores) In the 1970s, the poet Leopoldo María Panero, known for his philosophy of excess and the themes of alcohol, drugs and insanity in his poetry (175), spent part of his life in prison and in mental institutions. Panero identified with Blake due to the visions he experienced in his childhood. He thought “the hallucinations of the madman are in the infant the natural form of perception” (Panero qtd. in Flores 175; trans. by Flores). Panero profoundly admired Blake, Gérard de Nerval, and Edgar Allan Poe, whom he described as “epitomes of the disturbing strangeness, of madness ‘taken to’ the verse” (Panero qtd. in Flores 175; trans. by Flores, original emphasis). He saw himself as a poète maudit, a type of artist who diverges in many aspects from Blake, and has been known to mythologize Blake as a diabolist and a decadent. Blake’s references are often associated to abnormal mental states and the effect of drugs, like in the poem “Heroína” [Heroin] from Rosa Enferma (The Sick Rose, 2014): “When the venom enters my blood /​my brain is a rose.” (Panero qtd. in Flores 176; trans. by Flores).

William Blake in Spanish popular culture and literature  23 The Blakean rose is a symbol of his illness and his destroyed life, a product of the “personal hell” that experience entails, leading him to identify with the devil’s party (176), as he does in Sombra [Shadow, 2008], where he references the Marriage: “And only the devil is the lord of the page ‘Every real poet is in love with the devil’ Blake said worshiping the wind” (Panero qtd. in Flores 176; trans. by Flores). Panero wrote also “Al Infierno” [To Hell], a poem in which he is the devil and the tiger: “I am the tiger /​The most beautiful animal in the night: I am the Devil” (Panero qtd. in Flores 176; trans. by Flores). This thread of decadent Blakeanism reached more popular territories in music. The Spanish rock band Héroes del Silencio, formed in the 1980s and active until they split up in 1996, follow this interpretation of Blake (Flores 184). The lead singer, Enrique Bunbury, who was in fact friends with Panero,1 professes his admiration for Charles Baudelaire and Blake, and in the album El Espíritu del Vino [The Spirit of Wine], we can find the song “El Camino del Exceso” [The Road of Excess], whose title is taken from MHH 7.8. In this case, Blake is also associated to this idea of excess as a manifestation of freedom and independence. We can also find Blakean resonances in “Deshacer el Mundo,” “La Chispa Adecuada” and “Los Placeres de la Pobreza,” from the álbum Avalancha (1995; see Barnett et al. “Reviews and Receptions”). In these songs, Blakean echoes suggest the defence of imagination before reason, as in “Los Placeres de la Pobreza” [The Pleasures of Poverty]. A survey of the development of the reception of Blake in Spain from its inception in the nineteenth century to the present suggests that there has been a movement from a Romantic identification of Blake with certain traditional aspects of Spanish folk literature (musicality, spontaneity etc.) to a countercultural reading of Blake more mediated by American popular culture. For instance, Enrique Bunbury emulates Jim Morrison, a musician and icon made through Blakean imaginative influx, among other sources of inspiration. Another example would be the recent work of the publishing collective La Felguera. Among the relevant titles published by this house we can find William Blake: La Visión Eterna. Cartas, manifiestos y ensayos [William Blake: The Eternal Vision. Letters, manifestoes and essays], edited by Javier Calvo, and Ilustraciones al Libro de Job [Illustrations to the Book of Job]. It is of particular relevance to find these titles in the catalogue of a group of editors who hail from a background of cultural resistance and whose mission statement is “demolish culture under its current form” (my translation).2 Interpretations of Blake in Spain today tend to favour this latter countercultural edge, an angle that is not devoid of risks given the capacity of consumerism to co-​opt and commodify the transgression and creative potential inherent to this kind of Blakean avatar.

24  M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun Galician poets, Blake and the search for national identity Galicia went through a period of splendour in the Middle Ages (twelfth to fifteenth centuries), and then fell into a three-​hundred-​year decline until the nineteenth century, when groups of poets and artists took on the mission to revitalize Galician culture, using, among other strategies, its association with a mythical Celtic past. Successive literary movements in the twentieth century, such as the Xeración Nós [Generation Us], continued drawing on legendary connections with Ireland to support Galician culture. The Galician authors and artists I will explore are heirs to these movements, whose efforts were truncated with the start of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship. While some authors and artists went into exile, many others continued their efforts despite the risk of political reprisal from the Francoist regime. It is in this climate that some Galician writers show an interest in Blake, understanding his legacy from the framework established by their predecessors in the nineteenth century “Rexurdimento” [Renaissance]: Galicia has a common Celtic ancestry with other Atlantic regions, and therefore Irish and British inspiration may revitalize Galician literature and arts. Here I will examine evidence of this presence in the works of Seoane, Castro, and Álvaro Cunqueiro, and critically interpret the meaning of Blake for these Galician writers and artists. In twentieth-​century Galician authors, we find a turn to an idea of Blake that emphasizes nation in order to strengthen their own national identity themes. Madariaga’s description of Blake’s poetry resembles those of the nineteenth-​century Galician Rexurdimento poet Rosalía de Castro. Rosalía has been often characterized as demonstrating a sentimental, nationalist Romanticism that returns to the simplicity of the language of the humble people of rural Galicia. Although Rosalía’s life and works have many other aspects, her popular image is that of a “[p]‌ure and innocent individualism”; it emphasizes the folk musicality of Rosalía’s verse, and the theme of nature that Madariaga highlighted in Blake. Eugénio de Andrade, a contemporary Portuguese poet and admirer of Rosalía, dedicated her a short poem in which Blake is mentioned: A few verses for Rosalía This mist fluctuates As in Blake’s poem Over the wet earth LAND That prolongs mine Where poverty works Every plot, every word. And melancholy

William Blake in Spanish popular culture and literature  25 Gnaws and gnaws The bones, the stone Land of Rosalia Eug. Andrade 2.12.83 (Andrade qtd. in López and Pociña 211, translation mine)3 This might point to the specific horizon of expectations Galician authors might have had when reading Blake. Plácido Castro (1902–​1967) was an instrumental and influential figure in the reception of English literature in Galicia. Rubén Jarazo Álvarez and Elena Domínguez Romero attribute to Castro’s work other writers’, like Cunqueiro’s, “passion for Celticism and Anglophilia” (Jarazo Álvarez and Domínguez Romero 182). Castro published Poesía Inglesa e Francesa Vertida ao Galego [English and French Poetry transferred into Galician] in 1946. His 1949 essay “Comparative Study of the Lyrical Sadness of Christina Rosetti and Rosalía de Castro” analyses Rosetti’s “naively childlike” lyrical poems in Sing-​Song and mentions how critics compared them to Blake’s “unearthly rhythms” and “ethereal songs,” and popular traditional songs. He mentions Blake among other poets as exponents of a “Celtic spirit” (Martínez Quintanar, part 17) that he connects to these qualities. He tried to associate the feeling of Galician saudade with authors like Blake, Percey Bysshe Shelley, and Coleridge (17). According to Miguel Ángel Martínez Quintanar, the choice of Blake and other British Romantics was due to their vindications of imagination and nature, of freedom from religion, mechanicist philosophy and scientific discourse. This attests to Castro’s dubious categorization of Blake under the same label applied to Shelley and Coleridge, and the traits it implies. Castro’s essay “Vida y Poesía” [Life and Poetry, 1965] comments on Songs of Innocence and of Experience as the works that granted Blake “poetic immortality,” despite his “confuse” prophecies. Castro’s judgement comes from the horizon of expectations of Galician folklore, a Romantic sentimentality based on Rosalía, and his reliance on the traditional idea of “British Romanticism.” The musical spontaneity of the Songs appealed more to Castro’s horizonal concept of Atlantic Celtic pastoral than the Prophetic books. Castro’s translations from English contain “Ah, Sunflower!” [O Xirasol], “Infant Joy” [Ledicia Infantil], and “The Lamb” [O Año]. Blake’s sophisticated simplicity in “Infant Joy” is translated by Castro to familiar and expressive Galician turns of phrase, such as “Pretty Joy!” as “Ledicia boniteira!” (Castro 49). Similar sentimental idiosyncrasies can be found in “O año,” where he translates “Gave you voice of sweet delight” with the affectionate and familiar Galician diminutive “-​ iña” (“deuche esa voz tan tenriña” [Castro 51]). These translations were published in the newspaper El Faro de Vigo during the

26  M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun 1970s, and “O año” was even broadcast on the BBC Galician Programme no. 51 (1952) before it was also printed on El Faro. Luís Seoane (1910–​1969) shared with Blake the conception of the integration of poetry and visual art, an attitude that he also admired in William Morris, John Ruskin and the Sheffield utopian socialists (Vilanova 46). Exiled in Buenos Aires, Seoane founded the publishing house Botella al Mar, where he published in 1947 Neruda’s translations of Blake (Costa 12). Seoane’s illustrations for these translations of Visions of the Daughters of Albion and The Mental Traveller are a modernist avant-​garde reworking of Blake’s Oothoon. In the first extant letter where he mentions Blake, he speaks about the Spanish poet and artist Rafael Alberti, whom he compares to Blake, and he extols both Alberti and Blake for the hard work required by engraving: “a trade that demands patience and effort, what is known as material labour, struggle with a material, metal, wood or whatever it is” (To Anna de Sima and Isaac Kornblith, 1967). Nelly Perazzo commends “Infant Joy” or “The Divine Image” for their union of word and image in response to Seoane’s interest in Morris’ group and the Sheffield utopians for their integrative approach (Perazzo to Luis and Maruxa Seoane, 1975). After that, Seoane speaks of Blake again to the writer Domingo García Sabell in a letter where he thanks him for his comments on Insectario [Insectarium, 1975], his new woodcuts album. In the letter, he describes his quasi-​pantheistic world view. He confesses to feel an intimate link to nature and to human beings, in whom nature expresses itself. Conversely, human traits are revealed to him in natural beings and objects. This animism he associates to a pagan Galicia where the Celtic belief in metempsychosis would have unconsciously prevailed: “We, innocent Galicians, potential Celtic sages, knew something was contained in the stones, the earth and the waters we have always believed in” (“To García Sabell,” 16/​2/​1976). The same belief he perceives in Blake, and his creation of “The Ghost of a Flea”: “Blacke (sic.), Celtic poet, when he wanted to hurt a neighbour he drew him and wrote underneath ‘The Ghost of a Flea’, he did not think of any sort of machine, big or minute, but of that apparently insignificant creepy-​crawly.” The last letter where he mentions Blake makes reference to the common fascination of many artists like Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee or Piet Mondrian for “the occult speculations and Eastern thought, in other words, for mystery in general” (“To García Sabell” 16/​07/​1976). Not only, then, does he adopt the notion that Blake was a pantheistic, Celtic Romantic, but he was also fascinated with mystery (a word that was rather abhorrent to the real Blake) and the occult. While Blake did read and appreciate Emanuel Swedenborg, Paracelsus, Jakob Boehme and the Bhagavad Gita among others, he proclaimed William Shakespeare far superior as early as in Marriage. Rather than doctrine and system, he thought ultimate wonder was to be found in art and poetry. He thus proceeds: “The

William Blake in Spanish popular culture and literature  27 prerafaelists (sic.), Blacke (sic.), finding them [esoteric ideas] troughout the Bible (…) have in some way something to do with them (…)” (“To García Sabell” 16/​07/​1976). In Seoane we discover a construct of a Celtic Blake in tune with the defence of Galicia as an Atlantic region in Spain with an aura of Celtic myth, origins and connections, a legend originated during the Rexurdimento. Seoane laments that many modern Galician artists (Maside, Laxeiro among others) have been forgotten for the benefit of a new wave of academicist artists. He believed this concept of art was not well suited to Galician culture, thinking that only certain cultural changes in history favoured the development of Galician art in what he believes to be its more typically Romantic and spontaneous modes: It was necessary that profound changes occurred in world art for Galician painters to appear, the same as happened with nineteenth-​ century literature. And what happened with Galicia also happened, for instance, with Brittany. The Celtic countries were mute and confined within themselves from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century, precisely during the centuries of sovereign rules, academias and schools. (Seoane to Fernández del Riego, 5/​02/​1948, my translation)4 The discourse that can be appreciated in this letter presents Galicia as a sublime, Gothic cultural enclave in opposition to the classical and the orthodox view of art of the rest of Spain, in a way that echoes the Romantic portrayal of British and other Atlantic cultures on the basis of the ideals associated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Celtic, Germanic, and Norse antiquity: freedom, independence, strength, and an unpolished but sublime and more genuine lyricism. Seoane was involved with Castro and Álvaro Cunqueiro in contributions to avant-​garde and political magazines. Castro is mentioned very often and dearly in his letters, for instance, when his friend Arturo Cuadrado asks him to contact Castro to provide Irish translations into Galician for their magazine Resol: “Tell Plácido R. Castro to put his great feeling in our work and send some Irish translation. Don’t forget” (Cuadrado to Seoane, 25/​10/​1932, my translation).5 Cunqueiro is well known in Galicia for his magical realism and his neo-​ medieval poetry, inspired by Galician-​Portuguese cantigas. He was also a follower of the Celtic Arthurian myth, which he used in works like his novel Merlin and Company (Zarandona 205). His efforts to define Galician culture and literature with reference to other Atlantic peoples led him to Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England as well as Brittany (Rutherford 159). He was also a prolific translator, publishing numerous poems in

28  M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun the newspaper Faro de Vigo. Additionally, he wrote two chronicles of Blake’s aesthetics: “William Blake: Dos Cantos de Inocencia aos Cantos de Experiencia” and “William Blake no Ceo e na Terra” (Prieto 471). He translated into Galician and combined “I Laid me Down Upon a Bank,” “Are not the Joys of Morning Sweeter” and “Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau,” entitling the result “Dous Poemas de Amor e un de Mofa” [Two love poems and a satire]. He preserves formal traits, such as structure, alliteration, and repetition: “Where love lay sleeping” (E468.2) was translated as “A carón do amor adormecido” (Cunqueiro 54.2), while “Weeping, weeping” turns into “Saloucos e saloucos,” but Cunqueiro changes the setting with “dank rushes” appearing as as roseiras (the rose trees). The roses generate more contrast with the thistles and thorns (nettles and brambles in Galician, more local natural references), which are not “beguiled” in Galician, but punished (castigaron). This evokes a more forceful and violent imposition of religious repression, which consciously or not, fits the context of Galicia under the Francoist regime. While age and sickness “silent rob” the vineyards in the night, in Galician, they go to “vendimar,” harvest the grapes, which is the word for the traditional activity rather than one for a furtive action, and the same verb used for the young ones who “pluck fruits before the light.” Only in this example, we can see how locale, traditions and political context have influenced the reading of Blake. Conclusions The readings of Blake in different regions of Spain evidence the fictitious nature of cultural homogeneity in the Spanish territory. Contemporary Spanish-​speaking poets and musicians seem to have developed a decadent and countercultural interpretation of the Blake from Marriage, whereas in Galician culture, there has been a greater fixation on the lyrical, musical, and Bardic side of the Blake from the Songs. The reception of Blake by Galician authors provides us with insights on both the reception of Blake in a minoritized culture in a constant “Mental Fight” for survival and growth, and the construction of Galician identity from Romanticism and beyond as a global process that bridges Galicia with many cultures around the world, especially with the British Isles and Ireland. The Satanic, rebellious Blake who stimulated Panero’s or Bunbury’s imagination is more embedded in hegemony (through its marketability), but also maintains a resistance to system (through madness); the ambiguously patriotic but transcultural Bardic Blake read in Galicia could run the risk of acquiring the jingoism it has been associated to in Britain, but nonetheless offers resistance to cultural homogenization.

William Blake in Spanish popular culture and literature  29 Notes 1 A result of this association, Bunbury worked on a project to create an album with Panero’s poems set to music during 2001–​04. 2 “demoler la cultura bajo su forma actual” (“La Editorial,” lafelguera.net) 3 Algúns versos para Rosalía Esta névoa flutua como no poema de Blake sobre a terra molhada TERRA que prolonga a minha, onde a pobreza trabalha cada leira, cada palavra. E a melancolia rói e remói os ossos, a pedra Terra de ROSALIA Eug. Andrade 2.12.83 4 “Hizo falta para Galicia que se originasen cambios profundos en la pintura del mundo para que apareciesen los pintores gallegos, lo mismo que ocurrió con la literatura del siglo xix. Y lo que pasó con Galicia ocurrió, por ejemplo, con Bretaña. Los países célticos estuvieron mudos y encerrados en sí mismos desde la Edad Media hasta el siglo X I X , precisamente en los siglos de las reglas soberanas, de las academias y de las escuelas.” 5 “Dile a Plácido R. Castro que ponga su gran sentimiento en nuestra obra y envíe alguna traducción irlandesa. No te olvides.”

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30  M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun _______. “O Xirasol.” Verbas Atlánticas: Poesía inglesa, escocesa e irlandesa traducida por Plácido Castro. Laura Linares Fernández, editor. Fundación Plácido Castro, Cambados, p. 47. Castro, Plácido. “Vida y poesía.” (Originally published 27/​06/​1965 [El Faro de Vigo]), Obra Periodística, Obra. Fundación Plácido Castro. www.fun​daci​onpl​ acid​ocas​tro.com/​obra/​obra-​perio​dist​ica/​faro-​de-​vigo/​19650​627-​vida-​y-​poesa. Clark, Steve, and Jason Whittaker. Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Costa, María Eugenia. “Luis Seoane y el Arte de Editar: Rescate de Botella al Mar.” III Congreso Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Españolas Contemporáneas, vol. 4, Proyectos Editoriales de Españoles en la Argentina, La Plata, Argentina, 8–​10 October 2014. Edited by Federico Gerhardt, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 2014, www.memo​ria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/​trab_​even​tos/​ev.7440/​ev.7440.pdf. Cuadrado, Arturo. Letter to Luís Seoane. 25 Oct 1932. Edited by Emilia García López et al. Proxecto Epístola, Document archive of the Fundación Luis Seoane, Consello da Cultura Galega, 2016. http://​consel​loda​cult​ura.gal/​fon​dos_​docu​ ment​ais/​epist​olar​ios/​epist​ola.php?id=​3297&epis​tola​rio=​1651. Dent, Shirley, and Jason Whittaker. Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife from 1827. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet against Empire. 1954. 3rd ed., Dover, 1991. _______, editor. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Anchor/​ Doubleday, 1988. The William Blake Archive. http://​erd​man.blake​arch​ive.org/​.. Fallon, David. Blake, Myth and Enlightenment:The Politics of Apotheosis. Palgrave MacMillan, 2017. La Felguera. “La editorial.” Editorial La Felguera, https://​laf​elgu​era.net/​. Flores, Cristina. “The Reception of Blake in Spain.” The Reception of William Blake in Europe. vol. 1. Edited by Sibylle Erle and Morton D. Paley, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 155–​84. Gilchrist, Alexander. The Life of William Blake. 1863. John Lane, 1907. Jarazo Álvarez, Rubén, and Elena Domínguez Romero. “Breaking Boundaries and Dislocating Myths in Álvaro Cunqueiro´sFunción de Romeo e Xulieta, Famosos Namorados (1956): A Galician Adaptation of Shakespeare´s Romeo and Juliet in the 20th Century.” ES. Revista de Filología Inglesa vol. 32, 2011, pp. 179–​201. Larrissy, Edward. Blake and Modern Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. López, Aurora, and Andrés Pociña. “A Recepción de Rosalía en Portugal.” Follas Novas: Revista de Estudos Rosalianos, no. 3, 2018. Follas Novas: Revista de Estudos Rosalianos (online), https://​foll​asno​vas.rosa​lia.gal/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​ 2019/​02/​Bibli​ogra​fia-​ALo​pez-​APoci​nha-​FN3.pdf. López, Bernárdez, and Xosé Carlos. “Plácido Castro e a arte galega do seu tempo.” 15ª Conferencia Anual. Fundación Plácido Castro. www.fun​daci​onpl​acid​ocas​ tro.com/​conf​eren​cia-​anual/​15a-​conf​eren​cia-​anual-​plac​ido-​cas​tro-​e-​arte-​gal​ ega-​seu-​tempo. Martínez Quintanar, Miguel Ángel. “13ª Conferencia Anual: Galeguismo e saudade: A visión de Plácido Castro.” Conferencia Anual, 2012. Fundación Plácido Castro. www.fun​daci​onpl​acid​ocas​tro.com/​conf​eren​cia-​anual/​13a-​conf​eren​cia-​ anual-​gal​egui​smo-​e-​saud​ade-​vis​ion-​de-​plac​ido-​cas​tro.

William Blake in Spanish popular culture and literature  31 Perazzo, Nelly. Letter to Luis and Maruxa Seoane. 19 March 1975. Edited by Emilia García López et al. Proxecto Epístola, Document archive of the Fundación Luis Seoane, Consello da Cultura Galega, 2016. http://​consel​loda​cult​ura.gal/​fon​ dos_​docu​ment​ais/​epist​olar​ios/​epist​ola.php?id=​1424&epis​tola​rio=​1651. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Directed by Sophie Fiennes, performed by Slavoj Žižek. Amoeba Film/​Lone Star/​Mischief Films, 2006. Prieto Álvarez, César. Álvaro Cunqueiro. Viajes literarios, puertas de imaginación. 2019, Universitat de Barcelona, PhD dissertation. Rutherford, John. “Álvaro Cunqueiro e a Tradición Literaria Anglófona.” Mil e un Cunqueiros: Novas olladas para un Centenario. M. Forcadela, T. López, and D. Vilavedra (coords.). Santiago de Compostela, Consello da Cultura Galega, 2014, pp. 157–​74. doi:10.17075/​mucnoc.2014. Seoane, Luis. Letter to Anna de Sima and Isaac Kornblith. 17 March 1967. Edited by Emilia García López et al. Proxecto Epístola, Document archive of the Fundación Luis Seoane, Consello da Cultura Galega, 2016. http://​consel​loda​ cult​ura.gal/​fon​dos_​docu​ment​ais/​epist​olar​ios/​epist​ola.php?id=​1424&epis​tola​ rio=​1651. _______. Letterto Fernández del Riego. 5 February 1948. Edited by Emilia García López et al. Proxecto Epístola, Document archive of the Fundación Luis Seoane, Consello da Cultura Galega, 2016. http://​consel​loda​cult​ura.gal/​fon​dos_​docu​ ment​ais/​epist​olar​ios/​epist​ola.php?id=​56&epis​tola​rio=​1651. _______. Letter to García Sabell. 16 February 1976. Edited by Emilia García López et al. Proxecto Epístola, Document archive of the Fundación Luis Seoane, Consello da Cultura Galega, 2016. http://​consel​loda​cult​ura.gal/​fon​dos_​docu​ ment​ais/​epist​olar​ios/​epist​ola.php?id=​1424&epis​tola​rio=​1651. _______. Letter to García Sabell. 17 July 1976. Edited by Emilia García López et al. Proxecto Epístola, Document archive of the Fundación Luis Seoane, Consello da Cultura Galega, 2016. http://​consel​loda​cult​ura.gal/​fon​dos_​docu​ment​ais/​epist​ olar​ios/​epist​ola.php?id=​1424&epis​tola​rio=​1651. Vilanova, Fernando M. “A Arte de Seoane no Laboratorio Industrial.” Raigame, no. 33, 2010, pp. 42–​ 52. https://​dial​net.uniri​oja.es/​desca​rga/​artic​ulo/​3350​ 091.pdf. Whittaker, Jason. “Mental Fight, Corporeal War, and Righteous Dub: The Struggle for ‘Jerusalem’, 1979–​2009.” Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-​Century Art, Music and Culture, edited by Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly, and Jason Whittaker, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 263–​73. Zarandona, Juan Miguel. “From Pondal (1835–​ 1917) to Cabanillas (1876–​ 1956): Ossian and Arthur in the Making of a Celtic Galicia.” The Harp and the Constitution: Myths of Celtic and Gothic Origin. Brill, 2015.

3 (Re)reading classical mythology through the Aztec gods Cherríe Moraga’s lesbian Mexican Medea Marta Villalba-​Lázaro

Introduction Myth and literature are intimately connected concepts. As Michael Foucault notes, in the region of man’s own representations arise the study of literature and myths, the analysis of all oral expressions and written documents, in short, the analysis of the verbal traces that a culture or an individual may leave behind them. (355) Accordingly, mythology in general and classical literature in particular, can be useful resources in the search for the self-​identity of any community: folk tales, whether orally transmitted from generation to generation or shifted into written form, are likely to have resisted the forces of imperialism and consequently may illustrate both precolonial identities and postcolonial concerns. Indeed, many postcolonial writers use their knowledge of the classics to spread their ideas and demonstrate that antiquity may be “a source of social power for upwardly mobile indigenous people; that is not monolith, with classical material deployed sometimes in subversive ways that challenge rather than reinforce the colonial establishment” (Parker 7). Similarly, Lorna Hardwick asserts that classical texts have in recent years been acknowledged “as a source of resistance and liberation” (2). While literature in general has historically proved to be an effective instrument to raise consciousness and even transform society, drama can be singled out as an especially important sociopolitical platform. As Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins argue, postcolonial theatre “can offer more possibilities to intervene publicly and wield a more effective opposition to colonial discourse than other genres” (3). In fact, drama as a genre and Greek tragedy in particular is becoming increasingly relevant in a number of postcolonial debates and has played a central role in recent cultural politics (Hardwick 3). DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-3

(Re)reading classical mythology through the Aztec gods  33 The protagonist of Euripides’ Medea (431 BC E ) has developed into a prolific and ductile classical figure over the centuries, easily adaptable to different postcolonial contexts, as proved by many postcolonial dramas, such as Guy Butler’s Demea (1990), set in apartheid South Africa, and Wesley Enoch’s Black Medea (2003), which features an Aboriginal Medea in Australia. Despite these plays’ focus on a range of political, gender, and cultural issues, they share a common theme: the agency of an abandoned woman in a xenophobic and patriarchal environment who wins over the white man. This chapter focuses on Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001), a postcolonial and dystopian play that follows the Euripidean Medea in a long journey through time and space from ancient Greece, almost five hundred years before Christ, to Aztlán, the imagined promised land of Chicanos, an in-​between culture arising from Mexico and the United States in the second decade of the twenty-​first century. The Hungry Woman is a striking example of the reception of mythical classical imagery in precolonial and postcolonial contexts because of its portrayal of multiple gods, legendary ancestral figures, and Aztec reminiscences that intermingle with a rewriting of Euripides. Cherríe Moraga was born in Los Angeles in 1952. She now lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area. She is a Chicana writer, poet, essayist, and playwright. Moraga is from the United States and Chicana—​ descended from an Anglo father and a Mexican mother who herself was a product of two different cultures, the Indian and the Spanish. She is also a lesbian and an activist for women’s and gay rights. Her autobiographical writings are a rich source to understand her literary works. For example, in Loving in the War Years (1983), she pictures the patriarchal home and society into which she was born, which helps with interpreting Mexican Medea. In another autobiographical work, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of Queer Motherhood (1997), we learn about her aspiration to create a family beyond the constraints of the Mexican model and the process she went through to give birth to her only child, Raphael. The Hungry Woman expresses Moraga’s deep connection to myth, to Aztec culture and to the Chicano movement; it also shows her compromise with the queer identity cause. In fact, in the play’s foreword, Moraga explains that when she goes to her motherland, Mexico, she feels like an outsider until she goes to the Templo, when she descends “into the visceral experience of a collective racial memory that my writer’s soul irrefutably embraces” (Mexican Medea x), showing how important it is for both her literary and her sense of self to explore her roots. This resorting to the gods is somehow the return to an ancestral Mexican past, an essence which has been tainted with so many other cultures like the classical and canonical Western white myths, the Mexican and Spanish cultures (with their

34  Marta Villalba-Lázaro inevitable venerated Catholic referents), and the so-​called Euro-​American neighbouring culture which is, if not the most important, at least closest to the Chicanos. Moraga’s play revolves around infanticidal figures that may have developed from an architype similar to the Greek myth of Medea, which “evolved out of a paradigm found in the folk beliefs of Greece and many other Mediterranean cultures: the reproductive demon, who persecuted pregnant women and young children” (Johnston 45). The reproductive demons, whether found in ancient or modern times, are believed to be the souls of women who died as virgins or in situations failing to give birth so, out of revenge, they kill children or pregnant, parturient or newly delivered women. These figures serve “as the popular explanation for rare illnesses related to childbirth” (57). For example, in Mexican folklore La Llorona (the weeping woman) embodies the ghost of a mother who, having murdered her children, spends eternity wandering around the world looking for other children to kill. La Malinche is another legendary Mexican figure invoked by Mexican Medea; an Indian translator for the Spanish conquerors, who killed the child she had with Hernán Cortés. Yet, it is the Aztec imagery that frames the play: the Cicuahateo, female warriors who died in childbirth; Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of creation and destruction; Coyolxauhqui, the dismembered mother; or the Hungry Woman, the insatiable figure of desire. The protagonist, the Mexican Medea, is a pure Indian who marries Jasón, a successful, mixed-​race (Mexican and gringo) politician. They live in times of revolt until they set up their imagined and longed-​for Aztlán, a Chicano nation. However, this nation becomes a patriarchal society and Medea is expelled to the dystopian Phoenix when she is discovered with her lesbian lover, Luna. Medea’s son Chac-​Mool initially accompanies her, but there will come a time when he becomes a man, and inevitably, in this chauvinist Mexican-​Chicano society, a machista. Medea will not allow her son to grow into one of them. Moraga draws on the classical figure of Medea to discuss Chicano hybridity, lesbianism and Mexican patriarchy. This chapter engages with the play’s identity concerns from a mythological perspective, particularly how Moraga uses Mexican legends, and features the Aztec gods to resist assimilation and defend pre-​Columbian identity. First, I offer a brief background of the Chicano community’s hybrid culture, with a focus on theatre; I then proceed to a discussion of the play. My close reading of Mexican Medea will show how the dramatist (re)reads Euripides’ play through the Aztec gods to raise issues of identity, patriarchy, and sexuality, changing the ending of those mythical stories to bring about new understandings of the condition of women within the patriarchal and homophobic Mexican and Chicano societies.

(Re)reading classical mythology through the Aztec gods  35 The Chicano community’s hybrid culture: focus on theatre The Chicano movement emerged in the 1960s as the aspiration of a group of Mexican American nationalists “to integrate and organise their political concerns within the United States” (Perles Rochel 243). The term “Chicano” gradually replaced the hyphenated “Mexican-​American” with the idea of “emphasising racial combativeness, resistance to assimilation and working class origins”. If the activists succeeded in their initial project, it was because they were capable of “integrating their new claims within a new identity and a new space” (243). The Chicanos also approved a sort of manifesto: the Plan de Aztlán (1969), an ideological proposal setting the basic framework for nationalism and self-​determination. Chicanos’ culture emerged from a blend of the Mexican-​Aztec culture with the legacy of the Spanish empire in Mexico, both of which were combined with the impact of Mexican migration to the United States. This is a peculiar postcolonial context: the Chicanos have no physical territory whatsoever because they were actually the victims of a double colonization; first by the Spanish and then by the Anglo-​Americans, who deprived Mexicans of vast parts of their former territory. Mexicans then reinhabited this territory as migrants in pursuit of a better life and became anglicized in customs and language. Nevertheless, they rose politically and longed to keep their own identity; with this in mind, they wanted to foster their own cultural manifestations. In fact, the Plan de Aztlán (1969) that established the basis of the Chicano movement includes the following principle: We must ensure that our writers, poets, musicians, and artists produce literature and art that is appealing to our people and relates to our revolutionary culture. Our cultural values of life, family, and home will serve as a powerful weapon to defeat the gringo dollar value system and encourage the process of love and brotherhood. (León Jiménez 66) As argued by Carla Jonsson, Chicano theatre started as performances to entertain farm workers: Luís Valdez and other actors in El Teatro Campesino collectively created short, improvisational sketches called actos to entertain and educate audiences about their problems and to offer possible solutions (80). Soon, more controversial themes like violence, drugs and police brutality were included, along with any issue that could be imaginatively related to the Chicano struggle against the so-​called gringos. The main themes in Chicano culture, therefore, stem from this life on the border, from the clash of two completely different worlds, including marginalization and its consequences like educational discrimination, bad working conditions, disintegration of families, the partiality of justice and

36  Marta Villalba-Lázaro many other issues originating in migratory predicaments. As Jorge Huerta puts it, Chicano drama also “allows for a space in which the Chicanos’ search for identity can take place” (58), emphasizing that this theatre attempts to construct an identity in a country that wants to obliterate it. Chicano theatre also draws on folk and vernacular forms but, as Ivonne Yarbro-​Bejarano remarks, it mixes and approaches a variety of cultural genres, resulting in “a performative tradition which defies easy categorization” (24). Jonsson explains that this theatre emerged as a result of a feeling of discontent in the Chicano community (81); in fact, the main theme of Chicano drama is the struggle against the society in which Chicanos live. Therefore, theatre was once again used as a political weapon to fight cultural colonization created by migration that equally entails the loss of indigenous culture and identity. Although both Mexican and Chicano theatres deal with some postcolonial issues, each was shaped in a patriarchal society where gender and sexuality are not traditionally part of the dramatic repertoire. Yarbro-​ Bejarano contends that “the plays that form the canonical Chicano theatre repertory tend to perpetuate the hierarchy based on gender, confining the representation of women within the polarized gender structure that theatre reflects and reproduces” (24). The Chicanas’ representation as “the other” led playwrights like Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa to raise their voices and challenge traditional gender constructions by writing about lesbianism and women’s rights. As a dissident, Moraga is notable for her audacious perspective on mixing homosexuality and Chicano culture. Tomás Almaguer notes that her autobiographical work shows penetrating intuition about the complexities and contradictions that are inevitable for all gay or lesbian Chicanos and Chicanas in the United States (64). Alicia Arrizón believes that Moraga’s impact on Chicano theatre is now almost legendary: more than a gifted dramatist, “she is the transgressor, the taboo breaker in Chicano culture” (167). This analysis of Mexican Medea aims to prove these new understandings of contemporary Chicano theatre through themes like gender and sexual issues inspired by the myth of Medea. Aztlán is the imagined nation of the Chicanos, a migrant community who lives in the United States, speaks English and aims at having their own nation and shaping their own identity. Theirs is a clear case of hybridity, a term that in the colonial period was despised and marginalized and is now celebrated and privileged in postcolonial discourse. Hybridity is even considered a benefit because it opens new ways to negotiate the difference and to take advantage of both worlds. Moraga’s play deals with two kinds of hybridity: one is political and concerns Chicano identity; the other is sexual and has to do with homosexuality, specifically lesbianism. Hybridity is intimately connected with Homi Bhabha’s notion of the Third Space.

(Re)reading classical mythology through the Aztec gods  37 Bhabha conceives the concept of the Third Space (which he also calls “in-​between spaces”) as an imaginary place of freedom where any identity would be possible: “these ‘in-​between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of self-​hood—​individual or communal—​that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself” (The Location 1). In line with postmodernist views, Bhabha reinforces the idea that there is no unity or fixity in any cultural representation because even “the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew” (“Cultural Diversity” 208). One of Bhabha’s conclusions is that this “split space of enunciation” is also an opportunity to “open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism or multiculturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity” (“Cultural Diversity” 209, original emphasis). This interface would be a space of liberty without the usual constrictions, where it would be possible to imagine new flexible identity strategies, in terms not only of cultural identities but also of sexual or class difference. Aztlán, the imaginary land of Chicanos, can readily be identified with Bhabha’s notion of Third Space. Moraga describes the history of Chicanos and Chicanas in The Last Generation as follows: Chicano Nation is a mestizo nation conceived in a double-​rape: first, by the Spanish and then by the Gringo. In the mid-​ 19th century, Anglo-​America took possession of one-​third of México’s territory. A new English-​speaking oppressor assumed control over the Spanish, Mestizo, and Indian people inhabiting those lands. There was no denying that the United States had stolen Aztlán from México, but it had been initially stolen from the Indians by the Spanish some 300 years earlier. (153–​54) According to Aztec mythological tradition, “Aztlán is the ancestral homeland in the north that the Aztecs left in 1168 when they journeyed southward to found the promised land, Tenochtitlán—​Mexico City—​in 1325” (Arrizón 4). This unrealized land is just an ideal and imagined territory which symbolizes the motherland yearned for by many Chicanos, who find themselves in the middle of nowhere. Aztlán represents an imagined community rather than an actual land; it thus fits well with the understanding of Benedict Anderson, who defines a nation as an imagined political community—​and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-​members, meet

38  Marta Villalba-Lázaro them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. (6) Chicano writers were inspired by this new national consciousness and often turned to their myths and ancient gods as an essential and fresh starting point to resist assimilation and support the uniqueness of their identity. However, the shift to the ancestral gods and mythical figures is sometimes used by patriarchies to debase women. As Anzaldúa poetically puts it, “Guadalupe to make us docile and enduring, la Chingada to make us ashamed of our Indian side, and la Llorona to make us long-​suffering people” (55). Obviously, this is not Moraga’s intention: her purpose when using these figures is precisely to show how manipulative Mexican discourse can be in humiliating and demeaning her feminine goddesses or traditional folk images. As Carmen González Ramos explains, Moraga’s general use of Coyolxauhqui is protofeminist: This dismembered womanhood is presented in her work as the first step within a reconstruction process leading to self-​fulfilment [thus echoing how] fragmentation and dismemberment recur in feminist art and theory, symbolizing the difficulty of women to express their subjectivities, for so long silenced and erased from the dominant tradition. (137) Along these lines, Nadine Gebhardt observes that in Mexican and Chicano traditions, women are expected to imitate the Virgin Mary, an unrealistic image of femininity (5). On the other hand, la Malinche and la Llorona must be rejected, as Catholic-​patriarchal discourses have constructed them as mujeres malas (bad women), but these three archetypes may also “be emblems of feminine power. In a variety of ways, Chicana feminists have appropriated these mythic figures in, for example, literature, art, and music in order to imbue them with new meaning” (Gebhardt 5). Although inspired by Euripides’ Medea, Moraga’s Mexican Medea draws on many mythical figures which intermingle and play important symbolic roles; notably, all of them are childless women. In the foreword, she explains how she turns to “the mutilated women of our indigenous American history of the story: La Llorona, Coyolxauhqui, and Coatlicue. I worship them in my attempt to portray them in all their locura, because I admire the living expression of their hungers” (Mexican Medea x). And, of course, there comes the disturbing figure of the Hungry Woman, an Aztec goddess full of biting and moaning mouths that are never satisfied. According to Swyt, the figure of the

(Re)reading classical mythology through the Aztec gods  39 Hungry Woman “enacts (…). what Anzaldúa calls a borderland consciousness” (190), while its meaning in Moraga’s play is mainly sexual, personifying desire, as can be inferred from the fact that it only appears when Medea and Luna have sex. Mexican Medea and the Aztec gods: The Hungry Woman The Hungry Woman rewrites Euripides’ Medea picturing, as stated in the foreword, a “future of recent fictional past, dreamed only in the Chicana imagination” (Moraga, Mexican Medea 14).1 This is the result of a revolt against Anglo-​Americans, after which the longed-​for Aztlán is founded; however, a counter-​revolution immediately imposes new rules drawn from the forces of Mexican patriarchy: rules against difference and against the queer, who are to be banned and taken to Phoenix—​an in-​between, dystopic “blade runneresque” place (7). After the counter-​ revolution, Medea’s problems begin. She had been betrayed by her motherland and her older brothers and sisters: those warriors who, like her, stood up for their rights and achieved some portion of freedom and equality. But this freedom is more apparent than real; soon, the idiosyncrasy of the Mexican people will triumph, and patriarchal and machista values will be imposed. From then on, Medea will long for another Aztlán, a different one. The place yearned for by Medea is not the Aztlán depicted in the play: a patriarchal and intolerant Mechicano (blend of Mexican and Chicano) country. She complains about both politics and sexism when saying, “Men think women have no love of country, that the desire of a nation is a male prerogative. (…) Aztlán how you betrayed me!” (15). Like the classical heroine, she feels herself an orphan without her motherland. The Mexican Medea fits the personality of the Euripidean heroine. She is a strong-​willed and determined woman skilled in the art of mixing herbs—​a curandera. However, this beautiful Indian, sexually abused by her brother but a virgin when she married Jasón (15), discovers a different sexuality with Luna, her female gardener. Jasón finds them in bed and both are banished to Phoenix, a place created to exile not only the intrinsically weird but also any who do not obey the rules of Aztlán. Mexican Medea stays with Luna in Phoenix for seven years with her son Chac-​Mool, but he is about to turn 13 and is willing to return to Aztlán. Chac-​Mool does not merely make this choice; the moment arrives when Jasón can force her to let him go. The turning point in Chac-​Mool’s life, and hence in Medea’s, arrives with his incipient maturity. The play opens with a chorus composed of Aztec goddesses, the Cicuahateo warrior women who died in childbirth, in the tradition of

40  Marta Villalba-Lázaro the reproductive demons. The Cicuahateo assimilate motherhood into a heroic act, giving birth to new warriors. As Marta Fernández points out, it is significant that Moraga chooses to portray women who died giving birth, since they were the only female members of the community who could be honoured as warriors and buried as such in classical times[; in this way women are] given a political and cultural weight. (89) In the play’s opening scene, Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of creation and destruction and “an awesome decapitated stone figure” (9), stands on an altar flanked by the Cicuahateo, who tell the audience the mythical account of how she became pregnant from a feather. The Aztec god Coatlicue is so dominant that the whole setting is actually designed as an altar to her and in this two-​act play, each act begins with the re-​enactment of the Coatlicue myth. The figure of Coatlicue with a “serpent skirt” and breast shield splayed with dismembered hands and hearts is illuminated on stage (Koç 156). As is discussed below, Coatlicue’s story closes the play but subverts the ending so as to change the patriarchal triumphs of the legend. The play constantly shifts time and space, a postmodernist technique that helps account for things that already happened and better explore the causes of what is to come. We know from the beginning that Medea will end up in a prison’s psychiatric ward (9), and we gradually learn the reasons why. The author explains in a clarifying introductory note the setting and the time, but the audience has yet to decipher many other enigmas which are illuminated by those mythological figures, with their long history, and intriguing characters imbued with enormous symbolic meaning. In fact, the audience faces another difficulty: the characters’ personalities and evolution are full of contradictions, mirroring life itself. Moraga recognizes that this is one of the most challenging aspects of the play: [T]‌ he great thing about writing plays or fiction is that you write characters, so they can really contradict themselves all the time. In essays, people don’t like you to contradict yourself. But I usually show people failing. We fail each other. In The Hungry Woman, you see a lesbian relationship that’s just going to fail, you know? But I always feel by the portrait of that failure you portray their desire, and if you can portray desire, there’s hope. (qtd. in Anderson 77)

(Re)reading classical mythology through the Aztec gods  41 Medea and Jasón’s love story is scarcely related. We know that he is an important mixed-​race politician who needs the pure Indian blood Medea to legitimate him for political purposes. This is only hinted at, since the audience is not told about the relevant past events. Medea boasts of being an Indian, purer than Jasón and Luna: “You are (…) different, less hair”, says Luna, to which Medea replies simply: “Mas India” (61). She even believes that she deserves to be in Aztlán more than Jasón precisely because of her purer background, and knows that their alliance would support his political ambitions. Their love was passionate and remains so, even after Medea’s betrayal. Jasón doubts Medea’s lesbianism: “You are not a lesbian Medea, for chrissake. This is a masquerade. (…) I am not saying that you have no feelings for the relationship, but you are not Luna!” (54). When Medea is in prison, she does not want to talk to Luna, but the continual flashbacks show how they relished their lovemaking; this is when, for the first and last time, the Hungry Woman appears. The Aztec mythical figure finally turns up in a sexual scene: Pero, just like before, her mouths were everywhere, biting and moaning (…) opening and snapping shut. They would never be filled. (Pause). Sometimes por la noche, when the wind blows, you can hear her crying for food. (45) In this case, the myth serves to portray desire, the hunger for love and passion. Lesbianism is openly discussed in the moments when Luna and Medea have intense sexual intercourse. For Moraga, speaking her sexuality “meant finding [her] way out of a false and constricting choice between ethnic and sexual identity, between the affirmations and restrictions represented by the home place and home culture” (Adams 137). The playwright openly reveals how she realized, at the age of 11, that she did not have the same interests as her girlfriends, how she was her own worst enemy because she received the most brutal homophobic attacks from herself, the ordeal she underwent when she had to face her mother, and how her mother’s initial rejection “in a mean way” allowed Moraga to stand up and defend herself. She also acknowledges her mother’s final acceptance and the unconditional love that followed (Makers Videos tape 3). Moraga’s desire to create her own family within a lesbian relationship is also depicted in her autobiographical work Waiting in the Wings (1997). Collette Morrow analyses this book, particularly Moraga’s deeply introspective thoughts about the intimate reasons why homosexuals wish to have children. Moraga’s replies ranged from personal to sociocultural explanations. Morrow writes, “Generative lesbiana familia offers

42  Marta Villalba-Lázaro authenticity and healing in a world fraught with racism, sexism, homophobia, and abuse. It is an antidote to the death of the human spirit caused by oppression” (200). Morrow continues, saying that Waiting in the Wings also expresses Chicana literature’s traditional concerns and themes. The roles that spirituality and religion—​Mexican Catholicism and indigenous beliefs—​ play in subject constitution and cultural formation are reworked through Moraga’s need for faith in crisis as she contemplates the “mexicanism” that Rafael [her son] inherits. (200) This interpretation mirrors, in a clear autobiographical parallel, Mexican Medea’s feelings about Chac–​Mool’s “mexicanism”. At first, Phoenix represents freedom. Medea can live with Luna, her lover, and be herself—​or at least what she thought to be herself. However, Phoenix is not exactly a paradise; it is a ruined land, what Medea calls a “wasteland”, a place where “yerbas grow bitter for lack of water” (15). Yet she does not think about going back as long as her son Chac-​Mool can stay with them. Medea identifies her son with her motherland: “You’re my land, hijo, don’t you see that? You are my land!” (85). Motherhood is thus the most important identifying feature for Medea; paradoxically, however, she will ultimately kill her son. Medea feels uneasy even before she knows that her son Chac-​Mool might leave her. At one moment, she reassures herself by telling Luna that Jasón does not need his son because “he’ll get his progeny” with his new girlfriend who “is India enough” (16); she is in fact an Apache, a Native American, a legitimate inhabitant of former Mexican lands seized by the Gringo’s expansions. However, Medea is already disturbed, drinking tequila to unconsciousness, nagging, and complaining about everything; she is already an unbearable companion, and Luna, Mama Sal—​ her grandmother—​and Chac-​Mool form a sort of support group trying to understand her. Medea sees how her son is becoming an adult and feels anxious and empty; she even considers Luna a burden, the other half of an infertile relationship, as shown, for example, when she says to Mam-​ Sal: “you and I, childless women que chupan other’s barren breasts?” (18). In Act I, Scene 3, Chac-​Mool shows an interest in politics, a wish to go to Aztlán and change the regime: “I’m gonna go back to Aztlán, and make ‘em change, Mom. You’ll see. Like those Cuban kids who went back to Cuba in the 70s and became Castro sympathizers” (27). Medea is frightened; she fears losing her son, whether physically or ideologically. She sees how the Mexican culture, the patriarchal and homophobic family system of Aztlán, will inexorably absorb and convert him into Adolph,

(Re)reading classical mythology through the Aztec gods  43 his baptismal name. Chac-​Mool’s betrayal seems to be the worst of all betrayals. The play subverts the love’s betrayal portrayed in Euripides’ Medea since it is Mexican Medea who first cheats on Jasón, thus breaking her marital vows; even so, Medea’s principles and moral standards are higher than Jasón’s, who is merely a practical man with political ambitions and only wants his son for those purposes. This is illustrated in a dialogue that mirrors the corrupted Jason in Euripides’ Medea: MEDEA:

Tell him the truth Jasón. Since my son is standing here in front of you, tell him to his face. JASÓN: What are you talking about? MEDEA: That my son makes you legit, just like I did. That’s why you’ve suddenly appeared on our doorstep con tus papeles in hand. CHAC-​MOOL: Mom … MEDEA: He is your native claim. You can’t hold onto a handful of dirt in Aztlán without him. You don’t have the blood quantum. JASÓN: I’m a practical man, Medea. (71) This is the dilemma of both Medea’s life and the play as a whole. She refuses to accept Jasón’s decision. She is a warrior. She would be willing to accept a partial defeat for her son’s sake and return with him and Jasón to Aztlán, but only if she reappears as a respectable married woman; here, she somehow yields to the patriarchal canons since she is clever enough to see that this is the only way to live in Aztlán society; she is too proud to be “below” the 19-​year-​old India who is to marry Jasón. Medea seduces Jasón, and they enjoy passionate sex, but he does not accept her proposal; she can go with him but not as his wife. At this instant, she becomes frenzied and starts manipulating Mama-​ Sal’s herbs sachets. She makes her decision; she is going to prevent Chac-​ Mool from being a tool in Jasón’s ambitious hands to perpetuate his species. Medea is going to break the chain, the one that despises women solely because of their biological sex, the abhorred and oppressive chain that sustains a way of living that does not tolerate women’s development and sexual difference. This confirms Moraga’s opinion about the possible reasons leading a woman to murder her own child. Revenge, or even madness, does not seem to fully explain the act: there’s got to be another reason. The question to me was why would a woman really kill her child? And it remained a question to me in the

44  Marta Villalba-Lázaro writing of the play. I knew it had to be something about the sense of betrayal. But is it really about a man betraying her, or is it a more profound betrayal? (qtd. in Fernández 93) They are betrayed by their own people, by their homeland. From a gender perspective, Moraga uses the play to denounce a culture that has traditionally limited Mexican and Chicana women; they are there to serve men, whether fathers, husbands, brothers or even their brother’s friends. Moraga’s autobiographical works show how she suffered the pain of patriarchal society. In particular, in Loving in the War Years (1983), she describes how she was forced to wait not only on her brother but also on his friends and any other male in the household. Patriarchy is the main reason for Medea’s mental instability. Her life in Aztlán after the counter-​ revolution provoked in her an intense feeling “of lacking purpose in her life” (50). Being a woman in Mexican society goes “from being a daughter to be a mother (…) there is nothing in between”, as Mama-​Sal puts it (50). We also find some shocking evidence of sexual harassment suffered by Mexican Medea when she was a little girl, “at first when [my brother] opened his zipper; he taught me how to squeeze, not too hard just the right amount of pressure, the right curve in my little girl’s palm” (57). The almost invisible figure of Medea’s mother remains a mystery in the play, but it is suggested, if a little too gingerly, that her mother through her insistence “wait on your brother!” (58), knew and consented, as she repeatedly said: “give your brother whatever he wants” (58). Medea addresses her mother in the figure of Coatlicue—​goddess of procreation—​and rejects her by saying “te rechazo madre” (I reject you, mother) (92). After killing Chac-​Mool, Mexican Medea expresses again, and more clearly, the lack of maternal support and her mother’s responsibility: “my mother did not stop my brother’s hand from reaching into my virgin bed” (92). This is among the worst forms of machismo: being abused by your own brother and thus reduced to a mere sexual object, a sexual thing, by your own family. In the classical Medea myth, the most obvious reason for the infanticide may lie in Medea’s hunger for revenge and her proud personality, but in most contemporary rewritings, the ultimate reason lies in some kind of symbolic just cause. In the case of Mexican Medea, it is her struggle against a patriarchal system she does not want to sustain with her own son; it is her own warfare against machismo, against a hierarchy that destroys her life and suffocates all her dreams. Medea first envisages another way out before her mind turns to murder: to do “all the necessary wrenching [so Chac-​Mool leaves her as] a daughter would do” (71). This is her initial plan, as expressed to Jasón: “his eye will never see me as a woman.

(Re)reading classical mythology through the Aztec gods  45 I promise you that” (71). However, she is unable to accomplish this plan. In the end, she must kill her son, poisoning his drink with her herbs. The murder of Chac-​Mool displays full symbolic meaning since he is named after a mythical figure used to deposit offers to the gods. He is sacrificed to break the animal memory that will lead him to debase his mother and indeed any woman. Just before the crime is committed, Medea addresses Coatlicue: “This is my holy sacrifice (…) I cannot relinquish my son to them to walk ese camino triste” (88). The clearest textual evidence, however, of her underlying reasons for the murder is in Medea’s declaration to Jasón: I am a woman. A Mexican woman and there is no protection and no place for me, not even in the arms of another woman because she too is an exile in her own land. Marry your child-​bride. A mi no me importa. No, in that lies no traición. Betrayal occurs when a boy grows into a man and sees his mother as a woman for the first time. A woman, a thing. A creature to be controlled. (70) These words enable us to appreciate how determinism appears to exhibit all its power whenever Mexican society and family are concerned. Is there a way out of this closed circle, a circle that reifies women, dehumanizes them, and makes them simple objects to be controlled or abused? The ending for Mexican Medea is sad and hopeless; she will not escape unpunished in a dragon-​drawn chariot like the Euripidean Medea. After being locked up in an asylum for almost a year as punishment for having killed her son, she is assisted by Luna in dying by taking the same herbs she used to kill her son. She dies dreaming or hallucinating, seeing Chac-​Mool standing there to take her back home (99). The symbolism contained in the opening of the final act is deeply relevant and merits some explanation. The roles are subverted: Medea plays the god Coatlicue, Luna the god Coyolxauhqui and Chac-​Mool the god Huitzilopochtli. According to legend, Coatlicue becomes pregnant from some feathers that fell inside her apron, but her daughter Coyolxauhqui, believing that her mother had betrayed her by sleeping with another man, tries to kill her newborn son Huitzilopochtli. But he is a warrior and manages to defeat his sister and four hundred extra brothers, who will become the moon and the stars. Coyolxauhqui is even graphically fragmented and dismembered as the mythical story goes on to relate that her brother Huitzilopotchli severed her members and threw them to the sky to form the moon. In The Last Generation, Moraga reinterprets the history of the defeat of Luna, of the moon, as the triumph of patriarchy: the sun is Huitzilopochtli,

46  Marta Villalba-Lázaro and every day that it rises, Mexican society reminds one and all that men are above women: “This machista myth is enacted every day of our lives, every day that the sun (Huitzilopochtli) rises up from the horizon and the moon (Coyolxauhqui) is obliterated by his light” (74). In the play, the legend is inverted: in the end, the mother Medea kills her son (“the sun”)—​in fact Chac-​Mool is portrayed as a fallen warrior throughout the play—​ and Luna (“the moon”) will kill Medea (“the mother” or Coatlicue). Through the symbolic killing of Chac-​Mool and having Luna survive intact, Moraga does not limit herself to simply reinterpreting the mythical signifiers but also changes the ending of the story so as to help liberate Mexican and Chicana women and their societies in general from their long-​lasting, painful and destructive patriarchal and homophobic discourse. Note 1 Further citations of The Hungry Woman are of the page number only.

Works cited Adams, Kate. “North American Silences: History, Identity and Witness in the Poetry of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Leslie Marmon Silko”. Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, edited by E. Hedges and S.F. Fishkin, Oxford UP, 1994, pp. 130–​45. Almaguer, Tomás. “Hombres chicanos: una cartografía de la identidad y del comportamiento homosexual”. Differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, 1991, pp. 46–​77. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1983. Anderson, Kelly. “Cherríe Moraga”. Voices of Feminism Oral History. Sophia Smith Collection, 2005, Tape 5. www.smith.edu/​librar​ies/​libs/​ssc/​vof/​tran​scri​ pts/​Mor​aga.pdf. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/​La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute, 1999. Arrizón, Alicia. “Mythical Performativity: Relocating Aztlán in Chicana Feminist Cultural Productions”. Theatre Journal, vol. 52, no. 1, 2000, pp. 23–​49. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. -​ -​ -​ . “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences”. The Post-​ Colonial Studies Reader, edited by B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin. Routledge, 2003, pp. 206–​13. Fernández Morales, Marta. “Revisiting La Llorona on Stage: Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea”. Perspectivas transatlánticas en la literatura chicana: Ensayos y creatividad, edited by M. Herrera Sobek et al. Universidad de Málaga, 2004, pp. 85–​95. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by E.C. Frost. Vintage Books, 1994.

(Re)reading classical mythology through the Aztec gods  47 Gebhardt, Nadine. Female Mythologies in Contemporary Chicana Literature. GRIN Verlag, 2006. Gilbert, Helen, and Jane Tompkins. Post-​Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. Routledge, 1996. González Ramos, Carmen. “Remembering Coyolxauhqui: The Poetics of Fragmentation in Cherríe Moraga’s Work”. Perspectivas transatlánticas en la literatura chicana, ensayos y creatividad, edited by M. Herrera-​Sobek et al., Universidad de Málaga, 2004, pp. 137–​45. Hardwick, Lorna. “Introduction”. Classics in Post-​Colonial Worlds, edited by Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie. Oxford UP, 2007, pp. 1–​11. Huerta, Jorge A. Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms. Bilingual Press/​Editorial Bilingüe, 1981. Jonsson, Carla. Code-​Switching in Chicano Theater: Power, Identity and Style in Three Plays by Cherrie Moraga. 2005. Umea Universitet, PhD dissertation. Koç, Evrim Ersöz. “Liberating Serpentine Goddesses on the Borderlands: Cherrie Moraga’s Feminist Architecture in The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea”. Sosyal ve Vecero Bilimler Araştırmaları Dergisi, vol. 19, no. 42, 2018, pp. 149–​62. León Jiménez, Raquel. Textos sobre el desarrollo del movimiento chicano. (Texto bilingüe). Universidad de León, 2000. Makers Video. Cherríe Moraga: Writer and Playwright. AOL Productions, 2011 www.yahoo.com/​lifest​yle/​cherr-​e-​mor​aga-​wri​ter-​pla​ywri​ght-​005158​303.html. Moraga, Cherríe. Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. South End Press, 1983. -​-​-​. The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry. South End, 1993. -​-​-​. Waiting in the Wings. Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. Firebrand Books, 1997. -​-​-​. The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea. West End Press, 2001. Morrow, Collette. Review of Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood by C. Moraga. Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, vol. 4, no 1, 2002, pp. 199–​201. Parker, Grant. “Mixed Capital: Classicism in Unexpected Places”. Princeton/​ Stanford Working Papers in Classics. Stanford UP, 2012, pp. 1–​43 Perles, Rochel, and Juan Antonio. “Re-​Reading Chicano Nation: Cherríe Moraga’s Mexican Medea”. Perspectivas transatlánticas en la literatura chicana, ensayos y creatividad, edited by M. Herrera-​Sobek et al., Universidad de Málaga, 2004, pp. 243–​49. Swyt, Wendy. “Hungry Women: Borderlands Mythos in Two Stories by Helena Maria Viramontes”. MELUS, vol. 3, no. 2, 1998, pp. 189–​95. Villalba-Lázaro, Marta. “Guy Butler’s Demea: a South African Princess against Apartheid”. The Grove-Working Papers on English Studies, vol. 29 (2022): pp. 131–​149. Yarbro-​Bejarano, Yvonne. The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga. U of Texas P, 2001.

