Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism 1032069848, 9781032069845

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Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism

Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism is the frst book-length work to explore the interrelationships among contemporary female musicians and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, music, and literature by women and men. The music and videos of contemporary musicians including Erykah Badu, Beyoncé, The Carters, Missy Elliott, the Indigo Girls, Janet Jackson, Janis Joplin (and Big Brother and the Holding Company), Natalie Merchant, Joni Mitchell, Janelle Monáe, Alanis Morrisette, Siouxsie Sioux, Patti Smith, St. Vincent (Annie Clark), and Alice Walker are examined using the historical insights and critical tools provided by the study of Romanticism, the pastoral and the Gothic, female Gothic, Afropresentism, Hélène Cixous, and the literature, music, and philosophy of fgures such as William Blake, Beethoven, Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Dacre, Ralph Waldo Emerson, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ann Radcliffe, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, Horace Walpole, Jane Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth to explore how contemporary women musicians have not only appropriated, responded to, and been inspired by the work of the Romantic era, but how they are themselves Romantics in the present. James Rovira, Ph.D., teaches literature and writing at Valencia College and Keiser University. His books include Women in Rock/Women in Romanticism (2022); David Bowie and Romanticism (2022); Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History (2019); Writing for College and Beyond (2019); Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (2018); Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 (2018); and Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety (2010).

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

144 Migrating Minds Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism Edited by Didier Coste, Christina Kkona and Nicoletta Pireddu 145 Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care Edited by Katsura Sako and Sarah Falcus 146 Cultures of Currencies Literature and the Symbolic Foundation of Money Edited by Joan Ramon Resina 147 The Theory and Practice of Reception Study Reading Race and Gender in Twain, Faulkner, Ellison, and Morrison Philip Goldstein 148 Language, Style and Variation in Contemporary Indian English Literature Esterino Adami 149 Narrative Worlds and the Texture of Time A Social-Semiotic Perspective Rosemary Huisman 150 The Words of Winston Churchill Jonathan Locke Hart 151 Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism Edited by James Rovira For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com / Rout ledge - I nterd is cipl i na r y- Persp ec t ives- on- L iterat u re / book-series/RIPL

Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism

Edited by James Rovira

First published 2023 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 © 2023 selection and editorial matter, James Rovira; individual chapters, the contributors The right of James Rovira to be identifed as the author 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 identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-06984-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-33166-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-20485-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003204855 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For these four women who rock my life: my daughters Bethany, Beka, Grace, and Zoë.

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Women in Rock/Women in Romanticism

ix xi xiii xv 1

J A M E S ROV I R A

1 Are Women in Rock also Women in Romanticism?

8

J A M E S ROV I R A

2 Jane Williams, Rolling Stone: Reconstructing British Romanticism’s Guitar God(dess)

42

REBECCA NESVET

3 “Work Me, Lord”: Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues

59

S A S H A TA M A R S T R E L I T Z

4 “All Romantics Meet the Same Fate Someday”: Joni Mitchell, Blue, and Romanticism

81

C H R ISTOPH ER R. CL ASON

5 “There Is No Pure Evil, Nor Pure Good, Only Purity”: William Blake’s and Patti Smith’s Art as Opposition to Societal Boundaries

103

A LICI A CA R PEN T ER

6 “A Woman with an Attitude”: Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees DI A NA EDEL M A N

123

viii 7

Contents “Our Generation”: Gender, Regeneration and Women in Rock

143

L I N DA C . M I D D L E T O N

8

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque”

161

S H E R RY R . T RU F F I N

9

“I Can’t Believe We Made It”: Romanticism and Afropresentism in Works of African American Women Hip Hop and R‘n’B Artists

190

KIRSTEN ZEMKE

Index

215

Figures

2.1

“Shelley’s Guitar,” by Ferdinando Bottari. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Shelley relics 1. Ferdinando Bottari, c. 1815–1816. Photograph by Rebecca Nesvet. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries 2.2 Replica of Bottari’s guitar by Wes R. Schroeder, work in progress. Photograph by Rebecca Nesvet 2.3 Detail: “Shelley’s Guitar,” by Ferdinando Bottari. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Shelley relics 1. Ferdinando Bottari, c. 1815–1816. Photograph by Rebecca Nesvet. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries 2.4 Wes R. Schroeder, purfing method test, 2020. Photograph by Rebecca Nesvet

50 50

51 52

Contributors

Alicia Carpenter is a graduate from King’s College, London. Currently, she is the Editor of various independent music fanzines, including Live Circuit and BOLD. She has also contributed to LOCK Magazine. Before embarking on her studies, Alicia was somewhat unaware of poetry’s pull; it dawned on her when she began reading the visionary verse of William Blake. Christopher R. Clason, Ph.D., is a Professor Emeritus of German at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. His research areas include German Romanticism and the Middle Ages. He has authored articles on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novels, Romantic narrative and the Gothic novel, Gottfried’s Tristan, the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, Hartmann von Aue’s epic poems, and Walther von der Vogelweide’s poetry. Diana Edelman,  Ph.D., is a Professor of English at the University of North Georgia (UNG) specializing in British Romanticism and the Gothic. Edelman has published essays in The Keats-Shelley Journal, European Romantic Review, and Gothic Studies. Her monograph Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel was published in July 2021. Linda Middleton,  Ph.D., taught literature and writing at the University of Hawai`i, Mānoa English Department until her retirement in August 2017 as Assistant Professor. Middleton grew up in Honolulu, where she received her B.A. in English and Psychology and her Ph.D. in English from UH Mānoa. Her master’s degree in English is from UC Berkeley. She taught English at UH Mānoa for twenty-six years and received the Francis Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Rebecca Nesvet, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. She has published in journals including Nineteenth Century Studies, Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, Victorian Network, Notes and Queries, Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing, and Women’s

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Contributors Writing, and edited the COVE Edition of James Malcolm Rymer’s penny dreadful A Mystery in Scarlet.

James Rovira, Ph.D., teaches literature and writing at Valencia College and Keiser University. His books include Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism (2022); David Bowie and Romanticism (2022); Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History (2019); Writing for College and Beyond (2019); Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (2018); Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 (2018); and Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety (2010). Sasha Tamar Strelitz’s scholarly interests live in an interdisciplinary zone where music, literature, and Romantic and Transcendentalist spirituality and philosophy coexist. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Denver, and her research explores the culture of spontaneity in Beat writers and rock musicians who fall in a category she calls “electric Romanticism.” She is from Hollywood, FL, has lived in NYC, Tel Aviv, and Orlando, and is presently living in Denver. She teaches at the Metropolitan State University of Denver and works as a Technical Writer for Big Tech. Sherry R. Truffn, Ph.D., is a Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, where she teaches courses in American Literature, Rhetoric, and Writing. In addition to her monograph, Schoolhouse Gothic (2008), she has published essays on works by James Baldwin, Edgar Allan Poe, Donna Tartt, Stephen King, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, and Joyce Carol Oates as well as on the Gothic literature of New Orleans, the television show The X-Files, and the music of Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders. Kirsten Zemke,  Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her teaching and research explore hip hop, New Zealand hip hop, Pasifka popular musics, and popular music history, looking especially at issues of identity, race, gender, and sexuality.

Preface

Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism will be my fourth anthology examining rock music through the lenses of Romantic studies, so some explanation of the work it does in relationship to the other collections seems in order. I wrote and edited the frst two Rock and Romanticism collections almost simultaneously because they were products of a single call for papers that received ffty chapter proposals and twenty-fve completed chapters. I worked on the two collections simultaneously, unsure which collection would appear frst. Their subtitles refect the divisions into which their respective chapters fell: Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 largely covers music from the 1960s through the 1980s and more recent bands like Blackberry Smoke and the Martha Redbone Roots Project who write in a style of music characteristic of the 1960s’ and 1970s’ rock period, while Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms,1 after an initial chapter on “Sympathy for the Devil,” covers bands from the late 1970s to the 2000s. The frst collection emphasizes the pastoral in Romanticism, with a chapter on the Georgic, while the second emphasizes Gothic. Each collection was also somewhat imperfectly aligned with frst- and second-generation Romantics, respectively, almost as if different positions in relationship to the Vietnam War2 serve as a generational dividing line similar to the French Revolution. As I wrapped up the introduction to Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal, I looked back at its coverage: Future essays [about Romanticism and goth/metal] presenting arguments on a historical continuum beginning with Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Cure and then moving forward to fgures like Marilyn Manson might be an interesting way of reframing the topics addressed here. The number of highprofle African American, Hispanic, Native American, or Asian bands releasing music in these genres is limited, so a future volume including bands like Living Color, Lenny Kravitz, or King’s X would again present a different kind of argument. Since very few female Romantic-era authors are engaged here, another volume devoted to the female Gothic/Romantic in music and in literature would also

xiv Preface be an engaging next step. Joanna Baillie and Jewel? Mary Wollstonecraft and Tori Amos, especially American Doll Posse? I look forward to seeing what future work in this area will bring.3 At the time, I was thinking out loud about possible future collections organized around race, sex, and gender, and a collection devoted to Romanticism and heavy metal to extend the argument of the Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal collection. Since then, some of those ideas have come to fruition. After David Bowie’s death in early 2016, I committed to David Bowie and Romanticism, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2022 as of the time of this writing, which explores the intersections of Romanticism with identity through chapters on sexual identity, gender identity, political identity (David Bowie’s interest in fascism from the 1970s to the 2000s), death, and the meaning of the alien as a recurring trope in David Bowie’s oeuvre among other topics. Then in 2018, I circulated a CFP for Women in Rock, while Romanticism and Heavy Metal is at the CFP stage as of the time of this writing. Brown Romanticisms4 and rock is still just an idea, but I hope the heavy metal collection will provide some coverage of rock, Romanticism, and race or ethnicity in chapters about world Romanticisms and folk metal. I initially hoped to approximate a 50/50 division between male and female artists in those frst collections, but I wound up closer to 25–30% devoted to women artists past and present. Around the same time, the then-female editor of Continuum’s 33 1/3 book series expressed her frustration about her inability to recruit female authors and solicit books about female fgures, reporting that only 18% of contributors and 11% of artists covered were women despite her efforts.5 Her remarks helped me commit me to this anthology.

Notes 1 From this point I will refer to both collections by their subtitles. 2 It might be interesting to consider Reagan/Thatcher as a dividing line, which would apply to artists within the Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal collection. U2’s frst album was released in 1980; Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979 and Reagan President in 1981, so U2 is itself the dividing line between pre- and post-Thatcher and Reagan, bringing pre-Thatcher infuences and a pre-Thatcher mindset into the Thatcher years of their frst six albums. 3 James Rovira, Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 21. 4 See Manu Samriti Chander, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefeld, 2017). 5 Rovira, Post-Punk, 21.

Bibliography Chander, Manu Samriti. Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefeld, 2017. Rovira, James, ed. Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks go out to Roger Whitman and Jason Whittaker for providing excellent feedback on my proposal. They helped guide this project toward a better fnal product. I’m also grateful to Rebecca Nesvet, Christopher Clason, Sherry Truffn, and Diana Edelman for their invaluable feedback during the later stages of the proposal and then the introduction. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the Romanticists on NASSR-L for helping me secure resources and for pointing me in fruitful directions, particularly A.G. Ruderman, Shelley Jones, Michael Ferber, J. Scott Messing, Alan Liu, and Devoney Looser (as of the time of this writing: apologies if I couldn’t update this list in time for publication). Many thanks also to Michelle Pessaro at Savvy Vinyl Records (http://savvyvinylrecords.com) for having good vinyl and pointing me in the direction of new bands, to Liann and Kacie at Merritt Island Pancake House for keeping the coffee coming while I was reading for this book, to the conscientious and effcient staff at the circulation desk of the University of Central Florida for keeping the books coming, and quickly, even while an entire foor was under construction, and to my wife Sheridan for putting up with music that inevitably and invariably stressed her out.

Introduction Women in Rock/Women in Romanticism James Rovira

Lydia Goehr summarized Schopenhauer’s view of music with these words: “As the language of universal Will, music is the pure language of free subjectivity, feeling, spontaneity, and gesture; it is contentless, non-intentional, and of preterlinguistic signifcance.”1 As we’ll see in Chapter 1, Schopenhauer developed this view of music out of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. His philosophy refects a signifcant change in western philosophy, one with the potential to newly envision women’s status in western culture. Because Schopenhauer’s work is intricately bound up with the development of German Romanticism, my use of his philosophy in Chapter 1 leads to a number of questions, starting with, “What is Romanticism?” But that question leads to others. If Schopenhauer’s philosophy potentially changes women’s status in western philosophy, what is that status, and what is woman’s relationship to Romanticism? Were women Romantics? Contributors to this collection, with only one exception, focus primarily on English language Romanticisms, 2 so as we explore questions about women and Romanticism, we’ll have to examine the claims of German Romanticism against British at the same time. These questions will be addressed in the following chapters. Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism examines the creative work of women musicians from the 1960s to the twenty-frst century using the historical insights and conceptual apparatus provided by the study of Romanticism to understand women’s experiences as Romantic authors, artists, and musicians. This collection also explores what the study of Romantic art, music, and literature reveals about women’s experiences of, and resistances to, modernity from the eighteenth century to the present. But when I call this collection Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism, I don’t mean a collection that neatly pairs women Romantics with women rock musicians as I once envisioned. The creative process is not so simple. The women in rock, for the purposes of this collection, are themselves the women in Romanticism. This collection does pair eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women authors with contemporary women musicians, but women artists are always free to choose their own infuences and follow their own creative directions, DOI: 10.4324/9781003204855-1

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and they do. Pairings of women authors with women Romantic fgures, when present, are guided by the contemporary female artist herself. Emily Brontë inspired Kate Bush so profoundly that Bush became the frst female artist in the UK to chart a number 1 single with a song written by the artist herself, but Patti Smith’s most signifcant eighteenthand nineteenth-century infuence is William Blake. Smith served as the President of the UK Blake society, has edited her own collection of his poems, and has written a song titled “My Blakean Year” that’s either about his infuence upon her or about how she’s using Blake to interpret her own experience. I could also mention Caroline Crawley’s (d. 2016) band Shelleyan Orphan, so named after Crawley and co-founder Jemaur Tayle bonded “over a shared affection for the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley,”3 taking the band’s name from Shelley’s “Alastor.” Limiting these chapters only to pairings of women with women would also exclude an important dimension from the study of women artists, which according to Elizabeth Fay is the examination of male texts through a feminist lens. . . Further, when the defnition of the period is undergoing revision, it is especially important to place men’s and women’s texts in contextual relation to each other in order to more fully understand the nature of their endeavors, and the culture they respond to and critique.4 Exploring male infuence on contemporary women artists serves both these ends: it brings women’s appropriation of male texts and infuence into focus whether or not the woman is consciously writing or performing as a feminist, and it helps us more fully understand our ongoing Romantic period as we revise our understanding of it. Women rock musicians, like their foremothers in Romanticism, took their inspiration wherever they wished. I will use the phrase “English language Romanticisms” to defer to authors and musicians who would chafe at the words “Anglo-American,” but the majority of our texts, both musical and literary, are Eurocentric and white. Third-wave and postcolonial feminisms aren’t represented enough here. In the 1970s, Chrissie Hynde described rock and roll as a “skinny little boys’ club.” At the time she was speaking, she might have called it a “skinny little white boys’ club.” Performers of color have tended to be on the margins of rock and roll in popular culture, even though they were at the heart of rock and roll musically, with a few notable exceptions. Kirsten Zemke’s contribution, which concludes this collection, both breaks the color barrier and thoroughly critiques Romanticism for its own hegemonic whiteness, while Rebecca Nesvet’s chapter includes mention of Muddy Waters. Otherwise, as mentioned above, I hope for future collections to close this gap, and I hope that any future heavy metal books will fnd room for the Riot Grrrls (maybe we

Introduction: Women in Rock/Women in Romanticism 3 can eyeball it and say punk is close enough).5 The chapters that follow, I trust, extend the conversation on women in Romanticism by bringing them together with women in rock and revising our understanding of male Romantics by seeing them through the lenses of contemporary women artists. These chapters, arranged chronologically by female musician, refect many of the developments in feminist scholarship of British Romantic women writers described in Chapter 1, which in different ways show women musicians pushing against expectations for women, sometimes violating them, and at times affrming non-binary female identity. Nesvet’s chapter presents a transgressive Jane Williams who lives like the disreputable itinerant guitarists of her own day and ours. Sasha Tamar Strelitz’s Janis Joplin adopts the pose of the ecstatic poet in her own electric Romanticism of the 1960s. Christopher Clason sees many of the major themes of German Romanticism reaffrmed in Joni Mitchell’s album Blue, while Alicia Carpenter’s Patti Smith occupies a dissenting Protestant position similar to that of William Blake. Diana Edelman’s Siouxsie Sioux playfully employs Gothic tropes to escape and critique patriarchy, and Linda C. Middleton explores how Natalie Merchant, Alanis Morrisette, and the Indigo Girls resist the female subjectivity endorsed by capitalism and consumerism. Sherry Truffn’s chapter on St. Vincent studies her non-binary sexual identity and appropriation of Gothic tropes to affrm her own freedom, both as a woman and as a person, while Kiristen Zemke’s chapter on Missy Elliott, Erykah Badu, and Beyoncé engages their adaptation of Romantic pastoralism and nostalgia, among other themes, in ways that intersect with the Afropresentist movement, ultimately critiquing and affrming Romantic values from the standpoint of a rejection of Romanticism’s racism. More detailed chapter summaries follow.

Chapter Summaries James Rovira’s “Are Women in Rock also Women in Romanticism?” explains the theoretical and historical basis for writing about contemporary women musicians as Romantics. After arriving at a defnition of Romanticism unmoored from period considerations, Rovira explores the status of women in western philosophy as background to Romanticism. Traditionally, philosophy is aligned with reason, mind, and spirit, while women are subordinated in western philosophy through an alignment with emotion, nature, and the body. It then registers the shift in German Romanticism in the early nineteenth century from literature to music in the work of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Arthur Schopenhauer, demonstrating that this shift was infuenced by a change in women’s status. It also argues that the shift in focus to music from literature undermined the previous misogynist philosophical regime by subordinating reason as

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immanent within nature and making the primary characteristic of spirit out to be will. With music as a privileged, direct expression of will, women were theoretically emancipated from their subordinate position in the previous philosophical regime. The chapter ends by interrogating the principles of German Romanticism against feminist scholarship on English language Romanticisms for their compatibility, asking if women could be considered Romantics at all, and demonstrating how bringing this scholarship into conversation with German Romanticism and the work of Löwy and Sayre nuances and complicates the claims made about women musicians in the rock era. Rebecca Nesvet’s “Jane Williams, Rolling Stone: Reconstructing British Romanticism's Guitar God(dess)” identifes the rolling stone, a trope for the itinerant guitarist, as a central fgure in rock and roll and then explores its genealogy. Nesvet identifes Jane Williams (1798–1884) as one of the most important prototypes for the idea of the rolling stone and British Romanticism’s frst and most important guitarist. She was gifted a guitar by Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who immortalized this gift with his poem “With a Guitar, to Jane.” Nesvet describes a tradition of associating the guitar (or early versions of it) with itinerants and vagabonds as far back as the early seventeenth century, associating it with “sex, scandal, and rootlessness” even in early modern drama, and then demonstrates how Williams herself ft that role through her non-traditional romantic relationships and her own guitar playing. By Shelley’s time, the Spanish guitar had supplanted the English version of that instrument in English culture, so to elaborate on the nature of the Spanish guitar in Williams’s time Nesvet draws upon the insights gained from her work with luthier Wes R. Schroeder to reconstruct a playable version of Williams’s guitar in the present based upon the original currently held in the Bodleian. Nesvet concludes by explaining Williams’s instrumental role in preserving Shelley’s memory for antiquity, not only by publishing his poem about the guitar posthumously but by commissioning the George Clint drawing of Shelley that, at the time, helped to rehabilitate Shelley’s image for his contemporaries after his death. “‘Work Me, Lord’: Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues” by Sasha Tamar Strelitz explores the life and music of Janis Joplin (1943–1970) in terms of “electric Romanticism,” a phrase that Strelitz coins to explain Joplin’s particular kind of performance and musical energy that she not only projects but also embodies. Citing Coleridge’s “The Aeolian Harp,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, and most importantly Thoreau’s writing about the telegraph, which he himself described as an “electric aeolian harp,” Strelitz argues that as an aeolian harp channels the sounds of the wind into music, Joplin channeled the electricity of the late 1960s into her own music and performances. Joplin’s work is Romantic because of its commitment to ecstasy, non-conformity, and radical praxis combined

Introduction: Women in Rock/Women in Romanticism 5 with an equal commitment to the personal, a commitment to express herself. Strelitz cites Hélène Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” to explain how Joplin’s Romanticism is simultaneously feminist and emancipatory and then extends this emancipatory project to trace Joplin’s own affnity with Black culture. Christopher R. Clason’s “‘All Romantics Meet the Same Fate Someday’: Joni Mitchell, Blue, and Romanticism” examines Mitchell’s (1943–) 1971 album Blue through the lenses of German Romanticism, including the work of Friedrich Schlegel, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, Goethe, Novalis, and others. Clason is not so much concerned with establishing infuence as with examining Blue against Romantic paradigms to establish how these paradigms still assert themselves in the present. These paradigms include the blending, coalescing, and juxtaposing of forms; Romantic tropes and Romantic irony; folk culture; the artist as prolifc in multiple media; Romantic longing; and even the color “blue” itself through die Blaue Blume. Clason maps these affnities across Mitchell’s music and lyrics, registering the complexity of her work across multiple genres and media and its deep affnities with German Romanticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Alicia Carpenter’s “‘There is no pure evil, nor pure good, only purity’: William Blake’s and Patti Smith’s Art as Opposition to Societal Boundaries” compares William Blake’s Moravian upbringing to Patti Smith’s (1946) childhood within the Jehovah’s Witnesses to establish parallels between their respective dissenting Protestant traditions. Doing so highlights both the infuence of this background on their work and its continued infuence upon them. After establishing their similarities, Carpenter goes on to consider how their work is infected by gender with a close comparison between Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Smith’s 1970s’ album Horses. She registers the androgyny of some of Blake’s fgures in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to compare it to Smith’s own non-binary personas on these albums, including the album covers, where she suppresses her femininity to adopt a male rock persona. Diana Edelman’s “‘A Woman with an Attitude’: Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees” defnes Siouxsie’s (1957–) work as a “challenge to patriarchal structures through measured control mixed with playful dismissiveness,” interpreting her work as Gothic both in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense and as a late-twentiethcentury genre of music. Edelman focuses on the frst ten years of the band’s career, covering the albums The Scream, Kaleidoscope, A  Kiss in the Dreamhouse, Hyaena, and Peep Show, fruitfully comparing Siouxsie to Gothic novelists such as Charlotte Dacre to position her within eighteenth-century female Gothic in particular, which employs a series of Gothic tropes focused upon women’s social roles and the home, specifcally the patriarchal family. Siouxsie, in Edelman’s account,

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refects and extends this tradition to include the possibility of freedom, both in fction and in reality. Linda C. Middleton’s “‘Our Generation’: Gender, Regeneration and Women in Rock” compares the deferral of women’s contributions to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture to the deferral of women’s contributions to rock music from its inception and how they express the Weltanschauung of Romanticism. Middleton uses Löwy and Sayre’s Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to theorize Romanticism and women’s issues within Romanticism. Women’s key issues are defned by “the fetishization of wealth and women’s objectifcation,” which closely aligns women’s status with capitalism and economics, a situation replicated for women rock musicians. Alanis Morissette (1974–), Natalie Merchant (1963–), and the Indigo Girls (Amy Ray, 1964–, and Emily Saliers, 1963–) serve as Middleton’s exemplars of female Romanticism in the late twentieth century and in rock as she focuses on Morrisette’s album Jagged Little Pill, Merchant’s Motherland, and the Indigo Girls’ Rites of Passage. Sherry R. Truffn’s “‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” identifes Anne Clark’s (St. Vincent, 1982–) recovery and appropriation of monstrous fgures using conventions of the Gothic and the grotesque. Clark does so, according to Truffn’s argument, in order to reject received identities and maintain the freedom to create and recreate the self, part of which includes the right to affrm a non-binary gender identity. But at the same time, Clark’s lyrics also express anxiety about the isolation and potential destruction of this constructed self. Ultimately, following the fgure of the monstrous, the Gothic, and the grotesque across Clark’s entire creative output, Truffn argues that Clark embraces the monstrous female self to evade the objectifcation she would experience in an embrace of a “normal” female identity. Kirsten Zemke’s “‘I can’t believe we made it’: Romanticism and Afropresentism in Works of African American Female Hip Hop and R‘n’B Artists” evaluates Missy Elliott’s (1971–) 2005 video for “Lose Control,” Erykah Badu’s (1971–) 1997 debut single “On & On,” and Beyoncé’s (1981–) Lemonade series of videos as creative products engaging the Romantic themes of pastoralism, nostalgia, history, literary intertextuality, and pantheism. These works are also engaged for their affnity with Afropresentism. Bringing these two movements together highlights Romanticism’s own racism, especially in its notions of the noble savage or primitive, how Romanticism’s racism in part formed the basis of rock music, and points toward Afropresentism as a way to recuperate Romanticism by encouraging “dialogue and development around African American and non-white practices and aesthetics.”

Introduction: Women in Rock/Women in Romanticism 7

Notes 1 Lydia Goehr, “Schopenhauer and the Musicians: An Inquiry into the Sounds of Silence and the Limits of Philosophizing about Music,” in Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts ed. Dale Jacquette (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 217. 2 I’m using the term “English language Romanticisms” in place of “Anglo-American” to include authors writing in English who would not describe themselves as Anglo-American. 3 “Caroline Crawley of Shelleyan Orphan and This Mortal Coil Has Passed Away,” Post-Punk.Com, 4 October 2016. https://post-punk.com/ caroline-crawley-of-shelleyan-orphan-and-this-mortal-coil-has-passedaway/. Accessed 15 January 2022. 4 Elizabeth A. Fay, A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 31. 5 See Women’s Studies vol. 41 (2012) for an excellent issue covering women in punk.

Bibliography “Caroline Crawley of Shelleyan Orphan and This Mortal Coil Has Passed Away.” Post-Punk.Com, 4 October 2016. https://post-punk.com/carolinecrawley-of-shelleyan-orphan-and-this-mortal-coil-has-passedaway/. Accessed 15 January 2022. Fay, Elizabeth A. A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Goehr, Lydia. “Schopenhauer and the Musicians: An Inquiry into the Sounds of Silence and the Limits of Philosophizing about Music.” In Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, edited by Dale Jacquette, 200–228. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Rovira, James, ed. Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

1

Are Women in Rock also Women in Romanticism? James Rovira

“Predictably, the shoe fts.”1 “First a hat, then the state.”2

What Is Romanticism, and Who Are Women in Philosophy? Our approach to the question of women’s status within western philosophy and culture today necessarily begins with an attempt to defne Romanticism. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre’s Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (2001)3 offers a signifcant contribution to our understanding of Romanticism, especially for a collection that claims women in rock do not just resemble Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or were infuenced by them, but are themselves Romantics. To make this claim, Romanticism cannot be limited to a period. It must be an impulse, a transhistorical and transcultural force. Periodizing Romanticism, of course, has been problematic from its earliest days. In 1798, Friedrich Schlegel invoked the term “romantic” in relationship to the novels of his contemporary Ludwig Tieck,4 but only after discussing Medieval art and literature, Shakespeare (calling him the “center of romantic art”5), and English wit. Tieck is mentioned only after Schlegel describes Petrarch as “romantic” and then says, “We are closer to the Romans and can understand them better than the Greeks; yet a real feeling for the Romans is much rarer than for the Greeks, because there are fewer synthetic than analytic people.”6 Schlegel and other contributors to the Atheneum looked to Greece and Rome for their models for Romanticism. More importantly, the dictum “The more [currently] popular an ancient author, the more romantic”7 identifes looking back to the past as a defning feature of Romanticism. Schlegel believed Romantic irony had its source in Roman satire, and his sources besides Shakespeare and Petrarch include Dante among others. The late eighteenth century begins the Romantic period only because it is the period during which human creative products were frst theorized as Romantic, not the period that Romantic works frst appear. Ancient literature is

DOI: 10.4324/9781003204855-2

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also potentially Romantic according to this defnition, especially when it reappears in the present. The term “Romanticism” itself is overdetermined: as an umbrella term covering works from a variety of the arts and sciences across different times and cultures, it has come to mean too many different things, some of them conficting, so that A.O. Lovejoy could assert in the early twentieth century that the term “has ceased to serve the function of a verbal sign.”8 He advocated for a variety of Romanticisms, but making the term plural doesn’t eliminate the need for a single, unifying concept that can be rendered in the plural. Sayre and Löwy’s 1984 essay, revised and expanded to their 2001 book, takes on Lovejoy’s challenge by providing a coherent, unifying defnition of Romanticism that accounts for differences across time and place by providing a taxonomy of Romanticisms. Their unifying defnition is that “Romanticism represents a critique of modernity, that is, of modern capitalist civilization, in the name of values and ideals drawn from the past (the precapitalist, premodern past).”9 “Modernity” in their use of the term is a confuence of capitalism and Enlightenment, one in which “the market economy prevails” and which gives rise to “integrally related aspects of modern civilization: rationalization, bureaucratization . . . urbanization, secularization, reifcation, and so on.”10 This single defnition is common to all Romanticisms described by their taxonomy, therefore, addressing Lovejoy’s challenge by uniting a diversity of Romanticisms under a single defnition. This diversity extends to nation of origin, time of inception, and to genre, media, and feld, encompassing disciplines such as philosophy and political science as well as art and literature. That single defnition needs some explanation, however. As stated, it’s a concept, which can imply, however unintentionally, that all works falling under the rubric of Romanticism express the concept. Their taxonomy extends and diversifes the concept, which extends the problem because all of this conceptualizing can obscure the real focus of this defnition, which is an impulse, not a thought: “Romantic sensibility bears an anticapitalist impulse. Still, its anticapitalism may be more or less conscious, implicit, or mediated . . . However, this awareness is by no means always present.”11 Romanticism here isn’t an object, idea, or concept, but an impulse, an impulse of which we may be unaware, but still an impulse. Romanticism is therefore a feature of a subject engaged with modernity expressed through an object, but not necessarily a defning feature of the object itself. Their taxonomy isn’t of objects, but of reactions to an impulse that produces a variety of objects. I emphasize this point now because it will be important below. In Löwy and Sayre’s account these subjects are all in fact embedded in modernity and participating in its assumptions and economy:

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James Rovira We must also note that, whether we like it or not, Romanticism is a modern critique of modernity. This means that, even as the Romantics rebel against modernity, they cannot fail to be profoundly shaped by their time. Thus by reacting emotionally, by refecting, by writing against modernity, they are reacting, refecting, and writing in modern terms. Far from conveying an outsiders’ view, far from being a critique rooted in some elsewhere, the Romantic view constitutes modernity’s self-criticism.12

This caveat is important because Romanticism is not just a concept. It’s not just a critique of capitalist society: if that were so, Romanticism would be a species of Marxism at best. It does not stand outside the modernity it critiques nor is it independent of it. It may not even seek to replace it—but it is still an impulse pushing back against it. Because it’s an impulse, it may be expressed without being theorized or even consciously held, and as an impulse, it is primarily an emotional vector: it is “bound up with an experience of loss . . . certain essential human values have been alienated.”13 This defnition of Romanticism, or some version of it, is necessary to talk meaningfully about late twentieth- to early twenty-frst-century music as forms of Romanticism. Each author’s and musician’s embeddedness in modernity and even acceptance of its assumptions doesn’t exclude them from feeling the need to push back against these assumptions, from feeling a sense of loss and disconnection specifcally because of that embeddedness in modernity during whatever time the socioeconomic conditions for Romanticism are met. The next question, then, is what Löwy and Sayre’s account can contribute to our understanding of women in and through the lens of Romanticism. They surprisingly assert that “women, independently of their class origin and as writers . . . maintain a privileged relation within Romanticism from the outset.”14 This claim surprised me because I can’t think of too many female Romantic-era authors who would have described themselves as privileged, although some had more access to education and other benefts than others. This “privileged relation,” however, exists only as an “objective possibility” whose realization is dependent upon historical conditions. In other words, it is an abstract relation, not a concrete, historically realized position. This relation is a theoretical construct resulting from women’s material exclusion “from the creation of the principal values of modernity (by scientists, businessmen, industrialists, politicians)” and from their physical participation in social roles “centered on qualitative values: family, feelings, love, culture.”15 Qualitative values “as opposed to exchange values”16 are key to Löwy and Sayre’s understanding of Romanticism, so by associating women’s subjectivity with qualitative values they are indeed making a signifcant statement for women within the context of their system. The two key qualitative values forming the Romantic impulse

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are “individualism” and “unity or totality.”17 Romantic individualism is fundamentally different from that of liberalism—Löwy and Sayre defne Romantic individualism as a “subjective individualism” opposed to the “numeric individualism” of liberalism: while individualism seems at odds with unity, subjective individualism is not because it “stresses the unique and incomparable character of each personality,” emphasizing the possibility of complementary relationships among individuals.18 Otherwise, they engage feminist Romanticism in a subsection of Chapter 5, their chapter about twentieth-century Romanticisms, dedicated to the work of Christa Wolf.19 The situation of women in Romanticism, taking all of Löwy and Sayre’s comments together, is as bleak as could be expected. In two cases, Löwy and Sayre’s exemplars of Romanticism are pointed out to be, by their own description, deeply misogynist, 20 while the only direct association of Romanticism with women takes the form of attacks by Romanticism’s critics for its inherent femininity: weak, passive, and impulsive. 21 Whichever side of the Romantic divide one fnds oneself, therefore, there is misogyny. What is most important at this point, however, is that women occupy an abstract position in relationship to Romanticism independently of their material, social, or political positions, one that can be realized under the right conditions. That is exactly the argument that I intend to make later, when I consider the role of music in Romanticism and how deeply implicated it is in redefning a millennia-old western philosophical regime that is inherently hostile to women. This approach does not rely on establishing infuence to make its argument about contemporary women musicians and Romanticism. While infuence is undeniably present in many cases, all chapters in Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism argue that these women were not only infuenced by Romantic-era authors but that the women musicians discussed here are themselves Romantics, that their late twentieth- to early twenty-frst-century music continues the legacy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticisms. These women write and create in part due to shared social and economic conditions that provoke creative responses which are Romantic in nature in a condition/ response model22 as I have argued in previous collections. The conditions of modernity, in this case, produce the Romantic response. But I would like to add to this claim: women musicians in particular are potentially Romantics today because music itself took a different form during the Romantic era, a form that provoked a philosophical response that ultimately, though unintentionally, changed the ontological status of women in western philosophy. The philosophical reinvention of women coincides, therefore, with a conceptual structure that demanded and anticipated a reinvention of “woman” inherently bound up with the change in philosophy inspired by the rise of instrumental music in the late eighteenth century.

12 James Rovira But this rise of instrumental music comes at the end of a long history and does not represent a clean break with the past. Philosophy from Plato to the modern era and its understanding of women is our broader context, and it has been and continues to be thoroughly critiqued a number of ways. The focus of these critiques often relates to the status of reason in western philosophy. From Plato to the nineteenth century the defning characteristic of “spirit” was “reason,” reason being the most important human faculty and what humanity has in common with the gods. In Meno, when Socrates wants to demonstrate that knowledge is recollection, he resorts to geometry. In the early twentieth century, Husserl similarly resorted to geometry to identify the objects of his phenomenology, the ideal forms that exist beneath human psychology. These ideal forms, as non-human objects apprehensible only through the rational faculty, are the fundamental elements of all existing objects, their ultimate origin and base form, the sought-after “thing in itself” of all idealist systems. In Plato’s thought, this belief becomes very personal as the soul seeks release from a body to which it never desired to be bound: The truth is much more like this. If at its release the soul is pure and carries with it no contamination of the body, because it has never willingly associated with it in life, but has shunned it and kept itself separate as its regular practice—in other words, if it has pursued philosophy in the right way and really practiced how to face death easily—this is what “practicing death” means, isn’t it?23 Philosophy is the practice of death in Plato because it involves the lifelong separation of the soul from the body. Because women are associated with the body within these systems, women have been assumed to be subordinate at best, characterized by emotion rather than reason and equivalent to either children or slaves. For example, Aristotle puts slaves, women, and children on a progressive gradation of degeneracy in relationship to reason in Book 1 of Politics. Socrates sounds progressive at times, especially in Book V of Republic when describing the guardians of the ideal republic, where he asserts that the only difference between men and women is that of bearing and begetting (their respective roles in procreation) and physical strength, 24 so that both men and women can be educated to carry out the same administrative duties in the state. But he limited his statements to the guardians, who are meant to live in circumstances very different from the rest of the Republic. It’s not clear the Socratic dialogues extend this thinking to all women. For example, Phaedo, a dialogue set during the hours leading up to Socrates’s execution, describes Socrates’s wife Xantippe as breaking out “into the sort of remark you would expect from a woman,” who was soon led away “crying hysterically” at the

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prospect of her husband’s impending death. 25 When Socrates drinks the poisoned cup prepared for his execution, the men present weep as well, but their weeping “made us feel ashamed, and we controlled our tears.”26 One man, Apollodorus, is particularly emotional, but all the men except for Socrates himself weep. It’s clear in this dialogue that emotion is reserved for women, and men are expected to be more philosophical: philosophy itself in this dialogue is a movement away from the body, a freedom from the body, so a movement toward death. The preeminent philosopher accepts his own death without fear or delay, as the fulfllment of his work as a philosopher, just as he accepts the judgment of the state, while women remain bound to the body and, by extension, to emotion. Augustine inherits this tradition, Christianizes it, and in so doing defnes it for centuries to come. Man is to woman as reason is to the body: And as in his soul there is one power which has dominion by directing, another made subject, that it might obey; so was there for the man, corporeally also, made a woman, who in the mind of her reasonable understanding should have a parity of nature, but in the sex of her body, should be in like manner subject to the sex of her husband . . . the mind subjected to Thee alone and needing to imitate no human authority, hast Thou renewed after Thy image and likeness; and didst subject its rational actions to the excellency of the understanding, as the woman to the man.27 Augustine acknowledges a “parity of nature” in woman’s “reasonable understanding” but his system, because of her bodily nature, subjects her to gradations of inferiority, making her an object to be guided and directed as the mind directs the body. These issues are complexly debated with caveats, exceptions, and books thrown—both literally and metaphorically—so that I don’t know where to begin citing the scholarship or from what perspective (Kristeva’s reinvention of depth psychology? Cixous’s critique of Freud and Lacan? Derrida and phallogocentrism? Feminist theology?)—but for the purpose of defning the philosophical regime governing most western thinking from Plato to the present this outline suffces.