4 From influence to response Angela Carter’s selected novels come to terms with William Shakespeare’s tragedies Maria José Pires The question of influence, in terms of literary theory, is, in general, quite controversial, and even more so when considered in terms of what women write—​that is, the notion of influence as Harold Bloom defines it in studies where the canonical centrality of William Shakespeare was systematically reinforced (1997–​2000). Accordingly, the reflection here is on the central aspect of the Bloomian notion of influence, when applied to what women write by reading the references to Shakespeare’s tragedies in six of Angela Carter’s nine novels, following the growth of her narrative technique: Shadow Dance (1966), Several Perceptions (1968), Love (1971), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977), and Nights at the Circus (1984). It could be said that at the end of her journey, in Wise Children (1991), the novelist seeks to reclaim that playwright for popular culture (Gamble, 177), but we are only focusing on the Shakespearean tragedies’ references in her prior novels and not on the other plays, particularly the comedies, which have been the concern of scholars.1 We believe Carter did not fail to express her opinion on the improper way for the so-​called English high culture to read Shakespeare, nor did she fail to be critical of her Renaissance precursor. Evidencing a desire to deviate from Shakespeare’s drama, as an expression of her recognition and appreciation for him, Carter’s novels do not limit themselves to deconstructing it, but seek to reconstruct it—​“Throughout her career, she persistently invoked, reworked, adapted, and appropriated Shakespeare’s texts and the very idea of the national poet” (Sanders, 2006, 110). Thus, they offer her an answer intentionally deviating from him (Sage, 1992, 186–​87). Considering one of the main thematic lines of postmodern fiction has been to problematize multiple of our historical-​cultural discourses, along with the conviction that the political and social neutrality of conventional cultural constructions is intrinsically apparent and, when systematically repeated in everyday life, seems to become legitimately cultural and, as such, unquestionable, it is frequent to start from within the canon itself to DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-4

From influence to response  49 submit it to a critical analysis that denounces its conventionality. Thus, we are reading Carter’s fictional work in a postmodern context, through the various linguistic and stylistic resources that, in general, consubstantiate its practices: irony and many other constant language games (ostensibly presupposing a reader), the intertextuality, the fragmentation of discourses and current codes. Carter’s postmodernity is proposed here concerning how her fiction renegotiates values of a cultural and social nature, leading, in some cases, to the erosion of the canon itself—​ she reveals her intention to problematize certain elements that configure Western culture and how they prevent questioning it since the writer intends to overcome the simple paraphrase of the canon. She departs from a basically male cultural tradition by subverting and opposing it in a double and complex act of presentation and denunciation, of conformism and resistance. It is therefore to be expected that the fiction of such a contemporary is embodied in a feeling coerced to demythologize. We recognize in Carter’s production a feminist reading that renegotiates power relations and allows the construction of a different conception of the female subject (Wisker, 1994, 108) by rereading that male tradition. By seeking to challenge and, at the same time, subvert the dominant discourses and ideologies of Western culture, the various postmodernist and feminist manifestations challenge but also resist an economic, political, social, and cultural conception that has always been dominant (Sears, 1993, 5–​6). That challenge is visible in Carter’s novels, though not leading to an excluding opposition, which is also resistance, to men’s writing. Therefore, the novelist’s defence of the specificity of women’s writing does not imply the necessary isolation from what men write, even those central to the canon, about the hegemonic representations of Women, or even to the stereotype of the feminine. Carter builds characters, both female and male, that originate multiple interpretations from a defined identity, for example, in terms of nationality, socio-​economic, and cultural position, and the notion of gender. These characters still operate, on an ongoing basis, against discourse systems that deny any kind of individualized female subjectivity. Although Carter has intelligently avoided the utopian leap that intended to go beyond the normative representations of Woman, she achieved an “(…) uncontaminated representation of women (…).” (Robinson, 1991, 117). Thus, Carter’s novels end up subverting the stereotype of Woman, by building female characters that imply a differentiated plurality of women. She consciously belongs to a female literary tradition but refuses to sentimentalize women’s writing or to buy into any feminist myths of victimization (Showalter, 1999, 325–​26). As a postmodern writer, Carter creates female characters who present themselves as readers of their central narratives, and so she intends to

50  Maria José Pires work with a plurality of representations of women that differentiates from the diversity of representations established by men. This process becomes more evident in the first part of her work, where the female characters act in economic, social, and cultural contexts whose patriarchal dimension is particularly emphasized. Still, it is difficult to imagine Carter subject to an ideological position (Lee, 1996, 12). Despite her cultural involvement being also determined by history (Sage, 1977, 53), as a writer Carter is always in a state of transformation and growth (Jordan, 1990, 27).2 One of Carter’s strategies in the novels is to choose what one of her precursors wrote and what, related to this one, others wrote, establishing and exploring a network of relationships between them all. Textual autonomy and the writer’s authority are thus denied and replaced by the intertextual web, which results in another “schizoid” way of writing, in John Sears’s terminology, similar in some respects to the polyphonic novel described by Mikhail Bakhtin. These ways of writing are paradigmatic of a certain feminist strategy resulting from theoretical debates, such as the revision of the traditional canon, the opening of closed spaces, and the exposure of omissions and repressions on which the process of formation of the canon is based. Therefore, rewriting also implies redefining the current canon (or even challenging its existence). This is the freedom that female writers believe is inherent in the act of rewriting: the opportunity to re-​present old material in new ways. By redefining what was written before, a space for intervention is opened in the dominant canon (Sears, 1993, 28–​9). In Carter’s texts, we should be able to uncover, or at least recognize, the representations of a diversity of life experiences hitherto eliminated by our culture (Carter, 1998, 29). She deconstructs the male perspective, without ever completely eliminating it, and her strategy materializes in how she contests, making the basic habits of thought explode from within by rewriting the stories and myths that are considered central and dominant in the different cultures of the West (Gasiorek, 1995, 124–​25). For Carter, writing is as creative as reading and it is on the new interpretations of previous texts that new intellectual development is based (Carter, 1998, 25). The rewriting of the myths themselves is more easily denounced and deconstructed than History, a discourse tributary of evidence (Carter, 1980, 228). Carter needed to reconstruct a tradition from within her own culture, and the choice of “literary parents” is necessarily preceded by the phase of progressive construction of the individual’s identity, in which it is the discourses of the parents’ culture that determine individual action (Butler, 1997, 2). In Carter’s novels, irony and many other stylistic devices give form to irreverence and subversion, not only as literary techniques but also as intellectual strategies. Still, Carter does not deny tradition but fully assumes it and Shakespeare’s presence becomes particularly evident in the

From influence to response  51 novels, through the multiple references to characters and plays. As we follow Carter’s journey, we are made aware of possibilities for enrichment, change and subversion of traditional narrative models, which, revealing Shakespeare’s influence, manifest the maturity with which she reads him. To focus on the general problem of the influence that a writer receives from a tradition with which s/​he chooses to confront her/​himself, resorting to the always controversial notion of influence of Bloom. From the anguish felt by the new writer before those who wrote before, there’s the very question of the process that generates the anguish of influence—​a form of self-​knowledge, as an act of eternal demand, always and necessarily incomplete. Authentic influence is, by those who receive it, transformed into creative correction, resulting from an act of “misreading,” that is, from a reading that intentionally deviates from what could be the core meaning of what the previous poet wrote (Bloom, 1997, 71). Controversely recognized even by Bloom (Bloom, 2000, 203), the greatest legacy we have received from Shakespeare is that of having taught us to understand human nature, by building the modern notion of personality (Bloom, 1999, 4). The paradigmatic character of Shakespeare is insisted on as a writer who continually assimilates and contaminates what others write, thus overcoming the agon with tradition, joining the canon or becoming canon itself (Bloom, 1996, 6). The problem here consists of knowing whether it is possible to generate a theoretical framework for analysing the relationships between other forms of literary production, in this case between Carter’s novels and Shakespeare’s tragedies. There seems to be in Carter’s novels no marks of unresolved anguish, but rather a free celebration of the transfigured influence of Shakespeare. The epic language that Bloom uses to describe the relationships of influence between writers highlights the idea that the process of literary creation takes place in a war scene and the woman does intervene as the inspiring Muse, seeming to silence her protagonism as a free active creator (Bloom, 1997, 43)—​his perspective on the Muse makes clear the resentment towards women, who are also responsible for the writer’s anguish (61) and emerge in the poet’s imagination simultaneously as mother and prostitute (36–​7). Still, Bloom does not hesitate to include female writers in the Western literary canon, and, incidentally, to formulate the very notion of the anguish of influence. Women writers are also recognized as relevant, despite the complex relationships between them (Bloom, 1996, 34). The warmongering, assuming a competitive matrix of action, would be completely opposed to the feminine way of acting, supposedly determined by the principle of cooperation. Conceiving a typically cooperative feminine tradition and also a paradigmatically competitive masculine tradition cannot fail to be very reductive, since the differentiating factors between individuals are the most diverse (Sousa, 2000, 288).

52  Maria José Pires Carter explores the traditional relationships between the theatrical and the carnivalesque, especially where they converge in the interest in the illegitimate, with which Renaissance theatre was associated. We decided to highlight Kate Chedgzoy’s question “(…) who may speak of/​ for Shakespeare? and for/​to whom may Shakespeare be made to speak?” (1995, 1), and the possibility of discovering in Carter’s selected novels a very strong reading of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which would imply the appropriation of his cultural and aesthetic authority. Such an appropriation would thus constitute a means for the contemporary novelist to make room for the originality of how she fictionally expresses a reassessment and criticism of behaviours, among others social ones, such as the exercise of power. In these novels Carter chose exclusion as a theme and, correlatively, individual rights and the necessary opposition to any form of authoritarian exercise of power. Indeed, we must recognize that Shakespeare’s theatrical productions are offered as a paradigmatic example of an artistic formulation of differences, of social and cultural order, so often conflicting, which are presented, explored, and transformed, but which nonetheless always remain different (Chedgzoy, 1995, 2–​3). Considering the previous assumptions, we aim to analyse how these selected novels respond to Shakespeare’s tragedies, deviating from the traditional reading of the icons that have constituted the core of a culture that believes to consist, incontestably, in a set of polyphonic voices, but in which there is no harmony between these same voices, or in which some of them remain or are even prevented from pronouncing. In Carter’s first six novels, there are no references to Shakespearean comedies. This fact deserves a special mention given the widespread tendency of critics to overestimate the influence of Shakespeare’s plays only concerning Wise Children and the influence of comedy, due to this novel’s celebratory nature. Now, the responses of these novels to tragedies are equally important, since they give word to Shakespearean characters who had remained relatively marginalized and silenced. Ophelia (Hamlet), a recurring Shakespearean character in several of Carter’s novels, is used in her first novel, Shadow Dance, as a comparison term—​“The drowning mad girl floats along her narrative streams through the years; no novel is without her since she is the icon of pathos you must exorcise again and again and again” (Sage, 1994, 33). This need for Carter to constantly exorcise Ophelia stems from the character originally being portrayed as mad and wasting away, according to Gertrude (Hamlet), and also from the Pre-​Raphaelite John Everett Millais having reinforced that first image of Woman as a necessary intellectual and willpower fragility, by painting her drowning, surrounded by flowers, adrift in a current that drags her towards death as a virgin (an image that, despite being criticized, was still central to the dominant Western culture in

From influence to response  53 the 1960s). Later, Elaine Showalter pointed out the opposition between Ophelia being frequently represented in Carter’s fiction, as in many other writers’ and artists’ works, and how she continued to be relatively out of the Shakespearean limelight (Showalter, 1986, 90). But, in Shadow Dance, as later in Carter’s third novel, Several Perceptions, although Ophelia continues to be an image of fragility, it characterizes not the traditional female character but a male one. Indeed, Honeybuzzard is the marginal and violent protagonist who brutalizes several female characters, but whose fragility of behaviour becomes obvious at the end of the novel, when, having lost control of the action and himself, he is thus compared to the character of Shakespeare: “His hair trailed like mad Ophelia’s (…)” (Carter, 1995a, 179). There are no references to Shakespeare’s tragedies in Carter’s second novel, The Magic Toyshop, but there are three in the third one, Several Perceptions. The first, to Hamlet and Macbeth, comes when characterizing Joseph, the protagonist, who unsuccessfully stages a suicide in despair: He laughed, he suggested Joseph did his homework more thoroughly next time; himself, no doubt, learnt roles such as the grave-​digger in Hamlet and the porter in Macbeth in his spare hours. “You’d never have gone this way, anyway,” he said. (Carter, 1995b, 20) Like Shakespeare, in those two tragedies, Carter seems to use here, contrapuntally, the tragic register of a hallucinated Joseph, in opposition to the relative comicity of the comments of “lugubrious fellow,” intending to create a certain effect of ironic distancing to the existential anguish of the protagonist. The two other allusions are to Hamlet. The first is Ophelia and, similarly to Honneybuzzard, it is again a question of using Shakespeare’s character as a term of comparison to continue characterizing the typical despair of Joseph’s reactions to the world in which he lives: At length, prompted by mysterious intuitions, he rolled entirely into the pond and lay down full-​length in water colder than he would have believed possible, lying still as a dead tree trunk, gnawing his lips to avoid shivering. Gulls tossed on the wind. His hair floated out upon the water like that of the drowned Ophelia. (Carter, 1995b, 65–​6) As previously, the comparison with Ophelia’s hair floating in the water, in disarray, symbolizes Joseph’s mental and emotional disorientation. It is still as a character “in the icon of pathos” that Ophelia must continue to

54  Maria José Pires be exorcised, although vulnerability to suffering is unexpectedly masculine and not the traditional characteristically female behaviour. Another allusion to Hamlet appears when Joseph meets his friend Viv, to whom he cannot help but reveal the truth about his intimate relationship with the latter’s mother (Carter, 1995b, 120–​21). The allusion to Hamlet is now related to Viv and aims to emphasize the betrayal by which he feels victimized, while simultaneously reinforcing Joseph’s characterization as an inconsequential character. The novel thus takes hold of the supposed original fragility of Hamlet to project an alternative situation, from which the expected spirit of a male character would probably emerge much more fragile, due to the completely unforeseen origin of the betrayal. Moreover, the construction of a scene based on the alternation of somewhat serious registers, and others of great humour, becomes obvious, in a kind of glorification of the absurdity of human existence. It seems that Several Perceptions almost anticipates Wise Children. It seems we have here an example of what can be, concerning Bloom’s theory, the response as intentional recreative deviation. Referring to the importance of the allusions to Hamlet, these subvert the traditional conception of masculinity as mental and emotional resistance, and Hamlet is also used in a similar process of deconstructing stereotypes that condition the dominant way of conceiving the masculine, giving expression to Carter’s postmodernity. Later, Carter’s trip to Japan (1969–​72) constituted a rite of passage between two periods of her life, distinct both individually and historically (Carter, 1992a, 28). Her fifth novel, Love, has the first allusion to Romeo and Juliet and the remaining three allusions to Shakespeare bring us back to Ophelia—​again as a comparison, but for the first time concerning a female character, Annabel. Carter appropriates, thus, the characteristic traits of dementia and abandonment to death of Shakespeare’s character, to reinforce the portrayal of her character. The first comparison is implicit: (...) she [Annabel] did not bother to dress or wash but lounged around all day in her nightdress, the very image of mad Ophelia, her disordered hair often caked with watercolour or gobbed with breakfast egg. But now she knew who mad people were and how they behaved, she became a little self-​conscious and sometimes she looked like a blurred imitation of her former self. (Carter, 1988a, 71–​2, emphasis added) What is evident here is the difference between the madness that Ophelia would not be aware of and that of Annabel who, after yet another suicide attempt, is not only aware of but knows there is no possible salvation for her. Throughout Love, the character evolves more by alienating herself from her previous identity and building another, a new one, comparing

From influence to response  55 herself to Ophelia, although no longer to “mad Ophelia” but to “drowned Ophelia”: Because her [Annabel’s] dress was black [in her dream], she chose a long, plain, white dress of cotton with a square-​cut neck and long, tight sleeves. In the mirror of the changing room in the shop, she glimpsed the possibility of another perfect stranger, one as indifferent to the obscene flowers of the flesh as drowned Ophelia, so she had her hair dyed to dissociate her new body from the old one even more and then she got her face painted in a beauty shop. She was surprised to see how cold, hard and impersonal this new face was. (102–​03) The opposition between an old identity (intended to be annihilated) and a new one (to be built) is the axis around which the meaning of the excerpt is organized. Even more relevant than the colour opposition is the one that appears indicated by the body itself (adjectives “new” and “old”), associated with the verbal form “to dissociate.” By intending to build a new identity, Annabel ends up caught by surprise, realizing that she is turned in on herself, relatively immune to world threats, in particular those from Lee. In this context, Carter’s character is compared to Shakespeare’s, with Ophelia emerging not as an image of supposedly typical female fragility, which would imply succumbing to madness and death, but as an expression of a relative new indifference stoic in the face of the male world. It is still stoic indifference, now in the face of death, that seems to be at issue in the last allusion to Hamlet, when Annabel lets herself die slowly and calmly, asphyxiated by the gas that invades her room, in an attitude similar to that of Ophelia, who drowns: (...) she [Annabel] was quite determined. It was an exquisite pleasure to hear the first, faint hiss that announced the inrush of gas into the room. She knew it would take a long time but, like Ophelia, gladly lay down on the river and waited for it to carry her away as if she was light and willless as a paper boat. (…). She felt no fear or pain for now she was content. She did not spare a thought or waste any pity on the people who loved her for she had never regarded them as anything more than facets of the self she was now about to obliterate (…). (109–​10) Here the two characters are compared through their determination and their unique pleasure (“exquisite”). However, the new value in the comparison between the two characters is that it extends to the very process of their suicide, with the bed on which Annabel lies down to die suggested

56  Maria José Pires by the river that serves as Ophelia’s bed. Furthermore, the portrayal of the latter as someone who freely surrenders to the river invokes the same freedom, fully chosen, of the former. In the end, as with Marianne (Heroes and Villains), the right to choose is claimed for women, thus represented not as fatal victims of male arrogance, but as being able to choose, more or less heroically, their destiny, even if it is death itself. Still, before these three allusions to Ophelia, the similarity between Annabel’s expression and that of Ophelia painted by Millais had already been emphasized: “(…) he [Lee] found her a print of Millais ‘Ophelia’ in a second-​hand shop because Annabel often wore the same expression and she seemed surprised and contented enough with that” (41). At the end of the trip to Japan, Carter published The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman with two allusions to Shakespeare’s plays; the first being once more to Hamlet’s Ophelia, and again to characterize a female character, Mary Anne. Desiderio describes the first impression he gets of Mary Anne: She had the waxen delicacy of a plant bred in a cupboard. She did not look as if blood flowed through her veins but instead some other, less emphatic fluid infinitely less red. Her mouth was barely touched with the palest pink though it had exactly the proportions of the three cherries the artmaster piles in an inverted triangle to illustrate the classic mouth and there was no tinge of any pink at all on her cheeks. Now she was standing up, she was almost hidden in her dress and her tiny face, shaped like a locket, looked even smaller than it was because of a disordered profusion of hair streaming down as straight as if she had just been plucked from the river. I could see her hair and dress were stuck all over with twigs and petals from the garden. She looked like drowning Ophelia; I thought so immediately, though I could not know how soon she would really drown, for she was so forlorn and desperate. And a chilling and restrained passivity made her desperation all the more pathetic. The housekeeper clucked to see the wraith-​like girl’s bare feet. (Carter, 1982a, 53) Like Ophelia immediately before her death, Mary Anne is a female character deprived of the presence of any family support. Her physical appearance is seen as pale and fragile (“waxen,” “palest,” “tiny,” and “smaller”), already anticipating the comparison with Ophelia, before comparing her hair with what it would have looked like if she had been plucked from the river. Apparently with the same objective, the hair and the dress are covered with small branches and petals from the garden. And at the culmination of this process is the comparison with Ophelia.

From influence to response  57 Similarly to her, Mary Anne seems to be drowning in complete abandonment and despair. Thus, and contrary to the way Carter appropriates Ophelia to portray Annabel (Love), Shakespeare’s character here seems to reinforce the description of Mary Anne as a typical figuration of the feminine constructed in terms of passivity, more or less pathetic. We believe the allusions to Shakespeare’s tragedies in Love and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman configure the radicalism of the turn of the sixties to the seventies, as a moment in which the illusions break down and dissolve (Carter, 1988b, 211). Furthermore, we associate these novels with Carter’s desire to break free, albeit temporarily, in a unique way of seeing, from her own culture, thanks to the trip to a different space where she feels like the Other. From Marianne’s way of acting in a space that is foreign to her (Heroes and Villains), in comparison to Miranda (The Tempest) and Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra), to Annabel, with the allusions to Juliet (Romeo and Juliet) and Ophelia (Hamlet), these again define Carter’s characters opposed to Shakespeare’s characters. The former, explicitly or implicitly, compare themselves not as tragically victimized by male arrogance but as responsible, kind of heroic, for their tragic destiny. In terms of stereotypes, this voluntary demand for death is generally associated with male behaviour, but it is a key characteristic element of the way a female character, Annabel, acts. In contrast, in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, the allusion to Hamlet presupposes the use of the image of Ophelia as a way of emphasizing Mary Anne’s physical and psychological fragility, which predicts the premature death of Carter’s character. Her works from the 1970s still reflect an attitude contrary to that of most feminist debates, as the writer did not only intend to reverse or redistribute the exercise of power but to deconstruct “(...) all individual and societal moments of hierarchical oppositioning” (Schoene-​Harwood, 2000, 117). Carter’s seventh novel is The Passion of New Eve, where we find the following allusions to Shakespeare’s Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and As You Like It. As for the first allusion, the Englishman Evelyn recalls the film he saw in London, Wuthering Heights, whose cast was headed by the Hollywood actress he admires so much, Tristessa de St Ange. He reflects on how the romantic image of movie stars (at the end of the forties) was giving way to that of strong heroines, and on the photograph of Tristessa in The Fall of the House of Usher he had received upon request, in which she is still romantically portrayed (Carter, 1982b, 6). Later, he receives an unrequested new photograph of the actress in a modern sporty pose (7), and disillusioned with this new Tristessa, Evelyn establishes some comparisons to shape the paradoxical nature of this new image/​identity of his idol, conveyed by the MGM studios. The comparison made with Shakespeare’s Desdemona stands out (7–​8), as it is built on a game of oppositions. On

58  Maria José Pires the one hand, we have the traditional model of the romantic woman, who is haughty, relatively unattainable, but incapable of dealing with the real world—​Tristessa had been “the dream,” “her allure had lain in the tragic and absurd heroism with which she had denied real life” and was only able to perform “the most perfunctory gestures towards real life.” In addition to the importance of the meanings of “dream” and “heroism,” we are faced again with a description of the character as “tragic” and “absurd,” where “perfunctory” stand out. On the other hand, a new type of “the sportswoman” appears with no glory. Now Desdemona is alluded to and, for the first time, in the last of a series of implicit comparisons (first, Madeline Usher and, later, Dido) as if Shakespeare’s character constituted a kind of climax in a tragic crescendo of representation of the feminine—​in the late 1970s it seemed to be no longer dominant in the Western culture. However, Tristessa, implicitly compared to Desdemona, acts with relative determination. She even evokes Annabel (Love), who, characterized by comparison with Shakespeare’s Ophelia, is after all only fragile in appearance. It is Tristessa who, unable to assume the new image demanded by Hollywood, chooses to move away, although aware of the harmful consequences of such a decision, several times (re)taken along the adventures in which she ends up being involved with Eve(lyn), meanwhile transformed into a woman after having undergone surgical intervention. In the 1980s, Carter published only one novel, Nights at the Circus, with numerous allusions to Shakespeare’s plays, throughout a series of adventures in different spaces, which are always characterized by marginality, at the turn of the nineteenth century. The guiding thread is given by the heroine Fevvers, a robust Cockney trapeze artist, and by the Californian journalist Walser who accompanies her, trying to understand whether the artist’s wings are a fraud, an aberration or something else. The adventures that the heroine goes through, constantly supported by her adoptive mother, Lizzie, are portrayed as experiences, often painful, during which she always maintains an aura of mystery, whether as a “Winged Victory,” in Ma Nelson’s brothel, or in the museum of female monsters by the skeletal Madame Schreck, or as the headliner on the circus tour to Imperial Russia. From the start, Shakespeare’s theatre is part of Fevvers and Lizzie’s experience, when the latter shows the pleasure with which she attended various performances (Carter, 1994, 53). It is worth noting Shakespeare as a “Bard,” that is, as the one who, having a superior vision of human existence, is capable, in metaphorical terms, of feeding others with it (“spiritual sustenance”). This recognition and exaltation of Shakespeare, again brought by Fevvers and Lizzie to the field of popular culture, would be said to be close to Bloom’s academic evaluation. Other references to Shakespeare’s tragic characters are used in comparisons, explicit or implicit, with minor

From influence to response  59 characters in Nights at the Circus: how Madame Schreck is compared to Lady Macbeth, in the words of Fevvers (62) and, later, the comparison between Princess, the circus pianist, and owner of the tigers that perform there, and the same Shakespearean character, according to Fevvers—​“The Princess is pacing up and down, bereft, her useless hands outstretched, looking ghastly as Lady Macbeth in the sleep-​walking scene” (233). The allusions to Lady Macbeth serve to reinforce, in the first case, the uncertain gait of this old woman incapable of any kind of compassion and, in the second, the artist’s hallucinatory look at having lost control of her hands, now frozen by the cold of the Siberian steppe. Curiously, Carter’s notebook on Shakespeare, used to record research and ideas for her last novel, quotes Ellen Terry on conceiving Lady Macbeth “as a delicate little creature with hyper-​sensitive nerves” (Carter, s.d., f. 9r).3 Princess is also implicitly compared to Othello, insofar as, having lost recognition from others (now that she is unable to play), she finds neither peace of mind nor meaning for her existence—​“it was plain to see the Princess knew Othello’s occupation was gone” (228). Practically the same expression is used similarly regarding the Shaman’s inability to convince his tribe of the supernatural powers he held—​“And once the tribe stopped believing in the Shaman’s powers, then—​Othello’s occupation gone” (264). An aspect that distinguishes this novel from all previous ones is a quote from Hamlet used three times (by Fevvers and Walser, although in different situations): “What piece of work is a man! //​How noble in reason, how infinite in facultyes” (Hamlet II, ii, ll. 304–​05). Fevvers initially quotes him, commenting on the task she had been assigned at Madame Schreck’s museum of female monsters, which consisted of protecting Sleeping Beauty, one of the museum’s attractions, from any client who might harass her (Carter, 1994, 70). The situation portrayed by Fevvers points to the most diverse types of contradictory relationships between human beings: with Sleeping Beauty, as her guardian; the relationships of morbid dependency, because selfish and greedy, of Madame Schreck with Beauty; those of Beauty with Fevvers and Madame Schreck, conditioned by the former’s alienation, characterized mainly through the oxymoron “living corpse”; the way Madame Schreck and Fevvers relate to the museum’s clients in purely economic terms, as in the colloquialisms “cash down” and “on the tariff.” This multiplicity of relationships provokes the comparison, established by Fevvers, between her thoughts and those of Hamlet, embodied in the famous phrase. In both cases, “what a wonderful piece of work is man” seems to summarize this incredible multiplicity of human facets, with “man” being the word that is used, despite Hamlet’s phrase being pompously recited, in Nights at the Circus, by a woman, in a marginal feminine universe in which even the relationships with the male characters are established by the female characters, who, voluntarily,

60  Maria José Pires intentionally or not, move away from the traditional model of woman behaviour. Walser also quotes Hamlet in two different situations. Firstly, when he runs away with the circus on a tour of Imperial Russia disguised as a clown and is studied during a circus act (simian class) specially directed by the most astute of all apes, Professor. In their irrational cruelty, the apes, particularly Professor, scrutinize Walser to the point of nudity, in this unusual class of recognition of what is human (110–​11). The scene in which Walser finds himself ironizes the apparent natural order of things, with human beings not as subjects but as objects of study. Besides the Professor’s fixed gaze on Walser, there is an interest in the human mechanism of speech, and not in its meaning. Thus, Walser seems to say the first sentence he remembers, without worrying either about its meaning or its communicative relevance. In this context, the citation of Hamlet’s speech would seem to ironically point to how humanity considers itself a unique creation, due to its rationality and infinite ability to think, dealing with the most diverse situations, while, frequently, the irrationality of its behaviour is in no way different from that of apes. In addition, Carter’s character reveals a dissatisfaction with the human condition, like that of Shakespeare, who loses faith in wonderful human capacities, always overshadowed by the common destiny of all beings, death. On the second occasion that Walser quotes Hamlet, he has lost his memory, and therefore his identity finds himself under the effect of a poisonous mushroom and finally recovers speech (238). This last quote comes at the culmination of a series of extraordinary experiences that make Walser a new being. The idea of rebirthing the character’s mental capacities is suggested using an image of human rationality as a “motor in (…) overdrive.” The use of Hamlet’s speech is appropriated by those two characters who reflect on the intrinsically tragic dimension of the human condition while bringing the reflection to the domain of the marginal—​the museum where Madame Schreck sells various aberrant types of women, the circus, and a tribe in Siberia. Hence the effect of ironic distancing that the novel establishes with Hamlet’s famous speech, Carter’s intentional recreative deviation from Shakespeare. Attributes of a male Shakespearean character who is at the centre of his world serve Carter to portray a female character who moves in marginal spaces and becomes increasingly wilful towards the end of the novel, when comparing herself to Rosalind (As You Like It). The notion of the universality of human experience had already been pointed out by Carter as a mistake that stems from cultural mechanisms and contributes to historical conceptions assuming this universality, adding that the idea of a universality of female experience would be an even more intelligent mistake (Carter, 1979, 12).

From influence to response  61 Nights at the Circus stands out from all of Carter’s previous novels for the high number of references to Shakespeare’s plays and being the first in which quotations occur. The number of twelve plays alluded to in this penultimate novel contrasts sharply with the maximum of three cited in the seventh, and the most frequent plays are precisely the three tragedies also in the first seven novels: Macbeth (two allusions), Hamlet (three), and Othello (two)—​except in the second and fourth novels. It is also evident the constant occurrence of Hamlet in Carter’s first, third, fifth, and sixth novels and, mainly, through the appropriation of Ophelia referred to in all of them: the character “in the icon of pathos” that Carter feels compelled to keep exorcising throughout her novels (Sage, 1994, 33). In addition, in Nights at the Circus, the references to Shakespeare’s plays come with more diversified elements: titles, names of the characters and their speeches. Also, the way of proceeding with the allusions is markedly complex. This is very enlightening as to the growing importance of allusions to these Shakespearean tragedies in Carter’s novels, redoubling in the last one, Wise Children. Right after the comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the tragedies Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello are the plays most frequently alluded to in Wise Children, where a fourth tragedy still stands out, King Lear.4 However, these tragedies continue to be almost forgotten by critics—​ even in Carter’s undated notebook, there are only a couple of references to tragedies, “huge portrait of Melchior as? Hamlet?? Macbeth??” (Carter, s.d., f. 99r). The exception is Chedgzoy, who attributes great importance to Hamlet (1994). The implications of the tragedy in the novel are highlighted by Dora in an extremely enlightening way: “(…) the Hazards would always upstage us. Tragedy, eternally more class than comedy. How could mere song-​and-​dance girls aspire so high?” (Carter, 1992b, 58) and “Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people” (213). Despite the diversity of how Carter’s selected novels transform what is referred to in Shakespeare’s tragedies into key elements, mainly the characterization of her characters, we can reduce them to two types. The first type implies that Carter’s characters represent the feminine, reinforcing how Shakespeare’s plays do so: by seeking to escape the stereotype, they seize the strength of character of Shakespeare’s characters; however, it is still the stereotype that seems to creep in when a certain typifying passivity of Ophelia is appropriated to characterize Mary Anne, for instance. In contrast, regarding the second type of transformations of what Shakespearean plays refer to in Carter’s novels, these generally involve a representation of the feminine that intentionally deviates from that of the play, as Fevvers’ voluntarism counters Hamlet’s relative inability to decide. Moreover, the representation of the masculine in the novels may also imply that they take over female characters from the Shakespearean plays, subverting their

62  Maria José Pires more or less stereotyped character, as seen in Honneybuzzard, whose characterization appropriates the typical fragility of “mad Ophelia.” Thus, the intentionality of the way Carter’s novels, in the postmodern second half of the twentieth century, confront Shakespeare’s English Renaissance plays, to deviate from them, expresses the will to elect him as an influence and to come to terms with him. The novels’ literary maturity testifies to the overcoming of any anguish that may have been at the beginning of the response process. Shortly after the publication of her last novel, Carter declared with a touch of irony: “It must be obvious that I really like Shakespeare” (Sage, 1992, 187). Notes 1 Chapter 2 of Sanders’ book (2002) focuses on Wise Children and Carter’s technique of appropriation while engaging in the parallel process of textual takeover and adaptation. Apfelbaum’s focal point is “Performance Theory, Postcolonial Discourse, and the Filming of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Wise Children” (1998), and Michelle Ryan-​Sautour has reworked her article “Behind the Scenes of Sexual/​Textual Politics in Angela Carter’s ‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ ” (2008), as “Translational Play with the Shakespearean Utterance in ‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ ” (2020) at the international conference “ ‘The World Is Made of Words’: Angela Carter Translator—​Angela Carter in Translation” organized at the University of Lausanne by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Marie Emilie Walz and Juliette Loesch. 2 Although Carter was dissatisfied with the term “postmodernist,” describing the reflection of writers who write books about books as mannerist, criticism classifies her work as such—​justified by her particular interest in “ex-​centric” subjects and by writing from within a dominant culture, exposing it by undermining it (Hutcheon, 1989, 150–​56) or by the metafictional dimension of her work (Waugh, 1984, 21–​2)—​sometimes implicitly (Sage, 1979, 86–​7; Dunker, 1987, 222). 3 “Angela Carter Papers: Notebook” (undated) is now available to consult on the British Library’s website. 4 Marie Emilie Walz has been working also on “Overture and Incidental Music” and Wise Children and on how these texts “foreground reflections on transmediation and can thus be seen as self-​conscious and multilayered transcreative experiments illustrating Carter’s writing method” (2023, 195).

Works cited Apfelbaum, Roger. “ ‘Welcome to Dreamland’: Performance Theory, Postcolonial Discourse, and the Filming of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Angela Carter’s Wise Children.” Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress Los

From influence to response  63 Angeles, 1996. Edited by Jonathan Bate et al. University of Delaware Press–​ Associated University Presses, 1998, pp. 183–​93. Bloom, Harold. The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. Virago Press, 1979. -​-​-​. “The Language of Sisterhood.” The State of the Language. Edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks. U of California P, 1980, pp. 226–​34. -​-​-​. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. 1972. Penguin Books, 1982a. -​-​-​. The Passion of New Eve. 1977. Virago Press, 1982b. -​-​-​. Love. 1971. London: Pan Books Ltd in association with Chatto & Windus, 1988a. -​-​-​. “Truly, It Felt Like Year One.” Very Heaven: Looking Back at the 1960’s. Edited by Sara Maitland. Virago, 1988b, pp. 209–​16. -​-​-​. Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings. 1982. Virago, 1992a. -​-​-​. Wise Children. 1991. Chatto & Windus, 1992b. -​-​-​.Nights at the Circus. 1984. Vintage, 1994. -​-​-​. Shadow Dance. 1966. Virago, 1995a. -​-​-​. Several Perceptions. 1968. Virago, 1995b. -​-​-​. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. 1995. Papermac–​ Macmillan, 1996. -​-​-​. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 1973. Oxford University Press, 1997. -​-​-​. “Notes from the Front Line.” Critical Essays on Angela Carter. Edited by Lindsay Tucker. 1983. G. K. Hall and Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1998, pp. 24–​30. -​-​-​. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Fourth Estate, 1999. -​-​-​. How to Read and Why. Scribner, 2000. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford University Press, 1997. Chedgzoy, Kate. “The (Pregnant) Prince and the Showgirl: Cultural Legitimacy and the Reproduction of Hamlet.” New Essays on Hamlet. Edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning. AMS Press, 1994, pp. 249–​69. -​-​-​. Shakespeare’s Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture. Manchester UP, 1995. --​ -​ .​ “Notebook.” Add MS 88899/​1/​113, Angela Carter Papers, British Library, no date, www.bl.uk/​col​lect​ion-​ items/​notebook-​used-​by-​angela-​carter-​for-​wise-​children. Dunker, Patricia. “Queer Gothic: Angela Carter and the Lost Narratives of Sexual Subversion.” Critical Survey, vol. 8, no. 1, 1996, pp. 58–​68. Gamble, Sarah. Angela Carter: Writing the Front Line. Edinburgh UP, 1997. Gaziorek, Andrzej. Post-​ War British Fiction: Realism and After. Edward Arnold, 1995. Hutcheon, Linda.The Politics of Postmodernism. Routledge, 1989. Jordan, Elaine. “Enthralment: Angela Carter’s Speculative Fictions.” Plotting Change: Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Edited by Linda Anderson. Edward Arnold, 1990, pp. 18–​40. Lee, Alison. “Angela Carter’s New Eve/​lyn: De/​Engendering Narrative.” Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. Edited by Kathy Mezei. University of North Carolina Press, 1996, pp. 238–​49.

64  Maria José Pires Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-​ Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. State U of New York P, 1991. Ryan-​Sautour, Michelle. “Behind the Scenes of Sexual/​Textual Politics in Angela Carter’s ‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’,” Journal of the Short Story in English, 51, 2008. journals.openedition.org/​jsse/​ 911. Sage, Lorna. “The Savage Sideshow: A Profile of Angela Carter.” New Review vol. 39/​40 (June–​July), 1977, pp. 51–​7. -​-​-​. “Angela Carter.” The Contemporary English Novel. Edited by Malcolm Bradbury. Edward Arnold, 1979, pp. 86–​7. -​-​-​. “Angela Carter Interviewed by Lorna Sage.” New Writing. Edited by Malcolm Bradbury and Judith Cooke. Minerva Press, 1992, 185–​93. -​-​-​. Angela Carter. Northcote House in association with The British Council, 1994. Sanders, Julie. Novel Shakespeares: Twentieth-​ Century Women Novelists and Appropriation. Manchester UP, 2002. -​ -​ -​ . “Bubblegum and Revolution: Angela Carter’s Hybrid Shakespeare.” Re-​ Visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts. Edited by Rebecca Munford. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 110–​34. Schoene-​Harwood, Berthold. Writing Men: Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein to the New Man. Edinburgh UP, 2000. Sears, John (1993). Gothic Times: Feminism and Postmodernism in the Novels of Angela Carter. 1993, Sheffield University, PhD dissertation. Showalter, Elaine. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness and the Responsabilities of Feminist Criticism.” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartmann. Methuen, 1986, pp. 77–​94. -​-​-​. A Literature of their Own: From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing. 1977. Virago, 1999. Sousa, Alcinda. “Questioning Influence/​ Gendering Influence.” Actas do XX Encontro da Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Anglo-​Americanos. Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Anglo-​Americanos, 2000, pp. 282–​91. Walz, Marie Emilie. “‘This Entire Dream, in Fact, Was Custom-​Made and Hand-​ Built’: Angela Carter’s Transcreative Experiments with Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Traduire, illustrer, réécrire, mettre en scène. Edited by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère and Alberto Roncaccia. Franco Cesati Editore, 2023, pp. 195–​213. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction. Methuen, 1984. Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor (general editors). William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Wisker, Gina. “Weaving Our Own Web: Demythologising/​Remythologising and Magic in the Work of Contemporary Women Writers.” It’s My Party: Reading Twentieth Century Women’s Writing. Pluto Press, 1994, pp. 104–​28.

5 P.D. James’ The Black Tower “Almost Iris Murdoch with murders in it”? Jesús M. Nieto García

Introduction Iris Murdoch (1919–​1999) and P.D. James (1920–​2014) were two well-​ known, widely read women novelists writing in English, who had the traumatic experience of living in the London area during World War II in their youth. Their most relevant writing took place, additionally, between the 1960s and the 1980s, even if James went on to publish extremely popular novels well into the twenty-​first century, with the critically acclaimed Death in Holy Orders in 2001 and her last novel, Death Comes to Pemberley, in 2011. Although their views on the woman’s role in society and on other highly sensitive sociopolitical issues seem to present deep differences, the fact remains that they can be both included within a large group of women who decided to make a living out of their fiction writing in England, mostly in the second half of the twentieth century. They have then certainly contributed to making women visible and relevant within the English literary panorama in recent years. Beyond that, it is doubtful to what extent we can compare the way they approach fiction writing in general, especially if we pay attention to the opinion of scholars and critics. Murdoch has been described as an intellectual writer who enjoys dealing with the big issues in life, and who was, additionally, an expert in modern philosophy, to the extent that, in an earlier period of her life, she had published extensively on existentialism and other main philosophical theories of the twentieth century. On the other hand, P.D. James is mostly known for her sixteen crime novels, fourteen of them having an extremely popular protagonist, Inspector Adam Dalgliesh, and two having Cordelia Gray as their main character. To these eighteen novels we must add just a few novels outside popular literature, namely Innocent Blood (1980), The Children of Men (1992), and the previously mentioned Death Comes to Pemberley (2011). In fact, these last three “deviations” from detective fiction still involve murder, mystery and a quest for truth, in the case of the first and the third novels mentioned, and a dystopian world, in the case DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-5

66  Jesús M. Nieto García of the second, so that we could say that they also seem to be somehow close to some traditional forms of popular literature.1 This hardly seems to be the case of Iris Murdoch, who practically approaches all forms and genres of traditional fiction, but mostly covers the big social, political and cultural issues in England and (occasionally) Ireland in the twentieth century. Among these, if we just focus on two of her most well-​known novels, The Bell (1958) and The Unicorn (1963), what we see is basically human relations of all kinds and in all possible walks of life within a restricted group of protagonists. A similar pattern is established in many of her other novels, including, for instance, The Italian Girl (1964). So apart from the obvious coincidences concerning biography, there seems to be little in common between these two novelists, one acclaimed as a major author, and so included, for instance, by Harold Bloom in the corresponding appendix of his controversial The Western Canon (554), and the other seen as an extremely popular writer, mostly of crime stories. In spite of all this, P.D. James’ 1975 novel The Black Tower was once described by Kingsley Amis as “almost Iris Murdoch with crimes in it” (Brockes). The very form of this assertion is intriguing. Why, in the first place, “almost”? And, beyond that, why the comparison of P.D. James with Iris Murdoch, when most other critics will not find such similarity between them? Murders undoubtedly there are in The Black Tower. This is, after all, what P.D. James is mostly known for. But do any other similarities exist? I will devote the following pages to elaborating a suggestion that there are more similarities than we may first think. I will also deal with where they can be found, both thematically and structurally, and stylistically, focusing on James’ The Black Tower and on Murdoch’s The Bell, although some references to The Unicorn will also be included. Theme and structure in The Black Tower and The Bell The Black Tower is one of the few Adam Dalgliesh novels where he is not really acting as a police inspector commissioned to solve a murder. After a recent health crisis, he is actually visiting a lay religious community where an older friend, Father Baddeley, has recently died, apparently of natural causes. Dalgliesh’s crisis, initially related to health, is also very much of a professional and, we might even say, almost religious nature: he wasn’t sure that he could reconcile himself to his job. (…) Judges’ Rules, rigor mortis, interrogation, the contemplation of decomposing flesh and smashed bone, the whole body business of manhunting, he was finished with it. There were other things to do with his time. (Black Tower 295)

P.D. James’ The Black Tower  67 This is the fifth of James’ novels in which he appears as the main character, and we have seen in the previous four that he lives for his job and for his poetry writing, so that some critics have actually seen this as a major fault in the series, concerning character depiction (cf. Siebenheller (73–​82)). Additionally, James herself (Time 127) admitted this was done consciously: “I ruthlessly killed off his wife in childbirth even before beginning my first novel. Neither his poetry nor his professional life are inconvenienced by the pram in the hall.” Be that as it may, the fact that at a relatively early age in life such a professionally oriented man as Dalgliesh decides to leave all that behind for good is close to a turn of mind of an almost religious kind. Once we know, additionally, that he is visiting Father Baddeley and the community where he lives, Toynton Grange, “a private home for the young disabled” (Black Tower 297), as readers we initially have the temporary impression that this may not be one more of Dalgliesh’s mystery novels after all. In the second chapter, however, we read about Father Baddeley’s death, about the community, which is of a religious nature—​all members must wear a cloak, which reminds us of a monk’s habit, for instance. These clothes will be later instrumental in the development of the plot, and the people within the community are presented so that we are left with more than a few doubts about their actual reasons for being part of it. In addition, we also know that the area is isolated, far from the nearest village and surrounded by “dangerous cliffs” (Black Tower 301). And by the end of this second chapter, Dalgliesh has been given enough reasons to think that his friend’s death was not fully accidental. As readers, then, we start to suspect that this may be one more of his murder cases after all, even if he is not acting here as a police inspector. To all of this we must add the importance of the novel’s title, an element to which James always gives the importance it deserves: “What one hopes to achieve is a title which is memorable, euphonious, original and appropriate to the work” (James, Time 96). Even if it is not as revelatory as her other previous titles, such as A Mind to Murder (1963) or Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), this one works differently in the images it may trigger in our minds, especially once we get the first mention of the eponymous building: “One tiny phallic symbol on the coast, (…) it was nowhere near the marked path, bore the legend ‘the black tower’ ” (Black Tower 298). At a time when GPS was not even a dream for most drivers, Dalgliesh depends on Father Baddeley’s hand-​drawn map and on visible signposts to direct him towards his goal. The tower here acts as a beacon that attracts the protagonist to the scene of his next murder case, even if he is not at the moment fully aware of this. A certain sense of isolation and of bad omen, even of mourning, in most Western cultures in the 1970s, adds to a feeling that something terrible, possibly dangerous, has happened or may

68  Jesús M. Nieto García happen there, as we get to know later on (Black Tower 394–​97, 436–​39, and 561–​66). We could say that the scenario chosen by James plays a crucial role in the development of the plot, as is commonly the case in most of her novels.2 So we can say that James has stirred until the plot has thickened, but how does all this connect with Murdoch and her novels? In fact, the connection is closer than it looks, as is clearly stated by, among others, Hawkins (170, n. 49) and Shell (193, n. 14). For instance, in The Unicorn, the atmosphere is dark, and the house and its surroundings act as the only obvious setting for the novel. This single setting is far from other inhabited places, we find cliffs around it—​as in The Black Tower—​and, even if we lack the presence of a black tower, the description we get of Gaze Castle, a “remote and reputedly beautiful region” (Unicorn 10), will definitely make the reader think of the Gothic tradition in English fiction. The Gothic nature of the novel, mainly affecting its plot and setting, has been mentioned by, among others, Martz (51), Baldanza (106), Winsor (122), Johnson (67), Gordon (3, 126), and Conradi (501). This Gothic component is so significant that Jarząb focuses her study of the novel on its nature as “a twentieth century Irish gothic novel.” Additionally, Winsor (122) says that the other novel I am considering within this approach, The Bell, “has a strong Gothic subplot.” In The Unicorn, there is also non-​accidental death by falling from a cliff and a number of other violent deaths, like Gerald Scottow’s and Hannah Crean-​Smith’s; these are two further significant similarities with James’ The Black Tower. The structural and thematic coincidences with The Bell, however, are even more striking. Here we also find a community of characters who have intentionally decided to isolate themselves from the world in Imber Court, a religious lay community close to Imber Abbey, even if this sense of community does not go so far as to have them sharing a common costume, as in The Black Tower. However, most of the characters inhabiting Imber Court seem to have gone through dreadful living experiences, so that, if they are not physically limited, like most of the characters in Toynton Grange, they seem to be socially disabled in many ways.3 Among these main characters in The Bell, we find the following: Paul and Dora Greenfield are a married couple going through a very deep crisis in their marriage. Michael Meade, the ruler of the community, had wanted to become an Anglican priest but his hidden homosexuality deeply troubles him. Toby Gashe is an eighteen-​ year-​old boy who will be a crucial figure in the plot of the novel. Finally, Nick and Catherine Fawley, twins, are both in love with Michael Meade but seem to hide these feelings, Nick by drinking heavily and Catherine by preparing to enter Imber Abbey as a nun. Focusing again on James’ novel, we could say that the setting of the story links with Murdoch’s The Unicorn, and the set of characters largely

P.D. James’ The Black Tower  69 with The Bell, while the tone and approach are mainly her own. If we turn now to her characters, Adam Dalgliesh is, very much like Dora Greenfield and Toby Gashe in The Bell, a stranger who has arrived at Toynton Grange to trouble and unsettle the apparently quiet life of the community. As a final result, at the close of the novel, the whole area will no longer be used by the group originally living in it. In this it parallels, again, the situation of Murdoch’s The Bell, where at the end of the novel all the characters leave Imber Court, the community dissolves, and the place is given other functions, and also of The Unicorn. In the latter novel, the protagonist is Marian Taylor, who comes to work in Gaze Castle as a governess, and there finds a group of characters who, again, live their troubled lives:4 she is to teach Hannah Crean-​Smith, whose husband has lived abroad for many years now. Gerald Scottow, like Michael Meade in The Bell and Wilfred Anstey in The Black Tower, rules the lives of the isolated close group of people living in Gaze Castle. Other main characters, such as Effingham Cooper, Denis Nolan, Alice Sejour and Violet Evercreech, also play an important role in the novel. At the end of the story, Marian, the protagonist, leaves the place, whose function and group of human figures inhabiting it have also been dramatically altered in the course of the events. Even if, to my view, it cannot be said that Marian Taylor has been the stranger who arrives and changes the life of the community forever, as we find in both The Bell and The Black Tower, she certainly is a privileged witness who has, sometimes unwillingly, taken part in the deep changes that have happened in it. An analysis of the characters in James’ The Black Tower, beyond the fact that they frequently act as stereotypes in their roles of criminals, innocents or heroes, will yield as a result further similarities with Murdoch’s two novels—“James’s people are usually clean, civil, polite, and well-​ spoken. In circumstances other than murder they would have been described as respectable” (Siebenheller 117). The most striking similarities come from the fact that Wilfred Anstey, in James’ The Black Tower, rules Toynton Grange in the same spirit we previously found in Michael Meade, in Murdoch’s The Bell; both are the original owners of the two estates. The people in both communities must also live a simple life, with limited resources and no apparent luxuries (“you will find that we place little store on material possessions at Toynton Grange,” Black Tower 339; “We keep everything here as plain as possible. It’s a little austerity we practise,” Bell 58). In both novels we get further details from different members of the community, and these affect different aspects of life in the community. For example, at dinner, the members are sitting and eating in silence while one of them reads out selected passages from different religious sources (Bell 162–​63, Black Tower 359). The community’s actual diet is also discussed in the two novels, with an initial suggestion which is finally not agreed

70  Jesús M. Nieto García on about all following a vegetarian diet (Black Tower 343)—​like the three community members in The Bell who are “vegetarians on religious grounds” (Bell 94)—​and they are trying to be self-​supporting “even for heating” (Black Tower 403). Beyond these details, which may be common to many other similar communities, however, there are two aspects which seem to be crucial in both novels’ development. The first one only affects directly both ruling characters, Michael Meade and Wilfred Anstey. In The Bell, Michael Meade had tried to become an Anglican priest at one point in his life. Although in The Black Tower there is no such direct admission from Wilfred Anstey, his sister Millicent suggests that “if Wilfred wanted to dress up in monk’s garb and behave like a medieval abbot he should have applied for entry to a monastery” (Black Tower 533). And in what is possibly the clearest similarity in the internal norms of both communities, they both hold periodic meetings where they take decisions by voting, in the “family council” in The Black Tower (471) and in the community’s weekly meeting that we have access to in ­chapter 6 of The Bell. However, it is not less true that, in the end, in both communities practically all the relevant decisions are taken by their leader, irrespective of the function of the assemblies (“As time went on Michael began to feel far from democratic,” Bell 95). We can also find in both novels undercurrents of rebellion and of those characters that, in several of their customs, do not seem to agree with life in a religious lay community, especially in England in the middle of the twentieth century. Homosexual love and desire between two men is one of those elements that are present in both novels, although this is more intensely felt in Murdoch’s. In fact, Michael Meade in The Bell had not been able to become an Anglican priest in the past precisely because of an attempted affair with Nick Fawley, a boy of fourteen at the time. At the main time of action of the novel, some years later, Nick happens to be the main rebellious character, very much like Maggie Hewson in The Black Tower—​as she says, “I am the delinquent member of the community, the non-​co-​operator, the drop out, the heretic” (Black Tower 314). In The Bell, what happened in the past between Michael and Nick is partially reproduced in the narrative present when Michael now kisses Toby, that “exceptionally attractive” (Bell 125) innocent stranger who just spends a few weeks in the community in a complex rite of passage that will change his life forever. In a similar way, Henry Carwardine is “simply a man in need of love” according to Siebenheller’s description (121). He is also a minor character in The Black Tower who falls in love with Peter, a boy still underage, as soon as he arrives at Toynton Grange, even if their love is the object of “Wilfred’s innuendos and expostulations (…) against unnatural vice” (Black Tower 365). In this last aspect, Wilfred, the leader of Toynton Grange, by contrast, is unlike Michael Meade, a homosexual himself.

P.D. James’ The Black Tower  71 However, we can compare Wilfred’s reaction this time with that of James Tayper Pace, who is described in The Bell as “inevitably a second centre of authority” (Bell 85), when he says that “sodomy is not deplorable, it is forbidden” (Bell 211). In summary, after considering the three novels we have the impression that the atmosphere, the themes covered and many of the characters have a number of features in common that would be difficult to explain if James had not received some kind of influence from Murdoch’s previous novels The Unicorn and The Bell. As we will see in the next section, this influence extends in subtler ways to a preference for cultural referents that we are unlikely to expect in other forms of popular literature. Cultural, literary and artistic referents in The Bell and The Black Tower Iris Murdoch’s novels tend to be frequently loaded with all sorts of literary and artistic referents which a common reader will be unlikely to understand without conducting some additional research. The Bell is no exception in this. Topics range from painting and sculpture to philosophy, from religion to architecture. At one point in the story, Dora, the protagonist, visits the National Gallery in London, and in a short passage we find references to Botticelli; to Susanna Fourment, the sitter of a portrait by Rubens; to Margarethe Trip, the sitter of a portrait by Rembrandt; to Piero della Francesca; to Crivelli; and to Gainsborough. These allusions might make any reader think that they should be familiar with the stories behind the paintings that Dora so much enjoys looking at (Bell 195–​96), as they might be relevant for the composition of this character. The novel was written, of course, at a time when direct access to all this information was very different from what it is today, as we can now find it fast and easily by electronic means. Likewise, Toby is at one point seen by Dora, in remembrance of her trip to Italy, as “the young David of Donatello, casual, powerful, superbly naked, and charmingly immature” (Bell 75), to be later contrasted with a secondary character who looks “like someone acting Michelangelo’s Moses in a charade” (Bell 199). References to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant are explicit at least in two points in the story, on pages 85 and 129, the first having Michael as the focalizer of the philosopher’s theories and the second where Dora’s husband plays that part instead. As for architecture, the Palladian style of Imber Court (Bell 23) is associated to its Corinthian pillars and to the school of Inigo Jones (Bell 25), in a building later completed by William Kent (Bell 68). Relevant as all these elements are in Murdoch’s novel, however, it is religion that the book mostly turns around, as suggested by A.S. Byatt in her introduction to the novel (xi), very frequently in combination with

72  Jesús M. Nieto García original phrases in Latin, for which a translation into English is hardly ever offered by the novelist. Here references to the book of Isaiah in the Bible (Bell 319), to the Dies Irae (Bell 320), to Julian of Norwich (Bell 162), and to the Oxford movement (Bell 61) are explicitly included. The final message in a central episode in the novel seems to be one of consolation and of acceptance of the ways of God to men, through an extensive reading offered to the community at dinnertime in ­chapter 12 and the passages from both the book of Isaiah and from the Dies Irae, even when the latter is just given in Latin, with no translation into English. This in fact is not the only time Latin expressions are included in the novel. Upon Dora’s crucial arrival at Imber Court, for instance, she is received by an inscription reading Amor via mea (Bell 25), “Love my way,” in a certain revelation of the drastic changes that her life is about to experience. Likewise, when the new bell is first shown to the community, the inscription “Defunctos ploro, vivos voco, fulmina frango (…) Gabriel vocor” (Bell 247) appears on it; that is, “I bewail the dead, I summon the living, I overpower thunder (…) I am called Gabriel.” Even at a time when Latin was much more present in society than it is now in the early twenty-​first century, it is doubtful that these three messages could be understood in a straight way by most readers of the novel at the time. But religion seems to influence Murdoch in The Bell in other more subtle ways as well. This is seen in the episode in which Nick wants to force Toby to confess publicly that he has been kissed by Michael and that he has had sex with Dora, in ­chapter 21. Here we can read Nick using English in the mode and tone we would expect in a religious service: “Seek ye the Lord while He may be found.5 (…) Dearly beloved, (…) the mark of Cain is upon us, and with our sin comes grief and hatred and shame. What is there to lighten our darkness?” (Bell 265). We seem to be listening to James, or Michael, rather than to the rebellious outsider that Nick is, even when his purpose is ironic. The final impression we get from the combination of all these particular cultural elements in the novel is no doubt one of a certain intellectual elitism, which is to be expected from someone who was a university lecturer in philosophy for several years, and who during that period of her life devoted most of her writing time to philosophical treatises. The literary career for which she became famous in the UK and elsewhere, however, was starting practically simultaneously. What is possibly not to be expected, or not to the same extent, is the presence of similar stylistic features in James’ novel,6 especially if we think of her as a writer of popular fiction. This of course puts her, again, practically on a par with Murdoch, in a way that may be possibly less evident than in the study of the structural and thematic traits that I addressed in the previous section. The first broad area where this similarity is noticeable

P.D. James’ The Black Tower  73 is in the novel’s many literary allusions (cf. Leonard (37)): “in The Black Tower ‘great literature’ is used as the authority to validate the fictional world.” Apart from the ubiquitous presence of William Shakespeare, including references to The Tempest (370), Measure for Measure (447), Hamlet (448), Macbeth (530), and King Lear (566), Dalgliesh (300) and Henry Carwardine (362) seem to share a particular liking for Thomas Hardy, just as another secondary character does for Trollope (461). Fragments of poems by Christopher Smart (335) and Walt Whitman (369) are explicitly and intentionally included in the narrative, and again Wilfred’s sister, Millicent Hammit, spontaneously quotes Lord Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur” (532) at one point in the novel. And nowhere is this presence of English literature made more explicit than in the list of Father Baddeley’s books (Black Tower 422–​25), where nine different titles are presented, in a combination of literature both of a religious and non-​ religious nature, ranging from Thomas à Kempis to “the first edition of [George and Weedon Grossmith’s] Diary of a Nobody” (424). James’ selection here seems to be highly personal, as none of these titles are really a massively famous popular work. With Siebenheller (137), we can say that here James simply “assumes that the reader will be as well-​read and as thoroughly educated as she is herself,” as in fact the titles are merely included, not explained or further mentioned. As Hidalgo (96) also says, in James “La intertextualidad no suele pasar del terreno de la cita” (intertextuality does not commonly go beyond the inclusion of quotations) (my translation). The fine arts are also present in the novel, from architecture to classical music to diverse antiques, and here again some of the referents may be generally hard to trace for readers. This may not necessarily be the case with James’ common mention, here and elsewhere, of Georgian buildings (Black Tower 303), or of the “Pre-​Raphaelite stained glass” (331) of section IV, ­chapter 2, or of Vivaldi (Black Tower 382). However, many common readers will be at a loss when they face the list of antiques Dalgliesh pays attention to when he visits Julius Court (375–​76), where works by the late seventeenth-​century Dutch wood carver Grinling Gibbons and by one of Bernini’s disciples are explicitly mentioned, among several other articles. This highly detailed, precise list of objects will later have a structural function in the novel, but at this moment it likely leaves most readers with a certain feeling that they are missing something, unless they do a little research on these precious objects. Something similar happens with the frequent references to religion that we find in the novel. These range from “Trappist fashion” (Black Tower 359) to John Donne’s Sermon 11, which is quoted extensively as part of the community’s dinnertime routine in ­chapter 3, and to the book of Revelation (397), which certainly played a dramatic part in the fate of one

74  Jesús M. Nieto García of Wilfred Anstey’s ancestors. Quotes from the Bible are also present in the speech of some of the characters, such as Julius Court: “Vengeance is mine saith Her Majesty’s Commission of the Peace” (Black Tower 492), even if his undertone is clearly ironic, very much like Nick Fawley’s in The Bell. This is, of course, unsurprising in a writer who has acknowledged that “the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer have both been central to my life and to my craft as a novelist” (James, Time 89), and who, as in the case of Murdoch, frequently includes in her novels Latin expressions that appear untranslated for the general public, as we see extensively in section II, ­chapter 4 of The Black Tower. Even if here the Latin expressions are immediately associated to English phrases, this does not seem to help most readers when, for instance they confront the expression “NECESSI MORI: ah, there’s the rub” (Black Tower 394), where Salvator Rosa’s 1656 painting The Frailty of Human Life and Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in act 3, scene 1 are combined. Although James never explicitly suggests what the origin of these two referents is, their combination is perfectly timed, as it serves to illustrate the presence of death as one of the leitmotifs of her novels, as we saw above. The general impression that we get from the combination of these frequent cultural referents in the novel is, as in the case of Murdoch, one of a certain cultural elitism that seems to be at odds with most forms of popular literature in the twentieth century. We will expand on this idea in our closing section. Closing remarks In this comparative study of Murdoch’s The Bell and The Unicorn and James’ The Black Tower, we have seen that the thematic, structural and cultural similarities between the three novels are more numerous, and unexpected, than is usually acknowledged. This may explain why Siebenheller (139), for instance, speaks about James’ “colorful, clear, precise, ample (…), often dryly humorous, insightful, compassionate” writing. The distinction that the author herself established between “popular literature” and “great literature” (James, Talking 157) may not be clearly applicable in her case, as several critics have noted (Siebenheller 6; Leonard 31; Wood 583; and especially Carolyn G. Heilbrun 422, better known as Amanda Cross, it is obvious that she knew what she was talking about). It is true that P.D. James is still a hugely popular novelist, but some of the specific writing techniques that she uses in her production may call for a redefinition of what is still generally understood as “popular literature,” where boundaries may sometimes become blurred. After all, like Iris Murdoch, she can be “always interested in exploring the themes of good and evil, faith and failure, love and selfishness” (Kaur 201), and do it in a very

P.D. James’ The Black Tower  75 personal style which is likely to make readers eager to go beyond a superficial first reading of her novels. Even if James once described Murdoch, precisely, as having an “infinitely superior intelligence” (James, Time 229), her sense of humour and wit also allowed her to pay Murdoch her own personal homage. This can be seen when she writes that one of the characters in The Black Tower “was reading the latest Iris Murdoch” (329), or when she uses, on two occasions in the novel (321, 360), the highly formal, very uncommon word “rebarbative,” which any attentive reader of The Bell would immediately identify as Toby Gashe’s favourite word. These two further apparent coincidences represent additional ways in which these two women writers of the second half of the twentieth century seem to come even closer in their own ways of engaging with literary creation. Notes 1 P.D. James (Time 12) has admitted that she cannot imagine herself “writing a book which doesn’t include death.” 2 Harrington (500) suggests that “Gothic settings are a particular favorite of James,” coinciding in this with Shell (193), who speaks about her novels as “exercises in Anglican gothic,” whereas Sola Buill (328) refers to “the landscape, central and structural for everything else.” In this he coincides with James’ own words on the symbolic importance of setting (James, Time 16). Elsewhere, she even says that her detective novels “have been inspired by the place rather than by a method of murder or a character” (James, Talking 119). 3 Gerstenberger (65) speaks about, in this and other novels by Murdoch, “closed groupings of characters.” On the other hand, Baldanza (20) says the characters in The Bell are “free, spontaneous characters,” and Conradi (443) refers to them as “motley seekers.” It is not surprising, then, that Dora, one of the main characters in Murdoch’s novel, says of them that “they really are nice” (Bell 192, original emphasis), whereas Dalgliesh, in James’ The Black Tower, finds “the thought of Toynton Grange and its inmates disagreeable” (Black Tower 434). It looks as if the “dreams of moral perfection” that Rowland (198) mentions in connection with religion in murder mysteries have turned into a nightmare. In spite of Nick’s death and the dissolution of the community at the end of The Bell, however, as readers we do not have the impression that Murdoch’s novel closes as a nightmare, mostly as a result of Dora’s personal growth, which acts as one of its main leitmotifs. 4 In this, Dalgliesh coincides also with Marian in The Unicorn. According to Spear (47), “like (…) Dora in The Bell, [Marian] is the outsider, the catalyst who changes and finally destroys life at Gaze.” 5 Isaiah 55:6. 6 Regarding this, see the list of cultural referents provided by Siebenheller (70): “the rich and detailed architectural description (…), the many literary references, the quotes (…), the inevitable praise of Jane Austen, the device

76  Jesús M. Nieto García of describing a character by listing his (sic) books. There are knowledgeable comments on painting, on sculpture, on the museum world of London.”