Music and German Romanticism “We don’t understand music, it understands us.”28 Instrumental music as a signifcant, complex art form of its own appears against this background in the late eighteenth century. This section will explain how Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony contributed to the development of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, a philosophy

14 James Rovira that privileged music above reason and has the potential to change the status of women in western philosophy. Löwy and Sayre say nothing about music: the word does not appear in their index, a weakness of a system ultimately dependent upon a political taxonomy to conceptualize Romanticism in all its forms. 29 Discussions of Romanticism in music follow familiar patterns, however, and fall into similar traps—what is Romanticism? Is it just one thing? And if not, what if these things are all very different? One change registered by many authors is that “instrumental music was at least intellectually dominant between 1790 and 1910”30: music ascended to a primacy of position. Kenneth B. Klaus said of the Romantic era in music that for the frst time in music history the composer seeks to express himself; he strays far from uniform dogmas, tries very hard to be different—even strange and unfettered. Yet, this very individuality, in the fnal analysis, unites all romanticists: they are alike in that they are all different—hence, romanticisms, not just romanticism . . . to defne romanticism is almost to destroy it . . . since it means something different in almost every application.31 So, we must speak of Romanticisms in music as well, not just Romanticism, and the individuality of the composer is key. Romanticism in all of its forms is a feature of the subject, not the object, leading to our familiar emphasis on the genius of the composer parallel to the ecstatic, transfgured position of the poet in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” or the sensitive, refective poet of Wordsworth’s Preface. Other factors came into play, of course. According to Longyear, “Through the improvements in technology and metallurgy brought about by the Industrial Revolution, musical instruments became both easier to make and less expensive, thus accessible to more people.”32 Technology was catching up with the aspirations of instrumental music and with the more widespread dissemination of music. Both Longyear and Klaus register heightened tensions between creative artists and the newly broadened listening public, between public tastes and artistic self-expression, innovation, and freedom. Perhaps most signifcantly, Longyear describes a “virtual mania for writing about music that arose around 1770” which culminates, to many, with Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with the result that “No composer of the nineteenth century could wholly escape Beethoven’s infuence, for his music was so universal that he must be regarded as the trunk of the tree of nineteenth-century music from which so many branches sprung.”33 This infuence is due to some extent to Hoffmann’s veneration of Beethoven, for “Nowhere did Hoffmann more eloquently proclaim this gospel [of music] than in his review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”34

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Beethoven composed the Fifth Symphony during 1806 and 1807, seeing its frst performance in 1808 and its publication in April 1809. Hoffmann received a full score of the symphony in July of 1809 and sent in his review in May of 1810 to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in Leipzig.35 We aren’t sure if he ever heard the symphony performed except in his own head, during his own reading of the score. He then revised his review, excluding most of his technical discussion of the music and reproductions of the score but adding insights from his reviews of Beethoven’s two Piano Trios, Op. 70. He retitled it “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” which was frst published in the journal Zeitung für die elegante Welt (Z E W) in 1813, then as part of Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana, a collection of musical writings by the fctional musician Johannes Kreisler. His Kreisleriana was frst published as a section of his frst book (comprising most of the frst and fourth volumes of his Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier [Fantasy Pieces in the Manner of Jacques Callot]) in 1814–1815 and was then republished on its own in 1819. Each of these republications involved some revisions; Beethoven wrote an appreciative letter to Hoffmann in 1820. Hoffmann begins his review by communicating to his audience how profoundly moved he was by Beethoven’s symphony, warning his readers that he’s going to exceed “the limits of conventional appraisals” and strive “to put into words all the profound sensations that this composition has given rise within him.”36 It’s important that his initial focus is on the subjective experience of listening and not the formal qualities of the music, but later in the review he attempts to demonstrate where in Beethoven’s music these effects are achieved. He then goes on to make several important claims that carry forward in later philosophy: 1 The Priority of Instrumental Music: Music as an art form is only fully realized as instrumental music, and instrumental music is the only art form “that is purely romantic.”37 2 The Transcendence of Music: Music is separate from the “outer sensible world,” embracing the infnite. 3 Music as Prerational Cognition: Music expresses the inexpressible, bypassing the intellect. 4 The Suppression of Desire: The passions as presented through instrumental music are “clothed in the purple shimmer of romanticism,”38 but while desire arises in response to instrumental music, it soon “sinks back and disappears.”39 5 The Priority of Beethoven: According to Hoffmann, Haydn and Mozart were the frst composers to reveal this potential, but Beethoven exceeds them. a All three composers are Romantic but express a different emotional core: Hayden “a feeling of childlike optimism,” Mozart “the realm of spirits,” and Beethoven “the pain of infnite

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James Rovira yearning” which is “the essence of romanticism.” His music “sweeps the listener into the wonderful spirit-realm of the infnite.”40

Hoffmann is clearly straining against the limits of language, but he’s consciously writing about a medium that leaves behind intellect to “embrace the inexpressible,”41 wrestling to describe the sublime as it appears in a medium that had not often been elevated to those heights prior to his writing.42 Hoffmann’s recasting of his review into the essay “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music” brings these points out more clearly and directly, adding some discussion about the place of the piano in composition. At this point, we must account for the specifcs of Hoffmann’s language: what’s a “purple shimmer”? What does he mean by “infnite”? Isn’t a note a note, a specifc tone articulated during a specifc moment in time? How can music be “infnite,” then? We’re listening to music here in this world, as a physical medium, so how does it originate in or transport us to a “spirit world”? Steven Cassedy goes so far as to say that Hoffmann uses “language so extravagant, in fact, that to attempt to discern in it a logically compelling argument is an exercise in futility.”43 He does locate in Kant language similar to Hoffmann’s on several points but explains how Kant is applying that language to a faculty of reason which can grant access to a world behind experience. Hoffmann appropriates Kant’s language and ideas to derationalize it; in other words, Schopenhauer is using Kantian ideas to describe an experience that precedes reason and articulation, one that can only be spoken of after the fact. I don’t think that Hoffmann’s language is quite as nonsensical, or even as metaphorical, as Cassedy’s reading would have us believe, but I think it only works if we don’t attempt to use it as a description of the objective features of the music itself but rather as the language of subjective experience.44 This insight is the reason why I emphasized earlier that Löwy and Sayre’s defnition of Romanticism was of an inward experience provoked by an object, or an impulse, but not necessarily a description of the object itself. Commentators on Hoffmann regularly observe how different compositions might be better examples of his principles, including Cassedy, who spends the bulk of his article on Hoffmann explaining why Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata is really a better model for Hoffmann’s ideas than the Fifth Symphony, or they observe how the specifcs of Hoffmann’s own musical theory are defective. While it’s natural to look to the object for an explanation of the responses it provokes, I believe this focus is mistaken in Hoffmann’s case because the subject theorized as Romantic is an impulse or reaction to an object, not the object that provokes that response. What could Romanticism’s “purple shimmer” then be as a description of a subjective response to Beethoven’s Fifth? A shimmer is a wavering

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light that keeps us from clearly focusing on any object within it. My frst thought is to see “purple” as a reference to Book IV of Plato’s Republic, a section where Socrates compares rulers possessing wealth to statues with purple eyes; Hoffmann does reference Plato at least once in his writing, so this reading is possible, if remote.45 Purple may be the most beautiful color, but as an eye color it is unnatural: it is distracting rather than beautiful. Purple eyes don’t belong in this world, in other words, so they make for a defective representation of real objects. Michael Ferber asserts, however, that “in poetry since the Greeks ‘purple’ has seldom referred to the hue but to its brightness or iridescence,”46 while J. Scott Messing suggests the following in an email correspondence with me: Hoffmann’s term is Purpurschimmer, which he uses a second time in his essay “the nocturnal spirit-world dissolves into a purple shimmer”47 . . . In this sense, the term appears in German poetry of the previous two decades, associated with the dawn, at times in the guise of Aurora . . . Perhaps (a big if), he is suggesting that Romanticism is a dawning movement, implied also by his tapping Beethoven as the new kid on the musical block, following Haydn and Mozart.48 In a follow-up email Messing added several other references, including the following: Prinzessin Blandina (1815, spoken by Roderich in Act 1): “In the purple that shines from a distant spirit land, nature appears to him, everything appears to him [the poet], which his eye grasps.” (Notice that the purple emanates from a distant Geisterlande, and it is to the Geisterwelt rising in a bright purple glow that Mozart’s music takes us in Hoffmann’s essay.)49 Christopher Clason then suggests, I think when it comes to Romantic color symbolism among the Germans, Goethe is probably a key (albeit controversial) source (Zur Farbenlehre, 1810), since his attempt to prove Newton wrong was broadly debated and broadly refuted by the scientifc community. Anyhow, on the illustration of the Goethean color wheel (in the outermost ring), there are corresponding psychological or physiological dispositions attributed to the colors: at the border between blue and red, for example, there is a dark purple hue that Goethe attributes psychologically to “das Phantastische,” which I think would be the color category of greatest importance to the Romantics. I believe Hoffmann was probably aware of Goethe’s thoughts on this.50

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Hoffmann referring to Beethoven as the dawn of Romanticism is certainly on point here, a thought supported by both Ferber and Messing, as is Clason’s reference to Goethe. However, the brightness of the dawn implied by the “brightly radiating sun” of Ovid emphasizes the obscurity of any specifc object within a very bright light, a light so bright it keeps the viewer or listener from focusing on the specifc object that is the source of the light. Overall, “purple shimmer” might mean that the unnatural aesthetic intensity of the music, like the bright light of a new dawn, obscures even the music itself from view, separating the referent from the effect it produces. His reference to a “spirit world” performs essentially the same work, especially since he directly linked it to Purpurshimmer in the quotation from Prinzessin Blandina above, pointing the reader beyond material reality, as does “das Phantastische.” The closing lines of “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music” emphasize these connections: all the sublime effects and images the composer’s magical authority enclosed within his work . . . encircle us in bright rings of light, infaming our imaginings, our innermost soul, and bear us speeding on the wing into the far-off spirit-realm of music.51 The word “infnite” affrms this otherworldly idea as much as “purple shimmer.” One object of Hoffmann’s ire in his review of Beethoven’s Fifth are musical compositions that attempt to represent material phenomena such as sunrises, storms, and the sounds of battle directly. He says they are “ridiculous aberrations” that have been “deservedly condemned to total oblivion.”52 This emphasis on verisimilitude was a phase in eighteenth-century German music, one even emphasized in music criticism, as music in Germany “moved from church-dominated vocal forms in the early eighteenth century through to their decline at the end of the century.”53 The point is that purely Romantic music such as Beethoven’s Fifth is not directly representative of any object, not even any specifc emotion. Those emotions that do arise are enclosed in the “bright” or “purple” shimmer of Romanticism so that the emotions themselves are obscured by a non-referential, intense aesthetic experience. While emotions may be stirred by music, and of course certainly are, that stirring of emotion is effaced by the sublimity of a musical experience that puts us in touch with the “infnite.” The word “infnite” as used by writers like Hoffmann and Kierkegaard puzzled me for a long time: they keep using the word in ways that made me think it probably doesn’t mean what they thought it meant. I’d long felt that only Spinoza really grasped the concept of the “infnite.” But eventually, I developed a sense of what both Kierkegaard and Hoffmann may have meant. The “fnite” has one specifc and well-defned correlate: in a musical performance, this frst movement, for example, corresponds to

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bombs dropping in battle, while this next one might correspond to the emotions that combatants experienced after the battle. These compositions are fnite because they refer to a specifc, identifable object. The “infnite” in this context does not. It is open-ended: the person listening to the music of the infnite seeks after correlatives and realizes none of them are completely adequate, or perhaps that all of them together are meant, every conceivable correlative plus many that haven’t been conceived yet. In other words, the infnite is applicable to numerous objects and at least theoretically unlimited in its applicability. As Charlton puts it, in Hoffmann’s thought “the music itself is descriptively distanced from the Romantic effect it produces, or rather, the awareness it promotes.”54 Because human emotions tend to fxate on a specifc object in a specifc circumstance, intense aesthetic experiences that have no specifc referent make us feel as if we’re being pulled out of the world completely, certainly our material world completely comprised of referents, but maybe even beyond the world of ideal forms—maybe even to the impulse behind these ideal forms. Hoffmann’s language, therefore, grasps the phenomenology of ecstasy in his writing about Beethoven’s Fifth, identifying its origins. When a mind that normally correlates feeling with specifc referents experiences feelings that have no specifc referent, the mind opens up in ways in which it may seem to be lost, to be emptied out, to be expanded beyond its normal confnes. Had Hoffmann lived later in the millennia, he may have spray-painted ERIC CLAPTON IS GOD on a wall somewhere, but it’s more likely he would have been a Black Sabbath fan. Cassedy still has a point, of course: Hoffmann was no systematic philosopher, so he leaves us with words like “infnite” and “purple shimmer” without a clearly defned sense of what he meant by these words within the body of his work. He never defnes his terms. We’ll have to turn to Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [The World as Will and Representation (WWR: 1819, 1844)], frst published when Schopenhauer was 31, to develop a sense of what a systematic philosophy based upon this experience of instrumental music would look like. Schopenhauer’s 1844 edition of WWR left the frst largely unchanged but added a second book of supplementary essays elaborating the points raised in the frst book. If Hoffmann was an indirect source of Beethoven’s later veneration, Schopenhauer is a much closer one. Music historians ascribe to Wagner Beethoven’s position in the pantheon of Romantic composers, but it “was while thus composing the music to Acts II and III of The Valkyrie that he [Wagner] read The World as Will and Representation for the frst time.”55 Wagner remained devoted to Schopenhauer’s writings for life. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is a recast and, in his view, a correction of Plato’s and Kant’s idealism. Our approach to Schopenhauer should keep in mind the fundamental problem posed by idealist philosophy since

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Plato, which is the problem posed by perception. Human sense perception exists at some distance from the object itself. For example, seeing is limited to the interaction of available light with the physical object, the eyes’ reception of available light, and the brain’s processing of this sensory data. Because the world of our experience is essentially our own mental construction, we have no idea what the “thing in itself” (noumenon) is behind the world of sense perception (phenomenon): there is a deep, unbridgeable divide between the perceiving subject and the perceived object, or a subject/object dichotomy. To develop any idea of the thing-in-itself, we have to engage in a process to apprehend it, a process that throughout western philosophy until Schopenhauer required the use of our rational faculties. Against this background, Schopenhauer asserted that existence, at its base, proceeds from “Will,” a blind, unthinking force that unconsciously seeks its own expression. Will is the true “thing in itself” sought after by western philosophy since Plato. All objects are, therefore, expressions of Will, and since some objects are more complex than others, all objects exist as gradations of Will from the simplest to the most complex. Ideal forms, largely in Plato’s sense of the term, occupy the intermediate stage between Will and existence: Will projects itself frst into Ideal forms and then through them into the diversity of all existing objects, which are manifold representations of those forms, thus the world as “Will” and “Representation.” Because Will is blind, existence is characterized by struggle and suffering: Will projects itself outward unthinkingly and contradictorily so that “the world [is] a permanent battlefeld of all those phenomena of one and the same will,”56 where “one grade of the will preys on another grade.”57 All of existence, then, is a system of relations, so that all objects only exist as objects in relation to other objects and are subject to the laws governing all objects, which Schopenhauer identifes as the “principle of suffcient reason,” a principle that manifests itself in a number of forms and relations, such as time, space, and causality.58 Stated one way, the principle of suffcient reason explains the entire world as we experience it, and it consists of four roots: intuitive representations, which govern our perception of “objects in time and space” (“intuition” here is the brain’s ability to convert sense perception into a coherent picture of the world); concepts; intuitions of space and time; and will in its individual forms.59 Because all that exists is an expression of Will, Will also projects itself into intellect. Intellect develops concepts, which under the right conditions can lead to an apprehension of the Ideal forms underlying material existence. Human intellect isn’t limited to intuition, which in this system governs the perception of all objects by all perceiving subjects, but also includes abstract thought, which produces concepts.60 At frst glance Schopenhauer’s system seems like a modifed Platonism, but placing Will at the center of existence rather than reason has signifcant implications. Reason is, frst of all,

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immanent, not transcendent. It may be the apex of the world of representation, but it doesn’t escape it. In fact, “the transition from the Idea to the concept is always a descent.”61 However, it also means we aren’t completely alienated from the thing-in-itself: human will, as the highest gradation of Will as “thing-in-itself,” is Will made conscious: “the highest grade of the will’s objectivity [is] the presentation of man in the connected series of his efforts and actions.”62 Each human mind is potentially Will seeking understanding of itself, and all human minds together certainly are. As a result, from a comprehension of oneself (the microcosm) one is to gain a comprehension of the world (the macrocosm), and indeed on the model of self-comprehension such that the world facing oneself is properly designated as the great human being (the macanthropos).63 The self in Schopenhauer is, therefore, very different from Kant’s island surrounded by fog, his image depicting the relationship between human consciousness and the world of external objects. We are not isolated because the whole is represented in small form within each of us as individuals. This unique position accorded to human beings requires some discussion of the relationship between Ideal forms and humanly created objects like tables and chairs. Here Schopenhauer departs from Plato (in Republic, Book X, and Parmenides), saying that humanly created objects such as tables and chairs do not have corresponding Ideal forms, but “that they express the Ideas already expressed in their mere material as such,”64 elaborating that “Gravity, rigidity, fuidity, light, and so on, are the Ideas that express themselves in rocks, buildings, and masses of water”65 while pointing out that subsequent Platonists held to this position as well. Schopenhauer does not render human creative products irrelevant, however. They too exist in gradations of forms and potentially serve a unique function, from lowest to highest, as “the unfolding and elucidation of the Idea expressing itself in the object of every art, of the will objectifying itself at each grade.”66 These gradations begin with architecture as the lowest form of expression, move through sculpture and painting, and then culminate in poetry, specifcally tragedy. Poetry exists at the “highest grade of the will’s objectivity” because in it we fnd “the presentation of man in the connected series of his efforts and actions.”67 As a corrective to Kantian idealism, Schopenhauer engaged in a Romantic project that originated in Kant’s attempt not to undo Enlightenment principles, but to save them. Frederick Beiser describes the two major crises of the Enlightenment, skepticism and materialism, as the result of the Enlightenment principles of “rational criticism and scientifc naturalism,” where “skepticism undermines our common-sense

22 James Rovira beliefs in the reality of the external world [ . . . and] materialism threatens the beliefs in freedom, immortality, and the sui generis status of the mind.”68 Kant sought to address these weaknesses by defning truth as the conformity of a representation to “necessary forms of consciousness itself” rather than conformity to an external object in order to attack skepticism and then undermined materialism by criticizing materialism for confating “appearances with things in themselves,”69 so that not everything that exists is in nature. Reason could operate independently of nature, preserving human freedom. It is transcendental. Kant’s system made an impressive mark quite rapidly, but it also drew a great deal of criticism for not solving the problems of the Enlightenment, but rather exacerbating them. Critics of Kant shared his motivation to preserve Enlightenment principles. Fichte attempted to solve the problems he saw in Kant by postulating an “absolute ego,” a theoretical construct that served as a trajectory for human will, which existed in a state of striving to achieve that state of absolute ego, where nature conforms to human reason. The subject/object dichotomy only exists according to Fichte because both materialism and skepticism fail to take into account “the role of human activity in knowledge,” in Beiser’s words.70 Needless to say, Fichte’s system had shortcomings as well, and the group that attempted to correct these shortcomings constitute the Romantic response to Kantian idealism and its aftermath. The Romantic response to Fichte and Kant by authors such as Hölderlin, Schelling, Hegel, Novalis, and Schlegel lay in a reconception of “matter as a living force.”71 The universe was organic, not static, so that “the subjective and ideal is the internalization of living force, while the objective and the real is the externalization of living force.”72 “Living force,” therefore, bridges the subject/object gap by existing on both sides of it. It is out of this background that Schopenhauer developed his philosophy, several elements of which have already appeared, such as will, striving, and a critique of the subject/object dichotomy. Organicism, for that matter, was also the basis of Hoffmann’s interpretation of Beethoven, whose review of Beethoven’s Fifth “represented the frst extended musical analysis of the thematic structure of a work to be based on the concept of organicism.”73 “Organicism” for Hoffmann was not only a reference to a work’s inner coherence but also a reference to its metaphysical status.74 Hoffmann anticipated Schopenhauer in a number of ways. But Schopenhauer modifed this Romantic philosophic background as well. Music is given a special place in Schopenhauer’s thought. It “stands quite apart from all of the others [arts]” because in it “we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world.”75 His claims about music are quite remarkable: Thus music is as immediate an objectifcation and copy of the whole will as the world itself is, indeed as the Ideas are, the multiplied

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phenomenon of which constitutes the world of individual things. Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas.76 Will realizes itself directly through music without recourse to Ideas. It is the only direct expression of Will apart from the entire world itself. Schopenhauer is careful to say that music is not alien to every other existing thing, the world of Ideas realized in representations, because both music and Idea are manifestations of the same Will, but only that music comes into being without the mediation of Ideas. He even goes so far as to say that “the phenomenal world, or nature, and music [are] two different expressions of the same thing.”77 Music is somehow separate from nature. As a result, music is “the highest grade of the will’s objectifcation, the intellectual life and endeavor of man,” especially melody. Melody is particularly singled out because “all the events that occur within man himself. . . can be expressed by the infnite number of possible melodies, but always in the universality of mere form without the material.”78 Hoffmann took the remarkable step of ending the regime of reason and privileging the inarticulate. These ideas should sound familiar by now. Returning to Hoffmann’s fundamental claims about music derived from his review of Beethoven’s Fifth, we see them all in play in Schopenhauer’s philosophy: 1 The Priority of Instrumental Music can be implied from the place of music in Schopenhauer. Because the concept is a degradation of the idea, and words express concepts, only instrumental music can occupy primacy of place. 2 The Transcendence of Music: Music is separate from nature and is not a fnite form of expression, existing in the “universality of mere form without the material.” 3 Music as Prerational Cognition: Music in Schopenhauer embraces the inexpressible, bypassing the intellect because it exists separately from the concept. 4 The Suppression of Desire: I have not yet developed this point, but it too exists in Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer discusses in several places an aesthetic or contemplative state in which the individual “becomes conscious of himself as the subject of pure, will-less knowing, whose unshakeable, blissful peace now appears in contrast to the stress of willing that is always restricted and needy.”79 These moments seem to form the trajectory or fulfllment of what started as blind, unconscious Will. The only point of Hoffmann’s that Schopenhauer does not refect in his philosophy is the priority of Beethoven. Of Schopenhauer’s three great

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composers, only Hayden appears in vol. 1, while Beethoven appears once in vol. 2 and Mozart several times there. Schopenhauer’s tastes differed from Hoffmann’s, but he did write about the same composers. I’m not particularly interested in testing Schopenhauer’s philosophy for validity, either in critiquing it or defending it from critique. What interests me is that he made these claims to begin with, why he made those claims, and what they mean in the context of western philosophy. And more specifcally, what might Schopenhauer’s philosophy mean for women? It potentially overturns the previous philosophical regime privileging reason and the concept; remember that prior to Schopenhauer, reason existed outside the material order, while in Schopenhauer’s system reason and concepts exist only within material nature. The prior emphasis on reason led to the subordination of women through their association with the body and emotion and, by extension, with nature. Reason and the concept are now subordinate to will, which has never been denied women, and reason itself is now aligned with nature, where women have always been. R. Murray Schafer in E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music suggests that this change in philosophy was driven by the new status of German women in the early nineteenth century, and that Hoffmann's ideas about Beethoven were in part “a consequence of a social change in the role of women which, even though Hoffmann has left no explicit comment on the subject, cannot have left him unaffected.”80 I want to emphasize that Schafer is writing about the condition of women only in Germany at that time. He notes that in “Hoffmann’s work music changes its sex from feminine to masculine after his discovery of Beethoven.”81 Schafer also notes that by the “beginning of the nineteenth century woman [in Germany] had begun to be emancipated,” and that “there was a growing desire that woman should now receive an education,”82 a key point for Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, and other British Romantic women writers, who for their part also faced great resistance. This shift of music from feminine to masculine occurs, in Schafer’s account, because the new woman [again, in Germany] engages men as an equal; she is not divine, and the whole troubadour concept of adoration ceases. The woman of the nineteenth century continues to be wooed with music but she ceases to be the physical epiphany of the tender art itself.83 Shafer, therefore, establishes a parallel between women’s changing status in Germany and Hoffmann’s language about music around the same time. I would also like to add that Hoffmann reveals an anticapitalist, anti-industrialist impulse compatible with Löwy and Sayre in his understanding of music in his “Refections on the High Value of Music,” in which his fctional musician Kreisler, who has left behind papers

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recovered in his absence and then published, writes about music from a philistine point of view: The real purpose of art is to provide people with an amusement and thus to divert them from the much more important tasks of earning bread and fame. Then afterwards they may return to the real purpose of their existence with redoubled energy and dedication—that is, to be a faithful cog in the treadmill of the state and (I remain with the metaphor) to let themselves be manipulated like mechanical gadgets. Now no art is more qualifed to achieve this end than music.84 Kriesler goes on to attack people like Hoffmann, saying that clear thinkers (such as he) are polite to artists (who are specifcally identifed as musicians by the end of the essay) only because of “our cultivation and bonhomie which requires us also to be kind to children and other human beings whose company is pleasant.”85 It’s not hard to imagine that these “other human beings” include women, as Kriesler’s language about musicians parallels western discourse about women up to that time. The artists themselves, however, “fall victims of madness” by maintaining that music is “the most romantic of all the arts because it aspires to the infnite.”86 Ironically, Kreisler is in fact writing in defense of music, which kept within bounds makes people better cogs in the wheels of the state, although he fnally admits to feeling “related to” these musicians described above. Even more remarkably, he confesses that “Satan whispers in my ear that to them [musicians] many of my ingenuous remarks could be construed as dreadful irony.”87 I can’t quite unpack the multiple layers of irony in this comment, and the implicit link to Romantic Satanism I hope to approach later, but I believe Hoffmann represents here his belief that the effects of music are universal, an inescapable part of our humanity. Even the greatest philistines feel it. Within the Kreisleriana itself, “Refections on the High Value of Music,” written from a philistine perspective, immediately precedes “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” also “written by” Kreisler, I suspect for the purpose of dramatizing Beethoven’s infuence on Kreisler. He transformed into the artist he condescended to as a child after hearing Beethoven’s Fifth. He was overcome. The transformation of Kriesler from a philistine manager of workers to a sensitive artist has its own background in misogyny, however. And I don’t want Schafer’s depiction of an increasingly progressive early nineteenth-century Germany to go without qualifcation, however. Unfortunately, Schopenhauer himself emphatically represents the ongoing misogyny of his era. For example, •

“Women are directly ftted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted; in a word, they are big children all their

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James Rovira life long—a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the full-grown man.” This is the reason why women are more often inclined to be extravagant, and sometimes carry their inclination to a length that borders upon madness.” And so it lies in woman’s nature to look upon everything only as a means for conquering man; and if she takes an interest in anything else it is simulated—a mere roundabout way of gaining her ends by coquetry and feigning what she does not feel.”88

Almost everything described above from Plato to Augustine reappears here in Schopenhauer’s mid-nineteenth-century text. The frst quotation, which places women between children and men, is reminiscent of Aristotle and Augustine. The second makes woman a slave to will, associating her with the “madness” of artists Hoffmann describes above, while the third focuses women’s psychology exclusively on marriage and reproduction, relegating her to a bodily life only. All of these quotations are from Schopenhauer’s 1851 essay “On Women,” published just over thirty years after WWR and about nine years before his death, an essay which Christopher Janaway accurately describes as a “nasty, gratuitous piece of misogyny.”89 These attitudes were undoubtedly widespread, but in Schopenhauer, they were condensed and focused. It’s unclear how lifelong these attitudes were in Schopenhauer’s case, and it’s tempting to look to his life for a source of these attitudes. He had an acrimonious relationship with his mother. She didn’t see him for the last twenty-four years of her life, and even though she ran an infuential literary salon in Germany that entertained Goethe among others, those connections did not beneft him as much as they could have.90 Hoffmann had his issues too: if Schopenhauer was the Harvey Weinstein of nineteenth-century Germany, Hoffmann was its West End Caleb. I bring up Schopenhauer’s misogyny to illustrate how persistent some of these ideas were from Augustine to the nineteenth century and to illustrate the second of my points taken from Löwy and Sayre: the frst was that Romanticism was an impulse, not a concept (so an expression of will), and the second was that women’s privileged relationship to Romanticism exists only in the realm of possibility. Schopenhauer conceived of the system that should have revolutionized the place of women in western philosophy, but the thought never occurred to him that undermining the regime of reason to replace it with the regime of Will should change the status of women. Misogyny is habitual and persistent, a frame of mind and structure of social relations, and only conscious effort can dispel it. But the inherent weakness of Schopenhauer’s new regime of Will rather than reason is that it only undermines the misogyny inherent in the old system on its own terms, working with its own assumptions. So, at best his was a single step taken

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out of the old regime of reason, one taken while one foot remained within it, not the emancipatory act itself, for it is still true that the “master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”91 In Schopenhauer’s Romanticism, as in Löwy and Sayre’s, the changed status of women exists only as a possibility, one that he was not aware of himself.

From German Romanticism to British Romanticism and British Women Writers Schopenhauer’s philosophy articulated and systematized what was already thought and felt, as the background description and excerpts from Hoffmann illustrate, so his ideas could be identifed in some form in the works of other predecessors besides Hoffmann. His originality lay in the clarity with which he saw the issues and reframed them for his time. But is my description of Hoffmann’s and Schopenhauer’s Romanticism relevant to other Romanticisms, particularly British Romanticism, or the Romanticisms of women musicians of the twentieth century and beyond? With the exception of Christopher Clason’s chapter that reads Joni Mitchell’s Blue against the background of German Romanticism, the chapters collected here cite authors writing within English language Romanticisms. Pre-twentieth fgures discussed in this collection include William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Dacre, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ann Radcliffe, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, Horace Walpole, Jane Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth, as well as discussion of the Gothic and the female Gothic within English language Romanticisms. Contemporary musicians and fgures cited include members of the Afropresentist movement, Erykah Badu, Beyoncé, The Carters, Hélène Cixous, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Missy Elliott, Donovan, the  Indigo Girls, Janet Jackson, Janis Joplin (and Big Brother and the Holding Company), Natalie Merchant, Joni Mitchell, Janelle Monáe, Alanis Morrisette, The Replacements, The Rolling Stones, Siouxsie Sioux, Patti Smith, St. Vincent (Annie Clark), Alice Walker, and Muddy Waters. As a result, some work is needed connecting Hoffmann, Schopenhauer, and Löwy and Sayre to the scholarly conversation about women Romantics writing in English to these uniformly American, British, or Canadian artists and then to women’s status in English language Romanticism overall. Why German Romanticism to begin with? Schopenhauer’s claims about music are key pieces in the complex puzzle of his philosophy unmatched by other philosophers. Of all the Romantics writing in any language, he made the boldest claims about music. There is no equivalent in British Romanticism. But that’s not to say that his ideas aren’t refected in some British writers as well. William Blake’s Introduction to

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the Songs of Innocence anticipates in poetic form some of Schopenhauer’s ideas. Blake’s Introduction narrates a conversation between a shepherd and a cherubic “child upon a cloud.”92 The shepherd’s piping delights the child, who in his laughter requests “a song about a lamb.” Weeping after the requested song, the child asks the shepherd to “sing a song about a lamb,” and the shepherd complies, dropping his pipe to do so. Finally, the child asks the shepherd to write his songs down, and then the child vanishes. Again, the shepherd complies, but in order to write down his songs he made a pen and then “staind the water clear.” This song’s narrative follows a descent from instrumental music to singing to writing; as a “song of innocence,” it is unaware of its own doing so, but the invention of writing introduces a stain upon pure nature and undermines spontaneous, natural music. Blake doesn’t theorize in this poem: he only presents. But he presents a descent from purely musical form through speech to writing that anticipates Hoffmann and Schopenhauer. We should expect connections between British and German Romanticisms: Kant drew from David Hume, Fichte from Berkeley, and the German Romantics from Leibniz. British philosophy made its way to Germany frst. However, for my purposes here, I’m going to approach feminist Romantic studies in English initially by way of reference to two books published ten years apart right before the end of the twentieth century: Anne Mellor’s anthology Romanticism and Feminism (1988) and Elizabeth A. Fay’s A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (1998). I’m selecting this timeframe because it approximates the period during which Löwy and Sayre were carrying out their own work on Romanticism, the period between their 1984 article and their 2001 book. I can only apologize in advance to all of the scholars I don’t cite but should. I’d like to start by illustrating the situation of women authors in Romanticism through the 1960s and into the 1970s. My undergraduate seminar textbook was English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins. Published in 1967, it’s 1255 pages long and includes major sections on Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats, who are the Big Six by this point, with decent selections from Scott, Landor, Hazlitt, and John Clare and somewhat less representation of other authors. The anthology is largely poetry with some non-fction prose, but no fction or drama. Judging from my notes, I was required to read Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, de Quincey, Peacock, Shelley, and Keats, but not Byron. While the Big Six Romantics had been canonized by this point, they weren’t the only Romantics: the anthology covers thirty authors. Of these thirty authors, the only woman writer represented from this period is Dorothy Wordsworth. Six pages of her Grasmere Journals are presented in a short section following Wordsworth’s poetry that constitutes something of a reception history of Wordsworth, including reviews and personal writings by other authors that shed light on his work. Women authors of the Romantic period

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barely existed in the 1960s and 1970s. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner in their review of coverage for the introduction to Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776–1837 (1994) come up with similar results, naming Perkins, the Longman, and the Norton anthologies as the most common Romantic era anthologies up to the early 1990s. To contextualize my own experience, I attended this seminar in the early 1990s, and it never occurred to me to think that my undergraduate instructor was anything but a feminist. He worked with what he knew and had at hand.93 In 1988, Anne Mellor could write in the frst sentence of her introduction to Romanticism and Feminism that this “volume of essays, together with the recent books of Mary Poovey, Mary Jacobus, and Margaret Homans, marks the coming of age of a feminist criticism of the major texts of the English Romantic period.”94 Of course she cites infuences and predecessors such as Elaine Showalter, but most of them are from the late 1970s and earlier 1980s. Ten years later, when Elizabeth Fay quotes Jane Austen as representative of Romantic writing alongside Wordsworth and Byron, she explains that she has “said something quite unusual for Romantic studies. Until recently, the literary tradition has viewed the Romantic period as an intense burst of great poetry by a small, select group of artists” that include fve of the Big Six “with William Blake, Robert Southey, and Sir Walter Scott moving in and out of this primary group according to how critics change their evaluations of them.”95 While studies in Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (though not exclusively) were well on their way by the end of the twentieth century, some explanation was still required at the turn of the twenty-frst century, and we should keep in mind that Jane Austen’s status as a Romantic was often disputed. Mellor describes the two major traditions of feminist criticism at the time as being Anglo-American and French. Anglo-American critics worked out the implications of “‘gynocriticism,’ a working hypothesis that women both write and read differently from men,”96 and they attempted to recover the work of women writers from previous centuries, while in so doing they expanded the range of genres subject to literary analysis, such as “letters, diaries, and the less prestigious short story and silver-fork or mass-produced novel.”97 They felt a commitment to be “‘resisting readers’ . . . that directly challenge the sexist assumptions implicit in both the canonical texts of English and American literature and in the traditional body of criticism of those texts.”98 French feminist criticism, on the other hand, is “more philosophically oriented” and seeks to “call into question, even deny, the validity of the binary mode of thinking that has characterized philosophical discourse since the ancient Greeks.”99 Women must be considered in a completely different way; rather than existing as part of a binary system, feminist scholars would deconstruct them “into a liberating chaos, fux, or playfulness, a

30 James Rovira jouissance.”100 These goals are achieved as women discover their own mode of writing, an “écriture feminine” that “deliberately ruptures binary systems of synchronic and diachronic oppositions, of syntax, vocabulary, and genre.”101 The fundamental issue with Big Six Romanticism, aside from its primary focus on just six fgures, is that these fgures “endorsed a concept of the self as a power that gains control over and gives signifcance to nature, a nature troped in their writings as female.”102 Mellor followed up with Romanticism and Gender (1993), which draws stark contrasts between male and female encounters with the sublime to somewhat uneasily describe a “masculine romanticism” and “feminine romanticism,” both of which could be expressed by either men or women. Male experience of the sublime detaches it from the body, traditionally the province of women,103 while sublime horror in women’s writing is associated with “the sexual division of labor, and the domestic ideology of patriarchal capitalism. The father, whether as patriarch or priest, is unmasked as the author of violence against women,” including incest.104 For the positive sublime, Mellor cites Ann Radcliffe, whose “experience of the sublime in nature is one that is fnally beyond language, one that impresses the fnite self with the presence of an inexpressible other.”105 At this point we venture very closely to Hoffmann and Schopenhauer by placing the apex of sublime experience beyond language. Ten years after Mellor’s anthology, Elizabeth Fay (1998) reframed the discussion in terms of “critical feminism,” which regardless of the approach involved, always directs its “attention primarily to gender difference, patriarchy, and sexual politics.”106 Fay’s history of contemporary feminist scholarship begins in 1963 with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Sylvia Plath’s publication of The Bell Jar and then suicide, and Ellen Moers’s commencement of work on Literary Women: The Great Writers, which was published thirteen years later, in 1976. Fay then identifes many of the same works that Anne Mellor did in her introduction but describes a British feminist scholarship separate from American, listing a number of other works appearing in the 1980s.107 She also describes biographical work on women authors carried out in the early twentieth century. When Fay brings her survey up to the present, she emphasizes the difference between sex and gender, how that could lead to a split consciousness in women, and she discusses women as consumers, saying “with the increase in trade and industrialism that characterizes the Romantic period, middle-class women as well as upper-class women became identifed with the acquisition of material goods and with consumerism itself” with the result that “women became highly identifed with consumerism, even though men inherited, controlled, and accumulated money itself.”108 The Romantic era in Fay’s account complicated women’s relationship to nature; by shifting her from a producer (of children) to a consumer

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(of goods, especially goods designed to supplement her “natural” function of attracting a spouse and bearing children), women were moved into a position where they “provide the link between man-made artifce and nature that reassures society about industrialism’s possible negatives.”109 So in this vein of feminist thought, capitalism intrudes itself upon women’s identities and their construction during the Romantic era. As a result, women were caught in a tension between their old identities as producers and new identities as consumers when neither position, by itself, was particularly desirable. This tension appears in a number of ways in women’s literature of the period, manifesting itself in what Fay identifes as four “issues feminist studies have deemed most important to women’s concerns: public versus private life . . . domestic abuse and female psychology . . . women’s intellectuality . . . and women’s selfperception as subjects and objects.”110 She elaborates on each of these in separate chapters. Fay focuses closely on the rise of sensibility (emotion) during the Romantic period, and asserts that the new emphasis on emotion “offered women writers a way to portray women’s psychological and social experience, and to assess the effects of gender on the individual’s relation to society.”111 Of course Romantic males became poets of sensibility, and Wordsworth theorized the poet as such, but a man of feeling is an exalted being, while a woman of feeling is just a woman. But at the same time, the emphasis on emotion placed constraining expectations on women authors: women found they had to confront emotions in their writing because as women they were expected to have a stronger affnity for the emotional states, and to be more sensitive to those states considered to be feminine such as material affections and sexual love.112 So women writers were conficted; Fay sees an implicit critique of Romantic assumptions in Jane Austen’s fction, for example, and she asserts that women “writers . . . needed to have a complex relation to Romanticism, one which allowed them to absorb and yet dissent from its main precepts.”113 This brief overview should illustrate that Löwy and Sayre’s work isn’t incompatible with feminist scholarship on English language Romanticisms, as least as represented by Mellor and Fay. They affrm that women occupy a privileged position in relation to Romanticism based on affnity with emotion, but Fay would add that women authors were both conficted about that position and wanted to use it to critique Romantic assumptions themselves. Both Fay and Mellor also affrm the capitalist/industrialist dimension driving women’s literature, so that British women’s Romanticism could be a reaction against modernity in the form of capitalism plus Enlightenment as well. Moving forward from this early phase of feminist scholarship on Romanticism, Anne Mellor opened the twenty-frst century by asking

32 James Rovira in her 2001 article, “Were Women Writers ‘Romantics’?” She answers her own question almost immediately with a frm “no,” reversing her previous position: “our literary periodizations for this era—neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian—are conceptually useless for, perhaps even counterproductive in, illuminating women’s literary history.”114 She asserts this position because “there is no sharp cultural, political, or intellectual divide between 1789 and what went before or between 1832 and what came after . . . there is no ‘Romantic period’ in women’s writing.”115 There’s no French Revolution for women, in other words, as Susan Wolfson would graphically illustrate in Borderlines: The Shifting of Gender in British Romanticism just fve years later.116 Mellor draws upon good evidence to make her claim, suggesting that a dyad of “literary mothers and daughters” would be more productive.117 On every point at which Mellor could establish distinguishing features of the Romantic era, or of canonized Romantic authors, her argument is valid. But Löwy and Sayre’s distinguishing characteristics of Romanticism, which dismantles periodization by confguring Romanticism as a resistance to modernity, a critique of capitalism and Enlightenment, and an emphasis on subjective individualism and affect certainly could apply to women of the traditionally defned Romantic era (and before, and since) which Mellor recognizes in her description of a critique of “patriarchal capitalism” in women’s writing of the period. However, this application still needs to be qualifed, or modifed, for women Romantics. As Mellor also observes, the female author almost never thought of herself as a solitary genius, divinely inspired. Instead, she saw herself as woven into a web of affliations with her male literary peers and precursors; with her female literary friends, sisters, and mothers; with members of her family circle; and with the fora and fauna around her.118 Mellor characterized women Romantics by their adherence to qualitative values, like Löwy and Sayre, but the details of Mellor’s argument indicate that Romantic subjective individualism for women needs its own redefnition. By the early twenty-frst century, however, feminist scholarship on Romanticism started taking signifcantly different directions, moving away from binary gender formations and emphasizing instead women’s resistance to expectations. Adriana Craciun takes issue with Mellor’s depiction of Romantic women authors in Fatal Women of Romanticism (2003), arguing that her own focus on violent and fatal women in women’s writings demonstrates not only that Romantic heroines engaged in extremely unfeminine forms of behavior, but that in women’s violence and destructiveness

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we fnd the end of woman as a sex, and the end of all the consolations with which woman provides us.119 In terms of canon formation, she could say at the time that “women writers of the Romantic period are just now beginning to be reanthologized and recanonized by feminist scholars.”120 She suggests the work that must take place now is an interrogation of biological sex itself rather than sex and gender, or just gender: Feminist literary histories are not properly historical if they fail to examine the history of sex as well as that of gender . . . I argue that Romantic-period writers not only have questioned the nature of femininity and culturally constructed gender, but that they also questioned the stability and naturalness of sex itself.121 She argues that Romantic women writers in fact introduced the possibility of non-binary sexual identity for women, “suggesting alternatives to the two-sex system which, contrary to prevailing modern assumptions, they did not accept as stable and eternal.”122 This undermining of the binary system continues in later scholarship and grows in emphasis. Kari E. Lokke’s Tracing Women’s Romanticism: Gender, History, and Transcendence (2004) emphasizes that Romanticism as defned “by its own members is the repeated emphasis upon historical development or telos as infnite striving, a movement away from concrete, objective, sensuous representation toward the ideal, ineffable, and sublime,”123 which sounds compatible with Hoffmann and Schopenhauer. Lokke’s purpose is to respond to feminist scholarship on the sublime from the 1980s and 1990s, which asserts that traditional and restrictive associations of women with nature, immanence, and the body in Western culture exclude them from the discourse of transcendence . . . [but] these novelists create feminine and (proto-)feminist visions of spiritual and artistic transcendence that constitute a critique of Romanticism from within.124 Lokke brings us back to familiar ground, Hoffmann’s and Schopenhauer’s  sublime, but only after modifying it to account for women’s ambivalence toward this tradition, their acknowledged debt and resistance to it. Susan Wolfson’s Borderlines (2006), already mentioned above, leverages the “syntax of if” in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft to illustrate how she and other writers such as Catherine Macaulay resist the notion of gender “as uncontingent explanation,” describing how they “dislodged this ground by proposing the ‘nature’ of gender as a cultural text.”125 She presents the lines drawn between genders as

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James Rovira a differential across which both women and men face each other and continually negotiate, and across which occur more than a few strange shifts and transactions . . . On these medial lines, senses (and sensations) of gender shape and are shaped by sign systems that prove to be arbitrary, fuid, susceptible of transformation.126

Again, further reinforcement of non-binary gender formation for women. Devoney Looser’s introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in the Romantic Period (2015) explores some of the aftereffects of destabilizing the binary gender system. In terms of canon formation, she could say that the “longstanding neglect of the fascinating, pioneering group of women writers of the Romantic period is now a thing of the past.”127 But she registers that the conversation has begun to ask more fundamental questions: “In short, what makes Romantic women writers worthy of rereading and worthy of further study? . . . Some have questioned whether we ought to continue to study women’s writings separately from men’s,”128 a question that seems to follow from the eradication of the two-sex system. She answers these questions affrmatively, crediting Romantic-era authors with creating “the conditions for what we came to call male or female—or, more properly, masculine or feminine—in literary terms.”129 I suspect another answer is possible as well. Women still inhabit a social world, at least in the west, that views and treats them differently, so women’s experience of the world is different from men’s in many ways. For that reason, I limited myself to philosophy and intellectual history in this introduction: I feel I can write about those subjects, but while I may share the same space, I don’t live in the same world that women do. It’s not my place to try to speak for or on behalf of women. This collection provides plenty of space for women’s voices through the women scholars who have contributed to it and the women rock musicians they examine. Additionally, I think the fssures described above, as I attempt to apply Löwy and Sayre’s thought to the study of English language Romanticisms, also lead to an affrmative answer to this question in the ambivalence of women’s responses both to Romanticism and to the fuidity and instability of gender. I believe the chapters collected in this anthology, directly and indirectly, answer the questions posed in the Introduction. What is Romanticism? It’s an impulse to resist modernity, which is defned as the unity of capitalism and Enlightenment. As a result, Romanticism isn’t a period but an artistic, philosophical, musical, and literary response to the conditions created by modernity. Were women Romantics? Yes, but their relationship with Romanticism is simultaneously privileged and fraught with ambivalence, an ambivalence often refected in their creative product, and in the case of rock music, their rage, transgression, and the full range of their emotional experience represented through their music.

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Can German Romanticism help us understand British Romanticism and rock and roll as Romanticism? Absolutely, but with modifcations, understanding both women’s ambivalence about their relationship to Romanticism and at times their identity as “woman” in a binary gender system. Music, as prerational cognition, and as a potentially primary form of artistic expression, takes a place parallel to women’s place in western philosophy: suppressed in the previous regime but privileged in relationship to Romanticism. The emancipation of music in rock and roll is therefore a performance of the emancipation of woman that women musicians enact every time they compose music and take the stage to perform it in a musical genre defned by melody, ecstasy in performance, and rage against the dysfunctions of capitalism and Enlightenment in the modern state.

Notes 1 Sonia Hofkosh, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 5. 2 Susan Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006), 7. 3 Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity trans. Catherine Porter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 4 Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: U Minnesota Press, 1991), 83–84. 5 Ibid., 52. 6 Ibid., 15, 6. 7 Ibid., 37. 8 Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” PMLA 39.2 (June 1924): 232. 9 Löwy and Sayre, 17. 10 Ibid., 18–19. 11 Ibid., 20. 12 Ibid., 21. 13 Ibid. 14 86. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 24. 17 Ibid., 25. 18 Ibid. 19 I don’t mean to claim that Wollstonecraft was England’s frst feminist writer; some fgures could be identifed in the Early Modern period, and an argument could be made for some women mystical writers of the Medieval era. For a discussion of Wollstonecraft’s feminism in relationship to other women writers of her time and immediately before, see Andrew Winckles and Angela Rehbein, eds., Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism: “A Tribe of Authoresses” (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017). I emphasize Wollstonecraft here because she made a publicly political and actionable statement in direct response to the French Revolution. 20 Löwy and Sayre, 145, 254. Ruskin and William Morris, respectively.

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21 Ibid., 3. 22 See James Rovira, ed., Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 3–10. 23 Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1961), 64. 24 Ibid., 693. 25 Ibid., 43. 26 Ibid., 97. 27 Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine trans. Edward B. Pusey (Franklin Center, PA: The Franklin Library, 1982), 310–311. 28 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, eds., and Robert Hullot-Kentor, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xii. 29 The chapters collected here are a way forward. Another might be to bring Löwy and Sayre together with specifcally political approaches to music, especially music by Romantic fgures. See for example Stephen Rumph, Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 30 Rey M. Longyear, Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1973), 3. 31 Kenneth B. Klaus, The Romantic Period in Music (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1970), 7. 32 Longyear, 273. 33 Longyear, 8. 34 Rumph, 9. 35 David Charlton, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kriesleriana; The Poet and the Composer; Music Criticism trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 234. 36 E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” quoted in Charlton, 236. 37 Ibid., 236. 38 Ibid., 237. 39 Ibid., 238. 40 Ibid., 237–239. 41 Ibid., 236. 42 Abigail Chantler identifes J. A. P. Schulz (1771–1774) and C. F. Michaelis (1805) as important infuences on Hoffmann’s understanding of the sublime in music, both following Kant. See Abigail Chantler, “Revisiting E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Hermeneutics,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 33.1 (June 2002): 24–25. Chantler explains Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in terms of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics and its “employment of the principle of the hermeneutic circle” (10). 43 Steven Cassedy, “Beethoven the Romantic: How E. T. A. Hoffmann Got It Right,” Journal of the History of Ideas 71.1 (January 2010): 1. 44 Chantler, 10. 45 Charlton notes only one direct reference to Plato in his selections from Hoffmann’s writings: a reference to Alcibiades of the Symposium in Kriesleriana (125). 46 Michael Ferber is quoting from his own A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), the entry for “Purple.” This and the following two quotations from Messing and Clason are taken from a NASSR-L discussion in which I asked for thoughts about what Hoffmann

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48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

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may have meant by “purple shimmer” under the thread “Question about Hoffmann” posted 19 January 2022 16:38:03, https://listserv.wvu.edu/ cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind2201&L=NASSR-L&X=1B9C94522800362FBF&Y =jamesrovira%40gmail.com&P=3843. Charlton, 238. Messing provided his own loose translation of this passage, but requested that I not use it, while Clason pointed out that key terms in the German were somewhat ambiguous, so an alternate translation might be, “The night of the spirit world rises in a bright purple shimmering.” Ibid. Email to James Rovira 21 January 2022. NASSR-L discussion referenced above. Charlton, 103. Hoffmann, 237. Charlton, 10. Ibid., 8. Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983), 335. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation in Two Volumes, Vol. 1, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1969), 265. John E. Atwell, Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 13. Schopenhauer, 5–6. Atwell, 6–7. Schopenhauer, 6. Ibid., 238. Ibid., 244. Atwell, x. Schopenhauer, 211. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 252. Ibid., 244. Frederick Beiser, “The Enlightenment and Idealism,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 18. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 33. Ibid. Chantler, 11. Ibid., 12. Schopenhauer, 256. Ibid., 257. Ibid., 262. Ibid. Ibid., 250. R. Murray Schafer, ed., E.T.A Hoffmann and Music (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 159. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 160.

38 James Rovira 84 E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Refections on the High Value of Music,” in E.T.A Hoffmann and Music ed. R. Murray Schafer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 135. 85 Ibid., 137. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 139. 88 Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Women,” in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Schopenhauer,Artur/OnWomen. pdf. Accessed 5 January 2022. 89 Christopher Janaway, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 15. 90 Magee, 11. 91 Hofkosh, 10, drawing from Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider. 92 William Blake, “Introduction,” from The Songs of Innocence [Copy B, 1798], http://www.blakearchive.org/copy/s-inn.b?descId=s-inn.b.illbk.03. Accessed 16 January 2022. 93 Carol S. Wilson and Joel Haefner, eds., Re-Visioning British Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 2–3. 94 Anne. K. Mellor, “On Romanticism and Feminism,” in Romanticism and Feminism ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988), 3. 95 Elizabeth A. Fay, A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 3. 96 Mellor, 4. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid., 5. 100 Ibid., 5. 101 Ibid., 6. 102 Ibid., 8. 103 Anne. K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 88. 104 Ibid., 91. 105 Ibid., 95. 106 Fay, 23. 107 Ibid., 23–24. 108 Ibid., 29–30. 109 Ibid., 30. 110 Ibid., 32. 111 Ibid., 5. 112 Ibid., 6. 113 Ibid., 6. 114 Anne K. Mellor, “Were Women Writers ‘Romantics’?” Modern Language Quarterly 62.4 (December 2001): 393. (393–405). 115 Ibid., 399. 116 See Wolfson, Chapter 1. 117 Ibid., 402. 118 Ibid., 404–405. 119 Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 9. 120 Ibid., 2 121 Ibid., 2–3.

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122 Ibid., 14. See also the life of Mary Diana Dods, a friend of Mary Shelley’s, who wrote under the pseudonym David Lyndsay and used the name Walter Sholto Douglas in her private life. Michael Field is another interesting fgure (the pen name for both Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) from later in the nineteenth century. 123 Kari E. Lokke, Tracing Women’s Romanticism: Gender, History, and Transcendence (London: Routledge, 2004), 18. 124 Ibid., 2. 125 Wolfson, 2. 126 Ibid., xviii. 127 Devony Looser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), xvi. 128 Ibid., xvii. 129 Ibid.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Atwell, John E. Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Augustine. The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Translated by Edward B. Pusey. Franklin Center, PA: The Franklin Library, 1982. Beiser, Frederick. “The Enlightenment and Idealism.” In The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Edited by Karl Ameriks, 18–36. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Blake, William. “Introduction.” From The Songs of Innocence [Copy B, 1798]. The William Blake Archive. http://www.blakearchive.org/copy/s-inn.b?descId=s-inn.b.illbk.03. Accessed 16 January 2022. Cassedy, Steven. “Beethoven the Romantic: How E. T. A. Hoffmann Got It Right.” Journal of the History of Ideas 71, no. 1 (January 2010): 1–37. Chantler, Abigail. “Revisiting E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Hermeneutics.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 33, no. 1 (June 2002): 3–30. Charlton, David, ed. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kriesleriana; The Poet and the Composer; Music Criticism. Translated by Martyn Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Craciun, Adriana. Fatal Women of Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Fay, Elizabeth A. A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Ferber, Michael. A Dictionary of Literary Symbols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Goehr, Lydia. “Schopenhauer and the Musicians: An Inquiry into the Sounds of Silence and the Limits of Philosophizing about Music.” In Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts. Edited by Dale Jacquette, 200–228. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

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Hoffmann, Ernst Theoder Amadeus. “Refections on the High Value of Music.” In E.T.A Hoffmann and Music. Edited by R. Murray Schafer, 135–140. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975. ———. “Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.” In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kriesleriana; The Poet and the Composer; Music Criticism. Edited by David Charlton, 96–103. Translated by Martyn Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Hofkosh, Sonia. Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Janaway, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Klaus, Kenneth B. The Romantic Period in Music. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1970. Lokke, Kari E. Tracing Women’s Romanticism: Gender, History, and Transcendence. London: Routledge, 2004. Longyear, Rey M. Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music. 2nd edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1973. Looser, Devony, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. Lovejoy, Arthur O. “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.” PMLA 39, no. 2 (June 1924): 229–253. Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. Translated by Catherine Porter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Magee, Bryan. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983. Mellor, Anne. K. “On Romanticism and Feminism.” In Romanticism and Feminism. Edited by Anne K. Mellor, 3–12. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. ———. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. “Were Women Writers ‘Romantics’?” Modern Language Quarterly 62, no. 4 (December 2001): 393–405. Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1961. Rovira, James, ed. Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. ———. Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Rumph, Stephen. Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Schafer, R. Murray, ed. E.T.A Hoffmann and Music. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975. Schlegel, Friedrich. Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Schopenhauer, Arthur. “On Women.” In The Essential Schopenhauer: Key Selections from the World As Will and Representation and Other Works. Edited by Wolfgang Schirmacher. http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/ Schopenhauer,Artur/OnWomen.pdf. 2010. Accessed 5 January 2022. ———. The World as Will and Representation in Two Volumes. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. Volume 1. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1969.

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Wilson, Carol S. and Joel Haefner, eds. Re-Visioning British Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Winckles, Andrew, and Angela Rehbein, eds., Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism: “A Tribe of Authoresses.” Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. Wolfson, Susan. Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006.

2

Jane Williams, Rolling Stone Reconstructing British Romanticism’s Guitar God(dess)1 Rebecca Nesvet

Introduction Classic British rock and roll required three elements: a guitar, preferably electric; a player, typically a self-fashioned vagabond, outcast, or rebel; and at least a lingering lick of British Romanticism. Music critics call the electric guitar “the most privileged instrument in rock music” and “the primary symbol of rock culture” with a “rarefed place” in rock. 2 The term “guitar gods” testifes to rock’s enduring “cult of the guitarist.”3 In 1950, blues musician Muddy Waters (1913–1983) recorded the lyrics that would come to defne this cult’s hero: Well my mother told my father . . . Well, I got a boy child comin’ He’s gonna be a rollin’ stone.4 Waters depicts himself as a wanderer or itinerant musician, fatefully alienated from society. In homage to this archetype, the British band the Blues Boys renamed themselves The Rolling Stones in 1962. In a 1973 song, Donovan seems also to embody the character of the rolling stone. His version of the type is embellished with a Romantic quest for transcendence: Oh, God is playing marbles with his planets and his stars . . . And now I’m stumbling down the highway in my boots of steel. I could be rolling down the skyway on my cosmic wheels.5 By this point in time, British Romanticism was indelibly fused into British rock iconicity.6 In July 1969, the Rolling Stones’s sometime guitarist Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool. At a concert in Hyde Park, bandmate Mick Jagger eulogized Jones by reading from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais (1821). As Janneke van der Leest argues, Jagger chose this reading because “the entire rock and pop culture of the early 1960s” in Britain “clearly express[es] the legacy of the Romantic movement.”7

DOI: 10.4324/9781003204855-3

Reconstructing British Romanticism’s Guitar God(dess) 43 The two Rock and Romanticism collections preceding this one document the relationship between these two movements as does mass media rock criticism. Goals identical to those of major British Romantic poets inform the Rolling Stones’s “attempt to expand the boundaries of conventional subject matter portrayed in verse” and rock guitar’s striving for “mass resistance” and “authentic, artistic expression.”8 Where did this neo-Romantic peripatetic guitarist type, the rolling stone, originate? All the musicians I have just discussed are men. In traditional rock culture, sociologist Rosemary Lucy Hill points out that “masculinity is reifed,” with the “myth of the groupie” long implying that “the high-status role” of rock “musician is reserved for men.”9 According to rock historian David Pattie, “the received discourse in popular music” illustrates “a peculiarly male crisis” and rejects mainstream masculinity.10 However, as I will contend, a major prototype of the British rock icon or guitar god, I will contend, is British Romanticism’s most famous guitarist, Jane Williams (1798–1884). As James Rovira has observed of British Romanticism’s affnity with rock and roll, similar conditions create similar outcomes.11 Peter Otto observes that Rovira and colleagues argue that rock privileges “aspects of Romanticism that become visible only over time.”12 This claim is certainly true of rock’s relationship to Jane Williams. This article explores the development of her persona as musician and cultural icon via her iconoclastic life, the reputation of the acoustic guitar in Romantic-era England, and the design and fortunes of Jane Williams’s guitar, which Shelley famously gave to her. Reconstructing these contexts reveals how Jane Williams anticipates British rock’s iconic rolling stone complicating, I think, the customary gendering of that resonant archetype.

Jane Williams Jane Williams was born in 1798 as Jane Cleveland, daughter of John Cleveland, an East India Company employee who died when Jane was quite young. She spent part of her childhood in India under the guardianship of her brother John Wheeler Cleveland, who had followed his late father into the “Indian Army”; that is, the army of the British East India Company. In 1814, having returned to London, Jane married another East India Company offcer, Captain John Edward Johnson. When he proved an abusive husband, Jane fouted convention by leaving him. Initially, her brother and mother approved of her separation from Johnson, but she lost their favor by eloping to the Continent with Edward Ellerker Williams. Like Jane’s father, brother, and husband, Williams had served in India, but when he met Jane, he was fnished with that career, having been pensioned on half-pay after a period of illness. In Continental exile, Jane and Williams treated each other as spouses. Jane adopted Williams’s surname, posing as a conventional, law-abiding wife, but

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Williams defned them as refugees and rebels. “We seem to be fying from ourselves,” he wrote in his diary, “from a life which promised nothing in the perspective but misery, to one of peace.”13 According to John Cleveland Wheeler’s correspondence, it was Jane who proposed the elopement to Williams. In September 1818, Cleveland rebuked her by letter. Jane wrote back, “defend[ing] herself with great vigour.”14 In all these matters, from leaving Johnson to proposing to Williams to defending these choices to her birth family’s young patriarch, Jane Williams acted as a rebel. She was at least as transgressive in relation to her society as was Brian Jones or Mick Jagger in relation to theirs. She was also a musician. Many nineteenth-century women learned a smattering of instrumental music with which to entertain at home. Like them, Jane Williams never performed publicly, nor for pay. For an amateur, though, she was impressively informed. Her biographer Joan Rees (1984), drawing upon numerous recollections, claims Jane “had a considerable talent for music, and played the piano, the harp, and the guitar . . . singing in French and Italian as well as English.”15 She admired Mozart’s most provocative opera Don Giovanni and discussed music with one of the most prominent musical families in Regency London, the Novellos, who praised her taste; and with their associate Edward Holmes, biographer of Mozart.16 Her identifcation as a musician deepened with her introduction to Percy Bysshe Shelley. In Italy in 1821, the Williamses met the twenty-eight-year-old poet, cousin of their friend Thomas Medwin. Edward Williams was already familiar with one of Shelley’s most politically and socially controversial poetic productions, the utopian epic poem The Revolt of Islam (1816), which he had found years earlier at a bookshop in Bombay. The Williams’s interest in meeting Shelley cements their opposition to mainstream values. In turn, Shelley found Jane exotic, associating her problematically with India, which she encouraged by speaking “Hindustani” and attending the Carnival in Indian dress.17 In an unfnished play, Shelley depicted her as an Indian princess, and elsewhere represents the Williamses as persecuted exiles. His poem “To ________” (Jane, or perhaps the Williamses both) narrates a dramatic transoceanic elopement suggestive of theirs. “Drive we not free/O’er the terrible Sea,/I and thou?” one member of a fugitive couple asks the other.18 This poem employs an adrenaline-fueled, sexualized meter: One boat-cloak doth cover The loved and the lover– Their blood beats one measure, They murmur proud pleasure Soft and low.19 While both Jane and Edward’s “blood beats” this way, Jane is the more transgressive of the poem’s couple. “Curs[ing]” his “child,” the heroine’s

Reconstructing British Romanticism’s Guitar God(dess) 45 father “devotes to the blast/The best, loveliest, and last/Of his name” (56–60). This detail is fctitious, as Jane’s father had been long dead, but it pits her against patriarchy defned in the most obvious manner. As unconventional and dramatic as Jane Williams’s young adulthood was, it might have vanished from history was it not for Shelley’s impression of her as not only an adventuress and muse but a musician. He gave her some of the lyrics he had written. As his biographer Richard Holmes explains, “a characteristic covering letter with one read: ‘Dear Jane, if this melancholy old song suits any of your tunes, or any that humour of the moment may dictate, you are welcome to it.’”20 For instrumental accompaniment, Shelley wanted to give Jane a harp, a sumptuous instrument associated with inspiration and poetry, as in the Romantic metaphor of the “Aeolian harp.” Shelley wrote to his fellow poet Horace Smith in England, asking him to buy a harp for Jane, but Smith, knowing Shelley’s fnancial history, refused. Instead, in 1822, Shelley bought her a guitar and presented it with a poem, “With a Guitar, to Jane.”

The “Wild Guitar” Before we turn to Jane Williams’s guitar and Shelley’s accompanying poem, I must clarify what the gift of a guitar would have meant to British people in 1822. In short, that instrument’s connotations in early modern and Romantic-era Britain, now largely forgotten, eerily anticipate the early reception of rock. Since the seventeenth century, English commentators saw the guitar as the rebel’s instrument. In Ben Jonson’s unperformed Jacobean court masque Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion (1624), Proteus, disruptive god of change, plays guitar. As Christopher Page’s research has established, in early modern England, the lute-like four-course (eight-string) “gittern” or “English guitar” appears in English paintings, correspondence, lists of assets, and theatrical scripts and scenarios, often associated with wanderers, vagabonds, and musicians who challenge or transcend not only physical boundaries but social ones. 21 Peter d’Urfey (1623–1673) complains in his play The Intrigues at Versailles, or, a Jilt in all humours about a noxious, noisy “guitar-thrasher”; evidently, this shady character is an aesthetic ancestor of Robert Plant and Pete Townshend. 22 In the 1660s, the Restoration brought many continental European cultural products and innovations to England. Among them, in notable numbers, was a type of guitar that differed substantially from the baroque guitar: the “Spanish” classical guitar. So scandalous was the Spanish guitar, English critics deemed it “a seductive accomplishment for a woman, and a cavalier or degage accoutrement for a man,” and so “deprived of a place in professional consort music.”23 One of the best-known early modern paintings of a woman with this type of guitar, by Sir Peter Lely, depicts Restoration actress Mary “Molly” Davis playing her guitar. One of Davis’s signature

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theatrical characters is a guitarist and a rebel. As Page points out, in George Etherege’s comedy She wou’d if she cou’d (1668), Gatty, originally played by Davis, condemns “the common insistence that women should rarely venture forth from home; she will not be mewed like a hawk fastened to its perch.”24 No wonder she plays guitar: very few other instruments are as portable, and a woman who will not be tied to her home is unlikely to accept the constraints on mobility offered by a standing harp or a harpsichord. Gatty’s refusal to be pent up is speakable onstage only on account of Davis’s identity as a mistress of the libertine king, who had been brought back from continental exile in 1660. This detail tightens the guitar’s links with sex, scandal, and rootlessness. During the eighteenth century, the English guitar’s popularity dwindled. By the 1810s, the Spanish guitar had become comparatively more visible. This change is due to a great extent to the chaos of the Peninsular War (1808–1814) sending a critical mass of Spanish refugees into exile in London.25 Just like the English guitar, the Spanish model connoted romance, risk, and rebellion and was strongly associated with the woman player. An article in The Satirist (1813) claims that “harps for the sentimental, pianos for the gay, guitars for the romantic, crowd upon the roads, or echo from the cottages” outside Gloucestershire’s fashionable Cheltenham Spa.26 In the article, guitarists undertake “intense migration . . . like that of the herrings from the Pole.”27 Female guitarists are even more migratory, thought especially susceptible to the temptations of physical and moral vagabondage. Elizabeth Isabella Spence’s conduct novella The Spanish Guitar, a Tale (1814) accuses the Spanish guitar of enticing young women to abandon their families, homes, and good conduct. Protagonist Miss Emily Maynard is the eldest of three daughters of a late East India Company army offcer. After his death, the family live in genteel poverty with Emily in charge of her sisters and much of the household. Alas, she “had a natural taste for music.”28 A neighbor, retired guitarist Mrs. Fenton, gives Emily her Spanish guitar and lessons. Emily is soon seduced: “Enchanted fnd she could play a tune, she relaxed in her duties, and became to devoted to the guitar” (43). She abandons her chores: “instead of working for the poor, all the time she could steal was spent at the guitar” (43). She does become good at it, but “colour[s] violently” when accused of neglecting the household (45). Clearly, all this is the guitar’s dark magic. It demonically possesses the innocent girl, turning her into a narcissistic monster. It also destroys the Maynards’ domestic paradise by inspiring female autonomy and sexual license: “What was all the pleasure she had derived from her Spanish guitar, compared to fulflling those duties she had neglected?” (49), Spence rhetorically asks. Emily’s music is “one selfsh solitary enjoyment, from which no one could experience beneft or advantage” (ibid). The language of anti-domestic “pleasure” repeats in “the short-lived joy her guitar had yielded,” as if it is a fallen woman (50). Emily recognizes

Reconstructing British Romanticism’s Guitar God(dess) 47 herself as its double, “covered with shame and sorrow,” she confesses to her mother, “and would not keep the guitar for any consideration” (51). Via Mrs. Maynard, Spence delivers the moral of the story: You have proved, Emily, to a refecting and amiable mind, how little contributory to happiness, is the indulgence of any selfsh gratifcation . . . Music is a . . .too fashionable . . . science . . . often perverted: for young ladies, who used to amuse their friends by a few simple songs, now perform like [music] professors. (53) The lesson is clear: guitars corrupt women and musical professionalism is a form of gender rebellion. Having learned these lessons, Emily Maynard neutralizes the countercultural power of the guitar by giving it to Portuguese musician Fernando, who uses it to support his non-guitarplaying unmarried daughter (58). Fernando agrees that guitar-playing for proft or exposure is not for good girls. This view of the guitar was complicated by the London career of the Catalán musician and composer Fernando Sor (1778–1839). Arriving the year after the publication of Spence’s The Spanish Guitar, Sor popularized that instrument among the London court elite and the professional music community. Contra Spence, Sor also made the guitar a respectable instrument for London’s female amateur musicians. Originally from Barcelona, Sor held a variety of positions and patronages in both Habsburg and Napoleonic administrations. He pursued French Enlightenment ideas, contributing an opera to the tradition of adaptations of Fénelon’s “mirror of princes” Télémaque, but also sang Spanish “patriotic songs” and protested Napoleonic rule by singing and playing in patriotic protest bands. 29 Then in 1813, when the Spanish War of Independence drove the Napoleonic regime out of Spain, Sor was labeled an afrancescado, or French-aligned supposed traitor to Spain. “In 1974, more than a century and a half” after the War of Independence, recalls Sor’s Anglophone biographer Brian Jeffery, “an archivist in Spain even put obstacles in my way because Sor had been an afrancescado.”30 He traveled to Paris, then, by mid-1815, to London, where he composed successful ballets, but was known primarily as a guitarist. On 5 May 1815, Sor gave a private concert to the Prince Regent, his mother the Queen, and some of his sisters at Carlton House.31 In 1817, Sor played guitar in the prestigious Philharmonic Season at the Argyll Rooms, Regent Street. He became a celebrity and, as Page argues, “exploited the romance of the guitar to create a more deeply considered music for that instrument than anyone in his London audiences had ever known.”32 In this endeavor, it helped that Sor consistently cultivated a rebellious pose. He arranged for guitar several arias from Don Giovanni and befriended a South American rebel, Palacio Faxardo of Venezuela,

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a companion of el Libertádor Símon Bolívar. In 1816, Sor dedicated his Six Divertissements for Guitar (op. 2) to Faxardo.33 As an afrancescado and Faxardo fan, Sor anticipates Waters, Jagger, and other proto-rock or rock musicians whose melancholy migrations and outsider identities are key to their artistry. The Spaniard’s exile-wanderer persona may have intrigued Regency audiences in part because it is essentially Romantic. According to Helen Boyles, William Wordsworth struggled with the evangelical connotations of the idea of the “wanderer,” fnding that “the homeless wandering of the erring soul,” skeptical of the Christian promise of heaven as the terminus, “constitutes the inner journey of Romanticism’s visionary aspiration.”34 Robin Jarvis argues that Wordsworth engages in and writes himself engaging in “picturesque travel,” to be distinguished from the heroic variety. The more Romantic picturesque travel “is a form of travel that threatens to disorient the personality of the traveler,” in part because it is “erotic adventure” of the “wandering lover of picturesque beauty.”35 Byron popularized the “Byronic hero,” or peripatetic, rootless, outcast creative individual with moral complexity. Sor embodied all aspects of this role at just the right time and passed them on to his instrument, permanently. Sor’s history shows that by the time of Shelley’s frst meeting with Jane Williams, in Pisa in January 1821, the guitar was well established in London. In fact, Shelley probably knew of Sor, as the poet lived in and near London during 1814–1816 and 1817–1818, prior to his selfexile to Italy with his wife Mary Shelley and sister-in-law Jane “Claire” Clairmont. One of Shelley’s London addresses, in Bloomsbury in 1817, was a seven-mile walk from the home, studio, and shop of the Panormo family, Sicilian luthiers who began making guitars during Sor’s London residency and whose guitars Sor endorsed.36 In 1815–1816, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) lived in Marchmont Street, Somers Town, on the site of the current no. 86 Marchmont Street, which is marked with a blue plaque. The Panormos kept several workshops at different times, all in the Bloomsbury High Street (St. Giles), beginning in 1816.37 This street is less than a mile’s walk from Marchmont Street, an easy stroll for Shelley, who by 1816 was accustomed to trekking across Devon farmlands and up Swiss glaciers. He, therefore, likely knew of the Spanish guitar as Sor promoted it: as a professional concert instrument capable of supporting musical artistry and a wild instrument for the wild woman player. One example of the guitar’s depiction in that fashion postdating Sor’s arrival in London is the anonymous poem “The Guitar,” printed in the London Magazine in May 1821. “When Laelia waked that wild guitar,” it begins, Each string that own’d her raptured touch Gave music to the listening air, And taught the melting heart too much.38

Reconstructing British Romanticism’s Guitar God(dess) 49 There is no evidence that Shelley read “The Guitar,” although he may have, as his close friend and editor Leigh Hunt was published in the London Magazine and, in 1820–1821, that periodical reviewed his own epic poem Prometheus Unbound and tragedy The Cenci. Shelley’s circle certainly associated guitars with female wanderlust and agency. In the short story “The Pole” (1832), written a decade after Shelley’s death by his sister-in-law Claire Clairmont, the guitarist heroine refuses to pursue a purely domestic life. Instead, she insists on following her dream of a career as an opera singer. Holding her guitar, she declares “I choose to have my liberty.”39 Whether or not Clairmont shared this view of the female guitarist with Shelley, if he knew anything of the Spanish guitar’s English reputation, he would have found it perfect for Jane Williams. He had only to procure for her a guitar that would draw out this aspect of her persona. In that endeavor, Shelley succeeded, obtaining a guitar (Figure 2.1) from Pisan luthier Ferdinando Bottari. This instrument is now preserved in the collection of the Bodleian Library.40 About the artist, however, the historical record has nearly nothing to say. No Bottari instrument other than the guitar that Shelley purchased is known to survive, but Shelley seems to have thought highly of him. “I have contrived to get my musical coals from Newcastle itself,” Shelley bragged to Smith.41 This convoluted variation on the cliché “carry coals to Newcastle” suggests he meant its opposite: not that getting a guitar from Bottari is as pointless as carrying coals to the coaling center of Newcastle, but that Shelley got his guitar from a source known for guitars. Pisa does not seem to have been broadly understood as the Cremona of guitar-making, but when Shelley wrote to Smith, guitar virtuoso Marco Aurelio Zani de Ferranti (1800–1878) lived and performed there.42 The forgotten Bottari, however, was clearly no Stradivari, nor even Panormo. Even so, his guitar boasts distinctive stylistic choices that may contextualize the story of Shelley and Jane Williams. Today, luthier and engineer Wes R. Schroeder is constructing a replica of the Bottari guitar carefully modeled on the original (Figure 2.2). As Schroeder deduces, the original instrument’s eclectic rounded back implies Bottari was better used to making violins with their similarly rounded faces. This is not an unusual vocational shift: in the eighteenth century on the Continent, guitar-making was co-opted to a great extent by luthiers of violins.43 Evidently, Bottari put a great deal of thought and skill into the construction of the guitar that he later sold to Shelley. This instrument is distinguished by a number of ornamental features. One is the rare leaf veneer (Figure 2.3), which differs substantially from the “mustachios” and subtler veneers of many other surviving eighteenth-century guitars, though a similar leaf veneer, carved from ebony, decorates a Neapolitan guitar made in about 1830.44 Another notable feature of Bottari’s guitar is its purfing, or variegated borders made of thin ribbons of wood. Bottari’s

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Figure 2.1 “Shelley’s Guitar,” by Ferdinando Bottari. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Shelley relics 1. Ferdinando Bottari, c. 1815– 1816. Photograph by Rebecca Nesvet. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries.

Figure 2.2 Replica of Bottari’s guitar by Wes R. Schroeder, work in progress. Photograph by Rebecca Nesvet.45

purfing consists of eleven ribbons in alternating light and dark wood, encircling the instrument’s body concentrically (Figure 2.3, lower right). Making guitar purfing involves carefully cutting and shaping the strips one layer at a time via a patient ritual of pressure, glue, and clamping (Schroeder replica, Figure 2.4). In Schroeder’s deduction, the ornateness and eccentricity of Bottari’s guitar combined with its violin-like shape may indicate that it was an experiment, rarely if ever to be repeated

Reconstructing British Romanticism’s Guitar God(dess) 51

Figure 2.3 Detail: “Shelley’s Guitar,” by Ferdinando Bottari. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Shelley relics 1. Ferdinando Bottari, c. 1815–1816. Photograph by Rebecca Nesvet. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries.

or developed further. Without access to other Bottari instruments, it is hard to tell. Did the material features of Bottari’s guitar inform Shelley’s depiction of it, and Jane? In “With a Guitar—To Jane,” the pine-born sprite Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest gives the guitar to Miranda, representing Jane. Ariel claims that “the artist” who made the guitar strove To echo all harmonious thought Felled a tree, while on the steep The woods were in their winter sleep.46 This artist “taught” the guitar to articulate “[s]weet oracles of woods and dells,/And summer winds in sylvan cells” (64–65): the forest imagery perhaps echoes the guitar’s leaf-patterned veneer. Bottari’s purfing,

52 Rebecca Nesvet

Figure 2.4 Wes R. Schroeder, purfing method test, 2020. Photograph by Rebecca Nesvet.

too, perhaps anticipates Shelley’s poem’s imagery. Its alternating pattern constitutes rings of wood just like those that mark the age of the pine tree from which both Shakespeare’s sprite Ariel and the wooden guitar are born. Whether “With a Guitar, to Jane” comments on Bottari’s artistic choices or not, it certainly represents Jane as a rebel exile guitarist. In the poem, Shelley addresses her as the Shakespearean character, Italian-born island-exile Miranda. At the play’s end, Miranda is repatriated to Italy, a place of which she has no memory. Miranda’s travels suggest Jane Williams; both experience the perpetual geographic alienation of the settler colonist, especially the repatriated settler colonist. Shelley picks up on her constant refugeeism, claiming that the spirit Ariel, “by permission” of Ferdinand/Edward Williams, follows and protects her throughout her lifetime of travel: From Prospero’s enchanted cell As the mighty verses tell, To the throne of Naples he Lit you o’er the trackless sea.47

Reconstructing British Romanticism’s Guitar God(dess) 53 The echoes of Shelley’s untitled poem about the Williams’s elopement, with its enraged father-fgure, highlight Shakespeare’s Miranda’s rebellion against her own father, Miranda, in pursuing both the castaway Ferdinand and knowledge of the “brave new world/that hath such people in it.”48 Shelley’s Miranda is also a gifted player with almost godlike skill. Her guitar is a kind of Delphic oracle, receptive only to its prophetess. Arcane knowledge “it knows, but will not tell/To those who cannot question well/The spirit that inhabits it” (79–81). Miranda/Jane can transgressively “tempt it to betray/the secrets of an elder day” with “hands of perfect skill” (85–87). Restless keeper of her vine-wreathed instrument’s pagan cult, Jane is a guitar god(dess). Jane Williams is also a decisive fashioner of her own legend. Shelley wrote “With a Guitar—to Jane” and gave it to her with the Bottari guitar, but in the brief span of life remaining to him, he did nothing to publish that lyric. Maybe, like the fragments of other verses he gave her, he envisioned it as a song, not intended for publication but private domestic performance. After he and Edward Williams died in the wreck of their boat in July 1822, Jane Williams returned to England, where she lived near Mary Shelley, who became deeply enamored of her. In 1827, Jane “married” (as with Williams, in parlance, not law) Shelley’s college friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. In 1832, she shared “With a Guitar—To Jane” with the world via the Athenaeum magazine. It is to her that we owe its survival, and it defned her, for the rest of her life, as one of Shelley’s “muses.” She also helped to ensure the popularization and endurance of this poem and Shelley’s work as a whole by commissioning a controversial posthumous portrait of him, the one by the workshop of George Clint that, to the horror of generations of Romanticists, feminizes and infantilizes him, effectively defanging the author of provocative, confrontational works such as the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism (co-authored at college in Oxford with Jane’s second “husband” Hogg, and the impetus of their expulsion therefrom), The Revolt of Islam, Queen Mab, and Prometheus Unbound. This bowdlerization of Shelley’s image helped the Victorian public to believe in a sentimental, harmless Shelley, a revisionism that proved essential to Shelley’s slow posthumous release from the purgatory of moral opprobrium and censorship. She may have kept playing the gifted guitar through those years. Schroeder observes that an eyelet added to the instrument to secure a strap is thoroughly worn. This suggests that Jane, or someone, played the guitar for more than the few months that remained to Shelley after he gave it to her. In 1898, twelve years after Jane’s death, the Shelley-obsessive Captain Henry S. Silsbee, of Salem, Massachusetts purchased the guitar from her grandson John Wheeler Williams and, as Williams required, donated it to the Bodleian, where it was cataloged as “Shelley Relics no. 1.” This

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cataloging suggests that the gift of the guitar brought Shelley into being as a secular saint worthy of a reliquary and also renders the guitar more a relic of Shelley than of Bottari or Jane. The image was reinforced in 1992 by the Bodleian Library exhibit “Shelley’s Guitar: A Bicentenary Exhibition of Manuscripts, First Editions, and Relics of Percy Bysshe Shelley.” In this exhibit, the guitar played a major role as a touchstone, suggesting it is the conduit via which visitors could mystically channel a poet who, like it, had once sung but was now silent. Photographed for the exhibit catalog’s front cover inside its notoriously coffn-shaped apparently original wooden case, the guitar seems a doppelganger for the poet’s body. The manuscript of the poem appears to lie on top of the guitar, inside the case, as if the poet offers the late-twentieth-century public the gift he had once given to Jane, and the fnal portrait in the exhibit and catalog is of Silsbee, commissioned by the Bodleian Library on the occasion of his donation of the guitar. “Shelley’s Guitar” reinforced the Bodleian Library’s position that the guitar was Shelley’s relic. In the end, Jane Williams enlisted her guitar to shape Shelley’s posthumous image and in so doing guaranteed her own immortality as the sibyl of “With a Guitar—To Jane.” The critical tradition tends to reduce Jane Williams to a Shelley relic, but her biography, the history of the guitar in England, and the peculiar engineering of the Bottari guitar combine to suggest that we should recognize her as a very typical rolling stone; ergo, a Romantic cognate of British rock’s guitar gods.

Notes 1 For the opportunity to examine “Shelley’s guitar” (Bodleian Shelley Relics no. 1) that facilitated my research for this chapter, I thank Dr. Stephen Hebron, Curator of Special Projects, Special Collections, The Bodleian Library, Oxford University. For tutelage in guitar anatomy relevant to Shelley’s guitar, I thank Wes R. Schroeder. 2 Mary C. Kearney, Gender and Rock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 139–140. 3 Deena Weinstein, “Rock’s Guitar Gods—Avatars of the Sixties.” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 70, no. 2 (2013): 139–154, 139; Gavin Carfoot, “Electric and Virtual Noise: The Cultural Identity of the Guitar,” Leonardo Music Journal 16 (2006): 35–39, 36. 4 Muddy Waters. “Rollin’ Stone.” Rollin’ Stone. LP (Chicago, IL: Leonard Chess, 1950). 5 Donovan. “Cosmic Wheels.” Cosmic Wheels (New York: ABKCO Music, 1972). 6 Joe S. Harrington, Sonic Cool: The Life and Death of Rock’n’Roll (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2002), 125. 7 Janneke Van der Leest, “Romanticism in the Park: Mick Jagger Reading Shelley,” in Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, edited by James Rovira (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015), 19. 8 Frank Hoffman, The Literature of Rock, 1954–1978 (London: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 79, summarizes Richard Merton, “Comment on Chester’s ‘For

Reconstructing British Romanticism’s Guitar God(dess) 55

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

a Rock Aesthetic’,” in The Age of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, edited by Jonathan Eisen (New York: Vintage, 1969), 109–117; Carfoot, “Electric and Virtual Noise,” 36. Rosemary L. Hill. Gender, Metal, and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music (London: Palgrave, 2016), 67, 83. David Pattie, Rock Music in Performance (London: Palgrave, 2007), 133. James Rovira, “Introduction: Rock and Romanticism,” Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, ed. James Rovira (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) xv. Peter Otto, “Looking ‘thro . . . & not with’ with Eye: From Romanticism to the Counter Culture, Rock and Roll, and the Anthropocene.” European Romantic Review 31, no. 1 (2020): 67–74, 68. Edward Williams, quoted in Joan Rees, Shelley’s Jane Williams (London: William Kimber, 1985), 35. Rees, Shelley’s Jane Williams, 40. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 121. In the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s reading of Don Giovanni in Enten/Eller (‘Either-Or’, 1843, that opera exerts an emotional, erotic pull upon him, making him infatuated with Mozart. As read by Geoffrey Clive, Kierkegaard’s refection on Don Giovanni in this essay explores the contest between “freedom” and “dread.” See Geoffrey Clive, “The Demonic in Mozart.” Music and Letters 37, no. 1 (1956): 1–13. Clearly, that struggle was central to Jane William’s life choices. Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, 1974 (New York: Penguin, 1987), 697. Percy B. Shelley, “To Jane,” The Poems of Shelley: Volume Four: 1820– 1821, edited by Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan, and Kelvin Everest (London: Routledge, 2014), 29–31, lines 33–35. Percy B. Shelley, “To Jane,” The Poems of Shelley: Volume Four: 1820– 1821, lines 36–40. Ibid., 701. Christopher Page, The Guitar in Stuart England: A Social and Musical History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017), 10. For the baroque guitar, see James Westbrook, An Illustrated History and Directory of Acoustic Guitars (London: Anness Publishing, 2015), 44. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 10. For the classical guitar’s displacement of the baroque guitar, see Westbrook, An Illustrated History and Directory of Acoustic Guitars, 44. Ibid., 101. James Westbrook, “Louis Panormo: ‘The Only Maker of Guitars in the Spanish Style.’” Early Music 42, no. 4 (2013): 572–584, 571. “Cheltenham.” The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor 13 (December 1813): 483. Ibid. Elizabeth I. Spence, The Spanish Guitar: A Tale, for the Use of Young Persons (London: William McDowall, 1814), 42–43. Additional citations are inline in parentheses. Brian Jeffery, Fernando Sor, Composer and Guitarist (London: Tecla Editions, 1977), 21. Ibid., 21 Christopher Page, “New light on the London years of Fernando Sor, 1815– 1822.” Early Music 41, no. 4 (2013): 559. Ibid., 567. Jeffery, Fernando Sor, 45.

56 Rebecca Nesvet 34 Helen Boyles, Romanticism and Methodism: The Problem of Religious Enthusiasm (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 134. 35 Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Hounsmills: Palgrave, 1997), 61. 36 Westbrook, “Louis Panormo,” 574. 37 Ibid., 573-4. 38 “The Guitar.” The London Magazine 3, no. 17 (May 1821): 536. 39 Jane Clairmont, “The Pole,” in Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories with Original Engravings, edited by Charles E. Robinson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 355. 40 Shelley’s Guitar: An Exhibition of Manuscripts, First Editions, and Relics of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford: Bodleian Library), 1992, t.p. A different guitar, erroneously believed to have been Shelley’s, is in the New York Public Library’s Pforzheimer Collection. See Joshua Wilner, “Frankenstein: The Afterlife of Shelley’s Circle: Notes on a Guitar,” New York Public Library, 2007, www.exhibitions.nypl.org. Accessed 29 May 2020. 41 Percy Bysshe Shelley to Horace Smith, 11 April 1822, in The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F.L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), vol. 2, 412. 42 Phillip J. Bone, The Guitar and Mandolin: Biographies of Celebrated Players and Composers for These Instruments (London: Schott, 1914), 329–330. 43 James Westbrook, Guitars through the Ages: Craftsman to Performer (London: privately printed by Crisp Litho, 2002), 17. Further evidence of this phenomenon includes the Stradivari guitar in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the “early London-made guitar” pictured in Westbrook’s luthiering history, which has “painted purfings” (tessellated border ornaments) that are “found on some violins but” in Westbrook’s considerable experience, “no other guitars.” See Westbrook, An Illustrated History, 44. 44 A leaf veneer similar to that of the Bottari guitar survives in a guitar from the Neapolitan workshop of Gennaro Fabricatore I (c.1770–c.1840 and Gennaro Fabricatore II (1800–1853). This veneer depicts oak and laurel leaves and is made of ebony. The guitar, constructed circa 1830, postdates Bottari’s. See Westbrook, An Illustrated History, 42. 45 Percy B. Shelley, “To Jane,” The Poems of Shelley: Volume Four: 1820– 1821, lines 43–45. 46 Replica of Bottari’s guitar, Wes R. Schroeder, work in progress. Photograph by Rebecca Nesvet. As of July 2020, the ‘ladder bracing,’ common in Bottari’s era, is speculative. 47 Percy B. Shelley, “To Jane,” The Poems of Shelley: Volume Four: 1820– 1821, lines 17–20. 48 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1993, www.shakespeare.mit.edu [3 June 2020].

Bibliography Barker-Benfeld, B.C. Shelley’s Guitar: An Exhibition of Manuscripts, First Editions, and Relics of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1992. Bone, Phillip J. The Guitar and Mandolin: Biographies of Celebrated Players and Composers for These Instruments. London: Schott, 1914. Boyles, Helen. Romanticism and Methodism: The Problem of Religious Enthusiasm. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2016. Carfoot, Gavin. “Electric and Virtual Noise: The Cultural Identity of the Guitar.” Leonardo Music Journal 16 (2006): 35–39.

Reconstructing British Romanticism’s Guitar God(dess) 57 “Cheltenham.” The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor 13 (December 1813): 481–484. Clairmont, Jane. “The Pole,” in Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories with Original Engravings, edited by Charles E. Robinson, 347–373. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Clive, Geoffrey. “The Demonic in Mozart.” Music and Letters 37, no. 1 (1956): 1–13. “The Guitar.” The London Magazine 3, no. 17 (May 1821): 536. Harrington, Joe S. Sonic Cool: The Life and Death of Rock’n’Roll. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2002. Hoffman, Frank. The Literature of Rock, 1954–1978. London: Scarecrow Press, 1981. Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit, 1974. New York: Penguin, 1987. Jarvis, Robin. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. Houndmills: Palgrave, 1997. Jeffery, Brian. Fernando Sor, Composer and Guitarist. London: Tecla Editions, 1977. Kearney, Mary C. Gender and Rock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Merton, Richard. “Comment on Chester’s ‘For a Rock Aesthetic’,” in The Age of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, edited by Jonathan Eisen, 109–117. New York: Vintage, 1969. Otto, Peter. “Looking ‘thro . . . & not with’ with Eye: From Romanticism to the Counter Culture, Rock and Roll, and the Anthropocene.” European Romantic Review 31, no. 1 (2020): 67–74. Page, Christopher. The Guitar in Stuart England: A Social and Musical History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017. Page, Christopher. “New light on the London years of Fernando Sor, 1815– 1822.” Early Music 41, no. 4 (2013): 557–569. Rossington, Michael, Jack Donovan, and Kelvin Everest, eds. The Poems of Shelley: Volume Four: 1820–1821. London: Routledge, 2014. Rees, Joan. Shelley’s Jane Williams. London: William Kimber, 1985. Rovira, James, ed. Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 1993. https://www.shakespeare.mit.edu [3 June 2020]. Spence, Elizabeth I. The Spanish Guitar: A Tale, for the Use of Young Persons. London: William McDowall, 1814. Van der Leest, Janneke. “Romanticism in the Park: Mick Jagger Reading Shelley,” in Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, edited by James Rovira, 19–34. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Weinstein, Deena. “Rock’s Guitar Gods—Avatars of the Sixties.” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 70, no. 2 (2013): 139–154. Westbrook, James. Guitars through the Ages: Craftsman to Performer. London: privately printed by Crisp Litho, 2002. ———. “Louis Panormo: ‘The Only Maker of Guitars in the Spanish Style.’” Early Music 42, no. 4 (2013): 572–584. Wilner, Joshua. “Frankenstein: The Afterlife of Shelley’s Circle: Notes on a Guitar.” New York Public Library, 2007, https://www.exhibitions.nypl.org [3 June 2020].

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Discography Donovan. “Cosmic Wheels.” Cosmic Wheels. New York: ABKCO Music, 1972. Waters, Muddy. “Rollin’ Stone.” Rollin’ Stone. LP. Chicago, IL: Leonard Chess, 1950.