Works cited Baldanza, F. Iris Murdoch. Twayne, 1974. Bloom, H. The Western Canon; the Books and School of the Ages. Papermac, 1996. Brockes, E. “Murder, She Wrote.” The Guardian, 3 March 2001. www.theg​uard​ ian.com/​books/​2001/​mar/​03/​crime.pdja​mes. Byatt, A.S. Introduction. The Bell, by I. Murdoch. 1958. Vintage, 2004. Conradi, P.J. Iris Murdoch: A Life. HarperCollins, 2001. Gerstenberger, D. “The Red and the Green.” Iris Murdoch, edited by H. Bloom. 1975. Chelsea House, 1986, pp. 59–​70. Gordon, D.J. Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing. U of Missouri P, 1995. Harrington, L. “P.D. James (1920–​).” A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by J. Rzepka and L. Horsley, John Wiley & Sons, 2010, pp. 495–​502. Hawkins, P.S. “Iris Murdoch (1919–​99): Anglican Atheist.” Anglican Women Novelists: From Charlotte Brontë to P.D. James, edited by J. Maltby and A. Shell, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 161–​74. Heilbrun, C.G. “The New Female Detective.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, vol. 14, no. 2, 2002, pp. 419–​28. Hidalgo, P. “ ‘These Fragments against My Ruins’: cambios sociales en las novelas de P.D. James.” Atlantis, vol. 22, no. 2, 2000, pp. 93–​106. James, P.D. The Black Tower. A Dalgliesh Trilogy. 1975. Penguin, pp. 289–​567, 1991. James, P.D. Time to Be in Earnest. Faber & Faber, 1999. James, P.D. Talking about Detective Fiction. Bodleian Library, 2009. Jarząb, J. “The Significance of Space in Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn as a Twentieth-​ Century Irish Gothic Novel.” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 49, no. 4, 2014, pp. 5–​20. Johnson, D. Iris Murdoch. Harvester Press, 1987. Kaur, H. “Dystopian Vision and the Hope for Humanity: P.D. James’ The Children of Men.” The Criterion: An International Journal of English, vol. 7, no. 4, 2016, pp. 197–​202. Leonard, J. “Conservative Fiction(s): P.D. James’ The Black Tower.” Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association, vol. 83, 1995, pp. 31–​41. Martz, L.L. “The London Novels.” Iris Murdoch, edited by H. Bloom. 1971. Chelsea House, 1986, pp. 39–​58. Murdoch, I. The Unicorn. 1963. Vintage, 2000. Murdoch, I. The Bell. 1958. Vintage, 2004. Rowland, S. “The Spirits of Detection in British Women’s Crime Fiction.” International Journal for Mythological Studies, vol. 1, no. 3, 2007, pp. 191–​219. Shell, A. “P.D. James (1920–​2014): ‘Lighten Our Darkness’.” Anglican Women Novelists: From Charlotte Brontë to P.D. James, edited by J. Maltby and A. Shell, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 191–​206.

P.D. James’ The Black Tower  77 Siebenheller, N. P.D. James. Frederick Ungar, 1981. Sola Buill, R.J. “Landscape in Detective Fiction. A View of Julian Symmons’s Thirty First of February and The Players and the Game, P.D. James’s Shroud for a Nightingale and Sarah Dunant’s Under My Skin.” Verbeia, vol. 1, 2015, pp. 319–​32. Spear, H.D. Iris Murdoch. Macmillan, 1995. Winsor, D.A. “Solipsistic Sexuality in Murdoch’s Gothic Novels.” Iris Murdoch, edited by H. Bloom. 1981. Chelsea House, 1986, pp. 121–​30. Wood, R.C. “A Case for P.D. James as a Christian Novelist.” Theology Today, vol. 59, no. 4, 2003, pp. 583–​95.

6 Romanticism and heteronymic theory John Keats and the poetics of Fernando Pessoa Nuno Ribeiro1 The work of Fernando Pessoa presents multiple clues that allow us to establish the connection between the Portuguese author and the work of John Keats, one of the poets belonging to the English Romantic movement. The importance of the English Romantic movement in Pessoa’s literary universe is highlighted in an article by Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa, Cláudia Franco Souza, and João Carlos Callixto entitled “Portuguese Readings of William Blake: Fernando Pessoa, a National Poet, and Três Tristes Tigres, a Pop-​Rock Band,” published in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly in 2021, which clarifies the influence of Romanticism on the work of the Portuguese poet as follows, commenting on George Monteiro’s Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-​Century Anglo-​American Literature: It has long been recognized that Pessoa was strongly influenced by “the Elizabethan and the Romantics he so much admired,” as emphasized in Monteiro’s Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-​Century Anglo-​American Literature (45), which opens with a chapter on Wordsworth, followed by one on Gray and Keats, and a third dealing with Byron; we find Blake’s name merely in a note to the introduction, as the first on a list of poets also deemed advisable to study: “Other nineteenth-​century writers who particularly interested Pessoa and are therefore deserving of close study include Blake, Coleridge, Shelley.” (149n23)2 Indeed, the relevance of the Romantic movement in the work of Pessoa was explicitly stated by this poet himself in an article, originally published in 1912, with the title “The New Portuguese Poetry in its Psychological Aspect” (“A Nova Poesia Portuguesa no seu Aspecto Psicológico”)—​corresponding to the third in a series of three articles published3 by Pessoa in the literary journal A Águia, as we can see in the following excerpt:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-6

Romanticism and heteronymic theory  79 In the literature of Europe there are only two periods that can be called great without scruple of adjective attribution. The first is the Renaissance, the movement—​in our case, just literary—​that started with Dante, culminated in Shakespeare and ended with Milton. The second is Romanticism, understanding by Romanticism the literary movement that began in Germany, with its culmination in Goethe, continued in England, with Shelley as its greatest figure, and ended in France, with Victor Hugo as its main poet. The “romanticism” of other countries is a thing, in addition to being inferior and dependent on them, in some cases with another meaning. [Na literatura da Europa há só dois períodos a que se pode chamar grandes sem escrúpulos de adjectivador. O primeiro é a Renascença, o movimento—​para o nosso caso, apenas literário—​que começou em Dante, culminou em Shakespeare e acabou com Milton. O segundo é o Romantismo, entendendo por Romantismo o movimento literário principiado na Alemanha, com a sua culminância em Goethe, continuado na Inglaterra, com Shelley por figura máxima, e acabado em França, com Vítor Hugo por poeta principal. O “romantismo” dos outros países é coisa, além de inferior e dependente destes, em alguns casos com outra significação.]4 This text, which claims that there are only two periods in European literature that can be called great (the Renaissance and Romanticism), places English Romanticism—​side by side with German and French Romantic traditions—​as one of the most significant literary trends of Western literary culture. Pessoa’s interest in English Romanticism, as an echo of his broader interest in the history of English literature,5 is the result of his English education. Pessoa spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Durban, South Africa, where he lived between 1896 and 1905 and received an English education. The importance of Pessoa’s English education is highlighted by Hubert D. Jennings in the book Fernando Pessoa: The Poet with Many Faces: It was an “exutoire providentiel,” as Armand Guibert describes it, which took Fernando Pessoa to South Africa. On January 6, 1896, he and his mother left Lisbon for Durban, where he was to spend the next ten years of his life. The experience, and particularly the English education he received there, was to transform his life, permeate his work, and leave a marked influence upon the literary trends of modern Portugal.6 Throughout his life, Pessoa never abandoned the English language. Pessoa’s archive contains thousands of pages written by Pessoa originally in English which testifies to his continued engagement with English

80  Nuno Ribeiro literature, as clarified by Irene Ramalho dos Santos in the book Atlantic Poets—​Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-​American Modernism: Although born in Portugal, Pessoa obtained his elementary and secondary education in English schools in South Africa, was widely and deeply read in English literature, and wrote a number of interesting poems in English (including a handful of very early ones signed by Alexander Search, one of his first heteronyms). Furthermore, the roots of his poetic theory and practice reach almost equally into Portuguese literature and the Anglo-​American literary tradition.7 The impact of English literature on the work of the Portuguese poet has been recognized by Pessoa scholars, as testified by two important English publications about this author: 1) Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, n. 28, published in 2015 and devoted to Fernando Pessoa as English Reader and Writer, which was edited by Patrício Ferrari and Jerónimo Pizarro and contains several articles by multiple Pessoan researchers, among which is one by Mariana Gray de Castro about “Pessoa and Keats”;8 2) Pessoa Plural, n. 10, published in 2016, with a special issue about Pessoa’s English poems entitled “Inside the Mask—​ The English Poetry of Fernando Pessoa.” Additionally, it is important to mention an edition of Pessoa’s English theoretical prose, published in 2022, edited by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza, with the title Writings on Art and Poetical Theory, containing a set of theoretical writings on literature and art originally written in English by the Portuguese poet. It is in the context of the appreciation of English Romanticism as a main trend in the literature of Europe and of the revaluation of Pessoa’s works in English that the Portuguese poet’s interest in the work of Keats must be considered. Pessoa’s private library contains bibliographical references that present evidence related to the reading of Keats’ works. An important testimony in this regard corresponds to the book The Poetical Works of John Keats,9 which is held in Pessoa’s private library with multiple reading marks and that the Portuguese poet and thinker acquired following his winning of the “Queen Victoria Memorial Prize,” which was awarded to him in 1903, for the best English essay in the “Matriculation Examination” for admission to the University of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. This is precisely what Souza explains in the introduction to the book entitled Fernando Pessoa and Romanticisms [Fernando Pessoa e os Romantismos]: Another relevant consideration regarding Pessoa’s readings about the romantic movement is the fact that the book The Poetical Works of John Keats is part of the prize that Pessoa received in Durban in South

Romanticism and heteronymic theory  81 Africa in 1903 when he was still a young student, the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize. [Outra consideração relevante a respeito das leituras pessoanas sobre o movimento romântico é o facto do livro The Poetical Works of John Keats fazer parte do prémio que Pessoa recebeu em Durban na África do Sul em 1903 quando ainda era um jovem estudante, o prémio Rainha Victória (Queen Victoria Memorial Prize).10] In addition to the volume entitled The Poetical Works of John Keats, there are three anthologies in Pessoa’s private library with selections of poetical compositions by Keats and which present several reading markings by Pessoa: 1) an anthology of English poets, published in 1896 and organized by Charles Mackay under the title A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry;11 2) an anthology by Adam L. Gowans entitled The Hundred Best Poems (Lyrical) in the English Language: Second Series, published in 1907;12 3) another anthology also organized by Adam L. Gowans, published in 1909 under the title The Hundred Best Poems (Lyrical) in the English Language.13 However, Pessoa’s readings regarding Keats are not limited to books with poetic productions by the English Romantic author. Pessoa’s private library also contains books with studies on the life and work of Keats, as can be verified in the following references: 1) a biography entitled Keats,14 written by Sidney Colvin, which has underscores, reading marks and marginalia, bearing the signature “F. A. N. Pessôa” and the date “February, 1905,” that is, a period when Pessoa was still in South Africa, before the poet’s return to Lisbon, which would occur, in that same year, only a few months later; 2) the book by James Russell Lowell with the title The English Poets,15 containing a chapter on “Keats” that also presents reading traces; 3) a book by Matthew Arnold entitled Essays in Criticism: Second Series,16 which contains an essay with the title “John Keats.” Pessoa’s readings concerning Keats’ work would find an echo in the writings of the Portuguese writer, which encompass several testimonies in this regard. A manuscript17 written in 1914, where the Portuguese poet gives us an indication of his literary influences, contains the following passage relating to the years 1904 and 1905, in which there are several references to the name John Keats: 1904–​1905—​Influences of Milton and the English poets of the romantic period—​Byron, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson. (Also, a little later, and influencing initially the short story writer, Edgar Poe.) Slight influences also from Pope’s school. In prose, Carlyle. Remains of Portuguese sub-​poets influences read in childhood.—​In this period the order of influences was, more or less: 1) Byron; 2) Milton, Pope and Byron;

82  Nuno Ribeiro 3) Byron, Milton, Pope, Keats, Tennyson and slightly Shelley; 4) Milton, Keats, Tennyson, Wordsworth and Shelley; 5) Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats and Poe. [1904–​1905—​Influências de Milton e dos poetas ingleses da época romântica—​Byron, Shelley, Keats e Tennyson. (Também, um pouco depois, e influenciando primeiro o contista, Edgar Poe.) Ligeiras influências também da escola de Pope. Em prosa, Carlyle. Restos de influências de subpoetas portugueses lidos na infância.—​Neste período a ordem das influências foi, pouco mais ou menos: 1) Byron; 2) Milton, Pope e Byron; 3) Byron, Milton, Pope, Keats, Tennyson e ligeiramente Shelley; 4) Milton, Keats, Tennyson, Wordsworth e Shelley; 5) Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats e Poe.18] There is also the evidence of Pessoa’s reading of Keats in 1906, as can be seen in the diary19 of the Portuguese author’s pre-​heteronym Charles Robert Anon, where there are two entries, respectively from 11 and 25 May, revealing, among other subjects and authors, Pessoa’s interest in the poetry of Keats. This is what we read in the following excerpts from Anon’s diary: May 11th, 1906 Began reading seriously all the books I had read in childhood and boyhood, uselessly enough. Read Byron’s “Childe Harold”—​Cantos I and II, “Hebrew Melodies,” Keats’ “St. Agnes’ Eve,” the first chapters of Lombroso’s Homme Criminel and one small poem of Schiller’s (translated with difficulty, for I am but beginning to learn German).20 25th May (Friday) Curso: French & Philology. Read Keats and the Métromanie of Piron. I determined henceforth to read at least two books every day—​one poetry, or belles lettres, another science or philosophy. Finished the first propositions of my first philosophical work.21 In another notebook with the signature “F. A. N. Pessôa,”22 there is a “Reading Diary”23 which contains references to Keats’ poems that run from April to June 1906. Right at the beginning of this “Reading Diary” there is the following entry with reference to the name of Keats: April to May (end) Vanity Fair. Jules Verne: Voyage to the Moon, Voyage Round the Moon. Guerra Junqueiro: Velhice do Padre Eterno. Byron: Childe Harold (Cantos I & II) and Hebrew Melodies. Keats’s “Basil Pot”

Romanticism and heteronymic theory  83 (“Isabella”) and “St. Agnes’ Eve.” Forjaz de Sampaio: Palavras Cínicas. Also parts of: Lombroso (Homme Criminel), Keats, Chatterton, Kant, Campoamor, Rosseau, and Haeckel.24 Next in this “Reading Diary” there is also the following entries, written in June concerning Pessoa’s readings of Keats’ poetry: June 8th: Keats: Odes and other poems. Laing: Modern Science and Modern Thought. June 9th: Keats: Ibidem. Weber: History of European Philosophy up to Protagoras. Espronceda: Estudiante de Salamanca. June 10th: Keats. Espronceda. (…) June 12th: Laing. Keats: Early Poems. Spectator 10-​ . Collin d’Harleville: Vieux célibataire. (…) June 16th: Keats: Early Poems. (…) June 21st: Parny: Guerre des dieux—​six cantos. Hudson: Spencer, 1st chapter. Keats: In several places. Silva Passos: Evangelho Novo, 168 pages.25 Pessoa’s readings regarding Keats—​both of this author’s poems and of the studies related to the work of the English Romantic poet—​resulted in a series of references present throughout the Portuguese author’s writings.26 An important fact in this regard corresponds to a list of essays, from the beginning of 1905, that Pessoa planned to write and that contains the reference to three essays in English, respectively, on the odes, on the sonnets and on the character of Keats, as can be verified by the following document transcribed from Pessoa’s archive: Essays 1. On the Odes of Keats. 2. On the Sonnets of Keats. 3. On the Character of Keats. 4. On the Character of Byron. 5. On the Works of Edgar Allan Poe.27 This list of essays was written by Pessoa himself and contains, besides the project of three essays about Keats, one essay about another English Romantic poet—​Lord Byron—​and also one on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the American poet and prose writer. The order of the names and the numbers in that list were ascribed by the Portuguese writer.

84  Nuno Ribeiro The idea of writing a series of essays on Keats together with Pessoa’s reading of that poet’s work resulted in a set of considerations present among the writings of Pessoa’s archive that constitute evidence of the Portuguese poet’s interest in the English Romantic author. In a fragment, written in English, there is the following statement, written around 1906, where Pessoa expresses his admiration for the poetry of Keats: Keats

I cannot think badly of the man who wrote the “Ode to a Nightingale,” nor of him who, in that “to the Grecian Urn,” expresses so human an idea as the heart-​rending untimeness of beauty. We all have felt that tearful sensation. Mothers, how many of ye, in looking at your bright children and at their heavenly fairness, have not wished such small, lovely forms could be preserved for ever and unchanged. Lover, when looking upon the form of thy mistress hast thou not felt thy heart oppressed because such beauty should one day be no more, nay, should grow old and, may hap, unbeautiful. Have we not all wished the immortality of someone that we know, have we all not felt that same pain at feeling that none are immortal. The statue of roman Venus hath looked, century after century, upon us in its nude beauty, hath charmed generations by its form and liveth now to charm others. But where art thou whom she looked upon? Some faces, fair, perhaps, as her face; some forms, beauteous, perhaps, as her form, where are they now, animated as they were by the fire that she has not? Apollo Belvedere still stands, but what of the millions of fair youths and maidens that have looked upon him? Their fairness went dwindled to old age, rotted in horrible death, and the uninspired image stands beautiful for ever and ever before us. If we had but each of us an Aurora who would not be content to be a Tithonus, though thin-​rocked, world-​worn and feeble.28 In this text, where Pessoa develops the theme of the untimeness of beauty present in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the Portuguese poet almost quotes and reproduces the syntax of that poem. In fact, the book The Poetical Works of John Keats kept in Pessoa’s private library contains the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” presenting several underscores by the Portuguese poet, such as the following lines from the second and fifth stanzas of the poem: II

(…) Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Romanticism and heteronymic theory  85 Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal—​yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (…) V

(…) “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—​that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.29 The importance of these last two lines of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” underscored by Pessoa is expressed by the fact that the Portuguese poet writes “marvellous” as marginalia to those lines.30 In another fragment, also written around 1906, the Portuguese author writes about Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”: I deem the “Ode to a Nightingale” to be the best of all the odes of Keats, if the not in his works the greatest poem. Not that I think it perfect, or that I consider it □, 31 but because a more complete expression of a pained soul, of a wounded poetic spirit, has never been, nor ever will be formulated. Only a poet can grasp the full meaning of this Ode, only one pained and crushed by that blackest of all demons—​ the material—​can catch at the real spirit of this magic utterance, and can point out how great the expression of world-​weariness unfolded. Everything in this poem is full of life-​spirit, of a pained life-​spirit. It is not deep, nor awful, but, to him that can read it, moving to the highest degree. It will ever remain a masterly example of what poetry is.32 In the book The Poetical Works of John Keats which is found in Pessoa’s private library, there are also several lines of “Ode to a Nightingale” underlined by the Portuguese poet, such as the following lines, corresponding to the last three lines of stanza VII: The same that oft-​times hath Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn. 33 The relevance of these lines of “Ode to a Nightingale” underscored by Pessoa is also made explicit by the fact that the Portuguese poet writes “admirably spiritual”34 as marginalia to those lines.

86  Nuno Ribeiro Moreover, Pessoa’s interest in the work of Keats is revealed not only in the Portuguese author’s books present in his private library, reading lists and prose fragments, but also in his poetry, as Monteiro shows in a chapter entitled “Death-​Mask: Gray and Keats,” published in Fernando Pessoa and the Nineteenth-​Century Anglo-​American Literature, where one can read that “on November 17, 1908, Pessoa wrote a poem directly addressing to Keats and his prescient sonnet expressing fear at an earthly death. This poem Pessoa choose to write in Portuguese.”35 The poem Monteiro is referring to is entitled “To Keats” [“A Keats”]36 and is preceded by the indication of its having been composed after reading the Keats sonnet “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.”37 Another important reference to the relation between Pessoa and Keats is Arnaldo Saraiva’s book with the title Fernando Pessoa, Poet—​Translator of Poets [Fernando Pessoa, Poeta—​Tradutor de Poetas], where the editor also draws attention to the existence of a fragment of a Portuguese translation concerning Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” made by Pessoa and present among the posthumous writings from Pessoa’s archive.38 If it is true that the evidence so far revealed allows us to follow Pessoa’s interest in Keats’ poems, there are also elements that enable us to go beyond the problems related to the analysis of Pessoa’s reading of the English Romantic author, and establish a connection between Pessoa’s heteronymic theorization and the work of Keats. In fact, in the introduction to the collection of texts entitled Theory of Heteronymy [Teoria da Heteronímia], the editors Fernando Cabral Martins and Richard Zenith draw attention to the possible parallels between Pessoa and Keats regarding the genesis of the concept of heteronymy, as can be read in the following excerpt of the introductory text by Cabral Martins and Zenith: Anyhow, beyond the devaluation of the figure of the Author carried out by the symbolist poetics (Mallarmé and the “elocutory disappearance of the poet,” Foucault and the “transcendental anonymity”), the process of creation of heteronyms deals with the rediscovering and renewing certain different lines of poetry of the 19th century about the poetic subject. For example, again in Romanticism, that of Keats: the poet has no identity, other than the Protean capacity to become others, to mould himself completely to the others he sees. This poetic dissolution of the author suggested by Keats also echoes in Rimbaud’s capital phrase “JE est un autre,” that is, in the alteration of the poetic subject in the light of an “alchemy of the word.” [De todo o modo, para lá da desvalorização da figura do Autor levada a cabo pela poética simbolista (Mallarmé e a “desaparição elocutória do poeta,” Foucault e o “anonimato transcendental”) tratar-​se-​ia, no

Romanticism and heteronymic theory  87 processo de criação dos heterónimos, de reencontrar e renovar certas outras linhas de poesia do século XIX no que ao sujeito poético diz respeito. Por exemplo, de novo no Romantismo, a de Keats: o poeta não tem identidade, e a não ser a capacidade proteica de se tornar os outros, de se moldar por completo aos outros que vê. Esta dissolução poética do autor sugerida por Keats ecoa igualmente na frase capital de Rimbaud “JE est un autre,” ou seja, na alterização do sujeito poético à luz de uma “alquimia da palava.”39] To establish the parallels between Pessoa and Keats concerning the genesis of the concept of heteronymy, it is necessary, first, to understand Pessoa’s characterization and definition of “heteronym.” The concept of the heteronym as created by Pessoa is different from a simple pseudonym. In a “Bibliographical Summary” [“Tábua Bibliográfica”] published in the literary journal Presença, n. 17, in December 1928, there is the following statement by the Portuguese poet himself: Fernando Pessoa’s writings belong to two categories of works, which we may call orthonymic and heteronymic. We cannot call them autonymous and pseudonymous, for that’s not in fact what they are. Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs; heteronymic works are by the author outside his own person. They proceed from a full-​fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write. The heteronymic works of Fernando Pessoa have been produced by (so far) three people’s names—​Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. These individuals should be considered distinct from their author.40 [O que Fernando Pessoa escreve pertence a duas categorias de obras, a que poderemos chamar ortónimas e heterónimas. Não se poderá dizer que são autónimas e pseudónimas, porque deveras o não são. A obra pseudónima é do autor em sua pessoa, salvo no nome que assina; a heterónima é do autor fora de sua pessoa, é de uma individualidade completa fabricada por ele, como seriam os dizeres de qualquer personagem de qualquer drama seu. As obras heterónimas de Fernando Pessoa são feitas por, até agora, três nomes de gente—​Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos. Estas individualidades devem ser consideradas como distintas da do autor delas.]41 According to this text, the writings of Pessoa can be distinguished by two categories: the orthonymic, signed by Pessoa in his own name, and the

88  Nuno Ribeiro heteronymic, signed by fictional literary authors created by that author. The heteronymic works are different from the merely pseudonymous works, since the latter are written by the author in his own person, that is, with the simple shift in name, while the heteronymic works are written by each individual author and are distinct from his own person. Thus, the creation of a heteronym corresponds to the creation of a different literary fictional author with its own writings, its own biography, its own way of seeing the world, and its own style, that is, as if the works a heteronym produces were written by a completely different person. As asserted in the “Bibliographical Summary,” the only fictional authors Pessoa considers having achieved the status of a heteronym correspond to the name of three of his literary creations: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. Besides these heteronyms, Pessoa attributes the name of the semi-​heteronym to Bernardo Soares, a fictional author entrusted with the task of signing Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet [Livro do Desassossego] at its final stage.42 In a letter, written 13 January 1935 and sent to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, known as the letter on the genesis of the heteronyms,43 there is the following description of Bernardo Soares as a semi-​heteronym: My semiheteronym Bernardo Soares, who in many ways resembles Álvaro de Campos, always appears when I’m sleepy or drowsy, such that my qualities of inhibition and logical reasoning are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. He’s a semiheteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it. He’s me without my logical reasoning and emotion. His prose is the same as mine, except for a certain formal restraint that reason imposes on my own writing, and his Portuguese is exactly the same—​whereas Caeiro writes bad Portuguese, Campos writes it reasonably well but with mistakes such as “me myself” instead of “I myself,” etc., and Reis writes better than I, but with a purism I find excessive. What’s hard for me is to write the prose of Reis—​still unpublished—​or of Campos. Simulation is easier, because more spontaneous, in verse.44 [O meu semi-​heterónimo Bernardo Soares, que aliás em muitas coisas se parece com Álvaro de Campos, aparece sempre que estou cansado ou sonolento, de sorte que tenha um pouco suspensas as qualidades de raciocínio e de inibição; aquela prosa é um constante devaneio. É um semi-​heterónimo porque, não sendo a personalidade a minha, é, não diferente da minha, mas uma simples mutilação dela. Sou eu menos o raciocínio e a afectividade. A prosa, salvo o que o raciocínio dá de tenue à minha, é igual a esta, e o português perfeitamente igual; ao passo que Caeiro escrevia mal o português, Campos razoavelmente mas com lapsos como dizer “eu próprio” em vez de “eu mesmo,” etc., Reis melhor do que

Romanticism and heteronymic theory  89 eu, mas com um purismo que considero exagerado. O difícil para mim é escrever a prosa de Reis—​ainda inédita—​ou de Campos. A simulação é mais fácil, até porque é mais espontânea, em verso.]45 According to this excerpt, the difference between the heteronym and the semi-​heteronym corresponds to the manner of writing, that is, the style. Whereas the heteronym is different from its creator in his style, the semi-​ heteronym is only different in his way of thinking about and feeling the world, but with the same style of writing as his creator, for Pessoa explicitly says that, though Bernardo Soares is a mutilation of the Portuguese author’s personality, his prose style is the same as his own. Nevertheless, Pessoa’s creation of literary fictional authors doesn’t come to an end with the creation of the heteronymic and semi-​heteronymic works. Pessoa’s archive presents a multiplicity of other personalities created during the same period. Though there is considerable debate in Pessoa studies about how to name them and Pessoa himself doesn’t offer a specific indication in that regard, the general consensus is that they should be considered literary personalities. The creation of these non-​heteronymic literary personalities covers a wide range of literary creations, ranging from fictional authors with only a few fragments and projects to more complex personalities, with biographies as well as several other kinds of texts. Underlying the creation of all of the heteronyms, semi-​heteronyms and literary personalities are the pre-​heteronyms. The letter about the genesis of the heteronyms presents the following explanation: Ever since I was a child, it has been my tendency to create around me a fictitious world, to surround myself with friends and acquaintances that never existed. (I can’t be sure, of course, if they really never existed, or if it’s me who doesn’t exist. In this matter, as in any other, we shouldn’t be dogmatic.) Ever since I’ve known myself as “me,” I can remember envisioning the shape, motions, character and life story of various unreal figures who were as visible and as close to me as the manifestations of what we call, perhaps too hastily, real life. This tendency, which goes back as far as I can remember being an I, has always accompanied me, changing somewhat the music it enchants me with, but never the way in which it enchants me.46 [Desde criança tive a tendência para criar em meu torno um mundo fictício, de me cercar de amigos e conhecidos que nunca existiram. (Não sei, bem entendido, se realmente não existiram, ou se sou eu que não existo. Nestas coisas, como em todas, não devemos ser dogmáticos). Desde que me conheço como sendo aquilo a que chamo eu, me lembro de precisar mentalmente, em figura, movimentos, carácter e história,

90  Nuno Ribeiro várias figuras irreais que eram para mim tão visíveis e minhas como as coisas daquilo a que chamamos, porventura abusivamente, a vida real. Esta tendência, que me vem desde que me lembro de ser um eu, tem-​me acompanhado sempre, mudando um pouco o tipo de música com que me encanta, mas não alterando nunca a sua maneira de encantar.]47 Recent studies show that Pessoa created more than one hundred literary personalities, most of which were produced during the pre-​heteronymic period.48 However, to understand the relationship between Pessoa’s heteronymic theory and Keats’ idea that the poet has no identity, it is necessary to consider the notion of “chameleon poet” developed by the English Romantic poet in a letter sent to Richard Woodhouse dated 27 October 1818. First, it is necessary to point out that among the writings in Pessoa’s archive, there are elements that allow us to confirm that the Portuguese poet was interested not only in the poetry but also in the epistolary production from the English author, as can be seen in the following fragment: “Keats. /​Both in his poems and in his (private) letters, one notices Keats’ admirable happiness of expression.” [“Keats. /​Quer nos seus poemas, quer nas suas cartas (particulares) há a notar em Keats a admirável felicidade de expressão.”].49 In an article entitled “Pessoa and Keats,”50 Mariana Gray de Castro also draws attention to the fact that Pessoa was aware of Keats’ letter about the chameleon poet, through Colvin’s biography about the English Romantic poet, indicating that: “Pessoa read this letter, or at least a part of it, and drew a line next to it in his copy of Colvin’s biography of Keats.”51 Let us see, then, what Keats tells us in the aforementioned letter. In Keats’ letter of 27 October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse, the notion of “chameleon poet” appears in the context of the definition of the “poetical Character” as something devoid of an identity. The following passage from Keats’ letter says about this subject: As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am anything, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a thing per se and stands alone), it is not itself—​it has no self—​it is everything and nothing—​It has no character—​it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon Poet.52 According to this excerpt, Keats’ notion of “poetical Character” is characterized by the absence of a “self” that constitutes an identity. This

Romanticism and heteronymic theory  91 absence of identity is at the base of the chameleonic or Protean nature of the poet, who is capable of being everything, because he has no “self.” In Colvin’s biography about Keats that is held in Pessoa’s private library, there is the following excerpt about that subject presenting reading marks by the Portuguese poet: [→|]|“Even now,” he [Keats] says on another occasion, “I am perhaps not speaking from myself, but from some character in whose soul I now live.” | Keats was often impatient of this Protean quality of his mind.53 This absence of an identity combined with the chameleonic and Protean character of the poet means that the poetic creator can become another self, that is, the poet can create or assume multiple identities for himself, as Keats explicitly asserts in the sequence of the letter that we have been referring to: A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no Identity; he is continually in for and filling some other Body. The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute. The poet has none; no identity. He is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the Characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature. How can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People, if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of everyone in the room begins to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated.54 The experience of absence of identity, which Keats connects with the notion of “chameleon poet,” is also expressed in Pessoa’s texts of heteronymic theory. There a clear example of this in the following text by Pessoa, written around 1915: I don’t know who I am, what soul I have. When I speak sincerely, I don’t know what sincerity I speak with. I am variously another one then a self, that I don’t know if it exists. I feel beliefs that I don’t have. I feel uplift by cravings that I repudiate. My perpetual attention on me perpetually points me to soul betrayals to a character that I may not have, nor does it think I have.

92  Nuno Ribeiro I feel multiple. I’m like a room with countless fantastic mirrors that twist for false reflections a single central reality that is in none and is in all. Such as the pantheist feels wave and star and flower, I feel several beings. I feel myself living the lives of others, incompletely in myself, as if my being partook of all men, incompletely of each, individuated by a sum of non-​selves synthesized in a false self. [Não sei quem sou, que alma tenho. Quando falo com sinceridade não sei com que sinceridade falo. Sou variamente outro do que um eu que não sei se existe. Sinto crenças que não tenho. Enlevam-​me ânsias que repudio. A minha perpétua atenção sobre mim perpetuamente me aponta traições de alma a um carácter que talvez eu não tenha, nem ela julga que eu tenho. Sinto-​me múltiplo. Sou como um quarto com inúmeros espelhos fantásticos que torcem para reflexões falsas uma única central realidade que não está em nenhum e está em todos. Como o panteísta se sente onda e astro e flor, eu sinto-​me vários seres. Sinto-​me viver vidas alheias, em mim, incompletamente, como se o meu ser participasse de todos os homens, incompletamente de cada, individuado por uma suma de não-​eus sintetizados num eu postiço.55] This text, as in the above-​mentioned Keats letter, presents the experience of the multiplicity of the self as something that is based on an inability to find an identity or define a unique personality to determine what the self is. This indeterminacy of what the self is, considered as the inability to define a single and unitary personality to determine oneself, is explicitly expressed by Pessoa in an introductory text fragment, written around 1920, intended for a project called “Aspects,” which would serve as an introduction to the publication of the works of the Portuguese author’s three heteronyms (Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos), together with the texts of other literary personalities (António Mora and Vicente Guedes): The human author of these books has no personality of his own. Whenever he feels a personality well up inside, he quickly realizes that this new being, though similar, is distinct from him—​an intellectual son, perhaps, with inherited characteristics, but also with differences that make him someone else. That this quality in the writer is a manifestation of hysteria, or of the so-​called split personality, is neither denied nor affirmed by the author of these books. As the helpless slave of his multiplied self, it would be

Romanticism and heteronymic theory  93 useless for him to agree with one or the other theory about the written results of that multiplication. It’s not surprising that this way of making art seems strange; what’s surprising is that there are things that don’t seem strange. Some of the author’s current theories were inspired by one or another of these personalities that consubstantially passed—​for a moment, for a day, or for a longer period—​through his own personality, assuming he has one.56 [O autor humano destes livros não conhece em si próprio personalidade nenhuma. Quando acaso sente uma personalidade emergir dentro de si, cedo vê que é um ente diferente do que ele é, embora parecido; filho mental, talvez, e com qualidades herdadas, mas as diferenças de ser outrem. Que esta qualidade no escritor seja uma forma de histeria, ou da chamada dissociação da personalidade, o autor destes livros nem o contesta, nem o apoia. De nada lhe serviriam, escravo que é da multiplicidade de si próprio, que concordasse com esta, ou com aquela, teoria, sobre os resultados escritos dessa multiplicidade. Que este processo de fazer arte cause estranheza, não admira; o que admira é que haja cousa alguma que não cause estranheza. Algumas das teorias, que o autor presentemente tem, foram-​ lhe inspiradas por uma ou outra das personalidades que, um momento, uma hora, uns tempos, passaram consubstancialmente pela sua própria personalidade, se é que esta existe.57] All the elements that have been referred to enable us not only to follow Fernando Pessoa’s interest in the readings related to the work of John Keats, but also the parallels that allow us to approximate the conception that the English Romantic poet presents regarding the lack of identity underlying the chameleonic character of the poet and Pessoa’s texts of heteronymic theorization where the Portuguese poet and thinker calls into question the unitary and identical nature of the personality of the artistic creator. Notes 1 This text is part of a postdoctoral research study with a grant funded by FCT, Foundation for the Science and Technology (SFRH/​BPD/​121514/​2016), under the FSE programme, in the Institute for the Study of Literature and Tradition, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences –​New University of Lisbon. 2 sousa, Souza, Callixto, 2021, 3, § 8. 3 The other two articles about the new Portuguese poetry published in 1912 in A Águia are: “The New Portuguese Poetry Sociologically Considered” [“A Nova Poesia Portuguesa Sociologicamente Considerada”] and “Relapsing”

94  Nuno Ribeiro [“Reincidindo”]. Pessoa’s series of articles about the new Portuguese poetry published in A Águia are edited by Fernando Cabral Martins in Pessoa, 2000, 7–​67. 4 Pessoa, 2000, 54–​5. 5 Pessoa’s interest in the several periods of English literature was so intense that the Portuguese poet left several documents in his archive destined to the elaboration of a History of English Literature [História da Literatura Inglesa]. The testimonies that form Pessoa’s archive about the History of English Literature [História da Literatura Inglesa] are edited by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza in: Pessoa, 2021. 6 Jennings, 2019, 31. 7 Santos, 2003, 1–​2. 8 See: Castro, 2015, 143–​63. 9 Keats, 1898. [CFP, 8 –​294] The acronym “CFP” refers to Casa Fernando Pessoa (Fernando Pessoa’s house), where Fernando Pessoa’s private library is currently kept. The numbering after the acronym CFP corresponds to the catalogue reference of each book present in Pessoa’s private library. For the transcription of Pessoa’s private library texts, we use the following symbols: XXXXXX –​underlined segment [→|]|XXXXXX| –​section marked with a right vertical stroke 10 Souza, 2019, 7. 11 Mackay, 1896. [CFP, 8 –​2] 12 Gowans, 1907. [CFP, 8 –​272B] 13 Gowans, 1909. [CFP, 8 –​272A] 14 Colvin, 1899. [CFP, 9 –​20] 15 Lowell, 1888. [CFP, 8 –​326] 16 Arnold, 1921. [CFP, 8 –​14B] 17 According to Richard Zenith (PESSOA, 2003), this document corresponds to a “Manuscript delivered by Pessoa to Armando Cortes-​Rodrigues, who had asked him elements for a study on the poet, as he mentions in his letter of 19/​ 11/​1914 to Cortes-​Rodrigues” [“Manuscrito entregue por Pessoa a Armando Cortes-​Rodrigues, que lhe tinha pedido elementos para um estudo sobre o poeta, conforme este refere na sua carta de 19/​11/​1914 a Cortes-​Rodrigues”] (Pessoa, 2003, 414). The original document is not currently in Pessoa’s archive. This testimony is edited by Zenith in: Pessoa, 2003, 150. 18 Pessoa, 2003, 150. 19 BNP/​E3, 22 –​74; 13A –​41-​58. The acronym “BNP/​E3” refers to the cataloguing of Fernando Pessoa’s archive—​ Espólio 3 (Archive 3)—​ currently in the National Library of Portugal (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal). The numbering—​after the acronym “BNP /​E3”—​corresponds to the catalogue number of the document in Fernando Pessoa’s archive. 20 Pessoa, 2003, 38; BNP/​E3, 13A –​51r. 21 Pessoa, 2003, 42; BNP/​E3, 13A –​55r. 22 BNP/​E3, 144N –​2r. 23 BNP/​E3, 144N –​ 13-​19. 24 Pessoa, 2003, 46; BNP/​E3, 144N –​13r.

Romanticism and heteronymic theory  95 5 Pessoa, 2003, 48–​50; BNP/​E3, 144N –​14r, 14v, 15r. 2 26 In the book by Souza entitled Fernando Pessoa and Romanticisms (Souza, 2019), there is a wide collection of writings from the Pessoa archive on John Keats. In fact, Souza’s book contains a chapter (pp. 166–​75) dedicated to the collection of the most important prose fragments and reading lists by Pessoa about Keats, which allow the reader to contextualize the Portuguese author’s references to the English Romantic poet. 27 Souza, 2019, 357; BNP/​E3, 144N –​6r. 28 Souza, 2019, 168–​ 69; BNP/​ E3, 19 –​98r, original emphasis. In a chapter entitled “Death Masks: Gray and Keats” (Monteiro 40–​ 51) of the book Fernando Pessoa and the Nineteenth-​ Century Anglo-​ American Literature (2000), George Monteiro, the author of the chapter and the book, highlights the importance of this fragment in the context of the analysis of the relationship between Fernando Pessoa, Thomas Gray and John Keats. 29 CFP, 8-​294, 266–​67, underlining in original. 30 CFP, 8-​294, 267. 31 The “□” symbol indicates a blank space in the original document in the Pessoa archive. 32 Souza, 2019, 166–​67; BNP/​E3, 14C –​81r. 33 CFP, 8-​294, 265. 34 CFP, 8-​294, 265. 35 Monteiro, 2000, 40–​51. 36 BNP/​E3, 56 –​13r. Monteiro’s chapter entitled “Death-​Mask: Gray and Keats” offers an English translation of Pessoa’s poem “To Keats.” 37 BNP/​E3, 56 –​13r. 38 See: Saraiva, 1996, 216–​17; BNP/​E3, 74B –​54. 39 Pessoa, 2012, 16. 40 Pessoa, 2006, 3. 41 Pessoa, 2012, 227. 42 Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet has three distinct stages: 1) between 1913 and 1914, corresponding to a period when this project is signed by Pessoa in his own name; 2) between 1915 and 1920, when Vicente Guedes assumes the authorship of this project; 3) the final stage, when the project becomes the property of Bernardo Soares—​between 1929 and 1935, after a period of silence regarding that project (between 1921 and 1928, Pessoa doesn’t write any fragments for The Book of Disquiet). For further information regarding this, see: Ribeiro, 2013, 223–​41; Ribeiro, 2016, 217–​21. 43 BNP/​E3, 72 –​31-​38; BNP/​E3, 72 –​39-​46. 44 Pessoa, 2001, 258–​59. 45 Pessoa, 2012, 280–​81, original emphasis. 46 Pessoa, 2001, 254–​55. 47 Pessoa, 2012, 276. 48 See: Pessoa, 2012; Pessoa, 2013. 49 Souza, 2019, 166; BNP/​E3, 14C –​39r, original emphasis. 50 Gray, 2015. 51 Gray, 2015, 152. 52 Keats, 2005, 194–​95.

96  Nuno Ribeiro 3 CFP, 9 –​20, p. 216. 5 54 Keats, 2005, 195. 55 Pessoa, 2012, 149–​50; BNP/​E3, 20 –​67. 56 Pessoa, 2001, 2 57 Pessoa, 2012, 215; BNP/​E3, 20 –​70-​71.

Works cited Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism: Second Series. Macmillan, 1927. [CFP, 8 –​14B] Castro, Mariana Gray de. “Pessoa and Keats.” Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, n. 28—​ Fernando Pessoa as English Reader and Writer, edited by Patricio Ferrari and Jerónimo Pizarro, Tagus Press at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 2015, pp. 143–​63. Colvin, Sidney. Keats. 2nd ed., Macmillan, 1899. [CFP, 9 –​20] Ferrari, Patricio. Inside the Mask: The English Poetry of Fernando Pessoa, special issue of Pessoa Pural—​A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies, n. 10, Fall, 2016. Ferrari, Patricio, and Jerónimo Pizarro, editors. Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, n. 28—​Fernando Pessoa as English Reader and Writer. Tagus Press at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 2015 Gowans, Adam L., editor. The Hundred Best Poems (Lyrical) in the English Language: Second Series. Gowans and Gray, 1907. [CFP, 8 –​272B] -​-​-​., editor. The Hundred Best Poems (Lyrical) in the English Language. Gowans and Gray, 1909. [CFP, 8 –​272A] Jennings, Hubert D. Fernando Pessoa: The Poet with Many Faces. Edited by Carlos Pitella. Tinta-​da-​China, 2019. Keats, John. The Poetical Works of John Keats. Frederic Warne, 1898. [CFP, 8 –​294] -​-​-​. Selected Letters of John Keats. Edited by Grant F. Scott. Harvard UP, 2015. Lowell, James Russell. The English Poets. Walter Scott, 1888. [CFP, 8 –​326] Mackay, Charles, editor. A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry. 23rd ed. George Routledge & Sons, 1896. [CFP, 8 –​2] Monteiro, George. Fernando Pessoa and the Nineteenth-​Century Anglo-​American Literature. UP of Kentucky, 2000. Pessoa, Fernando. Crítica—​Ensaios, Artigos e Entrevistas. Edição de Fernando Cabral Martins. Assírio & Alvim, 2000. -​-​-​. The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. Grove Press, 2001. -​-​-​. Escritos Automáticos, Autobiográficos e de Reflexão Pessoal. Edição de Richard Zenith. Assírio & Alvim, 2003. -​-​-​. A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. Penguin Books, 2006. -​-​-​. Teoria da Heteronímia. Edição de Fernando Cabral Martins e Richard Zenith. Assírio & Alvim, 2012. -​-​-​. Eu sou uma antologia: 136 autores fictícios. Edição de Jerónimo Pizarro e Patricio Ferrari. Tinta-​da-​China, 2013.

Romanticism and heteronymic theory  97 -​-​-​. História da Literatura Inglesa. Edição e introdução de Nuno Ribeiro e Cláudia Souza. Apenas Livros, 2021. -​-​-​. Writings on Art and Poetical Theory. Edited, with notes and an introduction by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza. Contra Mundum Press, 2022. Ribeiro, Nuno. “Poéticas do Inacabado—​Pessoa, Wittgenstein e o Livro por Vir.” Literatura, Vazio e Danação, edited by Osmar Pereira Oliva, Editora Unimontes, 2013, pp. 223–​41. -​-​-​. “Wittgenstein and Pessoa: The Archive as ‘Open Work’ in Eco’s Perspective.” Philological Concerns: Textual Criticism throughout the Centuries, edited by Pamela Arancibia, J. L. Bertolio, Joanne Granata, Giovanna Licata, Erika Papagni, and Matteo Ugolini, Franco Cesati Editore, 2016, pp. 207–​21. Santos, Irene Ramalho. Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-​American and the Paradoxes of Authorship. UP of Florida, 2003. Saraiva, Arnaldo. Fernando Pessoa Poeta—​ Tradutor de Poetas. Lello Editores, 1996. Sousa, Alcinda Pinheiro de, Cláudia Franco Souza, and João Carlos Callixto. “Portuguese Readings of William Blake: Fernando Pessoa, a National Poet, and Três Tristes Tigres, a Pop-​Rock Band.” Blake—​An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3, Winter, 2021, pp. 63–​78. Souza, Cláudia Franco, editor. Fernando Pessoa e os Romantismos: Inglês, Francês, Português e Alemão. Apenas Livros, 2019.

7 Jennifer Egan and digital fiction after postmodernism Mairi Power

Within her fiction, Jennifer Egan engages and experiments with the technologies available to contemporary authors. By inserting digital materials into her work, Egan begins to distort the traditional body of the book and introduces various materialities and reading styles. Egan includes technologies within the worlds of her texts and also as the structure or vehicle for producing fiction, as is the case with her Twitter fiction “Black Box” (2012), and her representation of PowerPoint slides within A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010).1 Egan’s experimentation engages with the history of textual innovation well established within the literary canon. In particular, Egan demonstrates an advancement of some postmodern interests through her querying of literary boundaries and engagement with technology. Egan’s relationship with postmodernism is not a new subject of study—​ critics have often reflected upon her literary heritage and tied notions within her texts to the postmodernists. More than any other author, Egan is often linked to Don DeLillo, with many critics noting her similar interest in consumer culture and American aesthetics, alongside the growing influence of technology.2 Egan does not merely repeat these interests but extends such concepts to new levels and in new ways. While many critics have noted the important role of technology within the content of Egan’s fiction—​such as evoking nostalgia for the past and indicating the onset of a digital culture—​little attention has been given to the impact of technology upon form and textual materiality within Egan’s work. This chapter addresses Egan’s experiments with digital materiality in combination with a reflection upon her engagement with literary heritage and the legacy of postmodernism through a case study of the two most explicit interactions between technology and fiction within Egan’s work: ­chapter 12 of Goon Squad and the Twitter fiction “Black Box.”

DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-7

Jennifer Egan and digital fiction after postmodernism  99 A visit from the Goon Squad Egan’s Goon Squad is a formally innovative novel that switches narrative perspective and chronological setting between each chapter. “To understand the narrative, readers must reassemble the diverse events which make up the novel” (Humann 86). Chapter 12, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” adds a further layer to this innovation by taking the form of a PowerPoint presentation, with each page containing the image of one slide. The chapter creates a visual surprise, interrupting the previously smooth process of reading. In order to read the chapter, the reader must rotate the book ninety degrees to view the landscape slides properly, and turn the pages upward instead of sideways to progress through the chapter. This clearly signals an experiment which poses questions about the reader’s relationship to the physical text. Thus, Egan not only disconnects plot but also reading style, unsettling the process of narrative engagement with this unexpected visual interruption. These necessary adjustments emphasize the materiality of the book, forcing the reader literally and interpretively to adjust their grasp of the text. This emphasis on materiality contrasts with the digital aspects of the images, as the media-​specific environment required for electronic fiction is absent.3 The incorporation of PowerPoint is itself an experiment because this chapter merely represents the technology on the printed page. Whereas the reader has to manually turn the page to move from one slide to the next, on a computer screen these manual practices would be more intuitive and automatic. Egan deploys technology in two distinct ways. Firstly, she adds materiality into the represented technology, creating a representation of electronic material within the printed text. But secondly, this creates a paradox wherein the digital is incorporated through analogue techniques, and the experience of reading this digital image is overwhelmingly physical—​self-​consciously so in the necessary interactions between the material bodies of text and reader. Egan’s use of PowerPoint does not reflect the typical use of this technology; she even admits in an interview that she had never used PowerPoint before creating this chapter (Patrick). Despite her lack of experience, however, Egan’s use of the technology in her novel was so well received that critics claim her “ ‘PowerPoint’ chapter has become an instant reference to what can be done with digital print” (Reina 81), representing a creative adaptation of technology within narrative fiction. Indeed, Egan’s lack of experience with PowerPoint only serves her creative process, enabling her to come to this new technology with no preconceptions about what it should look like. This is much like how a child might approach a technology not made for them—​using tools meant to convey budgets and marketing strategies for personal, narrative ends. This is exactly what occurs in the text: this technology is moulded in the hands of a child who

100  Mairi Power uses it to reflect the world as she sees it. The chapter is written as a kind of diary entry from twelve-​year-​old Alison Blake, documenting her family life and the interests of her brother, Lincoln. The technology is thus uniquely tied to its author, emphasizing the way that technology in this novel marks generational difference. Bradley Reina makes the astute observation that this PowerPoint chapter comes as “the novel’s present moves past the 2010 publication date” (81). It is interesting that the date in Alison’s opening slide is “202-​.” It does not include the specific year. This generalization of the 2020s emphasizes the significance of crossing this decade boundary, of moving into an unknown new decade that will be undoubtedly marked by technology and by how the upcoming generation comes to approach and utilize these technologies. This technological generational gap is enforced in the writing of the novel, moving between text and image, thus requiring the reader to adjust expectations and reading styles. While this PowerPoint technology is used for only this one chapter, the text does not entirely revert to normal once the chapter ends, as the final chapter, “Pure Language,” comes with another new style of reading: “T-​ing,” an abbreviated form of texting. The reader is then unsettled by moving first from “normal” text reading to PowerPoint slides, images and diagrams in ­chapter 12, and then back to print—​but not the same kind of print. The novel ends with these two examples of technologized communication, never returning to a place where these new styles are not present. This emphasizes the lasting and increasing presence of technology as the novel continues to pass the decade boundary of “202-​.” In ­chapter 12, Alison notes how her brother, Lincoln, uses technology to look at old songs in a new way, highlighting silences and their contributions to the track. This mirrors how the chapter itself uses technology to look at another old practice: writing and reading. Melissa Strong views this novel as an attempt to “stop time within itself” (477), not only referring to Lincoln’s hobby of tracking silence in music, but also to the novel’s many efforts to pause and scrutinize specific moments in time, each chapter analysing the cultural and technological conditions surrounding each character. There is a shared interest here in renewing existing creative methods through technology, as both Lincoln’s project and the format of this chapter dissect their chosen modes of music and the novel through disruption, emphasizing the silences which break up, and yet enhance, meaning and narrative through this fragmentation. Lincoln’s place in this chapter holds further significance in the communication barrier between him and his family, particularly his father, Drew. Drew finds it difficult to communicate well with his son, who is “mildly autistic” (Egan Goon Squad 241): in Alison’s documentation we see Drew express frustration and anger at not being able to understand him. The

Jennifer Egan and digital fiction after postmodernism  101 PowerPoint style allows the narrative to incorporate both words and shapes into this chapter, representing the clashing communication styles of Lincoln and Drew, but enabling them to coexist and indeed produce a point of productive understanding as the two styles meet. Kathleen Reilly observes the significance of the relationship between shape reading and meaning within this unique chapter: While GRRP’s characters, storyline, and themes raise issues related to disability and enablement, so too does the story’s unconventional format. Comprised entirely of PowerPoint slides, GRRP positions readers to experience this text through an unfamiliar mode, requiring the use of different tools to make meaning. (79) Reilly notes that strong alphabetic readers tend to focus upon words, ignoring the significance of shapes and pattern (80). Thus, such readers have to work harder and learn a new kind of reading style in order to fully appreciate and follow the chapter. In doing so, “we share a part of Drew’s journey, practicing and gaining awareness of different ways to understand and interface with our surroundings” (Reilly 80). For instance, the slide “Dad’s Questions/​Lincoln’s Answers” (Goon Squad 282) presents a conversation between father and son in which both characters’ attitudes towards the other are visually evident. The image of the scale or see-​saw created using the triangle shape and the angled line replicates the weight of Drew’s questions and expectations, and his perception that Lincoln’s answers are not appropriately weighted in response. This is furthered by the darker colours used for Drew’s circles—​Drew’s questions are dark, menacing and overwhelming, reflecting Lincoln’s experience of this interaction as he does his best to reply to his father’s questions. The slide requires rereading and a back-​and-​forth reading style (much like the up-​and-​down movement of a see-​saw), as the reader flits between the light and dark bubbles to connect each answer to one of Drew’s questions. Thus, the image depicts both sides and experiences of the conversation—​as mediated through the eyes of a third party. This reading style offers a pause in the physical act of reading, which itself is an act of “stop[ping] time within time” (Strong 477) as the rereading requires a break from the continual turning of the book page or progress downwards through the text on the page, instead locking in on a horizontal scanning movement. Drew asks Lincoln about everything except the things he loves to talk about—​music and his project of mapping pauses within songs. On the far right there is a speech bubble from Lincoln, asking his dad if he can play some music. This question is not answered on this slide, leaving the conversation unbalanced and unfinished. Indeed, the shape is literally

102  Mairi Power unbalanced, tipping towards the left and thus implying a heavier weight on this side. Interestingly, the side with the most text is Lincoln’s: six answers and one question, contrasting with Drew’s six questions and zero answers. Yet Lincoln’s side is depicted as lighter, not even meeting the weight of his father’s questions. This visual depiction reveals how unimportant these questions are to Lincoln, in contrast with the weight that Drew places upon them as he attempts to enforce his expectations and priorities upon his son. On the next page Drew does respond, saying, “ ‘Sure, Linc’, (…) ‘Let’s hear some music‘,” on a slide titled “Signs that Dad isn’t Happy” (Egan Goon Squad 283). The next few slides detail Drew attempting to engage with his son’s interests but becoming frustrated and soon upsetting Lincoln. It turns, however, into a moment of care and connection in the slide “Then Dad Gathers Lincoln into His Arms” (Goon Squad 291), where the two embrace and Drew apologizes to his son. This moment of resolution comes after a mainly blank slide titled “A Pause While We Stand on the Deck” (Goon Squad 290), which is absent of any questions or answers, presenting only empty space and silence. This resolution slide literally points towards this empty space and silence as the solution, as three arrows push the eye into the blank centre of the page. In this reading experience, the page seems not to want to be read, instead wanting the eye to rest on the blank space. The spatial arrangement of the text within these large arrows is used, paradoxically, to push the eye away from the textual narrative and resist reading. Thus, the text replicates Lincoln’s aversion to his father’s demanding questioning, and emphasizes the silence and time to pause he desired. Father and son resolve their anger through the act of embrace, “Then Dad Gathers Lincoln into His Arms,” illustrated in this page which emphasizes materiality (physical touch) over textuality (the Q&A of the previous scene). James P. Zappen describes this chapter as an example of affective identification, showing “how an everyday new-​ media technology such as PowerPoint slides can enable a father to identify affectively and thereby improve his relationship with his son” (304). Pushing this concept further, I argue that the identification occurs not only between father and son but also between reader and text, as the process of becoming accustomed to shape reading produces an increased understanding. For example, instead of flipping past the slide that is just a black rectangle (Goon Squad 310) because it contains no text, the reader instead sits for a moment with the darkness and wordlessness of the slide and realizes that this visual representation conveys the moment in a distinctly different manner than if Egan had simply written out the sentence “it was dark and they were silent.” The reader is able to replicate the characters’ experiences in a manner: seeing a dark page and no words is a readerly re-​enactment of

Jennifer Egan and digital fiction after postmodernism  103 a silent moment on a dark night. Through this use of shapes and images, Egan finds a way to represent silence visually within a novel while still creating meaning and inserting significant non-​verbal references. Using digital structures to emphasize analogue features, she refocuses the reader’s attention through the spatial arrangement of the page, giving equal or higher value to shape and space over text. Egan’s disruption of the traditional body of the book through her narrative fragmentation and incorporation of technology enhances the narrative experience and imbues her novel with increased meaning and emotional significance. Her creative use of a contemporary technology not only suits the cultural context of the novel, but is used to alter the reader’s engagement with the text in order to better convey conflict and character development. Egan’s PowerPoint chapter, therefore, supports Jessica Pressman’s assertion that “literature retains a central role in our emergent technoculture.” Its adaption of a technology for literary purposes—​its intersection of digital and analogue textualities—​is a material response to the new digital environment. “Black Box” In “Black Box,” Egan again disrupts the traditional book body for specific and intentional narrative effect. Twitter fiction “Black Box” was released over the course of ten days, from 24 May to 2 June 2012. The text was published in short bursts via The New Yorker’s Twitter account, @NYerFiction, with one tweet released every minute for a one-​hour period each day. This is how the text was introduced to the world, in fragmented pieces that spread across accounts and readers through likes and retweets.4 The fragmentation of the text is central to its relationship with the reader and to the creation of narrative tension. Separating the text out into hundreds of individual tweets and spreading out its dissemination over multiple days instead of posting it all at once amplifies the digital nature of the text because the reader is constantly confronted by the digital casing of each new segment. The text does not come together as one continuous stretch of narrative; rather, it is always divided by the digital wrappings around each fragment. Because of this, the reader is also constantly interrupted, never able to settle into a continuous reading style on the Twitter platform because they have to sift out the advertisements, date marks and Twitter handles that sit around and between each tweet. As well as a fragment of story, when viewing the first tweet of “Black Box” on Twitter, the reader also encounters the digital information and the options present to them: to Retweet, Quote Tweet, and Like. They are also able to see the engagement of other readers/​Twitter users, viewing reactions to the text before it has been fully published. These reader responses are translated into the language of the host media, summarized in three

104  Mairi Power numeric values; 36, 2, 38; totalling 76 “interactions” visible to the reader (@NYerFiction). Here Egan does not just insert technology as one of many narratives, as with “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” but situates the entire text in a digital environment. The text latches on to the structure and visuality of the technology, as it carries these digital wrappings and adopts the style of its platform. These digital borders and casings also create gaps between and within the tweets, suspending the fragment of fiction within layers of technical information; in the first tweet the fragment actually takes up less than half of the space of the whole tweet. These gaps between and around the fragments of fiction not only bring reminders of digitality into every line of the text, but also create brief pauses filled by the noise of the technology. These pauses might be informed by the tweets or advertisements that appear in between the fragments of the Twitter fiction, or this might be a moment of emptiness in waiting for the next tweet to be published. In either case, this shows the fiction interacting with the reader and the platform in a truly distinct manner, as the experience is interrupted by the contributions of each user’s Twitter feed. The technological noise is thus embedded within the reading experience, indicating an interesting advancement of some dimensions of postmodernist fiction, where technology is often depicted as a constant presence infiltrating all aspects of life.5 Notably, DeLillo’s White Noise (1984) highlights this concept in title and content, presenting television and radio noise as constant presences within the characters’ lives, underlining significant events and mundane domestic moments alike.6 Egan’s text furthers this idea of technological noise underlying both the reading experience and daily life, as it literally becomes the background of the text, in a social media platform designed for individuals to share snippets of their own lives. The text adds to this digital noise, as well as being surrounded and interrupted by it. While it is impossible now to experience the live unfolding of the text, we can see the structure, pace and visual style of the tweets through websites such as Paste Magazine, which displays individual images of each tweet in “Black Box.” These images are also date-​stamped, which reveals where the publication ended on one day, and the readers were then left to wait until the account began tweeting the text again the next day. These twenty-​ three-​hour gaps add another layer of emptiness within the text: publishing “With each number, imagine yourself rising out of your body and moving one step farther away from it” on 24 May, and “By eight, you should be hovering just outside your skin” on 25 May (Egan “Black Box” Section 8, lines 4–​5, 6). This was the waiting period between day one and two of the text’s publication—​pausing in the middle of the narrator’s explanation of the Dissociation Technique, which she uses to endure the sexual assault she experiences in her role as a spy. Breaking at this point leaves

Jennifer Egan and digital fiction after postmodernism  105 the text in a state of uncertainty about the agent’s safety for this period and pauses oddly in the middle of a description of the dissociation process, rather than ending at the conclusion to a thought. It is interesting to consider how these day-​to-​day gaps work in comparison to the timeline shifts between chapters in Goon Squad. “Black Box” reliably continues from the point at which the previous day ended, whereas Goon Squad has no set pattern to its order. Thus, while both gaps fragment the narrative, they produce distinct effects. In Goon Squad, the reader has to chart the movement of characters across timelines and decipher implications which are not always narratively addressed. In “Black Box” the gaps between instalments are not truly empty but are filled by the ever-​changing digital noise of the social media platform, which amplifies the distance between segments of the text. Similarly, there is no overt narrative acknowledgement or explanation of these gaps. Roland Barthes provides an account of readers who read with their own rhythm, skipping over some sections and pausing on others, “imposing abrasions” upon the surface of the text (11–​12). These narrative gaps and discontinuities emphasize the “site of a loss, the seam, the cut,” self-​ consciously breaking the narrative to increase desire (Barthes 7). The gaps within “Black Box” similarly call attention to the fragmentation of the text and emphasize the state of uncertainty and desire that the reader is left in. Yet here it is the technology which imposes abrasions upon the text, emphasizing the digital seams which stitch together technology and fiction. This stop-​start method of publication thus increases narrative tension by exaggerating the barriers to knowledge and the reader’s lack of control over how to read the text. These pauses and gaps engage with the reader’s own thoughts and with the interruptions of digital noise, all contributing to the reading experience. Similarly, the narrative is enhanced by this fragmentation, building tension in a slow unfolding of the action within the text—​what Barthes calls the “gradual unveiling” (10). The layout of the text in Paste Magazine, as opposed to the New Yorker article, enables us to better notice these choices and periods of prolonged waiting for a conclusion. Reading the text in this cut-​and-​paste fashion might actually be truer to the original Twitter publication style, as the easier option of reading the text on The New Yorker’s website only replicates the pattern in which the text is divided, it does not carry the same visual markers as the tweets. The Paste Magazine version, however, exactly shows the image of the individual tweets and also inserts the magazine’s own advertisements in between each one. While a frustrating reading experience, made two to three times longer because of the high advertisement-​to-​image ratio, this is probably more akin to the experience of reading it on your Twitter home feed, with regular interruptions from other sources. Paste Magazine’s

106  Mairi Power record of “Black Box” also highlights the scheduled nature of the text in detailing its date marks, revealing the way in which it is not completely live, but programmed to send information at planned moments each day. While the daily burst is fragmented enough to feel random and certainly allows enough time to pass that the text newly interrupts the Twitter feed each day, it is important to note that there is nothing truly spontaneous about the text. Egan here plays with technology to create an atmosphere of interaction and spontaneity, which in reality is a structured and inflexible process with no room for adaptation. This is amplified by the material nature of the text’s planning: it was planned out on paper before being programmed into a scheduling site and then sent out in its short bursts on Twitter. The text’s live effect is countered by its predetermined nature, demonstrating a usage of the social media platform to create an impression of live dissemination through this fragmentation and scheduling. Further complication of the text’s “liveness” comes from the fact that most readers will not read the tweets live but will read the website version instead. Even rereading the Twitter page after the time of publication gives the impression of spontaneous thoughts, yet it is very unlikely that a reader now (or even past a few weeks of the original publication) will read the text on Twitter. The New Yorker website version does not include any time​ or date stamps on the text, thus removing this aspect of fragmentation through publication time gaps. This in a way ensures that the text is not “dated” and can seem continually live in a stream-​of-​consciousness style uploading. Yet it removes the spontaneous nature of the live tweets and the distancing between fragments that the reader experienced at the time of publication, and which is evident in the timestamps present on Twitter and the Paste Magazine version. The fragmented Twitter fiction style also distorts the representation of the text as it enables hundreds of different access points to the story, linked through each individual tweet, each of which could give an entirely different first impression of the text. If a reader merely stumbled upon the text by seeing one solitary tweet on their Twitter feed, that 140-​character segment alone would be their first impression of the fiction and the basis upon which they would decide whether or not to read more. While some phrases are extremely reflective and philosophical, such as “Kindness feels good, even when it’s based on a false notion of your identity and purpose,” others throw the reader into an action sequence, such as “It is hard to safely navigate a clifftop promontory at high speed while blind” (Egan “Black Box” Sections 2, lines 5–​6, and 27, lines 13–​14). These give two entirely different first impressions of the text and are a product of the text having lost its material unity, one in which all excess content is removed and only the text remains. There is a particular impact upon the first encounter between the reader and the text because the cover is removed,

Jennifer Egan and digital fiction after postmodernism  107 providing direct access to the text with no introductory material guiding expectations. While we all know not to rely too heavily on cover art to judge a book, the absence of such paratexts does have an impact. The lack of the usual blurb at the back of the book further removes insight into its plot and genre, things that are usually hinted at in cover art. Stumbling upon one section of “Black Box” on your social media feed is in some ways akin to finding a loose page from a book lying on the street, which might prompt a search for the complete book to situate the page in the correct context. For the most part, however, this idea of finding a loose page is theoretical, not a realistic or common scenario.7 Yet Twitter fiction makes this not only probable but real, enabling not just single pages but also each 140-​word fragment, to appear in isolation from the rest of the text. While the fragment may alert the reader to the Twitter fiction, it is not possible to enter the text from each of these points because the text was not tweeted as a “thread” (in which all tweets would be grouped together in the correct order) and thus does not provide links to the prior and subsequent passages. Instead, the source of the text must be found and read in a linear fashion. The Twitter fiction is thus as rigid in its linearity as a bound print narrative, although it does offer multiple “first encounters” because the first line read may be any of the 606 tweets making up the story. The impact of digitization upon the materiality of the textual body is quite evident here: “Black Box” sheds the paper skin of the novel and many of the expectations that accompany it. Yet, “Black Box” is not less structured, less engaging or less literary than a print novel. In “Black Box,” reading processes are rethought and constantly questioned, as there are fewer set expectations of the text—​given the multiple access points, the loss of paratexts and the informing digital noise that differs between each reader’s engagement with the text and platform. Literary heritage My observations lead me to a wider conversation about how this kind of digital fiction changes the definition and dissemination of the American short story, famously referred to by Frank O’Connor as a “national art form” (Boddy 2). The decision to publish “Black Box” through the New Yorker’s Twitter account (@NYerFiction), rather than Egan’s personal account (@EganGoonSquad), creates an added significance because this text is being endorsed by this institution. “Black Box” is thereby associated with The New Yorker’s rich publishing history.8 As well as this literary association, the visual style of “Black Box” as Twitter fiction in many ways continues and develops the interest of American short story authors in experimenting with the form of fiction, incorporating the visuality of the text in its form.

108  Mairi Power In particular, the experiments of postmodern writers such as William Burroughs’ “cut-​up” technique can be compared to Twitter fiction’s dispersal of fragments into an unpredictable and unconventional landscape, though Burroughs’ approach is certainly more radical than most Twitter fictions. Burroughs’ fragmentation is discernible in later postmodernist fiction, such as David Markson’s Reader’s Block (1996), which asks, “What is a novel in any case,” “Nonlinear? Discontinuous? Collage-​like? An assemblage?” (13, 14).9 Bronwen Thomas notes that Twitter is able to replicate such experimentation by “teasing readers with fragments that hold out the promise of some kind of meaningful connection, but also challenging the very idea that meaning can be predicted or consciously controlled” (358). Thomas’ observation relies on the contributions of fragmentation to an intentional narrative effect, which I have established within “Black Box.” While in the work of Burroughs and other postmodernists this withholding and controlling of meaning teases the reader or creates a collage effect, in Egan’s work it increases narrative significance, showing a twisting of technique for a slightly different outcome. Comparing Egan’s work to these earlier examples demonstrates her continuity with ongoing American literary experimentation, with elements of historic postmodernism, while also throwing into relief her distinctive practice of fragmentation through the deployment of contemporary technologies. A particularly revealing point of comparison is Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Explanation,” published in May 1968, also in The New Yorker, which addresses many parallel themes to “Black Box.” Barthelme, “the American creator of a hilarious oeuvre of postmodernist shorts” (“Ultra Short Fiction—​Flash Mob”), is often mentioned in analysis of Egan’s literary heritage and influence, alongside names such as Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen.10 It is thus not unreasonable to think that Barthelme’s work—​including this specific short story—​may have been a reference point for “Black Box.” Even without conscious engagement with this text, Barthelme’s widespread influence on American fiction, and especially the short story, makes him an important reference point for the contemporary short story and its electronic mutations.11 Written in an interview style made up of short statements labelled Q or A, the text is broken up by black dots which group the text into uneven sections. The text is further interrupted by solid black squares—​literal black boxes—​where a picture or advertisement might be expected in a normal newspaper or magazine interview. These squares are referred to in the text, often by the command “look at it,” and with statements that imply the pair are indeed looking at an object, but it is only represented in the text as this black box. For instance:

Jennifer Egan and digital fiction after postmodernism  109 A: I don’t know what it is. What does it do? Q: Well, look at it.

A: It offers no clues. Q: It has a certain … reticence. A: I don’t know what it does.

(Barthelme 44)

“The mysterious monolithic box is complemented by the abstraction and ambiguity of the exchange between Q. and A.. Q. seems to be trying to lead A. into an appreciation of ‘the machine’ as he refers to the black thing hovering over them on the page” (Porush 200). This machine is the focus of the text, but at the same time it is not because we never discover what the machine actually is. Instead, the idea of the machine leads to discussions about the impact of technology upon all aspects of life; philosophical musings about reality and purity; and descriptions of an attractive woman undressing. The machine itself is completely absent from Barthelme’s story, but in “Black Box” machines are not simply present within the fiction, but they are also the mechanism for delivery, the site of reading, the skeleton to which the flesh of the text is attached. The physical black boxes in “The Explanation” interrupt and separate the text in an intriguingly similar manner to the digital noise in “Black Box” where the wrappings around each tweet and the advertisements or tweets from other users insert visual gaps between the fragments of fiction. Yet the difference again lies in the transparency of the interruptions: Barthelme’s are obtuse interruptions literally obscuring the reader’s view and hiding any knowledge of the machine. “Black Box,” however, is transparently inserted into Twitter, and the details of the technology are explicitly displayed. In fact, the reader must have a prior knowledge of the technology to access and read the text. Technology moves from an obstacle between reader and text (Barthelme) and becomes a method of reading itself (Egan). Fiction and technology continue to play against each other: both authors use representations or actual examples of machines to shape their text, but

110  Mairi Power ambiguous theorizing in Bartheleme transforms into active engagement in Egan’s black boxes. We can also think back to A Visit from the Goon Squad, where Egan visually included solid black squares in her PowerPoint chapter, which I argued enable a non-​verbal expression of silence. There, black boxes embrace an alternative perspective and incorporate neurodivergent communication strategies into fiction through technology, thus avoiding moments of confusion. Egan’s work continues this postmodern interest in playing with visuality through technological fragmentation, surprising the reader through her rearrangement of materiality and incorporation of technological images into the body of her text. Yet, instead of representing an unknown, Egan makes these black boxes convey meaning rather than create confusion. In a reversal of Barthelme’s black boxes which represent readerly frustration and a distrust in the intersection between fiction and technology, Egan’s text promotes a connection between reader and fiction through the incorporation of technology. These black squares and slides are also reminiscent of other novels which include black or blank pages, such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), which uses a black page to represent death and mourning, while dually acting as a “visual joke” (Mullan). The connection to Sterne is particularly interesting because the many visual and typographic oddities within his text are used “to foreground the artificiality of Sterne’s chosen medium” (McDayter). Egan’s PowerPoint chapter also foregrounds artificiality by presenting a translation of digital media into an analogue format, highlighting the chasm between the represented image and its material form. Further, this connection again recalls Barthes’ idea of seams and abrasions, where the digital divisions and wrappings foreground the electronic nature of Egan’s chosen medium by interrupting fictional fragments with digital noise. Sterne, Barthelme and Egan all use the same technique of printed black boxes, yet in separate centuries with different technological contexts. The examples from Barthelme and Egan thus nod to this earlier innovation from Sterne, drawing upon an extensive lineage of typographical innovation. This connection points to the legacy of fictional experimentation with the materiality of the novel, reinforcing the idea that novels “respond to their contemporary, digital moment” (Pressman) through material experimentation and adaptation. Egan’s experimentations in Goon Squad and “Black Box” focus upon the relationship between fiction and machine in identifiably new ways from her postmodern literary predecessors. “Black Box,” her own New Yorker short story published forty-​four years after Barthelme’s, reveals an intersection of technology and fiction that relies upon the specific visual properties of machines, properties which in Barthelme’s text are seen as convoluted and ultimately useless. Egan’s work utilizes machines to draw

Jennifer Egan and digital fiction after postmodernism  111 new boundaries, incorporate new reading styles, and situate the American short story in this new digital landscape. This study has also demonstrated that Egan’s texts engage with existing literary interests and build upon the work of her predecessors through engaging with new technologies, rather than diminishing literary quality and prestige. Thus, Egan’s work revitalizes the act of readership and textual materiality through her digital interruptions of the novel and the short story, using these not to destroy but to augment the body of the text, and to provide new spaces and methods for fiction to thrive in a digital world. Notes 1 Hereafter referred to as Goon Squad. 2 For instance: Pankaj Mishra considers Moose in Look at Me (2001) as “Following in the American line of solitary prophets—​ both real, like the Unabomber, and those invented by DeLillo.” David Cowart focuses on temporality and the manner in which Egan, like DeLillo, “perceives temporality and sentience as inseparable from the language games in which they figure” (243). Another example is Kasia Boddy, who traces the influence of Don DeLillo on contemporary fiction, emphasizing his importance for women writers, including Egan. 3 According to David Ciccoricco, “Digital fiction is fiction written for and read on a computer screen” ’, which “would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium” (256). N. Katherine Hayles talks instead about “electronic literature,” which she says is “generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized, [and] is by contrast ‘digital born’, a first-​generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer” (3). 4 The text is also available on The New Yorker’s website, which readers can also easily download as a PDF file. 5 This is depicted to the extreme by theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, who speak of a technological apocalypse which indicates the end of meaning, as technology encapsulates all and nothing “new” can be created, only endless simulacra. David Porush notes that technology in postmodernist fiction occupies a paradoxical position between fascination and revulsion (93), identifying a common theme amongst major works to be “men who behave like, [and] think like” machines (94). 6 Susana S. Martins provides a thorough analysis of this concept in her article “White Noise and Everyday Technologies.” 7 Some experimental fiction has played with this idea of unbound fiction, such as B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969), which was presented as loose pages in a box designed to be read in any order (though with a specified first and last chapter). 8 Fiona Green discusses the status of The New Yorker in producing notable American short stories in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical.

112  Mairi Power 9 Markson is often characterized as a “highly experimental, ‘difficult’ postmodern writer ‘who write[s]‌writing’ instead of stories” (one critic’s assessment of Reader’s Block as ‘not a novel’ inspired the title of This Is Not a Novel (2001)), though Laura Sims argues that he “employs many familiar elements of the novel (…) in radically altered form” (59, 63). The quoted description/​questioning of a novel from Reader’s Block is repeated in This Is Not a Novel (2001), Vanishing Point (2004), and The Last Novel (2007), all of which continue this interest in rebuilding and defamiliarizing the novel. 10 Charles Finch speaks of the “youthful allegiance to the postmodern influence of DeLillo and Barthelme, among them Egan, Jonathan Franzen, Colson Whitehead and George Saunders,” though notes that the later work of these contemporary authors (Egan’s Manhattan Beach) indicates a movement away from this postmodern influence. 11 Larry McCaffery speaks of Barthelme’s early impact: “especially during the late 60’s and early 70’s Barthelme’s work probably had more impact on American innovative fiction than that of any other writer” (990), and William Gass emphasizes Barthelme’s continuing influence, stating that he “has permanently enlarged our perception of the possibilities open to short fiction” (46).

Works cited @NYerFiction. “People rarely look the way you expect them to, even when you’ve seen pictures.” Twitter 25 May 2012. https://​twit​ter.com/​nyer​fict​ion/​sta​tus/​205​ 8128​9158​3131​648. Barthelme, Donald. “The Explanation.” The New Yorker, 4 May 1968, pp. 44–​6. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. 1973. Hill and Wang, 1975. Boddy, Kasia. “Making It Long: Men, Women, and the Great American Novel Now.” Textual Practice vol. 33, no. 22, 2018, pp. 318–​37. Ciccoricco, David. “Focalization and Digital Fiction.” Narrative vol. 20, no. 22, 2012, pp. 255–​77. Cowart, David. “Thirteen Ways of Looking: Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad.” Critique vol. 56, no. 3, 2015, pp. 241–​54. Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad. Random House, 2010. -​-​-​. “Black Box.” The New Yorker, 4 June 2012. Finch, Charles. “Egan Dives into Historical Fiction with Sparkling ‘Manhattan Beach’.” USA Today, 2 October 2017. Gass, William. “Donald Barthelme.” Esquire, August 1986, p. 46. Green, Fiona. Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical. Edinburgh UP, 2015. Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature. U of Notre Dame P, 2008. Humann, Heather Duerre. “Nachträglichkeit and ‘Narrative Time’ in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad.” Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Summer, 2017, pp. 86–​100. Markson, David. Reader’s Block. Dalkey Archive Press, 1996.

Jennifer Egan and digital fiction after postmodernism  113 Martins, Susana S. “White Noise and Everyday Technologies.” American Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, 2005, pp. 87–​113. McCaffery, Larry. The Metafictional Muse. U of Pittsburgh P, 1982. McDayter, Mark. “ ‘Alas, Poor YORICK!’: The ‘Black Page’ in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.” Restoration & 18th-​Century Studies in English at Western. Western University, 27 August 2002. Mishra, Pankaj. “Modernity’s Undoing.” London Review of Books, vol. 33, no. 7, 2011, pp. 27–​31. Mullan, John. “The ‘Stuff’ of Tristram Shandy.” British Library, 22 June 2018. Orf, Darren. “Read ‘Black Box’ by Jennifer Egan—​ Tweet by Tweet.” Paste Magazine, 6 June 2012. www.pastem​agaz​ine.com/​books/​black-​box-​by-​jenni​ fer-​egan-​tweet-​by-​tweet/​ Patrick, Bethanne. “A Visit from the PowerPoint Squad.” Shelf Awareness, 11 May 2001. www.shelf-​awaren​ess.com/​issue.html?issue=​1461#m12​223. Porush, David. “Technology and Postmodernism: Cybernetic Fiction.” SubStance, vol. 9, no. 2, 1980, pp. 92–​100. Pressman, Jessica. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-​ First-​ Century Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 47, 2009, p. 4. http://​hdl.han​dle. net/​2027/​spo.act2​080.0048.402. Reilly, Kathleen A. “Reading the Silence in Jennifer Egan’s ‘Great Rock and Roll Pauses‘.” English Journal, vol. 106, no. 6, 2017, pp. 79–​82. Reina, Bradley. “Digital Print in the Material World: Paratext in Service of Narrative.” Word & Image, vol. 35, no. 1, 2019, pp. 76–​88. Sims, Laura. “David Markson and the Problem of the Novel.” New England Review, vol. 29, no. 3, 2008, pp. 58–​70. Thomas, Bronwen. “Tales from the Timeline: Experiments with Narrative on Twitter.” Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, 2016, pp. 353–​71. “Ultra Short Fiction—​Flash Mob.” Economist, 4 April 2015. Zappen, James P. “Affective Identification in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 27, no. 4, 2016, pp. 294–​310.

8  Non Angli, sed angeli The Christianization of the Anglo-​ Saxons and the Dawn of Englishness Angélica Varandas

Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, written in 731, is one of the oldest and most important sources for the history of the Anglo-​ Saxons and the beginnings of what is now the territory of England.1 It is in fact considered the first national history of England and among the most important of its sources is Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–​339/​40), who founded the tradition of ecclesiastical history with Historia Ecclesiastica. This work deeply influenced Bede’s own objectives of writing a chronological ecclesiastical account of English history, starting with the time of Julius Caesar and describing events until the mid-​eighth century. Bede devotes many pages to the arrival of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes in England, invited by the British leader Vortigern, and to the conflicts between the Christian British and the pagan Germanic tribes in the fifth century. By that time, Pelagianism threatened Christian dogma, and Germanus of Auxerre was sent to Britain to strengthen the faith of the British. Bede claims that, after Germanus’ death, the new generations forgot about their duties to God and never tried to preach their faith to the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, who thus became one of the few peoples in Europe who stood outside the margins of European Christianity. At the end of the sixth century, Gregory the Great, “prompted by divine inspiration, sent a servant of God named Augustine and several more God-​ fearing monks with him to preach the word of God to the English race” (37).2 In 597, Augustine arrived at the Isle of Thanet, in Kent, governed by King Æthelberht, who was married to Bertha, a Christian princess, daughter of the Merovingian king of Paris Cheribert I.3 Æthelberht allowed Augustine and his forty missionaries to wander freely and preach in his main city: Canterbury. He accepted the new faith, being the first Anglo-​Saxon king to be baptized and he ordered the building of churches. The conversion had begun, something we will return to.4 For now, we would like to focus on the story told both by Bede and by a slightly earlier work, written in the religious community of Whitby in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-8

Non Angli, sed angeli  115 713, the anonymous Life of Gregory the Great, about Gregory’s “divine inspiration” to convert the Germanic tribes that had settled in England.5 The story differs in some minor details in both texts, so let us follow Bede’s account: while in a marketplace in Rome, Gregory saw some young slaves with fair hair and beautiful complexions being sold and he felt curious about their origins. The sellers said they had come from Britain and they were heathens so that Gregory sighed and stated: “Alas that the author of darkness should have men so bright of face in his grip, and that minds devoid of inward grace should bear so graceful an outward form” (70).6 Bede goes on: “Again he asked for the name of the race. He was told that they were called Angli. ‘Good’, he said, ‘they have the face of angels, and such men should be fellow-​heirs of the angels in heaven’ ” (70).7 From these words sprang the famous Gregorian aphorism non angli, sed angeli (“not Angles, but Angels”). After becoming pope, Gregory tried to go to England himself on an evangelization mission, but he never reached his destination for he received a sign from God that he must return to Rome. In 595, he chose Augustine to fulfil that mission, and in 597, the monk arrived in Kent, an area inhabited not by Angles but by Jutes.8 We might suppose that, before his missionaries came to Kent, Gregory did not know whether they were Angles, Saxons or Jutes, so he used the term Angli for all of them. However, after hearing the monk’s news, he certainly could distinguish between them, but he decided to maintain the name, as a letter he wrote to Æthelberht and his wife testifies.9 In this letter, he names them respectively rex Anglorum and regina Anglorum.10 Thus, Bede adopts the name Angli that Gregory used when referring to all the Germanic peoples inhabiting England, something that is not common among his predecessors and contemporaries, since other authors of more or less the same period do not necessarily do so. Constantius in his Vita Germani (fifth century) and Gildas in De Excidio et Conquestuu Britanniae (sixth century), both used as sources by Bede, call the tribes that settled in England Saxones, the same happening with later writers of the seventh century, such as Jonas of Bobbio in Vita Columbani, the anonymous writer of Vita Sancti Cuthberti and Adomnán in his Vita Columbae. Bede, therefore, is promoting the Gregorian mission among the Anglo-​ Saxons, highlighting “the myth that England, or even Northumbria, occupied a special place in Gregory’s consciousness and in the history of his papacy, preordained and miraculously foretold” (Dunn, 43). In this sense, he clearly emphasises the term Anglorum, not only by quoting Gregory’s letters, or by telling the story of the Angles/​Angels pun, but also by giving it prominence in the title of his work: Historia Ecclesiatica gentis Anglorum. As Richter argues: “The term gens Anglorum is clearly Bedan” (112). In

116  Angélica Varandas fact, Bede’s account of Gregory’s desire to convert the pagans in England does not end in the excerpt quoted above. As in the Whitby Life of Saint Gregory, the future pope extends his love for puns, creating two other ones in the same context, although not as well known as the Angles/​Angels pun already mentioned. Determined to know where the slaves come from, “he was told that the men of the kingdom were called Deiri. ‘Deiri’, he replied, ‘De ira! Good! Snatched from the wrath of Christ and called to his mercy’.”11 He then asked what the name of their king was: He was told that it was Ælle, and playing on the name, he said, “Alleluia! The praise of God the Creator must be sung in those parts.” So, he went to the bishop of Rome and of the apostolic see, for he himself had not yet been made pope, and asked him to send some ministers of the word to the race of the Angles in Britain to convert them to Christ. (71)12 It is true that Bede had much admiration for Gregory, but did he have any other intentions apart from glorifying the pope and the conversion of the Angli more than one hundred years after Augustine’s travel to Kent? In fact, we know that, although the Roman missionaries managed to establish Christianity in Kent and in the surrounding areas in the south, thus founding the English church, Christian faith did not spread to the whole territory and paganism continued to be practised among the people. Apart from that, the heptarchy had already gained shape and, in Bede’s time, Kent was no longer the kingdom with the higher prestige it had acquired in the sixth century due to its connections both with the continent, especially with the Merovingians kings in Gaul, and inwards with its relation to East Anglia and Mercia due to strategic marriages.13 By the seventh century, Kent’s power had begun to decline under the pressure of other kingdoms, namely East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria.14 The latter had become a unified kingdom after the merging of the two provinces of Bernicia and Deira. Bede’s Historia Ecclesiatica is dedicated to Ceolwulf, who had become king of Northumbria in 729, and can be understood as a means to unite a whole country under a figure of authority both religiously and politically. Ceolwulf, indeed, abdicated in order to enter the monastery of Lindisfarne. In this sense, the expression gens Anglorum brings together, under the same designation, the several tribes occupying England and their distribution over the country.15 All of them were now envisaged as a single people—​the Angli—​with a common identity, sharing the same language (anglisc), experiencing the same traditions and the same collective memory in a unified country (Anglesland, the land of the Angles). In providing the earliest account of Augustine’s mission in Kent, Bede is creating a narrative

Non Angli, sed angeli  117 built upon biblical history which promotes the unification of the whole country under a Northumbrian king. The book begins with the description of Britain as a paradisiacal island, “rich in crops and trees,” which “has good pasturage for cattles and beasts of burden”; a place “remarkable too for its rivers, which abound in fish,” where are also “found excellent pearls of every colour”; a land full of “salt springs and warm springs” from which “flow rivers” which “supply hot baths”; an island “rich in veins of metal, copper, iron, lead, and silver,” which “has short nights in summer” and “for this reason the summer days are extremely long” (9–​10).16 This locus amoenus is certainly the perfect place to be occupied by a group of tribes, which, although pagan, were elected by God to become Christian, forming a single people, united by the same faith: “God in His goodness did not reject the people whom He foreknew, but He had appointed much worthier heralds of the truth to bring this people to the faith” (36).17 Bede undoubtedly states that the British were Christians upon the arrival of the Anglo-​Saxons. However, they are portrayed as a weak race, prone to sin in a promised land, incapable of defending it from foreign invaders or to spread their own faith.18 As such, they are destined to be replaced by a new race who will be worthy of the Edenic island: the English, depicted as the chosen people since, as an inspired Gregory said, they were not Angli but angeli, thus belonging to the angels’ race—​the Angelcynn. In celebrating the glory of Ceolwulf, Bede is also elevating the Northumbrian Angles to a people who descend from this race of angels and who, according to him, in the eighth century, represented the whole country, racially, politically and religiously. This fact led critics such as Higham to declare that “one could even argue that Bede invented the English nation” (2002, 99). I am well aware that, for most critics, the concepts of nation and identity are modern ones, although there is no consensus as to when they first appeared.19 Liah Greenfeld (1992) argues that England is the birthplace of nationalism.20 She places that birth in the sixteenth century after the creation of the Anglican church by Henry VIII. Hans Kohn (1944) defends that English identity and nationalism are a consequence of the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, while Gellner (1983) asserts that nations are born in the post-​industrial period. Gerald Newman (1997) points out that those ideals could not have emerged before the eighteenth century, and Krishan Kumar (2003, 2015) claims that nations only take conscience of themselves in the nineteenth century.21 Other recent books, such as the acclaimed Britons, by Linda Colley (2006), considered by Kumar “the most important single contribution to the new or renewed concern with Englishness” (2015: 3), or the newly published Englishness: The Political Force Transforming Britain (2021), by Alisa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones, explore these themes only from the eighteenth century onwards.

118  Angélica Varandas However, there are other critics, medievalists above all, who have recently called attention to the fact that those same concepts may be present in medieval texts, such as Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Schichtman who declare that “it is overwhelmingly tempting to read the modern nation back into the Middle Ages (especially given the nineteenth century’s use of the Middle Ages to create nationalism” (2004, 8), but end up acknowledging that the medieval political organization is very different from the modern ones. Contrariwise, Thorlac Turville-​Petre claims that “the similarities between medieval and modern expressions of national identity [are] fundamental, and the differences peripheral” (1996, v). Even among those who solidly defend the birth of nationalism and identity in the Middle Ages, there is no unanimity about when and in which texts. Patricia Clare Ingham (2001) says that nationalism and identity presuppose an ideal of sovereignty without which there is no political unity, and that the former can only be found in Middle English Arthurian romance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. According to Ingham, this sovereignty ideal gives rise to the emergence of an imagined community (2):22 I argue that late Middle English Arthurian romance offers a fantasy of insular union, an “imagined community” of British sovereignty. Stories of Arthur, king of Britain, rework notions of insular British unity because Arthurian sovereignty can be used to designate an indigenous tradition. (based upon its Welsh associations) Another author, Adrian Hastings (1997), goes back in time, considering that the idea of nation in England can be traced to the tenth century, to the time after Alfred’s reign:23 I will be suggesting that England presents the prototype of both a nation and a nation-​state in the fullest sense, that its national development, while not wholly uncomparable with that of other Atlantic coastal societies, does precede every other. (…) Moreover, its importance for us lies too both in its relationship with religion and in the precise impact of English nationalism on its neighbours and colonies. Much of this, I will be claiming, was detectable already in Saxon times by the end of the tenth century. (4–​5) The same happens with Michael Wood in In Search of England (2000), or with Sarah Foot, who, in “The Making of Angelcynn: British Identity before the Norman Conquest” (1997), argues that:

Non Angli, sed angeli  119 There are grounds for seeing an increasing sophistication in the development of a self-​conscious perception of English cultural uniqueness and individuality towards the end of the ninth century, at least in some quarters, and for crediting king Alfred’s court circle with its expression. (1) And she sums up: “King Alfred may be credited with the invention of the English as a political community” (1). The same idea is presented in the 2018 book by Jeremy Black, English Nationalism, where the author states that England as a united state was a creation of the tenth century, as the ruling house of Wessex conquered the lands of the Angles in the Midlands, the North, and East Anglia, subjugating the Vikings, many of whom had been settled there for decades. (n.p.) In this chapter, I would like to go even further back in time, and suggest that the roots of English nationalism and identity originate in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica. It may be that this preoccupation with the establishment of an English identity was highly restricted to the Northumbrian clerical elite or, possibly, consisted only in a Bedean ideal, as Richter suggests.24 Nonetheless, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum should be considered the very first attempt at creating an ideal of nationhood, based on biblical history, which, for Bede, defines and characterizes English identity, long before the Wessex would become the most prestigious kingdom under Alfred in the ninth century. When Alfred took dominion over Mercia, in the 880s, he adopted the title rex Anglorum [et] Saxonum or rex Anglosaxonum. However, he also used the words Angelcynn and Englisc, which leads Patrick Wormald to declare that “his nostalgia for the learning and glory that ‘England’ had lost was undoubtedly inspired by Bede” (2006, 118). Although Alfred was not the first king to entitle himself king of the Anglo-​ Saxons, he inaugurated, the first unbroken line of English monarchs. Nonetheless, the unification of the Anglo-​ Saxon kingdoms would only take place in 927, under Æthelstan, Alfred’s grandson, after the submission of Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria in Eamontum. Æthelstan becomes the first English king—​rex Anglorum—​ being accepted as such by all the other English kings. But the fact that Historia Ecclesiastica may be considered the earliest work where there is a self-​conscious goal at building a common sense of identity among the English, is somehow proved by Alfred’s ordering of its translation into English in his own reign.25 But perhaps it is now time to tackle the difficult concepts of nation, nationality and identity, whose definitions are far from being unanimous. As Kumar argues: “The best one can do is to indicate by the context why

120  Angélica Varandas the particular term might be the most appropriate, always aware that it can be contested and that alternative terms are nearly always available” (2015, 51). For this chapter, I have adopted the definition of nation as suggested by Hastings in The Construction of Nationhood:26 A nation is a far more self-​conscious community than an ethnicity. Formed from one or more ethnicities, and normally identified by a literature of its own, it possesses or claims the right to political identity and autonomy as a people, together with the control of specific territory, comparable to that of biblical Israel. (…) If nationalism became theoretically central to western political thinking in the nineteenth century, it existed as a powerful reality in some places long before that. (…) It arises chiefly where and when a particular ethnicity or nation feels itself threatened in regard to its own proper character, extent or importance, either by external attack or by the state system of which it has hitherto formed part. (…) The Bible provided, for the Christian world at least, the original model of the nation. Without it and its Christian interpretation and implementation, it is arguable that nations and nationalism, as we know them, could never have existed. (3–​4) Everything that Hastings states in this passage can be easily applied to Bede’s endeavour to construct an English nation from several ethnicities: his account is certainly self-​conscious in creating a common identity and autonomy for the Angles.27 Moreover, and most importantly, he makes use of the biblical model mentioned by Hastings, as we have already underlined, which after all is not something totally unusual, since all Judaeo-​Christian nations have envisaged themselves, at different times in their history, as chosen by God, as a community of the elected imbued with a divine mission, like the biblical Israelites.28 Moreover, he also reclaims the principle of sovereignty that Ingham considers fundamental to the birth of nationalism and identity, when he dedicates his text to King Ceolwulf. I will come briefly to the question of threat or external attack, also stressed by the author. Concerning identity, I follow both Montserrat Guiberneau (1996) and Donald and Rattansi’s (1992) definitions, quoted by G.J. Ashworth, Brian Graham, and J.E. Turnbridge in Pluralising Pasts: Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies (2007, 4): Identity can be visualised as a multi-​faceted phenomenon that embraces a range of human attributes, including language, religion, ethnicity, nationalism and shared interpretations of the past. (Guibernau, 1996)

Non Angli, sed angeli  121 It is constructed into discourses of inclusion and exclusion, of those who qualify for membership, and those who do not. Identity refers to the processes, categories and knowledges through which communities are defined as such, and the ways in which they are rendered specific and differentiated. (Donald and Rattansi, 1992) This sense of identity is implied in the notion of Englishness. For Kumar (2015), Englishness and English national identity can be understood as synonymous. For Jeremy Black, “Englishness is an identity, a consciousness” (n.p.). And he specifies: “Englishness thus becomes at once identity and analytical tool, at once a state of consciousness and a product of it, and yet also a potentially important rhetorical means in culture and debate” (n.p.). Likewise, Ashworth, Graham, and Turnbridge make it clear that identity is associated with the idea of the Other, a perspective also underlined in Hastings’ definition of nation we have quoted above.29 All these authors are indeed suggesting that “the attributes of Otherness are thus fundamental to representations of identity, which are constructed in counter-​ distinction to them” (Ashworth et al. 2007, 5), meaning that the concept of nation as well as the related one of identity presuppose competing values, external or internal threats, and that it is from these that the idea of Otherness develops. In Guiberneau’s Nationalisms. The Nation State and Nationalism in the Twentieth-​Century (1996), the author lists two criteria for the definition of identity: “continuity over time and differentiation from others” (n.p.):30 The defining criteria of identity are: continuity over time, and differentiation from Others. Continuity springs from the concept of the nation as a historically rooted entity that projects into the future. (…) Differentiation stems from the consciousness of forming a community with a shared culture, attached to a concrete territory, both elements leading to the distinction between members, and “strangers,” “the rest” and “the different.” In Bede, there is certainly the will to project the ideal of the gens Anglorum into the future, a wish that would soon become true. As for the differentiation criterion, we have already defended the idea that the promotion of Englishness implies a shared culture and a common, concrete and specific territory in which its members are different and distinguished from the others or, in Guiberneau’s words, from the “strangers,” “the rest” and “the different.” English consciousness takes shape as against that of the British. Here, we face another dilemma, since English and British identities are difficult to differentiate. However, in Bede’s time, and since the

122  Angélica Varandas Anglo-​Saxon occupation, the British were the Celts who inhabited the territory before being pushed away to the margins of the island by the invaders. We can, in fact, speak about factors of inclusion and exclusion as mentioned in the above-​quoted definition of identity. Also, the idea of Otherness is very explicit in Bede, in whose work we may find a solid notion of who the Other is, since the ones who were excluded from the territory and who continually threatened the Angles were the British tribes that had settled in Wales. They were named by the Anglo-​Saxons as wealas, a word meaning precisely “stranger” or “foreigner,” from which the name Welsh came. The battles between the British and the English are well attested by Gildas and subsequent authors, apart from Bede, such as Pseudo-​Nennius who, in 829, and differently from his predecessors, commemorates Britishness by creating the figure of Arthur in Historia Brittonum. But Historia Ecclesiastica is the first work in which these two identities are distinctively opposed—​the Britons (Brettones) and the gens Anglorum—​two contrasting peoples, sharing their respective cultures and territories, languages, ethnicities and interpretations of the past.31 Their differentiation is established by Bede in terms of divine predestination and resolute character. In the words of Peter Ackroyd: “There is clear evidence that the concept of Englishness—​the ‘Englishness’ of the Anglo-​Saxons as opposed to the ‘Britishness’ of the Celts—​circulated widely in the Anglo-​ Saxon world” (1981, xx). Thus, if, as Wormald suggests, “a sense of Englishness was spreading in the ninth century” (2006: 118), we want here to defend that it started with Bede. Being aware of the differences between the tribes, he “only used ‘Saxon’ when it was in his foreign source, when it was accurate (as for the East, West or South Saxons) or when referring to the vernacular.” (Wormald 2006, 118). Furthermore, he calls the Angli gens which, for Susan Reynolds in Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900–​1300, is a word that may be at the origins of the nation concept. Wormald stresses the ancestry of English’s national identity in relation to other European countries. He argues that it is striking that, although in Europe nationalism developed from a single political authority, in England, where there was none, it appeared much earlier. In his words: the Anglo-​ Saxons developed a sense of communal identity which inspired one of the world’s great histories, and which drew its strength from spiritual ideals rather than political realities. Indeed, it is arguable that it was because “Englishness” was first an ideal that the enterprise launched by Alfred, his children and his grandchildren was so astoundingly successful. (122)

Non Angli, sed angeli  123 This is not a consensual idea, far from it. Kumar, for instance, defies it in The Idea of Englishness where, in opposition to many critics, he says that the English did not create or invent nationalism. He goes so far as claiming: I argue on the contrary (…) that it is only in the last hundred years or so that we have seen a concern with English nationhood and English national identity—​and that until very recently that concern has been mainly cultural rather than political. (2015: viii) It is also Kumar who vehemently opposes the idea that nationalism was born in the Middle Ages, when there was no “need or the existence of a strong English nationalist consciousness” (2015, 123). But he also argues that “the question of origins is a vexing one (…). It is not likely to be resolved, given the range of features held to characterize Englishness and English national identity. Is it language, or literature, or religion?” (2015, 94). In this chapter I have tried to justify why I believe that perhaps not nationalism in itself, but its roots can be found in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiatica and in his desire to shape a common identity for his gens Anglorum. If we answer Kumar’s question quoted above, Bede’s purposes were certainly more spiritual than political, ecclesiastical, to use his own words. In fact, they derive both from the context of the conversion of the Angli, who as angels to be were predestined to occupy an Eden on earth, and from the establishment of the church of England. Concerning the complex question of nationalism, Jeremy Black argues: “There is no unanimously correct answer. Each approach is relevant and has its merits” (n.p.). I am well aware that the perspective sustained here is controversial, as I have already highlighted. I am also aware that the questions of English nationalism are intricate and complex, even if we restrict ourselves to its origins. The same applies if we consider Historia Ecclesiastica alone: I have left out from this chapter many issues that might have helped us to better understand those same origins, such as the question of ethnicity, the ideal of the Imperium, the controversial notion of the Bretwalda, or the relation of the English and, more specifically, of Northumbria with the Irish and with Celtic Christianity. Still, I hope I have somehow managed to sustain why, from my perspective, the conversion to Christianity, as explored by Bede in the mid-​eighth century, and its subsequent expansion played a major role in planting the seeds of English nationalism and the sense of Englishness. Both would be developed a hundred years later in Alfred’s reign, which witnessed the emergence of English literary tradition, and strengthened in the tenth century with Æthelstan.

124  Angélica Varandas Notes 1 There are dozens of manuscripts of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiatica Gentis Anglorum. The earlier ones are eight and were divided by Charles Plummer (Baedae Opera Historica, 1896) into two groups according to their distinctions: the c group and the m group. The c group circulated only in Britain. It consists of three manuscripts: K. Kassel, Landesbibliothek 4 MS. Theol. 2. CLA VIII, no. 1140 (late eighth century); C. London, British Library Cotton MS Tiberius C. II. CLA II, no. 191 (second half of the eighth century); O. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Hatton 43 (4106) (early eleventh century). The m group circulated mainly in Europe and includes five manuscripts:M.Cambridge,CambridgeUniversityLibraryKk.5.16.CLAII,no.139 (c. 737); L. Saint Petersburg, Public Library Lat. Q. v. I. 18. CLA XI, no 1621 (c. 747); U. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-​August Bibliothek Weissenburg 34. CLA IX, no. 1385 (late eighth century); E. Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek M. p. th. f. 118 (second third of the ninth century); N. Namur, Public Library, Fonds de la ville II (ninth century). Scholars believe that M and L listed above (from the m group) are very similar and the date of their production may suggest that both may have been copied from the same model, perhaps Bede’s own copy. 2 “Qui diuino admonitus instinctu anno XIIII eiusdem principis, aduentus uero Anglorum in Brittanniam anno circiter CL, misit seruum Dei Augustinum et alios plures cum eo monachos timentes Dominum praedicare uerbum Dei genti Anglorum” (HE 1.23). From here on, in the footnotes, the title of Bede’s work will be referred to as HE. 3 Bertha had a chaplain called Liudhard, a bishop who had come with her to England when she married Æthelberht (HE 1.25), but who apparently did not manage to convert the Kentish. Nevertheless, they prayed in an ancient Roman church they restored which may be St. Martin’s Church in Canterbury. 4 Not much is known about Æthelberht’s conversion. On the one hand, he may already have been Christian because of his union to Bertha (Cf: Ian Wood 1994: 10), although Augustine’s hesitancy in travelling to Britain as mentioned by Bede (I.23), may suggest otherwise. As the Frankish royal house may have had claims of overlordship over Kent, Æthelberht may have waited for Augustine to follow the new faith so as to avoid domination by the Franks. (Cf: Kirby: 27; Dunn: 49). On the other hand, it has also been suggested that the Kentish king might have turned back to paganism after Augustine’s return to Rome. The fact is that Eadbald, his son, as well as most of his court, did not convert, maintaining their ancient cults. We also know that Rædwald, who was king of East Anglia between c. 599 and c. 624, kept both a Christian altar and a pagan shrine (cf. HE II.15). 5 The title of this manuscript (which is part of Codex 567 of the Stiftsbibliothek of St. Gall, Switzerland) is “Liber beati et laudabili viri Gregorii pape urbis Rome de vita atque virtutibus,” but the text is also known as Vita Beatissimi Papae Gregorii Magni Antiquissima, since Francis Aidan Gasquet thus named it in his 1904 edition (Westminster: Art and Book Company). The standard translation is: Anon. of Whitby, Liber beati et laudabili viri Gregorii papae

Non Angli, sed angeli  125 urbis Romae de vita atque eius virtutibus. ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave, The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby (Lawrence, KS, 1968; repr. Cambridge, 1985). 6 Heu, proh dolor!’ inquit, ‘ quod tam lucidi vultus homines tenebrarum auctor possidet, tantaque gratia frontis speciei mentem ab interna gratia vacuam gestat! (HE II.1) www.thel​atin​libr​ary.com/​bede/​bede2.shtml 7 “Rursus ergo interrogavit, quod esset vocabulum gentis illius; responsum est, quod Angli vocarentur. At ille, ‘Bene’, inquit, ‘nam et angelicam habent faciem, et tales Angelorum in coelis decet esse coheredes’ ” (HE II.1). www.thel​atin​libr​ary.com/​bede/​bede2.shtml In the Life of Gregory the Great (“Liber beati et laudabili viri Gregorii pape urbis Rome de vita atque virtutibus”), it is said: “When he enquired as to their race, they answered: ‘The people that we belong to are called Angles’. ‘Angels of God’, he replied’.” “Quos quidam pulchros fuisse pueros dicunt, quidam vero crispos iuvenis et decoros.) Cumque respondÿearent: ‘Anguli dicuntur illi de quibus sumus’; ille dixit: ‘Angeli Dei’.” www.umi​lta.net/​greg​ory.html 8 Augustine would become the first Archbishop of Canterbury. 9 As Richter remarks: “There is equally reason to believe that Gregory was informed by his missionaries that they were not active among the Angli. It is all the more significant that he did not take note of that, presumably because this would have spoiled his story of the origin of the mission” (105). 10 Cf. Bede I.32 11 “Responsum est, quod Deiri uocarentur idem prouinciales. At ille: ‘Bene’, inquit, ‘Deiri; de ira eruti, et ad misericordiam Christi uocati’ ” (HE II.1). 12 “ ‘Rex prouinciae illius quomodo appellatur?’ Responsum est, quod Aelli diceretur. At ille adludens ad nomen ait: ‘Alleluia, laudem Dei Creatoris illis in partibus oportet cantari’. Accedensque ad pontificem Romanae et apostolicae sedis, nondum enim erat ipse pontifex factus, rogauit, ut genti Anglorum in Brittaniam aliquos uerbi ministros, per quos ad Christum conuerteretur, mitteret” (HE II.1). 13 According to Marilyn Dunn, Gregory’s “reference to all the Anglo-​ Saxon peoples as Angli could be read to indicate that he was aware of the coming together of Jutes, Saxons and Angles under Æthelberht’s overlordship and had begun to realize that a mission might yield considerable results in terms of converts, if Æthelberht himself would not only accept Christianity but also go on to impose it on the other kingdoms and populations under his control” (51). The concept of heptarchy is first mentioned by Henry of Huntingdon in his twelfth-​century Historia Anglorum. 14 Like Northumbria, also Mercia emerged as a unified kingdom after the late seventh century, “assuming the status of an insular, conglomerate ‘super-​state’, the principal power in England below the Humber” (Higham 202: 102), under Æthelbald (716–​ 57) and Offa (757–​ 96). The conflicts with Northumbria expanded mostly since Æthelbald became king of southern Britain, precisely

126  Angélica Varandas in 731. Both Mercia and Northumbria fought for supremacy over the other Anglo-​Saxon kingdoms until Alfred’s reign. 15 Cf. HE 1.15 16 “Opima frugibus atque arboribus insula, et alendis apta pecoribus ac iumentis” (…) “fluuiis quoque multum piscosis ac fontibus praeclara copiosis” (…) “exceptis uariorum generibus concyliorum; in quibus sunt et musculae, quibus inclusam saepe margaritam omnis quidem coloris optimam inueniunt” (…) “Habet fontes salinarum, habet et fontes calidos, et ex eis fluuios balnearum calidarum” (…) “Quae etiam uenis metallorum, aeris, ferri, et plumbi, et argenti” (…) “Et quia prope sub ipso septentrionali uertice mundi iacet, lucidas aestate noctes habet”; (…) “unde etiam plurimae longitudinis habet dies aestate” (HE I.1). The whole beginning of the book consists of a description of Britain as if it were a paradisiacal island. Bede’s sources for this description are: Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (77–​9); Solinus’ Collectanea rerum memorabilium (c. 200); Orosius’s Historiarum Adversum Paganos (416–​18); and Gildas’ De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (c. 520–​40). 17 “Sed non tamen diuina pietas plebem suam, quam praesciuit, deseruit, quin multo digniores genti memoratae praecones ueritatis, per quos crederet, destinauit” (HE I: 22). 18 One of Bede’s sources is De Excidio and Conquestu Britannae, written by Gildas in the sixth century. The British monk implies that the disobedience of his own people caused God to punish them with the Saxon occupation of the island. Although Bede also criticizes the British, he omits the idea of divine punishment, since for him the English are depicted as a race elected by God, predestined to become Christian and assume the dominion of the land. 19 In The Philosophy of Nationalism, Paul Gilbert offers a list of the several perspectives about the concepts of nation and nationalism: 1) the nominalist theories, as those which sustain that a nation emerges when any group of people consider to be part of one; 2) the naturalist theories, according to which a nation is created by nature; 3) the voluntarist theories in which critics defend that a nation results from a group of people who got together wilfully; 4) the territorial theories, by which a nation is born every time a group of people occupy a certain territory; 5) the linguistic theories by which a nation consists in a group of people speaking the same language; 6) the axiological theories, which defend that a nation is formed when people share the same values; 7) the destiny theories, which advocate that a nation begins to grow when people partake in a common mission and history (Gilbert, 1998). Also, Anthony D. Smith, in The Ethnic Origins of Nations, distinguishes between 1) the perennialists, for whom the ideal of nationhood was always present in human communities, therefore, being immemorial; 2) modernists, for whom the concept of nation is a modern one having appeared in the post-​ industrial era; and 3) postmodernists, for whom nations appeared in modern times, but they recreate a past by carefully selecting elements of tradition which, in most cases, are invented. The latter perspective is the one adopted, for

Non Angli, sed angeli  127 instance, by Eric Hobsbawm and T.O. Ranger, in The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983). 20 “The birth of the English nation was not the birth of a nation, it was the birth of the nations, the birth of nationalism” (23). 21 Eric Hobsbawm has adopted this perspective in Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1990). 22 The expression “imagined community” first appeared in Benedict Arnold’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), a book where the author defines nation precisely as an “imagined community”: “In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—​and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-​members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6, original emphasis). But whereas Arnold claims that nation, nationalism and nationality are cultural artefacts from the post-​ enlightened era, Ingham locates her imagined community in Middle English popular romance at the end of the Middle Ages. Ingham also declares that her “imagined community” is not based on a heterogeneous set of stories or on a homogeneous people but, instead, it is built upon the idea of sovereignty, constructed from ethnic, regional, linguistic and gender conflicts. For her, the imagined ideal of nation emerges from the groups that compete among themselves around the sovereign Arthur. 23 This work is based on a series of conferences Hastings presented at Belfast (Wiles Lectures), in 1996, trying to respond to Hobsbawm’s book Nation and Nationalism since 1780. 24 For Kumar, the circumscription of these ideals to an elite hinders the possibility of nations appearing in the Middle Ages: “If some kind of horizontal, populist solidarity is, in principle at least, a condition of nationhood, how likely are we to find it in societies in which monarchy, aristocracy, and church hold sway?” (2015, 117). 25 Alfred also ordered the translation into English of some of Gregory the Great’s works, namely the Dialogues, the first text to be translated in Winchester by Wæferth, Bishop of Worcester, and the Pastoral Care, which Alfred translated himself. 26 See also Gellner, who defines nation as a “primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent” (1). Moreover, he argues that “it is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round” (55). 27 In the same book, Hastings also provides a definition of ethnicity: “a group of people with a shared cultural identity and spoken language” (3) 28 Cf. Kumar 2015, 112. 29 This theory had already been underlined by Edward Said in his 1978 book Orientalism. 30 Guiberneau is one of the authors who considers nationalism to be contemporary of the nation state that followed the French and American revolutions.

128  Angélica Varandas 31 “the inhabitants of the island were all Britons, from whom it receives its name” (10). “In primis autem haec insula Brettones solum, a quibus nomen accepit, incolas habuit” (HB I.1).