3

“Work Me, Lord” Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues Sasha Tamar Strelitz

If I say “Janis Joplin” to you, I anticipate that you would either instinctively hear her intoxicating, raspy cackle or one of her striking, soulful screeches like that in “Cry Baby.” Or, perhaps, you would envision her wailing into the microphone in one of her iconic outfts. Maybe your mind connects the “Janis Joplin” to her FM radio hits—“Piece Of My Heart,” “Summertime”—or, more vaguely still, perhaps Joplin signifes the “twenty-seven club,” heroin, or the hippies’ social revolution. In her biography of the eccentric Texan rock star, Myra Friedman (Joplin’s publicist) explains that the 1960s was a formative decade for this country’s creative identity, calling it a “glorious time” for popular music and saying it “brought to fower a prideful, inspired, authentic American art form.”1 She further asserts that while “Jimi Hendrix was its most brilliant musician, the talent of Janis Joplin was its gorgeous light.”2 Even before Joplin took the San Francisco scene by storm, people began speaking about her in terms of her energy, which they often described as electric. Her friend Jim Langdon said of her performances in Austin that she “literally electrifed her audience with her powerful, soul-searching blues presentation.”3 Once Joplin had spread her energy outside of the Lone Star State to Haight-Ashbury, where she helped inaugurate the hippie’s social revolution—their “conspiracy of reality”—she electrifed her bandmates and their audiences.4 James Gurley, guitarist for her frst band Big Brother and the Holding Company, said, “Performing with Janis was an adrenaline-raising thing. I would never be able to go to sleep till past the dawn.”5 Singer Diane Lotny described her as a “snapped cable in an electric storm that does the snake, whipping around unleashed. She could get you to move.”6 Similarly, the title of a 1969 The New Yorker article reads, “Janis Joplin’s Electric Energy,”7 and David Dalton’s Janis pinpoints Joplin’s electricity to her voice, dubbing her the frst “cordless woman” with an “electric larynx.”8 I am intrigued not only by the weight of Joplin’s presence in our cultural imagination but also by these descriptors of Joplin in terms of electricity: “gorgeous light,” and by Friedman’s frsthand assertion that “Janis seemed to channel emotions for other people.”9

DOI: 10.4324/9781003204855-4

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Ultimately, what piques my interest is that decades after her untimely death, Joplin’s electricity extends beyond the deep cuts of wax on albums such as Big Brother and the Holding Company and Pearl, beyond recorded renderings of her concert performances on special concert albums and DVDs and in documentaries like Janis: Little Girl Blue, and beyond YouTube videos of her charming Dick Cavett on his talk show. Joplin, still, is a live wire in our cultural imagination. She was conscious of this electricity, as she once explained, I do believe in some very amorphous things that happen when you’re onstage . . . like something moves in the air. It seems like a real thing that moves around in the air. It’s nonexistent but it’s so real like love or desire. You know damn well it’s there, you know it’s RIGHT THERE, man—something’s going on.10 Joplin herself was electrifed by her own raw emotionalism, which often resulted in her state of ecstasy onstage that was “multiplied by the whole audience.”11 From the beginning of the revolutionary movement, she was simultaneously a source and a conductor of the fower children’s electric energy. As an anonymous fan expressed, “She’s not a star, she’s us. I’ve never met her but I know her. It’s like, hearing her, you leave your body and you just move, man. She’s just all energy.”12 With all this talk about Joplin harnessing the hippies’ electricity by channeling the emotions of her audience, I cannot help but think of her in terms of electric Romanticism. This essay demonstrates that like the more traditional blues before her, Joplin’s soulful white blues, her “kozmic blues,” is similar to Romantic poetry, as it is charged with radical praxis; it is an unwaveringly personal music that conveys much about Joplin emotionally, and in turn, the sociocultural climate of the fower children in the mid- to late-1960s.13 The radical aspect here lies in her performances, because instead of merely using the language of electricity or utilizing technological tools to more synchronously capture immediacy, Joplin embodies electric Romanticism, such that her spontaneous reaction to her audience is an essential aspect of her performances. Hélène Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” urges women to write, to invent a “new insurgent writing” that returns to the body in a radical effort to normalize female bodies, to de-censor women’s sexual nature so that they are no longer “the uncanny stranger on display.”14 By writing her self, by making her body heard, Cixous avows that “our naphtha will spread,” “immense resources of the unconscious [will] spring forth,” and women could then co-opt the relationship between their bodies and sexuality; “hence her shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression.”15 She later discusses the importance of public speaking and song as she highlights the “privileged relationship with the voice,” the power that voice and song have of moving

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us. She explains that because of our shared patriarchal history, for men, there is no division between the logic of oral speech and the logic of the text; conversely, there is scission when women assert their voices publicly, such that women must “inscrib[e]” their bodies into their oral performances, as speech is “governed by the phallus.”16 This is precisely what Joplin does. By inscribing her body into her oral performances, she shatters her entry into history and thereby spreads the hippie naphtha. Joplin’s performances—recorded but particularly those live on stage— are representative of that insurgence not only historically but in the lineage of artists who fall under the category of electric Romanticism (such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan). Her electric energy persists in soundwaves and in our collective memory because she fused feminism with electric Romanticism. She unapologetically bridged the gap between body and sexuality while channeling her audience’s emotions which then informed her performance in real-time, and this loop is contingent upon synchronous spontaneity. ~~~ Friedman’s remarks that Joplin was the 1960s social revolution’s “gorgeous light” and that “Janis seemed to channel emotions for other people” prompt me to consider Joplin and her electric energy in terms of her position as a Romantic hero.17 Like Thomas Chatterton who is arguably the frst in a long lineage, Romantic heroes are secularized Christ fgures. They are unconventional outcasts who reject societal norms, and in turn, are somehow rejected by society. They are sensitive artists whose noble art is only understood in the eyes of a select few. While her sister Laura Joplin never uses the term “Romantic hero” in her part-epistolary biography, Love, Janis, she circles around the concept: “To be an artist was to interpret experiences for others. The more a person tuned in to the charismatic forces in life or in a piece of art, the more that person lived the ecstasy of energy we call life.”18 A central aspect of Joplin’s ability to “interpret experiences for others” is that her art and her life were one and the same, and her experience as a social rebel inspired other nonconformists, those who focked to Haight-Ashbury in the early days of the movement and those who dotted the nation. In fact, not until shortly before her tragic overdose did she begin to separate her onstage persona, the caricature Janis Joplin, with her offstage identity she nicknamed Pearl. The outcast characteristic of the Romantic hero is what enables them to be, as Ezra Pound says, “the antennae of the race,” or more colloquially, the canary in the coal mine. Their separation from the mainstream helps the artist comment upon society clearly and without as much bias as someone situated within it.19 Joplin co-opted her position as social outcast by shifting her status to social rebel. She was emboldened by her

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loyal adherence to Jack Kerouac’s own snubbing of mainstream society as featured in Beat novels such as On the Road, which she considered her “map for fnding life.”20 Her self-imposed status as social rebel, in addition to the tragedy of her dying so young, fgure powerfully into Joplin’s status as Romantic hero. Her life reads like a myth, which she added to liberally, particularly in 1968 and 1969 when she was just as liberal with her alcohol and heroin intake. And her untimely death at the unripe age of twenty-seven adds to the myth and preserves her as an archetypal fower child and Romantic hero of the 1960s. Joplin remains the smiling, laughing, crowd-seducing, long-haired young lady singing from the depths of her soul, forever draped in hippie rags, ceremonial beads and feathers, and big ole sunglasses. Nonetheless, “Romantic hero” does not entirely represent the force of Joplin’s energy, so I extend the Romantic connection by positing that rather than merely perform electric Romanticism, she embodies it. She functions fguratively as the 1960s Aeolian harp as the way she performed is inherently a hippie expression. Recall that in traditional Romanticism, the Aeolian harp is an image conjured by Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley to denote an intellectual, inspiring breeze that fows through poets when they write. An Aeolian harp is a stringed instrument whose sounding board is played by gusts of wind that elicit harmonic frequencies. Etymologically, “Aeolian” originates with Aeolus, the Greek wind god, and in 1650, German scholar Athanasius Kircher resuscitated the instrument from Classical antiquity in his book Musurgia Universalis. 21 Henceforth, it became a popular household instrument from 1750 to 1860, a time frame that corresponds to the Romantic era, during which people were infatuated by Classical ruins and artifacts. 22 In terms of the Aeolian harp as a Romantic trip, Coleridge frst used it in his 1795 poem “The Eolian Harp,” one of his conversation poems that explores his concept of One Life, or the interconnectedness between humans and nature. The speaker wonders whether “all of animated nature” Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of All?23 If we are all “diversely framed” iterations of One Life, then we are all connected by “one intellectual breeze” that fows “At once [through] the Soul of each.” One Life is akin to the concept of universal consciousness, but it is poets who, like Aeolian harps, are inspired by and channel the “intellectual breeze.” Elsewhere in the poem, Coleridge explains that an Aeolian harp is placed in a window so that the “desultory breeze

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caresse[s]” it to create “long sequacious notes” that together generate “Such a soft foating witchery of sound.”24 His application of the trope encapsulates an essential Romantic metaphorical image of the poet creating her poetry. It is signifcant to note that Coleridge’s poem emerges from an original he simply titled “Effusion xxxv.”25 The fact that the original version of the poem is one of Coleridge’s effusions highlights the fact that, like the music played on the Aeolian harp, he associates poetry with the outfow of the poet’s inherent spontaneous thoughts, which are as spontaneous as wind currents; or, as his friend and co-author of Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth famously writes in its Preface, “a spontaneous overfow of powerful feelings.”26 Poetry as effusions emanating from a spontaneous realm caused by an “overfow of powerful feelings” signals the Romantic metaphor of the Aeolian harp as the poet’s engagement with her faculty of spontaneity. According to Shelley, the poet is like an Aeolian harp who is passively played upon by “external and internal impressions,” which evokes the poet’s art: Man [sic] is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind of an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody.”27 Similarly, Ralph Waldo Emerson connected the Aeolian harp with feelings of abandon and release. While he did not otherwise care for music, he owned an Aeolian harp that he enjoyed listening to because it “could catch the sad and triumphant melodies of nature.”28 He compared the Shelleyan passivity of the poet to the Aeolian harp who waits for the wind to play across its strings, but Emerson insisted that the passive experience requires some action in preparation, as the poet must “tighten up his [sic] intellectual strings.”29 Once the poet prepared herself, Emerson maintained that inspired poetry would emerge, as poetry is the harmonious result of the poet’s readiness for the “cosmic breath.”30 “Cosmic breath” is instrumental because, as he explains throughout his essay The Poet, the poet “ceases to have primary value as an individual” as soon as she poetically provides access through her subjectivity to universal consciousness.31 When the cosmic breath breathes through the poet, she creates on behalf of the collective. The spiritual overtones that are so vibrant in Emerson’s treatment of the Aeolian harp are refected in Thoreau’s electric version, that telegraph wire he fxated on in his 1851 journal entries. He writes of a new telegraph wire that was installed near his cabin, which he revered for its transcendental properties, as it behaved like an electric Aeolian harp. In September of 1851, he writes, As I went under the new telegraph wire, I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead. It was the sound of a far-off glorious life, a supernal life, which came down to us, and vibrated the lattice-work of this life of ours.32

64 Sasha Tamar Strelitz Some days later, he more directly compares the telegraph wire to an Aeolian harp that revealed to him “a triumphant though transient exhibition of truth.”33 According to Thoreau, the wind, “which was conveying a message to [him] from heaven,” vibrated the telegraph wire and communicated directly to him a quintessential transcendental message about how life’s goal is “upward,” toward those “infnitely higher planes.”34 Thoreau’s telegraph wire is the electric rendering of the Romantic Aeolian harp which he uses “to hear the music in the air.”35 With his telegraph wire, he inaugurated an electric Romanticism that continues with rock music in the 1960s. This continuity of Romanticism well into the twentieth century resonates with André Breton’s perspective that “Romanticism asserts itself as a continuum,”36 and Friedrich Schiller’s notion that Romanticism is essentially a democratic artistic mode that “construct[s] emancipatory visions out of materials at hand.”37 As pockets of youth began to rebel against the status quo in the 1960s, they craved an art form that represented them and that corresponded with their brand of social antagonism. The folk music of the early 1960s had previously “allowed youth to anchor their current experience within a context of the past” while “deliver[ing] a true picture of human drama.”38 However, with the aid of musicians such as Bob Dylan, folk was soon replaced by the “new rock, with its psychedelic infuence, [which] promised a way to confront the audience with a sensory experience of reality.”39 Joplin, who previously thought that folk was the answer, took a cue from Dylan’s shift to visionary rock in 1965, and she too turned away from folk to blues-based psychedelic rock. The blues—which is a form of folk poetry—lends itself to the sort of emotional expression Joplin craved that is Romantic at its core. As David Emblidge explains in his article, “I Feel, Therefore I am: The Blues-Rock of Janis Joplin”40: “The blues is a refreshing experience. It organizes a diffcult emotional problem and treats it in an aesthetic form not only beautiful in itself but providing numerous valuable opportunities to release pent-up energy.”41 Joplin released a whole range of emotions onstage that enraptured her audience, an audience that was made up of fellow outcasts and rebels who were as confused and frustrated as she was.42 She used her voice and her body just as her bandmates used their instruments: as inherent hippie expressions. Her melodic unity was always infected by “frenetic ornamentation” and therefore contained a “haunting feeling of always approaching the point of where something would break.”43 Therefore, sonically, her voice metaphorized the sociopolitical climate, which was on the verge of breaking. Like Kerouac, Joplin was drawn to Black culture, which in her opinion was more authentic. Consequently, old-time Black blues singers were compelling to Joplin because they “hit her with the experience of social oppression described in Kerouac’s books” and further encouraged her to “break out of the stereotypical limits of her white world, to move beyond race and

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meet the poetic hearts and minds of the black culture.”44 It is essential to note that this movement, while inspired by the Beat idealization of Black culture, is made possible by her white privilege. By the time she joined Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1966, she had honed her stage presence and was ready to provide her audience with “a sensory experience of reality.”45 Her brand of blues-based psychedelic rock is Romantic in nature, and as the social revolution was materializing, she functions similar to an electrifed Aeolian harp for the burgeoning hippie movement. I root this notion in the fact that the very genre of psychedelic rock, and Joplin’s particular brand of it, builds upon “a feedback loop that evoked new responses” on the part of the performer and the audience. She liked and responded musically to fans’ dancing, clapping, stomping, singing, and other displays that showed that the music moved them.46 Joplin “depended upon the spontaneous reactions in the audience,” and she used that feedback loop to simultaneously exude emotion and imbibe the audience’s emotion.47 Beyond technical competence, Joplin’s performance art hinges on the communication of emotions and therefore engages with spontaneity in a different way than the electric Romantics before her, because a central aspect of her art draws on the spontaneous reactions of her audience. Spontaneity like that enacted in Joplin’s performances became a religion for the hippies because it enacted the withdrawal from ordered and logical culture into a reality that revolves around the present and wishes to, in Ram Dass’s terms, “Be here now.”48 Not only does this spontaneity harken back to the Romantic poets’ conceptions of the Aeolian harp but it is emblematic of Romantic radical praxis. Joplin was inspired by Beat writers like Kerouac who “reduced life to its essential in order to feel alive again.”49 She did so by helping to inaugurate the hippies’ social revolution by responding with her kozmic blues to “the hypocritical social structure, the banality of school, the boring town, and prudish sexual values.”50 Over the years, Joplin defned kozmic blues as the fusion of a female blues sensibility into 1960s’ psychedelic rock, to which I stress electric and spontaneous components, because there is no kozmic blues without the plugged-in musical accompaniment as well as the spontaneous feedback loop between Joplin and her audience. Joplin’s musical performances were sites of Romantic radical praxis because in deploying her emotion—rage, contempt, love, fear, immense sadness—her “I” speaks for all. Dan Beachy-Quick explains that Romantic urgency produces art that not only records experience, but also “shows how experience experiences itself, and does so not [necessarily] as an intellectual gesture” but as a personal revelation: “The poet places herself in this crisis of herself, a crisis in the poem actualizes, conjures into a world, makes real even as it undermines its own reality.”51 Joplin’s performances are personal revelations for the artists and audience alike because they make their own reality as they undermine

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the reality around them. Joplin’s way of responding to conformist, mainstream society was by embracing art as “a way [she] interacted with the world.”52 Joplin boldly and unapologetically let her “freak fag fy,” which profoundly resonated with her audiences.53 By “showing how experience experiences itself” for her own personal revelation and by channeling the audience’s emotions through the feedback loop, she generated sites of Romantic radical praxis, her live performances, that combated and undermined square society.54 Like the Aeolian harp—an image that concurrently represents the poet in process as well as the dichotomous wildness and order of Nature—the “cosmic breath” moved through Joplin when she performed her kozmic blues.55 ~~~ Joplin was a nonconformist whose eccentricities—which were bolstered and shaped by the Beat literature she read, unconventional ideas circulated in her outcasts-turned-rebels friend group, and the blues she listened to—disrupted the status quo in small, oil refnery-dotted Port Arthur, Texas. For instance, her sister Laura explains that their town had an organized KKK chapter, but Joplin, who had espoused Kerouacian “ideals of the poor black man’s higher morality,” was always vehemently against segregation, and therefore was reviled by her peers for being a “N*gger lover.”56 As a teenager, she adopted a beatnik style that made manifest her eccentricities, which ranged from reading preferences to ideas to attitude. In terms of music, she always had a penchant for singing, but it was not until she was a teenager and sang a near— perfect interpretation of Odetta (Holmes) for her fellow intellectual, rebel friends that she realized her talent.57 She idolized Dylan, and after she realized her singing talent, she sang folk-blues, mostly in Austin, Texas, and then at Bay Area and Monterey hootenannies when she frst moved to the San Francisco in 1963. Eventually, the blues entirely replaced folk in her repertoire. The blues was a medium by which she could truly express herself, express her deepest feelings, which were abundant especially considering the rejection she experienced by her peers when she only ever pined for acceptance.58 The fact that the blues is a Romantic vehicle that expresses emotion to “perform a redemptive function” was of utmost importance for Joplin.59 Emotional expression, the root of the blues, is a central concept to Joplin’s musicianship. She once explained to a reporter that music allows her to “experience all kinds of things. . . feel things that are in your imagination,” because music is “created from and, as it’s happening, creates feelings.”60 Her insight sounds much like Romantic praxis, which is founded upon the individual’s experience, and she uses her imagination to translate her experience for her audience. Her last comment about how music is “created from and as it’s happening creates feelings”

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parallels the Romantic urgency of poetry not only as recording experience but “show[ing] how experience experiences itself, and does so not as an intellectual gesture but as a personal one.”61 Essentially, what Joplin explains in the quote above that is so fundamental to Romanticism is the exploration of the space between I think and I am, to reveal “how experience is experienced.”62 This is why Maine de Biran’s volo ergo sum (I desire therefore I am) replaced the Enlightenment’s “I think therefore I am”63 in the Romantic era, because for Romantics, I desire or I feel happens before I think. In terms of Romantic poetics, one feels and only then thinks about how she feels. Joplin reveals how experience is experienced in part by embracing the spontaneity essential to the blues idiom to penetrate the audience’s emotional plane. Furthermore, Joplin’s blues style carried with it what Mathes Carter refers to as the “cultural politics of black sound,” such that she simultaneously performed an act of rebellion against white Anglo culture and expressed the pain she otherwise kept suppressed within herself, thanks to a generous amount of alcohol and heroin she turned to for desensitization purposes.64 ~~~ Joplin’s singing career reached new heights when she joined Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1966. The band formed independently of Joplin in 1965, and it remains one of the best examples of the 1960s’ San Francisco psychedelic rock scene, along with the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Jefferson Airplane. On 10 June 1966, a mere six days after returning to San Francisco (after a stint back in Texas), Joplin joined them on stage as their lead singer, a role she would retain until she went solo in 1969.65 One song they performed that night was “Turtle Blues,” a Joplin original. The song is autobiographical. Like most of what she wrote, it is a poetic expression of her deep pain prompted by being a social outcast-turned-rebel. In Cixous’ words, this performance marked Joplin’s arrival, “vibrant, over and again” at the beginning of her new history, blending personal history and blues tropes to represent the history of women in general.66 While she had not yet coined “kozmic blues,” the song is emblematic of this genre, which is uniquely Joplin’s. A natural image like the turtle is a blues trope employed by singers like Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Joplin draws from other blues conventions used by male performers as she sings that she is a “mean, mean woman” and an “evil woman,” and she repeats these phrases “working some subtle but striking variation each time around,” which is also a blues convention.67 However, she further explains that she is okay with these blues-based epithets because she has been “called much worser [sic] things.”68 Her expression of her nonconformity—such as not being the sort of woman who is a glorifed dishwasher, but instead one who endorses her partner’s desire to go out

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drinking, as long he invites her along—is mimicked by Gurley’s use of distortion with his electric guitar.69 She co-opts phrases and conventions of male objectifcation and classifcation of women in the blues, and she, therefore, makes her body heard in her insurgent artistic expression. She intensifes the weight of her lyrics with the power of her voice that moves her audience. “Turtle Blues” reminds me of Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode”: In Joplin’s version, she compares herself to a turtle who is protected by its hard shell against life’s suffering, and in Coleridge’s, the poet is similarly separated from his pain, as it has calloused over to yield numbness. He “gaz[es] on the western sky, / And its peculiar ting of yellow green,” which he suspects may evoke emotion, yet “And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!.”70 Joplin experiences similar numbness. In the album version of Joplin’s song, she intermittently laughs amid the lyrics that undoubtedly stem from a deep-rooted pain, and her detachment from the pain reminds me of Coleridge’s lines, “A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, / A stifed, drowsy, unimpassioned grief.”71 Both Joplin and Coleridge are dejected by the realities of life’s suffering, but they are accustomed to these feelings. When Coleridge looks out at the western sky, he may as well be singing Joplin’s line, “I know this goddamned life too well.”72 Coleridge’s conclusion to the lady he addresses—Sara Hutchinson, whom he hopelessly loved even though he was married to another Sara—is that the sky’s beauty cannot enkindle his emotions, because emotions must come from within. Hutchinson, the “pure of heart,” already knows “What this strong music in the soul may be,” an awareness that causes Coleridge to draw a connection between the soul’s inner music and nature.73 As a result, he realizes A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud— Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud— We in ourselves rejoice!74 The catalyst of this realization is the “scream / Of agony by torture lengthened out / That lute sent forth!”75 The lute refers back to the Aeolian harp he speaks of earlier in the poem. In the frst stanza, the speaker witnesses a “tranquil” night and wishes for a storm that might remedy his dull feelings. The wind picks up, and “Upon the strings of this Aeolian lute” the “dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes” represents his dejected feelings.76 Coleridge’s imagination is triggered by the sounds emanating from the Aeolian harp, which prompt him to begin working through his calloused feelings, such that he ultimately realizes that fnding the music in his own soul paves the road to joy. Joplin never goes that far. Tragically, her inability to see past her protective hardened shell—which began to solidify in

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Port Arthur—distances her enough to allow a sense of humor about her emotional state but simultaneously inhibits her from accessing true joy. Reaching into the depths of her soul to fnd inner music was an essential aspect of her art, as Big Brother and the Holding Company’s drummer Dave Getz said of Joplin: “she was in touch with her emotions [ . . . ] in some way that nobody else I knew was in touch with.”77 However, instead of her ultimately fnding joy like the speaker in Coleridge’s poem, Joplin would come offstage and require escapist, dulling substances like alcohol or heroin to balance out the high from performing and connecting emotionally with other people, about which Getz explained, “to be like that is the price you pay for doing that art at that level.”78 ~~~ Just as the Aeolian harp that emits harmonic sounds as the winds pass over it, Joplin’s songs represent not only her own emotions but emotions from all the social outcasts, the freaks and the fower children. As previously highlighted, Joplin “channel[ed] emotions for other people,” and she does so by fusing a female blues sensibility to 1960s’ psychedelic rock, a fusion she referred to as kozmic blues.79 In 1969, she released her frst solo album, I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! that features one of the few songs co-written by her, “Kozmic Blues.” Her sister Laura explains that the term kozmic blues is “a true Joplinesque missile” that derives from Joplin’s “real angst of worrying about death” and the “sophisticated twist of misspelling cosmic.”80 I cannot help but hear “kozmic blues” and think of the connotation of the Emersonian “cosmic breath” that moves through the Aeolian harp, which is surely an unintended coincidence that, nonetheless, is evocative. Joplin defned kozmic blues while showcasing a sensitivity that she was a white woman using a Black expression: I don’t know if this is grossly insensitive of me, and it may well be, but like the black man’s blues is based on the have not, I got the blues because I don’t have my baby, I got the blues because I don’t have the quarter for a bottle of wine, I got the blues because they won’t let me stay in the bar. Well you know I’m a middle class white chick from a family that would love to send me to college and I didn’t wanna. I had a job, I didn’t dig it, I had it real easy and then one day I realized it in a fash sitting in a bar, that it wasn’t an uphill incline that one day was going to be all right, it was your whole life. You’d never touch that fucking carrot, man, that’s what the Kozmic Blues are.81 She always had the kozmic blues, even back in Port Arthur, and especially when she became successful and realized that success solved none of her most vexing problems. Early on, she anchored herself to the blues

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tradition, which her psychedelic rock is inspired by and consistently references. Joplin loyally subscribed to the blues style, and she considered herself the frst “black-white” person, which may sound problematic for a post-hippie, more racially conscious modern mindset, but nonetheless denotes her “internal self-integration, to quit just being white [ . . . ] to become all the good things from all heritages.”82 It is important to remember that this “black-white” self-imposed identity exemplifes the peace and love mentality that was quintessential to the hippies’ social revolution. Furthermore, Joplin’s insistence on being the frst “blackwhite” is emblematic of Cixous’ assertion that a woman’s writing—in this case, her singing—is “militant” because “she is an integral part of all liberations. . . she will bring about a mutation in human relations, in thought, in all praxis.”83 Expressing her own struggle in her blues-based music is therefore that radical praxis I mentioned earlier which represents Romantic poetry. Joplin’s performances were sites of liberation. She was the “voice of a Lady Leadbelly” situated in hippie Camelot.84 As with more traditional blues, essential to Joplin’s kozmic blues is the intersection between music and social memory; because performing the blues, as Paul Allen Anderson explains, provided especially haunting and portable sites for the staging of social memory. In the case of music—which may be the expressive form most frequently associated with experiences of spirit possession, contemplative reverie, and wistful or violent nostalgia—our most striking experiences often take place at moments of halfunderstood hauntedness.85 Joplin’s kozmic brand of the blues sung by Black women before her—such as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and so many other blues powerhouses—is imbued with their pain, with her own pain, and with the pain of her audience. Joplin’s boyfriend David Niehaus remarked, I realized when she sang me all these songs, they were always the blues. And that’s what she felt, basically, were the blues. She could feel everybody’s pain, and that’s one of the reasons she did heroin was so she didn’t have to be involved with everybody else’s life. Most people can be oblivious to what going on around them, but Janis couldn’t, she couldn’t block it out.86 Inherent to Joplin was her ability to “feel everybody’s pain” and to “channel emotions for other people,” which is the kind of art that requires a tremendous amount of inner fortitude that she just did not have.87 Recall Wordsworth’s famous concept of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility,” which is like a faucet Joplin was incapable of

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turning off without heroin. Instead, she fully embraced her empathic power and positioned herself as the hippie Aeolian harp, the “trance enhancer [who] brought total commitment to her music. . . pieces of her soul seemed to dance along the harmonies and ride the tidal waves of sound that defned her voice.”88 Moreover, Joplin’s kozmic blues—like the more traditional blues before it—provided “energizing site[s] of utopian anticipation,” which is a central aspect of the hippie counterculture.89 In Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought, Paul Allen Anderson reports that W. E. B. Du Bois’s early Black nationalist thought called for Black liberation, which he believed entailed the literary elevation of sorrow songs, elsewhere referred to as spirituals.90 Spirituals were “not only a haunted site of memory but [also] an energizing site of utopian anticipation,” as they originate with the bleak experience of slavery.91 Slaves’ feld hollers and groans that morphed into spirituals.92 Mathes Carter characterizes spirituals as containing the “sonic dimensions of failed promise of reconstruction”; in other words, this genre of music is imbued with the slaves’ hope of the eradication of slavery, of racial equality.93 As spirituals developed into the blues, the music evolved as “a proletariat art form rich in political implications.”94 The blues represents “a sonic tableau” featuring resistance.95 Just as Kerouac draws from bebop, a freedom sound, psychedelic rock, especially Joplin’s, pulls from the blues. Joplin’s kozmic blues music grafts the concept of utopian anticipation from its musical forebear onto the hippie counterculture, which is marked by a general enthusiasm for personal and social change.96 For the most part, the hippie counterculture Joplin was part of is characterized by peaceful resistance against the oppressors; apart from the senseless violence at the hands of the Hells Angels and other peripheral examples, emblematic of the movement is the image of a fower in a rife. As previously mentioned, Joplin endeavored to rebel against the very culture that cast her as a social Other. For Joplin in 1940–1950s smalltown Texas, this meant absorbing all the blues she could, such that her artistic expression binds her to the oral/aural tradition that is so fundamental to the Black American experience. As Beat poet and Black Arts Movement pioneer LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) explains, the blues contains aspects of African music, which uses “rhythmic. . . polyphonic, neglect of harmony and melody,” which is precisely why a white culture that was used to harmony- and melody-based European music could not appreciate it.97 Creatively, she mimicked her favorite visual artist, Modigliani, “who revolutionized the art world with his eerie fuid fgure that showed a forceful African infuence.”98 What our contemporary culture may castigate as appropriation was a survival technique to use the blues idiom that is founded on emotion and improvisation that helps people “cope with disjuncture and chance” in the face of

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“the rootlessness and the discontinuity so characteristic of human existence.”99 Joplin felt an affliation with the spirit of the blues and with the stories about blues singers. Behaviorally, Joplin emulated female blues singers’ lifestyles even when she was a teenager. Laura reports that her sister often referred to herself as “a candle, burning on both ends,” and frequently told her friends that she would die young.100 Laura posits that Joplin’s excessive drinking was inspired by Billie Holiday’s life choices delineated in her 1956 autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, about the “spontaneous and emotional singer who turned her tragic life into music that moved her audiences” and the alcoholism and heroin addiction that came with it. Joplin’s friend, Linda Gravenites, believed that Joplin was a reincarnation of Bessie Smith.101 Musically, Joplin engaged in the blues-based “righteous and dangerous experiment” of releasing her “feelings from years of bondage” and channeling her audience’s emotions as well.102 ~~~ At the dawn of the Summer of Love in 1967, with their self-titled 1966 record under their belts, Big Brother and the Holding company played the famous Monterey Pop Festival, which gained them national recognition. Their lineup included songs like “Down on Me” and “Harry,” but it is their set closer on both nights, “Ball and Chain,” that struck awe into the audience. Upon Joplin’s insistence against the advice from their manager at the time, Chet Helms, D. A. Pennebaker’s crew captured Big Brother’s second performance, which showcases Joplin clad in a cream outft whose golden threads glitter as she kicks to the rhythm section’s beat. First, in “Combination of the Two,” Joplin knocks us and rocks us as she compliments Sam Andrew’s vocals and the band’s heavier sound that weaves in and out of a psychedelic, progressive surf rock tune. It is not a blues song per se, but Joplin infuses it with a blues idiom, which consists of the parody of slaves’ “cries, swoops, squawks, and slurs”103; as Ed Denson once wrote in his column for The Berkeley Barb, Joplin’s “ability to scream and throw her body into the music” is impressive.104 Not only is it impressive, but Joplin as background singer bridges the gap between her body and her sexuality with bravado. Her body is a central part of her performance art, as exemplifed by her guttural singing and the way she moves her body and the güiro,105 which functions as an extension of her body, to the music. In their set closer, “Ball and Chain,” she enlivens Big Mama Thornton’s blues number. The performance exemplifes Joplin’s mastery of the dialectical energy of the blues, as she expresses grief both in the loudest moments of excitement and those that are quieter and more sensual. In the third minute of the performance, Joplin leads the band into a climactic moment when she goes into a state of onstage ecstasy as she squeals

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and bellows, “I wanted to love you, love you, that’s all I could do,” and then screams a sonorous “yeaaaaaaah” seemingly from the depths of her soul.106 Her swell of emotion is complimented by Gurley’s heavy guitar distortion, and suddenly the band dynamically takes it down low and we are back to the frst verse, quiet, muted, and melancholy: “Sitting down by my window / Oh, looking out at the rain.”107 Peter Albin’s bass guitar and Joplin’s kozmic bluesy embodiment of the painful lyrics are aurally spotlighted as the camera cuts to Mama Cass (of the Mamas and the Papas) sitting on a grassy patch in front of the stage, mouth parted and awe-struck.108 Joplin presented her audience with a powerful blend of rock and blues that was predicated on feeling—their feelings, Joplin’s feelings, Thornton’s feelings, all the feelings. ~~~ In 1969, Joplin left Big Brother and the Holding company and ventured solo. She took Andrew with her to start the Kozmic Blues Band. Their 1969 release, I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! features songs such as “Little Girl Blue,” in which she knowingly sings, “Baby, I know just how you feel.”109 In its title song, “Kozmic Blues,” she sings as a soulful twenty-fve-year-old who keeps “movin’ on” along with time, but still, she falters: I keep pushing so hard the dream I keep tryin’ to make it right Through another lonely day.110 Her soulful singing in “Kozmic Blues,” both the studio version and live versions, encapsulates her maxim, “My whole purpose is to communicate” her own experiences which align with others.111 Every rendition of the song I have heard displays what Friedman explains is Joplin’s ability to “give to her audiences such overwhelming emotional might.”112 The last song on the album, “Work Me, Lord,” is a powerful song written by her friend Nick Gravenites. Throughout every rendition, Joplin improvises by referring to the Divine as “honey” and “Daddy” as she pleads for companionship here on this earthly plane.113 In the song, she asserts what others have since said about her, that companionship is all she ever wanted in life, as she believed being in a relationship would make her life easier. In her loneliness, she tries to live, and while she continues to move forward, “something is driving me, oh, back, / And something’s trying to hold on me, / To my way of life, why.”114 Just as she does elsewhere, she exudes “knowledge of born pain, suffering and the scars of experience.”115 As with “Turtle Blues” and her performances of “Combination of the Two” and “Ball and Chain,” “Work Me Lord” exemplifes that her kozmic blues is an embodied expression of electric

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Romanticism. However, here she adds another element as she sings to and pleads with the Divine, confrming that the cosmic breath fows through her to generate her electrifed kozmic blues, which is clarifed in the frst line of the song, “Work me Lord, work me Lord” and iterated throughout.116 Linda Gravenites referred to her friend as “a thousand-watt light bulb going off,”117 and Niehaus remarked that his girlfriend “was on fre. She had the power.”118 But, just as quickly as she was powered on— ~~~ Since her overdose in October of 1970, the album she was working on during the time of her tragic mistake was posthumously released and titled Pearl after her off-stage, more genuine and less cartoonish persona. The day after she overdosed, she was scheduled to record lyrics for a song that was released as an instrumental titled “Buried Alive in the Blues,” which is ftting for the situation. Many people interviewed since have claimed that her work on Pearl showcases the fact that she was working diligently to hone her craft and master her idiosyncratic vocalization. The hypothetical game is moot, however, because Joplin’s art, which hinged on the immensely emotional feedback loop with the audience, was the “way [she] interacted with the world”: Janis thought her role as rock [performer] was really to guide her audience into feeling their innermost emotions. . . she sometimes felt like a prostitute, selling her heart, rather than her boys, to people who couldn’t touch their own feelings and so sucked off hers.119 Her embodiment of electric Romanticism is why we remember her so vividly in our cultural memory and why people claimed she was the most important female musical artist, more important than Aretha Franklin, but it is also part of why she met such a hasty and tragic demise.120 I am not sure about the claim that she is more important than Aretha, but I do agree that Joplin is one of the most important female artists in twentieth-century America, as she was a leader of the countercultural hippie revolution that so altered the sociocultural landscape of the United States, and on a larger scale, the West. To use Cixous’ terms, Joplin was an insurgent force on a music scene which was largely coded as male. She was inspired by Beat literature and beatnik culture, which were also coded as male, and she extended the female blues tradition by powerhouses like Holiday to the white masses; in other words, she fulflls Cixous’ claim, “our naphtha will spread” by “shattering [her] entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression.”121 By inscribing her body into her performances in a world that had been

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“governed by the phallus,” her attempts helped the normalization of women’s sexuality as she galvanized other women to be freer and more accepting of their bodies, sexuality, and emotion.122 She reached her audiences with her embodiment of electric Romanticism; she was the conductor—the hippie Aeolian harp, if you will—for her audience’s emotions, which she amplifed with her own emotions in that feedback loop. As her sister admits, “Hers was not an independent sound,” but “she knew what she wanted and she knew ahead of time what people around her wanted.”123 Joplin’s reliance on her audience’s clapping, stomping, and singing in tandem with her own fnely tuned emotional profciency that she wielded in her blues-based psychedelic music—her kozmic blues—is what marks her as unique, both then and always.

Notes 1 Myra Friedman, Janis Joplin: Buried Alive (New York: Harmony Books, 1992), xix. 2 Friedman, Janis Joplin: Buried Alive, xiii. 3 Jim Langdon quoted in Laura Joplin, Love, Janis (New York: Vintage, 2005), 140. 4 L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 196. 5 Ibid., 232. 6 Diane Lotny, quoted in Friedman, Janis Joplin: Buried Alive, xxvii. 7 Ellen Willis, “Janis Joplin’s Electric Energy,” The New Yorker, 15 March 1969, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1969/03/15/changes-janis-joplinselectric-energy. Accessed 1 June 2020. 8 David Dalton, Janis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 3. 9 See notes 1 and 2 (emphasis added). 10 J. Joplin quoted in L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 232. 11 Ibid., 248. 12 Unnamed fan quoted in ibid., 232. 13 Peter Guralnick, Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock ‘N’ Roll (New York: Back Bay Books, 1999), 9. 14 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa.” The University of Chicago Press Journals 1, no. 4 (1976): 880. 15 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 880. 16 Ibid., 881. 17 See notes 1 and 2. 18 L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 119. 19 Ezra Pound, “The Teacher’s Mission.” The English Journal 23, no. 8 (1934): 630. doi: 10.2307/804596. 20 L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 115. 21 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “Aeolian harp,” www-oed-com.du.idm. oclc.org/view/Entry/ 3106#eid9645343. Accessed 10 July 2019. 22 Robert S. Matteson, “Emerson and the Æolian Harp.” The South Central Bulletin 23, no. 4 (1963): 4. doi: 10.2307/3252401. 23 Samuel T. Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 28–29. 24 Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” 28–29. 25 Paul Magnuson, “‘The Eolian Harp’ in Context.” Studies in Romanticism 24, no. 1 (1985): 3–20. doi: 10.2307/25600521.

76 Sasha Tamar Strelitz 26 William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, eds. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen & Co., 1965), 246. 27 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” 1840, Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/fles/5428/5428-h/5428-h.htm. 28 Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in Matteson, “Emerson and the Æolian Harp,” 5. 29 Matteson, “Emerson and the Æolian Harp,” 5. 30 Emerson, “The Harp,” 1904, Bartleby, www.bartleby.com/370/85.html. 31 Dan Beachy-Quick, “The Oracular Tree Acquiring: On Romanticism as Radical Praxis,” in Active Romanticism: The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice, eds. Julie Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson (Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2015), 43. 32 Henry David Thoreau, The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, ed. Odell Shepard (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), 57. 33 Thoreau, The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, 59. 34 Ibid., 57. 35 Beachy-Quick, “The Oracular Tree Acquiring: On Romanticism as Radical Praxis,” 31–32. 36 André Breton quoted in Julie Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson, eds., Active Romanticism: The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice (Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2015), 2. 37 Friedrich Schiller, quoted in ibid., 8. 38 L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 103. 39 Ibid., 153. 40 Emblidge’s “I feel therefore I am” references Maine de Biran’s volo ergo sum (I desire therefore I am), which encapsulates an important shift in consciousness from Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” to the Romantic Age that refocuses to an individual’s emotional, interior landscape. 41 David Emblidge, “I Feel, Therefore I am: The Blues-Rock of Janis Joplin.” Southwest Review 61, no. 4 (1976): 348. 42 L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 103, 127. 43 Emblidge, “I Feel, Therefore I am: The Blues-Rock of Janis Joplin,” 348. 44 L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 61. 45 Ibid., 153. 46 Ibid., 306. 47 Ibid., 154. 48 Ibid., 154. 49 Ibid., 52. 50 Ibid., 59. 51 Beachy-Quick, “The Oracular Tree Acquiring: On Romanticism as Radical Praxis,” 32, 34. 52 Ibid., 43. 53 The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “If 6 Was 9,” recorded May–June, October 1967, on Axis: Bold as Love, Sony 8697 62396 1, 2010. 54 Beachy-Quick, “The Oracular Tree Acquiring: On Romanticism as Radical Praxis,” 32. 55 Emerson. 56 L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 56. (slur redacted by me). 57 Ibid., 62. 58 Ibid., 104. 59 Lorenzo Thomas, “‘Communicating by Horns’: Jazz and Redemption in the Poetry of the Beats and the Black Arts Movement.” Poetry and Theatre, special issue of African American Review 26, no. 2 (1992): 297. doi: 10.2307/3041856.

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60 Janis Joplin quoted in Amy Berg, dir. Janis: Little Girl Blue, performed by Cat Power and Janis Joplin. (2015; FilmRise). 61 Beachy-Quick, “The Oracular Tree Acquiring: On Romanticism as Radical Praxis,” 32. 62 Ibid., 35. 63 Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton UP, 1999), 97. 64 Mathes Carter, Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2015), 13; L. Joplin, 104. 65 L. Joplin, 148. 66 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 882. 67 Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Turtle Blues,” recorded March– May 1968, on Cheap Thrills, Columbia 43346 00331, 2006. 68 Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Turtle Blues.” 69 Ibid. 70 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 114. 71 Ibid. 72 Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Turtle Blues.” 73 Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode,” 115. 74 Ibid., 116. 75 Ibid., 116–117. 76 Ibid., 114. 77 Dave Getz quoted in Amy Berg, dir., Janis: Little Girl Blue, performed by Cat Power and Janis Joplin. (2015; FilmRise). 78 Ibid. 79 Friedman, Janis Joplin: Buried Alive, xix. 80 L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 254. 81 J. Joplin quoted in Emblidge, “I Feel, Therefore I am: The Blues-Rock of Janis Joplin,” 343. 82 L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 124. 83 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 882. 84 New York Free Press quoted in L. Joplin, 220. 85 Paul A. Anderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001), 4. 86 David Niehaus quoted in Amy Berg, dir. Janis: Little Girl Blue, performed by Cat Power and Janis Joplin. (2015; FilmRise). 87 Friedman, Janis Joplin: Buried Alive, xix. 88 L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 153. 89 Anderson, 5. 90 Ibid., 5. 91 Ibid., 5. 92 LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 28. 93 Carter, 11. 94 Anderson, 9. 95 Carter, 15. 96 Ken Goffman and Dan Joy, Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House (New York: Villard, 2004), 32. 97 Jones, 25. 98 L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 75. 99 Albert Murray, “Improvisation and the Creative Process,” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert O’Meally (New York: Columbia UP, 1998), 113.

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100 101 102 103 104 105

L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 125. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 127. Jones, 30. Ed Denson quoted in L. Joplin 171. A Latin American percussive instrument that is played by scraping a stick along the wooden notches to produce a unique scratching-like sound. Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Ball and Chain,” by Willie Mae Thornton, recorded 1967, on Monterey International Pop Festival, The Monterey International Pop Festival Foundation MIPF1967-1, 2017. Ibid. D. A. Pennebaker, dir., Monterey Pop, performed by Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Mamas and the Papas, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, and Ravi Shankar. (1968; Leacock Pennebaker), DVD. J. Joplin, “Little Girl Blue,” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, recorded 1969, on I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, Sony 88697 97822 1. J. Joplin, “Kozmic Blues,” by Janis Joplin and Gabriel Mekler, recorded 1969, on I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, Sony 88697 97822 1. J. Joplin qtd. in L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 293. Friedman, Janis Joplin: Buried Alive, xviii. J. Joplin, “Work Me, Lord,” by Nick Gravenites, recorded 1969, on I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, Sony 88697 97822 1. Ibid. Langdon quoted in L. Joplin, 138. J. Joplin, “Work Me, Lord.” Gravenites quoted in L. Joplin 191. Niehaus quoted in L. Joplin 278. L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 43, 293–294. Berg. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 880. Ibid., 881. L. Joplin, Love, Janis, 306–308.

106 107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123

Bibliography Anderson, Paul A. Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001. Beachy-Quick, Dan. “The Oracular Tree Acquiring: On Romanticism as Radical Praxis.” In Active Romanticism: The Radical Impulse in NineteenthCentury and Contemporary Poetic Practice, edited by Julie Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson, 31–46. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2015. Berg, Amy, dir. Janis: Little Girl Blue. Performed by Cat Power and Janis Joplin. 2015; FilmRise. Carr, Julie and Jeffrey C. Robinson, editors. Introduction to Active Romanticism: The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice, 1–17. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2015. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” The University of Chicago Press Journals 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–893. www-jstor-org.du.idm.oclc.org/ stable/3173239. Coleridge, Samuel T. “Dejection: An Ode.” In Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, edited by H. J. Jackson, 114–118. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.

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———. “The Eolian Harp.” In Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, edited by H. J. Jackson, 27–29. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Dalton, David. Janis. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971. Ellison, Ralph W. Shadow & Act. New York: Signet Books, 1966. Emerson, Ralph W. “The Harp.” Bartleby. 1904. https://www.bartleby. com/370/85.html. Emblidge, David. “I Feel, Therefore I am: The Blues-Rock of Janis Joplin.” Southwest Review 61, no. 4 (1976): 341–353. www.jstor.org/stable/43468881. Friedman, Myra. Janis Joplin: Buried Alive. New York: Harmony Books, 1992. Goffman, Ken, and Dan Joy. Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. New York: Villard, 2004. Guralnick, Peter. Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock ‘N’ Roll. New York: Back Bay Books, 1999. Joplin, Laura. Love, Janis. New York: Vintage, 1992. Jones, LeRoi. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. Magnuson, Paul. “‘The Eolian Harp’ in Context.” Studies in Romanticism 24, no. 1 (1985): 3–20. doi: 10.2307/25600521. Mathes Carter, Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2015. Matteson, Robert S. “Emerson and the Æolian Harp.” The South Central Bulletin 23, no. 4 (1963): 4–9. doi: 10.2307/3252401. Murray, Albert. “Improvisation and the Creative Process.” In The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, edited by Robert O’Meally, 111–113. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. Pennebaker, D. A., dir. Monterey Pop. Performed by Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Mamas and the Papas, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, and Ravi Shankar. 1968; Leacock Pennebaker, 2009, DVD. Pound, Ezra. “The Teacher’s Mission.” The English Journal 23, no. 8 (1934): 630–635. doi: 10/2307/804596. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” 1840. Project Gutenberg. http:// www.gutenberg.org/fles/5428/5428-h/5428-h.htm. Thomas, Lorenzo. “‘Communicating by Horns’: Jazz and Redemption in the Poetry of the Beats and the Black Arts Movement.” Poetry and Theatre, special issue of African American Review 26, no. 2 (1992): 291–298. doi: 10.2307/3041856. Thoreau, Henry David. The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, edited by Odell Shepard. New York: Dover Publications, 1961. Willis, Ellen. “Janis Joplin’s Electric Energy.” The New Yorker, 15 March 1969. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1969/03/15/changes-janis-joplinselectric-energy. Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 241–272. Edited by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones. London: Methuen & Co., 1965.

Discography Big Brother and the Holding Company. “Ball and Chain,” by Willie Mae Thornton, in Monterey International Pop Festival. Monterey International Pop Foundation MIPF1967-1, 2017, vinyl LP. Recorded in 1967.

80 Sasha Tamar Strelitz ———. Cheap Thrills. Columbia 43346 00331, 2006, vinyl LP. Originally released in 1968. ———. “Turtle Blues,” in Cheap Thrills. Columbia 43346 00331, 2006, vinyl LP. Originally released in 1968. The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Axis: Bold as Love. Sony 8697 62396 1, 2010, vinyl LP. Originally released in 1967. ———. “If 6 Was 9,” in Axis: Bold as Love. Sony 8697 62396 1, 2010, vinyl LP. Originally released in 1967. Joplin, Janis. I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! Sony 88697 97822 1, 2011, vinyl LP. Originally released in 1969. ———. “Little Girl Blue.” By Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, in I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, Sony 88697 97822 1, 2011, vinyl LP. Originally released in 1969. ———. “Kozmic Blues.” By Janis Joplin and Gabriel Mekler, in I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, Sony 88697 97822 1, 2011, vinyl LP. Originally released in 1969. ———. “Work Me, Lord.” By Nick Gravenites, in I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, Sony 88697 97822 1, 2011, vinyl LP. Originally released in 1969. Monterey International Pop Festival. Monterey International Pop Foundation MIPF1967-1, 2017, vinyl LP. Recorded in 1967.