Works cited 1)  Medieval Texts Anon. of Whitby, Liber beati et laudabili viri Gregorii papae urbis Romae de vita atque eius virtutibus. The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby. Edited and translated by ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. 1968. Cambridge UP, 1985. Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Conquest and Ruin of Britain) Latin text: www.kmatth​ews.org.uk/​hist​ory/​gil​das/​gild​as1.html (06/​09/​2014) English translation: On the Ruin of Britain. Edited and translated by J. A. Gile. Serenity, 2009. Beda, Historia Ecclesiatica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) (731) Latin text: www.thel​atin​libr​ary.com/​bede.html. English translation: The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, edited by Judith McClure and Roger Collins. Oxford UP, 2008. 2)  Critical Texts: Ackroyd, Peter. Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. Vintage Books, 1981. Arnold, Benedict. Imagined Communites: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso Books, 1983. Ashworth G.J., Brian Graham, and J.E. Turnbridge. Pluralising Pasts: Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies. Pluto Press, 2007. Black, Jeremy. English Nationalism: A Short History. Hurst, 2018. Colley, Linda. Britons. Forging the Nation. 1707–​1837. Pimlico, 2003. Donald, James, and Rattansi, Ali, editors. Race, Culture and Difference. SAGE/​ Open University, 1992.

Non Angli, sed angeli  129 Dunn, Marilyn. The Christianisation of the Anglo-​Saxons, c. 597–​700: Discourses of life, death and the Afterlife. Continuum, 2009. Finke, Laurie A., and Martin B. Shichtman. King Arthur and the Myth of History. UP of Florida, 2004. Foot, Sarah. “The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity Before the Norman Conquest.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 6, 1996, pp. 25–​ 49. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​3679​228. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalisms. Cornell UP. 1983. Gilbert, Paul. The Philosophy of Nationalism. Westview Press, 1998. Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Harvard UP, 1992. Guiberneau, M. Nationalisms. The Nation State and Nationalism in the Twentieth-​ Century. Polity. 1996. Hastings, Adrian. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge UP, 1997. Henderson, Alisa, and Richard Wyn Jones. Englishness: The Political Force Transforming Britain. OUP, 2021. Higham, N.J. The Northern Counties to AD 1000. Longman, 1986. —​—​—​. The English Conquest: Gildas and Britain in the 5th Century. Manchester UP, 1994. —​—​—​. King Arthur. Myth-​Making and History. Routledge, 2002. Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge UP, 1990. Hobsbawm, Eric, and T.O. Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge UP, 1983. Ingham, Patricia Clare. Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain. U of Pennsylvania P, 2001. Kirby, D.P. The Earliest English Kings. Routledge, 2000. Kohn, Hans. The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background. 1944. Transaction, 2005. Kumar, Krishan. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge UP, 2003. —​—​—​. The Idea of Englishness. English Culture, National Identity and Social Thought. Ashgate, 2015. Newman, Gerald. The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–​ 1830. Palgrave Macmillan, 1997. O’Frazer, William, and Andrew Tyrrell, editors. Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain. Continuum, 2000. Reynolds, Susan. Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900–​ 1300. Clarendon Press, 1984. Richter, Michael. “Bede’s Angli: Angles or English?” Peritia, vol. 3, 1984, pp. 99–​ 114. www.mgh-​bib​liot​hek.de/​dokume​nte/​a/​a149​671.pdf. Ryan, Judith, and Alfred Thomas, editors. Cultures of Forgery. Making Nations, Making Selves. Routledge, 2003. Said, E. Orientalism. Columbia UP, 1978. Schwyzer, Philip. Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales. Cambridge UP, 2004. Smith, Anthony D. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. 1986. Blackwell, 1998. Turville-​Petre, Thorlac. England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity 1290–​1340. Clarendon Press, 1996.

130  Angélica Varandas Whitelock, Dorothy. The Beginnings of English Society. Penguin Books, 1952. Wood, Ian. “The Mission of Augustine of Canterbury to the English.” Speculum, vol. 69, no. 1, 1994, pp. 1–​17. https://tinyurl.com/5h99b54c Wood, Michael. In Search of England. Journeys into the English Past. Penguin Books, 2000. Wormald, Patrick. “Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum.” The Times of Bede. Studies in Early Christian Society and its Historian, edited by Stephen Baxter. Blackwell, 2006, pp. 106–​134.

9 Exploring the outsider consciousness in a selection of stories by Alice Munro Pilar Sánchez Calle

When discussing Alice Munro’s fiction, we realize that very little in a Munro story is just about the present: the past is always present in her stories, which accounts for the depth to which her fiction goes in the exploration of character (Hooper 163). The result is the creation of individual characters that are bound to the general human condition and with whom most readers can connect. Munro’s characters are afflicted by loss, bereavement and the passing of time. In her stories we often find a combination of the strange and the familiar, and the domestic surfaces conceal deeper layers of complexity (Guignery 13, 15). This chapter explores a corollary theme to that of the influence of the past on the present, around which many of Munro’s stories are constructed: the outsider consciousness. The selected stories belong to the volumes Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and Dear Life (2013). Some of Munro’s protagonists, men and women, frequently feel outside the mainstream in socio-​economic and gender situations. We find women and girls who don’t want to perform traditional female roles, non-​traditional teachers whose methods are punished by the small-​town narrow-​minded mentality, old people being an embarrassment, and men who behave as “grown-​up” children, condemned to a lonely life or to a life of recursion. These characters exemplify Munro’s interest in incongruity, in what does not fit (Guignery 19). In “Family Furnishings” (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001), the unnamed narrator is a woman writer who evokes the figure of her aunt Alfrida, and at the same time, she recreates scenes of her family life as a girl in a rural small town in Ontario, Canada, in the fifties. As a young girl, the narrator expresses her fascination with Alfrida because she is a “career girl” (89). She has moved to the big city (“It was also said she was a city person,” 89) and writes a section for a paper. Under a pseudonym, Alfrida gives her recommendations concerning fashion, lifestyle, and health to young women and country housewives.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-9

132  Pilar Sánchez Calle For the narrator, in her summer visits, Alfrida carries a breath of fresh air with her frivolous laugh and her stories about politicians and celebrities, and her presence ephemerally transforms the lives of community members (88). Alfrida places herself outside the world of her childhood as a career girl, but she secretly wishes to keep her links with her old world. She has become an outsider to her family by leaving home, becoming a journalist and living with a man without marrying him. However, as a journalist, she fosters her readers’ female stereotypes, those she grew up with. She rejects the intellectual world and despises literature and high culture: “ ‘You know, down at the paper we sometimes get somebody that’s been all through that. Honors English. Honors Philosophy. You don’t know what to do with them. They can’t write worth a nickel’ ” (107). Her readers are involved with the practical side of life, what she considers real life, so she writes for them. For Alfrida, writing is a skill, not an art. She despises those who use words to create vicarious representations. When the narrator tells Alfrida she is going to attend a performance of a Streetcar Named Desire, she responds virulently, “ ‘You went all the way to Toronto to see that filth’ ” (108, original emphasis). Alfrida’s attitudes towards the narrator’s artistic interests and towards her wish to become a writer confirm her small town mentality and her nostalgia for her childhood world, which she had to abandon after conceiving a child with the narrator’s father and giving it up for adoption (we learn about this at the end of the story). Alfrida’s teeth and her furniture symbolically expose her restlessness regarding her outsider position and her craving to be admitted back into her family circus (Hooper 135; Löschnig 69). The narrator had always liked Alfrida’s teeth, considering them a symbol of her individuality, “But these teeth of Alfrida’s were unusual in their individuality, clear separation and large size” (95). However, when the narrator, in her college years, visits Alfrida, she realizes she has got false teeth, like most middle-​aged people at that time. This may be interpreted as Alfrida’s conformity to mainstream society’s expectations. During this same visit, Alfrida shows the narrator her family furniture: “ ‘I know I’ve got far too much stuff in here’, she said. ‘But it’s my parents’ stuff. It’s family furnishings, and I couldn’t let them go’ ” (104). These pieces of furniture represent Alfrida’s connection with her family, and her painful separation from them. Her keeping them suggests Alfrida’s intimate wish for belonging, which is not satisfied. The narrator finds herself asphyxiated by the dullness of everyday life in a small town, without interesting conversations about politics or world affairs and burdened by small talk about practicalities such as food, illnesses and so on. She escapes this atmosphere, and above all, her sick mother, to go to college in the same city where Alfrida lives. Her aunts had

Exploring the outsider consciousness  133 insisted that she should take care of her mother, but she abhors that destiny. In this sense, the narrator chooses her own type of life, on her own terms, rather than simply falling into line based on what was programmed for her (Hooper 156): “I won a scholarship. I didn’t stay home to take care of my mother or of anything else. I went off to college” (99); “the contempt I hoped never to have to show, about the things that really mattered to me. And in order not to have to do that, I would pretty well have to stay clear of the people I used to know” (101). She chooses to be an outsider. While in college, the narrator immerses herself in the city’s intellectual world and meets people with her same interests: My new friends were people who said, ‘Have you read Look Homeward Angel? Oh, you have to read that. Have you read Buddenbrooks?’ They were people with whom I went to see Forbidden Games and Les Enfants du Paradis when the film society brought them in. (100) She avoids Alfrida because she despises intellectual persons, she considers “high culture” snobbish, and she has always shown contempt for books and for those who read them and attend plays. Unlike Alfrida, who addresses, according to her, real women and their real-​life interests, the narrator decides to become a writer and to make her living out of vicarious experiences. Her fiancé also adores intellectual life, far from the practicalities that afflict other people. He tries to keep himself at a distance from real-​life tragedies, but likes vicarious ones: “He admired opera and Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, but he had no time for tragedy—​for the squalor of tragedy—​in ordinary life” (110); “Failures in life—​failures of luck, of health, of finances—​all struck him as lapses, and his resolute approval of me did not extend to my ranshackle background” (110). However, the narrator’s self-​confidence shatters when she is “on home ground” (114). She has not been able to get rid of the burden of her hometown opinions and beliefs about her books and her role as a fiction writer. Her outsiderness leads her to question her own ability as a creator of vicarious experiences. She wonders if what she does is valuable and matters to anybody. Maybe Alfrida was right and real-​life women and their solid realities will always prevail over “an ever increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting -​set against the rich productions, the food, the flowers and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say that is was worth the trouble” (114). The short story “Haven” (Dear Life, 2012) resembles “Family Furnishings” in several aspects. This story is also told by a nameless female first-​person narrator and we also find the figure of a woman, Mona Cassel, who left her hometown to pursue a career as a violinist and became an

134  Pilar Sánchez Calle outcast to her only brother who despises her and her music. Several situations in the story reveal Mona’s wish to come back to her family circle. The narrator evokes episodes of her life during the year she spent living with her Uncle Jasper and her Aunt Dawn in a small town in Canada in the 1970s. Her parents were teaching in Ghana and she was sent to stay with her uncle and aunt. The narrator describes her relatives’ home as dominated by her Uncle Jasper’s wishes and rules, who embodies the mainstream beliefs and stereotypes of a society which in the 1970s was still dominated by men (Müller 31). Thus, “The house was his, the choice of menus his, the radio and television programs his” (113), “ ‘Dawn’s life is devoted to her husband’, my mother had said, with an attempt at neutrality. Or more drily, ‘Her life revolves around that man’ ” (112). In this society, women could leave, like Mona Cassel or the narrator’s mother, who was involved in religious activities in Africa with her husband, or adapt themselves to the crude gender segregation (Löschnig 69), like Aunt Dawn. As the story develops, we learn about Uncle Jasper’s relationship with her sister Mona. They keep no contact and the reason for their estrangement seems to be connected to a brother and sister’s rivalry and Mona’s belief that she had not had the same educational opportunities. The narrator makes reference to Mona’s being gifted in music since she was a child: Some relatives had thought that this girl should be taken away and given a better chance because she was so musical. So she was brought up in a different way and the brother and sister had nothing in common and that was really all that she—​Aunt Dawn—​knew about it. (117) However, Uncle Jaspers had not received much external help to become a doctor: “He had grown up poor but smart and had taught school till he could afford medical training” (115). The character of Mona is presented in an oblique way, through other people’s opinions. She never speaks a word; her music is her voice. Her concert with her trio in Uncle Jasper’s small town proves her devotion to music and her role as a successful career woman, defying mainstream stereotypes about women. Her brother, Jasper, had succeeded as a doctor because of his interest in science and medicine; however, for the narrator, the same enthusiasm was considered ludicrous in a woman: “Devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous” (128). But Mona is not afraid of her brother and his derogatory comments about classical music and concertgoers: “Pay money simply to perpetrate a fraud?” (125);

Exploring the outsider consciousness  135 “A load of horse manure. All in the hope of appearing high-​class” (125). Mona’s concert in town suggests her attachment to her childhood background, and her private performance at her brother’s home confirms her intimate wish to regain contact with Jasper. Mona’s final decision to be buried in the family Anglican cemetery expresses her wish to be admitted back in the family circle. Being an outsider had allowed her to pursue her music career, but Mona had paid a price for her eccentricity and passion (Löschnig 70). This plan for her burial surprises everybody, even her brother, and reveals a personal wound which was never healed during her lifetime. She manages to be accepted back on family ground at least after her death, which can be considered a pyrrhic victory. In “Comfort” (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001), we find a story about Lewis and Nina, an elderly childless couple. It is a third-​person narration with Nina as the story’s focalizer. It opens with Lewis’s suicide and Nina’s frantic search for a suicide note. As the story progresses, we learn that Lewis, a sixty-​two-​year-​old man had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and, due to his personality, he would have never accepted physical collapse, so he and Nina had agreed that he would take his life at an indeterminate future time. Lewis’s personality offers a “repertoire of mockery, disbelief, ironic patience, suffering disgust” (123). He rejects religion and believes in science. He despises sentimentality and sticks fiercely to his principles, often “on the lookout for enemies” (129). Lewis and Nina are both high school teachers in a small town in Ontario, Canada. Lewis teaches biology and Nina Latin. His unconventional teaching arouses criticism from narrow-​minded Christian students, their parents and pious people whose religious feelings are offended by Lewis’s strong views about the relationship between religion and science. They all require Lewis to include religious references to the Genesis story of creation, to Adam and Eve, and so on: “It’s not that we necessarily want the religious view, sir. It’s just that we wonder why you don’t give it equal time.” Lewis let himself be drawn into argument. “It’s because I’m here to teach you science, not religion.” (132) But Lewis ends up resigning. He never accepts being kind to that type of religious fundamentalist: “Lewis said there was a definite movement now to reinforce belief in the literal Bible Story. ‘Adam and Eve. The same old rubbish’ ” (130). However, the official reason for his resignation was ill health.

136  Pilar Sánchez Calle Although Nina and Lewis got along fine as a couple, his outsiderness became painful and a burden for her throughout the years of their marriage. Nina was happy to retire some years earlier than Lewis. This way she did not have to cope with all the negative consequences his unsettling style of teaching provoked. Nina joined a choral society because she loved music, but the fact that many of their recitals were given in churches distanced her from Lewis, who hated those places. Nina establishes a special relationship with one of the couple’s friends, Ed, who does not have such a striving personality, and, paradoxically, she finds consolation in something Lewis hates: a religious score, “Comfort Ye My People,” from Haendel’s Messiah, in Ed’s interpretation: When Ed sang the tenor solos in the Choral Society’s performance of the Messiah every Christmas, that moment would return to her. “Comfort Ye My People” pierced her throat with starry needles. As if everything about her was recognized then, and honored and set alight. (148) Ed’s kiss to Nina becomes a very important memory for her, and a symbol of that sentimentality she intimately misses and needs and Lewis never gave her: “Her memory of Ed Shore’s kiss outside the kitchen door did, however, become a treasure” (148). After finding Lewis’s dead body, Nina does not express pity but, once more, disappointment. She had expected to be present when Lewis decided to put an end to his life: “Nina had assumed that she would be present and that there would be some ceremonial recognition. Music. The pillows arranged and a chair drawn up so that she could hold his hand” (121). She starts to look for a suicide note addressed to her, maybe hoping for a last personal message. Nina will receive that note some hours later, found by a friend in Lewis’s pyjama pocket. Again, this is not the kind of note Nina was expecting. It contains nothing personal or intimate. On the contrary, Lewis has written “Several verses of scathing doggerel” (143), a sarcastic kind of poem, “The Battle of the Genesisites and the Sons of Darwin for the Soul of the Flabby Generation,” which does not offer the comfort Nina needs. Lewis’s caustic personality takes revenge on those who tried to censor his teaching, but he leaves nothing for his wife, Nina. The story ends with Nina scattering Lewis’ ashes in the country and expressing an ambiguous relief. It is a mixture of personal liberation and devotion to her husband’s wishes, to part without any ceremony of any kind, neither civil nor religious. However, comfort is not complete; the calm she experiences is undermined by pain. Lewis’s outsiderness, his striving personality, his confrontation with authority were initially attractive and seductive features, but they ended

Exploring the outsider consciousness  137 up being a burden for his wife, Nina, due to his intransigent attitudes and opinions. Lewis failed in offering consolation and comfort to her; he always considered those needs as superfluous and sentimental. In “The Bear Came over the Mountain” (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001), we have another retired elderly couple, Grant and Fiona. Fiona is starting to suffer the symptoms of a degenerative disease, which requires her husband to take her to a nursing home. The story is a third-​person narration presented from Grant’s point of view. By internal focalization through Grant, and by direct, indirect, and free indirect style, the narrative discloses his intimate thoughts (Strauss 139). Fiona becomes an outsider to herself, in the sense of losing her old self, and behaving in a new way for her husband. Grant had been a university professor of Nordic literatures and a womanizer, but had never abandoned his wife despite his immoral behaviour of prolonged marital infidelity. Grant’s visits to the nursing home are a descent into the world of senile dementia. He feels like an intruder in a territory which is not his and where he is received with a certain hostility (Ventura, para. 15): “They all looked up—​all the players at the table looked, with displeasure. Then they immediately looked down at their cards, as if to ward off any intrusion” (289). His wife, Fiona, seems distant, as if she had forgotten him and their marriage. Fiona has established an intense attachment to another resident, Aubrey. Grant experiences what it means to be an outsider and an intruder on Fiona and Aubrey’s life at the nursing home, and he finds himself in the paradoxical position of the betrayer being betrayed. After Aubrey is released and returns home with his wife, Fiona’s health suffers enormously, and she falls into severe depression, so Grant persuades Marian, Aubrey’s wife, to bring her husband back to the nursing home. Grant becomes the agent of his wife’s betrayal and allows her to reciprocate infidelity (Ventura, para. 20). The serious effects dementia has on the patients themselves, their relatives and caretakers, and the persistent advance of the disease may demand ethical principles that deviate from the established norms of a community (Strauss 146). In “Train” (Dear Life, 2012), narrated in the third person, a soldier named Jackson is on his way home to a town in southwestern Ontario, after having served in the Second World War. But he decides to leave the train before reaching his home town and he ends up on a derelict farm run by a woman, Belle, with whom he spends the next eighteen years in a brother-​sister relationship. In 1962, Belle develops a cancerous lump and has an operation in Toronto to remove it. Afterwards, still in the hospital, she tells Jackson about a disturbing episode of her youth. When she was a young woman, her father had once come to stare at her naked while she was still in the bathroom. Belle believes that his subsequent death upon

138  Pilar Sánchez Calle being hit by a train was a suicide provoked by this encounter. Jackson feels embarrassed after this revelation and abandons Belle without even saying goodbye. He finds a job as superintendent at an apartment building in the city. Three years later, a woman appears at the building looking for her adult child, and Jackson recognizes the woman as someone from his home town. Her name is Ileane, and, we discover, it was to avoid marrying her that Jackson jumped off the train at the beginning of the story. Jackson does not want to confront her and abandons his life once more, boarding a train to look for work in a northern lumbering town. With regard to Belle, we learn that she dies in 1965 after fighting cancer (McGill 145). From the very beginning, Jackson describes himself in free indirect speech as “being a disturbance” (177), “Life around coming to some conclusions about you from vantage points you couldn’t see” (177). His choice of jumping off the train and not coming back to his hometown confirms his drive to place himself outside mainstream expectations about what his life should be. His outsiderness is reinforced by staying at Belle’s farm and living there with her for eighteen years as friends, without any kind of sexual relationship and with almost no social contact, with the exception of the Mennonite families who are their neighbours. What Jackson shares with them is their rejection of a conventional life by sticking to their old traditions involving religion, clothing and social contact. The Mennonites can also be considered outsiders from regular society. Belle is an outsider in the sense that she lives on a dismal farm in the middle of nowhere, but she is an educated woman whose father was a journalist and she herself likes reading, keeps books and old newspapers in the farm, and is very much attracted to movies (188). According to Robert McGill (148), both Belle and Jackson are examples of arrested development characters. Even as an adult, Belle refers to her father as “daddy,” and she also continues to live in her parents’ house after both of them have died. She seems to overlook even the most basic technology, and is still using a horse and buggy when Jackson meets her. On their way to Toronto, in 1962, she is amazed at the new multi-​lane highway (190). She is suspicious about the advent of socialized healthcare in Canada, claiming that since its inauguration, “nobody did anything but run to the doctor” (190). Jackson himself thinks of Belle as someone who “was stopped at some point in life where she remained a grown-​up child” (189). But there is a turning point in the story when we foresee a change in Belle’s personality, and this takes place when she tells Jackson about her bathroom encounter with her father. The verbalization of this traumatic moment liberates her and probably enables her to move on in life, without the burden of guilt: “ ‘Now I see. Now I have got a real understanding of it and it was nobody’s fault’ ” (198); “ ‘I feel so released. It’s not that I don’t

Exploring the outsider consciousness  139 feel the tragedy, but I have got outside the tragedy, is what I mean’ ” (198); “ ‘You realize I am in an abnormal state. I know I am. Everything so clear. I am so grateful for it’ ” (198). Even though Jackson abandons Belle after her confession, we are told later that Belle did not come back to the farm and stayed in Toronto. Her obituary suggests that during her last years, she was accompanied by an old friend, Robin, she had known from her youth. The traits of eccentricity and outsiderness were overcome in the last part of Belle’s life. After meeting Belle, Jackson decided to stay there not because of any attraction towards her, but because he realized that fixing some buildings on the farm and helping with the agricultural chores could give his life new meaning (Tolksdorf 79): how this place was on its last legs but not absolutely hopeless, if somebody wanted to settle down and fix things up. A certain investment of money was needed, but a greater investment of time and energy. It could be a challenge. He could almost bring himself to regret he was moving on. (183) Jackson had only his outsiderness in common with Belle, but apparently, not much else. Belle had intellectual interests which Jackson despised. Jackson was not particularly interested in books and couldn’t understand why some people still wanted to write them (186–​87). Eighteen years pass. Jackson detests Belle’s emotional exposure when she reveals her father’s incident with her: It wasn’t that he was worried so much by the change in Belle. He thought that it was possible or even probable that she would get back to normal (…) She might not even remember the story she had told him. Which would be a blessing. (199) Jackson misses the eccentric Belle, the “grown-​up child,” the naive woman who lived with him as brother and sister. Jackson is unable to face Belle again and leaves immediately after her revelation, which marks him as another “grown-​up child” (McGill 149), unable to behave as a mature person. He finds a new job as caretaker and superintendent of a building, where he works with the same dedication as on Belle’s farm (Tolksdorf 82). The living conditions in the building improve, so the owner lets him decide which people can move in. Jackson opts for older and single tenants, people a bit like him, outsiders. In fact, the building becomes famous as a “haven for loonies” (82).

140  Pilar Sánchez Calle However, Jackson’s haven comes to an end when he hears a woman talking to the building’s owner. He identifies her as Ileane, the woman he was supposed to marry after the war ended. In a flashback sequence, we are told about Jackson and Ileane, who had been a couple until the war separated them. At the beginning of the story, Jackson jumped from the train that was taking him back home and deserted Ileane. Ileane’s reappearance leads Jackson to revise his childhood. He had a problematic relationship with his stepmother, who showed abusive behaviour and illicit attentions towards him. This could be the source of his lifelong failed relationships with women (Mitchell 75), with Ileane and with a prostitute in France during the war, as well as the reason for his emotional paralysis. Jackson’s crises always have to do with women who might exert an emotional or sexual hold on him. Whenever he foresees this situation approaching, he gets on the move again. Tolksdorf suggests repressed homosexuality as a cause for Jackson’s conflicts with women. Jackson calls himself “a certain kind of man” (189), and the story ends with his travelling to a lumbering town populated in its majority by male wood choppers. Jackson’s choice of this place as his destination might prove his wish to live next to hard-​working, strong men, far from women’s more emotive personalities (85). In “Gravel” (Dear Life, 2012), the plot can be summarized as follows: Caro, a nine-​year-​old girl jumps into a gravel pit filled with water and drowns. The unnamed narrator, Caro’s younger brother or sister, still struggles with the memory of this tragedy long into adulthood. He/​she is unable to understand the reasons for Caro’s death. The first-​ person narrator is an elusive character. The reader learns barely anything about him/​her. Neither name, nor age, nor gender is clarified throughout the story. We find a reference to Ruthann as the narrator’s partner, which has led some critics to identify the narrator as male or as lesbian, but the word “partner” is an ambiguous term which does not necessarily imply a sexual relationship (Huber 57–​8). This elusiveness is reinforced by the fact that the narrator has problems remembering what happened. He/​She does not feel confident about what he/​she is narrating from the beginning of the story: “I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the link you need to form a proper picture” (91). The narrator also makes extensive use of modes of uncertainty such as “There must have been” (97); “I may have said that” (102); “I must have done so” (102), and he/​she sometimes states his/​her ignorance of the facts: “I can’t remember” (97); “I can’t imagine” (97); “I don’t know” (103). He/​She is also suspicious about psychologists trying to remove her restlessness and sense of guilt by giving reasons for Caro’s death that he/​she can’t believe. The narrator describes his/​her father as a man with a conventional and “boring” job, “insurance agent” (93), and his/​her mother, as a middle-​class

Exploring the outsider consciousness  141 housewife with artistic and intellectual interests who became involved as a volunteer with the town theatre and some fund-​raising activities to support it. She is lured by the theatre atmosphere, by actors and actresses, by the looks they have, and their lifestyles, apparently freer and more open than those of the majority of the people in town. The father also supports the arts and does not oppose the mother’s activities; however, she eventually has an affair with one of the actors, Neal, gets pregnant and decides to break with her traditional life. Her reasons are that “she had felt alive. Maybe for the first time in her life, truly alive. She felt as if she had been given a chance; she had started her life all over again (…). She would live now, not read” (94). The mother places herself physically on the margins by leaving the small town and going to live in a trailer with her two kids, including the narrator, and her lover, Neal. However, she is still a vigilant mother, which contrasts with her easy-​going partner, Neal. “His philosophy, as he put it later, was to welcome whatever happened. Everything is a gift. We give and we take” (94). He doesn’t act like a father (96). After his/​her sister’s accidental death, the narrator retakes a conventional life with her mother. She and Neal separate, they abandon the trailer and start living in town, where the mother gets a regular job as the theatre’s business manager. The narrator makes sensible choices, goes to college, becomes a teacher and has a partner, Ruthann. Apparently, he/​she leads a normal existence, but he/​she has not overcome this tragedy. Feelings of guilt persist in his/​her mind and answers to his/​her sister’s mysterious drowning seem as elusive as ever. Years later, Neal contacts the narrator and they meet. He then explains his position when Caro’s accident happened, admitting no responsibility for the child’s death. Neal recommends the narrator to be happy: “The thing is to be happy,” he said. “No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.” (109) Neal has not changed. He is one of those persons who keeps on moving in life, going ahead and escaping when squalor appears. Neal’s initial attractiveness is associated to his outsiderness. When he was young, he placed himself outside a conventional job and house, being an actor and living in a trailer. Yet his seductive promises of an alternative lifestyle do not work in the middle of tragedy. His easiness leads to chaos and death, and he manages to resist, untainted by affliction and adversity, evading

142  Pilar Sánchez Calle any responsibility. For the narrator, this is not an option. He/​She would like to feel like Neal, but he/​she can’t. The story’s last sentence is: “But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself in, as in triumph, and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash” (109). The narrator remains in a position of stasis, outside the normal flow of life. The narrator’s father, the conventional man, proves to be much more moral than Neal, and never accuses her mother of not being vigilant enough (106), partially due to his new partner, who becomes the narrator’s stepmother. These people with their sensible options for life go along in the world in a human and moral way, unlike the charming Neal, who behaves selfishly and never copes with the consequences of his actions. “Leaving Maverley” (Dear Life, 2012) is a third-​ person narration, presented most of the time from the character Ray Elliot’s point of view. It is set in an average small town, “in the old days” (67), and it tells the stories of three characters, Leah, Ray and Isabel, Ray’s wife. Leah, sixteen at the beginning of the story, comes from a very religious family. Her fundamentalist father forbids all entertainment and keeps Leah, her mother and her siblings detached from society, media and worldly experiences of any kind (Hofmann 52). Leah works for the town’s movie theatre but can neither watch the movies nor listen to their dialogue. After the session is over, she is walked home by the local policeman, Ray Elliot, who from time to time clarifies for her the movies’ plots and the dialogue. Ray considers her a very imaginative girl: There was something in her, he told Isabel, something that made her want to absorb whatever you said to her, instead of just being thrilled or mystified by it. Some way in which he thought she had already shut herself off from her family. Not to be contemptuous of them, or unkind. She was just rock-​bottom thoughtful. (73) In this way, Leah probably got a glimpse of the world of art, of artists, of entertainment, very far from a practical and conventional existence with a “real” job. Later, we learn that Leah has eloped with the minister’s son, a saxophone player in a jazz band. She marries him and they have two kids. Throughout the years, Ray heard other scandalous stories about Leah. She comes back to Maverley to stay with her parents-​in-​law, the now-​retired minister and his wife. But while being there, Leah meets the new minister, who is married, and starts a relationship with him. As a consequence, the new minister tries to divorce his wife and confesses that after meeting Leah, all his previous preaching about love and sex was a sham:

Exploring the outsider consciousness  143 He was now a man set free, free to tell them what relief it was to celebrate the life of the body along with the life of the spirit. The woman who had done this for him, it seemed, was Leah. (85) Eventually, Leah is abandoned by this minister and her children’s custody is given to her first husband. Ray places himself outside his family and his war crew after marrying Isabel, a divorced teacher older than he and of a higher social status. Isabel’s family considered her marriage to Ray “preposterous,” which led to the couple’s social isolation, “There was a divorce—​a scandal to her well-​connected family and a shock to her husband, who had wanted to marry her since they were children” (70). Unfortunately, Isabel develops pericarditis. This condition sets her apart from a normal life. She has to quit teaching and stays home most of the time, being a spectator of other people’s lives. Isabel’s illness forces Ray to accept a job as policeman in the small town called Maverley and they move there. He often works the night shift so that he can take care of Isabel during the day. With Leah, Ray played the role of introducing her to the vicarious world of movies; with his wife, Ray is her link with the real world, telling her what happens outdoors, Leah’s story and her conflicts and so on. Ray’s stories inspire Isabel and nourish their relationship (Hofmann 51). Isabel gets worse over the years and she is taken to hospital in another town, where she dies after four years, several of them spent in coma. Ray meets Leah at the hospital where his wife Isabel is being treated. In the past, they had shared an outsider position by breaking with family and social conventions. Leah was bold enough to pursue what she thought a more rewarding life, and she experienced how difficult and painful it turned out to be. Isabel and Ray also broke up with family, friends, and became socially isolated. Isabel dies, and Leah and Ray find themselves in a similar situation, deprived of those they loved the most. Both must cope with their losses, and Leah’s are hard (her children’s custody). Although Ray always admired Leah’s determination to overcome her dull existence in Maverley, in the end, Ray is glad not to have been involved with her. He has his own losses to cope with: the death of his wife, Isabel. The girl he’d been talking to, whom he’d once known—​she had spoken of her children. The loss of her children. Getting used to that. A problem at suppertime. An expert at losing, she might be called—​ himself a novice by comparison. (90)

144  Pilar Sánchez Calle And Leah herself seems to regret her persistence in occupying the outsider position: “I should have had my head examined” (88), because of the high price she has paid, her loneliness and the loss of her children’s custody. This chapter has illustrated that traumatic episodes, gender pressures, social expectations and oppressive families are at the core of the characters’ outsiderness. The promises of personal liberation far from the burden of a “real” and a “pragmatic” existence do not necessarily lead to success. The outsider position is a difficult locus which demands a high price to be paid, usually associated to loneliness, personal losses and the breaking of family ties. Alfrida (“Family Furnishings”) and Mona (“Haven”) strive all their lives to return to their family circle; Lewis’s outsiderness is reinforced after his death (“Comfort”); Grant becomes witness to his wife’s attachment to another man (“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”); Jackson (“Train”) always places himself outside any personal engagement; the traumatic death in “Gravel” keeps the narrator in a permanent self-​questioning condition; and Leah, Ray, and Isabel (“Leaving Maverley”) have always occupied the outsider position, experiencing different degrees of deprivation and loss. Works cited Guignery, Vanessa. “Introduction: The Balance of Opposites in Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades.” The Inside of a Shell: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades, edited by Vanessa Guignery, Cambridge Scholars, 2015, pp. 1–​24. Hofmann, Nadja. “ ‘Leaving Maverley’: Life’s Stories in Bits and Pieces.” For (Dear) Life. Close Readings of Alice Munro’s Ultimate Fiction, edited by Eva-​ Sabine Zehelein, Lit Verlag, 2014, pp. 47–​56. Hooper, Brad. The Fiction of Alice Munro: An Appreciation. Praeger, 2008. Huber, Bettina. “ ‘Gravel’: (Re-​)Constructing the Past.” For (Dear) Life. Close Readings of Alice Munro’s Ultimate Fiction, edited by Eva-​Sabine Zehelein, Lit Verlag, 2014, pp. 57–​65. Löschnigg, Maria. “ ‘Oranges and Apples’: Alice Munro’s Undogmatic Feminism.” The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, edited by David Staines, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 60–​78. McGill, Robert. “Alice Munro and Personal Development.” The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, edited by David Staines, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp.136–​53. Mitchell, Lee Clark. More Time. Contemporary Short Stories and Late Styles. Oxford UP, 2019. Müller, Sigrid. “My Home is My ‘Haven’: Patriarchy and/​vs. Female Lib.” For (Dear) Life. Close Readings of Alice Munro’s Ultimate Fiction, edited by Eva-​ Sabine Zehelein, Lit Verlag, 2014, pp. 21–​31. Munro, Alice. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Vintage, 2001.

Exploring the outsider consciousness  145 —​—​—​. Dear Life. 2012. Vintage, 2013. Strauss, Sara. “Memory, Dementia, and Narrative Identity in Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’.” Traces of Aging. Old Age and Memory in Contemporary Narrative, edited by Marta Cerezo Moreno and Nieves Pascual Soler, Transcript Verlag, 2016, pp. 133–​48. Tolksdorf, Udo. “Riding the ‘Train’ of Events.” For (Dear) Life. Close Readings of Alice Munro’s Ultimate Fiction, edited by Eva-​Sabine Zehelein, Lit Verlag, 2014, pp. 77–​85. Ventura, Héliane. “The Skald and the Goddess: Reading ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ by Alice Munro.” Journal of the Short Story in English, 55, Autumn 2010. http://​journ​als.open​edit​ion.org/​jsse/​1121

10 Depiction of enforced identity in Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa—​the novel and the film Ritu Mohan

Introduction The word “Naxalism” represents the activities of the people who follow the Maoist ideology (Awasthi 1). These are common tribal people who had been living in the forests for many years. They were poor and oppressed ones who were completely dependent upon the forests for their survival. And when the government declared certain forest areas as forests reserved for conservation and research, it was an alarm for the residents of these areas. Not only that, the government, in the name of globalization and industrialization, also started constructing dams and bridges on the rivers flowing inside the forests. Regarding this, these tribal people expressed their strong remonstration. The government, in response, offered good compensation and promised to rehabilitate these people appropriately. But the government betrayed these people. They were neither rehabilitated properly nor given fair compensation. It was a big shock for these people. They, consequently, decided to fight for their rights. And, in 1967, in a village named “Naxalbari,” located in the state of West Bengal, the Naxalite movement started for the first time, when a clash between the tribal people and the local landlords took place. These landlords attacked the tribal people with the help of local goons (Awasthi 2). This clash later become more violent and spread to many other states like Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh. The government declared these Naxalite people equivalent to terrorists and started operations against the activities of these people, as some of the leaders among them stated their own politics and tried to run a parallel government. Thus, this movement, which was started against exploitation and inequalities, went astray from its direction. And from then to now, a lot of encounters have taken place between the Naxals and the paramilitary forces. Numerous people from both sides have been killed. It is worth mentioning here that, many innocent people have been killed in these clashes who were not even Maoists or Naxals. DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-10

Depiction of enforced identity in Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa  147 Numerous writers have portrayed the pain of these people through their novels. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, for instance, is a strong response to Indian Maoism. A Fine Balance (1995), by Rohinton Mistry; The God of Small Things (1997), by Arundhati Roy; The White Tiger (2008), by Aravind Adiga; and The Lives of Others (2014), by Neel Mukherjee, are partially or fully grounded on the sufferings of the common people owing to state-​sponsored violence that occurred from time to time due to the clash between the government and the Naxals. Mahasweta Devi’s Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa or Hazaar Churashir Maa (Mother of 1084) was also a retort to the exploitation of common people by the local government with the help of the police. Devi presents her novel as a “mission document” in the expedition of the Naxalite movement. The Novel Ramon Magsaysay Award winner Mahasweta Devi was born in the city of Dacca in East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) in 1926. Her first literary work, Jhansir Rani [Queen of Jhansi], was a fictional restoration of Laxmibai, the brave woman who died fighting against the British army. Her novels Amrita Sanchay (1964) and Adhanmalik (1967) were also set during the colonial period. Her works were influenced by the Naxalite movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Devi is one of the front-​ranking activists for the marginalized sections of society. Besides being a social worker, she is a prolific writer in Bengali, and through her literary works, she is continuously engaged in voicing concerns about the sidelined. Her literary writings are very powerful in depicting the complexities of lived life, and they are representations of the sensibilities that employ innovative uses of language and techniques of narrative, becoming unique in their own way. Her powerful, haunting tales of exploitation and struggle have been seen as rich sites of feminist discourse. Her novel Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa or Hazaar Churashir Maa (Mother of 1084), deals with the psychological and emotional trauma faced by a mother. According to the storyline of the novel, Sujata, an employee in a nationalized bank, lives with her husband, Dibyanath Chatterji, and only child, a son, Brati. They live a middle-​class existence in Calcutta, West Bengal, India, around the early 1970s. Sujata is a soft, sincere Hindu, a religious and kind-​hearted woman. Brati, after finishing his schooling, is now studying in a college. Out of the blue, one day their world is traumatized during the early morning hours when the police tell them that Brati has been killed. The ruthless and drastic assassination of an avant-​garde son fills the mother’s life with trauma and forces her to start a journey of introspection—​ asking questions as to the surroundings and situations which led to her only son’s ill-​timed death. Sujata wrangles to recognize

148  Ritu Mohan Brati’s group, meets all his friends, and discovers that Brati had a girlfriend, Nandini Mitra, and that’s when she finds out that Brati was part of a rebellious group often called “Naxalbari,” a revolutionary leftist group. As she probes deeper into Brati’s former life, she starts to understand her son’s struggle, and chooses to carry on with this only. Fixed in the milieu of the Calcutta of the 1970s at the height of the Naxalite rebellion, Hazaar Churashi ki Maa is the voyage of Sujata Chatterjee—​an “apolitical” mother. This rebellion, primarily started by the farmworkers in Naxalbari against the crooked and feudal landholders and zamindars, finally matured into a movement that also touched urban arenas like Calcutta. Young students from numerous colleges, mostly from upper-​middle-​class families, characterized by Brati and Nandini, joined hands with the farmers to contest the rising forces of subjugation and control, of which the government machinery was a decisive part. Hazaar Churashi ki Maa extends across just over twenty-​four hours in terms of the time frame, but this one day symbolizes an entire expedition and process of evolution in the life of the central character, Sujata Chatterjee. Sujata, like several other women from analogous sections of society, has remained ignorant of the political activities around her. Her husband and son didn’t want to let her know why they were going to Kantapukur as that place was not safe due to the ongoing activities there. Kantapukur is the government mortuary, where the bodies of all those slain by the state mechanism are kept for identification. She is stunned to hear that her youngest son, and the one whom she had always felt closest to, Brati, was a part of this movement. That is the first shock wave for Sujata, who supposed that Brati had kept no secrets from her. She starts analysing her motherhood. In her article “Mother in Fiction and Film,” Madhumita Chakraborty says: One of the major pitfalls of the position accorded to women in Indian society, irrespective of their socio economic identity—​ wherein they have been simultaneously marginalized and deified—​is that although a woman may be reviled and otherwise considered an outcaste from mainstream society, it is her role as a mother that gives her a unique position that no one can replicate. The fact that the cause of the dispossessed and the travails of the marginalized have gained central focus in Mahasweta Devi’s writings has often tended to blur out other important aspects—​for instance—​motherhood. (Chakraborty 118) The three significant women in the novel—​along with Sujata—​Somu’s mother and Nandini are also symbolic of three phases of knowing and

Depiction of enforced identity in Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa  149 three phases of hierarchy. Somu’s mother is resolutely positioned in her socio-​ economic cultural reality—​ the powerlessness and terror within her have a foil in the bitterness in Somu’s sister, who amenably expresses her displeasure at Sujata’s visits to their home. Sujata is in the next stage, the process of knowing and understanding. In many ways she is a sovereign woman, having a job in a public sector bank. For her, this very important day in her life begins by remembering Brati’s birth so many years ago—​the agony and the absenteeism of her husband even at this time—​and ends with her finally able to oppose the hierarchical order. She contests her husband for the first time, leaving him ruffled and voiceless and with no choice but leave the room. At present, two years far ahead from that unfortunate day, when Brati and his companions were exterminated, and tragically also Brati’s birthday, Sujata stands at an intersection in her life. It is apparent that the mother-​child relationships with her other three children—​Jyoti, Nipa and Tuli—​are awfully brittle. All are lost in their world of artificiality and insincerity to have any compassion to the situation round them. Possibly, it is their way of imagining that everything is all right. But Mahasweta Devi locates the detached relationship between Sujata and her other three children within the constructions of masculine society. Numerous critics and theoreticians have written about the construction of motherhood and the motherly notion. Adrienne Rich, in her Of Woman Born, states, “patriarchy could not survive without motherhood and heterosexuality in their institutional forms; therefore they are treated as axioms, as ‘nature’ itself, and not open to question” (Rich 43). Rich admires the exercise of mothering. Mothering, as a female-​defined and centred experience, is actually a place of enablement for women. Psychoanalytic lessons united with feminist studies have proved the most useful in analysing the representations of motherhood and the construction of the maternal role. Psychoanalytic theorists have inspected the mother’s unconscious activities, discovering her deep affection for her children, while sociologists have attempted to trace her definite experience of child nurturing, recognizing the way that society and culture have affected her behaviour and her attitudes (Rich 43). The novel finishes with Sujata’s epiphany and realization, but the film moves on. A few years henceforth, it shows a movement from the “then” to the “now.” It shows Dibyanath (Sujata’s husband) as a transformed man, assisting Sujata in her deeds to accomplish Brati’s vision. Sujata, having been discharged from the bank, now runs a human rights association, assisted by Nitu, one of Brati’s allies, and Nandini. Nandini is portrayed as working amongst the expelled tribal people, by this means representing Mahasweta Devi herself.1 Mahasweta expresses in an interview: “I think a creative writer should have a social conscience. I have

150  Ritu Mohan a duty towards society. Yet I don’t really know why I do these things. The sense of duty is an obsession. I must remain accountable to myself.” (http://​artic​les.times​ofin​dia.ind​iati​mes.com) The Film Adapting a text into film is not an easy job. All film-​makers involved in such an exercise grapple with issues—​how faithful should they remain to the original, the comparative cogency of the adaptation and so on. Consequently, a director has fewer opportunities for experimenting, as he/​she has to remain true to the source. In addition, this becomes more important when a film director is going to make a film on a sensational novel written by a noted playwright like Devi. Yet when one looks at any adaptation, one is supposed to go for it, considering it as a fresh work, leaving out the preconceptions that tend to dominate such adaptations on the basis of faithfulness. Joy Boyum remarks: A work of literature (or anything truly worthy of the name) is by definition a work of complexity and quality which is addressed to an educated elite; that movies, in contrast, are mere entertainment (…) and that to adapt a book to film is thus of necessity to adjust it, not so much to its new medium as to its audience. (Boyum 8) The cinematic version of Devi’s novel was presented by Govind Nihalani in 1998. On 19 August 1940, Nihalani was born in Karachi, Sindh province (presently in Pakistan). His family moved to India after the partition in 1947. He has been associated with Shyam Benegal in many films. Both Nihalani and Benegal are famous for the “Cinema of Substance.” The first film directed by Nihalani was Aakrosh, which was based on a real story scripted by Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar. This film made a huge impact on audiences all over in India and also won the Golden Peacock Award for best film in 1981. From then to now, he has directed many significant films like: Vijeta (1982), Ardh Satya (1983), Party (1984), Aghaat (1985), Tamas, a television series (1987), Drishti (1990), Karam Yoddha (1992), Sanshodhan (1996), Deham (2001), Dev (2004), and so on. His film Hazaar Churashi Ki Maa, the subject of this chapter, reveals the scuffle that happended to free burdened villagers from the control of feudal landlords soon entered into city homes with leftist aggressive youth protesting against what they considered the self-​ righteous, two-​ faced bourgeois society. As the film begins, Sujata Chatterji (Jaya Bachchan), an upper-​middle-​class wife and a mother, is called to the police mortuary to identify her son, Brati Chatterji (Joy Sengupta). Recognized only as

Depiction of enforced identity in Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa  151 number 1084, her son is libelled by his own father, who is more concerned with shushing up the matter. The police decline to turn over the body, and the mother and the daughter watch insensitively as the son is cremated in a monotonous public funeral. The mother then starts questioning the circumstances in which she herself survives, and seeks out a reason for her son’s desire to fight for a major cause and his sense of sacrifice for the masses that the family has had no association with. Her torment and confusion are gradually replaced by her self-​awareness. The film continues at a deliberate and insightful pace so as to be appropriate to its colloquial approach, which is of such an extent that the characters steadily invite the concentrations and hearts of the spectator vis-​à-​vis the hopeless family loss and the state of the social order they now have in common (www. imdb.com). Nihalani perfectly captures the mother’s woe in finding out some unfamiliar facts of her son after death. When police search her son’s room and discover many socialist books and banners, Jaya Bachchan’s incomprehension is strikingly heart touching. She feels she knows each and every aspect of her son’s life, but finally she recognizes that she could never recognise what her son’s was concealing in his heart—​he was concealing his opinions and struggles in the dark to fetch light for others. But the major question that comes to her mind is why? Why did her son hide a substantial episode of his life? Was she disregarded? She therefore sets out on an operation to discover what and why exactly her son was hiding from her. As Patrick Fuery asserts: Films, like other narrative processes, establish social order which are constructed from a variety of sources, including the social order of the created world, the socio-​ political-​ historical contexts which the film draws on, the critical contexts of its reception, and the social contexts of spectator. These orders are all played out within what can be called the architectonics of social orders. Such architectonics operates within themselves to give relational points to events, people, histories, ethics, etc. within the film and outside of it. Part of this process is the construction of boundaries which delimit and establish the “hows” and “whys” of narrative events and objects. (Fuery109) The relationship of films to reality, as Fuery suggests, have produced a long tradition of ideas concerning what this relationship might be, how it differs from another textual forms, how it shapes the very processes of the cinematic apparatus and so on. Part of this issue is, of course, to do with “realism,” but the implications of it resonate throughout the very idea of cinema itself. By considering this relational context of reality and realism,

152  Ritu Mohan we shall be able to speculate further on some of the connections between film and its social orders (Fuery 123). Moreover, the film ends as it begins, with Sujata her solitary metamorphosis being that she is now much more at harmony within herself and with the backdrop round her. With restored consideration of the situation around her, Sujata now feels nearer to her son than she had ever felt so far. The film remains mostly truthful to the original novel of Devi. The movements between time past and time present—​from the time of the phone call from the police station til the bursting of Sujata’s appendix—​is not only fluid, but it also serves the purpose of emphasizing the contradiction that occurs amid the numerous domains. The “real” and the “reel” world seem to have fused naturally. However, the world outdoor has not changed much, as embodied by Nitu’s devious assassination in broad daylight. But by catching one of his murderers, Sujata expresses her newfound cognizance and resilience. Whereas the old Sujata would perhaps have just looked on dumbfounded at such an occasion, the “new” Sujata essentially catches one of the assassins herself, completely unaccompanied, till onlookers come and help her. It is worth noting here that the Indian film industry has also had its specific concepts of motherhood. In many films, there are several mother characters (played by veteran female actors like Nargis, Nirupa Roy, Sulochana Devi, and others) which have left a deep imprint on people for a long time. Doubtlessly, one of the most celebrated dialogues of Hindi cinema is Mere Paas Maa hain [I have Mother]! While talking about such massive appeal, the reknowned Indian cinema critic Poonam Trivedi comments: The popular Indian film has in the recent past been subject to considerable critical attention and exegesis, particularly in its embodiment of a public domain which is expressive of a people’s desires, quests and achievements. From being dismissed as crass and commercial, the popular film has now acquired legitimacy, even an authority, as maker in the evolution of mass culture. (150) Occasionally, a film surpasses the acute abilities and traces that rare triad between the film and its audience. That is the point where one becomes fascinated with the obsessive trauma of the story illustrated in a specific film to make us understand that “People of this kind have also lived their lives for a cause.” Nihalani through his film provides a strong satire on contemporary society. For example, there is a scene when a party is organized at the Chatterjee house to celebrate the engagement ceremony of Brati’s sister on the eve of only his second death anniversary. The

Depiction of enforced identity in Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa  153 argument spoken by Sujata in the background reveals the extreme condition of her state of mind. The scene also unearths the naked actuality of the capitalist system and becomes tremendously against the stances of the elite class. It is of course significant to point out that in the novel, Sujata dies from a burst of appendix at the party, and that Nihalani modifies this incident and it is natural, for he would not have been successful to retain the revolution commenced by his son Brati (Singh 15). This portrayal of the incident makes us ruminate about the real happenings on which the film is grounded, and when the framework of such a movie was shaped by a director like Nihalani, the entire story leaves greater effect on our mind. Furthermore, it leads us to think and reassess our specific value system. Jaya Bachchan, playing the intense role of Mrs Sujata Chatterjee, successfully endeavours to portray a sense of self from the extensive psychosomatic and emotional trauma, and gains some deep insights, during the passage of the film, into a composite connection between personal and apolitical phases of her social life. It is quite strange to get how an employed woman of Calcutta in that era could be so blind, so ignorant and so apolitical, but later, the way the film transforms the novel makes Sujata’s self-​constructed seclusion not only reasonable but also symbolic of a particular social stratum, which desires to have nothing to do with political affairs. As Chakraborty notes: The passage of two years since the passing away of Brati and his associates are marked by subtle visual cinematic notes. Nandini too is changed from the Nandini of two years back—​the physical scars are hidden behind dark glasses, which also hide the near blindness of her eyes, the spirit remains but the mental scars come back to haunt her again and again. Sujata herself remains an anomaly in the hypocritical world around her—​ travelling by rickshaw into the slums of Calcutta a few days after Brati’s death; she is far removed from the world of Somu and his family and fails to comprehend the looks given to her by the locals. (120) Her total realization of the hypocritical world comes at the end of this day—​the bursting of the appendix, symbolic of labor pain, signals the birth of a new Sujata, passing from severe trauma, a new course of beginning to know and coming close to her son. As she lies in hospital, we go back to the first scene of the film—​of her going in alone into a maternity ward to give birth to Brati. In her mind, she recalls the nurse carrying her son to her for the first time. Brati was hers, of course, hers alone; likewise, she is alone with this newfound intense epiphany. This is for the first time she has been happy after the long journey of trauma.

154  Ritu Mohan Final remarks Lettering a novel of such delicate and so far revealing stark reality of early days of Naxalburi with a strand of mother-​son relationship entails an extraordinary aptitude and zeal what Mahasweta posses doubtlessly. On the other hand, moulding a novel into a two-​and-​a-​half-​hour-​long movie demands more than astounding expertise. Govind Nihalani makes sure that he unmistakably interprets each and every vital incident of the novel in a limited “filmic” time span. His characters voice the dialogues, which explicate the trauma strikingly but concisely. The film, determined to bring a more cinematic closure to the tale, presents the woman running a prosperous human rights organization and transforming her unsympathetic husband into sharing her viewpoint. In order to foreground the trauma faced by Sujata during her voyage of self-​actualization, the film places more stress on her psychological discourses and interior feelings. The film also plays on visual contrasts. For example, all hints of Brati’s presence have vanished from the house less than two days after his passing, and Dibyanath is obviously prickly to have the police in the house probing his belongings. The distinction is presented through the scenes on his last day alive, as he sits in the living room with his mother and sister-​in-​law chatting about ordinary things. The contrast between the light of that day and the darkness in the same room just two days later, in addition to the evaporation of all clues about Brati, is thus enormously metaphorical. Many observers have concentrated on the process of the conversion of a novel into film, where often a well-​known work of great literature is adapted for the cinema and expectations about the “fidelity” of the screen version come to the fore. For many people, the comparison between a novel and its film version results in an almost unconscious prioritizing of the fictional origin over the resulting film, and so the main purpose of comparison becomes the measurement of the success of the film in its capacity to realize what are held to be the core meanings and layers of ethics of the source text. Nonetheless, Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa is not a film made for the common audience—​its actual leitmotif restricts it from being so. Apart from the pure commercial or masala films, this film was made for a particular set of aware audiences. Bollywood movies, regretful to say, have awkwardly inclined to be clearly separated into popular and art cinema, or the cinema of substance. Nihlani’s film has for its cast two veteran actors of popular Indian cinema—​Anupam Kher and Jaya Bachchan—​and it is a compliment to their acting expertise that they fit so flawlessly into not-​so-​ stylish roles. The cast members are also well chosen, for they altogether collaborate to portray the phase of 1970s Bengal into 1990s India. This film proves successful in depicting the trauma of political rampage faced

Depiction of enforced identity in Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa  155 by a mother. The film has also earned the opportunity to be included in one of the most faithful adaptations of text into film in the history of Bollywood. Note 1 Since Mahasweta Devi herself is a social worker and is associated with many NGOs that work for the welfare of Tribal people, the character of Nandani is shown as similar to her.

Works cited Awasthi, Sonali. “The Naxalite Movement in India.” International Journal of Law Management & Humanities, vol. 1, 2018, pp. 1–​12. Boyum, J. Gould. Double Exposure: Fiction into Film. Seagull, 1989. Chakraborty, Madhumita. “Mother in Fiction and Film: The Mother in Hazar Churashir Maa (Mother of 1084).” Muse India: The Literary E-​journal, vol. 19, no. 1, 2009, pp. 114–​26, www.musein​dia.com. Devi, Mahasweta. Hazaar Chaurasir Maa. Translated by Shamik Bandyopadhyay, Seagull, 1997. —​—​—​. In the Name of the Mother. Translated by Radha Chakraborty, Seagull, 2004. Fuery, Patrick. New Developments in Film Theory. Macmillan, 2000. Nihalani, Govind, director. Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa. Performance by Jaya Bachchan, Anupam Kher, Nandita Das, Seema Biswas, Nihalani Films. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Norton, 1986. Singh, Ram Bhagwan. “Mother of 1084: A Critique of Naxal Movement.” Cyber Literature, vol. 38, 2016, pp. 13–​22. Trivedi, Poonam. “  ‘Filmi’ Shakespeare.” Literature-​Film Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 2, 2007, pp. 148–​ 59. gale.com/​ apps/​ doc/​ A165917103/​ AONE?u=​ anon~130307b8&sid=​googleScholar&xid=​39f2f48a. Zywietz, Bernd. “Hazar Chaurasi ki Maa,” 23 February 2023. https://​scr​eens​hot-​ onl​ine.blogs​pot.com/​2011/​07/​haz​aar-​chaur​asi-​ki-​maa.htm.

11 A transmodern reading of Joanna Kavenna’s Zed Digital reason and the attempt to transcend Cartesian dialectics Jessica Aliaga-​Lavrijsen Introduction: transmodernity and transmodern literature In recent years, authors such as Rosa María Rodríguez Magda (1989), Enrique Dussel (1999), Marc Luyckx Ghisi (1999), Etienne Le Roy (2011), Nicanor Perlas (2011), and Ziauddin Sardar (2004a), among others, have identified a change of paradigm taking place after the 1980s, when postmodernism was proclaimed to be over (Hutcheon 2002), and have termed it “transmodernity.”1 Transmodernity signals the transcendence of the postmodern paradigm (Rodríguez Magda 2017) and refers to a transnational and virtual reality (VR) that is telepresent, interactive, unstable, and interconnected (Aliaga-​Lavrijsen and Yebra-​Pertusa 8). In the early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies—​especially the technology related to informatization and communication—​ has given place to “a global transformation process” and it has restructured the world as we knew it (Bustamante 85). For this reason, technology has been considered the main factor in the configuration of the new transmodern society (87). The development of technical knowledge and telecommunication has been associated with “the hegemony of digital reason” and the rise of a “cyber-​universe,” in which the subjects interact virtually (Rodríguez Magda 2017, n.p.). The capitalist expansion of globalization and the creation of the global market, which have increased mobility and internationalization, have also been considered key factors in the development of the transmodern age (Aliaga-​Lavrijsen 2018, n.p.). Among the most essential characteristics of transmodernity, we could highlight that globalization has melted differentiated places into an indistinct global place and transformed local economies into a global market (Mura 72). Moreover, the growing development and interaction of technological and computerized artefacts has brought about a change in our perception of space and time and a promotion of new formulations of reality (72). DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-11

A transmodern reading of Joanna Kavenna’s Zed  157 Accordingly, authors such as Alan Kirby or Alison Gibbons have hypothesized that this paradigm change has also been reflected in contemporary fiction of the last two or three decades. Kirby believes that somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies restructured, violently and forever, the relationship between text, reader, and author (2006, n.p.). Furthermore, Gibbons has claimed that “the world—​or in any case the literary cosmos—​is rearranging itself” (n.p.). This shift from postmodernity to transmodernity suggests that we need a new interpretative grid capable of articulating the new reality (Onega and Ganteau 7). Therefore, it is my hypothesis that a transmodern approach to a contemporary Scottish science fiction (SF) novel such as Joanna Kavenna’s Zed (2019) is especially appropriate to analyse the representation of a near-​future world in which virtual interactions have shaped a new reality. As the analysis of Kavenna’s Zed will show, the transmodern age has altered our perception of space-​time, as well as of the self, since the development of the internet and of virtual reality (VR) have allowed the coexistence of multiple superimposed realities in the same instance. Despite the fact that contemporary science understands space and time as part of the same reality, as space-​time, human thinking still contemplates space and time as two distinguishable aspects of reality. As Markos Novak has stated, “ordinary space has become just a subset of a composite ‘newspace’ that interweaves local, remote, telepresent, interactivated, and virtual spacetime into the new spatial continuum that is the focus of emerging transarchitectures” (n.p.). Moreover, the analysis will also focus on the creation of a new artificial intelligence-​ engineered language—​ originally called “BeetleSpeak” (Kavenna 90)—​ a new and artificially created language,2 which later becomes “Bespoke” (149), and which appears to be more in accord with the novel’s transmodern cyber-​ reality, in which “digital reason” has become hegemonic. This non-​binary and non-​linear artificial language might become a tool to express a different type of contemporary thinking. Or perhaps it will be an unsuccessful attempt. Joanna Kavenna’s Zed and digital culture Scottish writer Joanna Kavenna has published five novels, as well as several essays and articles. Her latest SF novel, Zed, offers a satirical and dark-​ humorous look at the digital age and megacorporations. In the dystopic future-​London represented in the novel, “[t]‌echnology has invaded and colonized every corner of the social and domestic space” (Beck 93). The novel’s technocratic Britain shows how society tries to adapt to the quick technology moves, and this often caused “cutting-​ edge technology”

158  Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen companies to make mistakes (Kavenna 360). However, and consistent with the transmodern literature being produced in the last decades, ethics and personal accountability have special relevance in the text, and corporate technological mistakes are neither inexcusable nor innocent. In Zed, everything from education, employment, the economy, the media, surveillance and people’s behaviour are controlled by a megacorporation called “Beetle,” which is like “like a combination of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, but with an even more scandalous helping of state power” (Beck 93). Moreover, everything citizens do and say is being constantly being monitored by cameras and other technological devices such as “Beetlebands” measuring people’s vitals; “VIPAs” (Very Intelligent Personal Assistants); “VIADs” (Very Intelligent Automated Driving Systems); and AI-​controlled home appliances. This exhaustive monitoring is Beetle’s main tool for its real business, “lifechain,” an all-​ encompassing predictive algorithm to foresee citizens’ behaviour. As one of the characters in Zed comments, “Pre-​emptive arrest has been one of our greatest weapons in the battle against crime and terror” (74). Readers of SF literature will immediately be reminded of “The Minority Report,” by Philip K. Dick (1956)—​later adapted for the big screen by Steven Spielberg (2002)—​in which a Pre-​Crime3 police force unit can arrest suspects before they commit a crime. In both stories, clairvoyant humans, or “precogs,” visualize future crimes, and their thoughts are transmitted to a machine that analyses the data, which is used by the police as the basis of their predictive policing system. Free will is, of course, one of the central topics to be questioned in SF dealing with algorithm predictions, and Zed is no exception to this, as we shall see in BeetleSpeak, (Orwellian) totalitarianism and free will. Not surprisingly for us, like any other system, error can occur. In Kavena’s novel, error is thought to be human, not part of the system: as human beings seem to have an innate “disappointing tendency to mess up perfect systems” (46). Beetle describes these human errors and environmental errors—​which include things such as the bright light causing a perception ellipsis in an ANT killing an innocent civilian (47)—​as “Zed events” (46). One of the characters, Frannie, explains Zed as “the stuff that doesn’t quite fit within every paradigm. Or, the anomalies that prove the system” (39). Zed4 are just the glitches that every immaculate system might have (39). Therefore, they are not caused by human error but rather by chaos theory,5 by the instability inherent to every system and that disrupts the lifechain (40). As we shall see in BeetleSpeak, (Orwellian) totalitarianism and free will, Zed events disrupt organized systems and undermine “public confidence in lifechain algorithms and thus the Sus-​ Las” (74), so this is something the megacorporation wants to hide from the public. Their technology should appear to be perfect and infallible.

A transmodern reading of Joanna Kavenna’s Zed  159 Linked to this is that data input should be clearer, and “[w]‌ords must become more reliable as input. Therefore, language must be adjusted, to make it less susceptible to error” (56). So, a new simplified version of language should be used. The above-​mentioned technological advances, as well as the new virtual interactions established by people, have shaped a new reality. Citizens not only interact with virtual representations of other individuals, but they also interrelate with all kinds of (Beetle) devices, especially by means of the spoken word. As we shall see, in the novel’s cyber-​reality, new forms of human representation, along with innovative systems of communication, are required. In transmodernity our sense of locality, community and home are strongly connected to globalization (Robertson 30; Abu-​Lughod), and the local is constructed on a trans-​or super-​local basis (Robertson 26). In this new context, a different and transmodern urban place is conceived, where the glocal and the virtual meet in a new multifold reality. Accordingly, the transmodern space is constructed under the tension of globalization and regionalization, of non-​located medial networks and the local assertion of identity (Hess-​Lüttich 2). In the new millennium, the emergence of cutting-​edge communication technologies has restructured our relationship with the world, and “a new dominant culture logic is emerging” (Gibbons n.p.). In transmodernity, as the technological revolution continues its steady progression, space-​time has become even more complex than the postmodern fragmentary and discontinuous space and time. The prefix trans-​ implies that this movement “reaches beyond”; it is not just an inter-​territory, it means something “further than.” With the particle trans-​, another new territory is created. Boundaries are not crossed, but transgressed, penetrated and transformed (Aliaga-​ Lavrijsen and Yebra Pertusa 105–​06). Moreover, Transmodern hyperspace has brought an increasing global hyperconnectivity that cannot be turned off. In the last decades, “new forms of relationship, social networks (such as chat sites, Facebook, Twitter)” have appeared (Rodríguez Magda 2019, 22). The isolation of the postmodern individual has given place to “a style of static connectivity, through which groups communicate and interact” (Rodríguez Magda 2017, n.p., my translation). With the hegemony of the virtual “we live among simulacra” (Rodríguez Magda 2019, 22), but this absence of the referent does not imply absolute relativism or a lack of meaning. Rodríguez Magda has defined this new relation to the simulacra as “a simulorgy, a discipline that seeks to describe how the simulacra that we endow with effects of truth are generated” (23, original emphasis). As she further explains, “by accepting the interweaving of power and knowledge, a conscious critique emerges that must reveal how these simulacral networks conceal or reveal certain strategies

160  Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen of power. This is what I have called simulocracy” (23, original emphasis). Consequently, postmodern notions of presence and of authenticity have been transformed, and transmodern simulacral networks have become tangible everyday realities that transcend postmodern understandings of place (Aliaga-​Lavrijsen 2021, 48). Our subjective experience and understanding of time—​space-​time—​ has also been altered due to the impact of real-​time communication and the hegemony of digital culture and globalization forces. Modern technology has “woven a network of communications which puts each part of the world into almost instant contact with all the other parts” (Bohm 1). Conceptions of space-​time have been altered in several ways due to the hegemony of technology and the “transmissibility of information in real time” (Rodríguez Magda 2017, n.p.). The sensation of inhabiting an “instantaneous world” in which events occur at a “breath-​taking speed” is something that many people immersed in digital societies experience (Rodriguez Magda 2004, n.p.). With the advent and expansion of the internet, we have discovered worldwide simultaneity. It has feigned a sense of time according to which the individual could be in any place at the same time and participate in everything happening elsewhere. The present is everywhere, and one can communicate with people all over the place (Nowotny 27). As Andrea Mura has explained, in transmodernity, globalization and the development of informatization have brought about “dramatic transformations in the way in which space, time and communication are perceived” (72). These forces have motivated the rise of virtuality, which has brought about “the emergence of a new way of experiencing space and reality” (72) by means of the new technological structure of multimedia communication, as well as the creation of what he calls “spatial displacement,” which enacts “both the dislocation and re-​shaping of notions of space and related cognitions of time” (72, original emphasis). Telepresence, VR and “newspace” Virtual reality (VR) has been defined as “a simulated environment in which a perceiver experiences the feeling of presence by means of a communication medium, a phenomenon referred to as telepresence” (Riva et al.). Telepresence opens up a new way of being there and of perceiving, and thus it is common to find VR in SF literature to pose strong philosophical questions about the nature of “real” reality (Booker 323). Telepresence seems to be a new way of establishing a relation with others and inscribing oneself in the world. VR, or “real virtuality” (RV) as it appears in the novel, revives the Platonic anxiety about truth and authenticity, already reawakened in postmodernism by Jean Baudrillard’s

A transmodern reading of Joanna Kavenna’s Zed  161 precession of simulacra.6 Nevertheless, as Rodríguez Magda has postulated, transmodernity goes a step further in the realm of hyperreality and embraces “the abandonment of representation, the realm of simulation, of the simulation that is known to be real” (Rodríguez Magda 1989, 141–​42, my translation). As she has further stated: The primacy of the virtual places us, after the death of old metaphysics, in the challenges of a new cyberontology, of the hegemony of digital reason. But it is not the festive celebration, without any ethical and political commitment, of a supposed death of reality, but rather of the necessary consideration of how material reality has been amplified and modified by virtual reality. (Rodríguez Magda 2017, n.p.) In the context of cybernetics, it has often been argued that the traditional (and perhaps outdated) discourse of physicality has been transcended in transmodernity. As Camile A. Silva has put it, reality might have multiplied beyond the body, as “new electronic technologies and advanced digital media have separated realities from the realm of the body and transformed experiences into a ubiquitous event” (Silva v). She goes on to say, “[S]‌pace is finally getting rid of its physicality and is now giving way to virtual spaces, where digital technology emerges in the form of data and information” (2). In fact, several studies have compared VR experiences with out-​of-​body experiences, as participants of experiments with VR have often “mislocalized their own bodily selves as they drifted toward their virtual bodies and thus to a position outside their bodily borders” (Riva et al. 1242). “They felt located at a distance from their body” (Lenggenhager et al. 1242). So, VR does not imply that physical places disappear; instead, they are dislocated. As Kathy Rae Huffman argues “a physical place is still a necessary space” (136). Rather, it presents a new reality, the reality of cyberspace, resulting from principles of collaborative communication, where new uses of language, space and time are required (136). In Zed, the proliferation of “real virtuality” and the creation of this new transmodern hybrid space—​which Novak refers to as “newspace”—​ leads to a palimpsestic superimposition of realities and selves in which physical reality and authenticity seem not to have been completely transcended. Different times and spaces overlap, and the self has to establish a new way of connecting to its hybrid environment: “The individual subject, the actually real Douglas Varley, for example, real in body that is, entered the RVcave (…) and found himself, most usually, in a small room full of cameras” (Kavenna 38). As the narrator explains, “[i]‌n order to create a perfect avatar, you needed about five hundred

162  Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen cameras” (38). Another option is to use “holographic technology, which produced shimmering, primitive avatars” (38). However, “[t]he actually real Douglas Varley needed a highly convincing avatar” which would record his every twitch and stammer (38). To maintain the old notions of authenticity and identity, and to “ensure that the Real Douglas Varley was the actually real Douglas Varley,” and not someone who had filmed him and created an avatar with those images, they should “re-​ authenticate their avatar whenever they entered the RV cave” (38). So, it seems that, even if it is only for practical reasons, authenticity of the self is still a usable concept. Additionally, VR allows for an “authentic” setting of the avatar, which enables, for example, Francesca’s avatar to bite her nails when the real Francesca feels nervous and does the same (51). As the character herself explains, she dislikes the real and non-​real distinction: “I prefer to talk about my Real Virtuality elf. This is the cogent manifestation of all possible selves, in real time, in all time” (52). Eloise, on the other hand, who defines this thinking as “BeetleBabble” (91)—​referring to BeetleSpeak, a language created with the intention to simplify language and make it into a comprehensible and closed (and controllable) system of meaning (90)—​and digital and non-​binary nature of this new thinking, “preferred an absolute schism between her real self and her unreal self” (52). Nevertheless, authenticity can be faked too: “It was impossible to know” (358). For example, as Douglas Varley acknowledges, some people, like Frannie, were “so good at being authentic, or fake, or a bewildering and perfect hybrid of the two” that one could ever tell (358). In this sense, it might be argued that authenticity has lost its meaning in an age were “Real Virtuality [has become] real” (223). Furthermore, the exchange of information mediated by an interface or avatar might blur one’s sense of “being in the world,” as Martin Heidegger puts it. For instance, when Guy identifies himself to the door, so it opens allowing him to go through it, the door asks him: “You are, are you?” “I am,” said Guy. Am I? I am what I am. A body, despite everything. It was infuriating, to be this body, still. And trapped! Because he was still a body, he couldn’t walk through the door and he couldn’t become the door. (311) But, despite the hegemony of the digital in this new transmodern reality, physical reality still matters, as Guy Matthias experiences when the talking door won’t let him in (311).

A transmodern reading of Joanna Kavenna’s Zed  163 BeetleSpeak, (Orwellian) totalitarianism and free will As commented above, people do not only interact with their avatars, but they also speak to their technological devices and appliances, both at home and in public spaces. As the narrator explains, this might lead some of them to experience a certain degree of anguish: “everything spoke to Guy, every appliance, every element in the room” (223). As further narrated: Guy “had made this, the whole empire of talk!” (223). He had worked very hard to make this a reality, “[y]‌et nothing understood anything. Or anyone. (…) [I]t was turning into a bedlam of words” (223). The very nature of organic language, echoing other words, the existence of metaphors, the subjectivity of words, “the way each person applies their own varieties of imprecision to words” (250) is seen as a problem to be solved, a cataclysm to be “bespoken away” (250). Therefore, if one eliminates these varieties of an organic and complex system, by fixing elements and simplifying things, it might become a more controllable and predictive system. As mentioned in the introduction section, some linguists at Beetle create an artificial language, first called “BeetleSpeak”—​“a new, beautiful, simple language” (91)—​which later becomes “Bespoke,” a more advanced and simplified version that has been made by AI working with humans (252). AI chose the most popular word and eliminated all those sharing “the same basic meaning” (252). With Bespoke, Guy explains, “[a]‌word was a word. It was integer, with a fixed meaning. Good was good and bad was bad. People could bespeak words and there would be no hurtful, confusing or mystifying words” (250). Guy seems to be obsessed with eliminating uncertainties and instabilities, as he believes that systems containing “perilous ambiguities” cause “pain and suffering” (91). Moreover, he thinks that “the world would be less prone to Zed events if language became more stable” (91). He panics “about the meaning or non-​meaning of everything or nothing” and has the feeling that “[n]othing meant what it was meant to mean!” (223). Bespoke does appear to him unnatural and artificial, unmeaningful, and detached and cold. As he puts it: “I want there to be no more unmeaning and only love” (223). Many readers will interpret Beetlespeak and Bespoke as a reference to George Orwell’s Newspeak (1949). In fact, Professor Rosalind Gallagher—​linguistic expert at the University of Harvard that Gus first contacts to assess him on BeetleSpeak—​makes explicit “archaic references to dystopian fiction” such as Orwell’s (91): “Furthermore, do you really want to refer so obviously to Orwell?” “Aren’t we post-​ironic about all that stuff?” said Guy. “Don’t be so Orwellian, you cantankerous old fossil, that sort of thing?”

164  Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen “By your terms, that should be you bad-​tempered old fossil,” said Professor Gallagher. (91, original emphasis) In Orwell’s futurist dystopia Nineteen Eighty-​Four, Newspeak is the language of the totalitarian superstate of Oceania, and it is an artificial and controlled language of simplified grammar and vocabulary developed by Ingsoc. Newspeak is an instrument designed to dumb down by gradually diminishing the range of what was thinkable by eliminating, contracting and manufacturing words. The implication of this new language is that it shapes and limits the individual’s mental processes, as complex thoughts are reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. In Zed, “the connection between language and consciousness” is also explored (Beck 2020, 95). When Guy attends a meeting with the Beetle Ethics Committee—​a boardroom in which “all members were disguised as beetles” (251)—​conducted in Bespoke, he tries to convince Beetle 5 that language creates feelings, and that if one eliminates certain language, if for example one cannot express or say: “I hate you because you are a woman (…) I cannot hate you because you are a woman. The thought is lost entirely” (252). Bespoke “by reducing understanding also limit the thoughts you could convey” (274), makes the “Beetle monopoly” total (274). From the very notion of algorithms used to predict human behaviour and the notion of free will (33) to the existence of Zed events or anomalies in the system, the predictive lifechain operates “on the assumption that free will was inevitable, but that even free humans may exert their free will in predictable ways” (33). It is suggested here that life can be understood as data that can be collected and analysed. Beetle detractors, for example, regard “lifechain as a form of determinism” (34) that precludes free will, as it controls everything in their lives: their jobs, their relationships, even their bodies, as sterilization of certain people is suggested based on their predictions (34). Also, the economy could be considered as a deterministic force. Beetle controls the whole economy, and the lives of UK citizens. Universities request fees to be paid in BeetleBits—​some time ago, pounds had to be changed into this cryptocurrency—​just like any other Beetle services—​including the 98 per cent of driverless cars and 91 per cent of cars in any sort (35)—​and Beetle is “the mayor employer of humans in the UK, the US and Europe” (36). The idea is that the algorithm will influence people’s buying choices, but also their “existential choices, reconditioning choices, political choices” even “not to vote the wrong way in elections and so on” (88). So statistically, everybody will be related to Beetle in one way or another. “They were members of an enlightened liberal democracy” which is in fact a

A transmodern reading of Joanna Kavenna’s Zed  165 totalitarian government ruled by a megacorporation (88). In a sense, the reality is not that different from Orwell’s Oceania, despite its anti-​capitalist origin, which highly contrasts with that of Kavenna’s London, which is fully immersed in advanced capitalism. The above-​mentioned explicit allusion to Orwell made by Professor Gallager and to Newspeak might have put readers of SF on guard, and they might take a step further and associate the symbol of the beetle to Orwell, as it appears as a metaphor on several occasions in Ninety Eighty-​ Four—​usually referring to beetle-​like men “with a flat face and tiny, suspicious eyes” (73), who “who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries” (41), “little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party” (40). These beetle-​like men are small, almost insignificant (73), and Winston Smith—​one of the characters in Orwell’s novel, who had worked at the Ministry of Truth, and who has been tortured by the Party—​denounces that the “Thought police had watched him like a beetle under a magnifying glass” (182). In his cell, he feels diminished to nothing and in the end, his human values have been completely destroyed by the Party. Thus, for the knowing reader, the beetle in Zed has some negative connotations. In fact, the symbol of the beetle appears already printed on the very first page of the novel inscribed in a circle. This symbol resembles Guy’s description of a qubit: “as a beetle trapped in a sphere, completely contained and unable to get out” (143). As he further describes, “[p]‌ossibly the beetle was dead, but at the same time and in line with cutting-​edge theories of physics it was also alive” (143), making reference to Schrödinger’s thought experiment to illustrate a paradox of quantum superimposition.7 Despite the potentiality of these paradoxes, Guy envisions them in a more entropic or existential way, as he imagines qubits as “a strange diminishing series of sphere-​beetles, getting smaller and smaller (…) until he could no longer see anything at all” (143). Linked to the above-​mentioned feeling of insignificance that Orwell’s Winston experienced, we could interpret the beetle as a shared metaphor for something related to smallness, insignificance and lack of power, mirrored in Kavenna’s Guy: “The endless retreat into smallness frightened him. (…) He didn’t want to disappear himself” (143). The printed symbol of the beetle in the first chapter undergoes an entropic transformation and starts losing its original shape by incorporating chaotic elements as the chapters in the novel advance. Nevertheless, as chapters progress, readers realize that the beetle on ­chapter 1 is chaotically deformed and being gradually substituted by another symbol, leaving the letter “z,” or “zed,” as described on the novel’s first page.

166  Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen From the closed and oppressive sphere-​ beetle, we move towards “enlightenment and order” (351), and towards the opportunities of the “zed,” the organic and vegetal symbol in the last chapter. In a sense, the entropic evolution of the symbol throughout Zed’s chapters, from order into an organic chaos, mirrors the ideological and social and revolution suggested at the end of the novel, which is “a moment of pure Zed” (315). Transmodern science, non-​binary languages and paradoxical thinking One of the characters in the novel, Tara, is writing “her doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Post-​Humanism and Cartesian Dialectics’ ” (90). This suggests to readers that transmodern technological advances, telepresence and the evolution of language are inextricably linked to our perception of reality. In one of Zed’s intertexts, Ninety Eighty-​Four, Winston, tries to write down official slogans of the Party which represent an illogical or paradoxical thought, such as “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY” and “TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE” (182). These slogans are defined in Orwell’s novel as “doublethink,” which has been described as “a process of indoctrination in which subjects are expected to simultaneously accept two conflicting beliefs as truth, often at odds with their own memory or sense of reality” (McArthur 321). Citizens are supposed to accept that “[s]‌ometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once” (182). As Orwell explained in his review of Bertrand Russell’s Power: A New Social Analysis: “It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so” (n.p.). Nevertheless, in Zed, the political element and the critique of propaganda in Orwell’s work are brought to chaos theory and quantum physics, where concrete reality and rational thought are being questioned radically. Paradoxes abound in the novel, as well as notions of instability, which can be linked to chaos theory. As commented in Introduction: transmodernity and transmodern literature, the nature of chaos theory is paradoxical, as it connects randomness or unpredictability and deterministic laws (Britannica n.p.). Young’s double-​ slit experiment helped us understand the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, that is, nature at the level of atomic and subatomic particles. At this level, objects behave as particles and as waves, something that has been named the “wave-​particle duality” .Albert Einstein referred to this duality in the following terms: It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality;

A transmodern reading of Joanna Kavenna’s Zed  167 separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do. (278) It appears difficult to use ordinary language to have grasp the paradoxical nature of these scientific models. The study of the world of atoms led physicists to realize “that our common language is not only inaccurate, but totally inadequate to describe atomic and subatomic reality” (Capra 53). As Werner Heisenberg noted, “The most difficult problem (…) concerning the use of language arises in quantum theory” (177). Quantum physics breaks Cartesian dialectics and embraces logical paradox on several levels. It is not easy to grasp these concepts in ordinary language. But people who like the arts, as well as people familiar with the spiritual traditions of the East,8 for example, know that there are many ways to express and transcend the world of opposites. This is beautifully symbolized in the novel through the element of the qubit. The qubit—​ a term coined by Benjamin Schumacher (1995)—​which is the basic unit of quantum information, serves as a symbol for the transmodern reality and thought. In contrast with the postmodern basic unit of information, which is the binary bit, and whose state can only be either 0 or 1, a qubit is a two-​state system, that is, it can be in its both states simultaneously (Nielsen 13). In Zed, the Professor leading the qubit programme at CERN tells Guy that “[t]‌he qubits were kept as tiny particles magnetically suspended in extreme cold, just fractions of a degree above absolute zero. This was to keep every qubit in a state of superimposition, so it was simultaneously a one and a zero” (Kavenna 145). In a manner, the qubit has a certain mystical aura, as its nature cannot be really grasped by common people using linear thinking. The qubit is, as Guy puts it, “not what we imagine and yet it is. It is anything we would like, and yet all things at the same time” (143). It is “[t]he celestial egg, the cosmic egg” (143). Qubits and BeetleSpeak transcend binary and linear thinking. In a sense, BeetleSpeak at first results in being good at representing paradoxical realities, and a certain transcendence or break in Cartesian thinking might be achieved, in the human tendency to resolve paradoxes. It could thus be argued that this non-​binary and non-​linear language reflects one of the characteristics that some authors such as Irena Ateljevic or Gloria Steinheim have identified as being specifically transmodern: the anti-​linear and relational model (Ateljevic 213), also termed “circularity paradigm” (Steinheim 189–​290). In this line of thought—​and following Rodríguez Magda’s theorization of the term (1989, 13)—​ “transmodernism and tradition are not two opposing worldviews but a new synthesis of both” (Sardar 2004b, n.p.).

168  Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen Nevertheless, most characters, such as Guy, “liked the old world. One or zero. One or the other. Not both” (145). Ordinary language, as opposed to the new artificial language, gives human beings a certain stability. Furthermore, as this initially promising and multidirectional language is further simplified by the company Beetle, and it becomes “even more neutral” (354), it starts collapsing. It is true that it had some advantages, such as the fact that “Bespoke was a new and innovative way to enhance understanding between people and nations” (295). However, “by reducing understanding [it] also limited the thought you could convey” (274) and then, the “Beetle monopoly was total” (274). Everything depended on the megacorporation. Until it is destroyed by some anonymous hackers, it becomes nonsense and thus completely useless (320). Communication in this artificial language is no longer possible. Conclusions As the analysis has shown, the future technologically governed London represented in Joanna Kavenna’s Zed represents a world in which individuals interact virtually among themselves and with everyday machines and appliances. The rising interaction of technological and computerized artefacts has generated a transformation in human perception of space-​ time, creating what has been termed “newspace” (Novak n.p). This space for telepresence has also serious implications for the construction and interrelation of self and world. Despite the “primacy of the virtual,” as Rodríguez Magda has put it (2017, n.p.), several characters in the novel feel a certain anxiety about the transmodern reconfiguration of the relationship of self and its environment, and long for old notions of authenticity and direct human contact or love. The reality of this new cyberspace, resulting from principles of collaborative communication, might require new uses or even the creation of a new of language that will enable people to think and communicate in non-​binary and non-​linear terms, more in accordance with contemporary physics. When linguists at Beetle company engineer, with the help of AI, a language in accordance with the novel’s transmodern reality, the initial acceptance of this new communication system soon collapses, as characters seem to struggle to adapt to it, and in the end the system is destroyed by means of a computer virus. In a nutshell, the transmodern paradigm change and the age of digital reason do not seem to arrive without some struggle in which Cartesian dialectics and old notions of reality, such as authenticity or binary language, still play an important role in the negotiation and creation of new meanings.

A transmodern reading of Joanna Kavenna’s Zed  169 Notes 1 For other names or labels used to refer to this new period, see: Aliaga-​Lavrijsen 2018, n.p. 2 “BeetleSpeak,” as is its more advanced and simplified version, “Bespoke,” has been made by AI (252). 3 The term “pre-​crime,” coined by Philip K. Dick (1956) to refer to crimes not yet committed, mirrors George Orwell’s term “thoughtcrime” (1949), which described illegal thoughts and opinions against the government, which could result in actions against it. 4 Zed might refer to Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606) and “thou unnecessary letter!” (act 2, scene 2), as well as to the Egyptian hieroglyph “djet,” a pillar-​ like symbol representing stability (40). 5 Chaos theory proposes that what were once considered completely random states of disorder and irregularities within the apparent randomness of complex systems, are in fact underlying patterns, interconnectedness, constant feedback loops and self-​organization. The nature of chaos theory is paradoxical, as it connects randomness or unpredictability and deterministic notions (Britannica, n.p.). 6 Some authors consider that postmodernism still holds and that virtual and augmented reality “are just the latest manifestations of that drive to simulation that Baudrillard detected and explored in the 1980s.” For more on this, see: Aliaga-​Lavrijsen and Yebra-​Pertusa 237–​44. 7 Examples of quantum superimposition are Thomas Young’s double-​slit experiment (1802), and a quantum logical qubit state, in which two apparently opposing states coexist. 8 Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki writes: “The fundamental idea of Buddhism is to pass beyond the world of opposites” (18).

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12 Hospitable loci The spatialization of oppositional world views in eighteenth-​century women’s writings Yolanda Caballero-​Aceituno Introduction: hospitable loci and male-​biased Enlightened ideals In its oscillations between the cult of reason and the cult of sensibility, the long eighteenth century was a period of fascinating intellectual dynamism in which the ideals of freedom and well-​being became ethically central. However, the patriarchal appropriation of these ideals undervalued the possibility of women’s empowerment and self-​assertion. Throughout the century, relevant examples of women writers using their works to assert their identities as independent individuals beyond the limitations of hegemonic discourses can be identified. Women outlined in their writings spaces hospitable to their emancipatory ideals, generating oppositional world views that destabilized the validity of male-​biased discourses. These hospitable loci emerged as spaces of epistemological, emotional and creative comfort where it was possible for women to configure alternative cosmovisions opposing the ideal of femininity popularized by some patriarchal narratives, materialized in, for example, conduct books: their extraordinary proliferation concealed an attempt at validating those female qualities deemed socially “acceptable.” The ideal of femininity represented in conduct books revolved around the confinement of women’s potential to the domestic space and discouraged the public display of their capability for agency. The epistolary narrative of Maria Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), partially articulated around the dialogue between two narrative personae representing conflicting models of masculinity, criticizes some widespread patriarchal misconceptions of women’s role. Edgeworth’s misogynistic male correspondent refers to “silent happiness” (24) as a central female attribute. He also adds “that genius will be respected only when united with discretion” (25) and asserts that men “dislike that daring spirit in the female sex, which delights to oppose the common opinions of society” (26). Male anxiety about the public exhibition of women’s achievements and about the dissemination of their oppositional world views was increased by DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-12

The spatialization of oppositional world views  173 the emergence of women writers in the public sphere. The aforementioned gentleman in Edgeworth’s Letters voiced his anxiety about the fact that they were “much more numerous of late than they were a few years ago” (23), describing their creative productions as “imprudent exhibitions” (40). With the outpouring of women writers—​who contributed to transforming “the hitherto exclusively masculine world of literature into a feminine domain” (Kent 22)—​came another powerfully destabilizing factor: the publication of works explicitly vindicating women’s rights, as Mary Wollstonecraft’s texts evidenced at the end of the century. Women writers and philosophers were greatly influenced by the intellectual vitality of the Enlightenment, the energy of which was demonstrated by the proliferation of philosophical treatises, literary works and other documents theorizing upon human beings’ position in the world. Patriarchal ideologists, who exhibited “a cultural anxiety about female intellectualism” (Weiss 16), considered that the philosophical questioning of one’s identity was too “serious” an issue for women to discuss, a belief that was ironically immortalized in the correspondence between Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot: our Letters (…) should be filled with the newest accounts of fashion, accurate description of French hoops, Venetian caps, and all such important matters, that might enable you to shine away in the very tip top of the fashion, at church or at the ball. (Carter 91–​2) However, in spite of this patriarchal offensive, women writers intensely participated in public debates about the construction of personal identities and about the role of the individual in society. One of the leading discourses of the period was articulated around the search for happiness. With the waning of the Puritan ethos of restraint, the idea that happiness should be attained in this world filled the eighteenth-​century imaginary. This “happiness revolution”1 (Gregori 12) intersected with the Enlightened ideals of autonomy, freedom and self-​assertion. However, these ideals, essential components of well-​being, emerged at the time as powerfully masculinized constructs. As Meyda Yeǧenoǧlu argues, “the assumptions that govern Enlightenment notions of individual imply a subject that is rational, universal, and, by extension, male” (106–​07, original emphasis). Women writers advocated the democratization of Enlightened ideals and used their works to outline alternative ethical paradigms within which participation in the public sphere, sociability and female agency were explicitly identified as the constituents of women’s happiness. The hospitable loci constructed in women’s writings demonstrated that this oppositional ethics could be powerfully functional and that, consequently, their works were both socially useful and intellectually solid. By describing “Literary

174  Yolanda Caballero-Aceituno Ladies” as “women who have cultivated their understandings, not for the purposes of parade, but with the desire to make themselves useful and agreeable” (45–​6), the male addressee of the misogynistic gentleman in Edgeworth’s epistolary narrative, depositary of a new ideal of masculinity, redefined the role of women’s writing, disassociating it from its patriarchal consideration as useless and intellectually inferior. Space and the figurative territorialization of ideologies in the eighteenth century Whether as a material construct or an imaginary, space is not “an inert entity” but “an arena in which power relations are encoded and contested, bodies and minds are moved, social perceptions are shaped, communicated, and challenged, and personal and collective identities are fashioned” (Denney and O’Connell 2). The consideration of space as an ideological construct appears reflected in leading philosophical works of the eighteenth century. In Remarks upon Some Writers (1739), Catharine Trotter defined space as an entity bridging “the vast chasm betwixt body and spirit” (391), thus separating it from the idea of mere physicality. Likewise, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke referred to “place” not as an aseptic category “to design the particular position of things,” but as an intentional construction, the constituents of which were defined according to “which best served to [men’s] present purpose” (129). In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–​40) David Hume suggested that the perception of space was also shaped by “our passions, emotions, desires and aversions” (65). Reflecting on the centrality of space as an organizing category, Peter Denney and Lisa O’Connell have used the label “spaces of Enlightenment” to describe the intellectual vitality of eighteenth-​century spatial constructions as “settings (…) for new discourses, technologies, and practices (…)” (11). Space was also an important analytical paradigm to understand gender relations in the period. As Liz Bondi and Joyce Davidson claim, “gender relations and gender identities are constructed in and through space and place, and, conversely, space and place construct gender” (20). Spatial constructs and imaginaries, which became powerful communicative tropes in the eighteenth century, assisted women writers in their delineation of hospitable loci. They probably expected to embrace wider audiences by using this well-​known “language.” Central issues, such as the boundless possibilities for men’s agency, were frequently encoded by using spatial semantics, as the reflections of the more open-​minded gentleman in Edgeworth’s Letters exemplify: We mix with the world without restraint, (…) every scene of life is open to our view; (…) From academies, colleges, public libraries, private

The spatialization of oppositional world views  175 associations of literary men, women are excluded, if not by law, at least by custom, which cannot be easily conquered. (6–​7) Women writers also used spatial imagery to denounce patriarchal restrictions. In an interesting study about the public spaces of eighteenth-​ century London, Catharina Löffler provides meaningful evidence for their “patriarchalization,” a process according to which “men were the dominant participants of cultural life in the city, whereas women were generally subordinated to the male gaze, to male authority and to male desires” (265). Through a description of the narrow microcosm of Cloe’s life, in her Essay on Happiness (1751), Mary Leapor denounced that men’s monopolization of space rendered women unhappy. The result of Cloe’s movement from one “authorized” locus to another—​from “the Park” to “the Play, Assembly, or the Ball”—​is her retiring “to her closet,” “with languid Spirits and appal’d Desires” (Leapor 57). In the same way as the consciousness of being relegated to the margins of a patriarchal society was spatialized in women’s writings, their “desire to govern beyond the domestic in public affairs” (Edgeworth 93), was also figuratively territorialized. Women’s spatialization of their refusal to be contained within their domestic microcosms and of their willingness to become “expansionist sel[ves]” (Ballaster 64)—​that is, boundless in their possibilities for agency—​was also materialized in some works from the beginning of the century, as Delarivier Manley’s tragedy The Royal Mischief (1696) exemplifies. It opens with Trotter’s praise of Manley for having inserted her writings into a male-​dominated public sphere, thus invading “the borders of their Empire.” In an interesting conjunction of the paratextual and the intratextual territorialization of ideological issues within the tragedy, the Islamic protagonist of the play, Homais, mimics Trotter’s spatial semantics of defiance. With her potential for agency relegated by her husband, the Prince of Libardian, to the boundaries of the Castle of Phasia, Homais objects to being “confin’d till Age, or Grief /​Presents [her] Death” and engages in a project “to seek new Regions out, disgusted with the old” (Manley 9, 3). The semantic territorialization of feminist aspirations configured literary loci hospitable to women’s self-​assertion in many literary works. Some of these loci were “liquid,” as they delineated oppositional world views that were not assigned any specific real or imaginary spatial locations. Other hospitable loci were constructed in travel narratives, which used the motif of the journey to foreign geographical locations to show that women could trespass the boundaries of the limitations imposed by British patriarchal culture, as Mary Wortley Montagu demonstrated in The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763). The epistolary realm also exemplified the configuration

176  Yolanda Caballero-Aceituno of hospitable spaces. Women writers took advantage of the heyday of the genre to create emotionally restorative networks acting as loci of rest from patriarchal invisibilizations and exclusions. Eliza Fenwick’s epistolary novel Secresy: Or, the Ruin on the Rock (1795) opens with a dedication to Eliza B—​that epitomizes women’s need for self-​protection: “What does the world care about either you or me? Nothing. But we care for each other” (5). The letters between Catherine Talbot and Elizabeth Carter also dwell on the emotionally healing power of the exchange of correspondence, described by Carter as a “seasonable revival to [her] spirits” (Carter 18), and by Talbot as “one of the most agreeable incidents that [her] life is likely to be checquered with” (Carter 227). The patriarchal perception of epistolary exchanges as potentially “dangerous”—​inasmuch as they could lead to women’s organization as an empowered community—​is immortalized in Edgeworth’s Letters, where Caroline writes to Lady V that she has had to burn her letter after having read it: “I must renounce all future intercourse with you. I am a sister, a wife, a mother; all these connections forbid me to be longer your friend” (175). Thus, epistolary narratives also contributed to interweaving meaningful ideological spaces of resistance and defiance. Nonetheless, in this contribution we are particularly interested in the discussion of the anatomy of some “solid” hospitable loci, that is, those where the ideological and the physical dimensions of space intersect to highlight the possibility of actually materializing alternative loci with an autonomous ethical functioning, as Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millenium Hall (1762) exemplifies. Patriarchal spaces of closure: asphyxiating domesticity and the cult of materialism The eighteenth century witnessed a “process of accommodation between capitalism and patriarchy” (Massey 192) that contributed to strengthening the conception of the public sphere as a male-​dominated space whilst validating the confinement of women’s potential to the private sphere. The patriarchal ethos revolved around the principle of making domesticity attractive for women, an issue that has recently gained critical interest.2 The construction of the patriarchal fiction of “home” as a “hospitable” locus for women was articulated around three processes: the materialist commodification of the domestic realm, “the performance of sociability” (Hague and Lipsedge 4), and the creation of fictions of management. Their conjunction turned “home” into an asphyxiating space of closure for women. In Misogynous Economies (1999), Laura Mandell explains that many writings of the period stimulated “capitalist desires” and “instill[ed] in readers the desire to accumulate profits and commodities” (3). As Stephen G. Hague and Karen Lipsedge note, these commodities

The spatialization of oppositional world views  177 and luxury items contributed to “transform[ing] the appearance and atmosphere of the domestic interior, making it more visually appealing, inviting, and above all, comfortable” (5). The intentional commodification of space was aimed at discouraging women from developing their inner selves “through active relationship with the things of the world” (London 8), as Mrs. Trentham’s reflections exemplify in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall: “the wife must have a profusion of ornaments for her person, and cards for her entertainment” (144–​45). Writers such as Edgeworth, who asserted that “private virtues are public benefits” (111, original emphasis), considered women’s domestic confinement both unnatural and socially unproductive. Using a spatial analogy, Edgeworth contended that “if each bee were content in his cell, there could be no grumbling hive” (111). The commodification of domestic interiors intensely intersected with “the staging [of] social fictions” (Humfrey 24), which alienated women from the possibility of experiencing authentic sociability. It also minimized their opportunities for cultivating the virtue of critical introspection through “relaxed domestic intimacy” (Humfrey 29). The awareness of this distressing reality probably inspired Catherine Talbot’s reflections, addressed to Elizabeth Carter: “Happy you doubtless are at home, but happier would you be were you to change it for a home, more properly your own” (Carter 316). This false sociability relied for its effectiveness on “the economics of gentility” (Hague 108), which resorted to the cult of materialism to impart a socially acceptable image of happiness and well-​being. Writers like Mary Wortley Montagu unmasked the evilness of this patriarchal fiction of sociability. In one of her letters, written from Belgrade and addressed to Alexander Pope, she emotionally expressed how during her journeys she could enjoy the “agreeable variety” (103) that was far from her view in the non-​hospitable “polite” London society, the functioning of which she described as exclusively articulated around “Monday at the Drawing Room, Tuesday Lady Mohun’s, Wednesday the opera, Thursday the play, Friday Mrs Chetwynd’s, etc.: a perpetual round of (…) seeing the same follies acted over and over” (103). Together with the fiction of sociability, the patriarchal ethos centralized the “fiction of management,” aimed at creating an illusion of domestic female agency. As Beth Cortese argues, women’s potential was confined to “managing their wealth in a productive way” (128) by “maintaining accounts as a mark of virtue, establishing charitable causes, choosing their own furnishings, and housing collections” (126). Within these domestic spaces ruled by superficiality, women felt compelled to exhibit a socially acceptable identity. In Millenium Hall (1762), this superficiality is epitomized by Sarah Scott’s description of the lives of Lady Sheerness, “victim to (…) the love of fashionable pleasures” (158), and of Lady Brumpton, truly addicted to exhibition: “to recommend her

178  Yolanda Caballero-Aceituno person she studied dress and went to considerable expense in ornaments. To shew her taste, she distinguished herself by the elegance of her house, furniture and equipage” (181). The intersection of commodification and artificial sociability left no room either for women’s privacy or for their possibilities of self-​making. Lady Mary Jones escaped to Millenium Hall because she was “weary of the multitude” (187) surrounding her at Lady Brumpton’s house. As Ariane Fennetaux argues, “the domestic interior afforded [women] very little actual privacy. Having a locked writing desk, let alone a room of one’s own, was a luxury that few eighteenth-​ century women enjoyed” (307). Lady Mary Jones’ flight to Millenium Hall symbolizes women’s need to escape from antisocial “noise”: in fact, in Scott’s narrative, “noise” functions as a physicalized metaphor for false sociability. Its protagonists express their desire “to change noise for real mirth” (77) and consider “retirement better (…) than noise and flutter” (252). As we shall argue, the validity of the three processes articulating the patriarchalization of “home” was radically deconstructed in Scott’s novel. Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762): physicalization, solidity, and hospitality Women like Mrs. Jones, Miss Mancel or Mrs. Trentham, who “overcame sexual predators, tyrannical spouses, and inconstant suitors” (Mangano 112), escape from their “no places” within a patriarchal society to find a room of their own in Millenium Hall, which becomes both an emotionally restorative locus and a productively generative utopian community where new spaces for female agency are created. Within this hospitable microcosm what was formerly “useless” comes to be articulated around a fully functional ethos conducive to women’s happiness. The solid texture interweaving Scott’s narrative—​which became a success3—​results from the combination of several factors: on the one hand, from her exploitation of the communicative potential of spatial imagery through an intense physicalization of socio-​ethical issues and, on the other, from the polyphonic confluence of different women’s stories about the evilness of the non-​hospitable spaces of closure that they had left behind to take shelter in Millenium Hall, an “assured asylum against every evil” (Scott 7). This emotionally intense confluence of female voices denounced the vast imperium of non-​inclusive spaces in eighteenth-​century society. But not only do different women’s cosmovisions merge in Scott’s epistolary travelogue: the inclusion of a male fictional narrator—​an anonymous traveller who had escaped from a world obsessed with “mercantile gain” (Scott 3)—​acts as a powerfully destabilizing element. After having witnessed the functioning of this hospitable asylum, he endorses the activist message of Scott’s narrative by expressing his desire to imitate it, thus encouraging

The spatialization of oppositional world views  179 (male) readers to make inclusive spaces proliferate. Likewise, the solid ideological texture articulating Millenium Hall derives its strength from its “indebtedness to (…) sentimental discourse” (Batchelor 30). Sentimental philosophers advocated self-​fulfilment through the cultivation of qualities that capitalist rationalism had marginalized and through the conciliation of the individual and the authentically social dimensions of human beings. Scott’s design of her emancipatory microcosm is inspired by the belief that women’s potentialities cannot be contained within the reductionist paradigms around which patriarchal spatialization is articulated. This belief, which is rigorously sustained all through the narrative, endows Scott’s feminotopia with a philosophical solidity materialized in a carefully delineated ethos that destabilizes the validity of patriarchal commodifying fictions and is reinforced by the foregrounded physicality of Millenium Hall. Its carefully delineated geography, truly inclusive, is diametrically opposed to that characterizing masculinist spaces of closure. Scott’s narrative is inspired by the century’s fashionable dialectic between what Lynda A. Hall describes as the “expressed” and the “intrinsic” value of women—​that is, between their “expressed (economic or exchange) value” and their “real or intrinsic (human or moral) value” (4, original emphasis). In the context of this dialectic, Scott rejects the validity of “the extrinsic signification women carry in their legal status as the property of father and husband” and embraces “the intrinsic meaning they potentially exercise as possessors of their own persons” (London 5). Thus, all the components of the ruling ethos of Millenium Hall encourage women to strengthen their intrinsic virtue. Eighteenth-​century sentimental philosophy contributed to redefining the notion of virtue, disassociating it from self-​restraint and from the values articulating a materialist profit-​ making “anti-​ethics.” Sentimental philosophers primarily identified virtue with the search for happiness, as David Hume expressed in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), where he linked it to “play, frolic, and gaiety” (153). This sentimental redefinition of virtue inspires the ethos of Millenium Hall, which legitimizes “unmarketable” values. After having witnessed how women live in that hospitable locus, the anonymous narrator concludes that “they are free from that littleness of mind, which makes people value a thing the more for its being possessed by no one but themselves” (Scott 14). The narrator also describes the virtue of Millenium’s ladies as “transcendent” and praises their “superior sense” (224). He endorses the sentimental belief that the idea of virtue is indissolubly associated “with fresh delight” (19). In this respect, Scott primarily designs Millenium Hall as a locus hospitable to spontaneity and authenticity. One of the most recurrent descriptors associated to women in the novel is “vivacity,” a quality alien to artificiality, superfluity, male control and paralysis. Millenium Hall becomes, thus, a locus hospitable

180  Yolanda Caballero-Aceituno to joy and pleasure. “Vivacity” (57) appears purposely combined with other descriptors such as “lively imagination” (57), “solidity” (14), or “dignity” (13), a sentimental mixture of attributes that destabilizes reductionist constructions of femininity. Scott also presents authentic sociability as one of the essential constituents of happiness: through Mrs. Trentham, she criticizes those social systems in which “domestic virtues are exploded, and social happiness despised as dull and insipid” (146) and advocates a healthier conception of society alien to artificial sociability and ostentatious exhibition. Miss Mancel defines this ideal social system as “a state of mutual confidence, reciprocal services, and correspondent affections” (76), based on “a free communication of sentiments” (77). When discussing the characteristics of space from a philosophical point of view, Trotter argued that “some have ascribed a positive infinity to space: others a negative one” (400). The optimistic assertion of women’s boundless potential, which opposes the negativity of patriarchal limitations, permeates Scott’s narrative. Together with the validation of a new idea of virtue, its ethos centralizes an education aimed at epistemological expansion, economic independence and self-​fulfilment, as expressed in the dialogue between Miss Mancel and the anonymous fictional narrator: You will pity us perhaps because we have no cards, no assemblies, no plays, no masquerades, in this solitary place (…) but while we can with safety speak our own thoughts, and with pleasure read those of wiser persons, we are not likely to be often reduced to them. We wish not for large assemblies, because we do not desire to drown conversation in noise; (…) and as we are not afraid of showing our hearts, we have no occasion to conceal our persons, in order to obtain either liberty of speech or action. (76–​7) Throughout the narrative, the wide scope of patriarchal “reductionism” is denounced. “Reduced” is, in fact, a conspicuous semantic occurrence in the narrative. As Scott mentions, the reductionism that some of the women who come to the asylum of Millenium Hall have experienced is economic—​as they are “women, who from scantiness of fortune, and pride of family are reduced to become dependant” (80)—​and also intellectual as, in Mrs. Maynard’s words, they had been educated “genteelly, or in other words idly,” so “they are ignorant of every thing that might give them superior abilities (…)” (80). Those who had been educated differently—​ like Miss Mancel or Miss Selvyn—​ had been relegated to the margins of their former societies for impersonating “notions (…) too refined for persons who live in the world” (63) or for having received an education “without narrowness of mind” (194). Patriarchal reductionism

The spatialization of oppositional world views  181 also invaded the affective domain, as expressed by Scott through the narrator’s voice: “the first thing a girl is taught is to hide her sentiments, to contradict the thoughts of her heart, and tell all the civil lies which custom has sanctified” (228). The rhetorical intensity emerging from the passionate denunciation of reductionism reaches its pinnacle in Scott’s novel with Miss Mancel’s association of the myth of Procrustes with the functioning of the reductionist patriarchal anti-​ethics: Procrustes has been branded through all ages with the name of tyrant (…) from fitting the body of every stranger to a bed which he kept as the necessary standard, cutting off the legs of those whose height exceeded the length of it and stretching on the rack such as fell short of that measure, till they attained the requisite proportion. But is not almost every man a Procrustes? We have not the power of shewing our cruelty exactly in the same method, but actuated by the like spirit, we abridge of their liberty (…) all who either fall short, or exceed the usual standard. (24) Within Millenium Hall, the function of economy is also radically rewritten and becomes an emancipatory domain that assists women to overcome reductionism. As Bryan Mangano argues, the contrast between the “feminized productivity” of this hospitable locus and “the ill effects of ventures governed and inheritances stewarded by men” (122) articulates a narrative where qualities excluded from the functioning of capitalist economy here become ethically central. The economy of Scott’s utopian community is “of the highest kind, since it regards those riches which neither moth nor rust can corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal” (Scott 153). Profits are invested, for example, in “a fund for the sick and disabled from which they may receive a comfortable support” (260), as Mrs. Morgan explains. Economy is primarily linked to women’s happiness in a narrative that, in Jennie Batchelor’s words, “renders visible and valuable women’s affective work as mothers, homemakers and mentors while also emphasizing the psychic, social and economic gains to be made by allowing women to work outside the domestic economy’s oppressive confines” (45). Thus, the validity of the patriarchal fiction of management is also radically destabilized in Millenium Hall. The communicative effectiveness of Scott’s narrative resides in the fact that all the ethical principles that regulate her utopian community are overtly “physicalized.” “Home,” its decoration and the different spaces integrating it are assigned highly oppositional significations. The spatial delineation of the mansion and of its adjacent surroundings—​characterized by “permeable boundaries between exterior and interior spaces and

182  Yolanda Caballero-Aceituno between natural and social environments” (Stewart 8)—​is, thus, highly intentional from an ideological point of view. In this respect, the moral decay inherent to capitalist philosophies is represented by the material ruin of the mansion “Millenium Hall,” the last proprietor of which “was an old miser whose passion for accumulating wealth reduced him into almost as unfortunate a state as Midas” (Scott 221). Likewise, the physical centrality of “three large book-​cases” (7) in the hall of the mansion and, in general, the proliferation of communal spaces where women read together and join their intellectual energies, give material shape to an education based on an ethos of expansion which also encourages self-​assertion, as illustrated by the walls of the school, decorated with “pieces of the children’s work of various kinds (…) exhibited as encouragement to their ingenuity” (189–​ 90). Yet, one of the most consciously highlighted spatial elements within the surroundings of Millenium Hall is the “temple dedicated to solitude” (20), which represents women’s need for privacy, a “residual,” if not overtly marginalized concern, within male-​dominated domestic spaces. Significantly, “in the temple is a picture of Contemplation, another of Silence” (20). This ideologically oppositional decoration, different from the commodifying ornamentation typical of materialist culture, is a symbolic invitation for women’s introspection and self-​knowledge and, consequently, for the construction of inalienable identities. The architecture of the temple metaphorically encourages women to see beyond the limits of reductionist epistemes, as “the prospect from it [is] noble and extensive” (20). Thus, the different spaces articulating Millenium Hall are hospitable to authenticity and self-​making. They also make possible the conciliation of women’s social and individual dimensions and, consequently, their happiness. It is in this conciliation, which interwove a powerful sentimental discourse opposing the “rational” logics of capitalism and the patriarchal compartmentalizations between “acceptable” and “non-​ acceptable” spaces for women’s agency, that the activist quality of Scott’s narrative resides. Conclusion: memory, feminist scholarship and inclusive spaces In The Future of Feminist Eighteenth-​ Century Scholarship: Beyond Recovery (2018), Robin Runia situates the analysis of “how eighteenth-​ century women writers were circumscribed by a variety of educational, class, religious, political, and racial boundaries” (3) in the centre of current critical interest. Regrettably, these boundaries are still solid in the twenty-​ first century. We live surrounded by spaces that are not hospitable to women’s agency and well-​being because “a geographical imagination that is masculinist in nature (…) privileges and makes room for male subjects to express and impose themselves in and on their environs” (Bondi and

The spatialization of oppositional world views  183 Davidson 21). The title of a recently published book by Rebecca Solnit, Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters (2019), significantly presents women’s limitations as a distressing continuum between the past and the present. Referring to the many occurrences of spatial exclusions that contemporary women experience, she argues that “walking down the city streets, young women get harassed in ways that tell them that this is not their world, their city, their street; (…) and that a lot of strangers expect obedience and attention from them” (137). Thus, research work aimed at critically illuminating the ways in which women have historically transgressed oppressing boundaries to (re)configure their identities emerges as a vital task. Integrating the contributions of women from the past into a meaningful restorative dialogue with the voices and concerns of those of the present is essential to generate transhistorical inclusive loci opposing patriarchal exclusions. History, “where past and present commingle and coalesce” (Confino 82), is wonderfully porous and generates a synergic space where memory and literature productively intersect to create an affective and intellectual historical background supporting and encouraging women’s self-​ assertion. It is within this “shared space of topoi, tropes, images, references, echoes, apprehensions, joys and worries” (Irimia 6) that we have revisited the significance of some hospitable loci consciously constructed in eighteenth-​ century women’s writings. At a time in which, as Denney and O’Connell assert, we are experiencing a fashionable “spatial turn” (2) in research within the humanities, it is extremely pertinent to continue analysing the anatomy of these inclusive loci and their evolution from “liquid” to “solid,” that is, their potential to transcend the textual realm to embrace the domain of social intervention, as Sarah Scott’s life project exemplified.4 This critical labour, aimed at revitalizing the significance of eighteenth-​ century hospitable loci in the present, is fuelled by the same intention animating Scott’s utopian community: making inclusive loci proliferate in our contemporaneity. Notes 1 The centrality of the debate on happiness in eighteenth-​century fiction writing has been extensively analysed by critics such as Brian Michael Norton (2012). 2 See, in this respect, the volume At Home in the Eighteenth Century: Interrogating Domestic Space (2022), edited by Stephen G. Hague and Karen Lipsedge. 3 Mangano mentions, in this respect, that “after the success of Millenium Hall, she was pursued by Andrew Millar,” who was a relevant publisher, “and offered a much higher sum for the sale of its sequel, Sir George Ellison” (111). In Mangano’s view, Scott used narrative strategies, such as the incorporation of a male narrator (121), to find her way in a male-​dominated publishing industry and book-​selling market.

184  Yolanda Caballero-Aceituno 4 As Mangano argues, she “sought in practice and in her fiction to create households, in Batheaston and later at Hitcham, where women might support one another and channel their friendships into public charity” (112).

Works cited Ballaster, Ros. Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–​1785. Oxford UP, 2005. Batchelor, Jennie. Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–​ 1830. Manchester UP, 2010. Bondi, Liz, and Joyce Davidson. “Situating Gender.” A Companion to Feminist Geography, edited by Lise Nelson and Joni Seager, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 15–​31. Carter, Elizabeth et al. A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, from the Year 1741 to 1770: to which are added, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Vesey, Between the Years 1763 and 1787: Published from the Original Manuscript in the Possession of the Rev. Montagu Pennington, vol. 1. Printed for F.C. and J. Rivington, 1809. HathiTrust Digital Library. https://​babel.hat​hitr​ust.org/​cgi/​pt?id=​mdp.390​1500​6959​ 285&view=​1up&seq=​7. Confino, Alon. “Memory and the History of Mentalities.” Cultural Memory Studies: an International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, Walter de Gruyter, 2008, pp. 77–​84. Cortese, Beth. “Home Economics: Female Estate Managers in Long Eighteenth-​ Century Fiction and Society.” At Home in the Eighteenth Century: Interrogating Domestic Space, edited by Stephen G. Hague and Karen Lipsedge, Routledge, 2022, pp. 126–​46. https://​doi.org/​10.4324/​978042​9297​267-​6. Denney, Peter, and Lisa O’Connell. “Spaces of Enlightenment: from Domestic Scenes to Global Visions.” Eighteenth-​Century Life, vol. 45, no. 3, 2021, pp. 1–​15, https://​doi.org/​10.1215/​00982​601-​9272​978. Edgeworth, Maria. Letters for Literary Ladies, to Which is Added an Essay on the Noble Science of Self-​Justification. 2nd ed. Printed for J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church-​Yard, 1799. Fennetaux, Ariane. “Women’s Pockets and the Construction of Privacy in the Long Eighteenth Century.” Interiors, special issue of Eighteenth-​Century Fiction, edited by Julie Park, vol. 20, no. 3, 2008, pp. 307–​34. Fenwick, Eliza. Secresy: Or, the Ruin on the Rock. Leopold Classic Library, 2015. Gregori, Flavio. “Introduction.” Happiness (and Unhappiness) in Eighteenth-​ Century English Literature, special issue of English Literature: Theories, Interpretation, Contexts, edited by Flavio Gregori, vol. 2, no. 1, 2015, pp. 5–​16. http://​doi.org/​10.14277/​2420-​823X/​EL-​2-​1-​15-​0. Hague, Stephen. “ ‘I Am Now Determined to Inform You What I Am Sure Will Amaze You’: Objects, Domestic Space, and the Economics of Gentility.” At Home in the Eighteenth Century: Interrogating Domestic Space, edited by Stephen G. Hague and Karen Lipsedge, Routledge, 2022, pp. 107–​25. https://​ doi.org/​10.4324/​978042​9297​267-​5.

The spatialization of oppositional world views  185 Hague, Stephen G., and Karen Lipsedge. Introduction. At Home in the Eighteenth Century: Interrogating Domestic Space, edited by Stephen G. Hague and Karen Lipsedge, Routledge, 2022, pp. 1–​17. Hall, Lynda A. Women and “Value” in Jane Austen’s Novels: Settling, Speculating and Superfluity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​ 978-​3-​319-​50736-​1. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford UP, 1998. —​—​—​. A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. The Floating Press, 2009. Humfrey, Paula. “Staging Fictions for Domestic Privacy in Early Eighteenth-​ century London Households.” At Home in the Eighteenth Century: Interrogating Domestic Space, edited by Stephen G. Hague and Karen Lipsedge, Routledge, 2022, pp. 21–​41. https://​doi.org/​10.4324/​978042​9297​267-​1. Irimia, Mihaela. “Introduction: Literature and/​as (Cultural) Memory.” Literature and Cultural Memory, edited by Mihaela Irimia, Dragoş Manea, and Andreea Paris. Brill Rodopi, 2017, pp. 1–​15. Kent, Susan K. Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–​1990. Routledge, 1999. Leapor, Mary. “Essay on Happiness.” Poems upon Several Occasions by the Late Mrs. Leapor. Printed and Sold by J. Roberts, 1751, pp. 54–​60. ProQuest. www. ujaen.debib​lio.com/​login?&url=​https://​www.proqu​est.com/​books/​essay-​on-​ happin​ess/​docv​iew/​214​8006​881/​se-​2. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Batoche Books, 2000. Löffler, Catharina. Walking in the City: Urban Experience and Literary Psychogeography in Eighteenth-​Century London. J.B. Metzler, 2017 [PhD dissertation]. https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​978-​3-​658-​17743-​0. London, April. Women and Property in the Eighteenth-​Century English Novel. Cambridge UP, 2004. Mandell, Laura C. Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-​Century Britain. UP of Kentucky, 1999. Mangano, Bryan. Fictions of Friendship in the Eighteenth-​Century Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​978-​3-​319-​48695-​6. Manley, Delarivier. The Royal Mischief: A Tragedy, As It Is Acted by His Majesties Servants, by Mrs Manley. Printed for R. Bentley, F. Saunders and J. Knapton, 1696, ProQuest. www.ujaen.debib​lio.com/​login?&url=​https://​www.proqu​est. com/​books/​royal-​misch​ief-​trag​edy-​as-​is-​acted-​his-​majest​ies/​docv​iew/​224​0891​ 109/​se-​2. Massey, Doreen B. Space, Place and Gender. U of Minnesota P, 1994. Norton, Brian Michael. Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness: Ethical Inquiries in the Age of Enlightenment. Bucknell UP, 2012. Runia, Robin. Introduction. The Future of Feminist Eighteenth-​ Century Scholarship: Beyond Recovery, edited by Robin Runia, Routledge, 2018, pp. 1–​10. Scott, Sarah. A Description of Millenium Hall, and the Country Adjacent: Together with the Character of the Inhabitants, and Such Historical Anecdotes and Reflections, as May Excite in the Reader Proper Sentiments of Humanity, and

186  Yolanda Caballero-Aceituno Lead the Mind to the Love of Virtue, by a Gentleman on his Travels. 4th ed. Printed for T. Carnan, and F. Newbery, 1778. Scholar Select (Palala Press), 2015. Solnit, Rebecca. Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters. Granta Books, 2019. Stewart, Suzanne. “‘[B]‌eyond that Small Circle all is Foreign to Us’: Spatial and Social Cohesion in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall.” Lumen: Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-​Century Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1–​14. https://​doi.org/​10.7202/​101225​5ar. Trotter, Catharine. “Remarks upon Some Writers in the Controversy Concerning the Foundation of Moral Duty and Moral Obligation.” The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn: Theological, Moral, Dramatic, And Poetical. Several of Them Now First Printed. Rev. and Published by Thomas Birch, vol. 1. Printed for J. and P. Knapton, 1751, pp. 379–​450. HathiTrust Digital Library. https://​ babel.hat​hitr​ust.org/​cgi/​pt?id=​uc1.318​2201​5275​175&view=​1up&seq=​14. Weiss, Deborah. The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives: Mary Wollstonecraft, the British Novel, and the Transformations of Feminism, 1796–​1811. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​978-​3-​319-​55363-​4. Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary. The Turkish Embassy Letters, edited by Malcolm Jack. Virago, 1994. Yeǧenoǧlu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge UP, 1998.