4

“All Romantics Meet the Same Fate Someday” Joni Mitchell, Blue, and Romanticism Christopher R. Clason

Joni Mitchell’s stature and accomplishments in the artistic realm of music are immense. As an iconic “woman of rock,”1 she has garnered accolades from critics in virtually every musical-disciplinary area. Her fourth album, Blue (1971), was proclaimed nothing less than the “greatest album made by a woman” in a National Public Radio review2 in 2017, while some critics have gone so far as to claim that Blue is “arguably the best album of all time” by any artist, male or female. 3 The songs of Blue treat issues of relationship, identity, women’s roles, and others in an intensely intimate and profound manner, couching their sophisticated lyrics in musical settings of similar erudition and beauty. They have been called “popular music” but are scarcely comparable to other examples of popular “hits” from the time, exuding a sparsity of mechanical production and arrangement, but at the same time evincing great intricacy and virtuosity in composition and performance. While critics have debated the degree to which features of Romanticism have reappeared in various twentieth-century art forms, current research has been disclosing numerous parallels and similarities between principles of Romanticism and the aesthetics of rock and roll.4 Affnities between Mitchell’s music and elements of European and North American Romanticism are apparent, but the specifc legacy of Romantic art in her artistic productions has scarcely moved beyond identifying general tendencies and thematic trends or outrightly denying them.5 Critics have regularly mined Mitchell’s biography for facts about her life that seem to explain aspects of her songs, but as a result they have often missed much of the artistic signifcance abundant in her work.6 Among Mitchell’s albums, Blue reveals these connections perhaps most clearly. In this chapter, I would like to examine three songs from Mitchell’s highly regarded 1971 album (“The Last Time I Saw Richard,” “A Case of You,” and “Blue”) through a “Romantic” critical perspective to illustrate the extent to which Mitchell’s music at the time is informed by principles and concerns that run parallel to those discussed by Romantic artists and philosophers, particularly the early German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schlegel. The project of German Romanticism, for which Schlegel’s contributions were key, included literary and aesthetic features DOI: 10.4324/9781003204855-5

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which have never, in fact, completely disappeared from western cultures, even during times when science and realism were primarily informing artistic disciplines.7 It is not my intent to map paths of infuence, since such attempts rely on biographical “facts” that demonstrate connections which may or may not have taken place in reality. Rather, I wish to ascertain the extent to which Joni Mitchell’s music and lyrics ft Romantic paradigms (particularly of German Romanticism) and how her compositions, as unique and defant of categorization as they may be, nevertheless hearken back to aesthetic principles of some two centuries past.

“The Last Time I Saw Richard”: Emotional Vulnerability and Subjectivity As the vast majority of her biographers and critics have pointed out, again and again, much of Blue was produced during a period of Mitchell’s life when she was facing several personal crises while battling deep psychological depression. Within a brief period, she had become an unwed mother but had chosen to give her baby up for adoption; she had married and then divorced her musical partner, Chuck Mitchell, with whom she had proved incompatible both personally and musically; and she had fallen deeply in love with a musician, Graham Nash, with whom she was very compatible both personally and musically, but felt far from prepared, willing, or able to carry through with their commitment, and so she left him. One is tempted to hear Blue through the flter of Joni Mitchell’s biography, as a confession in song by a very sensitive and eloquent woman who has lived through some extreme hardships. Perhaps it is even more tempting to draw parallels between Mitchell’s tumultuous relationships at that time and those of the women and men of early German Romanticism, for whom love was crucially important but whose relationships, especially their marriages, were also turbulent and certainly far from monogamous.8 However, this approach sells short the profound aesthetic value of this remarkable album: because her lyrics, compositions, performance techniques, and visual images on the Blue album confront the listener with a challenging aesthetic experience, the songs earn consideration as multi-faceted works of art that belong to serious artistic traditions beyond that of most popular music. Especially since these songs present such a high degree of aesthetic richness and complexity, they seem to shift the focus away from the artist and fx it rather on the work itself, and from there onto the listener’s own interpretation, universalizing the listener’s experience of it. As her biographer David Yaffe writes, Mitchell would not consider a purely biographical interpretation of her songs very productive: “Joni has often said that if you listen and are thinking of her, you’re doing it wrong. You should listen, she insists, and fnd yourself. ‘Otherwise,’ she said in 2013, ‘you’re just rubbernecking a car accident.’”9

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“The Last Time I Saw Richard,” the fnal song on the album, relates an acrimonious meeting between the artist and her former lover, whom she calls “Richard,” at the point of their relationship when they are about to split up and go their separate ways or have already done so. Although the song appears last on Blue, it nevertheless provides an excellent point of embarkation for discussing the aesthetic qualities of the whole album and for illustrating how these compositions evince principles and features of Romanticism. The story told in the song is simple: it is 1968, and the songwriter and her lover are holding their conversation in a bar in Detroit. In the give-and-take, each expresses frustration at the other’s delusions in life and lack of self-knowledge; in the fnal section of the song, describing their respective situations after they have fnally separated, the artist reports that they both have ended up depressed and, apparently, no wiser about their illusions. In the course of their bar conversation, each refers to the other as “Romantic” in two senses of the word: frst, Richard claims that people like her, with the Romantic faults he cites, wind up in bars like the one they are in; they become cynics and grow tiresome. He sees that the artist’s eyes contain “moon,” a common Romantic trope, as she stubbornly clings to the illusions of life, and naively believes men who fatter her with “pretty lies,” a phrase which he repeats with slight variations fve times in succession. Second, the artist considers Richard’s existential pain to be a romanticizing of something that doesn’t exist and claims that, although he seems to have death in his eyes (she’s not pulling any punches!), his selections from the jukebox also indicate a degree of romanticization, and asserts (four times) that love is (or can be) sweet. In the fnal section of the song, from a far later point in time, the artist summarizes their subsequent situations in just eight musical bars devoted to each person: Richard marries and settles down to a life of middle-class consumerism but feels he must keep the lights in his home brightly lit while he sits drinking alone. The artist, on the other hand, while she drinks alone in the darkened bar, wants to engage in no conversation whatsoever—thus, she has fulflled Richard’s prediction, having become something of an inebriated cynic. She sits in the dark, but at least she has eluded the prophecy that she would be boring someone. She claims that, although she may be caught now in a web of such dark experience, lingering alone in the shadows of the café, she declares that this is merely a stage in a metamorphosis—she fully expects that after she moves past this period of her life she will rise like a butterfy emerging from its chrysalis. The song is a Romantic tour-de-force with respect to lyrics, composition, and performance. In the folk song tradition, Mitchell sings to her own musical accompaniment and there is no other instrument playing in the recording; yet, the melodic and harmonic complexity of the song makes for a performance far more sophisticated than usually expected within the folk song tradition. The long piano introduction to the song

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extends over twenty-six bars as transcribed in her songbook10 and exhibits the complexity and dynamism of the harmonic structure, with its intricate chord voicings and alternations between major and minor key swings woven together with suspended chords and other alternative harmonies, unusual characteristics for popular musical compositions around 1970, but certainly calculated in this piece to accentuate the longing and disappointment associated with inconstant love, a leitmotiv that runs throughout the album. Furthermore, in this song, Mitchell makes extensive use of the long poetic line, some with as many as sixteen or eighteen syllables. Such lines accelerate the cadence of the song, and Mitchell delivers some of them breathlessly, as if the information they convey is most important to these estranged lovers and must be communicated, entirely, on this evening, the last time they see each other. The conversation begins with Richard’s statement, which is followed in the give-and-take by the artist’s words and is completed with the artist’s narrative summary. Thus, in one lyrical package, we have the three core genres of the lyric (the performed song, rhyme, etc.), the dramatic (the conversation, directly quoted), and the epic (the artist’s narrative), thereby aligning with Friedrich Schlegel’s observation that Romantic literature, as progressive-universal literature, should blend, coalesce, and juxtapose literary forms as a means to establish Romantic perspectives and affects.11 Romantic tropes and formulations in the song recur often. Richard presents his opinion of his lover’s supposed future, and thereby reveals his own tendency to project onto her precisely those faults that he contains—the fate that he forecasts for her, how she supposedly will wind up, is suggested later in her report on his subsequent life, that he now lives with a fgure-skater spouse, but that he mostly spends his nights in front of a television in a brightly lit room, alone and drinking. In the bar, his repetition of the phrase “pretty lies” presents an oxymoron12 but is also a negative take on one of the essentials of a Romantic sensibility: art does not render to our senses the “thing-in-itself,” and so remains an illusion; but in the illusion there may be beauty, and contemplating its aesthetic qualities educates us, according to Friedrich Schiller,13 to moral disposition and action. Richard’s formulation is, of course, sarcastic. For him, “pretty” implies that the lies are pleasant-sounding but superfcial. He is merely ridiculing what he considers her gullibility and her inclination to believe that which is not evident to him. Is not love a pretty lie? Both he and she seem utterly miserable, yet she repeats fve times her belief that love can be sweet. It is certainly not sweet love that we encounter in the darkened bar in Detroit in 1968, and he belittles her inclination to think the opposite. She, too, projects onto him qualities that may also be illusory, e.g., that his choice in music refects dreaminess, and that the pain he feels is nothing more than a romanticized illusion. She dismisses it as a mere

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phantom of his idiosyncratic perspective and, in her opinion, reveals his highly questionable judgment, which has led him to his current, unhappy state of mind. Both Richard and the artist judge one another from very subjective viewpoints that are informed by the sources of their own discontent. As their later fates seem to suggest, both retreat into their subjective, intractable positions, and it seems impossible that they could ever emerge again and meet in the middle. Instead, they project onto one another many of the qualities they may fnd in themselves. Perhaps it is their relationship, now ensconced in opposition, which has become the actual oxymoron. Richard and the artist each imply that the other’s eyes serve as “windows to the soul,” giving each what they believe is privileged evidence of what the other is truly feeling. In their statements each uses metaphorical language (according to him, her eyes refect the moon, and in his eyes she sees tombs) that connects the song to one of the seminal works of German Romanticism, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman,” 1814), possibly his best-known tale. In it, the protagonist, Nathanael, a young student suffering from a psychosis brought on by childhood trauma, becomes obsessed with eyes. He defnes his “reality” through his projections, creating in him a subjective perspective that no one and nothing can affect. He projects his inner torments upon his fancée Clara, for whom he writes a dreadful poem, ending with a macabre verse: “He looked into Clara’s eyes; but it was Death gazing welcomingly back at him.”14 Later, at the university he attends, Nathanael looks through a special, small telescope at what he thinks is a young woman, Olimpia, sitting in an apartment across from his own. Her eyes appear “oddly fxed and lifeless. But as he looked more and more keenly through the glass, it seemed as if damp moonbeams rose from Olimpia’s eyes.”15 Of course, Olimpia is a very sophisticated automaton, an experiment conducted by a physics professor and an evil lawyer named Coppelius, Nathanael’s nemesis. The death he believes he sees in Clara’s eyes, and the moonbeams he thinks he detects in Olimpia’s, are nothing more than what he has projected onto them. Tragically, the unwitting student falls deeply in love with the automaton and clings to his narcissistic delusions and to the veracity of his uncanny projections to the bitter end, when he commits suicide. In Mitchell’s song, the tropes seem less menacing physically, but certainly foretell the demise of the relationship between the artist and Richard. In Hoffmann’s tale, we also receive news of what will happen to Clara after Nathanael’s death—Hoffmann reports that her life will be far happier than it might have been with Nathanael: After several years it was said that Clara was seen in a distant region, as she sat holding hands with an amiable husband on the porch of a beautiful country house, and before her two animated boys were

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Thus, Clara enjoys her bourgeois happiness with her husband and without the subjective Nathanael, while Richard remains unhappy, having embraced his bourgeois trappings, but also living without his Romantic artist. In typically Romantic fashion, Hoffmann’s description of Clara’s future existence can easily be read ironically: there are very few idyllic scenes of bourgeois bliss in Hoffmann’s oeuvre, or for that matter in the works of any other German Romantic, and the brief description the “Sandmann” narrator gives reminds one more of an offhand, clichéd ekphrasis of a saccharine, bucolic painting. Mitchell’s irony is also palpable in her description of the artist’s current status, anticipating her future happiness but currently enduring a dark period of her life. The beautiful butterfy wings for which she hopes seem to be far from a sure thing, and one feels that any metamorphosis is wishful thinking, at least as long as she retains her misanthropic attitude. Mitchell’s ironic touch is well-grounded earlier in the song, in the voice of the barmaid; her prophetic exhortation, “Drink up now it’s gettin’ on time to close,”17 forecasts more than the end of the conversation. Her formulaic notice about the café closing for the evening ironically applies as well to the doomed relationship between Richard and the artist, which, as they fnish their drinks, will soon be ending, if it has not already done so.18 The fnal image of the metamorphosis from the cocoon of her dark period to the beautiful butterfy provides just one example of a profusion of natural metaphors that Mitchell regularly employs in her songs. On Blue her tropes refect a new ecological consciousness in early 1970s singer-songwriters; among them, Mitchell was one of but a few pioneers, and the spaces and objects of nature that she celebrates in her songs are carefully integrated into a variety of Romantic themes. In “Carrie,” the source of her restlessness and longing is the wind blowing northward across the Mediterranean Sea from Africa; her feelings of regret at losing a lover make her desire the oblivion and release that travel might afford her in “River,” where she hopes to disappear, skating off on a wintery, frozen river; her infant baby, to whom she devotes the song “Little Green,” is compared to spring fowers and to northern lights; in “Blue” (as we will see later), she presents her lover with the gift of a seashell in which he can believe that he hears the waves at the seashore; etc. The profusion of such imagery in her work aligns her songs with nature lyrics of the Romantics, whose metaphorical utilization of natural scenes and objects has profoundly affected how the modern world looks at nature.19

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Romantic Intoxication: “A Case of You.” Mitchell provides one of the most strikingly beautiful musical performances on the album in her song “A Case of You,” although she famously has told her biographer that it “is just a doormat song.”20 Her choice of a dulcimer for this and several other works on her album lends them something of an American-folk favor since the dulcimer is possibly “America’s oldest folk instrument,”21 and she exploits its rhythmic qualities, slapping out a kind of Calypso beat 22 while fngering austere but bright melody lines. In fact, in the frst song on the album, “All I Want,” the dulcimer’s joyous “twang” is the frst sound heard on Blue. Such interest in the “folk” (including songs, stories, instruments, customs, and other aspects of culture) became a signifcant part of 1960s’ and early 1970s’ American counter culture; similarly, the interest in Volkslied and Volkskunde (folk-culture) comprised a core principle of the German Romantics, many of whom found German folk art and culture instrumental for recovering a lost, historicized essence of what it meant to be truly “German.”23 However, in “A Case of You,” the voice of the dulcimer inspires nothing like joy and giddiness but rather conveys a seriousness not in the previous tune, a gravity that reverberates through one of the most visceral songs on the album, particularly in the chorus, in which she claims that her love, the “you” of the song, is “in my blood like holy wine./You taste so bitter and so sweet.”24 Accompanying her on acoustic guitar is James Taylor, with Russ Kunkel on percussion, but they are in a hopeless competition with the steady cadence of the dulcimer. 25 Her instrument, her voice, and her performance all blend solemnly as she reveals something of great importance about basic human reality. Mitchell seems to be on a mission of both joy and sorrow, and the listener discovers that the message is nothing less than how one experiences authentic love. The literary problem of how one can love authentically has a long tradition, extending back to classical times, but achieving a literary pinnacle during the High Middle Ages.26 In literature from the ancient world through the ffteenth century, eloquent and signifcant discussions of authentic love came in a variety of literary forms, from Ovid’s Ars amatoria to Gottfried von Straßburg’s early thirteenth-century epic poem, Tristan und Isolde. The medieval-obsessed Romantics delighted in the latter, a tale of love beyond all measure between the nephew and the wife of King Mark in Cornwall. The German version, an epic of almost twenty thousand lines composed by Gottfried, was particularly noted for its underlying thesis that love is the affrmation of life, and therefore true love is not just joy (as many courtiers would have had it), but rather a joy and sorrow in equal measure.27 Those who understand and accept authentic love were identifed by Gottfried as edele herzen, “noble hearts,” for whom the author composed his work, employing the rhetoric

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of the oxymoron and the language of the Eucharist in his prologue to foster an almost mystical appreciation of love’s enigmatic essence. The act of reading about the love of Tristan and Isolde thereby becomes a meditation on the mystery of authentic love itself. Gottfried expresses it thus: “This is bread to all noble hearts. With this their death lives on. We read their life, we read their death, and to us it is sweet as bread.”28 The onset of love between the lovers occurs on the sea in a boat sailing to Cornwall from Ireland, on which King Mark’s nephew accompanies Isolde, the Princess of Ireland, whom he has successfully wooed to marry his uncle. Tristan, fnding onboard the ship what he thinks is wine—actually it is a powerful love potion—drinks it and offers it to Isolde, who also imbibes it. As if it were sacramental (i.e., the outward sign of an inward change of disposition), the potion enters their blood, and they become hopelessly enamored with one another. Unable to contain their feelings, they consummate their relationship on board the skiff, and numerous times thereafter, even after Isolde becomes a queen in Cornwall. Later in the story, Tristan pays a stealthy, nocturnal visit to Isolde in their sleeping quarters, amidst the slumbering courtly retinue, by leaping from his bed to hers, unwittingly thereby opening a wound he had received earlier in the day and soiling her bed with his blood. The blood-soaked sheets and Tristan’s bleeding wound serve as evidence of the adulterous couple’s lovemaking that night; the king and his court discover this in the morning, and it nearly leads to the lovers’ execution. Thus, in Tristan und Isolde, blood becomes proof of love: a mad, extreme, and undeniable variety of loving that becomes as destructive as it is delightful and as dangerous as it is exquisite. The image that each is in the other’s blood is thus a most striking and appropriate metaphor for love, which functions like the titillation one feels by drinking wine, and like life itself it is fraught with bitterness and sweetness. Critics and biographers have often noted that the person to whom Mitchell most likely addresses her song is the late, fellow-Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, and the facts about their relationship have become the source material for a standard “reading” of it, beyond which most have not dared to venture. 29 Unfortunately, such readings omit many of the song’s more signifcant levels of meaning. Establishing the identity of the “other” in the poem as Cohen, however, does provide an access point to these meanings, because Cohen was renowned as a poet/songwriter for whom mythology occupies an important place in art. Mitchell engages the “you” of the text with a deconstruction of his mythic language, when, for example, she cites his allusion to Shakespeare’s quotation concerning the constancy of the Northern Star, which, while it doesn’t change its position, certainly and unfalteringly resides in the most obscure darkness, the dead of night. She thereby appropriates and bends the metaphor toward a new meaning, which includes the aspects of distance, gloom, and murkiness.

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The problem with the kind of academic “literary-quotation” and consciously mythicizing statement produced by the “you” of the song is that it becomes a way of not loving, by keeping the experience too much within one’s rational faculties, thereby holding one’s emotions back and aloof; a way of not coming to terms with the reality of love. The “you” lives very much in an intellectual universe, quoting literary sources such as Shakespeare (Julius Caesar)30 and Rilke (“Liebes-Lied” [Love Song]).31 Such love as the “you” speaks of here is not heartfelt but is rather a discussed love that resides safely in the intellect. Emotionally speaking, this love is indeed the darkness. When the “you” summarizes Rilke’s “Liebeslied,” an intensely evocative and intimate poem, reducing it to a short cliché about souls that touch, the utter absence of any trace of humanity (even pronouns with human antecedents are missing from his text) in the intellectual formulation is chilling. Mitchell responds by expanding and personalizing the metaphor, thus reclaiming some of the power and intimacy of Rilke’s verse.32 She goes on to assert that from her perspective authentic love cannot consist only of the pleasures of the intellect expressed through literary quotation. To love truly is to bleed, as she is reminded by the woman who knows the “you” well. When one loves this intensely, it feels metaphorically as if the other has entered one’s blood, and so, when Mitchell creates lyrics about her love, the lines communicate things from deep inside her: sometimes a part of that other bleeds out of her and onto the page. Mitchell’s numerous artistic activities (her interests extend to dance as well as the plastic and musical arts) include her high accomplishments as a painter. She has repeatedly asserted that, as an artist, she thinks of herself primarily as a painter and secondarily as a musician.33 That she is highly accomplished as a painter has been made amply clear on many of her album covers, including the artwork on Song to a Seagull, 34 Court and Spark, 35 Night Ride Home, 36 Turbulent Indigo, 37 and others. In “A Case of You” she affrms her identity as a plastic artist. The Romantics, too, often exhibit genius in several artistic areas of endeavor, both as fctional characters and as fesh-and-blood creative artists. Perhaps the earliest German Romantic literary work (1796) came in the form of a collection of fctitious “essays” (perhaps more correctly panegyrics for the paintings of past masters, Raphael and Albrecht Dürer), entitled Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1796; “Heartfelt Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar”), which championed painting as the highest form of Romantic art. Ludwig Tieck’s early Romantic novel, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald’s Journeyman Years, 2 vols., 1798) frmly established the German Künstlerroman (artist novel) among the early Romantics as a form dealing with the education of a painter to true artistry. A decade later, music would vie with painting for status as the primary Romantic Kunstform, most emphatically in the essays and works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, 38 who was a musical

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composer and performer, and also a sketch artist and caricaturist of some talent, all in addition to his career as jurist and renown for his most memorable artistic endeavors, as perhaps the fnest storyteller among the German Romantics. Such a multiplicity of artistic talents is certainly not the provenance solely of Romantics, but Romanticism’s programmatic elevation of various artistic genres and their practitioners and the intentional incorporation of diverse aesthetic categories by other literary types are essential to their agenda, as Friedrich Schlegel’s “116th Athenäums-Fragment” declares: “[die romantische Poesie] umfasst alles, was nur poetisch ist, vom größten wieder mehrere Systeme in sich enthaltenden Systeme der Kunst bis zu dem Seufzer, dem Kuss, den das dichtende Kind aushaucht in kunstlosen Gesang” (“[Romantic literature] includes all that is poetic, from the greatest systems of art that contain systems of art within themselves, to the sigh and kiss that the poeticizing child breathes forth in artless song”).39 The ideal Romantic aesthetic situation produces art within art, in which the art work becomes a commentary about other works, not only in describing other works (as in ekphrasis) but also as the artist claiming an identity in another realm of art, as Mitchell does in “A Case of You.”

“Blue”: Romantic Seascape and a Life of Longing The German novelist and philosopher known as “Novalis” (the pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg) introduced the “Blaue Blume” (Blue Flower) of Romanticism in his incomplete novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen, 1800). The frst chapter of the novel describes young Heinrich’s dream one night: as the boy is bathing in a gentle spring within an underground grotto, he fnds himself at the edge of the water, where he spots a beautiful, pale blue fower. The petals of the blossom spread apart, revealing the image of a young girl, whom he suddenly intuits to be his future beloved. He soon awakens, but the vision has kindled an intimation of deepest longing in his heart that carries on into his waking hours and so catalyzes the rest of the novel’s plot as it sends him on an extended journey toward his ancestral home in Augsburg and, flled with Romantic yearning from the dream of the “Blaue Blume,” on the quest to fnd his love.40 While the tonal palette of German Romantic authors and painters is extremely varied, describing and rendering objects, landscapes, and even ideas in vivid colors as well as in dark and obscure images, one of the most signifcant colors of the Romantic movement is the blue of Novalis’s “die Blaue Blume.” Blue is the color of the sky and the sea, two of Romanticism’s favorite, visually inspiring spaces. In the German language, a “Fahrt ins Blaue” is the equivalent of a journey “into the wild blue yonder,” a trip that has no specifc goal, where the reason for the trip is less important than the trip itself.41 Motivating the travel are

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longing and melancholy, the sources of which are often not specifc, or which are completely unknown and merely intuited.42 The concept that the act of journeying is more signifcant than achieving the destination permeates German Romantic literature, from Ludwig Tieck through E.T.A. Hoffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff, and even to the very end of Romanticism in the Reisebilder (“travel narratives”) and lyric poetry of Heinrich Heine.43 Thus, experience through travel and the color blue, taken together, are signifcant ingredients in German Romantic literature and painting. Mitchell’s album Blue was largely born of her own travels, images of which permeate nearly every song on the album. Mitchell wrote several of the songs during and directly after a trip she had just taken, spending some fve weeks in Matala on the island of Crete as well as a short time in a village in Spain and in Paris. There is a palpable restlessness about the songs, a recurring sense of unfulflled longing, which particularly the music and the performances in several instances underscore. In the previously discussed “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” the impatience felt by the two former lovers is accentuated by the repeated delays in resolution of chord progressions, particularly of suspended chords, by the long, breathless lyrical lines, and by the barmaid’s interruption, urging the couple to fnish their drinks and leave because the bar is closing. In “River” Mitchell paints a Christmas card image of the holiday season and even samples modifed lines from “Jingle Bells” at the beginning and the very end of the song,44 but she surprisingly destroys the mood created by the Christmas music with her wish to escape it all by skating away on a frozen river. At the very end of the vocal performance (and just prior to sounding the altered “Jingle Bells” chords on the piano) Mitchell’s voice turns gloomy and leaden for the fnal “I wish I had a river I could skate away on,”45 which prepares the listener for the musical surprise that follows. In the last few bars, she returns to a transformed “Jingle Bells” progression, but the scene turns bleaker, even uncanny, when the familiar major chords of the common Christmas carol are delivered in syncopated rhythm, carried through a minor series of modifed chords to end on an unresolved Dm7—clearly, she is very impatient to get far away from the happy people enjoying the holiday, since the contrast of their joy with her sorrow, articulated unmistakably in the minor seventh, is torturous for her. In at least one song on Blue, “This Flight Tonight,” even when she is traveling she feels unnerved and wishes she were elsewhere, doing something, anything else: her guitar delivers chords that dart from one variation of a G chord to the next (including G, G11, Gm7, G5, Gmaj7, etc.) as it is searching the acoustic environment for a place to settle but can fnd none, while her worried voice soars above all else in the chorus, lamenting having departed from her lover and regretting ever having “got on this fight tonight.”46

92 Christopher R. Clason In the song “Blue,” the travel is to sea, where Mitchell claims to have been before, while she paints a metaphorical marine landscape as background to possibly the fnest work on the album. While the album brings the listener on an intensely emotional journey through personal disappointments of a time of great public discontent (the expansion of the Vietnam confict as well as the realization that the ideals of the “Age of Aquarius” were unachievable), the song “Blue” deals with some of the most diffcult emotional adversity and ruinous paraphernalia of life at the end of the 1960s. This includes the tattoo, or more specifcally, the process of tattooing, which, by penetrating the skin and flling up the space (the emptiness of contemporary life?) there, points directly at the drug culture that would provide the images of alcohol, drug abuse, and marijuana later in the song. Furthermore, the tattoo is a tradition of those who spend time at sea: sailors, pirates, merchant mariners, and others. For them, the image of a crown or an anchor, emblazoned on their skin, are symbols that indicate that the sea is their life; not an easy one, and not for everyone, but one that demands commitment and know-how. For Mitchell, her imperative, directed at the “you” (whom she has named “Blue”) of the song to “crown and anchor me/or let me sail away,”47 expands the metaphor from the marine environment to include the ecology of relationship and asks “Blue” to make up his mind, to accept her in this relationship or to set her free. The crown and anchor tattoos in this context imply the richness and the permanence of what one would hope for in an authentic, loving relationship, but letting her sail away—ending the relationship and saying goodbye—is also possible. The condition of being “in-between” is clearly torturous. It is important to note that this and other metaphors of “Blue” operate on several layers and present a personal dilemma (the unclarity of the artist’s path through life, love, addiction, etc.) in a musical and verbal structure that echoes one of the main aesthetic principles of Romanticism: art becoming the aestheticization of life itself.48 Another of the most signifcant metaphors of the song, as well as the title of the album and the image on its cover, is the color “blue.” The album cover’s photograph, shot by Tim Considine while Mitchell was performing at a concert (Monk 11), shows her face “possibly in ecstasy, possibly in sorrow, probably in both, and she is sinking into the color blue.”49 Again, the prologue to the medieval epic Tristan und Isolde comes to mind, wherein love consists of both bliss and agony; here, the ambivalence of the image accurately renders the uncertainty apparent everywhere in the album, where the artist seems to be perched on a razor’s edge between the two poles, and where each emotion with its raw intensity can fip at any moment to its opposite. The color blue represents a space between extremes, for example, of the sea and the land, of commitment and abandonment, or of joy and sorrow; blue is the color of

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the ambient light that accompanies the prototypical Romantic condition of in-betweenness, becoming, and change, of longing without hope of satisfaction. In the song “Blue,” the artist occupies such a liminal state, as some of the lines suggest either/or choices: between acceptance and commitment or breaking up, between knowing what will do harm to oneself but being curious about it anyhow, and ultimately between the emptiness inside and the problematic, short-term easing of pain through drug use.50 A third Romantic metaphor is the seashell elucidated in the fnal verse. In the human psyche, the seashell invokes its origins like few other objects: it operates as a mnemonic device that jolts one’s memory, both visually and tactilely, to thoughts of the seashore. Conch shells particularly generate such associations, since they possess an added feature to those of the more common, fat seashells: they also enclose an empty space. However, it is a popular folk custom to hold such a hollow shell up to one’s ear; then one supposedly can hear what folk wisdom asserts is the sound of the ocean. Of course, science can explain the phenomenon as the echoes of the listener’s own blood pumping through the arteries in the neck, which the shell, held against the ear, picks up and amplifes in its hollow spaces, then returns to the ear of the listener, who then supposedly believes she or he has heard the breaking of the waves at the beach where the conch shell was found. But for an imaginative person, it is perhaps more “Romantic” to identify the sound with the song of the sea. In “Blue,” Mitchell appropriates the seashell’s “music”: she claims that the song is her gift to Blue, labeling it as an ambiguous sighing that may express longing or impatience, or as a musical sedative, an image recalling the seashore’s fogginess that dampens sound and the soporifc genre of song (the lullaby) that tranquilizes the listener to ease her or his pain and perhaps fnally to put the listener to sleep. Again, the metaphor supports several layers of meaning. While the tattoo of the frst verse signifes permanence, a kind of branding, the gift given in exchange in the fnal verse, the shell’s music is both permanent (in the sense that the lullaby is constantly available, merely by lifting the shell to one’s ear) and feeting (since a sigh is but a single breath, and since the acoustic effects of the shell disappear as soon as one lowers it from one’s ear). In one sense it is precious since it represents the gift of a lover who is also a musician; on the other hand, it is common, an object merely found at the seashore (and not won through arduous effort). Finally, it offers an object from nature, a reminder of the healing that is possible in the “natural world” for one who perhaps has been worn down by the object-traps of the “civilized world.”51 Mitchell is keenly aware of the Rousseauian mandate, expressed in some of her best-known works (e.g., “pave paradise, put up a parking lot,” or “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden”).52

94 Christopher R. Clason Perhaps the greatest psychological danger threatening the Romantic personality is unfulflled longing. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther) fctionalized the depression and despair that Romantic artists and philosophers doubtlessly felt later. The casualty list of late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century artists who could not endure is tragically long, and it includes the names of some of the fnest contemporary Romantic artists. Heinrich von Kleist and Karoline von Günderode committed suicide, as Werther had done; a number of other German, British, and American Romantic and post-Romantic artists, authors, and philosophers died at an extremely young age (Wackenroder, Novalis, Büchner, P.B. Shelley, Byron), suffered from debilitating neuroses (Lenz, Hölderlin, Schumann), drank alcohol in excess (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Poe), or composed works with a strongly nihilistic message (Klingemann). Mitchell may seem to be on a dangerous path toward oblivion by the end of “Blue.” However, as Whitesell points out, her fnal piano progression offers a ray of hope by ending in a major mode: “as the piano postlude winds down. . . it comes to rest on a major tonic sonority— yet another unexpected, extraneous fight of fancy, a symbol of hope not quite deferred.”53 Despite the deep and almost relentless depression implicit in most of the songs on Blue, at this crucial moment there is still a message of hope built into the music. Mitchell will not give up nor give herself over to despair. For her it is essential that the artist resist these tendencies—she can endure. While “Blue” may be a “devastating love song,”54 it offers at least a fnal spark, a glimmer of light to illuminate her way out of the depressing and cynical times and toward personal redemption in contrast to her minor tones at the end of “River,” described above.

Conclusion: Joni Mitchell and Romanticism, Abiding and Enduring In a previous, similar collection, the editor, James Rovira, explains that “all essays [in that collection] assume that Romanticism continues into the present as an essential feature of modern culture and takes on a specifc, musical transformation in the period following World War II” (xiv).55 From Mitchell’s interest in environmental issues, through her use of borders and space, her appeal to mythic and medieval topoi, her incorporation of folk culture and instruments in her songs, and her focus on various Romantic themes to her use of alternative, exotic, and experimental forms and structures (including jazz, folk, rock, and others), she evinces many aspects of Romantic art, language, and life in most of her works and throughout her career. However, Blue holds a unique place in her many nods to Romanticism, primarily because the album and its songs arise from a period of

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more turmoil and upheaval than perhaps any other in her life and thus contain more raw emotional content than the vast majority of her other eighteen albums. Yet, her stark emotions and vulnerability become the material of high art since each song is contained within a carefully crafted poetic and musical form, and each is given a nuanced performance on the album. Despite the affective intensity expressed in Blue, there is no sense of maudlin sentimentality, except where it is called out and criticized as such (e.g., in the aforementioned self-critical passages in “The Last Time I Saw Richard”). However, where sadness and sorrow are deep and cutting, or where joy occasionally bubbles to the surface of a song, such emotions are given the dignity of serious aesthetic expression, recalling what Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his defnition of Romanticism, that Romantic art’s duty is to “make life and society poetic” (37). Mitchell thinks of herself primarily as a painter, and the brush with which she paints this album brings blue paint into the picture. That “blue” is the color of German Romanticism’s most identifable characteristic, “die Blaue Blume,” is vitally important as context for the ten songs of Blue, and dominates the symbolic color palette. It is the principal color in fve of the songs: in “All I Want” she and her lover hurt each other and “blue” describes their sorrow; in “My Old Man,” a “blue” mood characterizes her loneliness when he’s gone; when she’s not in “California,” the news from her distant home gives her “the blues”; in “A Case of You,” the artist as painter draws a map of Canada with two superimposed sketches of her lover’s face, all accomplished by the light of a television screen that provides a blue ambiance. The album’s title song goes so far as to personify the color—not as an apostrophe, but rather as a fesh-and-blood lover who seems to be sinking through the hell of contemporary culture, and the ambient light of his downfall is decidedly blue. Blue is the illuminating medium through which each song conveys its visual images. There are no rose-colored glasses here: they are defnitely a shade of blue. Thus, the “blue” leitmotif is ubiquitous on the album, both acoustically in the songs and graphically on the cover. It remains the clearest, most visual, and most defning characteristic of this work of art, and links it especially to the “Blaue Blume” of the German Romantics, thereby setting up a paradigm of musical/lyric and aesthetic values with roots that have endured well over two hundred years.

Notes 1 It is not possible to categorize Mitchell’s music purely as “rock” or, for that matter, as any other strictly defned musical genre. Her earliest works, as well as her later compositions, contain elements of folk, rock, blues, classical, and jazz music as well as other forms, and thus I maintain that one may properly speak of affnities, tendencies, and trends in describing her music rather than of generic absolutes.

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2 “Turning the Tables: The 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women,” https://www. npr.org/2017/07/20/538307314/ turning-the-tables-150-greatest-albums-madeby-women-page-15 (accessed 24 June 2019). 3 See Katherine Monk, Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (Vancouver and Berkeley, CA: Greystone, 2012), 129; John Corbett, Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 59–60. 4 Signifcant critical works that have attempted to establish the connections between rock music and Romanticism include Robert Pattison, The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism (New York and Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 1987); Perry Meisel, The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1999); and the predecessors of this collection, Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, ed. and intro. by James Rovira (Lanham, Boulder, et al.: Lexington Books, 2018), and Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms, ed. and intro. by James Rovira (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 5 See, for example, the scathing and extreme review of the late 1975 album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, by Perry Meisel for Village Voice, who, in criticizing Mitchell’s earlier works as well, states, The question of literary prototypes also raises the question of Mitchell’s relation to real Romanticism [!]. The High Romantics themselves were by no means the pantheists our high schools like to teach, nor were they the source of Mitchell’s naive assumptions about the status of nature. Shelley, for example, begins his famous poem in awe of Mont Blanc, and ends by asserting that he has imagined it. Not only is there not [a] way back to the garden that Mitchell’s “Woodstock” once demanded—nature itself may not even exist. There is no state of innocence down ”underneath,” where she expects it to be. http://jonimitchell.com/library/view.cfm?id=412 (consulted 24 June 2019). 6 A case in point: before Mitchell revealed that the song “Little Green” concerned her baby whom she had given up for adoption, some critics dismissed it as too obscure to take seriously, but since she publicly established the song’s connection to the biographical incident, “Little Green” has received high acclamation. See David Yaffe, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell (New York: Sarah Crichton, 2017), 40–41. 7 For example, with respect to literary art, during the last decades of the nineteenth century the extreme, realism-oriented, “photographic” duplication of nature in such artistic movements as “Naturalism” (represented by authors such as Emile Zola in France or Gerhard Hauptmann in Germany), which was based on new scientifc discoveries by Charles Darwin or Gregor Mendel, grew alongside imagination-driven, contemporaneous artistic movements such as Symbolism in France or Neo-Romanticism in Germany, epitomized by such authors as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stefan George, and the young Rainer Maria Rilke. See Ernst Grabovszk, “Literary Movements of the 1890s: Symbolism, Impressionism, and fn-de-siecle Austria,” German Literature of the Nineteenth Century, 1832–1899, ed. Clayton Koelb and Eric Downing, Camden House History of German Literature 9 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 139–154. 8 See Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,

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2002), 40–45, 91–93, and 166–176; Richards weaves the cultural, political, philosophical, and literary aspects of the early Romantics together with their personal histories and illustrates how such talented women as Caroline Schlegel Schelling and Dorothea Veit Schlegel participated in the intellectual and social lives at that time. Indeed, the parallels between their experiences as described by Richards and those Yaffe recounts of Joni Mitchell at the time she was composing and recording Blue are remarkable. Yaffe, Reckless Daughter, 143. See Joni Mitchell, Joni Mitchell: Complete So Far (Van Nuys, CA: Alfred Music, 2014), 129–133. Schlegel developed a defnition, of sorts, for Romantic literature in the 116th “Athenäums-Fragment,” published in 1799 in the aesthetic journal Athenäum: “Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universal-Poesie” (“Romantic literature is a progressive and universal literature”), thus emphasizing its aesthetic tendencies for expansion and resistance to closure and completion; see Friedrich Schlegel, “116th Athenäums-Fragment,” Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1958), 37. Such oxymora describing love provide another Romantic rhetorical device; perhaps the most famous of these is Karoline von Günderode’s take on love, consisting of nothing but a series of antithetical statements; see “Liebe,” http://www.wortblume.de/dichterinnen/liebegue.htm (consulted 17 June 2019). This concept is fully developed by Schiller in the time just prior to the blossoming of the Romantic movement in Germany, see Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Keith Tribe, intro. Alexander Schmidt (New York, London, etc.: Penguin, 2016). “Nathanael blickt in Claras Augen; aber es ist der Tod, der mit Claras Augen ihn freundlich anschaut” (E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Der Sandmann,” 11–49 in E. T. A. Hoffmann Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3, Nachtstücke, Klein Zaches, Prinzessin Brambilla: Werke 1816–1820, ed. Hartmut Steinecke with collab. of Gerhard Allroggen (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985 [2009]); my translation. “Nur die Augen schienen ihm gar seltsam starr und tot. Doch wie er immer schärfer und schärfer durch das Glas hinschaute, war es, als gingen in Olimpia’s Augen feuchte Mondesstrahlen auf.” Hoffmann, “Der Sandmann,” 36; my translation. “Nach mehreren Jahren will man in einer entfernten Gegend Clara gesehen haben, wie sie mit einem freundlichen Mann, Hand in Hand vor der Türe eines schönen Landhauses saß und vor ihr zwei muntre Knaben spielten. Es wäre daraus zu schließen, daß Clara das ruhige häusliche Glück noch fand, das ihrem heitern lebenslustigen Sinn zusagte und das ihr der im Innern zerrissene Nathanael niemals hätte gewähren können.” Hoffmann, “Der Sandmann,” 49; my translation. Joni Mitchell, “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” on Blue, Reprise MS 2038, 44128 (1971) 33 1/3 rpm. In Mitchell’s performance of this song on her album Miles of Aisles, Asylum AB 202 (1974) 33 1/3 rpm, recorded live with Tom Scott and the L.A. Express in the Universal Amphitheatre in August 1974, she underscores her ironic treatment of this line; there, she interrupts the fow of the performance with a single, loudly voiced root note on the piano, and mundanely delivers the line, spoken rigidly, in a voice modulated to seem bossy and impatient.

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19 The number of ecocritical studies of German Goethezeit and Romantic literature is enormous and interest in them shows no sign of diminishing; some examples from recent years include the essays in the special environmental section, edited by Luke Fischer and Dalia Nassar, of the Goethe Yearbook 22.1 (2015); Heather I. Sullivan, “Nature in a Box: Ecocriticism, Goethe’s Ironic Werther, and Unbalanced Nature,” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 2.2 (2011): 228–244; Seth Peabody, “Goethe and (Um)Weltliteratur: Environment and Power in Goethe’s Literary Worlds,” Seminar 54.2 (May 2018): 215–230; the volume edited by Gabriele Dürbeck, Urte Stobbe, Hubert Zapf, and Evi Zemanek, Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture, Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Lanham, MD, Boulder, New York, etc.: Lexington Books, 2017); Catrin Gersdorf and Juliane Braun, ed., America after Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016; and Ronald D. Morrison, “Wordsworth’s ‘Michael,’ the Georgic, and Blackberry Smoke,” 127–139 in Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, ed. James Rovira, For the Record: Lexicon Studies in Rock and Popular Music (Lanham, MD, Boulder, New York, etc.: Lexington Books, 2018); aside from Mitchell’s appearance at the Amchitka concert to launch Greenpeace in 1970, her credentials as an environmental activist/artist include a number of her earlier songs, such as “Song to a Seagull,” “Cactus Tree,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock” (all written before most of the songs on Blue), a vast number of songs from the ffteen studio albums she has produced since 1971, as well as public appearances in support of environmental initiatives and organizations of various kinds. 20 Yaffe, Reckless Daughter, 148. 21 See the website for Appalachian History at http://www.appalachianhistory. net/2007/01/americas-oldest-folk-instrument.html (accessed 17 June 2019); Mercer refers to the dulcimer as Mitchell’s “standout hippie prop” during her trip to Crete around the time Blue’s songs were being written: A few months earlier, she had commissioned a mountain dulcimer from a local Los Angeles artisan, Joellen Lapidus, and she took her new instrument on the road. The dulcimer’s soft but bright drone served Mitchell well in the nightly cave music circles, where she held it across her lap, strumming melodies with a fat pick and sliding depressions of the strings to create her own accompaniment while she sang. (20) 22 See Michelle Mercer, Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period (Milwaukee: Backbeat Books/Hal Leonard, 2012), 23. 23 Fabian Lampart, “The Turn to History and the Volk: Brentano, Arnim, and the Grimm Brothers,” 171–189 in The Literature of German Romanticism, ed. Dennis F. Mahoney. Camden House History of German Literature 8 (Rochester, NY and Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2004); it was indeed a bizarre perversion of the German Romantic interest in the Volk that devolved into the pseudo-mythological abomination of Teutonic racial superiority that eventually led to the obscenity of twentieth-century Nazism; still the most helpful investigations of this history remain two volumes by George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), and The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: H. Fertig, 1975).

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24 Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You,” on Blue, Reprise MS 2038, 44128 (1971) 33 1/3 rpm. 25 Yaffe notes that “her open-tuned dulcimer bangs out percussive, rough-andtumble chords while James Taylor’s standard-tuning acoustic guitar tries to bring resolution but is drowned out” (147). 26 Although the critical literature on literary works concerning love in medieval times is vast, two studies are especially helpful for fnding one’s way through it, especially James Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), and Albrecht Classen, ed., Words of Love and Love of Words in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 347 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008). 27 See my essay, “‘Good Lovin’’: The Language of Erotic Desire and Fulfllment in Gottfried’s Tristan,” Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: New Approaches to a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and Literary-Anthropological Theme, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 257–278. 28 Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan: With the Tristan of Thomas, trans. and intro. A. T. Hatto (London, New York, et al.: Penguin, 1960), 44. 29 See, for example, Yaffe, Reckless Daughter, 147–148. 30 The passage in Julius Caesar stems from Caesar himself and is spoken not with reference to love, but rather as an egotistical, self-congratulatory statement of the emperor’s immovability when it comes to frm decision-making: “I am constant as the northern star, Of whose true-fx’d and resting quality There is no fellow in the frmament.”

(III, i, 60–62)

31 Rainer Maria Rilke, in his “Liebes-Lied,” presents one of the most personal, heartfelt, and emotional statements of love, in which the reader is certain of the relationship between the lyric “I” and the receptive “you” (Rilke, Neue Gedichte [Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1907], 3; all translations are my own) 32 Thus, when Rilke asks (questioning rhetorically in the negative), “How can I ever hold my soul so that / it doesn’t touch yours?” (“Wie soll ich meine Seele halten, daß / sie nicht an deine rührt?”), we cannot imagine that the relationship between the poet and his beloved is anything but intimate, and as much as the “you” voice in “A Case of You” seems to depersonalize Rilke’s poetic lines, Mitchell rescues them for the emotionally engaged lyric “I” of the song and returns to the image its dignity as a high poetic trope. 33 Mercer, Will You Take Me As I Am, 71. 34 Joni Mitchell, Song to a Seagull, Reprise RS 6293 (1968), 33 1/3 rpm. 35 Joni Mitchell, Court and Spark, Asylum 1001-2 (1974), 33 1/3 rpm. 36 Joni Mitchell, Night Ride Home, Geffen Records GEFD 24388 (1991), compact disc. 37 Joni Mitchell, Turbulent Indigo, Reprise 9 45768-2 (1994), compact disc. 38 For Hoffmann’s perspective on music as the most Romantic of the arts, see Kristina Muxfeldt, “The Romantic Preoccupation with Musical Meaning,” 251–271 in The Literature of German Romanticism (q.v.), here 254. 39 See Friedrich Schlegel, “116th Athenäums-Fragment,” 38. 40 See Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, trans. Palmer Hilty (Prospect Hgts, IL: Waveland, 1990 [1964]), 15–17.

100 Christopher R. Clason 41 The Duden Rechtschreibung-Wörterbuch online (https://www.duden.de/ rechtschreibung/blau#bedeutungen) defnes “ins Blaue” as: “umgangssprachlich: ohne Zweck und festes Ziel, ins Ungewisse hinein: ins Blaue fahren; zu: Blau als Farbe der unbestimmten Ferne” (“colloquial: without purpose and defnite goal, into the unknown: ins Blaue fahren; derivation: blue, as the color of undetermined distance” [accessed 24 June 2019], my translation). 42 For example, in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s essay on Beethoven’s instrumental music, which for Hoffmann is the most sublime Romantic art form, he praises the composer whose musical treatment of fear, awe, horror, and suffering “erweckt eben jene unendliche Sehnsucht, welche das Wesen der Romantik ist” (“awakens just that infnite longing which is the essence of Romanticism” [Hoffmann, quoted in Muxfeldt, 254]). 43 Many of the German Romantic prose works, as well as much of the lyric poetry, are informed by travel; Tieck’s Franz Sternbald is a journeyman painter; Hoffmann’s novels are built upon characters (the Capuchin monk Medardus and the Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler) for whom travel is essential; Eichendorff’s unwitting Taugenichts (good-for-nothing) treks from his German village southward to Rome and returns home again; and Heine’s travel sketches are among the best-loved humorous essays from the period, especially his satirical Reisebild “Die Harzreise.” 44 Yaffe, Reckless Daughter, 137. 45 Joni Mitchell, “River,” on Blue, Reprise MS 2038, 44128 (1971) 33 1/3 rpm. 46 Joni Mitchell, “This Flight Tonight,” on Blue, Reprise MS 2038, 44128 (1971) 33 1/3 rpm. 47 Joni Mitchell, “Blue,” on Blue, Reprise MS 2038, 44128 (1971) 33 1/3 rpm. 48 The German Romantics were particularly interested in poeticizing life and thus elevating it so that all aspects of it could rise to the level of art. In his 116th Athenäums-Fragment, Schlegel states, “[Die Romantische Poesie] will und soll. . . die Poesie lebendig und gesellig und das Leben und die Gesellschaft poetisch machen” (“[Romantic literature] is intended to and should. . . make literature alive and sociable, and make life and society poetic”; my translation); see Friedrich Schlegel, “116th Athenäums-Fragment,” 37. 49 Yaffe, Reckless Daughter, 130. 50 In an earlier album (Joni Mitchell, Song to a Seagull, Reprise RS 6293 [1968], 33 1/3 rpm) Mitchell employed a similar metaphor for the feeling of hollowness/emptiness within, the image of the desert cactus plant that carries water in its hollow interior, in the song “Cactus Tree”: “And her heart is full and hollow / Like a cactus tree.”] 51 The musical meter for most of this song is 4/4. However, as Whitesell notes, “when the poetic lines shift from around seven syllables (‘Well there’s so many sinking’) to fve syllables (‘Acid, booze and ass’), the meter shrinks to 3/4, grinding to a halt after a few bars before being able to resume” (162). 52 The former quote from Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi,” the latter from her “Woodstock,” both on the album Ladies of the Canyon, Reprise RS 6376 (1970), 33 1/3 rpm; it is interesting to note that, while the former song is upbeat and somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “Woodstock,” as it is performed in the album (and in contrast to the “hit” version by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, on Déjà Vu, Atlantic SD 7200 [1970]. 33 1/3 rpm) is very dark and ominous, perhaps foreboding the dashed hopes and innocence of the “Sixties Generation.” 53 Lloyd Whitesell, The Music of Joni Mitchell (Oxford, New York, et al.: Oxford University Press, 2008), 137. 54 Whitesell, The Music of Joni Mitchell, 135. 55 Rovira, ed., Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, xiv.

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Bibliography Brackett, David. Interpreting Popular Music. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, [1995] 2000. Corbett, John. Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music. Chicago, IL and London: U of Chicago P, 2019. Crouse, Timothy. Rev. of Blue. Rolling Stone 5 August 1971. https://www. rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/blue-104415/. Last consulted 12 February 2021. Echols, Alice. Shaky Ground: The ‘60s and Its Aftershocks. New York and Chichester: Columbia UP, 2002. Gates, Sarah. “‘Songs are Like Tattoos’: Literary Artistry and Social Critique in Joni Mitchell’s Blue.” Women’s Studies 45 (2016): 711–725. Henderson, Stuart. “‘All Pink and Clean and Full of Wonder?’ Gendering ‘Joni Mitchell,’ 1966–74.” Left History 10.2 (Fall 2005): 83–109. Joni Mitchell Offcial Website, http://jonimitchell.com/ Last consulted 12 February 2021. Mellers, Wilfrid. Angels of the Night: Popular Female Singers of our Time. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986, 141–168. Mercer, Michelle. Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books/Hal Leonard, 2012. Monk, Katherine. Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell. Vancouver, BC and Berkeley, CA: Greystone, 2012. Nelson, Sean. “Court and Spark.” 33 1/3 Greatest Hits 2 (2007): 323–338. Pattison, Robert. The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism. New York and Oxford: Oxfort UP, 1987. Rovira, James, ed. Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2. For the Record: Lexington Studies in Rock and Popular Music. Lanham, Boulder, et al.: Lexington Books, 2018. Shumway, David R. Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. Weller, Sheila. Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon— and the Journey of a Generation. New York, London et al.: Atria Books, 2008. Whiteley, Sheila. Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Whitesell, Lloyd. “Harmonic Palette in Early Joni Mitchell.” Popular Music 21.2 (2002): 173–193. ———. The Music of Joni Mitchell. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Yaffe, David. Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. New York: Susan Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Discography Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Déjà Vu, Atlantic SD 7200 (1970). 33 1/3 rpm. Mitchell, Joni. Song to a Seagull. Reprise RS 6293 (1968), 33 1/3 rpm. ———. Ladies of the Canyon. Reprise RS 6376 (1970), 33 1/3 rpm. ———. Blue. Reprise MS 2038, 44128 (1971) 33 1/3 rpm. ———. Court and Spark. Asylum 1001–2 (1974) 33 1/3 rpm.

102 Christopher R. Clason ———. The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Asylum 7E-1051 (1975) 33 1/3 rpm. ———. Night Ride Home. Geffen Records. GEFD 24388. (1991) CD. ———. Turbulent Indigo. Reprise 9 45786-2 (1994) CD. Mitchell, Joni, with Tom Scott and the L.A. Express. Miles of Aisles. Asylum AB 202 (1974) 33 1/3 rpm.

5

“There Is No Pure Evil, Nor Pure Good, Only Purity” William Blake’s and Patti Smith’s Art as Opposition to Societal Boundaries Alicia Carpenter

William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a text that constantly pushed eighteenth-century societal boundaries. For that reason, it remains one of the most revisited text in rock and roll. David Fallon’s essay, “Hear the Drunken Archangel Sing: Blakean Notes in 1990s Pop Music” explains how the Marriage “certainly presents an alluring fgure for the rebellion and excess that has come to defne rock ‘n’ roll.”1 While Fallon’s comment rings true when discussing rock as a collective genre, I would argue that Patti Smith’s Blakean infuence deviates from the infamous excess that has come to defne rock; rather, Smith presents the alternative, individualized responses to Romanticism that illuminate the spirituality present in rock singers. Examining Smith’s lyrics demonstrates how rock and roll, although a rebellious outlet, can also be a source of divine inspiration toward a liberating form of creative expression, which is a very Blakean notion. Creativity was of paramount importance to these artists and led them to foreground the imagination in their religious consciousness, which refects how their faiths are informed as much by their colourful imaginations as by their need for creative expression. This chapter investigates the connections between Smith and Blake and thus hopes to remind readers that female artists should be discussed in as much detail as males have been. This discussion, by highlighting the similarities and differences between Patti Smith and William Blake, aims to illuminate how their oeuvres remain spiritually informed and liberating.

Religion as Inner Experience Blake was raised in the Moravian tradition of private Bible reading and private prayer rather than public catechism and congregational worship. 2 Dissent is a term used for Protestant religious groups and individuals who refused to conform to the 1662 Act of Uniformity. This Act decreed that The Book of Common Prayer (1662) was to be used by all priests, and it was mandatory for them to use the prayers and administrations of the sacraments found in the book. There could be “two DOI: 10.4324/9781003204855-6

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sentences [of their own] only added in the delivery of the Sacrament to the Communicants, and none other.”3 If any ministers did not adhere to these rules while performing their sermons, they would be “thereof lawfully convicted according to the Laws of this Realm.”4 Since Blake was raised in a tradition that did not conform to the orthodox ways of the Church of England, it comes as no surprise that the Marriage artistically expresses his individualized faith. Although Blake was highly pious, he is only known to have attended a religious service three times in his life: his baptism (1757), his wedding, and his own burial (1827). 5 He did not identify with the set religious orders in the eighteenth century; he forged his own faith. The Marriage exhibits how he devoted his time and talent to explore his vision. He remarks, “Men are born with an Angel & a Devil.”6 The art of the Marriage refects this statement. On the frontispiece, an angel and a devil seem to be embracing, suggesting that these fgures could represent “the deities or spirits—plural and contrary, rather than the single, one-sided deity of orthodoxy—in the human breast.”7 The inclusion of an angel and a devil embracing suggests that Blake has a different approach to faith. His designs cause readers to question the inner elements of the human soul and the extent to which one is either “good” or “bad.” The Marriage explores this concept further. He introduces readers to “The voice of the Devil” and to humanity’s inner contraries.8 In this sequence, he states that “Energy is Eternal Delight” and thus invites readers to question religious orthodoxy; if “Energy is Eternal Delight,”9 are desire and virtue truly polarized? What Blake’s Marriage presents is much more complex. His contraries display the possibility that perhaps embracing the two sides could result in a richer discovery of the inner self. In the Marriage, Blake rejects conventional religious thinking. Traditional Christian views of heaven and hell are questioned throughout as he pairs good with evil, angels with demons. By presenting the two as symbiotic, Blake illuminates a blasphemous yet, in our present-day world, arguably realistic notion: that one cannot exist without the other. Plate 5 rhymes “desire” with “Messiah,” and these words are each repeated three times throughout the verse.10 This semantic rhyme association connects the human individual to the divine because the sacred name for Christ’s coming is connected with a human vice. Blake defends desire; he associates it with messianic qualities through rhyme and repetition. This effectively challenges conventionality and engages in a revolt against a religion that admonishes pursuing desire. If religious “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity,”11 then for Blake, at least in the plates of the Marriage, wisdom comes from questioning organized religion: “Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of the truth.”12 Plate 11 demonstrates the main conspiracy of the Marriage: that organized religion is the “powerful vestige of an ancient coup that installed

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an illegitimate priesthood.”13 Plate 11 questions the authority of priests. It reads, The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names . . . . . . thus began Priesthood.14 Blake warns against blind faith here. The extract implies that one must fnd biblical agency within the Bible itself, not merely in the words of the clergy. Only then may people be liberated from the reductive clutches of the Church. However, Blake also exhibits a suspicion about the accuracy of the Bible in the Marriage. He shows his audiences how biblical allusions can represent the divine agency within human spirituality through questioning biblical accuracy. Blake includes the prophet, Isaiah, in the Marriage and his account of godly contemplation highlights that “All deities reside in the human breast.”15 Blake’s Isaiah states, “I saw no God, nor heard/any, in a fnite organical perception; but my sen-/-ses discover’d the infnite in every thing.”16 Blake’s Isaiah states that he did not hear or see any God, but that his senses discovered God’s nature. Therefore, the Marriage presents Isaiah’s biblical writings not as the Word of God, but as evidence of his own empirical contemplation of Him. Blake implies that Isaiah’s writings could have dubious, but credible, accuracy. In fact, Mark Crosby argues that in the Marriage, “Blake considers the Bible as a rhetorical construct for unifying a community rather than a historically accurate chronicle of events.”17 To accept the Bible as historically accurate is problematic for Blake. He was suspicious of the hegemony of organized religion. Perhaps Blake includes this account to show his readers that spirituality can result from many things, not just from blind devotion. Blake presents readers with an alternative explanation for religious institutional authority, suggesting that priests constructed religion to promote social obedience. Isaiah emerges as a Blakean tool; through him, believers can undergo a personal liberation from religious fetters and, consequently, forge their own readings of the Bible to inform their faith. There is an obvious link between Blake and Smith that should be discussed in more detail. Smith has published biographical comments about her admiration for Blake. Smith’s and her frst partner Robert Mapplethorpe’s “most prized books were on William Blake,” and she would often read Blake’s poetry “to Robert before [they] went to sleep.”18 Blake was an integral part of the broader culture during the 1960s when Smith was in her twenties. Her admiration for Allen Ginsberg and for Jim Morrison—who named his band “the Doors” after plate 14 of the Marriage—increased Smith’s interest in Blake and his poetry. She has published original poetry, such as the Blakean-titled Auguries of

106 Alicia Carpenter Innocence: Poems (2009), and in 2000, she performed in honour of Blake at the church where he was baptized.19 Smith was a published poet before she was a rock singer, and thus “comes to rock ‘n’ roll via poetry,” unlike her male heroes, “Reed, Morrison and Dylan who approached poetry via rock ‘n’ roll.”20 Therefore it is necessary as well as constructive to discuss the links between Blake and Smith as it highlights the hitherto gendered reception of Blake’s infuence on contemporary music culture. Considering the opposition between state and dissenting religion illuminates the similarities between Blake and Smith. The British Constitution in Church and State, a result of the conficts that arose after the Protestant Reformation, posed a great point of conjecture in the seventeenth century. The State was questioned regarding its legitimacy in controlling public religious practice. In the 1790s, dissent spread through Britain as more people broke away from the neglectful Church of England. 21 Blake “referred to state religion as ‘The Abomination that maketh desolate’” and thus used his art to combat the deformed Christianity that had become the national religion of Britain, [and] to take religion back from the priests who had subordinated it to the political, economic, and cultural agenda of the ruling classes, and to make it a truly revolutionary force in society. 22 Smith was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness and so, like Blake, practiced a dissenting tradition. Charles Taze Russell was the founder of the Witnesses. His parents, who were Scottish-Irish, brought their family up in the Presbyterian faith. 23 From a young age, Russell shared in his mother’s dream of him becoming a minister:24 “In pursuit of such goals, a Presbyterian ‘tradition’ could prove a living and adaptive force, or an ossifed and imprisoning one.”25 For Russell, his native faith proved to be the latter. He writes: Brought up a Presbyterian, indoctrinated from the Catechism, and being naturally of an enquiring mind, I fell a ready prey to the logic of infdelity, as soon as I began to think for myself. But that which at frst threatened to be the utter shipwreck of faith in God and the Bible was, under God’s providence, over-ruled for good, and merely wrecked my confdence in human creeds and systems of Bible misinterpretation. 26 Russell could not accept the “predestination doctrine of his native religion . . . [nor could he] reconcile [the] biblical descriptions of the love, justice, wisdom and power of God with the rapt, ad hoc randomness attributed to God by the Presbyterians.”27 He thus moved away from the Presbyterian governance of the church order and instead dabbled

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in Congregationalism for a time before becoming a sceptic.28 In effect, Russell dissented from his native faith in lieu of a new one that he would have a hand in creating. Russell came to the makings of a new religion when he happened upon a Second Adventist religious service in Pennsylvania; he states that he entered the small hall “to see if the handful who met there had anything more sensible to offer than the creeds of the great churches.”29 This experience drove him to renounce his scepticism and, as Russell states, “re-establish my wavering faith in the divine inspiration of the Bible, and to show that the records of the apostles and prophets are insolubly linked.”30 This experience would prove crucial for the development of the Witnesses. Although Russell was pleased with the Adventist’s liberal views on hell, he believed that they “veered from the word of God as revealed in the only source of truth, the Bible.”31 In order to remedy this, Russell began to organize a small Bible reading group in 1870.32 This would later develop into the Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society for “the dissemination of Bible Truths in various languages by means of the publication of tracts, pamphlets, papers, and other religious documents.”33 This Society is now known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Russell’s religious journey is not so far removed from Blake’s if we examine the motivations that drove each from the systematized religions that they did not identify with. The poet also rejected the “orthodoxy of institutionalised religion… in favour of a radically literal assertion of Christ’s message.”34 From a young age, Blake had visions; he once recounted to his parents upon returning home how he saw angels in a tree in Peckham Rye, “and only through his mother’s intercession escape[d] a thrashing from his honest father,” and also attested to seeing a procession of monks and hearing songs of exaltation in the empty pews of Westminster Abbey.35 These visions would come to shape the way Blake approached private Bible worship and art; instead of repressing his visions, he embraced them and saw them as “the voice of God manifested through . . . [his] inner light.”36 Smith explains how the Jehovah’s Witnesses played a crucial part in the development of her faith. She writes, “My mother taught me to pray when I was . . . two-and-a-half years old, and it expanded my world totally.”37 Her interest in prayer led her mother to enroll her in Bible school and thus to her frst encounter with the medium through which she would later explore herself: “It was Sunday. My mother . . . was taking me to Bible school . . . [Then I heard] ‘Tutti Frutti’ . . . That was for me the birth of rock and roll.”38 Shaw highlights how Smith’s “epiphany occurred on a Sunday. Rock ‘n’ roll is conceived here as quasireligious.”39 Smith’s frst interaction with what would later become her chosen art form occurred on the Sabbath; the fact that she vividly remembers it refects how music can be both a form of entertainment and of divine inspiration. In her biography, Smith describes how she developed an intimate relationship

108 Alicia Carpenter with God through prayer: “Not contented with my child’s prayer, I soon petitioned my mother to let me make my own . . . It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination.”40 Here Smith explicitly associates religion with imagination, which displays a thoroughly Blakean approach to private worship. Her discontent with the set prayers that were available to her foreshadows the wandering, inquisitive mind that would later come to shape her deviance from set religious orders. Smith came to doubt the absolute teachings of her family’s faith. This religion forbade any form of creative expression, therefore Smith decided to denounce it, which allowed her to explore her faith creatively.41 Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that only 144,000 people will ascend to heaven.42 This reductive view of humanity’s redemptive potential could be one of the motivators that drove Smith from the faith. The years she spent as a Witness gave her an understanding of the extent to which biblical apocalypse holds power over the imagination, as “she maintained its fascination with biblical apocalypse, recasting the prophetic claims of Revelation as a form of psychomania or psychic struggle.”43 This is shown in the signifcance given to horses on the album by that name. In the fnal track, “Land,” Smith sings, Horses, horses, horses, horses Coming in all directions White shining silver studs with their noses in fames.44 White horses symbolize the Divine Warrior who rides the white horse in Revelations 6:2.45 She uses biblical allusions in her lyrics, which present an artistic contemplation of divine power. In Revelations, the white horses symbolize the going forth of the Gospels. Perhaps Smith’s inclusion of this image presents one of these psychic struggles: the tension between her need to spread her own creativity and her desire to pay homage to the Word that spurred her imagination since she was a child. By displaying these two devotions in this lyric, Smith asserts that Revelations’ white horses, the harbingers of triumph over Christ’s enemy, are also radiant vessels through which to spread her own Word: that— contrary to Jehovah’s Witness belief—creative expression can remain religious. Over time, she learned how to see divine power refected in her art by recognizing “the string of words propelled by God” and “the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifes His motion.”46 The rigid doctrine of the Witnesses caused Smith to break free from organized religion, and she comes to realize that “religion cannot contain God.”47 The frst track of Horses exhibits Smith’s rebellion against organized religion. “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo” may have been considered by some as blasphemous upon its release because it contains the infamous lyric, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”48 Shaw argues that the

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song is “a symbol of Smith’s alienation as a woman in a male-dominated cultural environment.”49 In this way, the song emerges as a manifestation of Smith’s rejection of set social orders, and one of these orders she rebelled against was the organized religion in which she was raised. Her rebellion against religion refects her inner understanding of faith; she herself remarks about the opening lyric to “Gloria”: “Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.”50 In the song, the female Gloria is embodied only in the vocal exchange between Smith and her male bandmates, and this “implies that she must remain an object of exchange: glory to God the highest, but not to herself.”51 The lyrics, therefore, signify Smith’s oppositional stance to masculine authority both in religion and in rock culture. Smith fnds a path to an alternative authority throughout the rest of the album. It seems as though she reconciles with God through an artistic representation of divinity, and her discovery of inner faith emerges as a celebration of herself as an artist who found self-expression “beyond gender.”52 Horses’ fourth track, “Kimberly,” displays a Blakean interest in the connection between the individual and the divine. Smith’s vocal glides above “a churchy-sounding Hammond organ,” suggesting that she intends for it to possess a religious undertone.53 The subject matter of “Kimberly” changes from maternal to apocalyptic, connecting the individual to the divine through its imagery and rhyme. Smith sings about a baby wrapped in “her swaddling clothes” in the frst verse.54 This imagery instantly transports listeners to Luke 2:7, invoking the image of Mary wrapping Jesus in “swaddling clothes.”55 Smith changes the story to suit her own artistic needs. Instead of singing the pronoun “he,” she sings “her.” In the second verse of “Kimberly,” Smith sings, “here I stand again in this old ‘lectric whirlwind / The sea rushes up my knees like fame” [italics mine: indicating rhymes].56 The phonetics here result in word associations. The words “stand,” “again,” and “wind” all sound similar due to their internal pararhyme and assonance, thus creating semantic-syntactic associations. Smith stands alone in the electric whirlwind of God’s creation; the sublime elements of the scene are reinforced through the rhyming of “sea” and “knees” because the forces of God’s creation impact her physically. Smith uses an apocalyptic choice of syntax in the second verse (“the sky split and the planets hit”).57 This internal rhyme refects Smith’s connection with the godly sublime, creating further associations between her individual experience and the divine because the apocalypse occurs after she internalizes the sublime and feels the storm calming in her stomach. Smith’s choice of pronoun, imagery, and rhyme cement the song as a “feminist revision of the Immaculate Conception.”58 Smith’s feminized reinterpretation of this story in “Kimberly” presents how she was interested in pushing the boundaries of biblical allusion in her music: by wrapping a female baby in “swaddling clothes,” Smith imbues

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womanhood with divinity. She inserts herself into the New Testament story through imagery and re-imagines the biblical reference through individualized artistic expression. Smith states that the inspiration for “Kimberly” came from her being “sick of being a Jehovah’s Witness, because they said there was no place for art in Jesus’ world.”59 Clearly, Smith’s radical revision of the Immaculate Conception in “Kimberly” is an inner revolt against a faith that did not meet her artistic needs. Both artists rebelled against the set orders of their religion and, through creative expression, came to an understanding of their own inner faith. Where Blake came to his through dissent, Smith took a step further through direct apostasy. Both Blake’s and Smith’s art exhibits belief in a deity. They use their work as a vehicle for liberation from set orders that attempted to compartmentalize their spirituality. Blake and Smith came to a better understanding of their spirituality through rebelling against set religious orders and instead chose to liberate themselves by exercising their own faith through creative expression. Blake, as a Moravian, never denounced his religion as Smith did. He simply wished to practice a faith that was designed according to his own understanding of God, one fuelled by his private catechism. Blake’s Marriage exhibits how the poet forged his own faith by rebelling against the set orders of the Church of England. According to G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake was an “enthusiastic visionary,” which meant that he “believed that all institutions, beginning with the Church and the State, were tyrannical.”60 Blake’s Marriage exhibits this viewpoint: “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.”61 Here, Blake attacks Swedenborg’s writings that merely re-word “already publish’d books.”62 Line 11 of plate 20 promises a contrary to Swedenborg’s “interpretation of the Bible as a code of law.”63 Smith, however, refects the imminent secularization of society through her apostasy. Although Smith was spiritual—after denouncing her faith, she dabbled in Catholicism, Buddhism, and Judaism for brief periods—she was only able to fnd her faith once she realized that God was present in her art.64 This allowed her to reconcile with God through rejecting organized religion and coming to a unique faith of her own. This fundamental difference highlights how the creative process of both artists should be understood as products of separate cultural ages.

The Expanded Potential of the Body Blake’s Marriage uses metaphors about the liberation of bodies to bring about political liberation. Present in the Marriage is “the conviction that individual and collective revolutions are interdependent, that the circle of revolution can only spread through the body human and the body politic.”65 Blake imbues the bodies in the poem with symbolism that signifes a breaking away from received biblical and cultural codes. They suggest that the Marriage is a text that liberates the body from

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the restrictive shackles of organized religion. Blake’s Marriage and Smith’s Horses exhibit interest in the Prometheus myth, which will be discussed later. The signifcance of allusions to this myth illuminates how both works show the vast potential of the body. Smith uses her own body as a symbol of liberation. The cover of Horses displays Smith as a female poet/rocker, which was a hitherto masculine role. She, therefore, undertakes a political rebellion against prescriptions of gender in music through artistic bodily expansion. The Marriage uses bodies to represent deviations from accepted religious ideas. On plate 2, two fgures are situated around a tree. The top fgure seems to hand the bottom a piece of fruit. The former transforms from a human to a reptilian creature. The image alludes to the story of Eve’s temptation in Genesis: “the woman . . . took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband.”66 Serpentine temptation also appears in plate 2 of the Marriage: Now the sneaking serpent walks In mild humility. And the just man rages in the wilds.67 Although traditional Christianity teaches that the villainous serpent (Satan) leads the “just man” down a desolate path, in this extract Blake seems to be referring to his idea that in each of us resides an “Angel & a Devil.” The serpent walks in “mild humility,” which suggests that he is not proud of his actions or his bad qualities. The “just man,” assured of his morality, still “rages in the wilds.” This image is evocative of the moral man being in a perpetual state of violent, uncontrollable anger. Perhaps Blake is suggesting that if the just man accepts his duality then he will rage no more. Blake’s Marriage exhibits how the bodily form can be liberated from the restrictive shackles of physicality through spiritual enlightenment. Some visual elements of the Marriage indicate that the text exhibits a wider spectrum of gender than previously assumed. Christopher Z. Hobson examines Blake’s writings in the light of homosexuality and discovers that there are visual features of the Marriage that can be described as androgynous. He states that the frontispiece “offers an image of arguably indeterminate sexuality” as there is a fgure with “no defned genitalia on its frontally viewed pelvis.”68 This partially androgynous fguring occurs throughout the Marriage; on plate 2, the serpentine fgure is genderless, and the genitals of the fery fgure on plate 4 are indiscernible, as are those of the fgure on plate 5. This implies a world of androgynous sensual enjoyment in the Marriage. Blake’s Moravianism could well have contributed to the fuidity of bodily form in his works. Keri Davies explains how the Moravians believed that “Christ is the only true male, and men will be married to him just as women are.”69

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Davies is almost certain that Blake and his mother, Catherine, had some knowledge of a Moravian hymnal, in which the songs “sang of the soul’s androgyny.”70 It becomes apparent that “the androgynous state of the human being in the fallen world”—as Davies puts it—is being explored by Blake in the plates of the Marriage through a representation of the fuidity of the body throughout the work.71 Blake’s fuid treatment of bodily forms in the text is an interesting point of comparison with Smith’s fuid treatment of gender. Horses’ cover depicts Smith in a particularly androgynous way. She wears a masculine black tie and white shirt ensemble, and her physical feminine features are not accentuated or enhanced. Smith inverts and destabilizes the dominant male voices in the music industry by rejecting the agency of socio-cultural institutions in her art and by refusing to conform to the accepted gender norms set by the music industry in the 1970s. During the 1960s–1970s, rock and roll experienced a surge of androgynous male musicians such as David Bowie and Marc Bolan. They were freely able to test the boundaries of gender. Masculine experimentations with gender require “reference to a stable femininity,” which means that males were at liberty to experiment with gender as femininity remained a constant in society for them.72 This undoubtedly made it diffcult for female musicians to fnd room to explore the inner workings of their gender. But Smith was a musician who was about to change that. During her years living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York with her partner, Mapplethorpe, Smith began to reject the restrictions of prescribed gender roles and embrace elements of the male aesthetic. Tired of her long locks, Smith “cut out all of the pictures [she] could fnd of Keith Richards” and “took up the scissors, macheting [her] way out of the folk era. . . It was a liberating experience.”73 Smith used her own appearance as a vehicle to escape fxed gender roles and the prescribed femininity that was inhibiting her self-expression. Embracing the masculine aesthetic that she admired allowed her to enter into a liberating space that fxed her as an artist beyond gender. During the 1970s, the majority of females in music were depicted in a gender-binary way. Album covers from 1975, like Melissa Manchester’s Melissa, Cher’s Stars, and Carly Simon’s Playing Possum evoke an enhanced femininity of artists when being exhibited in the public domain. Before Horses was released in December, album covers tended to emphasize female bodily features. The male gaze is welcomed in the aforementioned album covers, and this continues today in the music industry. Nicola Dibben explores portrayals of women in music and comments on The Spice Girls: “In terms of the male gaze, the alternating focus on each female provided by the camera work. . . is the equivalent of the pornographic magazine’s portrayal of female types.”74 In terms of the male gaze, the alternating focus on the females featured on Manchester’s, Cher’s, and Simon’s album artwork are also arguably

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similar. Horses, with its androgynous cover, only peaked at number 94,75 while Playing Possum peaked at number 10 on the albums chart in June 1975.76 Clearly, enhanced femininity was a successful selling point in the US in the 1970s, and instead of including a feminine album cover to optimize sales, Smith stays true to her punk aesthetic through non-conformity. This refusal to conform to gender roles could date back to a specifc event in her childhood. When Smith was twelve, she refused to wear a shirt while playing, but her mother forced her to. She states that the incident made her experience a sense of enormous “betrayal”; she continued to watch her mother perform feminine tasks, while the “heavy scent of perfume and the red slashes of lipstick, so strong in the ffties, revolted” her.77 Clearly, prescribed gender roles have troubled the singer for some time. Horses’ album cover deviates from the music industry’s tendency to portray femininity and signifes how Smith’s androgynous body metaphorically liberates her from societal gender boundaries that previously perplexed her. Smith’s decision to depict herself androgynously echoes the physical revolution of Blake’s Marriage in that it demonstrates an artist who is presenting their society with an alternative to accepted societal constructs, namely gender. Veronica Doubleday asserts that androgyny “on one level concerns the expression of both male and female characteristics,” but on a deeper level, androgyny is “an archetype of primordial unity, transcending the polarities of gender.”78 As Shaw notes, Horses is concerned with challenging the borders between “male and female; queer and straight,”79 and this element becomes predominant when Smith’s eyes gaze out from the album cover. By crossing societal boundaries between males and females, Smith evokes a physically motivated political revolution. She rejects accepted gender norms by adopting a de-feminized aesthetic and transcends the boundaries between genders. Smith’s songs reveal the body’s potential to transgress societal conventions. In “Break It Up,” the sixth track on Horses, Smith sings about a dream she had in which the singer Jim Morrison was bound to a marble stone: “he was alive with wings that merged in the marble. Like Prometheus.”80 The allusion to Prometheus in the song reveals Smith’s fascination with godly judgement and earthly sin and the effects it can have on the human bodily form. Perhaps Smith was so transfxed by the Prometheus myth because her religious upbringing made stories like this all the more vivid. Her decision to express it in song suggests that she was interested in how Morrison, a rock star icon who had the ability to transgress societal boundaries through rock and roll music, was able to present the liberation of the bodily form through creative expression. The Promethean destruction of tyrannical order manifests in Morrison’s infamous stage antics and thus establishes him as a ftting Titanic fgure to have featured in Smith’s mythic dream. Morrison “developed

114 Alicia Carpenter the stage technique of getting hard by rubbing himself against the microphone stand,” and after a Miami show, he was prosecuted for indecent exposure.81 These public displays of rebellion against societal boundaries exhibit how Morrison used his fame and infuence to present his own lurid rejections of a society that had, ironically, enabled his creative expression in the frst place. Perhaps Smith and Blake were so interested in the Prometheus myth because in it they saw refected the potential of the body and the vast possibilities available for it once the imagination is fully realized and implemented. Instead of sexualizing her body, like Morrison, Smith uses her body to publicly reject prescribed gender roles. Her androgynous aesthetic remains a symbol of resistance to societal gender constructs. In the Marriage, the body is elevated to a space of imaginative refection through a series of contradictions. They indicate that Blake strives to show his audience how their bodies are not one-dimensional physical forms, and once they understand this, they can become spiritually enlightened. On plate 4, the voice of the Devil exclaims that Bibles and sacred codes have caused errors of perception; one of these is that “Man has two real existing princi-/-ples Viz: a Body & a Soul.”82 The Devil argues that this is in fact an error: “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul.”83 This contrary demonstrates how Blake strives to present the vast potential of the human body once the imagination is fully implemented and the spirituality of the body is fully realized. Blake writes that this distinction of body and soul needs to be eliminated in order for humanity to truly realize their full spiritual potential: “If the doors of perception were cleansed/every thing would appear to man as it is, in-/-fnite.”84 The line breaks in this metaphor are purposely enforced. Blake could have started a new line instead of keeping “In” on line 18. This causes readers to trip over while reading lines 18–19, and thus they retrace their reading to correct themselves. This rhythmic retracing is enforced by Blake through hyphenating the word “Infnite” and causes the word to ultimately unify the preceding lines,85 resulting in readers coming to a deeper understanding of what the metaphor means. If we cleanse our perception and fully implement our imagination, we may come to know the unity in all earthly beings: our spirituality is “Infnite.” The visual effect of this plate is also very visceral. It displays a male fgure, laid horizontally, with what appears to be a spiritual being above him, pulling scorching fames from his body. It seems evident that the fgure is being purged of the constraints of physicality when we assess the verbal and visual elements of the plate. Other readings consider the fery design as symbolic of imagination, as “imagination cannot be consumed by fre, for it is fre.”86 If the Marriage symbolises imagination, its “infernal . . . corrosives”87 also recall the Promethean myth. According to Greek mythology, Prometheus is the defender of humanity. Zeus punishes him for giving humans the gift of fre, and he is bound

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to a rock where an eagle gnaws at his liver for eternity. As Northrop Frye asserts, the plate will remind Blake’s readers of “the triumph of man’s freedom, symbolized by a Promethean Titan, over the tyranny of convention.”88 Tyrannous convention emerges as an issue for Blake throughout the Marriage. Plate 6 asserts, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell is because / he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.”89 If Blake’s Proverbs do not rise from an infernal dungeon, but from creative expression, then Blake’s devils emerge as fgments of human creativity. The imagery surrounding the fgures of plate 14 suggests that creative expression is a worldly delight that is commended and condoned by Blake. Smith’s work also questions “the restraints of conventions and reality.”90 In her poem seventh heaven, she explores accepted gender roles by adopting a male persona and expanding the boundaries of the self. Smith reimagines the Fall of Man in the poem and asks her readers to “Think of Satan as some stud. / Maybe [Eve’s] knees were open.”91 This eroticized retelling begs readers to rethink their preconceived notions about the roles of Satan and Eve in this story. Penning Eve as a consensual individual and sexualizing Satan in this manner invites readers to see how Smith is, as Blake would say, “a true Poet.” Blake’s and Smith’s artworks present the expanded potential of the body. The fgures on plate 2, the “sneaking serpent” and the “just man,” cause readers to question biblical accounts of fxed morality. Blake imbues the “just man” with perpetual violent rage to imply humanity’s dual morality; thus, Blake questions whether the human body is inherently moral, or whether morality is more complex than that. Consequently, by presenting readers with the idea that within all humans resides an “Angel & a Devil,” Blake’s bodies cause readers to refect on questions of morality and his work emerges as an instigator for personal liberation against religious dogma. The androgynous fgures in the Marriage also display the expansive potential of bodies as they insinuate that spiritual bodies can be above gender. As the majority of the creatures in the text connote masculinity, however, Blake’s Marriage is less radical in relation to gender. Smith reveals a fundamental difference between herself as an artist and Blake: her gender and her ability to transgress boundaries set by it. Smith effectively de-centres the male by displaying her body in an androgynous manner. As Anna Kryukova states, Smith “detached her identity as a woman from her identity as an artist: she didn’t give in to the pressures to identify with certain social roles because of her gender.”92 Smith comes further than Blake in exhibiting how artistic expression can liberate the body from fxed gender roles. Through a direct rejection of allowing herself to be subjected to the male gaze, Smith shows how females can be liberated from the patriarchy by undertaking physical and political revolutions.

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“Approach with Song Every Object We Meet” Blake and Smith’s artworks are monuments of mental battles fought against the constraints of fxed social orders. Examining Blake’s poetry in relation to a contemporary singer makes his liberating fight from mind-forged manacles soar even higher in our current climate. Theodore Roszak states that perhaps the only way to bring culture, knowledge, power, and human achievement together in harmony is “to approach with song every object we meet.”93 If we applied this philosophy to the works of Romantic poets like Blake, it could quite possibly add a whole new dimension to scholarly treatises on poets’ relationship to contemporary musicians. After all, Blake was a highly musical poet; his contemporaries noted how he would often even perform at dinner parties. He would “sing several of his poems. He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed by the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit.”94 Blake’s interest in song and musicality justifes the tendency that Blake critics have for exploring him in relation to the musicians who perked their ears, just as Blake perked up those of his contemporaries. Finally, there is more to say about Smith’s relationship with Blake. Smith’s artistic life has been indebted to him. Recent releases such as Poems: Selected and Introduced by Patti Smith (2007) attest to this view. Smith herself points out that Blake “did not jealously guard his vision; he shared it through his work and called upon us to animate the creative spirit within us.”95 Smith shares her love for Blake with the world through her gift of music; she enables a listenership access to the vast infuence that an illustrious eighteenth-century English poet had on her own artistic expression. Smith’s and Blake’s visions serve as reminders that liberation from fxed societal order is possible.

Notes 1 David Fallon, “‘Hear the Drunken Archangel Sing’: Blakean Notes in 1990s Pop Music,” in Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture, eds. Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly and Jason Whittaker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 256. 2 G.E. Bentley, Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (London: Yale University Press, 2001), 7. 3 Taken from Brian Cummings, ed., “An Act for the Uniformity of Common Prayer, and Service in the Church, and Administration of the Sacraments,” in The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 187. 4 Ibid., 187. 5 Kathleen Raine, Blake and the New Age (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979), 32. 6 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake, the Early Illuminated Books, eds. David Bindman, Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, Joseph Viscomi (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1993), 133 [All further references to this text will be abbreviated, i.e. “Blake et al., 3.”].

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7 Blake Trust, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake, the Early Illuminated Books, eds. David Bindman, Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, Joseph Viscomi (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1993), 131 [All further references to this text will be abbreviated, i.e. ‘Bindman et al., 3.’]. 8 Blake et al., 146. 9 Ibid., 146. 10 Ibid., 148. 11 Ibid., 152. 12 Ibid., 154. 13 Bindman et al., 128. 14 Blake et al., 160. 15 Ibid., 160. 16 Ibid., 162. 17 Mark Crosby, ‘“Merely a Superior Being’: Blake and the Creations of Eve,” in Blake, Gender and Culture, ed. Helen Bruder and Tristanne J. Connolly (London: Routledge, 2016), 15. 18 Patti Smith, Just Kids (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 49 [All further references to this text will be abbreviated, i.e. “Smith et al., 3.”]. 19 Nick Johnstone, Patti Smith: A Biography (New York: Omnibus Press, 1997), 180. 20 Philip Shaw, Horses 33 and 1/3 (New York: Continuum, 2008), 8 [All further references to this text will be abbreviated, i.e. “Shaw et al., 3.”]. 21 Robert Ryan, “Blake and Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 150–152. 22 Ibid., 153–154. 23 “Part 1, Early Voices (1870–1878),” The Watch Tower, 1 January 1955, < https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1955001#h=12> [accessed 13 June 2020]. 24 Gary Botting and Heather Botting, The Orwellian World of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 70. 25 Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Insular Christianity: Alternative models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c. 1570–c.170 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 2. 26 Andrew Holden, Jehovah’s Witnesses: Portraits of a Contemporary Religious Movement (London: Routledge, 2002), 18. 27 Gary Botting and Heather Botting, The Orwellian World of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 70. 28 Albert V. Vandenberg, Charles Taze Russell: Pittsburgh Prophet, 1879– 1909, the West Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, Vol. 69, No.1 (January 1986), 5. 29 Ibid., 5. 30 Ibid., 5. 31 Ibid., 5. 32 George D. Chryssides, The A to Z of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Toronto: Scarecrow Press Inc., 2009), xxi. 33 Ibid., xxiii. 34 Bruce Woodcock, The Selected Poems of William Blake (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994), viii. 35 G. E. Bentley Jr., William Blake: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1995), 36–37. 36 Bruce Woodcock, The Selected Poems of William Blake (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994), viii. 37 Shaw et al., 37. 38 Ibid., 33.

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Ibid., 33. Smith et al., 17. Shaw et al., 38. “Who Goes to Heaven?,” [accessed 4 May 2018]. Shaw et al., 38. Smith, “Land: Horses/ Land of a Thousand Dances/ La Mer (de),” recorded 1975, on Horses, 2012 RCA 88691960281, 33⅓ rpm. Allen Kerkeslager, “Apollo, Greco-Roman Prophecy, and the Rider of the White Horse in Rev 6:2,” Journal of Biblical Literature 112:1 (1993), 116, [accessed 12 May 2018]. Smith et al., 77. Ibid., 13. Smith, “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo,” recorded 1975, on Horses, 2012 RCA 88691960281, 33⅓ rpm. Shaw et al., 106. Smith et al., 259. Shaw et al., 105. Smith, “Even as a child, I felt like an alien” < https://www.theguardian.com/ music/2005/may/22/popandrock1> [accessed 12 May 2018]. Shaw et al., 119. Smith, “Kimberly” (1975), on Horses, 2012 RCA 88691960281, 33⅓ rpm. King James Bible, Luke 2: 7 [accessed 2 July 2020]. Smith, “Kimberly.” Ibid. Shaw et al., 119. Ibid., 119. Bentley, Jr., The Stranger from Paradise, 8. Blake et al., 186. Ibid., 180. Michael Phillips, William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2011), 145. Shaw et al., 38. Bindman et al., 129. King James Bible, Genesis 3: 6 [accessed 2 July 2020]. Blake et al., 142. Christopher Z. Hobson, William Blake and Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave, 2000). Keri Davies, “Bridal Mysticism and ‘Sifting Time’: The Moravian history of William Blake’s Family,” Blake, Gender & Culture (Pickering, 2012), 5. [accessed 23 June 2020]. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 17. Joanne Gottlieb, Gayle Wald, “Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution, and Women in Independent Rock,” Critical Matrix, 7:2 (1993), 25. [accessed 5 May 2018]. Smith et al., 152.

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74 Nicola Dibben, “Representations of Femininity in Popular Music,” Popular Music 18:3 (1999), 343. [accessed 1 May 2018]. 75 “Billboard 200,” [accessed 1 May 2018]. 76 “Billboard 200,” [accessed 1 May 2018]. 77 Smith et al., 22. 78 Veronica Doubleday, “Sounds of Power: An Overview of Musical Instruments and Gender,” Ethnomusicology Forum, 17:1 (2008), 25. [accessed 1 May 2018]. 79 Shaw et al., 98. 80 Ibid., 121. 81 Tristanne Connolly, ‘“He Took a Face from the Ancient Gallery’: Blake and Jim Morrison,” Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture, eds. Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly, and Jason Whittaker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 242–243. 82 Blake et al., 146. 83 Ibid., 146. 84 Ibid., 166. 85 Michael Phillips, William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2011), 123. 86 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 196. 87 Blake et al., 166. 88 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 219. 89 Blake et al., 150. 90 Nick Johnson, Patti Smith: A Biography (London: Omnibus Press, 1997), 11. 91 Patti Smith, Seventh Heaven [accessed 28 June 2020]. 92 Anna Kryukova, “Patti Smith: Exploration of Gender and Identity,” [accessed 12 May 2018]. 93 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Refections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 268. 94 J. T. Smith, A Book for a Rainy Day, in Blake Records: Documents (1714–1841 Concerning the Life of William Blake (1757–1827) and His Family, ed. G.E. Bentley, Jr. (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 29–30. 95 Smith, Poems: Selected and Introduced by Patti Smith, (London: Vintage Books, 2007), 12–13.