13 “Rememberest Thou Me?” Violent women in Louisa Medina Hamblin’s “The Panorama of Life” Milagros López-​Peláez Casellas

Introduction In 1831, the writer Louisa Honore Medina Hamblin (1813–​1838) left Liverpool for New York on the largest passenger ship in the world, The Thames. She would spend the following seven years in New York until her early death, aged twenty-​five. By then, she had become the first European-​ born US dramatist to earn a living exclusively from her work and, no less significantly, the first dramatist in the history of US theatre to have seen her plays enjoy long runs.1 Her vast professional and literary output is striking—​she had a total of thirty-​four plays published, as well as poems and short stories. She also acted and helped manage a theatre. And yet her work has received scant critical attention. Instead, much of the research on this author has centred around her personal life: her affair with the British actor and theatre manager Thomas S. Hamblin, and the commotion caused by the death of the young actress Missouri Miller who lived with them. Some have highlighted her activity as a playwright for New York’s well-​ known Bowery Theatre2 but, in truth, literary history listings of pioneer women writers have not done her justice.3 Yet Medina, who, as one of her contemporaries remarked, “sliced the character of lordly man into small bits and exalted woman to the rank of angels” (Hewitt 49) was a woman ahead of her time. Her published literary work consistently featured strong women and weak men. Her essays, poems, and short stories were published in the most prominent US newspapers of the time. In her plays, Medina adapted novels from contemporary writers to the stage,4 but it is in her short stories where we find the author’s most original and early feminist voice. Unfortunately, scholars have only referred to Medina as a playwright, ignoring her other original written productions, her poems and the short stories “The Beauty of Holiness” and “The Burial by Fire” (both published in The Ladies Companion in 1837 and 1838 respectively), “The Panorama of Life” (The Gentleman’s Magazine 1838), and “Chess Play” (published posthumously DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-13

188  Milagros López-Peláez Casellas in 1843 in The Rover: A Weekly Magazine of Tales, Poetry and Engravings). I have found a fifth short story titled “Olive Etherington,” unknown to scholarship so far and which was published in both the Spirit of the Times and the Southern Literary Messenger in 1837. Overall, Medina’s short fiction is filled with women who have been wronged by men—​emotionally but at times also physically—​and who end up performing violent acts of revenge. Forced marriages (i.e. “Olive Etherington”), infanticide (i.e. “The Panorama of Life”), female rivalry (i.e. “Chess Play”), and male characters as villains abound in all of them. In short, her women heroines go through a process that takes them from being easily manipulated by men to becoming strong, self-​ confident, violent and vindictive even though some of these stories inevitably end with death. “The Panorama of Life” is a Gothic-​style story and an early example of nineteenth-​century reform fiction. With an anonymous narrator, the story, at times a roman-​à-​clef of sorts, brings to mind real events and thinly veiled real-​life characters from Medina’s inner circle. The story points in particular to specific incidents which occurred just a few months before its publication in September 1838 in The Gentleman’s Magazine. Thus, any meaningful analysis of “The Panorama of Life” must take into account these events which captured the attention of the nineteenth-​ century New York press and public: the sudden death in Hamblin and Medina’s home of the young actress Miss Missouri, Hamblin’s protégée and one of his lovers (Medina being another) at the time. We might argue that Medina writes “The Panorama of Life” to give, in fictional terms, her own take on Missouri’s death. The heroine of this story is the Italo-​American Ada/​ Ada St. Armand—​who is strikingly similar to the real Missouri—​while the villains are clearly the men. This chapter will look into the transgressive potential of the conventionally misogynistic gendered constructs of violence in “The Panorama of Life” and will argue that its prevailing message is to formulate what it means for women to be self-​governing moral agents. In the story, violence represents a protofeminist intervention into the patriarchal order even though its use as a tool for women’s agency is deeply conflicted. Romantic love, originally the cause of the heroine’s devastation, is ultimately transformed into “unchained passion,” which leads to violence, a productive weapon that serves to confront and dismantle man’s hegemony and to successfully subvert the construct of women as passive. Our aim is to reveal how in Medina’s story, the voice of the subaltern is not only heard but also serves to successfully subvert the construct of women as passive and to point directly at the actual cause of women’s abuse and subjugation. Moreover, I seek to show how the function of violence is effectively managed in the story for the self-​interest of the main

Violent women in Louisa Medina Hamblin’s The Panorama of Life  189 female characters and the author’s creative treatment of passion as a transgressive and liberating force for women. Miss Yankee Doodle Reconstructing Louisa Medina Hamblin’s life is like putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle since the little we know about her comes from references to herself and her work in some newspapers of the day. In an interview with the Spirit of the Times on 1 October 1836, we are told that she was born somewhere in 1813 in Europe (258). Her mother was possibly Irish5 and her father was a successful Spanish merchant who went bankrupt and died when Medina was an adolescent (258). By the age of twelve, she had been published in London annuals and, owing to her father’s economic problems, she was sent to live with “some distant relatives.” By the age of seventeen, she had travelled to Ireland, France, and Spain (258). Shortly after arriving in the US in June 1831, Medina moved to Baltimore where she worked as a French and Spanish teacher publishing dozens of poems and essays in various magazines. Among them was The Visitor, a magazine that in 1833 gave Edgar Allan Poe a prize for his poem “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” and whose editor, the poet John Hill Hewitt, fulfilling the writer’s request, helped her get in contact with the British actor and theatre manager Thomas S. Hamblin (1800–​1853) in New York (Hewitt 51). She then emigrated to New York and would live there until her sudden death in 1838. During Medina’s lifetime, she was described as a “wild and wayward writer, somewhat in the George Sand school” (Hewitt 49). In 1833, she moved to New York, where she worked in Hamblin’s house as governess to his daughter Elizabeth. Hamblin was an English actor—​a notorious Lothario—​and was married to the English actress Elizabeth Blanchard Hamblin (b.?–​1849). The marriage soon ended in divorce—​an event that coincided with Hamblin becoming the manager and owner of the Bowery Theatre in 1830. Soon after arriving at the house, Medina began a relationship with Hamblin, who had another protégée and lover in seventeen-​ year-​old Missouri Miller. Prior to these affairs with Medina and Missouri, Hamblin had other affairs with the young actresses Josephine Clifton (Missouri’s half-​sister) and with Naomi Vincent,6 who died giving birth to Hamblin’s child under his roof. For the time that Medina lived with Hamblin, she worked as governess to his child and it was her pivotal work as a playwright for the Bowery Theatre along with Hamblin’s notoriety that brought her regular attention from the newspapers. A swift glance at Medina’s circumstances could lead us to surmise that she accepted submissively the role of Hamblin’s mistress—​one of them—​ and was possibly the object of domestic violence. After all, in her Concise

190  Milagros López-Peláez Casellas History of the Life and Amours of Thomas S. Hamblin, the sensationalist writer and contemporary playwright Mary Clarke, referring to the relationship between Hamblin and his wife, claimed that: “Mr. Hamblin frequently beat her in a barbarous manner, lashing her with a large whip, till persons in the house came to rescue her” (25).7 And what is more, Blanchard identified him with Satan himself: I have frequently heard that even old Satan has redeeming traits in his character, and Hamblin is so like him in such various points, we must literally mark them all (…) adultery, seduction, tyrannizing double-​ dealing in business, intoxication, rioting and gambling. (Clarke 4) Indeed, there were repeated accusations that Hamblin was an extremely violent man who had killed two of his lovers, that is, Naomi Vincent and Missouri Miller.8 The young actress Miller’s puzzling death on 26 May 1838 saw Hamblin and Medina as the main suspects in the murder. Hamblin’s accusation came as no surprise to the nineteenth-​century New York public as there had been many instances of his violence9 and, after all, the actress had died under his roof. However, many also accused Medina—​who was living in the same household—​of having poisoned the young actress out of jealousy. Medina’s writing the coroner’s report on the same evening of Missouri’s death added more fuel to the accusations (Clark 37).10 A few weeks later, on 20 June 1838, Medina published her essay “Singular Death of Miss Missouri” laying all the blame on Missouri’s mother, Adeline—​ an old prostitute—​and her most immediate friends and associates.11 In her account of the death of the actress and in trying to defend herself against any accusations of murder, Medina concluded that it was after reading the “virulent and venomous” article written by Missouri’s mother about her own daughter and published in the Polyanthos, that the young actress, as she put it, “the poor girl—​innocent and virtuous,” went into “violent hysterics” and dropped dead (Medina 38). The coroner’s report established that Missouri died of “inflammation of the brain,” and even though an inquiry of sorts was carried out immediately after her death, its cause was never clarified during Medina’s lifetime. Most possibly as a response to Medina’s article, an anonymous article was published three days later in The Spirit of the Times titled “Melancholy Death of Miss Missouri,” which referred to Missouri as a “crucified victim,” “a fragile flower” who was driven to madness by Hamblin and Medina. No doubt the nativist resentment of the time which questioned foreigners’ loyalty and caused several riots in the Bowery Theatre had much to do with the way the New York public reacted. Hamblin became an American citizen

Violent women in Louisa Medina Hamblin’s The Panorama of Life  191 (he had been called “an ungrateful alien” in the press; Bogar 179), changed the name of the Bowery to the American Theatre, and in order to further reward the public’s strong patriotic inclinations, introduced American actors as “native talent” (192).12 Medina’s Gothic short story “The Panorama of Life” was published on 14 September 183813 in The Gentleman’s Magazine. Considering that Medina died two months later, this was most probably her last published work. But most interesting perhaps is the fact that, as our close reading of the story will indicate, it seems Medina used aspects of her own most recent life as inspiration for her short story, yet again providing, albeit in fictional terms, her second own and more detailed account of the “Singular death of Miss Missouri.” “If the Wild Wind Should Awaken the Sea” The story “The Panorama of Life” may be divided into three parts, content-​ wise. The first sets the scene and tells of the Italy-​born Ada St. Armand, the main heroine, and her childhood. The second part recounts her falling in love with the villain of the story, the English captain Gerald Falconer, and how she saves him from going to prison for treason, which becomes the breaking point in the heroine’s behaviour. The last part involves both Ada and her mother, Clarisse, performing an act of revenge. In brief, Clarisse, unaware that Ada is her daughter, puts the heroine in a madhouse and then helps the now-​ghost of Ada kill Falconer—​a man who had mistreated and abandoned them both. However, it is only by the very end of the story that the narrator delivers some unknown crucial details. In short, both the reader and the main characters learn that Falconer had tricked a most patriotic Ada by pretending to be an American officer, when in fact he had been a traitor who finally abandons her for Ada’s half-​sister. And it is also by the very end of the story that we learn as well that Ada’s father, George Sherwood, had kidnapped Clarisse from a convent in Italy, later abandoned her and sent her child, Ada, to New York. It is a story, therefore, of virtue lost and abusing men, and of revenge and violence set during the American Wars of Independence; a Gothic-​style story with a non-​conventional ending where the heroine dies by committing suicide. In this short story, Medina contrasts weak and lying men who resemble the real-​life Hamblin, with the heroine Ada, who plays a dynamic role in the story and, through her actions, moves the plot forward. This process starts as soon as she falls in love with Falconer, a British captain who deceives her by telling her he is an American officer, when he is actually a spy.14 In 1798, Benjamin Rush had stated that “the obligations of patriotism should be inculcated upon women” (19). Indeed, from the start, the narrator depicts Ada as a strong-​minded, courageous, active woman,

192  Milagros López-Peláez Casellas no doubt an American patriot—​a “Miss Yankee Doodle” (Medina, “The Panorama of Life” 330) and a fervent believer in the American independence project “openly (expressing) her warm wishes for the success of Liberty” (Medina, “The Panorama of Life” 328). As a counterpoint to Ada’s strong patriotism, the seventeen-​year-​old lives under the roof of her British guardian, Mr Bingham (coincidentally or not, the seventeen-​year old Missouri’s guardian was Hamblin). Mr Bingham—​and note that if you remove the “g” and replace it with an “l,” you have an anagram of Hamblin—​is introduced to us in the words of Ada herself as a “weak and timid man” (Medina, “The Panorama of Life” 322), “lacking in courage” (323); British-​born if “wishing in his heart success to the Americans, but firmly believing it would attend the British” (322).15 Linda Kerber has argued that in America, the coming of the Revolution emphasized the public dimension of the role of women and consequently a new understanding of their role appeared. Through what Kerber calls “republican motherhood,” it was understood that women would shape the future of the republic by inculcating patriotism, teaching virtue and encouraging self-​sacrifice for the public good (Kerber 22). At the time of the publication of “The Panorama of Life,” the United States was going through a crucial period of nation-​building which was crafted out of the theories of the Enlightenment and had education as one of its pillars. In addition, in the 1830s, new editions of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared in the United States. In line with Wollstonecraft’s views, Medina the “unrepentant feminist” and “cosmopolitan, strong-​ willed woman of lively talents and violent passions” (Hewitt 51), published a short story with a strong concern for women’s education. Indeed, as the narrator tells us from the start, it is “the bringing up of youth (…) my chiefest (sic) study” (Medina, “The Panorama of Life” 325). And as we are later further informed, the heroine Ada’s demise in life is caused by her negation of an education: “Poor Ada had never been thus fortified (…) a young scion of a foreign stem” who “should the storm o’ertake the vessel, she has no anchor to hold her fast upon the Rock of Ages”16 and is not able “to overcome the danger” that lies ahead of her (Medina, “The Panorama of Life” 328). Wollstonecraft described passion as the “natural effect of ignorance,” (Vindication, n.p) and it is passion, we are specifically told, that invades an uneducated Ada as she falls in love with Falconer, who works under the orders of the historical character, the British commander Sir Henry Clinton. She is romantically described as a child who from an early age “would only ask to live for one, die, be loved by one, and by one alone to be regretted” (326). Ada, an “innocent creature” displaying an “impassioned nature” and whose “very existence seemed framed to love and be loved” (Medina, “The Panorama of Life” 326), is expected to be unable to “regulate the passions

Violent women in Louisa Medina Hamblin’s The Panorama of Life  193 as they begin to ferment” (93). But the story surprises the reader by moving away from the conventional romantic ending expected at the time. Indeed, this “innocent creature” reminds us of Wollstonecraft’s claim that a certain type of education “gives this appearance of weakness to females” (95). Ada has, as Wollstonecraft criticized in her texts, “the great misfortune” of having acquired “a knowledge of life before they have, from reflection, any acquaintance with the grand ideal outline of human nature” (95). Nevertheless, Ada, responding to the Romantic conception of identity, clearly manifests a “Romantic self-​ consciousness” that is not “a merely passive engagement with the self” but rather the engaging with the external world (Clayton 32). Having been aggressively attacked—​ an action which recalls the violence perpetuated against women in the Wars of Independence and that reinforces the view of women as powerless victims—​and having almost been raped by two British officers—​as the trope of the “white, blood-​stained dress” (Medina, “The Panorama of Life” 331) indicates—​Ada demands a meeting with the historical character, the British commander Sir Henry Clinton, to defend Falconer from accusations of murder. On her way to Clinton’s house, Ada gives evidence, for the first time, of her newly found power as she walked “with a step as firm, a glance as high and proud as though a carriage waited to bear her to some glorious triumph” and “she was now braving alone the inclement weather and rude stare of strangers” (331). Interestingly, this third section of the story starts with a quote from Walter Scott’s Marmion—​“when her silence broke/​still as she spoke, she gathered strength” (330)—​which usefully serves to introduce at this point Ada’s paradigm shift. And just like Constance de Beverly in her final speech regains power by accusing Marmon of having mistreated her, Ada, “in love but with startling violence” (330), equally breaks her silence and shouts “Sir Henry Clinton SHALL HEAR ME!” (330) in order to reach her goals. To achieve power, she must first take ownership of language—​something that is made evident in an earlier dialogue with her guardian in which she had asked for his help. Mr Bingham starts by telling her: I go with you to the British general—​I intercede for a continental spy—​ I who am so strictly neutral! Not only will I not accompany you, but, as your guardian, I forbid you going, and advise you to remain tranquil. (331, original emphasis) To this, Ada responds: I do not wish your sanction. Your power I disallow—​your guidance I detest—​your advise I do despise! (…) I will save his life. (Medina, “The Panorama of Life,” 331, original emphasis)

194  Milagros López-Peláez Casellas It is important to note that along with the anaphoric use of the pronoun “I,” the pronoun is written in italics. This helps highlight the significance of this aggressive exchange regarding her character. In the “I” dialogue, Mr Bingham’s non-​patriotic and cowardly comments contrast sharply with Ada’s brave and strong determination to save a man’s life, and ultimately serve to destabilize the apparently sure category of gender. Mr Bingham confesses that Ada was not the girl “whom he had hitherto regarded as a timid child” (331). What is more, Ada has now denied Mr Bingham his power (“your power I disallow”) and, consequently, the “natural” behaviours ascribed to men and women are successfully questioned. Indeed, a few lines before, Mr Bingham complains about her absence at teatime. Tea, an emblem of domesticity, has not been served for the first time—​as Mr Bingham points out—​by Ada: “I am astonished at Ada’s want of punctuality, she knows that I fancy no one but herself to make my tea or butter my toast” (330). Ada’s refusal to serve tea alters the domestic order and becomes a point of inflection in the story. It is this domestic repression exacerbated by repetitive behaviour—​where women, as Wollstonecraft claimed, “do to-​day, what they did yesterday, merely because they did it yesterday” (22–​3) against which the heroine rebels. Clearly, “The Panorama of Life” is in dialogue with and responding to early nineteenth-​ century gender debates while featuring numerous allusions to a wide range of other texts. Novels and short fiction at the time had clearly a didactic aim and urged women to make the right decisions in life so to avoid the finale of their impulsive heroines. Indeed, as Rosemarie Zagarri states, “if a woman should compromise her virtue—​meaning her chastity and good reputation—​then a bleak future of disgrace and/​or spinsterhood awaited her” (31). Ada compromises her virtue—​“All the dignity (…) was gone” (332), we are told—​and like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s dark lady heroine claims “I have given thee much/​I gave what I can ne’er recall.” Consequently, Ada “asked no vows, demanded no pledge” (332), and decides not to restrain her desire and sexual impulses by uttering a “consent to be his, only his, to fly with him from home and friends” (332). And interestingly, as we are informed, this is done from an empowered position as “she had no doubt, no fear, and she looked for no assurance” (332). Ada’s reputation,17 as expected, is damaged, but a quote from Moore’s Eveleen’s Bower anticipates that she will eventually be saved: “But there’s a light above/​Which alone can remove/​The darkness that’s left upon the maiden’s name!” (332).18 Indeed, the next time Ada appears in the story is—​unexpectedly—​in the form of a phantom who has for the last few months been driving Falconer to madness. It is by successfully making use of the corporeal through Ada’s phantom figure and unsexed body—​that the two-​sex system is subverted.

Violent women in Louisa Medina Hamblin’s The Panorama of Life  195 As Adriana Cracium asserts, unsexed and undead bodies share “an anomalous status between two normative, supposedly fixed categories of truth (male and female, living and dead)” (12). It is Ada’s conscious use of violence that serves as a tool to reverse gender roles. And it is through violence that her demands are fulfilled. Thus, the narrator, referring to Ada, declares that “her manners and general expressions were soft and placid,” “beneath this quietude, lay the sleeping storm” (328, emphasis added) with “the power, if called into action, to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm” (228). Having made use of language for her own ends and having claimed power back from her governor, Ada is no longer a “sleeping storm,” by which the reader clearly anticipates the violence that is later enacted by her. This metaphor of the “sleeping storm” had already been used by Medina in one of her poems where she delved into the possibility of “the wild win should awaken the sea.” Asked by one reporter from the Ladies’ Companion about her “brow so often clouded with sadness and the tone of her writings so gloomy,” Medina improvised the following poem that we partly quote below: Be silent! Be silent.-​The heart will not brook That the eye of the many on its secrets should look! (…) But if the wild wind should awaken the sea, ‘Whelmed in foam and in fury then beauty would be. Then be silent, be silent; oh! ask me not why My brow wears a gloom, or my breast heaves a sigh! (302, emphasis added) This “wild wind,” which in the above poem transforms “beauty” into “fury” and is eventually able to “awaken the sea,” finds in the story its equivalent in the “evil hand” (Medina, “The Panorama of Life” 328) that as the narrator informs us, has the capacity to “awaken the passions of [Ada’s] soul” (328). It is this “wild” component precisely that serves as the trigger mechanism which enables the heroine to use violence for her own benefit. Thus, by conferring a natural and primitive character to Ada and by spatially positioning her surrounded by nature, “fragrant flowers” that receive the “moon’s rays” (334), Ada’s peripheral status is highlighted. Indeed, Ada—​the narrator informs us—​has changed from being an “innocent creature” to having “a strange wildness mixed with sweetness” (334) and to finally committing a “wild deed” (336). And it is precisely this “evil” (a term that incidentally was used by Wollstonecraft when referring to women’s violence) that makes women the active agents of destruction (as opposed to traditionally feminine creation) and that as Cracium avows, is most valuable to feminism (71). A violent

196  Milagros López-Peláez Casellas Ada under the new form of a “haunting phantom” is identified now as “the Bride of Death” (336), “the Angel of Death” (335) who “comes from the bridal chamber” (335).19 The image of Ada as a destructive, violent woman does not serve man’s interests in women’s oppression. Furthermore, while Ada and Clarisse are increasingly empowered and self-​governed as the story moves forward, it is Falconer, the Gothic villain, who progressively loses his power, reason and self-​control. By the end of the story, it is he who is experiencing passionate feelings—​he “addressed her in the deep tones of passion” (333)—​and is finally punished by two women, mother and daughter. A most confused Falconer confesses his altered, unruly passionate state to Clarisse with language like “I have so maddened” and “I adore her to distraction” (333). He even acknowledges having lost his mind as he is in a “maddening bliss” (335) and powerless “knelt(ing) beside her” (334). Passion—​a patriarchal tool that has served to keep women away from any emancipatory intent—​is successfully used as a feminist tactic to subvert the patriarchal discourse. The story successfully shows how emotions can be managed for self-​interested purposes as by the end of the story, Falconer speaks the language of emotions, a change in his behaviour that partially disarms the patriarchal ideology of gendered feeling. His new speech serves to show that men’s discourse is irrational as it is at this point in the story fairly evident that Falconer cannot govern his newborn passion through reason. Like Anne Bannerman’s “The Dark Ladie” (1802), a veiled Ada cruelly haunts Falconer, who confesses hearing her “low deep tones” and her “melodious laugh,” “an unknown vision that has enthralled me thus” (333), and terrifyingly confesses that “I cannot exist in this suspense” (334). The tale in Bannerman’s poem is puzzling and stays unresolved for the reader. Likewise, Ada’s story is not fully explained and the reader is never told how she became a phantom. Still, both Ada’s phantom figure and the Dark Ladie—​both dressed in white—​terrifyingly haunt the men in their stories. Ada, in her “white dress,” is described to us “reposing on her bridal couch [as] the Bride of Death!” (336). Bannerman’s “Dark Ladie” is not only an impossibility but also “resists and foregrounds her objectivization” (Cracium 167). Curiously Ada, unlike the Dark Ladie, goes even further and by the end of the story, is able to possess Falconer before killing him. Indeed, right after giving Falconer “the fatal goblet” (335)—​(a glass of wine in Bannerman’s poem)—​while chillingly mocking wedding ceremonies, Ada’s last uttered lines in the story are “For life or death, in time and in eternity, I claim thee for my own!” (335, emphasis added). The end result is a fracture in the system, and the transgression and reversal of gendered boundaries is successfully achieved through the use of violence. Thus, if at first, the women in the story—​Ada and her mother, Clarisse—​ base their existence around men’s desire, this nevertheless does change as

Violent women in Louisa Medina Hamblin’s The Panorama of Life  197 the story progresses and Ada and Clarisse regain female agency by killing Falconer. Clarisse’s story and Constance’s in Walter Scott’s Marmion (also quoted in the story) share many similarities: both women in their final speech explain how they had been lied to by men and abandoned for other women: while Clarisse’s “rival” (336) is Ada, Constance’s is Claire. But, in contrast to Constance, who also seeks to avenge, Clarisse’s revenge is consciously and meticulously violent and she does not lose her life as a result (Constance, by contrast, is punished by being walled up alive in Lindisfarne convent). Consciously becoming violent/​murderous women, both Ada and Clarisse break with the assumptions that women are the more benevolent sex as their stories contain instances of controlled female agency and power. The Romantic period constituted the female sex as maternal, nurturing and domestic, a functioning of the bourgeois ideology. Medina’s violent women, in contrast, challenged the sex/​gender system by remaining outside of it. In contrast to the type of women that we find in Romantic literature of this period, Ada and Clarisse act outside their prescribed gender roles as they are not static, domestic characters but destructive, merciless and vindictive. Ada’s violent revenge act confronts the binary order that struggled to contain her. As Cracium states, “such unnatural, unsexed, undead, and sometimes inhuman bodies” (11) challenged the ideology itself. As a veiled supernatural character, a demystified Ada terrifies Falconer in order to gain revenge. If Maggie Kilgour described the Gothic as “a transgressive rebellion against norms which yet ends up reinstating them” (8), in Medina’s “The Panorama of Life,” the wedding—​that idealized and expected ending for women—​is successfully transformed and subverted. By the end of the story, the heroine has turned into an active spiritual female who has learnt to control her passions rationally and to break away from the restrictions of social norms. The conventional aggressive sexual male characteristic of Gothic fiction finds here its equivalent in the self-​regulating autonomous aggressive female. “REMEMBEREST THOU ME?” If at the time of Missouri’s death, Hamblin, described by all as a violent and abusive man, was left unindicted, “The Panorama of Life” does not let men evade punishment. Violence appears as one useful protofeminist tool that serves to exclude violent men from women’s lives. Ada becomes an “emancipated spirit” (336) who not only kills Falconer but also leaves him “contorted as with pain, remorse and dread” (336). Through the use of violence, Medina is able to write about women who are capable of aggression, murderousness and destructiveness. By embracing the

198  Milagros López-Peláez Casellas apparently misogynistic archetype, she is able to destabilize the “natural” binary position of male and female. Unfortunately, “The Panorama of Life,” as with all her short stories and poems, has remained unread for too long. In her short stories, Medina consistently created villains that resembled Thomas Hamblin, the main villain in her life.20 After all, she spent her last five years around him—​both as his lover (among others) and as his playwright. We will never know the exact cause of Missouri’s death, just as we are never told how Ada became a phantom. But what she makes clear is that in “The Panorama of Life” as in her own life, men are the real villains. And it is only through fiction that the writer can be avenged. It is precisely in her published short stories that the author found the freedom to consistently feature strong women and weak men who end up being punished and even repent.21 Sadly, and due to the strange circumstances in which Medina found herself after Missouri’s death, The New York American (13 November 1838) upon the writer’s death22 wrote the following words: “Medina, blasted, ruined and wretched, died of morphine, self-​ administered.” Nevertheless, we do know that by the time of her death she had become, as The Ladies Companion stated, an author of “unparallel grandeur”; “the most spirited and successful of our American dramatists”; “a brilliant woman,” simply “a genius.” Through Ada’s last breathing message to the villain before killing him, Medina’s last words are uttered: “REMEMBEREST THOU ME?” Notes 1 The Last Days of Pompeii (1835) was the first play in New York to remain twenty-​ nine consecutive days on stage. Norman Leslie (1836) and Rienzi (1836) were twenty-​five days. The New York Mirror mentioned that “some of (Medina’s dramas) have been played for sixty consecutive years” (28 April 1838). 2 The Bowery Theater—​America’s largest theatre—​opened in 1826 and seated 3,000 people. 3 In Theatre and Feminism (1988), Sue Ellen Case positions Hrotsvit von Gandersheim as “the first woman playwright of written texts” (32); Aphra Behn as “the first woman to make her living as a playwright” (36); and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz as “the first woman playwright in the New World to write plays performed and published” (41). Sadly, there is no mention of Medina. 4 Of Medina’s plays, the majority were adaptations, in the loosest sense, of work by canonical writers. Medina’s work touched on topics relating to the American South—​ in particular, to rural life, squatters and borderers, and

Violent women in Louisa Medina Hamblin’s The Panorama of Life  199 problematically contributed to the maintenance and transmission of Anglo-​ American structures of power and the rhetoric of dominance. 5 There is no known record of her mother’s origin, but it is possible to infer that she was Irish as Medina’s middle name was “Honore” (a rather common Irish name at the time) and she had a native level of English. Bogar asserts that her mother was Irish (113). 6 In her Concise History of the Life and Amours of Thomas S. Hamblin, Late Manager of the Bowery Theatre, Mary Clarke adds the following: “On Mrs. Hamblin’s return she found her lordly husband snugly domesticated with his two dulcineas, Miss Vincent, and the (as she calls herself) far-​famed Miss Medina, ‘Of talents rare, and beauty fair’ (…) This lady Mr Hamblin had taken as a companion for his fair mistress Miss Vincent” (28–​9). 7 Interestingly, I have found a handwritten sentence on one of the margins in Clarke’s original document—​(I can only speculate, most possibly written at around that period of time due to the letter style)—​that reads “This is a damn lie.” The sentence is written right on a side margin on Clarke’s manuscript. 8 By 1835, Medina had started to write plays for William Dinneford, a famous theatre manager, who wrote to Hamblin that Medina “expects me to be govern’d as you but it won’t do for my temperament” (Bogar 155). John Hill Hewitt, in Shadows on the Wall or, Glimpses of the Past, mentions that in the one interview to the author (misspelled “Miss Modina”), she described herself as “a genius” and as a being “resolute and determine” (50). 9 Mary Clarke, who knew Hamblin well, described him as: “(…) a mean, cowardly assassin, (who) assault(ed) an editor in his own office” (9). The person in question was the New York Herald’s editor James Gordon Bennett Sr. Hamblin would also be prosecuted a second time for assaulting the theatre manager, William Dinneford. 10 Lester Wallack mentions that soon after Missouri’s death, Missouri’s mother, Adeline, gathered a mob outside Hamblin and Medina’s house. She accused Hamblin of having been “ruined” by him and Medina of being a “murderess” and of having “in revenge (…) poisoned her” (Memories of Fifty Years 188). As he further tells us, “the story went about, and there was the most terrific row that can possibly be imagined. Hamblin could hardly appear for fear of being mobbed” (188). 11 Clarke tells us those where mainly a “half-​negro” (referring to the actor, singer and newspaper editor of The Polyanthos, George Washington Dixon) and “two or three other wretches” (40). 12 See Theodore J. Shank, “Theatre for the Majority: Its Influence on a Nineteenth Century American Theatre” Educational Theatre Journal vol. 11, no. 3 (October 1959), pp. 188–​99. 13 Following these events, Hamblin and Medina, who was suffering “severe anxiety attacks and headaches,” decided to spend August and September in Oyster Bay, New York (Bogar, 179). It is reasonable to conclude that Medina wrote “The Panorama of Life” at that time. 14 There is a striking similarity between Falconer and the real-​ life character of John André, a major in the British army and head of its secret service in

200  Milagros López-Peláez Casellas America during the American Revolutionary War who was hanged as a spy in 1780. 15 Again, coincidentally or not, Thomas Hamblin had been the centre of strong criticism from the American public for having not shown himself a true American as he had a record of favouring European actors and playwrights over American ones. 16 The reference to Augustus Montague Toplady’s traditional Christian hymn “The Rock of Ages” (1776) serves to reinforce the longing for justice as well as the need for Ada’s future sin to be pardoned. 17 Soon after Missouri’s death, The Spirit of the Times, referring to Hamblin, wrote that “female reputation is forever blighted by the mildew of his society” (“Melancholy Death of Miss Missouri,” vol. 8, no. 19, 23 June 1838). 18 As expected from Medina’s literary career, here she also slightly modified the final line of Thomas Moore’s “Eveleen’s Bower”: “That stain upon the snow of fair Eveleen’s fame.” 19 Medina borrows this line from Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801). 20 Even though there is no record of Hamblin and Medina ever marrying (he referred to Medina as his wife so that he would not have to pay her for her work), we have found numerous references to Medina’s married name (The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1838, 50; The New York Evening Post (33); Clark, Concise History, 38; Lester Wallack, Memories of Fifty Years 1889, 116; John Hill Hewitt, Shadows on the Wall or, Glimpses of the Past 1877, 51). Faye E. Dudden is right to mention that “although she had accepted a life as Hamblin’s mistress, she nevertheless understood and resented the injustice of a society that made him a wealthy businessman and her a pariah” (74). 21 By 1835, Medina had started to write plays for William Dinneford, a famous theatre manager, who wrote to Hamblin that Medina “expects me to be govern’d as you but it won’t do for my temperament” (Bogar, 155). John Hill Hewitt in Shadows on the Wall or, Glimpses of the Past mentions that in the one interview to the author (misspelled “Miss Modina”), she described herself as “a genius” and as a being “resolute and determine” (50). 22 Medina’s sudden death on Monday morning under Hamblin’s roof made him again a murder suspect. However, this time, as soon as the day after Medina’s death and “at the special request of the friends of Mr Hamblin,” “an inquest upon the body of Mrs Medina L. Hamblin” was performed (The Spirit of the Times, 1838, 17 November, 316). As the newspaper further reassured the New York public, she had “died of apoplexy and not “by anything taken into the stomach” (316). This served to calm the mob that had already gathered at Hamblin’s house and was calling him a murderer.

Works cited Bannerman, Anne. “The Dark Ladie.” Tales of Superstition and Chivalry. 1802. University of California, 1998. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/bwrp/BannATales/ Bogar, Thomas A. Thomas Hamblin and the Bowery Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Violent women in Louisa Medina Hamblin’s The Panorama of Life  201 Case, Sue Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. Macmillan, 1988. Clarke, Mary. A Concise History of the Life and Amours of Thomas S. Hamblin late manager of the Bowery Theatre, as Communicated by his Legal Wife, Mrs. Elizabeth Hamblin, to Mrs. M. Clarke. Philadelphia, 184?. Clayton, Jay. Romantic Vision and the Novel. Cambridge UP, 1988. Coleridge, Samuel T. “The Ballad of the Dark Ladié.” Great Books Online. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–​1834). The Ballad of the Dark Ladie. William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. 1909. The Book of Georgian Verse (bartleby.com) Cracium, Adriana. Fatal Women of Romanticism. Cambridge UP, 2003. Dudden, Faye E. Women in the American Theatre. Actresses & Audiences, 1790–​ 1870. Yale UP, 1994. Hamblin, Thomas S. “Last Will and Testament.” Harvard Theatre Collection, 1836. Hewitt, John Hill. Shadows on the Wall; or, Glimpses of the Past. Turnbull brothers, 1877. Kerber, Linda. Women of the Republic. Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. U of North Caroline P, 2000. Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. Routledge, 1995. López Rodríguez, Miriam. “Louisa Medina. Uncrown Queen of Melodrama.” Women’s Contribution to Nineteenth-​ Century American Drama, edited by Miriam López Rodríguez and Mª Dolores Carbona Carrión. Universitat de València, 2004. Medina Hamblin, Louisa H. “The Beauty of Holiness.” Ladies Companion, vol. 7, May 1837. —​—​—​. “Olive Etherington.” Southern Literary Messenger (1834–​1845). American Periodicals, vol. 3. September 1837. —​—​—​. “Olive Etherington.” Spirit of the Times: A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage (1835–​ 1861). American Periodicals, vol. 7. November 1837. —​—​—​. “The Burial by Fire.” Ladies Companion, vols. 8–​9, June 1838. —​—​—​. “Singular Death of Miss Missouri,” 20 June 1838 “Melancholy Death of Miss Missouri.” The Spirit of the Times, vol. 8, 23 June 1838. —​ —​ —​ . “The Panorama of Life.” The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 3, September 1838. —​—​—​. “Chess Play.” The Rover: A Weekly Magazine of Tales, Poetry and Engravings, Original and Selected, edited by Seba Smith and Lawrence Labree, vol. 1. Labree, Dean and Co., 1843. —​—​—​. Last Days of Pompeii. French Standard Drama, issue 146. 1835. Samuel French, 1844. —​—​—​. Nick of the Woods. Victorian Melodramas, edited by James L. Smith. Dent, 1976. 65–​96. Moore, Thomas. “Eveleen’s Bower.” https://allpoetry.com/Eveleen’s-Bower Rush, Benjamin. “On the mode of Education Proper in a Republic.” Essays, Literary, Moral & Philosophical. Philadelphia: Printed by Thomas and Samuel F. Bradford, 1798, http://​deila.dickin​son.edu/​theiro​wnwo​rds/​cont​ext (Accessed 4 August 2023) Scott, Sir Walter. Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.

202  Milagros López-Peláez Casellas Wallack, Lester. Memories of Fifty Years. 1889. Benjamin Blom, 1969. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. Penguin Pocket Hardbacks, 2020. Zagarri, Rosemarie. The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-​Century American Women’s Writing. Cambridge UP, 2006.

14 Patriarchal orthorexia and embodied dissidence in contemporary feminist dystopias Almudena Machado-​Jiménez

Patriarchal utopias have traditionally regarded women’s matrixial entity as the locus to find the individual’s illusion of self-​sufficiency. Considering that the biopolitics of utopia is based on patriarchal individualism, this fantasy of individuality, as Almudena Hernando defines it, depends on women’s relational identity. The categorization of women as merely relational converts them to selfless beings that host and represent the individual’s utopian ideal: “No se generan deseos para una misma, sino que se está pendiente de averiguar y satisface los del hombre del que procede la seguridad” (Hernando 127). Hence, not only must women live in utopia, but they also are utopia themselves, becoming “the terrain on which patriarchy is erected” (Rich 55). The configuration of women as spatial ironically recalls Lucy Sargisson’s process of utopianism where the resulting “spaces are the new place that is no place: utopias” (Utopian Bodies 10). By women becoming a utopia, they are compelled to be a good place that is no place. As selfless beings, their existence is now filled and marked by others’ experiences—​for their own experiences and discourses have been conspicuously disregarded and muted. And yet, their compliant participation (as objects, not subjects) is crucial to boosting the individual’s welfare and his illusion of sovereignty. The ersatz autonomy granted to female inhabitants within patriarchal utopias is adjusted to prevent transgressions from their generative power and thus reinforces a gender hierarchy. This fool’s paradise that women are offered is what Sargisson calls sham utopianism (Fool’s Gold?), which eventually discards the very possibility of self-​definition, not even as “other” or as victim since their fallacious quest for female perfection evades any confrontation or reflection about their mere existence: Without deeper, active distrust, the stigmatised believe that nothing can change. They are powerless to redefine themselves, and dependent on the spoiled identity in order to have an identity at all. (...) So those who DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-14

204  Almudena Machado-Jiménez have been labeled as abnormal, for whatever reasons, will stay where they are until profound dissent alters self-​image, and coming together can be felt to be a source of strength. (Janeway 247) Female matrixial corporeality is thus configured and circumscribed under the ideological standards of patriarchal utopia. As matrixial beings, the indoctrination of women’s psyche is intrinsically related to the distortion of their anatomy to fit into the normative standards of womanhood. In so doing, the patriarchal woman learns from birth that, in order to reach self-​fulfilment and attain perfection, she must be a compliant member of society. By rejecting communal interdependence, the individual “va construyendo un mundo a la medida de su capacidad de controlarlo, porque solo incluirá en él el conjunto de fenómenos que sea capaz de ordenar y por tanto de pensar organizadamente” (Hernando 43). Corrections to the lands of classical utopias usually convey a shrinking and isolationist procedure, for example, separating Utopia from the continent, making Bensalem invisible with scientific devices, or walling their cities in general. Likewise, the patriarchal mechanisms to prevent and palliate the decay of bodily utopia have a shrinking and detrimental function in salvaging women as utopia. Consequently, there is a blockage of any component that feeds women aberrantly. Dissident feeding within patriarchal utopias turns literal, considering that “food is a weapon and a means of communication in this world” (Sceats 112). The control of food intake is employed as a preventive measure to avoid ideological deviance. Indeed, Sarah Sceats explains how women have traditionally gained agency and self-​awareness through alternative forms of nourishment: “forbidden foods themselves become a measure of delight, of transgression.” Thus, patriarchal utopias determine a correct appetite within their prescriptive understanding of health and behaviour. I call this form of dieting patriarchal orthorexia. This chapter examines the contemporary feminist dystopias Only Ever Yours, by Louise O’Neill, and Gather the Daughters, by Jennie Melamed, which expose the epistemic violence of patriarchal orthorexia. The novels present dissident behaviour patterns towards food among female characters, whose liminal identity is lost during puberty. Eating disorders are articulated as utopian transgressive acts that defy the cultural meaning ascribed to women’s bodies as beautiful abject objects. Patriarchal orthorexia is fundamental in the orthopaedics of the system. As the paradoxical representation of the patriarchal ideal of femininity suggests, this kind of dieting conveys a contradiction of women’s eating habits:

Patriarchal orthorexia and embodied dissidence  205 We are simultaneously exhorted to be thin and to consume, to be hedonistic and virtuous, to worship the body and punish the body; the difficulty, even impossibility, of achieving a homeostasis in this culture is reflected in anxiety, guilt, anger and obsession. (Sceats 66) Contemporary forms of nutrition result from the established alliance between patriarchy and capitalism, which, together with the hypersexualization resulting from the porn industry, worsens this contrariety. In recent decades, the shift from the supermodel “heroin chic” ideal to the Kardashian “slim-​thick” effect in the Instagram era’s liquid modernity reimagines the embodiment of virgin-​ motherhood in this hypersexualized era. The resulting utopian body combines infantility—​ and the characteristics that come along with it (immaturity, virginity, innocence, vulnerability)—​with a sexual maturation directed towards suggestiveness for the male gaze and even pornographic explicitness, though not with maternity or women’s maturity in general. The immediacy of social networks and their technological advances prove this hypersexual virgin girl’s radicalization and democratization, too—​at least as a virtual fantasy. The average user can attain this ideal through replication in mainstream social media. Filters, Photoshop and correct poses can ensure the illusion of having attained the desired body as long as the virtual self exists. Corporeality in social networks simulates perfection in its most utopian sense—​representing the ideal wellness as utterly impossible in reality. The virtual selves immersed in the Facetune culture do not reflect but represent the identity of users. I resort to Gayatri Spivak’s twofold meaning of representation as both “proxy and portrait” (108) insofar as the simulated idealized re-​presentation in social media is imbued with the hegemonic trends of beauty, patriarchal institutions pouring through our self-​perception. The resulting dissociation between the virtual and the tangible body eventually provokes utopian dysmorphia, which exposes the epistemic violence in the hegemonic construction of ideal womanhood. Only Ever Yours uncovers the confrontation between the appearances of the enhanced photographed version of freida and the real freida, as she hopes to be desired by her approximation to female perfection but is anxious about the possibility of others noticing her defects if they look at her authentic self: 1.  Turn partially to the camera, one foot in front of the other 2.  Weight on the back foot. 3.  Left hand on hip 4.  Dazzling smile

206  Almudena Machado-Jiménez There is a flash of light, my foto uploaded instantly to the School website for the Euro-​Zone Inheritants to judge (...). I’m left in the darkness. I should leave, but just for a moment I want to stay in here. I want to hide, fold into the shadows and become invisible so no one can look at me any more. I hope the foto was perfect (O’Neill 15). In patriarchal utopias, the enhanced virtual self neither transgresses nor accomplishes conventional corporeal representations of virgin-​ motherhood. This unfeasibility leads the majority of eves to purgative methods and eating disorders, for these are the expected “sane and mentally healthy responses to an insane social reality” (Wolf 60). Nonetheless, I articulate that some female characters undertake these illnesses as a desperate measure to gain agency and power over their bodies since they are powerless in the world outside. Utopian dysmorphia not only supposes a reinforcement of physical insecurities and eating disorders but also denotes the female inhabitants’ monetary precariousness within these patriarchal utopias. Sceats’ paradox of the hegemonic and competitive beauty market presents how female images in the media provoke a lifelong financial debt to the industry: The implication of such advertising (for its purpose is to foster discontent and a sense of lack) is that our bodies are deficient, requiring the intervention of whatever is being offered (…). We are constantly bombarded with images urging consumption and promising instant gratification. (6) While women undergo social pressure to consume and to be consumed as a utopian product, their limitations as consumerist subjects in this Disneyfied1 trading prove their dependence on hegemonic sexist authorities in problem-​solving their bodies. As economic independence is unfeasible in these patriarchal utopias, the only way to achieve their beauty goals relies on a sacrifice-​and-​reward system, for example, fasting to be skinny (but also eating cake after behaving well). Thus, women can only remain passive and be consorts, producers and consumers, because patriarchal capitalism establishes these market conditions (i.e. punishing and trading their bodies to improve their bodies) without considering a non-​violent process of becoming fulfilled. Patriarchal orthorexia connects eating with female sexuality. This parallelism of woman and food alludes to a conventional understanding of mothers as natural feeders. As Caroline Walker Bynum explains in her research on the significance of food for medieval women, a woman’s body

Patriarchal orthorexia and embodied dissidence  207 has been traditionally associated with food as “breast milk was the human being’s first nourishment—​the one food essential for survival” (270). As mothers are natural feeders, women become food naturally. The two authors depict women as the eaten while men are the eaters. However, women’s role as feeders reminds them of their generative matrixial power, which appears threatening because “to prepare food is to control food. (...) Food is not merely a resource that women control; it is the resource that women control” (191, original emphasis). In controlling food, there is also a control on communal relations, as Sceats remarks. In so doing, the relational bonding of dependent individuals is exposed—​and their fantasy of self-​governance and sovereignty is debunked. Hence, if feeding takes place within the realms of patriarchal utopia, such a task (especially if it is breastfeeding) is restricted to the private space. O’Neill illustrates how companions must be biologically conditioned by their tasks as feeders but never empowered in doing so: “I think breastfeeding is so important. As long as it’s done in private, of course. (...) These ‘women’ who can’t be bothered to breastfeed are bad mothers” (328–​29). Oppositely, during their upbringing as eves in the School they never prepare food, being solely consumers at the Nutrition Centre. The resulting relation of women with food is aversive, as their role as shameful feeders determines their lack of power in enjoying food consumption. Indeed, the protagonists of these patriarchal utopias will be (force-​)fed after their rejection to continue living under these social dynamics, ironically adopting the individualist role of men in this dualist distribution. Female cravings are only authorized and encouraged if food is phallic and the act of devouring resembles heteronormative sexual intercourse: “When women are positively depicted as sensaciosly voracious about food (…) their hunger is employed solely as a metaphor for their sexual appetite” (Bordo 110). Moreover, this positive image of girls’ voracity only occurs if their body weight and ideology comply with the function of arousing male desires, as the exceptions of isabel will exemplify. In Only Ever Yours, eves try to mimic the cookery lessons in virginia Licks, where virginia is “pouting her inflated lips at the camera, licking cupcake mixture off her fingers, pressing her redesigned breasts together as she beats the eggies vigorously. No wonder she’s popular in the Zones, even if cooking is a prehistoric skill” (O’Neill 191). Similarly, finger licking with cream appears early in the novel Gather the Daughters with one of the children: “Vanessa stirs the milk with a finger and watches as blobs of tawny cream rise to the surface. She dunks in a cookie and carefully licks each drop of cream clinging to its sweet crumbling mass” (Melamed 13). Melamed’s portrayal of infantile eating is suggestive yet not voracious, to emphasize daughters’ innocence.

208  Almudena Machado-Jiménez Voracity is solely reserved for men on the island. The author employs this analogy of predation to portray Wanderers as “birds of prey, seizing the girls with their talons and carrying them off to break their bones and tear their flesh” (291). The detailed description of Vanessa’s Father eating meat compared to her impossibility of enjoying the meal further evinces the contrast between the sexual predator and the victim: Father eats it with gusto, closing his teeth over the fibers and chewing lustily. Looking around, she sees chewing mouths, closing on flesh and turning it into slime, and she clenches her jaw against the turn of her stomach. She nibbles (…). Eventually Father notices and says, “Vanessa.” Forcing the mutton down, Vanessa barely chews, pretending she is a dog. Dogs don’t chew, they just swallow. (18) The graphic lustful tearing of the meat fibres illustrates Father’s sexual greed, symbolizing the possible lacerations caused to her daughter during their sexual intercourse. On the other hand, Vanessa has to accept her condition without hesitation nor delight at her Father’s command. Her eating experience supposes the acknowledgement of her condition as a woman in this patriarchal setting: Like body, food must be broken and spilled forth in order to give life. Macerated by teeth before it can be assimilated to sustain life, food mirrors and recapitulates both suffering and fertility. Thus food, by what it is, seems to symbolise sacrifice and service. (Bynum 30) The paradox of patriarchal orthorexia in contemporary utopia forces women’s appetite to fulfil this hypersexual yet controlled body image. The need to comply with over-​consumerism forces them to enter into a loop of dependence on what the market and celebrity culture can offer for their salvation, as Timothy Caulfield explains. The heuristics of patriarchal utopia deposits women’s goal to achieve perfection on an unending list of dieting plans, detox programmes and food supplements that foster the illusion of instant purging, redemption and recovery of the normative female corporeality, even though “there is absolutely no evidence to support this practice” (Caulfield 375). This reliance on placebo remedies is observed in the daily doses of O’Neill’s eves: “The usual VitC, Zinc, Mag, Aloe, Flax, Chlorophyll, Q10, Multi-​Omegas, Lipoic, Carnosine, Acetyl-​ L-​ CarnitineArginate, COX-​ 2 and 5-​ LOX and DHEA (…) And your anti-​womenstruation meds are included, of course” (27). Heuristics thus depicts Sargisson’s fool’s paradise (Fool’s Gold?) as it facilitates the

Patriarchal orthorexia and embodied dissidence  209 transmission of arranged dogmatic principles by reducing the female citizens’ mental effort and suppressing any attempt at introspection and deep emotional connections. Moreover, the heuristic method enables women to collaborate with institutions and make them feel responsible for problem-​ solving their own flawed corporeality. In this neocapitalist scenario, even starvation becomes a commodity, for “almost all of us who can afford to be eating well are dieting and hungry—​almost all the time” (Bordo 103). Naomi Wolf agrees with Susan Bordo, though she remarks that social acceptance relies on a state of “permanent semistarvation” (Wolf 60), which corresponds to the midpoint between purging and phallic eating. Nonetheless, patriarchal orthorexia is not noteworthy because of the resulting slimness of the utopian woman but the female dependence and embracing of violence that diet culture provokes (Caulfield; Wolf). Wolf remarks that the passivity and anxiety of the restrictive intake disorders of our contemporary era are qualities that “the dominant culture wants to create in the private sense of self of recently liberated women in order to cancel out the dangers of their liberation” (60). However, these traits are also explored in the public arena in patriarchal utopias. The examination of girls’ body weight is displayed as one of the cornerstones of patriarchal biopolitics, not only because their beauty allegorizes the state’s excellence but also because of reproductive reasons. Only Ever Yours perfectly illustrates the encouragement of body shaming with the weekly beauty rankings and subjects like Calorie Calculation or Comparison studies, where eves humiliate their sisters for their defects: “She’s fat, girls. She’s fat and disgusting. Say it with me. She’s fat. Fat. Fat” (O’Neill 61). This public shaming reinforces the inner guilt but serves as a kind of surveillance that breaks girls’ emotional bonding and solidarity. The communitarian celebration of shared eating is prevented by treating nourishment as a punishment. However, the female characters of the chosen novels find radical methods to—​if not establish connections with others—​at least denounce patriarchal orthorexia and, in so doing, reject the social values of these utopias. Indeed, considering that the phallocentric hegemonic discourse nullifies their logos, girls resort to a performative munching that allegorizes the protest in its most destructive form, as it supposes alterations in the matrixial bodies that sustain the materialization of patriarchal utopias. The female protagonists experience eating disorders like anorexia and binge eating as a political weapon. Yet, the narration of their embodied dissidence does not present a romanticization of eating disorders either, because their endings in the novels are crude and violently anticlimactic. According to Bynum, this practice has been recurrent throughout history since women (feeders) have usually found it easier to renounce food

210  Almudena Machado-Jiménez in their expression of world-​denial rather than other aspects within the patriarchal restriction of the times, for example, money, family, sex (191). Wolf interprets the complete rejection of consumption from the outside world as a self-​defence reaction: It is a sign of mental health to try to control something that is trying to control you, especially if you are a lone young woman and it is a massive industry fueled by the needs of an entire determined world order. (60) Melamed employs anorexia with one of her female characters to defy her biological destiny on the island as a woman. In the novel, Janey refuses to nourish herself to control her ageing towards womanhood. Her anorexic body delays fruition due to amenorrhea—​one of the most common consequences of this eating disorder. Thus, anorexia supposes an “abortion of development” (Michel and Willard 37). Aware of what her life after fruition awaits, Janey aims to eternize her childhood days, where she enjoys free mobility, wildness and solidarity with the other daughters at the shore. This infantile regression implies a rejection of this patriarchal utopian form of sociability but also of her sexuality (Greer; Grosz; Michel and Willard; Sceats). Greer describes menstruation as “a hideous violation of her physical integrity” (100). Regarding the traumatic transition at puberty, anorexic patients fear and dislike their own corporality. (...) Menstruation, like hunger, is seen as shameful, violating, and threatening; body, like food, is seen as frightening and powerful; sexual maturation is seen as vulnerability, as loss of what little capacity for self-​ determination the child had possessed. (Bynum 202) Elizabeth Grosz concludes that this problem arises not because of the biological transition itself but rather because the problem relies on the social construct of womanhood: “Anorexia is a form of protest at the social meaning of the female body” (40). Bordo delves into this issue by categorizing three observable axes of continuity in patients with anorexic syndrome: the dualist axis (where Janey defines her antisexuality), the control axis and the gender/​power axis (where she rejects the traditional conception of compliant womanhood). Regarding the control axis, it is through fasting that Janey acquires an invulnerable condition. The absence of flesh and blood prevents her from being “eaten” by Fathers in their customary sexual voracity. Wanderers cannot exploit her matrixial corporeality for the maintenance of their

Patriarchal orthorexia and embodied dissidence  211 utopia. Her inedia shows an alternative way to build utopia: “The anorectic does not eat nothing. She eats Nothing. She eats Nothing in order to appear in the space that is thereby opened up, even if this entails a fatal disappearance” (Angerer 29). The devouring of the Nothing recalls the etymological sense of utopia, as a good place that is a no-​place. The delay of her fruition enables her to fantasize about non-​reproductive forms of conceiving her own utopia so that she, together with the other children of the island, can escape from the parallelism of being a woman/​mother/​ utopia. However, her fatal disappearance supposes the impossibility of transcending her body within the hostile patriarchal community. About to be whipped at her trial for blasphemy, Janey Salomon’s body is exposed to the courtroom audience. Vanessa describes her as: graceful in its starvation, posed in arcs and wings of bone, her collarbone soaring upward against her skin like a loosed bird. The hollows between her ribs are so deep that the shadows loom gray and blue (...) Vanessa thinks she can see her heartbeat, the tiny tremor of it, against the triangle of her sternum (...). Where her dress hung, Janey’s skin is so pale it glistens silver. (Melamed 297) Her corporeal architecture simulates an ethereal Gothic church, with her bones pointing at the sky and her translucent glass skin. The bluish tones covering her body contrast with her fire-​red hair, which makes her “give off her own light” (26). The combination of these colours characteristic of the Virgin Mary makes her impersonate the ideal of virgin-​motherhood without submitting to the ancestors’ dictates nor sacrificing her individuality. Moreover, her heart peeking out of her chest brings to mind Jesus and Mary’s portraits with the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart out of their robes. With her amenorrheic body, not only does she evade her expected relational role as a daughter or a wife—​for “Janey doesn’t belong to anyone” (295)—​but her Passion reveals her as a new prophetic incarnation (hinted at by the heart beating out of her chest) that, instead of professing forgiveness and love for humankind, unleashes her rage contesting the logical infallibility of this patriarchal society: food was a resource women controlled but also because by means of food women controlled themselves and their world. Bodily functions, sensations, fertility, and sexuality; husbands, mothers, fathers, and children; religious superiors and confessors; God in his majesty and the boundaries of one’s own “self”—​all could be manipulated by abstaining from and bestowing food. (Bynum 193–​94)

212  Almudena Machado-Jiménez Janey’s graceful starvation becomes an example of the anorexia mirabilis in the contemporary patriarchal utopia, as it shows similitudes to medieval female fasting: “The holy anorexic never gives in, and ultimately she may die of her austerities” (Bell 19). Unlike the holy anorexia that some nuns underwent during the Middle Ages,2 Janey’s starvation is not imitative of imitatio Christi, nor is it about sacrifice for her deities (Bell; Bynum). Janey’s anorexia is not even concerned with aesthetics—​equating thinness with beauty—​but becomes a form of gaining self-​governance and rejecting the bodily practices that condemn women. Janey’s anorexia mirabilis becomes the only means of control within hostile patriarchal institutions. Indeed, as female discourse and access to education are highly restricted, this performative munching becomes a carnal expression of her desired individuality. Her body also serves as a constant reminder of the impossibility of men using her as their utopian space (i.e. avoiding marriage). Janey’s wish to expand horizons and chase individuality by escaping from the island is illustrated by her bones “soaring upward against her skin like a loosed bird.” This developing individuality approximates Janey to the status of men on the island, which resembles eucharistic transgressions from medieval women through mysticism: It was particularly in their eucharistic visions that mystical women saw themselves in “priestly” images and claimed roles and opportunities otherwise prohibited to them. Some women received, in visions, the power to distribute the eucharist and to touch altar vessels—​a power they were forbidden because of their gender. (Bynum 232) Similarly, Janey’s frenzy encourages all the children to congegrate in the community church at night. In the gathering, she reluctantly takes Pastor Saul’s spot behind the altar: When she speaks behind the podium, her faint voice is suddenly strong and echoing. With a start, Caitlin wonders if Pastor Saul’s sermons are really deep and thundering, his voice driven by otherworldly power, or if it’s simply a result of the way the church is structured. (Melamed 212) With Janey’s Eucharistic vision, she debunks the dualism characteristic of the patriarchal utopia (e.g. men/​women, divine/​human). The transubstantiation of her body breaks the conventional understanding of her body as food. Janey transforms her ethereal body into an idea, which she feeds to the young clandestine parishioners. Her sacrificial fasting encourages younger generations to find utopia beyond the insular limits.