Bibliography Armstrong, Robert, and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Insular Christianity: Alternative models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c. 1570–c.170 (Manchester: Manchester University press, 2013). “Billboard 200,” accessed 1 May 2018, https://www.billboard.com/charts/ billboard-200/1975-12-27.

120 Alicia Carpenter Botting, Gary, and Heather Botting. The Orwellian World of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Bentley, G. E. Jr. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (London: Yale University Press, 2001). ———. William Blake: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1995). Blake, Trust. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, William Blake, The Early Illuminated Books, eds. David Bindman, Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1993). Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Early Illuminated Books, eds. David Bindman, Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1993). ———. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, accessed 2 May 2018, http://erdman.blakearchive.org/#35. Chryssides, George D. The A to Z of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Toronto: Scarecrow Press Inc., 2009). Connolly, Tristanne. “‘He Took a Face from the Ancient Gallery’: Blake and Jim Morrison,” in Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture, eds. Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly, and Jason Whittaker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 230–247. Crosby, Mark. ‘“Merely a Superior Being’: Blake and the Creations of Eve,” in Blake, Gender and Culture, eds. Helen Bruder and Tristanne J. Connolly (London: Routledge, 2016), 11–24. Cummings, Brian, ed. “An Act for the Uniformity of Common Prayer, and Service in the Church, and Administration of the Sacraments,” in The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Davies, Keri. “Bridal Mysticism and “Sifting Time”: The Moravian history of William Blake’s family,” Blake, Gender & Culture (Pickering, 2012), accessed 23 June 2020, https://www.academia.edu/1500470/Bridal_Mysticism_ and _ Sifting _Time_the_ lost _ Moravian _ history_of_William _ Blakes _ family. Dibben, Nicola. “Representations of Femininity in Popular Music,” Popular Music 18:3 (1999), 331–355, accessed 1 May 2018, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/853611?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. Doubleday, Veronica. “Sounds of Power: An Overview of Musical Instruments and Gender,” Ethnomusicology Forum, 17:1 (2008), 3–39, accessed 1 May 2018, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1 7411910801972909?needAccess=true&instName=King%27s+College+ London. Fallon, David. ““Hear the Drunken Archangel Sing”: Blakean Notes in 1990s Pop Music,” Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture, eds. Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly and Jason Whittaker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 248–262. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947). Gottlieb, Joanne, and Gayle Wald. “Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution, and Women in Independent Rock,” Critical Matrix, 7:2

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(1993), 13–43, accessed 5 May 2018, https://search.proquest.com/ docview/1307822238?rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo. Hobson, Christopher Z. William Blake and Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave, 2000). Holden, Andrew. Jehovah’s Witnesses: Portraits of a Contemporary Religious Movement (London: Routledge, 2002). Johnson, Nick. Patti Smith: A Biography (London: Omnibus Press, 1997). Kerkeslager, Allen. “Apollo, Greco-Roman Prophecy, and the Rider of the White Horse in Rev 6:2,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 112:1 (1993), 116– 121, accessed 12 May 2018, http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/ pdfviewer?vid=5&sid=c86a2001-ff9a-481f-94e1-2b1cb9d10e07%40pdc-v-sessmgr01. King James Bible. Accessed 2 July 2020. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/k/kjv/ kjv-idx?type=DIV2&byte=9498. Kryukova, Anna. “Patti Smith: Exploration of Gender and Identity,” accessed 12 May 2018, https://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/french13/2013/10/10/ patti-smith-exploration-of-gender-and-identity/. “Part 1, Early Voices (1870–1878),” The Watch Tower, 1 January 1955, accessed 13 June 2020. https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1955001#h=12. Phillips, Michael. William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2011). Raine, Kathleen. Blake and the New Age (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979). Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Refections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (London: Faber and Faber, 1970). Ryan, Robert. “Blake and Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 150–168. Shaw, Philip. Horses 331/3 (New York: Continuum, 2008). Smith, J. T. A Book for a Rainy Day, in Blake Records: Documents (1714–1841 Concerning the Life of William Blake (1757–1827) and His Family, ed. G.E. Bentley, Jr. (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 29–30. Smith, Patti. “Even as a child, I felt like an alien,” accessed 12 May 2018, https:// www.theguardian.com/music/2005/may/22/popandrock1. ———. Just Kids (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). ———. Poems: Selected and Introduced by Patti Smith (London: Vintage Books, 2007). ———. Seventh Heaven, accessed 28 June 2020, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50433/seventh-heaven-56d22d8ceae8b. Vandenberg, Albert V. Charles Taze Russell: Pittsburgh Prophet, 1879– 1909, the West Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, Vol. 69, No. 1 (January 1986). “Who Goes to Heaven?,” accessed May 4, 2018, https://www.jw.org/en/ bible-teachings/questions/go-to-heaven/. Woodcock, Bruce. The Selected Poems of William Blake (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994).

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Discography Smith, Patti. “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo.” Horses. Arista AL 4066. 1975. mp3 accessed 21 May 2018. ———. “Kimberly.” Horses. Arista AL 4066. 1975. mp3 accessed 21 May 2018. ———. “Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mer (de).” Horses. Arista AL 4066. 1975. mp3 accessed 21 May 2018.

6

“A Woman with an Attitude” Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees Diana Edelman

On 1 December 1976, Thames Television anchor Bill Grundy interviewed The Sex Pistols, an interview that became infamous because Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones cursed live on air. The cursing caused quite a stir and led to Grundy’s dismissal1: after Rotten says “shit,” Grundy turns to the two young women standing behind the band and asks, “What about you girls . . . behind? Are you worried or are you . . . uh . . . just enjoying yourself?” The “girl” with the bleach blonde pixie haircut and black star makeup around her right eye nonchalantly plays with her hair, cigarette in hand, and says, “Just enjoying myself.” Grundy replies, “Are you? That’s what I thought you were doing.” She smiles and says politely, “I’ve always wanted to meet you.” Grundy firtatiously replies, “Did you really? We’ll meet afterwards, shall we?” At that moment, the smiling playful “girl,” none other than Siouxsie of Siouxsie and the Banshees, swiftly turns her head away and sneers. Her face then takes on an icy calm. Shortly after, Steve calls Grundy a “dirty old man” and a “dirty fucker”; by the end of the interview, just seconds later, Siouxsie is making faces and playing with her suspenders. Two days later, The Guardian reported that Grundy was banned for two weeks for “sloppy journalism” due to the cursing and an oblique reference to being drunk at the beginning of the interview.2 The Guardian article did not even mention Grundy’s interaction with “the girls.” This interview is emblematic of the music scene in the late 70s—the women stand “behind” the men while those in power treat them as “girls” and sex objects. Notably, the interview also showcases Siouxsie’s measured response, one that encapsulates what her life and music have always been about—a challenge to patriarchal structures through measured control mixed with playful dismissiveness. This spirit of power and playfulness became a hallmark of the band’s style, which some describe as “Goth.” Simon Reynolds argues that Siouxsie “crystallized the emerging Goth movement’s spirit when she declared her desire to be a ‘thorn in the side of mediocrity.’”3 Despite their initial success, they famously had trouble getting a record deal. Siouxsie explains, “All I can think is that record companies saw no future in the concept of a woman fronting a band—or at least a woman with DOI: 10.4324/9781003204855-7

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an attitude.”4 The band relentlessly rejected all labels, including Goth, and refused to be consumed by the music industry’s expectations. While rebellion is typical of rock bands, these attitudes coupled with Siouxsie’s boundary-defying persona, particularly gender norms, explain not only the band’s successes and failures but also the “Goth” label, which can be traced back to its roots in eighteenth-century Britain, a time when female artists, writers in particular, were doing the same kind of cultural work in similar cultural conditions. Although Siouxsie to this day takes issue with the label “Goth,” her work clearly demonstrates features of what she calls that “very powerful, twisted genre.”5 Traditionally discussed as a subset of Romanticism, the Gothic has been notoriously diffcult to defne. In Art of Darkness, Anne Williams frees the Gothic not only from strict generic boundaries but also from the limitations of a specifc historical time frame, arguing that the “Gothic and Romantic express a single literary impulse” that continues to this day.6 Given that Siouxsie Sioux rejected tradition (and the patriarchy that sustained it), it seems ftting that we should turn to a defnition of Romanticism and the Gothic that dismantles these lopsided dichotomies; otherwise, we will continue what Anne Williams warned against over twenty years ago: As long as we think of Gothic primarily as a form of prose fction, as something relative and subordinate to its early contemporary, Romanticism, and as long as we fail to address the issue of ‘male’ as well as ‘female’ Gothic, we are trapped in a prison of our own devising.7 As long as the Gothic, like Siouxsie in that infamous interview, is the “girl” standing behind Romanticism, we perpetuate the problem. We can escape this prison if we recognize that Siouxsie’s place in the post-punk music scene of the 1970s was not unlike the place of Gothic novelists in the 1790s and early 1800s: a product of sociocultural conditions in which female artists were striving for a voice among male artists. Unlike her early Gothic sisters, though, she takes the Gothic beyond the writing to her own life. We can make this parallel between the two time periods when we see cultural history as James Rovira describes it in Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms: When Romanticism is defned not as an era but as a response to historical conditions in a condition/response model, one in which similar historical conditions can give rise to similar responses regardless of when and where they occur, the observation that popular lyricists from the early 1960s to the present drew so often from Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake should seem not so much coincidental

Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees 125 as expected. Rock musicians found in the Romantic poets kindred spirits or fellow travelers because these musicians were also, in a very fundamental way, Romantics.8 Rovira’s account relies, in part, on the work of Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre in Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, wherein they argue that Romanticism is a “collective mental structure” that is transnational, transhistorical, and transgeneric.9 If Romanticism is a “collective mental structure” that follows a “condition/response model” of history, then it stands to reason that, just as the Gothic posed a challenge to the Romantic in the second half of the eighteenth century and beyond, so too Gothic music emerged alongside Romantic music in the twentieth. It is interesting to note that Williams begins her discussion of Gothic inductively, with the example of mass-market Gothic novels of the 1960s through the 1980s, the precise time period when Siouxsie entered the scene, which suggests that her Gothic is emerging at the same time, and perhaps for similar socioeconomic and cultural reasons as the fction itself. This “coincidence” underscores Rovira’s claim that the cultural conditions that created Romanticism in the late eighteenth century are similar to those that buttressed late-twentieth-century manifestations of Romanticism and, in this case, the Gothic in rock music.

Defning Male and Female Gothic An important element of the literary Gothic, both in its heyday and in its critical history, is the way in which it was positioned against so-called high Romanticism and in its bifurcation into male and female modes (or, as Ann Radcliffe famously put it, horror and terror).10 Siouxsie’s Gothic voice emerged for similar reasons as her literary foremothers’, but interestingly her work and life, though defnitely exhibiting features of the female Gothic, leans towards male Gothic, not unlike early Gothic writer Charlotte Dacre. In Victoria de Loredani, Dacre created a violent, sexually powerful female counterpart to Matthew Lewis’s rapacious Ambrosio in her 1806 novel Zofoya. The male and female Gothic modes indicated physical and psychological terrors, respectively, which have been further theorized by Ellen Moers, Juliann Fleenor, Kate Ferguson Ellis, Anne Williams, and Diane Hoeveler. Ellen Moers coined the term “Female Gothic” in Literary Women wherein she discusses Frankenstein as a “birth myth” that demonstrates the “motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and fight surrounding birth and its consequences.”11 Extending Moers’s defnition further, Juliann Fleenor writes that “Horror of the self, of female physiology, is closely tied to the patriarchal paradigm” of terror Gothic.12 Further, female Gothic is characterized by “self-fear and self-disgust directed toward the female role, female sexuality, female physiology,

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and procreation.”13 Kate Ferguson Ellis’s defnition of male and female Gothic centers on the home: In the feminine Gothic the heroine exposes the villain’s usurpation and thus reclaims an enclosed space that should have been a refuge from evil but has become the very opposite, a prison. The masculine Gothic gives the perspective of an exile from the refuge of home, now the special province of women.14 Taken together, Moers, Fleenor, and Ellis identifed not only the relationship between physiological horror and psychological terror but also one of its primary settings—the home. Williams extends these defnitions further by outlining the conventions of male and female Gothic, but the foundational concept of her theory is that of the Gothic myth—a family romance in which we struggle with the tyrannical “Law of the Father.”15 She writes, “I shall argue that ‘the Gothic myth,’ the mythos or structure informing this Gothic category of ‘otherness,’ is the patriarchal family.”16 Gothic is a family romance in which the patriarchy defnes what constitutes otherness and difference, but the Gothic itself is what challenges this framework. As Williams writes, “Gothic is a discourse that shows the cracks in the system that constitutes consciousness, ‘reality.’ Gothic, therefore, is a ‘poetic’ tradition in Kristeva’s sense of language disrupted by the Semiotic.”17 According to Williams, male Gothic is characterized by multiple points of view, the supernatural, tragic endings, horror, fascination with female suffering (especially threats to virtue), and lack of narrative closure. Female gothic, by contrast, has a limited point of view and relies on explained supernatural and terror. The endings are usually comedic with the heroine’s virtue remaining intact and with possibly a rebirth or renewal of the protagonist’s sense of self. This chapter argues that Siouxsie’s work demonstrates elements of Moers’ and Fleenor’s defnitions of female Gothic, particularly the horror of female physiology, and that her use of male Gothic conventions such as multiple points of view and fascination with female suffering are tools deployed to challenge the myth of the family romance. Siouxsie extends the work that began in the eighteenth century, expanding it to include freedom not only in fction but also in reality.

The Romantic/Gothic Contexts of 1970s’ and 1980s’ Rock Music Signifcantly, Siouxsie’s place in the male-dominated rock world of the 1970s and 1980s was not unlike that of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury female Gothic novelists in a world dominated by the “high” art of male Romantic poetry. Romanticism, as Williams shows, defned itself against this irrational, messy, and female genre. The Gothic is the “black

Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees 127 sheep” of the Romantic family, and although scholarship has “politely ignored” any affnities between them, the Gothic can expose the “cracks in the system.”18 Interestingly, Löwy and Sayre’s defnition of Romanticism is bound up in what most of us would call the Gothic, indirectly implying what Williams asserts plainly: Romanticism and the Gothic are the same. Löwy and Sayre state that a key element of Romanticism is the recovery of the lost, which happens in numerous ways, including the “emergence of the supernatural, the fantastic, the oniric, or, in certain works of art, by the tonality of the sublime.”19 They also write that “Romanticism represents the revolt of repressed, channeled, and deformed subjectivity and affectivity.”20 Deformity, abjection, repression, loss, the supernatural—these are elements of the Gothic. Siouxsie’s work embodies all of these elements, indicating that her work is central to the “Romantic” music of the time period precisely because of its Gothic nature, which exposes, as Williams notes, the “cracks” in the system. In a similar vein, Charles Mueller argues that one of the key features of Goth music of the 1980s is “attacking and mocking masculine structures of power.”21 While Mueller’s argument is less subtle than Williams’s, his point about the gendered implications of Gothic music is on target. Siouxsie, of course, recognized and resisted that dynamic: I was holding back [from a record deal] because I was put off by every other girl that was trying to get into the music business. They were all manipulated by men, singing pretty songs. So I just waited for something to happen. And it did. Just at the right time. 22 Siouxsie’s words articulate the clear power dynamic at work in the music industry and the limited roles women could play. They had to be “pretty.” It was hard for music critics of the time to ignore her femaleness. Two early interviewers, Vivien Goldman and Jon Savage, articulate clearly the gendering of the band. In 1977 Goldman responds to Siouxsie’s irritation at always being compared to Blondie: “Understandable. The only conceivable point of comparison between Siouxsie and Blondie is that they’re two penis-less creatures making music on the same planet at the same time.”23 Goldman writes, Siouxsie is very obviously intelligent. Too intelligent and articulate for a girly-girly-girl. At 20, she’s got the assertiveness I still grasp for at 25. One look into her level, inquiring brown eyes is all it takes to know she’s as likely to take shit as I am to fog my typewriter for a new frock. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t got a record deal. 24 Just as Siouxsie herself said, the record companies struggled with signing a band led by a female, particularly one who is outspoken and assertive.

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In 1978, after Siouxsie’s band received their frst record deal from Polydor, Jon Savage summed up the state of the media portrayals of the band as follows: “The current lines on the Banshees STILL go either ‘Original punks, therefore passe and (shudder) decadent’, or Siouxsie = woman, therefore drool over or put on a pedestal: ‘Page Three Gal’ or ‘Future is Female’, or ‘Ice Queen/New Musick.’”25 Savage indicates that the media has a Madonna/whore complex and cannot keep themselves from commenting on Siouxsie’s gender. This focus on her gender continues, however positively construed, in a review of their frst album (The Scream, 1978). Kris Needs writes that “Panic and passion creep in as the band rise and fall, and you realise that Siouxsie has become one of our most mesmerizing and individual singers, if you hadn't already (notice I did not say ‘female’).”26 And, yet, he did say “female” because one could hardly help it in the context of an industry that insists on comparing her to Blondie simply because neither has a penis. Record companies certainly did sign women but, as Siouxsie said, they were more likely to sign women who would play by the rules or who were, in Goldman’s words, the “girly-girly-girl” type. But Siouxsie prevailed and was able to create a legacy in which she challenged the patriarchy through her works’ evocation of the Gothic family romance and the Gothic body. Perhaps this is why she, like the Gothic itself, continues to fascinate.

Siouxsie and the Gothic Family Romance Siouxsie’s life and body of work illustrate the Gothic mythos of the patriarchal family romance by relentlessly exposing the “cracks in the system.”27 In this way, her life and work become what Williams calls the “behavioral manifestations” of the Gothic ethos, which has “an unconscious structure that nevertheless has its ‘real,’ that is, its material, effects.” 28 Unlike those early Gothic mothers, Siouxsie was able to live the Gothic in performance, daily life, and fashion. Siouxsie, born Susan Ballion, describes where she lived as a child: “I grew up in a suburban, residential district with seemingly perfect lives and neat lawns, though our house stuck out like a sore thumb.”29 While all around her was cookie-cutter perfection, she felt different and isolated, but eventually, she says, “I enjoyed being the freak in a middle-class suburb.”30 At the same time, although the family did not quite conform to the middle-class suburban mentality, her family did conform to patriarchal structures. Her father’s sisters, for example, wanted to be doctors like their brother, but “they weren’t allowed to pursue that inclination,” and as Siouxsie recalls, “there were a lot of problems in the family, but these were never discussed.”31 Her father was an alcoholic, and when she was nine she was “seriously sexually assaulted” by someone in the area, a fact that was “totally ignored” by the rest of her family.32 She withdrew from her

Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees 129 peers and describes herself as a “loner.”33 In many ways, then, Siouxsie’s life shows that this patriarchal structure has, as Williams argues, its “‘real,’ that is, its material, effects.”34 The “effects” of this family romance appear in several of Siouxsie’s songs, songs that demonstrate the suffocation of the domestic indicative of female Gothic and the objectifcation and suffering of the female body, indicative of male Gothic. “Suburban Relapse” from their 1978 debut album The Scream, described by one reviewer as an “aural monster,” articulates this feeling of suffocation from a domestic space with dark family secrets.35 So too does the ironically titled “Happy House” from Kaleidoscope (1980) where we “forget ourselves and pretend all is well” (ln. 16).36 “Suburban Relapse” narrates a moment when the speaker has “snapped,” a word repeated throughout the song.37 The domestic space, in these and other songs, constricts and confnes, leading to mental and emotional damage. The speaker begins with an apology for hitting the listener, and she explains that while doing chores she asks, “what for?” (ln. 5) which is followed by an emotional breakdown. In the midst of the most domestic of duties, washing dishes, the speaker questions the entire system in which she is operating. “What for?” equals “why?” Why are we doing this? In lines 12–14, the speaker questions proper behavior, challenging those unwritten rules of the patriarchal family. Violence and sexual deviance are certainly unacceptable, particularly for women, and yet these are the secrets that are hidden in the family, just as Siouxsie can attest to in her own childhood. Here she is “doubtless exorcising the feelings of entrapment she endured as an arty, angsty adolescent growing up in the bourgeois London suburb of Bromley,” write Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, but they believe it is unclear as to whether she “identifes with” or “scorns” the woman in the song. In either case, she challenges the family romance, its mediocrity and its reliance on gender inequality and female repression.38 As Mueller says of “Candyman” (Tinderbox, 1986), this and other songs “expose the evil hidden beneath the surface . . . exposing the potential for horror and tragedy in the home and in daily life.”39 The speaker is clearly drowning in the domestic space and wonders if she’s going crazy. Interestingly, the song illustrates elements of both male and female Gothic. The song begins with the violence of the male Gothic, but given that she is washing dishes, most likely the speaker is a woman. Her desire to “expose” herself is suggestive of the male Gothic fascination with threats to female virtue. In thinking about exposing herself, she expresses the “self-fear and self-disgust directed toward the female role.”40 “Circle” from A Kiss in the Dreamhouse (1982) shows what happens in the long run to this “Happy House,” the consequences of this family romance, but in the male Gothic mode.41 Jeffrey Morgan wrote that the songs on this album “chart a celebration of ritual and pain, ecstasy and

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eroticism”42 The conjunction of ritual, eroticism, and pain is consistent with the male Gothic mode. “Circle” could be entitled “cycle” as that’s what is described here—the cycle of family dysfunction—and highlights, as do most of Siouxsie’s songs, the psychoanalytic meaning of Williams’ Gothic “complex.”43 The “ruined girl of 16” (ln. 3) gets pregnant, repeating her mother’s rebellion, imprisoned by the consequences of her sexuality. The boy in the song runs away for “love and adventure” (ln. 8), but winds up beating his own children just as his father did him. The song repeats the phrase “round and around”—a repetition of a repetition—signifying the endless cycle, which is further reinforced by the image of a cat infested with worms that chases its own tail. The imagery in the song is not exactly subtle, but nor is the melodrama and horror of many Gothic novels from the classic period.44 In this song, the Law of the Father is prominent in the idea of the “ruined” girl whose virginity has not been kept intact and the son-turned-father who beats his children “if they disobey him” (ln. 22). The rules of the patriarchal family home must be obeyed, and yet these rules create the violence and cause the degeneration of the family in the frst place. The young girl demonstrates Fleenor’s description of feminine Gothic as that which depicts self-loathing, particularly towards “female sexuality, female physiology, and procreation.”45 The young girl and the song as a whole underscore Ellis’s idea of the home as a prison. At the same time, the “Circle” displays elements of the male Gothic in depicting the young boy as an exile. “Circle” has many of the features of Williams’s defnition of male Gothic: the tragic ending, the fascination with female suffering (particularly in relation to her virtue, which does not remain intact as it would in Williams’s defnition of female Gothic), multiple points of view, and lack of closure. The story repeats and repeats and repeats, enacting what Horace Walpole articulated most famously as the “moral” of his Gothic tale: “that the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation.”46 The elements of male and female Gothic of the family romance displayed in the music is not just literary; the “behavioral manifestations”47 of the Gothic family romance are apparent in Siouxsie’s life from childhood to adulthood. As a child, she attacked her brother’s friend just for fun. She narrates, my brother made me attack him and kiss him. The boy was horrifed. He tried to fend me off and went bright red. I used to attack him just to get a reaction. As long as he hated it, I was happy!48 In this way, she becomes the aggressor and pursuer of the male Gothic; at the same time, it is evident that this behavior may have been caused, in part, by the sexual assault she experienced at the age of nine, which is the story she tells just before this in Paytress’s biography. Violence

Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees 131 and sexuality unbecoming of a “proper” daughter in the family system were to become regular parts of her adulthood, but without any shame or regret. At a party in 1979, the band encountered Kenny Morris, the drummer who had left the band in the middle of a tour. Angry, Severin strikes him and Nils follows up. Once Kenny hit the foor, Severin states, “Siouxsie started kicking him.”49 Another time, Siouxsie explains that if anyone started spitting at the concerts, she’d “kick the shit out of them.”50 Lucy O’Brien, writer and broadcaster specializing in women in music, recalls the early days watching Siouxsie: At the Gaumont gig . . . we stood in silence near the front, while mayhem spewed forth all around us. Siouxsie few across the stage like a bat, dressed in a raincoat. ‘Stop fucking spitting,’ she said at one point, and we thought that was bone-crushingly fne. A woman in charge.51 Siouxsie could “hold her own” in these altercations and was often the aggressor, aligning her much more with the male Gothic. We could certainly psychoanalyze Siouxsie and these “behavioral manifestations” of the Gothic family romance, but whether they are signs of trauma or reclaimed power, they reveal that all is not well in the “Happy House.” As it did in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Gothic is the means by which the patriarchal family system is exposed/ challenged. But it is not just a subtle fctional challenge as it was in the classic Gothic phase. Siouxsie carries the challenge to the next level in her own life: body, voice, behavior.

Siouxsie and the Gothic Body In addition to displaying key elements of the Gothic family romance, Siouxsie’s work presents elements of both male and female Gothic attitudes towards the female body, and as with the family romance, Siouxsie’s stance (if it can be called that) is more male Gothic than female. As noted above, Fleenor writes that female Gothic expresses horror and self-disgust “directed toward the female role, female sexuality, female physiology, and procreation.”52 Williams suggests that whereas in female Gothic threats to virtue never materialize, in male Gothic female virtue is ruined and the victim’s suffering is part of the writer’s and audience’s pleasure in the experience. In Siouxsie, we see this male Gothic fascination with female suffering and sexuality and multiple points of view in songs like “Carcass” (The Scream 1978), “Placebo Affect” (Join Hands 1979), “Paradise Place” and “Red Light” (Kaleidoscope 1980), “We Hunger” (Hyaena 1984), and of course “Peek-A-Boo” (Peep Show 1988). In these songs, the female body is a source of pleasure and

132 Diana Edelman pain (and pleasure through pain), but clearly within the context of male power and female submission. The speaker of “Carcass” articulates the “love” relationship between what appears to be a serial killer and his victim, addressing the female victim directly.53 The lyrics emphasize the pleasure in the pain, a feature of male Gothic, more reminiscent of the horror of a Monk Lewis than the terror of an Ann Radcliffe. He is “longing for fresh meat” (ln. 6). He hides his “cleaver” (ln. 4) and promises to be with her “forever” (ln. 5), but as soon as she’s hanging in the freezer, he goes in search of more fresh meat. At the end of the song, the speaker asserts that he loves her severed limbs and the pain she felt as he chopped her to bits. Like any good horror flm, this song places the audience in the role of voyeurs and victims, fnding both pleasure and fear in the gruesome plot that challenges the family romance. Siouxsie explains that when John McKay joined the band “I played him the soundtracks from Psycho and The Omen and told him that was the sound we wanted.”54 Though she is talking about the creation of their frst album, The Scream, horror flms and music were particularly infuential on the band’s entire oeuvre. This connection with horror flm, a direct descendant of classic Gothic, is clearly no accident as they both express a preoccupation with female suffering and sexuality in ways that indicate that all is not well in the domestic space, that the very structures designed to maintain order are those that create disorder and dysfunction, and The Scream as a whole is, as Kris Needs says of “Helter Skelter” from the same album, a “frenetic mutilation.”55 Although Needs is describing the sound, I would suggest that the mutilation is aural and philosophical, a mutilation of the family romance. “Placebo Affect” moves outside the home and presents the horrors of the female body consistent with both male and female Gothic and exposes the cracks in a patriarchal medical system, not unlike Siouxsie’s Gothic forebear Mary Shelley. 56 “Placebo Affect” takes aim at the medical profession and may be related to Siouxsie’s experiences of doctors when she was younger. As a child, she was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, an auto-immune disorder where “your body starts attacking itself,” she says.57 Though Siouxsie’s bodily experience here is not directly related to her femaleness, the indictment of the profession in this song, her experience of her own body, and its connection to later songs about the female body and sexuality certainly allow an interpretation in which those in power (usually male at this time) invade the weak, the sick (usually female). The song begins with an image reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein pursuing nature to her “hiding places.”58 He “sticks pins in my receptacles” like a voodoo doll; meanwhile “another corpse” waits her turn in the waiting room (ll. 7, 23). He gives her a little blue pill for her “hysteria” which contrasts with “his mojo” (ll. 16, 8). The use of the term “hysteria” alone indicates a female patient who cannot

Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees 133 control her emotions. The speaker indicts the doctor for his ambition and self-aggrandizement, calling his cure “bogus” (ll. 12, 20). Like Victor Frankenstein, the doctor here promises cures and miracles that only wreak havoc. Siouxsie, who happened to be going through puberty at the time, identifes with the creature when her illness led to the need for a blood transfusion and an operation. She recalls that they left “the end of my gut poking through” and exclaims, “I was a Doctor Frankenstein experiment!”59 She recalls that her time in a London hospital made her feel like a “slab of meat” and “dehumanised, violated and scared.”60 This experience, she states, “certainly made me aware of my physicality and deromanticized my vision of human beings.”61 As a young female experiencing puberty and with a disorder in which the body attacks itself, Siouxsie lived life in a Gothic body, a body whose experiences make their way into her aesthetic productions. While “Placebo Affect” exposes the “cracks” in the patriarchy of the medical profession in general, “Paradise Place,”62 which one reviewer calls “hypnotic, relentless and incisive,”63 introduces the issue of gender and power more directly, suggesting that the male gaze, not the body itself, is the problem. The female body, the song implies, is grotesque both before and after “intervention.” If the female must attract and excite men for their pleasure, her body must conform to a particular standard, even if it becomes monstrous in the process. The speaker has, apparently, had plastic surgery in an effort to improve what’s “wrong” with her body; line three refers to a “tummy tuck.” This surgery, however, leads to an even more grotesque version of herself as she asks repeatedly if her eyes are still in the right place. Lines fve and six indicate the central problem: “Hide your genetics under drastic cosmetics/But this chameleon magic is renowned to be tragic.” The grotesque female body—its natural “genetics”— must be hidden under “cosmetics.” The body then becomes even more warped in its unnatural state. “Magic” turns “tragic” just as it did for Victor Frankenstein upon seeing his “beautiful” creation awake. In this way, Siouxsie exposes the doctor’s vision as the warped male gaze, not the female body itself, thus challenging the entire family romance. Like “Happy House,” the title of “Paradise Place” is ironic. The “paradise” of female beauty is unattainable when defned by a warped eye. “Red Light” and “Peek-A-Boo” address female sexuality and the male gaze even more directly than “Paradise Place,” for the women in these songs are the natural manifestation of that male gaze in a patriarchal family romance.64 Sexual violation and degeneration are what happens when male sexuality runs wild and when the “Happy House” unravels. The red light of the title of course implies the generic term for a seedy area of town where prostitutes run rampant—a red light district. One of the most famous is in Amsterdam where red lights glow around the windows of the brothel. This red glow is evoked in the music video in

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which red and black lines crisscross the backdrop of the scene at canted angles as if the very mundane window blinds of a suburban living room have gone Goth. The interrogation of the male gaze here is not subtle. The model “falls into frame” and the “voyeur sucks [her] into focus” (ll. 1, 7). She suffers from “too much exposure” as the song repeats throughout. Like the warped body of “Paradise Place,” the model in this song is warped by the camera, if not physically, then emotionally. She has become a “shutterslut” (ln. 15). While these are harsh words for the female model, the real villains here are the Polaroid and Kodak, symbols of the male gaze. While the male gaze hides behind a camera in “Red Light,” the gaze in “Peek-A-Boo” is much more direct and the implications far worse as her body is directly used and abused. The model in “Red Light” makes love to the camera, but the woman in “Peek-A-Boo” fucks real men. The “John” creeps up the backstairs of the brothel or rendezvous room; the “furtive eyes” of line four may be either hers or his looking for her services. Either way, the gaze and the objectifcation are explicit. Siouxsie sings about the woman’s willingness to play any role he wants (see lines 5–7). The woman will do anything—play dead, submit, bite, pretend to love it. While she takes the “lunge and thrust” (ln. 16), she is “jeering” and “sneering” (ll. 13–14), which notably recalls Siouxsie’s sneer at Grundy in that infamous interview. The “faccid ego” of line 11 is clearly the limp penis that must play with whips and dolls to get aroused. While exploiting the male Gothic perspective in much of her work, Siouxsie also challenges it; after “they” leave, the woman gets her money and crumples up on the foor in tears. Though she is worn and wasted, her existence and her “sneering” are a subtle challenge. Taken in the context of the band’s oeuvre, this song is the dirty Gothic underside of the patriarchal family. In answer to the questions repeated throughout the song—“Where’d you get those Peepers?” and “Where did you get those eyes?”—one might respond: the kitchen of “Suburban Relapse,” the “Happy House,” or the operating table of “Paradise Place.” A song more directly related to female bodily experience and its horrors, particularly its reproductive horrors, is “We Hunger.”65 Reynolds and Press argue that this song “imagines pregnancy in terms of the appalling rapacity of the insect world.”66 This “ambivalent attitude to female biology”67 is consistent with Fleenor’s description of female Gothic as a refection of the horrors of reproduction; Roy Trakin of Creem described it as the “anti-sexual heebie-jeebies.”68 But it is also very much about fascination with suffering. The frst half of the song is directed at “you,” thus creating a distance between the speaker and the female who has a “ravenous greed for a brood to feed” (ln. 1). The “you” could also be interpreted as the male whose sexual desire leads to pregnancy; however, line eight indicates that “you” is the female whose

Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees 135 “belly aches” once impregnated. The second half of the song moves to “we” and thus indicates Siouxsie’s identifcation with the hunger that the song expresses, but of course, it is also a loathing. The shift in point of view and the fascination with suffering expressed throughout the song—“sharpened knives” (ln. 6) and “stretch marks” (ln. 7)—are indicative of male Gothic. This song thus expresses both male and female Gothic responses to the results of female sexuality whether experienced in pleasure or pain, voluntarily or for a price. From “Carcass” to “Peek-A-Boo,” Siouxsie and the Banshees illustrate the male Gothic convention of fascination with female suffering and sexuality, while simultaneously undercutting the power dynamic on which that rests. Further, each song presents a different voice, and sometimes, as in “Circle,” there are multiple points of view within one song. According to Williams, these multiple points of view are characteristic of the male Gothic. The speaker in “Carcass” addresses the potential female victim describing the mindset of the male serial killer, a kind of warning, while “Red Light” offers no direct warning but is in third person, written about the female model. “Paradise Place” is written in frst person from the perspective of the woman butchered by the plastic surgeon, and “Peek-A-Boo” directly addresses the male client who seeks both pleasure and pain in the female body. Regardless of which perspective, however, the power dynamic is the same. The body parts in the freezer in “Carcass” are the body parts in the camera in “Red Light” and the brothel in “Peek-A-Boo.” The female body is objectifed, and yet it is through this objectifcation that the whole story of the family romance is undermined. The murderer in “Carcass” is pathetic, likely a result of his controlling mother as implied by stanza fve (and possibly an allusion to Norman Bates). The voyeur hides behind the camera in “Red Light,” and the “faccid ego” of “Peek-A-Boo” can hardly be a more direct allusion to the faccid penis, perhaps symbolic of the failure of the “Law of the Father.” Using male Gothic conventions, these songs, not unlike classic Gothic, expose the myth of the patriarchal family romance. As with the family romance, this challenge to male voyeurism and female objectifcation fnds its “behavioral manifestations” in Siouxsie’s own life. She is famous for being an “Ice Queen,” for refusing to pander to the audience’s expectations for emotion and sexuality from a woman on stage. Siouxsie said she wore shorts on stage for ease of movement. Goldman explains, “That way, Siouxsie onstage, stripped for ease of movement, plus elemental eroticism, is half-gymnast, half-warrior.”69 Although she is described as cold, the eroticism is there, but on her own terms. As a “lone woman among men,” O’Brien notes, she not only “symbolized a kind of sisterhood,” but also “presented an admirable picture of control.”70 As much as possible, she controls the narrative, the gaze. In 1995, she rejected “Women In Rock and all that crap,”

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but despite her protests, her work and behavior offered the necessary challenge for the time.71 In The Sex Revolts, Reynolds and Press place Siouxsie in the “woman unbound” and “masquerade and mastery” camps of their taxonomy, arguing that her rebellion against the rock patriarchy embraces the irrational and escapes unifed identity through “an endless succession of costume changes and sexual personae.”72 Masquerade, they argue, “becomes a way of provoking and confounding the male gaze.”73 While it is true that she confounds the male gaze and, to some extent, deploys masquerade, her identity is unifed in the sense that her version of “woman unbound” is consistently Gothic. After all, she is not dressing up like a cowgirl or a car mechanic. In this sense, I would suggest that she manages to create this challenge while maintaining a distinct identity that is precisely her own, and therein lies her success. Despite her rejection of “all that crap,” she controlled that gender narrative not only through her music but also through her behavior. She confounded the male gaze with her stage shorts, but she also courted it (and controlled it) in her infamous photoshoot with Budgie in 1981. During the Juju tour, Siouxsie and Budgie, who had been sneaking around seeing each other, scheduled a photoshoot together, which produced some very sensual yet dark photos of the two of them in a shower. Siouxsie recalls, Fuelled by a lot of champagne, Budge and I let Adrian Boot, a photographer we’d known for ages, take shots of us in a shower together in one of the hotel rooms. It was my obsession with Hitchcock’s shower scene in Psycho again. I wanted the ambiguity of sex and murder for that shot . . . For the label photos, I wanted the spirit of [Millais’] pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia underwater, and covered in fowers, and wanted it to look as if I was nude.74 In this scene, Siouxsie invites the camera on her terms, but revels in the “ambiguity of sex and murder” that’s readily apparent in songs like “Carcass” (1978) and implied in works like “Red Light” (1980) and the much later “Peek-A-Boo” (1988). The image is a striking black and white photo in which Siouxsie’s black hair and eye makeup contrast with Budgie’s blonde hair; even more compelling is the sexual intensity that emanates from two somewhat androgynous “creatures.” But it wasn’t just this secret photoshoot for the Creatures, a band she started with Budgie in 1981, that manifests the male Gothic association between sex and death in Siouxsie’s life and works. She is, of course, known for her fashion, which was largely inspired by the fetish/bondage fashion of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s boutique, “Sex,” which was open in London between 1974 and 1976. Siouxsie is known for her spiky black hair, cat-like black eye makeup, and pure white skin:

Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees 137 quintessential Goth. Berlin (Bertie Marshall of the so-called Bromley Contingent) recalls that, during a party in 1976, Siouxsie answered the door wearing nothing but fshnet stockings, high heels, and a plastic apron; she was carrying a whip. The neighbor called her a slut, and Siouxsie reacted by punching her in the face.75 This scene is typical Siouxsie and illustrative of male Gothic—sex and violence under a dark and foreboding cloud of mystery. These “behavioral manifestations” of the Gothic serve to undermine the patriarchal family romance as well as the male gaze of objectifcation and control.

Conclusion: She Will “Win This Deadly Game” It has been over forty years since that infamous interview with Bill Grundy. Since then, Siouxsie has moved from “behind” the boys, and the band has been recognized as one of the frst Goth bands and one of the most infuential post-punk groups of the era. Siouxsie and the Banshees were actively performing and producing albums for almost twenty years (1976–1996). Siouxsie and drummer Budgie started a side project, The Creatures, in the 1980s, which continued after the band split, and Siouxsie launched her solo career with the release of Mantaray in 2007. It is hard to believe that she turned sixty in 2017, but it is not hard to believe that she is just as ferce and beautiful as ever. Ben Hewitt writes, “mysterious and misunderstood, the singer of goth pop’s sacred texts outlasted her Banshees peers and outwitted anyone who would second-guess her. There is much to celebrate.”76 This chapter, I hope, celebrates the value of those “sacred texts” by demonstrating how they, like the Gothic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, offer a means by which female voices and identities can expose the cracks in the system. It is perhaps ftting that the last song she released, at the time of the writing of this article, is “Love Crime,” written and produced as the love theme for Hannibal and Will for the television series about a cannibalistic serial killer, Hannibal. She sings, “I will survive, live and thrive/Win this deadly game” (ll. 1–2 of chorus).77 Yes, yes you will.

Notes 1 There are several YouTube posts of this interview. See “Sex Pistols–Bill Grundy Interview,” YouTube, online video, 00:02:37, uploaded by MunisAwesome, 25 May 2010, https://youtu.be/i4YM70M_e-U. 2 “Grundy Banned,” The Guardian (3 December 1976), https://www. theguardian.com/theguardian/1976/dec/03/greatinterviews. 3 Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 355. 4 Mark Paytress, Siouxsie and the Banshees: The Authorised Biography (London: Sanctuary Publishing, 2003), 64.

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5 Paytress, Siouxsie and the Banshees, 106. 6 Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 175. 7 Williams, Art of Darkness, 1. 8 James Rovira, “Introduction: Theorizing Rock/Historicizing Romanticism,” in Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms, ed. James Rovira (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 6. 9 Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 14. 10 Ann Radcliffe made this distinction in 1826 in “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” New Monthly Magazine, 16, no. 1 (1826), British Periodicals, http://libproxy.ung.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libproxy. ung.edu/docview/4400026?accountid=159965, accessed 9 September 2018. 11 Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 92–93. 12 Juliann E. Fleenor, The Female Gothic (Montreal: Eden, 1983), 7. 13 Fleenor, The Female Gothic, 15. 14 Quoted in Williams, Art of Darkness, 100. 15 Ibid., 24. 16 Ibid., 22. 17 Ibid., 66. 18 Ibid., 4, 66. 19 Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, 23. 20 Ibid., 25. 21 Charles Mueller, “Gothicism and English Goth Music,” Gothic Studies 14, no. 2 (2012): 75. 22 Vivien Goldman, “Siouxsie and the Banshees,” Sounds, 1977, Rock’s Backpages, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/siouxsie-and-thebanshees. Accessed 23 August 2018. 23 Goldman, “Siouxsie and the Banshees.” 24 Ibid. 25 Jon Savage, “Siouxsie and the Banshees: The Unacceptable Face Of ’78,” Sounds, 1978, Rock’s Backpages, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/siouxsie-and-the-banshees-the-unacceptable-face-of-78. Accessed 1 September 2018. 26 Kris Needs, “Siouxsie and the Banshees: The Scream,” ZigZag, 1978, Rock’s Backpages, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/siouxsie-andthebanshees-ithe-screami. Accessed 23 August 2018. 27 Williams, Art of Darkness, 66. 28 Ibid. 29 Paytress, Siouxsie and the Banshees, 16. 30 Ibid., 24. 31 Ibid., 16–17. 32 Ibid., 20. 33 Ibid., 22. 34 Williams, Art of Darkness, 24. 35 Needs, “Siouxsie and the Banshees: The Scream.” 36 Siouxsie and the Banshees. “Happy House,” in Kaleidoscope, Polydor 2442 177, 1980, LP. Throughout this article, I will provide the full citation for the song in the endnotes upon frst mention; thereafter, line numbers will be cited parenthetically in the text. 37 Siouxsie and the Banshees. “Suburban Relapse,” in The Scream, Polydor ‎ SATBLP01, 1978, LP.

Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees 139 38 Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ‘N’ Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 351. 39 Mueller, “Gothicism and English Goth Music,” 83. 40 Fleenor, The Female Gothic, 15. 41 Siouxsie and the Banshees. “Circle,” in A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, Polydor 5064, 2383 648, 1982, LP. 42 Jeffrey Morgan, “Siouxsie and the Banshees: A Kiss in the Dreamhouse (Polydor)” (Unpublished), 1982, Rock’s Backpages, http://www.rocksbackpages. com/Library/Article/siouxsie-and-the-banshees-a-kiss-in-the-dreamhousepolydor. Accessed 25 August 2018. 43 Williams argues that the Gothic itself is a “complex,” a word that denotes an intersection of grammar, architecture, and psychoanalysis. Like Gothic architecture and narrative, it denotes intricacy, ‘complexity,’ and in different contexts it may refer to behavioral manifestations or to an unconscious structure that nevertheless has its ‘real,’ that is, its material, effects. Thus my purpose in this ‘poetics’ of Gothic: to follow the signs of this ordering principle through two centuries and through its plots, settings, imagery, affects, effects, and literary forms. (23–24) 44 Throughout this essay, I will refer to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Gothic period (roughly 1764 to 1820) as the “classic” phase. 45 Fleenor, The Female Gothic, 15. 46 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764), ed. W. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), 7. Emphasis in original. 47 Williams, Art of Darkness, 24. 48 Paytress, Siouxsie and the Banshees, 21. 49 Ibid., 84. 50 Ibid., 97. 51 Lucy O’Brien, “Siouxsie and the Banshees: A Kiss in the Dreamhouse” (Book Excerpt), Love is a Drug (Penguin, 1994), Rock’s Backpages, http:// www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/siouxsie-and-the-banshees-iakiss-in-the-dreamhousei, accessed 25 August 2018. 52 Fleenor, The Female Gothic, 15. 53 Siouxsie and the Banshees. “Carcass,” in The Scream, Polydor ‎ SATBLP01, 1978, LP. 54 Paytress, Siouxsie and the Banshees, 58. 55 Needs, “Siouxsie and the Banshees: The Scream.” 56 Siouxsie and the Banshees. “Placebo Affect,” in Join Hands, Polydor 5024, 2442 164, 1979, LP. 57 Paytress, Siouxsie and the Banshees, 21. 58 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), 2nd Norton Critical Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012), 33. 59 Paytress, Siouxsie and the Banshees, 22. 60 Ibid., 22. 61 Ibid., 22. 62 Siouxsie and the Banshees. “Paradise Place,” in Kaleidoscope, Polydor 2442 177, 1980, LP. 63 Paolo Hewitt, “Siouxsie & The Banshees: Kaleidoscope (Polydor),” Melody Maker, 1980, Rock’s Backpages, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/siouxsie--the-banshees-ikaleidoscopei-polydor. Accessed 30 August 2018.