Patriarchal orthorexia and embodied dissidence  213 Eventually, just as the island prevents daughters from escaping patriarchal utopia, her tight skin incarcerates Janey’s desire for freedom and utopia: “I wanted to change everything” (…) “You did” “I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was trapped.” “The island” “No.” (416) Despite Janey’s appearance resembling an infantile body, her growing bones betray her wish to remain forever as a child. Eventually, Janey experiences the same fallacy of dependent individuality by which patriarchal utopia operates. Because of the impossibility of conceiving utopia either textually through mental pregnancy (Aristarkhova) or of escaping to other lands, she gains agency by using her body as her utopian space. The deciduous nature of the body puts an end to Janey’s utopia, displaying how conditioned women on the island are by their bodies to conceive utopia, either others’ or to pursue their own. O’Neill presents analogies with the regular diet of medieval convents. She depicts a School where gynoid girls—​called eves—​reside, but patriarchal powers outside the Centre highly surveil that. The chastities mind eves’ nutrition, which resembles the abbesses caring for their novices. The Nutrition Centre is the refectory, where all eves dine. In this Centre, the BeBetter Buffet offers different menu sections, such as the 0Kcal, the Lo-​ carb, or the Tasty/​Healthy, which comply with the moderate restrictive bland diet of patriarchal orthorexia. The Centre also displays the FatGirl Buffet and the Vomitorium, although this Buffet is “only there to tempt the weak” (31). As O’Neill illustrates the paradox of the hypersexual virgin in the posthuman woman, the association of food and sexuality as a constant temptation approximates eves to the illusion of human imperfection: “A mentally healthy person will resist having to choose between food and sexuality—​sexuality being bought, today, by maintenance of the official body. By vomiting, she gets around the masochistic choice” (Wolf 60). The masochistic loop between the tempting junk food, bland meals and fasting is critical to distance eves from their perfect initial design if female medieval asceticism is also brought into the comparison, as “survival without eating is characteristic of ‘the perfect’ ” (Bynum 241). This defence of Catherine de Siena turns literal in the conception of the posthuman eve, designed perfectly by Genetic Engineers, but whose body is altered by eating and ageing. eves are obliged to go to the Nutrition Centre, yet their overeating is observed as atrophy of their perfect beauty: “Fat women are ugly. Old women are ugly” (O’Neill 7).

214  Almudena Machado-Jiménez Bulimia is encouraged as an instant remedy to bring back women to normative weight limits. This millennial utopia evokes the pro-​ana and mia culture of the 2000s heroin-​chic-​meets-​playboy model, with a celebration of being skin and bones, having a flat stomach while still being attractive to the male gaze. Nonetheless, this thinness cult operates within the concrete weight targets of semi-​starvation, differentiating the issue of anorexia at two levels: the permissible competitive type (solely concerned with beauty trends) and the forbidden suicidal type (related to self-​denial and closer to the definition of holy anorexia). The twofold interpretation arises from Sceats’ definition of anorexia as a food refusal that supposes a refusal of social connection. On the one hand, the rankings and concern about dieting within the hunger culture assume the loss of emotional bonding through eating and its disconnection from pleasure. The loss of sisterhood enables an easier manipulation of their self-​esteem. However, freida’s extreme anorexia has more profound implications. Her food refusal supposes a denial of all the sacrifices women have to undergo and a denial of the system. When freida says she finds boys stupid, she is careless about her image. chastity-​magdalena warns her about her weight loss as a dangerous move: “you’re absolutely emaciated. (...) It’s not a compliment (...). You need to shower, change your clothes and you need to start on a weight-​ restoration plan.” “I’m not hungry.” “I don’t care whether or not you’re hungry, freida. If you don’t eat, you’re going to die. And more importantly, men don’t find skinny women attractive. The target weights have been specifically set for that reason.” (O’Neill 147) Her anorexia nervosa is more related to hysteria, going beyond the less extreme anorexia and related to the aesthetics of the beauty industry. freida’s imposed weight-​restoration plan does not seek to save her life—​ as eves are disposable for the system—​but it aims to disguise the cracks in the system and prevent an insurrection by other girls. Moreover, by bringing freida to the normative standards, she merges into the mass and is stripped of her potential individualist thinking. Her inedia hinders her modern recreation of the Fall of Man through temptation. Though “sick-​ skinny, you-​could-​be-​dying-​skinny” (111), freida is closer to her original perfect design. Hence, the paradoxical nature of patriarchal orthorexia evinces the oscillation between the celebration of fasting and of consumption as long as it perpetuates eves’ perfection-​seeking and their continuous frustrations.

Patriarchal orthorexia and embodied dissidence  215 As Janey, freida also presents a corporeal manifestation of her wish to escape from society by the collision of her bones with her tightened skin. In this case, her anorexic body does not show symptoms of amenorrhea as she takes anti-​womenstruation to prevent the excretion of these fluids. In the following excerpts, freida describes the body as a jail: It’s true, I am skinny. My bones jostle underneath my skin, fighting to be the first one to pierce my flesh. “Food tastes of nothing.” (103) My bones are growing and my skin is shrinking. I am too much, too big for this body. I want to break every bone inside me. I want to scrape off all this flesh, clean out the shit that makes me what I am, start anew. (341) Even though Bynum asserts that fasting in medieval women has more implications and interpretations than reinscribing the dualism of the body/​woman and the soul/​man, the authors of these contemporary patriarchal utopias do present holy anorexia as a reaction against the state’s enforcement of a dualist arrangement of reality. Girls’ attacks on their bodies are undertaken to free them from their biological trap to construct their desired utopia (notice the expanding bone structure under the skin). However, O’Neill differentiates her narrative from Melamed’s intention of using anorexia as a political weapon. While Janey represents emaciation as a matter of self-​discipline, O’Neill shows these utopian transgressions as eves’ refusal of self-​control. As the School’s patriarchal orthorexia is highly demanding for eves to control their food intake constantly (e.g. having lessons in calorie calculation, caring about the portions and the sections at the food centre, etc.), freida’s recklessness in her nourishment serves as a defiant example to her sisters of alternative corporealities, and consequently, alternative ideological aspirations. The opposite extreme of this reckless eating as performative munching occurs with isabel and her binge eating syndrome. As the aspirational beauty resembles the model of the Barbie girl with a slim-​thick figure, isabel’s fatness questions the rigidity that characterizes eves’ nature and exposes the incongruency of the biological essentialism in the posthuman gynoid. She questions and rejects the assumed objectivity of her prefabricated plastic body (Toffoletti), showcasing plastic’s power of malleability and resilience. By shaping her body, she rejects that objectification and becomes a subject. Described as the “rubbish pit” (O’Neill 136), freida’s best friend isabel is a habitual consumer of the FatGirl Buffet and, consequently, is marginalized and ridiculed. However, her determination to continue eating without restrictions from this Buffet transfigures

216  Almudena Machado-Jiménez her body as a site of resistance against patriarchal utopia. Contrary to the School’s teachings, fatness is positively represented as a shelter to absorb and prevent trauma. The carelessness in her diet supposes that the mental efforts are devoted to self-​reflection and the realization of an individual identity under these hostile conditions: “The focus on food and weight serves to prevent her from thinking about disturbing, underlying issues such as a history of physical or sexual abuse” (Michel and Willard 30). Traditionally chosen as the favourite eve in the rankings, the development of isabel’s eating disorder on reaching puberty also supposes her awareness of all the years of abuse she has suffered from the Father, who will make her his companion. As in the other novels, the verbal impossibility of mouthing this denouncement makes her use performative munching to devour but also expose her secret. Her gorging in public spaces differs from other weak girls who nibble timidly from the FatGirl Buffet to later run to the Vomitorium: The camera zooms in on Isabel’s face as she stuffs the food into her mouth. She gags slightly, bringing up a chunky fluid, some of it spraying on to her leggings. She doesn’t seem to notice, she just keeps shoving food in, even swallowing back down vomit-​encrusted bread (…) practically inhaling [chocco bars]. (O’Neill 136) Even though, traditionally, gorging has been intimately related to sensual pleasures (Bynum 2), isabel’s refusal to vomit or get rid of that involuntary vomit supposes the refusal of her sexuality, according to Wolf’s masochistic loop between food and sexuality. While isabel rejects her position as a sexual object like the suicidal anorexics of the novels, she embraces her body and its relation with food based on delight rather than pain and sacrifice. When freida asks her why she is satisfied with her weight despite the alienation, isabel reassures her of her power of autonomy: “ ‘Why, isabel? Why are you doing this to yourself? To your body?’ (…) ‘Because I can, (…) Because it’s my body, (…) isn’t it?’ ” (O’Neill 138–​39). Through eating without restrictions, she develops individualism and the capacity for self-​determination. However, isabel is forced to yield to authority when she undergoes several redesigns to recover the ideal body. The reason for this persistence is the Father’s infatuation with isabel. Otherwise, she would be sent directly to the Underground or the pyre. In this setting of maniac self-​control, her behaviour is seen as a sign of weakness rather than a sign of mutiny: “She got her stomach shrunk.” “What? (...) But I thought only companions were allowed to get that done?” “Whatever. It’s ridiculous

Patriarchal orthorexia and embodied dissidence  217 that she needed to get it done in the first place. They did it to control her. It’s so weak.” (181, original emphasis) Her corporeal agency gained through performative munching is repetitively snatched with several redesigns. The retrieval of the normative weight implies restoring the patriarchal control through coercion once the hegemonic indoctrination of self-​control has failed. Now commodified, isabel melts within the plastic mass of eves, losing her uniqueness: “She’s beautiful, but it’s a faded beauty now, as if she’s been washed too many times” (250). Despite the forceful attempts to accept her position as the eaten and passive consumer, such a task fails even after her body complies with the ideal of beauty, because of isabel’s nonacceptance of embracing and naturalizing the patriarchal tenets of orthorexia and abuse: “The illusion in successful objectification is not in the reports of its consequences—​ the women who have been forced to submit do submit; the illusion is in, so to speak, the modality of such claims—​women submit by nature” (Haslanger 66). The two novels portray the complicated emotions towards food of the female characters, recovering dualist equations of gender with the body/​ soul dichotomy. When transferred to food relations, this parallelism identifies women as the eaten and men as the eaters. Nevertheless, while eating disorders suppose borderline attitudes that favour girls’ self-​destruction and even eucharistic sacrifice, they also suppose a reversal of the roles of food consumption. Our protagonists—​Vanessa and Janey, and freida and isabel—​are fed by the ruling members of their community, and even though the intention is to make these girls obey the conventions of the land, patriarchal authorities also acknowledge the individuality they want to eradicate from girls. Janey, in Gather the Daughters, is never force-​fed like in the other cases. In summer, children are fed at the seashore to survive during that season without adults’ supervision. Janey, an adult living in a child’s body, can recognize the liminal power of being fed: “Janey likes that the adults have to feed them during summer, even if she won’t eat much of anything. It makes her feel powerful, like she is an ancestor that has to be appeased, or a wanderer receiving tribute” (Melamed 78). Janey as an eater possesses the autonomy of not eating, and in so doing, she gains self-​governance and approximates a divine state. Oppositely, Vanessa from Gather the Daughters, and freida and isabel from Only Ever Yours, are force-​fed, experiencing the most violent recognition of their self-​ identity. isabel cannot even enjoy eating at the Buffet with the other eves. Her autonomy and will—​just as her dieting choices—​are eradicated at the very moment of recognition.

218  Almudena Machado-Jiménez The act of becoming eaters does not suppose triumphant acquisition of the powers enjoyed through male privilege. Instead, the convergence of their actions as the eaten and the eaters results in anti-​climatic liminality that leads them to recognize and prepare their individuality and utopian desire but never enjoy them once these are finally conceived. In the presence of all kinds of constraints within the domains of these patriarchal utopias, the only alternative left is to escape, with death being the only viable way out for most girls. The suicidal political stance after failing to master their dissident corporeality recalls Sargisson’s “ironic utopia” (Utopian Bodies 141). Death becomes their ultimate utopian transgression. Since the two patriarchal utopias enact a termination date for women after they effectively become mothers/​utopia, the willing decision to die by their own hand makes them gain utopian agency in their very last action. Eating disorders as utopian transgressive acts display how performative munching and, generally, corporeal dissidence condition girls’ entire existence in the quest for their own discourse when they have been stripped of any other means of expression. Such a political act is not planned or revolutionary. Nor are these instances of empowerment through the illness, since it never jeopardizes the foundations of patriarchal utopia nor supports girls’ well-​being while they live. Nevertheless, the brutality experienced by women within patriarchal utopias trespasses the fictive realm to provide readers with new insights into the means of understanding utopianism and female corporeality within our contemporary society. These girls’ testimonies dismantle the delusive neoliberal forms of Disneyfied empowerment and place their hopes for transforming society on introspection and the rebuilding of supportive emotional bonding. It is time we deconstruct our view of perseverance and beauty from the hegemonic position of trauma, burnout and self-​disgust and instead embrace a more genuine, positive and organic attitude towards corporeality. But most importantly, it is time patriarchal orthorexia is held accountable for hindering our capability of self-​love even after seeking empowerment in feminism. Notes 1 Suvin’s Disneyfication refers to a strategy heavily indebted to substitution commodifying that offers the capitalization of female empowerment and the desire to become desired. This empowerment proves ineffective in overhauling the status quo, as Disneyfication shapes all “affective investment into commodifying,” which supposes a perpetual “infantilisation” of women in this society (195). 2 Even though the life of religious people was characterized by a strict humble diet and the feeding of the needy, some women undertook extreme measures of starvation, trying to replicate Christ’s spirituality, e.g. Catherine de Siena or Veronica Giuliani. The latter’s vindication of her extreme fasting asserts that

Patriarchal orthorexia and embodied dissidence  219 “eating would be an even more grievous suicide” (Bynum 196), which acquires a literal interpretation if the lives of Melamed’s daughters are examined. See Bynum for more information.

Works cited Angerer, Marie Luise. “Cyber@rexia: Anorexia and cyberspace.” Cyberfeminism. Next Protocols, edited by Claudia Reiche and Verena Kuni, Autonomedia, 2004, pp. 19–​32. Aristarkhova, Irina. Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture. Columbia UP, 2012. Bell, Rudolph M. Holy Anorexia. U of Chicago P, 1985. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight. Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. U of California P, 1995. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. U of California P, 1987. Caulfield, Timothy. “From Kim Kardashian to Dr. Oz: The Future Relevance of Popular Culture to Our Health and Health Policy.” Ottawa Law Review, vol. 47, no. 2, 2016, pp. 368–​89. Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. Granada, 1981. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Indiana UP, 1994. Haslanger, Sally. Resisting Reality. Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford UP, 2012. Hernando, Almudena. La fantasía de la individualidad. Sobre la construcción sociohistórica del sujeto moderno. Traficantes de Sueños, 2018. Janeway, Elizabeth. Powers of the Weak. Alfred A. Knopf, 1980. Melamed, Jennie. Gather the Daughters. Tinder, 2017. Michel, Deborah M., and Susan G. Willard. When Dieting Becomes Dangerous: A Guide to Understanding and Treating Anorexia and Bulimia . Yale UP, 2001. O’Neill, Louise. Only Ever Yours. Quercus, 2014. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born. Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Norton, 1986. Sargisson, Lucy. Utopian Bodies and the Politics of Transgression. Routledge, 2000. —​—​—​. Fool’s Gold? Utopianism in the Twenty-​First Century. Palgrave, 2012. Sceats, Sarah. Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-​ Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sarah Harasym, Routledge, 1990. Suvin, Darko. “Theses on Dystopia 2001.” Dark Horizons. Science fiction and the dystopian imagination, edited by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, Routledge, 2003, pp. 187–​202. Toffoletti, Kim. Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls. Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body. I. B. Tauris, 2007. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. 1990. Vintage, 2015.

15 Instapoetry and the transmodern paradigm Transnational feminism in Nikita Gill’s work1 Alejandro Nadal-​Ruiz

The hyperconnectivity facilitated by the rise of social networks has greatly contributed to the promotion, dissemination, and production of creative literary works that may reach a worldwide audience within a short period. Besides the rapid spread of these original creations, social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram have the potential to offer users the possibility of actively engaging with these texts (Thomas 1). Hence, these sites have become, in the words of Miriam Johnson, a “meeting point for writers and readers” (1). In this sense, when sharing a post, writers come face to face with an audience that may feel identified with their creations’ main themes, very often linked to their day-​to-​day experience. Any active or passive feedback on the part of the audience thus leaves the text liable to a continuous reshaping and reinterpretation based on the multiplicity of cultural parameters that users from all around the world have. One of the genres of digital literature that has gained massive popularity in recent years is Instapoetry. Written in a bare and accessible style, Instapoetry deals with present-​day social justice issues, and so one of its recurrent perspectives is the feminist one. The poetic praxis of feminist Instapoets such as Rupi Kaur or Nikita Gill—​who is tackled in this study—​can be said to align with the tenets of a feminist paradigm known as transnational feminism. In their seminal volume Scattered Hegemonies (1994), Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan succinctly construe the performance of transnational feminism in the following terms: “[C]‌reating coalitions based on the practices that different women use in various locations to counter the scattered hegemonies that affect their lives” (18). In a summarized way, it can be posited that this model mainly operates on two interdependent levels: first, it aims at the creation and strengthening of feminist synergies worldwide; second, it draws on the power of such a transnational effort to destabilize hierarchies. While Grewal and Kaplan’s idea of countering hegemonies is a natural outcome of their reading in the context of a postmodern society, both DOI: 10.4324/9781003373834-15

Instapoetry and the transmodern paradigm  221 the emergence of horizontal alliances and the geographical polycentrism suggested by the variegated locations from which these practices are articulated, are some of the key aspects of a contemporary cultural paradigm known as transmodernity. Remarkably, the transmodern paradigm, which is more thoroughly explained below, shares with the term “transnational feminism” the prefix “trans-​,” which underlines a “move that connects (…) transculturally in a world more globalized than ever before” (Yebra 6). The move towards relationality that both transmodernity and transnational feminism advocate runs parallel to the connectivity fostered by the creation and publication of digital literature on social networks. Not surprisingly, the Spanish philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, who coined the term ‘transmodernity’ in 1989, has remarked that “our current reality is both transnational and virtual” (“The Crossroads” par. 10). Therefore, it seems important to draw academic attention to the role of Instapoetry—​and, more concretely, feminist Instapoetry—​as the epitome of such an amalgamation of the transnational and the virtual. What appears to make the case for this line of research is that Instapoetry capitalizes on the flexibility of geographical, social and cultural barriers enabled by social media platforms to make heard (hi)stories of insidious gender-​based oppression, women’s vulnerability or female empowerment and, most importantly, to let their audience engage with them. This chapter aims to give an insight into the transnational possibilities of the feminist Instapoetry by Nikita Gill, a UK-​based writer who, with over 600,000 followers and about 500 posts, has become one of the most widely known Instapoets. An organizing principle of her work is the construction of dialogic poetry that renegotiates both the identity and the position of women while benefiting from digital hyperconnectivity to encourage a fruitful worldwide debate on feminism. In like manner, her poetry’s dissemination via Instagram enables a webbed interaction between a multifarious readership living in different places around the globe. Such a network-​like interplay recalls the above-​mentioned intersection between the transnational and the virtual and, indeed, it has been frequently identified by transmodern critics as a defining feature of transmodernity. Following the interconnectedness advocated in transmodern thinking, this chapter sets out to explore how Gill’s digital poetry manages to give a literary response to the transmodern demand for a transborder exchange of (hi)stories and ideas, in this case on women’s experiences. This can be seen in the construction of a poetic cosmos that represents and raises debate on feminist consciousness at a transnational scale. The ensuing analysis of a selection of Gill’s Instapoems, then, seeks to stress how they are part of a transnational feminist endeavour that enhances the interpersonality, borderlessness and relatability of feminism, ultimately forging synergies of empathy and solidarity inherent to transnational feminism.

222  Alejandro Nadal-Ruiz Transmodern routes for interconnectedness and dialogue The centrality of the rhizomatic dialogue demanded in our hyperconnected global era has been underlined from the inception of the transmodern paradigm. In her 1989 essay La sonrisa de Saturno, Rosa María Rodríguez Magda gives a preliminary definition of transmodernity as “the persistence of the assumptions of Modernity in a postmodern society” or, to put it another way, “making good use of the characteristics of postmodern society and epistemology to carry over the modern project” (10; my translation). In this early attempt to theorize her perception of an ongoing paradigm shift, it is postulated that transmodernity does not entail a radical break from modernity and postmodernity. It is the continuation of modernity rather than a departure from it that is endorsed, and in that matter, Rodríguez Magda maintains: “Modernity is the project, Postmodernity its fragmentation, and Transmodernity is a simulated return in the plural form” (La sonrisa 10; my translation). Transmodern cosmovision, then, recaptures the idea of the modern coherent project amid postmodern fragmentation, while it leaves behind the modern systematicity and the cult for the individual to both embrace and celebrate the plurality that postmodern thinking promotes. The successful integration of elements belonging to apparently antagonistic frameworks points to the idea of a synthetic dialogue that Rodríguez Magda foregrounds in her later work Transmodernidad (2004): “Modernity, Postmodernity, and Transmodernity form the dialectic triad that, in a more or less Hegelian manner, would complete a process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis” (28; my translation). As primarily dialectical, this integrative epistemic perspective steers away from hierarchical classifications, adopting eclecticism as its organizing principle (Rodríguez Magda, La sonrisa 11). The eclecticism and fluidity advocated by transmodernity tie in with the system of ever-​flowing relations characterizing our global age. Drawing on Jean-​François Lyotard’s notion of the “grand narrative” (63), Rodríguez Magda explains that the postmodern drive to assemble the scattered and hitherto disjointed pieces of modern grand narratives has led to the creation of a new grand narrative, namely globalization (Transmodernidad 28). In this case, however, it appears that this twenty-​first-​century metanarrative does not support the establishment of pyramidal hierarchies; interestingly, it follows a polycentric, horizontal model of organization based on network-​ like connections. Once again, such an ongoing phenomenon as the myriad connections facilitated by globalization reflects one of the prospects of the transmodern cosmovision as exposed by Rodríguez Magda: “[T]‌o cast light on the gnoseological, sociological, ethical and aesthetic relations of the present day” (“Un nuevo paradigma” 1; my

Instapoetry and the transmodern paradigm  223 translation and my emphasis). Accordingly, the move towards a relational mode of thinking seems imperative as a way of responding to what Susana Onega and Jean-​Michel Ganteau have denominated “the gnoseological demands made by an era of swift transformations and fluidity in which water-​tight boxes no longer make sense and everything functions as long as it is interconnected” (1–​2). The interconnectedness of our present-​ day world seems to have contributed to a re-​evaluation of the way people interact with each other. Critics such as Jeremy Rifkin have pointed to the growing awareness of a global and relational consciousness binding people together (377). In like manner, Irena Ateljevic explores the potentially beneficial outcome of a non-​hegemonic interpersonal dialogue where the commonality of certain experiences is stressed: “Once the grounds of shared risk, vulnerability, and interconnectedness of all humans occupying our Earth are acknowledged, a true dialogue without patronising can be created” (216). As suggested by the rejection of any patronizing tincture this dialogue might adopt, this network of interpersonal exchanges deviates from any essentialist views of identity, in terms of gender, ethnicity or nationality. Indeed, this all-​ inclusive dialogue is a consequence of our present-​day world’s demand for a transborder mode of thinking (Rodríguez Magda, Transmodernidad 30) that reflects our social reality’s instability insofar as it advocates the dissolution of fixed, exclusive barriers. Instapoetry and the call for a synergy of relatable women’s experiences In line with the uninterrupted boundary crossing that defines our present-​ day age, recent feminist theory has put forth analytical frames that both highlight and call for interactions across borders. At the onset of the twenty-​ first century, Chandra Mohanty advocated a vision of feminism that she termed “feminism without borders.” This framework draws attention to the discernible existence of boundaries such as ethnicity, sexuality or location while envisaging, in the words of Mohanty, “change and social justice work across these lines of demarcation” (2). Mohanty’s paradigm sets out to address the intricacy of borders that amalgamate narrowness and openness, or else restriction and liberation. In doing so, it acknowledges the existence of binary opposites that, far from being mutually exclusive, can be transcended through dialogue. Mohanty hints at the dialectical and inclusive nature of “feminism without borders” as she explains that, before exploring and problematizing the border, she must speak about feminism “without silences and exclusions” (2). It seems imperative, then, that feminist practices of performance and attention—​including writing, storytelling or attestation—​cast light on the experiences of individuals and groups from different social, cultural or geographical backgrounds while

224  Alejandro Nadal-Ruiz offering them the opportunity to engage in a dialogue where any constructive opinion may matter. The feminist concern about narratives that both oppose and complement ​what has traditionally been deemed mainstream perspectives​ is a keystone in transnational feminist theory and activism. During a round table on transnational feminisms held at Ohio State University in 2014, Mignonette Chiu conceived of transnational feminism as follows: “It is a political framework—​a way of seeing that potentially offers a feminist escape from overdetermined colonial and colonizing, liberal and neoliberal, Western paradigms, narratives, processes, methodologies, practices, and applications” (Blackwell et al. 6). It can be asserted, then, that transnational feminism is a critical construct that aims to reject the univocality and subsequent limitations of discourses on women’s experiences and identities. In its drive towards the escape from short-​sighted, Western epistemologies of feminism, transnational feminism has been regarded as unanalogous to “global feminism.” By way of illustration, Grewal and Caplan clarify: “The term ‘global feminism’ has elided the diversity of women’s agency in favor of a universalized model of women’s liberation that celebrates individuality and modernity” (17). Transnational feminism goes beyond a model that perpetuates the supremacy of the Western world by embracing the heterogeneity of women’s voices and how their stories imbricate with the experiences of other women. In transcending the cult of the individual, this form of feminism stresses commonality, though without erasing the interpersonal or intercultural differences between women’s experiences. In like manner, Barbara Fultner argues that “transnational feminists have made us aware that women’s plights in one place are often deeply connected to women’s situations elsewhere” (205). By encouraging the recognition of common difficulties and trials, transnational feminism contributes to the emergence of a network of solidarity that Mohanty defines in terms of “mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests as the basis for relationships among diverse communities” (7). This means that, when attention and visibility is given to experiences with which other fellow women can identify, a sense of empathy can arise that connects women across the globe in a weblike manner. The analogy between the connective tissue of transnational feminist solidarity and the intricate pattern of a web is crucial for understanding the approach to Instapoetry taken in this study. As Gina Heathcote convincingly explains, “the flow of knowledge across transnational feminist networks is multi-​directional, reacting to the international, enacted at the local, yet travelling across regions” (16). In a similar fashion, Instagram facilitates a smooth exchange of knowledge—​in this case

Instapoetry and the transmodern paradigm  225 Instapoetry and the users’ feedback—​that is created at a certain location on Earth and that immediately reaches as many destinations as viewers of that given post. A phenomenon on the move, Instapoetry radically departs from monolithic, universalist conceptions of cultural and gender identity. As social media platforms are a global forum, Instapoetry attempts to cater to a multifarious audience with diverse interests and needs. In this context, it appears vital for Instapoets to ensure that their poems are liable to openness and mutability, as, in the words of Jeneen Naji, “in both poetry and the digital world, (…) the construction of meaning is dependent on the context, background, platform and socio-​ cultural situation of the human interpreter” (3). It is not surprising, then, that Instapoetry is an accessible and open-​to-​interpretation digital genre whose meaning is renegotiated every time a given user engages with its manifestations. It should be noted that Instapoetry represents the culmination of a process by which the assumedly elitist praxis of poetry is opening up to non-​ canonical forms—​most notably digital poetry—​which, as Astrid Ensslin notes, combine “thereness, critical potential, and replicable accessibility” (9). In other words, it is a tangible poetry whose accessibility may entice readers into an active engagement with the text that may ultimately bring about a critical response. Such an implication of readers is first and foremost facilitated by the poems’ language and spatial arrangement. They are written in a simple, reader-​friendly style and are often enhanced by drawings and images that lead to a more thorough understanding of the written text’s main themes. In addition to this, the openness of this poetic genre is strengthened by the cultural hybridity of many of its best-​selling authors. To name but a few, the Indian-​born Canadian Rupi Kaur, the British-​Somali Warsan Shire, the New Zealander of Asian origin Lang Leav, and the British-​Indian Nikita Gill share a cultural multifariousness that lays bare that the accessible world of social media poetry has opened the way for transnational voices, many of which are female and non-​white (Hill and Yuan par. 9). It should also be remarked that, as a form of poetry, this digital genre appeals to emotions while creating a sense of shareability among readers (Khilnani 135). As users read about issues such as trauma, war, gender roles or resilience, there emerges a feeling of relatability that may ultimately become the catalyst for social action. This is certainly the case with the selected poetry by Gill to be analysed below, in which she revolves around such relatable experiences as abuse, body image or the lack of agency, using the power of words to kindle both individual and collective transformation. Gill’s Instapoems promote self-​ care for women in the aftermath of shattering and, at the same time, they advocate an empathetic response that binds different people—​both women and men—​together with

226  Alejandro Nadal-Ruiz a view to consolidating a strong feminist consciousness that is inherently transnational. In doing so, she brings to the fore frequently overlooked experiences to which women around the globe may relate, hence creating a network-​like topography of poetry that reflects the transversality of our global age. Nikita Gill and the transformative function of her feminist Instapoetry Gill’s poetry is an emblem of the potentiality of creative writing to transform a desolating and alienating experience into a pathway towards resilience and reconnecting with both the self and others. In a personal experience article written in 2018, Gill reminisces about her first steps as a yet-​to-​be-​discovered Instapoet. She makes it clear that her main mission when she started sharing her creations on social media platforms was to find whether her feelings were potentially relatable. It was when her inbox started being filled with direct messages from people who felt identified with her poetry’s main themes that she had an epiphany, which she relates in the following terms: “I was, indeed, not alone in my flawed, terrible and sometimes extremely difficult-​to-​handle feelings” (“The Power to Transform” par. 9). What followed was the inclusion of questions in the captions of her Instagram posts that could enable their readers “to share their personal stories, to start conversations and to empathise with strangers” (“The Power to Transform” par. 11). After facing the rejection of more than one hundred publishers, she was encouraged by her awareness that her Instapoetry was in tune with the day-​to-​day experience of users who now had the opportunity to undergo a similarly motivating and empowering realization that their story mattered: “Where people had been feeling powerless, they now felt motivated. They came away from the experience of reading and listening to poetry feeling better, stronger and empowered” (“The Power to Transform” par. 14). Drawing on her personal experience, Gill turns her evolution from unrelatability to bond-​forging into a leitmotif in her feminist Instapoetry. In “The Women I Know,” she appeals to the strengthening of affective ties between women as a potentially empowering compromise. The opening lines of the poem already hint at this transformative process as they emphasize how the passing of both the hours and the seasons intensifies the radiance of these women, who are perceived as peers: “I call them: my sisters, goddesses and the moon. /​I tell them they glow more radiant /​with each passing spring and monsoon” (1–​3). The poetic persona’s compliment is a token of the interpersonal love that this text aims to bring to centre stage. Such a pure love is seen as the harbinger of togetherness, which this poem sets in opposition to the egotism of women who have opted for hating each other rather than embracing mutual support and admiration:

Instapoetry and the transmodern paradigm  227 We have loved each other through the pain, /​through the forests of crueller hearts /​and refused to tear each other apart, /​even though we were all taught in subtle ways /​from an early age /​to hate one another. (4–​9) It is interesting to note that the final lines in the stanza, which touch on the promotion of female misogyny, are notably shorter than the ones dealing with interpersonal care. The brevity of these lines may be said to reflect that there is no room for such disruptive behaviours as those of the stereotypical “mean girl” in the relational project that Gill aims to build. Indeed, female misogyny curtails any attempt at forging powerful bonds between women as it tears apart rather than links, and this might be formally suggested by the lack of rhythmic or rhymical connection between the last two lines. What is proposed for the enhancement of solidarity among women is not simply a readiness to “defend one another with a primal fury” (11), but chiefly to partake of a collaborative endeavour to write that mirrors Gill’s project for writing accessible poetry whose meaning is refashioned every time readers reply on the post: “Together, we will write better /​stories to tell. Oceans to love. /​Skies to fly” (13–​15). These concluding lines could be interpreted as an invitation for readers to share their particular little narratives in a virtual forum of debate where any constructive story is welcome. The wide range of (hi)stories this dialogic poetry is liable to interact with, is evidence of its transnational extent, and this is metaphorically implied by the reference to fluid and limitless spaces such as the ocean and the sky. “The Women I Know” lays bare that Gill’s Instapoetry has the potential to become, using Johnson’s phrase quoted above, a “meeting point” for the poet and her readers. As evinced by the progressive adoption of a collective ‘we’, this representative example of her digital poetry sheds light on the dissolution of hierarchies as crucial for the attainment of a dialogue leading to the creation of feminist synergies. The poem “Queens II” revolves around this idea of renegotiating power hierarchies to ensure a dialogue that, along similar lines as Mohanty’s “feminism without borders,” eradicates silences and exclusions. This poem takes the form of a dramatic monologue where, as Gill points out in the caption, the poetic speaker addresses a female friend who had long been facing the abusive behaviour of a male partner. Having been belittled by this form of insidious oppression, the shattered addressee is reminded in this poem that she has the status of a queen: “Listen to me, girl, /​you have castles inside your bones, /​coronets in your heart” (1–​3). The metaphorical positioning of the victim as a figure of authority is a subversive strategy that serves Gill to critically comment on patriarchy while underscoring the dignity of women. Unlike her perpetrator, the female addressee is likely to put her

228  Alejandro Nadal-Ruiz power to good use. Accordingly, when growing cognizant of her potential, she is bound to start a struggle that, far from being destructive, aims at the renegotiation of her position in society: “If he threatens you with battle, /​you raise him a whole war, /​the last time I checked, /​Queens cower before no man” (4–​7). It is implied that the previous flinching of a submissive woman is soon to give way to answering back to patriarchy. Just as the seemingly experienced poetic persona is doing, the poem’s addressee can overcome the obliteration of both her voice and agency, ultimately uttering a strong-​willed verbal backlash that runs parallel to the resolute tone used by the lyrical subject throughout. This is an example that, as Gill implies by the end of her explanation, can be helpful for all women alike. Her final assertion in the caption—​“Now I pass it [this poem] to you”—​is an indication of the poem’s relatability. It is not coincidental, then, that the word “queens” is written in the plural to show that every woman may become an agent for positive change regardless of her class or sociocultural situation. Gill’s enterprise to celebrate the long-​neglected fortitude of women is illustrated by the poem “What I Dread Most”. In this meditative composition, the poetic persona mulls over her frustration at having to teach her daughter that she should yell “fire” in the event of rape. It is insinuated by her unrest that she is deeply aware of women’s susceptibility to sexual aggression. Moreover, her disturbance seems to be aggravated by the fact that this lesson does not necessarily prevent sexual assault from happening. As implied by her reproduction of the advice to scream “fire” through direct speech, she considers this lesson as a cliché that does not fulfil the function of empowering women. In view of the vulnerable position to which society has condemned women, the poetic speaker opts for teaching her daughter an alternative lesson: “(…) [T]‌eaching her /​that she matters and is sacred. /​This is how we keep turning our girls into wildfires” (6–​8). What Gill achieves at the end of the poem is to advocate the need for a learning process whereby women embrace from an early age their power and understand that standing up for themselves might be an effective way to prevent abuse and rape. Given that sexual assault is a global phenomenon, she underlines in the concluding line that the ordeal dealt with in the poem goes beyond the individual or locatable experience, and she does so by transforming the poetic voice into a collective “we” that appears to call for a transnational ethics of care. The interpenetration of the individual and the collective is a key element that allows Gill to articulate a representative poetry aiming at a transformative feminist social action. In the poem “Death Threat,” she takes the crossing of the private/​public boundary to its ultimate consequences to stress that her poetry is neither an unfounded condemnation of patriarchal misjudgement nor a fanciful representation of women’s resilience.

Instapoetry and the transmodern paradigm  229 As she explains in the caption, the backbone of this poem is an intimidating message she received from an unidentified man that, as reflected in the initial line, urged her to “stop writing poems for women” (1). In brief, the poem shows that the male interloper was vexed at the fact that Gill is writing a poetry that, in his view, makes women “an endangered species” (7). He cannot fathom the idea of a woman that mightily fights for her rights because it contradicts his slanted view of an impeccable woman as “obedient and docile” (6), a mother qualified to “serve men like [him]” (10), and a “sort” that can be easily tamed (12–​13). It should be noted that sixteen out of the twenty-​two lines comprising this poem are either paraphrases or direct quotes from the unfruitful conversation between Gill and the male intruder, and in this case the prominence given to the altercation that took place via direct message contributes to building a sense of immediacy and relatability that allows for a more active reader engagement. When direct speech is used to represent the sexist remarks made by the male sender (lines 5–​13), it may reinforce the rigidity of his beliefs. As is the case with the suggestion quoted in “What I Dread Most,” “Death Threat” urges women to be both wary and critical of a worn-​out discourse characterized by rigidity and avail themselves of an alternative mantra that highlights their resilience. What is more, the use of direct discourse draws attention to the relatability of this personal experience insofar as her readers—​especially non-​male—​are likely to receive similar messages from strangers bent on devaluing their identity. In accordance with her effort to elicit social action, Gill finishes her caption by making heard that her particular response to such verbal aggressions has been transforming them into a poem recurrently. Though not explicitly persuading her followers to write, the author may be using her remark that making poetry out of a distressing experience is restorative as an excuse to encourage her implicit addressees to turn their particular pains into narratives of resilience and protest. Once again, the Instagram post stands as a meeting place where the experiences of the author and her readers converge, thus giving rise to a collective effort to build a transborder network of feminist solidarity. Remarkably, this poem was Gill’s most commented post in 2021, with nearly six hundred comments that discuss everyday relatable experiences ranging from receiving unwelcome requests for sex in the workplace to being intimidated by a male artist for an inoffensive comment on a tattoo thread. The massive response from Gill’s readers is a telling example of how social media platforms amplify the subversive message of her feminist digital poetry as they facilitate encounters and connections that can bring about social change. The multilateral dialogue that her Instapoetry promotes—​both between the text and the reader and among readers—​ stimulates a sense of transnational solidarity that turns a confessional little

230  Alejandro Nadal-Ruiz narrative by a victim of neglect into a powerful and inspirational narrative that may lead to resilience at both an individual and a collective level. Such a transition from seeming insignificance to far-​reaching impact is illustrated by the poem “Written on a Bar Napkin on December 17th 2016.” In the caption of the post, Gill recalls that this compressed yet deeply moving piece of poetry was conceived as she was sinking into depression. In brief, the cumulative effect of a toxic love relationship and an employment that curtailed her creativity led to a growing alienation. She explains that on the night of December 17th, she confronted her estrangement by heading for a bar just for the sake of being surrounded by people. As she was drinking a glass of wine, she scribbled this poem on a napkin and, at that moment, it dawned on her that she felt empowered because she realized that her decision to take herself out was an act of self-​care. As a product of self-​reflection, this poem captures the enabling revelation that the author had on that night: The ghosts of all the women you used to be are all so proud of who you have become, storm child made of wild and flame. (“Written on a Bar Napkin” 1–​5) A preliminary reading of these lines displays that Gill’s conversation with herself tries to counteract the feeling of helplessness induced by trauma. First, instead of showing herself as a disengaged subject, she lays bare that she is a polycentric entity composed of different women who represent different stages in her life. All these women seem equally relevant for the formation of the resilient self portrayed in the shorter lines that round off the poem, and this is emphasized by the anaphoric repetition of “all” in the first two lines. Once she has verbalized the transition from paralysing inertia to vehement agency, she seems to be putting her self-​reflection into dialogue with other stories of women’s resilience. Indeed, as happens in “The Women I Know,” she concludes her caption stating, “I give it to you,” and this contributes to turning this meditative poem into a dialogic narrative that fosters transnational feminist solidarity. Considering this move towards a far-​reaching dialogue, the addressee alluded to in lines 2 and 3 could be read as an all-​encompassing “you” that demands every woman reading this poem commit not only to the practice of self-​care but also to empowering other women. The close reading of Gill’s selected Instapoems has made evident that the appeal to mutual nurturing is a driving principle behind her art. As she declared in a tweet posted in 2018, her work is aimed at “women

Instapoetry and the transmodern paradigm  231 empowering other women” (@nktgill), therefore corroborating that it instigates an encounter whereby women from different nationalities and walks of life can learn to care for both themselves and others. Just as the beginning of “Written on a Bar Napkin” draws attention to the multidirectional influence of a number of women who are part of someone’s (hi)story, the poem “For Our Daughters and Their Futures,” written in celebration of the 2021 International Women’s Day, starts by acknowledging: “(…) [W]‌e are the direct result of women /​who have endured centuries of trauma and fight /​to bring us to this light” (2–​4). Later, the collective poetic persona mentions some key figures to whom, in her view, women owe their freedom to raise their voices for justice and gender equality: “We owe it to Mary Wollstonecraft, Rosa Parks [,] /​Bell Hooks and Sojourner Truth. /​We owe it to Sylvia Pankhurst, Audre Lorde, /​Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou” (13–​16). The main effect of this catalogue, which brings together some key feminist icons from variegated cultural backgrounds, is to highlight that feminism is a transnational phenomenon where any effort to improve women’s lives matters, whether it has been turned into a tangible story or obliterated by systems of power (Gill, “For Our Daughters” 5–​6); whether it represents the culmination of a process leading to a “warm, bright liberty” (7) or is one among a hundred skirmishes “fought in the cold” (8); whether it is an unplanned five-​ line reflection scribbled on a frangible napkin or a thought-​out hardback monograph. What is highlighted in this inciting poem, which works as a summary of the main points tackled in this chapter, is that the combined effort of both well-​known and invisible women from different nationalities and epochs has created, is creating and will create a network of feminist solidarity that can bring about women’s empowerment. In the lines that follow the acknowledgement of these feminist icons’ influence, the collective poetic voice declares that present-​ day women should take the “torch” (17) bequeathed by their foremothers and proceed as follows: “[T]‌urn it into a wildfire through our daughters /​and granddaughters, an epic warsong [sic]” (19–​20). In a similar way to the mother’s prospect in “What I Dread Most,” the collective “we”—​an inclusive voice encompassing both Gill and her readers as representative of women’s daily struggle—​advocates teaching future generations of women to assert their power. In this case, it is encouraged to transform the legacy of centuries of feminist revolution into a flame-​like song of war that could be said to stand for poetry. The collective voice promises that they will build a world “from the embers and the ashes” (26) where these daughters and granddaughters may feel that their voice is respected (28). This collaborative project seems to be pointing to Nikita Gill’s Instapoetry, a borderless and dialogic literary endeavour that, using Rifkin’s term, builds a “global relational consciousness”—​or, more

232  Alejandro Nadal-Ruiz precisely, a transnational and transmodern feminist consciousness—​that is strengthened through the unrelenting interpersonal and intercultural encounters facilitated by social media platforms. Note 1 “The present chapter was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness (MINECO) (PID2021-​124841NB-​100); and by the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H03_​ 20R).

Works cited @nktgill. “Also if you’re trying to tell me … what my work is about.” Twitter, 21 January 2018, 9:39 a.m., https://​twit​ter.com/​nktg​ill/​sta​tus/​954​9969​6730​ 5826​305 Ateljevic, Irena. “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of Our Human History?” Integral Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2013, pp. 200–​19. Blackwell, Maylei, Laura Briggs, and Mignonette Chiu. “Transnational Feminisms Roundtable.” Transnational Feminisms, special issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 2015, pp. 1–​24. Ensslin, Astrid. Pre-​web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature. Cambridge UP, 2022. Fultner, Barbara. “The Dynamics of Transnational Feminist Dialogue.” Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization, edited by Margaret A. McLaren, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017, pp. 203–​29. Hill, Faith, and Karen Yuan. “How Instagram Saved Poetry: Social Media Is Turning an Art Form into an Industry.” The Atlantic, 15 October 2018. www. thea​tlan​tic.com/​tec​hnol​ogy/​arch​ive/​2018/​10/​rupi-​kaur-​instag​ram-​poet-​entre​ pren​eur/​572​746/​. Gill, Nikita. “Nikita Gill on How Poetry Has the Power to Transform Your Life.” Stylist, 4 October 2018. www.styl​ist.co.uk/​long-​reads/​poe​try-​poem-​instag​ram-​ nik​ita-​gill-​rupi-​kaur-​lang-​leav-​books-​read​ing-​writ​ing-​polit​ics-​adv​ice/​229​800. —​—​—​. “Written on a Bar Napkin on December 17th 2016.” Instagram, 22 October 2018. www.instag​ram.com/​p/​BpNk​lSAn​Grf/​?igs​hid=​MDJm​NzVk​ MjY%3D —​—​—​. “Queens II.” Instagram, 30 May 2019. www.instag​ram.com/​p/​ByF3​vtJH​ PPl/​?igs​hid=​MDJm​NzVk​MjY=​ —​—​—​. “The Women I Know.” Instagram, 21 January 2021. www.instag​ram. com/​p/​CKT9​Bmnp​iHl/​?igs​hid=​MDJm​NzVk​MjY=​ —​—​—​. “For Our Daughters and Their Futures.” Instagram, 8 March 2021. www. instag​ram.com/​p/​CMJ4​K7QH​WB1/​?igs​hid=​MDJm​NzVk​MjY=​ —​—​—​. “Death Threat.” Instagram, 12 May 2021. www.instag​ram.com/​p/​COxxa​ aYL-​Yf/​?igs​hid=​MDJm​NzVk​MjY=​ —​—​—​. “What I Dread Most.” Instagram, 26 April 2022. www.instag​ram.com/​p/​ Cc0X​obQI​GJB/​?igs​hid=​MDJm​NzVk​MjY=​

Instapoetry and the transmodern paradigm  233 Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity.” Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, edited by Inderpal and Kaplan, U of Minnesota P, 1994, pp. 1–​33. Heathcote, Gina. Feminist Dialogues on International Law: Successes, Tensions, Futures. Oxford UP, 2019. Johnson, Miriam J. Books and Social Media: How the Digital Age Is Shaping the Printed Word. Routledge, 2022. Khilnani, Shweta. “  ‘Moving’ Poetry: Affect and Aesthetic in Instapoetry.” Inhabiting Cyberspace in India: Theory, Perspectives, and Challenges, edited by Simi Malhotra, Kanika Sharma, and Sakshi Dogra, Springer, 2021, pp. 135–​42. Lyotard, Jean-​François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1979. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester UP, 1984. Mohanty, Chandra T. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke UP, 2003. Naji, Jeneen. Digital Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Onega, Susana, and Jean-​ Michel Ganteau. “Introduction: Transcending the Postmodern.” Transcending the Postmodern: Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, edited by Onega and Ganteau, Routledge, 2020, pp. 1–​19. Rifkin, Jeremy. The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream. Penguin Group, 2005. Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María. La sonrisa de Saturno. Hacia una teoría transmoderna. Anthropos, 1989. —​—​—​. Transmodernidad. Anthropos, 2004. —​—​—​. “Transmodernidad: Un nuevo paradigma.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-​Hispanic World, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–​13. —​ —​ —​ . “The Crossroads of Transmodernity.” Translated by Jessica Aliaga-​ Lavrijsen and Susana Onega. Plenary Lecture read at the Conference on Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English. University of Zaragoza, 26 April 2017. www.acade​mia.edu/​33683​289/​_​The_​Cr​ossr​oads​_​ of_​Tran​smod​erni​ty_​. Thomas, Bronwen. Literature and Social Media. Routledge, 2020. Yebra, José M. The Poetics of Otherness and Transition in Naomi Alderman’s Fiction. Cambridge Scholars, 2020.

Index

A Description of Millenium Hall 176, 181, 185 Æthelstan 119, 123 Alberti, Rafael 26 Alfred, King 122 Andrade, Eugénio de 24–​5 anorexia 209–​10, 212, 214–​16 Anzaldúa 36, 38, 39, 46 art 18, 21, 26–​7, 35, 38, 39, 80, 84, 93, 132, 142, 230; as Blake’s Art 1–​17; as cover art 107 Aztec 32–​5, 37–​41 Aztlán 33–​7, 39, 42–​4 Bakhtin, Mikhail 51 Balbín de Unquera, Antonio​21 Bannerman, Anne 196, 200 Bhabha 36, 37, 46 beauty 205–​6, 209, 212–​15, 217–​18 Bede 114–​130 Beeching, H. C. 15 BeetleSpeak 157, 158, 162, 163, 167, 169 The Bell 66, 68, 71, 72, 74–​5 Berger, Pierre 21 Bindman, David 1, 4 The Black Tower 65–​7, 69–​71, 73–​5 Blair, Robert 21 Blake, William 1–​16, 18–​28 Bloom, Harold 51, 54 body 205–​13, 215–​17; ideal 216; plastic 215; shaming 209; weight 209 Brexit 15 Bride of Death 196 Bridges, Robert 14, 15

Calvo, Javier 23 Carter, Angela 18, 49–​62 Cartesian dialectics 156, 167 Castro, Plácido 22, 25–​7 Cernuda, Luis 21, 22 Chac-​Mool 34, 39, 42–​6 Chaos theory 166 characterisation 131–​45 Chesterton, G. K. 21 Chicano 33–​9, 47 Cicuahateo 34, 39, 40 Clare, John 21 Clark, Steve 11, 18 Coatlicue 34, 38, 40, 44–​6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 25 Connolly, Tristanne 11 consciousness 131 corporeality 204–​6, 208–​11, 215, 217–​18 Coyolxauhqui 34, 38, 45, 46 culture 205, 208–​9, 214; facetune 205; celebrity 208; diet 209; pro-​ana and mia 214 Cunqueiro, Álvaro 27–​8 cyberontology 161 Damrosch, Leopold, Jr. 1 Davies, Henry Walford 15–​16 dementia 54, 137 Dent, Shirley 19, 20 Devi, Mahasweta 148–​50 dieting 204, 208–​9, 213–​14, 216–​18 digital 4, 9, 12, 16, 17, 98–​111, 220; culture 98, 157, 160; literature 220–​31 domesticity 194 Dubois, Andrew 10

Index  235 eating 204, 206–​11, 213–​18; disorders 204, 206, 209, 217–​18; binge eating 209, 215 embodied dissidence 209, 218 empathy 221, 224 Egan, Jennifer 98–​104, 106, 110 enlightened ideals 172–​3 englishness 19–​21, 114, 117, 121–​3 epistolary narratives 172, 174, 176 Erdman, David V. 5, 7–​8, 12 Esclasans, Agustí 22 ethics of care 228 euripides 33, 34, 38, 39, 43 Fallon, David 20 Fawcett, Millicent 16 female empowerment 221, 231 feminism 195, 218, 220, 223, 224; global 224; transnational 221, 224; feminism without borders 223, 227 feminist: dystopia 204; solidarity 221, 224, 227, 229–​31 fiction 48, 49, 53, 63, 65–​6, 131, 133, 157; American fiction 108; crime 76; detective 76; digital fiction 98–​113; dystopian 163; and film 148, 155; patriarchal 176–​7, 181; and technology 98, 105, 109–​10; Twitter fiction 98, 103–​7 film 148–​55; adaptation 150, 155 food 204, 206–​17 fragmentation 38, 47, 49, 100, 103, 105–​6, 108, 110, 222 Frye, Northrop 8, 21 gender equality 231 The Gentleman’s Magazine 187, 188, 191 Gibbons, Allison 157 Gide, André 21 Gilchrist, Alexander 12, 15, 18, 19 Ginsberg, Allen 18 globalization 146, 156, 159, 169–​71, 222 gothic 188, 191, 196, 197 Gregory the Great 114–​17 Hamblin, Thomas 198, 200 Hateship, Friendship,Courtship, Loveship, Marriage 131–​45

Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa 147, 154 hegemony 28, 156, 159–​62, 188, 205–​6, 209, 218 Héroes del Silencio 22, 23 heteronomy: heteronyms 80, 86, 88–​9, 92 high culture 48, 132, 133 Hilton, Nelson 8, 13 Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum 114, 119 homosexuality 36, 68, 140 hospitable loci 172–​6, 183 Huitzilopochtli 45, 46 The Hungry Woman 32–​4, 38–​41 Huxley, Aldous 18 hybridity 16, 34, 36, 37, 225 hyperreality 161 ideal of femininity 203–​5, 211, 216–​17 identity 20, 24, 28, 32–​8, 41, 49–​50, 54, 55, 57, 60, 86, 90–​3, 106, 116–​23, 146, 148, 159, 162, 173, 177, 193, 203–​5, 216, 217, 221, 223, 225, 229 individuality 18, 119, 132, 203–​4, 207, 212–​14, 216–​18, 224 instapoetry 220–​31 James, P. D. 65, 66–​9, 71–​4 Jarazo Álvarez, Rubén 25 Jarman, Derek 20 Jasón 34, 39, 41, 43, 45 Jiménez, Juan Ramón 21 Jones, David 19 Kaur, Rupi 220, 225 Kavenna, Joanna 157, 170 Keats, John 78, 80–​7, 90, 91, 93 Keynes, Geoffrey 12, 21 La Felguera 23 Larrissy, Edward 18 Lentrichia, Frank 10 lesbianism 34, 36, 41 literature: Eighteenth Century 5, 117, 172–​83; English 9, 21, 73, 79–​80, 94; Portuguese 80 Linton, William James 19 machismo 44 Madariaga, Salvador de 22, 24

236 Index Makdisi, Saree 8–​10 marginalia 81, 85 Martínez Quintanar, Miguel Ángel 25 matrixial beings 203–​4, 207, 209–​10 McGann, Jerome 11–​12 Medea 32–​4, 36, 38–​46; Mexican Medea 32, 33, 36, 38, 42–​5 Medina Hamblin, Louisa (also known as Louisa Medina) 187, 189 Mexico 33, 35, 37 Millais, John Everett 52, 56 Miller, Missouri 187, 189, 190 Milton, John 13, 14, 16 Mitchell, W. J. T. 1 Moore, Alan 20–​1 Mora, José Joaquín de 21 Moraga 32, 34, 36–​41, 44–​6 mother-​child relationship 149 Munro, Alice 131, 144, 72, 74–​5 Murdoch, Iris 65–​6, 68 myth 1, 9, 10, 17, 27, 32–​4, 36, 40, 41, 44, 46, 115, 181 narrative gaps 105 narrator: partner 140–​2, 227; self-​confidence 133; third person 135, 137, 142 nation 19–​21, 24, 34, 36–​7, 39, 117–​22, 126–​7, 192 nationalism 35, 117–​23, 126–​7 naxalism 146; naxalite movement 146–​8 Neruda, Pablo 21, 26 Nerval, Gérard de 22 Ninety Eighty-​Four 165–​6 Orwell, George 163–​6; Orwellian 163; Newspeak 163–​5 outsider 131–​45; outsiderness 144 Paley, Morton D. 5 Panero, Leopoldo María 22–​3 The Panorama of Life 187, 188, 191–​4, 197, 198 paratexts 117 Parry, Sir Hubert 14–​16, 18 patriarchy 34, 39, 44, 45; patriarchalization 175, 178, 179, 181; patriarchal orthorexia 204, 206, 208–​9, 213–​15, 217–​18

Perazzo, Nelly 26 perfection 203–​6, 208–​9, 213–​14 performative munching 208, 212, 215–​18 Pessoa, Fernando 78–​92, 94–​6; archive 79, 84, 86, 89–​90; private library 80, 81, 84, 86, 91 Poe, Edgar Allan​22 popular: Indian cinema 154; cinema of substance 150, 154; culture 18, 23, 25, 48, 58 postcolonial 32–​3, 35–​6, 62; theatre 32 postmodernity 49, 54, 157, 222 psychological 57, 78, 147, 154; discourses 154; metamorphosis 155 qubit 165, 187, 169 Raine, Kathleen 1, 8 refusal 175, 194, 214–​16 relationality 221 resilience 152, 215, 225–​6, 228–​30 Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María 221–​3 romanticism 21, 24–​5, 28, 78–​80, 86 Romero, Elena Domínguez 25 Rossetti, Christina 25 Rossetti, William 12, 15 Sage, Laura 49, 51, 52, 62 science fiction 157, 170, 219; Scottish 157 Scott, Sarah 176–​81 Scott, Walter 193, 197, 202 Sears, John 50, 51 self-​care 225, 230 Seoane, Luís 22, 26–​7 sexuality 205–​8, 210–​11, 213, 216; hypersexualisation 205, 208, 213 Shakespeare, William 14, 26, 30, 48–​62, 73, 79 shape-​reading 101–​2 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 25 Showalter, Elaine 50, 53 sentimental philosophy 179 social 4, 8, 9, 32, 49–​50, 52, 66, 166, 221; action 225, 228–​9; conscience 149; conventions 143, 197; expectations 144; justice 220, 223; media 104, 106–​7, 205, 221, 225,

Index  237 229; networks 159, 205, 220, 221; order 151–​2; stratum 153 Sousa, Alcinda Pinheiro de 9, 51 spatial 102–​3, 172, 175, 203, 225; analogy 177; delination 181; exclusions 183; imagery 175, 178; locations 175; semantics 174, 175; spatial constructions 174 Spector, Sheila A. 10 Spirit of the Times 189, 190, 200 state-​sponsored violence 147 stereotypes 54, 57, 69, 132–​4 Swinburne, Charles Algernon 18, 19

The Unicorn 66, 68–​9, 71, 74–​5 Utopia 203–​18; dysmorphia 205–​6; millenial 214; patriarchal 203–​4, 206–​7, 209–​10, 212–​13, 216, 218; Utopian community 178, 181, 183, 205, 213

technology 11, 98–​100, 102, 104–​6, 109–​10, 138, 156–​8, 160–​2; Aura and technology 11 territorialization of ideologies 174, 175 Thatcher, Margaret 19 theatre; American 191, 199; Bowery Theatre 187, 189, 190 transmodernity 156–​71, 221–​2; characteristics 156–​60; society 156; science 156 trauma 147, 152–​4, 216, 218, 225, 230–​1

Whitson, Roger 12 Whittaker, Jason 11, 12, 18–​20 women 183–​4, 187–​9, 191–​8, 203–​15, 217–​18 Worrall, David 4

Valente, José Ángel​22 Vincent, Naomi 189, 190, 199 violence 188–​91, 193–​7 virtual reality 157, 159–​161 Viscomi, Joseph 4 vulnerability 221, 223

Yeats, William Butler 21 Younghusband, Sir Francis 14–​16 Zed 156–​171 Žižek, Slavoj 19