140 Diana Edelman 64 Siouxsie and the Banshees. “Red Light,” in Kaleidoscope, Polydor 2442 177, 1980, LP, and “Peek-A-Boo,” in Peep Show, Polydor 837 240-1, 1988, LP. 65 Siouxsie and the Banshees. “We Hunger,” in Hyaena, Polydor 821 510-1, 1984, LP. 66 Reynolds and Press, Sex Revolts, 344. 67 Ibid., 344. 68 RoyTrakin,“SiouxsieandtheBanshees:Hyaena,”Creem,1984,Rock’sBackpages, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/siouxsie-andthe-bansheesihyaenai, Accessed 1 September 2018. 69 Goldman, “Siouxsie and the Banshees.” 70 O’Brien, “Siouxsie and the Banshees: A Kiss in the Dreamhouse.” 71 Dave Thompson, “Siouxsie and the Banshees: The Shriek’s Back,” Alternative Press, 1995, Rock’s Backpages, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/ Library/Article/siouxsie-and-the-banshees-the-shrieks-back-. Accessed 1 September 2018. 72 Reynolds and Press, Sex Revolts, 291. 73 Ibid., 289. 74 Paytress, Siouxsie and the Banshees, 112. 75 Ibid., 36–37. 76 Ben Hewitt, “Siouxsie Sioux at 60: More Than a Monochrome Goth-Pop Priestess,” The Guardian, 26 May 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/ music/2017/may/26/siouxsie-sioux-banshees-60-goth-pop-singer. Accessed 11 June 2018. 77 Siouxsie and Brian Reitzell. “Love Crime (Amuse-Bouche Version),” Hunger, 2015, single, MP3.

Bibliography Fleenor, Juliann E. The Female Gothic. Montreal: Eden, 1983. Goldman, Vivien. “Siouxsie and the Banshees.” Sounds, 1977. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed 23 August 2018. http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/siouxsie-and-thebanshees. “Grundy Banned,” The Guardian (3 December 1976), https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1976/dec/03/greatinterviews. Hewitt, Ben. “Siouxsie Sioux at 60: More Than a Monochrome Goth-Pop Priestess.” The Guardian. 26 May 2017. Accessed 11 June 2018. https://www. theguardian.com/music/2017/may/26/siouxsie-sioux-banshees-60-goth-popsinger. Hewitt, Paolo. “Siouxsie & the Banshees: Kaleidoscope (Polydor).” Melody Maker. 1980, Rock’s Backpages. Accessed 30 August 2018. http://www. rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/siouxsie--the-banshees-ikaleidoscopeipolydor. Hoeveler, Diane L. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Morgan, Jeffrey. “Siouxsie and the Banshees: A Kiss In The Dreamhouse (Polydor)” (Unpublished). 1982. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed 25 August 2018. http:// www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/siouxsie-and-the-banshees-akiss-in-the-dreamhousepolydor.

Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees 141 Mueller, Charles. “Gothicism and English Goth Music.” Gothic Studies 14, no. 2 (2012): 74–88. Needs, Kris. “Siouxsie and the Banshees: The Scream.” ZigZag. 1978. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed 23 August 2018. http://www.rocksbackpages.com/ Library/Article/siouxsie-and-thebanshees-ithe-screami. O’Brien, Lucy. “Siouxsie and the Banshees: A Kiss in the Dreamhouse” (Book Excerpt). Love is a Drug (Penguin, 1994). Rock’s Backpages. Accessed 25 August 2018. http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ siouxsie-and-the-banshees-ia-kiss-in-the-dreamhousei. Paytress, Mark. Siouxsie and the Banshees: The Authorised Biography. London: Sanctuary Publishing, 2003. Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” New Monthly Magazine 16, no. 61 (1826): 145–152. British Periodicals. Accessed 9 September 2018. http://libproxy.ung.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libproxy.ung. edu/docview/4400026?accountid=159965. Reynolds, Simon. Rip It Up and Start again: Postpunk 1978-1984. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Reynolds, Simon, and Joy Press. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock 'N' Roll. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Rovira, James. “Introduction: Theorizing Rock/Historicizing Romanticism.” In Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms, ed. James Rovira, 1–26. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Savage, Jon. “Siouxsie and the Banshees: The Unacceptable Face Of ’78.” Sounds, 1978. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed 1 September 2018. http:// www.rocksbackpages.com / Library/Article/siouxsie-and-the-bansheesthe-unacceptable-face-of-78. “Sex Pistols–Bill Grundy Interview,” YouTube, online video, 00:02:37, uploaded by MunisAwesome, 25 May 2010, https://youtu.be/i4YM70M_e-U. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (1818). 2nd Norton Critical Edition. Edited by J. Paul Hunter. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Thompson, Dave. “Siouxsie and the Banshees: The Shriek’s Back.” Alternative Press. 1995. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed 1 September 2018. http://www. rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/siouxsie-and-the-banshees-the-shrieksback-. Trakin, Roy. “Siouxsie and the Banshees: Hyaena.” Creem. 1984. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed 1 September 2018. http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/siouxsie-andthe-banshees-ihyaenai. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto (1764). Edited by W. S. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Discography Siouxsie and the Banshees. “Carcass.” In The Scream, Polydor ‎ SATBLP01, 1978, LP. ———. “Circle.” In A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, Polydor 5064, 2383 648, 1982, LP. ———. “Happy House.” In Kaleidoscope, Polydor 2442 177, 1980, LP. ———. “Paradise Place.” In Kaleidoscope, Polydor 2442 177, 1980, LP.

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———. “Peek-A-Boo.” In Peep Show, Polydor 837 240-1, 1988, LP. ———. “Placebo Affect.” In Join Hands, Polydor 5024, 2442 164, 1979, LP. ———. “Red Light.” In Kaleidoscope, Polydor 2442 177, 1980, LP. ———. “Suburban Relapse.” In The Scream, Polydor ‎ SATBLP01, 1978, LP. ———. “We Hunger.” In Hyaena, Polydor 821 510-1, 1984, LP. Siouxsie and Brian Reitzell. “Love Crime (Amuse-Bouche Version).” Hunger, 2015, single, MP3.

7

“Our Generation” Gender, Regeneration and Women in Rock Linda C. Middleton

The signifcance of women artists to the evolution of rock music was unacknowledged for decades after their frst appearances as individual performers of note. A major cause of this deferred recognition was the perception among audiences and industry moguls that rock music was a predominantly masculine genre. The rock revolution was often connected with male performers and masculine energy; as critics of gender and rock have noted, “rock’n’roll in excelsis . . . [is] male ferocity, resentment, [and] virulence,” “fueled by . . . [a] violent fervour to cut loose.”1 A comparable energy had ignited an earlier revolution two centuries before in France. And as rock was the aesthetic of masculine energy in the 1960s, the French Revolution expressed its aesthetic energy in Romanticism, which dominated art, literature, and music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this chapter, I will explore how Romanticism’s most recognized artists and writers and the rock revolution’s most praised musicians and performers included almost no women when these movements were both most active. In both cases, women artists’ signifcance was deferred by a century or more in Romanticism, and by nearly a half-century in rock. My touchstone text on Romanticism is Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre’s Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (2001). Drawing upon what Lӧwy and Sayre term the Weltanschauung of Romanticism in resistance to late-twentieth-century modernity, I speculate on how rock artists and performers more fully express the Weltanschauung of Romanticism. 2 More specifcally, my focus will be women in rock who, though a passing “trend” during rock’s early years, gathered a following between the late 1980s through the 1990s.3 During this decade, women in rock began to produce and perform their own work, disrupting the previous hegemony of rock’s masculinist landscape and enhancing the Weltanschauung of Romanticism male rockers had expressed. Those women who might have been relegated to the role of groupies in the era of traditional 1960s-rock (or muses in the case of the earlier revolution of Romanticism) were eventually recognized in their own aesthetic right, regenerating revolutionary messages for new audiences.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003204855-8

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Women’s deferred recognition in the masculine-dominated rock scene was a consequence of their marginalization, containment, and control in the decades when the rock industry was being commercialized as a “business”—a business dominated by men.4 Though male performers were also controlled and contained to some degree during rock’s commodifcation, the masculine dominance of the business resulted in men often being partners in their own marketing. Similar self-marketing partnerships between performers and their “backers” were rare with women, and this lack of participation in the production of their music delayed their full participation in the rock revolution. In the 1960s-rock era, women were generally silent partners—performers managed by men, or groupies “following” male performers—while the rock revolution remained a masculine one. Women artists’ and performers’ lack of status persisted from rock’s earliest decades through its surge in popularity in the 1960s through the early 1970s. This disregard of women artists next to the validation of male artists can be compared to women’s diminished regard in during the Romantic era—in Romantic “culture,” specifcally—which differs, as Lӧwy and Sayre have noted, from the Weltanschauung of Romanticism. An example of the lack of recognition of women artists in early Romantic culture as contrasted with their validation in the Weltanschauung of Romanticism was in the distinction between two schools of women authors writing and publishing during the Romantic Revolution: “proper women writers” and “radical women writers.” Proper women writers contributed to the ideology consistent with Romantic culture, in which sentiment and “subordination” to men—especially husbands— allowed women to infuence them emotionally and thereby vicariously claim an indirect authority through them. Radical women writers, allied with the Weltanschauung of Romanticism, sought to infuence social and political change directly, and were often called “unsex’d” by their male critics, owing to how they “breached the gendered codes” and “challeng[ed] . . . the status quo,” thereby owning their power. 5 Radical women writers sought self-determination and challenged their marginalization in Romantic culture, locating themselves in the Weltanschauung of Romanticism, where they could claim their own agency rather than co-opt it from men. Analogously, in the rock revolution, women had to explore for themselves where they might claim greater agency in the Weltanschauung of Romanticism, which provided the matrix of rock, while they also resisted the double commodifcation of modernity and the rock industry. One option for women in rock searching for the expression of their agency was, like that chosen by many male performers, to channel the rebellious impulse of Romanticism’s Weltanschauung. One of the most signifcant historical demonstrations of this impulse of rebellion was the French Revolution, and one of its most famous historical documents,

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An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794), was by a woman, Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft, a feminist philosopher—possibly, one of the frst— based her writings on direct observations of the revolution in France, where she’d relocated from her native England to be present at the site of societal reformation she hoped to eventually see in her own country.6 Her commitment to human rights was such that when prominent English philosopher Edmund Burke wrote his condemnation of the French Revolution, Refections on the Revolution in France (1790), Wollstonecraft replied with a much-praised rebuttal, A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790), followed closely thereafter with her even more radical A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1790). In her argument for women’s rights, Wollstonecraft covers themes related to the polarized articulation of the powers of “proper” women writers and their radical counterparts. Aligning herself with the radicals, Wollstonecraft advocated for women’s individualism and freedom, defending their independence from the approval of their spouses. Though aware that most women were due to be wives and mothers, Wollstonecraft suggested ways motherhood allowed women some role in managing their daughters’ education to cultivate their minds. She was aware that the path to agency for women would be one that might take centuries, not mere decades, to travel.7 Illustrating Wollstonecraft’s point on the obstacles to women’s liberty, the French Revolution did not earn freedom or agency for women in France, and this failure was attributed by Wollstonecraft to how “the acquisition of property[, ] . . . conspicuous display” and the “decadence” of French society resulted in the Revolution’s ultimate failure and the demonstration of what ensues when a Weltanschauung of Romanticism does not displace Romantic-era culture. Wollstonecraft’s critique of the sway of materialism in France and its hindrance to change supports Lӧwy and Sayre’s concept of Romanticism’s Weltanschauung. Wollstonecraft argues further that French decadence, the failed Revolution, and the absence of independent agency in women are linked to the fetishization of wealth and women’s objectifcation. She suggests that a revolution in “the nature of the relationship between men and women” was necessary to address society’s orientation toward money and who controlled it.8 The economy that evolved from a successful revolution would shift from a capitalistic to a communal system of production. And relationships between men and women no longer based on ownership would foster communal alliances necessary for collective resistance. Represented historically in the communes of Europe, America, and elsewhere, collective resistance was an affrmation of the humanism and utopianism of Romanticism’s Weltanschauung.9 Humanism and utopianism were values also embraced two centuries later by the women in rock discussed here, and they link the feminism of radical predecessors like Wollstonecraft to the feminist perspectives

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women employed to establish their agency in rock’s masculinist landscape. In the exploration of agency grounded in feminism, the women in rock I will be concerned with—Alanis Morissette, Natalie Merchant, and the Indigo Girls (Amy Ray and Emily Saliers)—pushed the revolutionary envelope in diverse but related ways. These performers confront one of the central challenges posed by rock, Romantic culture, and modernity by foregrounding the vexed issue of women’s identity and subjectivity in the face of their objectifcation. Their feminist innovations of women as subjects with agency assisted their protest of the objectifcation imposed on women by the masculinist “aesthetic” of 1960s-rock culture. Alanis Morissette and Natalie Merchant initially challenged their reifcation and objectifcation as women in rock by forsaking the masculine-defned performative platforms they had occupied as emerging solo artists. Their evolution as rock performers was intertwined with the articulation of their respective identities and agency. Morissette’s and Merchant’s moments of self-innovation and the slightly different visibility of the Indigo Girls on the rock scene were hinge moments in the shifting identifcation of women in rock. Alanis Morissette, among the above performers, most dramatically tapped the power of women’s shifting identifcation in rock by overtly protesting women’s objectifcation in a capitalist culture fueled by desire. She clearly locates her resistance within Romanticism’s Weltanschauung to women’s commodifcation in capitalism and modernity’s bourgeois money-consciousness. Morissette’s protest focuses on the fetishization of women in Romantic culture. While all the performers I discuss honed their identities as women in rock with greater resonance over the years, Morissette voiced her rebellion with distinctively unrepressed anger against both the system of masculinist hegemony and the men who had personally silenced her. The Indigo Girls and Natalie Merchant, unlike Morissette, found communities that resonated with their messages at cultural celebrations like Lilith Fair, where the importance of women’s voices was asserted. Events like Lilith Fair came to be recognized for their signifcance to women performers “carving out a substantial place for themselves in the rock world—for the frst time.”10 But Lilith Fairs and similar platforms did not serve as spaces where women’s anger was more than implied in measured protest to their treatment by the rock industry and media. It wasn’t until the “riot grrrls” of the 1990s, like Morissette, added their message to that of Lilith Fair’s “quiet girls” that the latent anger in women’s music was transferred to their profles as performers, and their careers began to evolve in ways that countered the control of masculine rock industry moguls and media.11 This turn toward independence from corporate determination of the images and voices of women in rock grounded their challenge to modernity in the collective feminist energy of late Romanticism’s Weltanschauung.

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As women’s voices and messages in historical Romanticism—culled from literature, correspondence, and memoirs—were often humanist and collective, so were the similarly nuanced interruptions by women performers of masculine rock’s dominance. These interruptions had not generated enough audience interest in the 1960s to prompt those in the rock music industry to promote women performers as they did male performers. But the trend of masculinist rock’s primacy began to turn after what came to be known as the “fower power” decade. The “fower power” period was an initially optimistic emphasis on nature-focused Romanticism, and its climax was the festival of Woodstock, launched as an expression of the Weltanschauung of Romanticism grounded in a reverence for nature. But the celebration of nature was displaced by a hedonism more in keeping with fn de siécle modernity. The music was quintessential masculine rock, and the natural ambiance of Yasgur’s farm was eclipsed by the crowd of more than 400,000 festival attendees, many daunted and dazed by the spectacle, a good proportion drug-induced, but most just overwhelmed by the disorganization and mismanagement of those who sought to proft from Woodstock’s anticipated but underestimated popularity.12 The distortion of the intended paeon to the Romanticism of nature in this massive spectacle of masculinist rock decadence dismayed a segment of rock audiences, who began to turn toward different messages and visions, eventually helping to prepare the way for women in rock as a source of counterpoints to excesses like Woodstock, where both the human in nature and the spirit of nature were lost. Women in rock generally promoted more humanist messages, including a relationship with nature more refective of the Weltanschauung of Romanticism, respecting both the human value of nature and the natural values of the human. Romanticism’s Weltanschauung in nature is affrmed by the women in rock covered in this essay in different ways. Morissette shows how the female body, a woman’s personal intersection with nature, is objectifed in masculine rock, as nature itself was distorted by corporate interests at Woodstock. Natalie Merchant attempts to renew the link between the earth, women, and the natural-maternal which had been exploited in capitalist modernity, as exemplifed in the exploitation of the land at Woodstock. Merchant’s celebration of nature, as Woodstock was intended, is reverent, as Woodstock’s was not. Her acknowledgment of the elegiac and apocalyptic in the messages of her music expresses a vision of the earth as powerfully related to women, motherhood and death, beginnings and endings, but it eschews nature-trashing exploitation— one of Woodstock’s “mistakes.” The Indigo Girls’ natural Romanticism is expressed in folk-rock and regional music, which evoke the land as a familiar space enduring through time. Their songs are nostalgic, reminding listeners not only of a disappearing homeland but also of a promised utopia. The Indigo Girls’ “Galileo” and “Virginia Woolf,” among other

148 Linda C. Middleton songs, posit communities of collective resistance, separated from each other by time as well as geographical boundaries, but essentially unlimited by those spatial and temporal borders. Humanity itself, in nature across time, as imagined by these women in rock, is possibly the most expressive vision of Romanticism’s Weltanschauung. The regeneration of the message of revolutionary humanism in both rock and Romanticism, though, was possible only when women had claimed the identity and agency to introduce their voices to the rock chorus. Agency allowed women to evolve as rock performers with messages that regenerated and renewed the rock revolution from a masculinist industry to a feminist enterprise and, fnally, to a humanist movement that provided new voices and listeners for a fresh diversity of messages.

Alanis Morissette’s Anger: Agency and Irony in the Subversion of Modernity Alanis Morissette is an icon of feminist rebellion who protests women’s reifcation, reduction to capitalist use-value, and consequent exploitation. Her protest is blunt in the frst song, “You Oughta Know,” from her album, Jagged Little Pill (January 1995). Raw anger infects both its music and message, opposing rock culture stereotypes as well as Romantic culture’s and modernity’s mandates that a woman’s revelations about her betrayal as a love object demean her. Morissette challenges a central convention of cultural Romanticism by giving woman—the traditional “love object”—a voice, inventing a new subject position for her in a revised Weltanschauung of Romanticism. Her anthems of simultaneous rage and hurt achieve a more nuanced emotional message than the standard masculine anger of rock. When “You Oughta Know” frst aired, rock culture was still “the culture of the angry young man,” but Morissette broke through the boundaries of rock’s gendered expressiveness, demonstrating how its “premium on authenticity and rawness” made it “the ideal medium for . . . [women’s] catharsis.”13 One critic observes that “You Oughta Know” sounds like “a spiky, enraged missive to an unfaithful ex”; but Morissette confessed it was written from “a desperate, dark, almost pathetically sad place within my subconscious.” By disclosing she is both angry and wounded, Morissette is authentic. Her musical intonation, vacillating between a “deadpan style” and rage,14 evokes the paradox of relationships in modernity—and postmodernity. Engaging listeners with the authenticity of revelation and almost Gothic angst, Morissette adopts a seemingly dramatized but convincing ethos true to the Weltanschauung of revised Romanticism. Unmasking the inauthentically stoic recoveries from spurned love in modernity, Morissette invokes the ambiguity of Romanticism still holding sway in an era associated with the practical indifference of capitalist modernity.

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Morissette was primed for protest by her early years as a musician, her frst performance platforms having restricted her as a child performer, and later as a singer of music by others in a male-dominated music industry.15 Her frst album, Alanis (1991), did well commercially, but Morissette was discontented with being “managed” and wanted to claim her own performance persona. In a 1995 interview, the year Jagged Little Pill was released, she explained the risk she took with it: “I had such fear around expressing anger as a woman: how can we express it without feeling, as the physically weaker sex, we’ll get killed.”16 And her expression of anger toward the agent of betrayal is unabashed in “You Oughta Know” as she confesses the shame of abandonment in her frank description of herself as “the mess”17 her lover leaves behind. By owning her post-affair pain and abjection, she validates the risk forecast in her interview, cited above, of women’s vulnerability preventing them from showing honest anger to men: “we’ll get killed.” This shift strategically invokes the guilt of the betrayer (aptly dubbed “Mr. Duplicity” (l. 21)), if only for his violation of Romantic culture’s chivalric code. Meanwhile, Morissette faunts cultural Romanticism’s conventions of feminine decorum by referencing the graphic details of modern relationships in her lyrics (“Would she go down on you in a theater?” (l. 5)), illustrating how the expectations and exploitation of women have only become more dangerously extreme—and more dangerous for women to threaten withdrawing—since the days of nineteenth-century Romantic heroines. By such devices, Morissette deconstructs both Romanticism’s cultural conventions and modernity’s versions of women’s “agency.” In aligning woman’s newfound agency with an ethos of Romanticism’s Weltanschauung, Morissette undermines the stereotypes of women that permeate modernity and masculine rock culture. In “You Learn,” also from Jagged Little Pill, Morissette uses strategies of irony appropriate to cultural Romanticism to suggest both its and modernity’s violations against women. “You Learn” prompts the satirically subversive responses women might adopt to get past these violations: “I recommend getting your heart trampled on to anyone” is its opening advice.18 Similar risky suggestions follow, aligned with Morissette’s general proposal that, in the evolution of agency, risks are inevitable. The reassuring shelter of Romantic convention must be shunned in favor of the inspiriting winds of Romanticism’s Weltanschauung: a message essential for women claiming new agency and identities in the onslaught of cultural stereotypes that can only be outstripped by experiencing them. One of the cultural stereotypes referenced in “You Learn” reminds the listener that Morissette’s album title Jagged Little Pill alludes to The Rolling Stones’ infamous masculine rock classic “Mother’s Little Helper,” a portrayal of women as helpless addicts of capitalist consumerism. In “You Learn,” Morissette’s lyrics, “Swallow it down (the jagged little pill) / It feels so good (swimming in your stomach)” (ll. 3–4)

150 Linda C. Middleton mock and parody the Stones’ original lyrics, as if mocking the danger they warn of for the Valium-hooked housewife: “And though she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill / She goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper.”19 Morissette faunts this construct of selfdestructive femininity corresponding to the narrative of twentiethcentury patriarchy. “You Oughta Know” and “You Learn” both critique capitalist modernity’s misogyny and 1960s’ masculine rock from the site of female subjectivity in the Weltanschauung of Romanticism which Morissette employs both ironically and cathartically, urging women to rebel with angry energy against the stereotypes of modernity and masculine rock. Morissette’s use of irony as a subversive strategy is probably best seen in her signature hit, “Ironic,” which features a series of paradoxical vignettes from capitalist modernity. 20 Among the ironies Morissette cites in her lyrics, those of Romantic culture are emphasized. In these ironies, Morissette highlights juxtapositions of the aesthetic and the organic in a way that relates to Romantic culture’s binary constructs of women as aesthetically denaturalized yet inescapably biological. One example of such a juxtaposition of the aesthetic and organic, unrelated to Romantic culture but illustrating Morissette’s concept of irony, is fnding a fy in one’s white wine. 21 This irony, though banal, sets up the ones that follow, relating to Romantic culture, and ranging from the disappointing irony of one’s wedding day being spoiled by rain to the Romantically tragic irony of “meeting the man of your dreams / And then meeting his beautiful wife” (ll. 28–29). 22 In these ironic tableaux, Morissette shows how an artifcially Romanticized aesthetic of beauty traps women as subjects of modernity in a dizzying oscillation between the contrived and the “natural.” The dissonance of this oscillation is particularly problematic for women of modernity programmed to Romanticize the unnatural perfection of Romantic culture uncomplicated by natural contingencies; the fy in the Chardonnay, the rain at the wedding, the love-at-frst-sight mate who is already mated are, thus, summarized in a fnal verse of the song as “too ironic” (l. 31). To liberate themselves from these binaries in their conceptions of perfection, women must forge new modes of subjectivity by deconstructing the artifces of Romantic culture within an ethos of a revised Weltanschauung of Romanticism that liberates them from capitalist conceptions of value and restores their agency as emotional and ethical subjects. While Morissette’s focus is the establishment of individual agency for women in rock, Natalie Merchant addresses the theme of women as collectively empowered. And while Morissette directs her rebellion toward personal exploitation, Merchant makes her case for collective regeneration, usually imagined as organic. Compared to the raw feminism of Morissette’s work, Merchant channels the energy of nature and the earth as primal maternal powers which are aligned with women’s

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collective voices. In the Weltanschauung of Romanticism, Merchant aims for a restoration and rebirth of the earth as interlinked with women. Her themes are often elegiac or apocalyptic to emphasize what has been lost in the desecration of nature. She sees in women the hope for the regeneration of a richer conception of nature than the patriarchal model of Romanticism’s “paradise regained” without women’s full participation.

Natalie Merchant: Collective Agency, Gender, and the Regeneration of Nature Organic regeneration and the agency of the collective are the themes in Romanticism addressed by Natalie Merchant. Her protest is less angry than Morissette’s, but her appeal for the recovery of women’s inherent power is resolute. Since her debut as a solo rock performer (after leaving the rock group 10,000 Maniacs23), Merchant’s validating vision of women’s communities continued to evolve. The song “Wonder” from her debut solo album, Tigerlily (1995), celebrates women’s individual and collective identity. 24 Like other selections in this album, “Wonder” suggests the revolutionary Romanticism discussed earlier in connection with the experimental communes of post-revolutionary France, America, and other countries. Merchant’s communities occupy spaces that also suggest nature in Romanticism’s tradition, but her recuperated Edens are revised as women’s spaces, qualifying Merchant’s nature as inspired by the Weltanschauung of Romanticism distinct from Romantic culture’s paradigms of a patriarchal “Eden regained,” as alluded to earlier. Since Merchant, like Morissette, critiques masculine rock, her revisionary Eden contrasts with the 1960s communal events like Woodstock, and the mutual validation of the community of women in Merchant’s “Wonder” proposes a celebration that counterpoints the failures of Woodstock’s desecration of nature in the service of corporate gain. Merchant’s Motherland (2001) album and its title song capture a restitutive Romanticism’s reverence for the earth in mythography addressing the dangers modernity poses to the natural maternal. 25 “Motherland” is a hymn of nostalgia for primal mergence not only with the mother but with a dimly recollected nature that, as mentioned above, is not simply a patriarchal dream of Eden. Due to the serendipitous linkage of Motherland’s release with the events of 9/11, its title song is also an homage to a different “motherland,” one of paradoxical innocence and the icon of modernity destroyed on 9/11. The paradox of nostalgia for both a homeland and an icon of a golden age associated with America was partially censored by the collaborative decision—according to the senior vice-president for marketing at Elektra Entertainment Group, the album’s distributor—to revise the album cover Merchant originally imagined of “children in a feld wearing oxygen masks.”26 The revised album cover shows an appropriately motherly Merchant posed in a

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natural landscape. What may seem like a conscientious decision to avoid alienating audiences is thus complicated by the circumstances of Motherland’s release; the appeal of the original album cover to the human collective, acknowledging the dangerous desecration of nature and life, becomes a poignant shadow supplanted by one expressive of Romantic culture’s natural maternal. This maternal motif is epitomized in the benign image of Merchant as maternal presence in a natural setting, signifying what Romantic poets like Wordsworth would have approved as an affrmation of the admirable motherhood consistent with raising children, an attribute of women he and similar Romantics thought of as being “a particular access to knowledge and truth.” Though women’s natural reproductive gifts were regarded with “both admiration and fear” in the Romantic period, “Romantic ideals of motherhood . . . [granted that] . . . women possessed a naturally sympathetic temperament that made them uniquely equipped to nurture children.”27 The women in the song “Motherland” (a “fve & dime queen” (l. 18) and “shot gun bride” (l. 34)), cited as mothers-to-be of an imperiled “motherland” (in the context of the album’s original presentation and ominous cover), are re-contextualized by the revised Romantic natural and nostalgic “American” setting emphasized in the fnal chosen cover. And the symbiosis craved at the end of the song in the rhythmic refrain, “don’t go” (l. 17, repeated), whispered to a disappearing maternal presence, is also whispered to the “motherland” that will never return after the capitalist modernity that supported it was destroyed by militaristic modernity. Critic Barry Singer calls the fnal lines “more consoling” than “prophetic” when Merchant sings, “Don’t miss this wasteland, this terrible place, / When you leave, / Keep your heart off your sleeve.”28 The dirge-like closing whispers of modernity’s potential for matricide, which emphasizes the case for a Weltanschauung of Romanticism that will preserve the maternal and nature in the face of an impending apocalypse. An alternative scenario of nature’s reinvigoration juxtaposed with woman’s empowerment is addressed in Merchant’s “San Andreas Fault” from Tigerlily. The rebellion of the earth itself against the desecrations of modernity is presented with the mythos of modernity as female. The apocalyptic scene (an earthquake along the California coast) conjured by this song’s title follows a paeon to a woman urged to “Go west”—as young men were once proverbially encouraged—not to fnd gold, but to become golden in what Merchant’s lyrics suggest is “Paradise.”29 The beckoning westward to what clearly seems to be the capitalist nexus of Hollywood is followed abruptly by the rending of the earth at the [San Andreas] fault line. The apocalyptic consequences of a capitalist paradise built on a natural fault line are twice narrated in the lyrics, evoking both the paradox of what seemed a dream being undone as well as the disclosure of its foundation on modernity’s “wicked ground” (l. 38). This dystopic vision, coinciding with the arrival of a woman

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(rather than a man) urged to “go West,” seems to be a feminist revision on Merchant’s part, aligning women with the destruction of capitalist “Paradise,” a “wicked ground” undone by a force of nature—the San Andreas Fault—symbolically manifested in a woman. Such an imagined apocalypse suggests Romanticism’s Mary Shelley in her novel The Last Man (1826), which was both an homage to and corrective of (as was her earlier Frankenstein (1818)) the paradox at the heart of masculinist Romanticism. Merchant’s version of this theme, however, replaces the “last man” with the last, and frst, woman.30

The Indigo Girls—Agency, Feminist-Humanism and Utopia Of the women in rock considered in this essay, the Indigo Girls are seemingly most infuenced by masculine rock in their performative presentation. But the duo’s performative masculinity both challenges and interrogates the conventional masculinist perspectives of rock music. The optics of their stage presence counter what one critic claims is a major obstacle for women entering the rock scene: “the unsuitability of any serious and lasting connection between woman and instrument, woman and technology.”31 With their hip-slung guitars and jeans, the Indigo Girls seem to confrm ethnographer Adele Fournet’s observation in her study of women bands: the “agency” of women acting to “transform their bodies and demeanors, including how they play their instruments, into male bodies and demeanors.” Fournet echoes what has been mentioned earlier about rock music, how “maleness is the lingua frança of [its] . . . production” and how women “who [mimic] . . . maleness . . . experience less resistance and more power in their feld.”32 I suggest, however, that the Indigo Girls use such “mimicry” as a strategy to illustrate its function as a construct. Demonstrating “masculinity” in their “performance,” they disclose that gender is neither essential nor fxed, but fexible, allowing them to synchronize performative masculinity with their women’s voices, music, and messages. The Indigo Girls’ “Romeo and Juliet” from Rites of Passage (1992) illustrates this synchronicity in an homage to one of Romanticism’s iconic works, Shakespeare’s original drama. “Romeo and Juliet” also recalls Romantic ballads from traditional masculine rock and roll of the 1950s and early 1960s, such as The Refections’ “Just Like Romeo and Juliet” (1964). These echoes of the gentler phase of rock’s nascence prompt listeners to consider the evolution of the rock genre from chivalrously to raucously masculine. The oscillation of gender roles in The Indigo Girls’ “Romeo and Juliet” renders Romeo the complainant of love pangs more traditionally suited to Juliet, while Juliet is dismissive, as Romeo protests: “And now you just turn away and say / ‘Romeo I think I used to have a scene with him.’”33 In assigning Juliet’s role to

154 Linda C. Middleton Romeo, the Indigo Girls ironicize the idealized tropes of love in Romantic culture. Romeo giving voice to the pathos of spurned love emphasizes its association with the plaint of victimization usually assigned to women. His reference to how Juliet can “fall for” the seductive gifts of “pretty strangers” (l. 32), the fetishes of Romantic culture which lure Juliet to competing suitors, refect modernity’s commodifcation of love and the violation of Romanticism’s ethos. The gender-switching in “Romeo and Juliet” becomes more explorative in “Galileo,” which hints at the shifting permutations of self and identity through time. The title of this song suggests how the album title, Rites of Passage, relates to the way the self fguratively transcends time as much as it is bound by it. The self is also reconceived as a collective selfhood on a ritual of discovery to explore both its intersections with the collective and its individuation. In “Galileo” the self’s passage through time is compared to working through karma, implied by the lyric, “How long ‘til my soul gets it right?”34 Here, though, unlike the karmic agenda, the self’s quest through time is speculative rather than ethical, since “getting it right” is ambiguous—being neither a moral arrival nor an empirical inquiry. The quest, rather, is the perpetual search within Romanticism’s Weltanschauung of each self’s and selves’ passage through time. This inquiry, which transcends a single lifetime, is the utopian feminist-humanist quest, feminist in being gender-fuid and transgressive, and utopian in its infnite projection of truth-seeking. The “truth” is inquired into by a collective of subjectivities, by shared subversive curiosities; hence, the “crime” [my emphasis] is in the collective subversiveness of “lookin’ up the truth” (l. 2). Measured time and the limited lifespan are both irrelevant to this collective searching for and imagining of “truth”; it transcends accepted humanist limitations, rendering it “utopian.” In “Virginia Woolf” this quest for truth is further explored, and its feminist dynamics feshed out.35 A lyrical dialogue with the writer who inspired its title, and whose life coincides with the historical hinge between nineteenth-century Romanticism and early modernity, “Virginia Woolf” is a conversation across time with a female reader infuenced by her diary. The conventions of Romantic culture shift toward those of Romanticism’s Weltanschauung in this song because of its dual transgressions. One is “sapphic” love, the then-popular phrase, often used by Woolf, denoting lesbianism in its allusion to Sappho, the classic poet who wrote inspired verse for her female lovers. The other transgression is the revolutionary act of a woman writing to a woman reader. The diary-writing Woolf sends her love—a regenerative love, since Woolf’s suicide is, in this context, a gift of life or rebirth—to her reader, and, implicitly, to all women hearing her words in the temporal “now” of the Indigo Girls’ voices. Woolf’s diary, thereby, bridges mortality and morality in “Virginia Woolf,” for Woolf’s subversive lesbianism gains

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transgressiveness by her subversive authorship, culminating where her diary entries end in her supremely subversive suicide. Woolf’s death “in the river,” however, is paradoxically life-giving to the lyricist of “Virginia Woolf,” who credits it with her own rebirth. Woolf’s diary is fgured as her “soul” arriving, “like a message in a bottle,” which the singer deems her “rebirth” (ll. 44–45). Gender non-normative love and the radical act of a woman writing to and for women readers regenerate a Romantic convention (“the message in the bottle”) within the Weltanschauung of Romanticism. The Weltanschauung of Romanticism is revolutionary in transforming Romantic love’s conventions into a transgressive, collective, almost metaphysical regeneration. The Indigo Girls speak from this Weltanschauung against Romantic love’s rigid categories of gender, which have constricted women in rock, reducing them to their material value and reifying them into silence. Regenerative love, for the self and the other, unrestricted by Romantic culture’s limitations, and renewed in the messages of songs like “Virginia Woolf,” is the revolutionary message of the Indigo Girls. And because regenerative love transgresses Romantic culture’s gender norms and temporal limitations, it ensures that “our revolution” is the revolution of the hour, excluding no voices, and thus allowing truths to emerge in the synthesis of many messages once silenced. Perhaps this is the “soul’s . . . getting it right” in the collective utopia of music?

Conclusion Women were generally unacknowledged as important contributors to the rock revolution until they started seeking their agency and identity and developing strategies for attracting an audience in a predominantly masculine genre. Because both rock music and the Romanticism that inspired its rebellious energy designated women as the objects of men’s desires or mere helpmates in masculine rebellion, women in rock had to establish themselves as subjects with perspectives distinct from—and often critical of—how they were objectifed in rock, Romanticism, and the modernity Romanticism challenged in masculine rock. The signifcance of this quest is loudest in Alanis Morissette’s angry feminist protest which grounds the message of key songs in her album Jagged Little Pill, especially “You Oughta Know,” “You Learn,” and “Ironic.” Of these three selections, it is in “Ironic” that Morissette reaches a provisional ground of feminist agency within the Weltanschauung of Romanticism. “Ironic” is, indeed, an “ironic” interrogation of the subjectivity modernity offers women (which resembles their conventional role in Romantic culture). Episodically conveying how women are objectifed, commodifed, and lacking in agency or voice, “Ironic” lets Morissette speak from a revised Weltanschauung of Romanticism. This revision authenticates women as subjects in rebellion against

156 Linda C. Middleton capitalist-dominated modernity’s monetized objectifcation of Romantic culture’s feminine stereotypes. Natalie Merchant locates the scope of women’s subjectivity and agency within a recovered and revised collective of regenerated nature in Romanticism. Merchant’s turn to nature, like Morissette’s quest for subjectivity, qualifes as revolutionary Romanticism, since it seeks agency for women where they had previously been objectifed. But Merchant’s Weltanschauung of Romanticism is both restitutive and collective, as she reinstates what it has most poignantly lost to modernity—the regenerative and communal connection to nature. Her focus on the maternal in nature links nature, feminism and—less overtly—humanism in an interdependent and primal triad. The recognition of women’s regenerative signifcance, which allies them with nature, restores the humanity they are due, as nature is also recognized for its germinal primacy. These recognitions restore what was stripped from women and nature by modernity and capitalism, reducing their value to the use-value that led to misogynistic and ecological desecrations of rock spectacles like Woodstock. Whether or not Eden is retrieved in Merchant’s Weltanschauung of Romanticism, nature and its new Eves collectively resist the exploitations of masculine rock culture. The projected agency of the Indigo Girls belongs to a time-transcendent and gender-transgressing utopian collective. This collective subjectivity reaffrms feminist-humanist energy and insight, rethreading Romanticism with its lost power and introducing inclusiveness to the Weltanschauung of Romanticism. This corrects the eclipse of women from the rock revolution, so that their voices are no longer muted in the hitherto masculine chorus of rock music. Rather, their voices and words regenerate the chorus, especially when energized by the corrective to gender exclusion that had prohibited other transgressive voices from the rock collective. The regenerative participation of diverse subjects over space and time traverses the limitations of Romantic culture, compensating for decades of absence of all but masculine voices in rock culture. Women in rock in the context of Romanticism’s rebellion against modernity enhances the rock genre by complicating its aesthetic and political horizons, inspiring audiences to reconsider how rock music, including the works composed and performed by women, convey feminist-humanist infused sounds and messages for listeners who had long awaited a collectively relevant and resonant rock experience.

Notes 1 Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock‘n’Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995), xv. 2 Romanticism as Weltanschauung or “worldview” differs from Romanticism as a “culture industry” or “market culture.” Relevant to rock’s “rejection of

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modern reifcation and alienation,” the rock revolution also rejects “market culture,” aligning itself with the Weltanschauung of Romanticism as opposed to the Romantic culture industry. The rock revolution’s ideological rebellion against middle-class conventions and bourgeois attitudes is, consequently, consistent with Romanticism’s Weltanschauung, making rock music, in the context of Lӧwy and Sayre’s specifcations, “‘Romantic’ in the fullest sense.” Michael Lӧwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 226–227. Gillian G. Gaar, ed., She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll, 2nd ed. (New York: Seal Press, 2002), xvii. Gaar, Rebel, vii. Kat Powell, “Women Writers,” Romantic Politics (University of Texas Department of English), accessed 7 June 2020, http://web.utk.edu/~gerard/ Romanticpolitics/womenwriters.html. “Mary Wollstonecraft,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 10 June 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/. “Wollstonecraft,” Stanford Encyclopedia. “Wollstonecraft,” Stanford Encyclopedia. The collective, utopian resistance of the commune was attempted during the era of the French Revolution in France and, later, in Paris’s Second Commune of 1821 during the time of Karl Marx. Communes included nineteenth-century America’s Brook Farm, the Shakers, and others. Elizabeth Dunn, “5 19th-Century Utopian Communities in the United States,” History Stories, 22 January 2013, accessed 10 June 2020, https://www.history. com/news/5-19th-century-utopian-communities-in-the-united-states. Lilith Fairs began in the Summer of 1996, initially “limited to four to test the concept.” Organized by Sarah McLachlan and featuring performers like Patti Smith, Suzanne Vega and Lisa Loeb, the Fairs were “sellouts.” Their identifcation with “feminism” provoked some controversy, which Sarah McLachlan answered by declaring her feminism but contrasting it with “man-hating,” about which she remarked: “I tried to diffuse that thinking.” Buffy Childerhouse, From Lilith to Lilith Fair (Vancouver: Madrigal Press, Ltd., 1998), Gaar, 414. Gaar, Rebel, xvi. Woodstock’s “fower power” version of nature illustrates how the rock revolution was infuenced by Romantic rebellion against the Vietnam War, another parallel to how nature fgured in historical Romanticism’s counter-response to the violence of the French Revolution. Reynolds and Press, The Sex Revolts, 266. Lucy O’Brien, She Bop II: The Defnitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul (London: Continuum, 1995), 466–467. Gaar, Rebel, 407. Michael Craig, “Alanis Morissette: I still have PTSD from the Jagged Little Pill. It was a profound violation,” The Guardian, 16 August 2012. https:// theguardian.com/music/2012/aug/re /alanis-morissette-profound-violation, accessed 6 June 2021. Alanis Morissette, “You Oughta Know,” Jagged Little Pill (Maverick Reprise Records) 90-45901-2, 1995, CD. l. 14. Alanis Morissette, “You Learn,” Jagged Little Pill (Maverick Reprise Records) 9-45901-2, 1995, CD. l.1. The Rolling Stones, “Mother’s Little Helper,” Through the Past Darkly (Big Hits Volume 2), London Records NPS-3, 1969, LP. ll. 4–5. Alanis Morissette, “Ironic,” Jagged Little Pill (Maverick Reprise Records) 9-45901-2, 1995, CD.

158 Linda C. Middleton 21 Morissette, Jagged Little Pill, paraphrase of l. 3, repeated in chorus. 22 Morissette, Jagged Little Pill, paraphrase of l. 6, repeated in chorus, followed by cited lyrics (lines indicated parenthetically in essay). 23 Merchant parted ways with 10,000 Maniacs (composed of three male musicians and herself) in July 1993, after twelve years as their lead singer. She was thirty-one, fatigued by what she called “art by committee,” being the group’s sole female member, and having become its domestic drudge when the group lived together while preparing their last album, Our Time in Eden (1992). “I just came to rehearsal one day [Merchant commented of her departure], and said, ‘It’s over. I really can’t do this anymore’.” . . . “And I remember [bassist] Steve Gustafson saying, ‘I’m actually surprised you stayed as long as you did.’” Nisid Hajari, “Natalie Merchant Launches a Solo Career,” Entertainment Weekly (21 July 1995) https://ew.com/ article/1995/07/21/natalie-merchant-launches-solo-career/, accessed 2 August 2019. 24 Natalie Merchant, “Wonder,” Tigerlily, Electra 61745-2, 1995, CD. 25 Natalie Merchant, “Motherland,” Motherland, Elektra 62721-2, 2001, CD. Lӧwy and Sayre defne restitutive Romanticism as “neither resigned through realism . . . nor restoration of the object of nostalgia.” Romanticism Against Modernity, 59. In this case, the object of nostalgia is the natural maternal or, more generally, the “motherland.” 26 Barry Singer, “Music; Natalie Merchant, Accidental Prophet,” The New York Times, 7 July 2002, 2, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/arts/ music-natalie-merchant-accidental prophet.html, accessed 4 August 2018. 27 Julia McLeod, “Mothers in the Romantic Period: Delight, Duty, and Danger,” Romantic Politics (University of Texas Department of English) http://web. utk.edu/~gerard/Romantic politics/mothersRomanticperiod.html, accessed 14 June 2020. 28 Barry Singer, “Natalie Merchant: Accidental Prophet,” 2, citing Merchant’s “Motherland,” ll. 8–10. 29 Natalie Merchant, “San Andreas Fault,” Tigerlily, Elektra 61745-2, 1995, CD. ll. 1, 2. 30 The theme of The Last Man has been explained by critic Northrop Frye as inspired by a “revolutionary ‘mother-goddess myth’ . . . allow[ing] power and dignity to women . . . [and] liberat[ing] the energy of all living creatures—[which] ‘gained ground’ in the Romantic period.” Northrop Frye, Paradise Lost: a Tercentenary Tribute (Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1967), quoted in Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979), 98–99. 31 Lucy Green, Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 29, quoted in Adele Keala Fournet, “Women Rockers and the Strategies of a Minority Position,” Music and Arts in Action (Vol. 3, Issue 1, 2010), 27. https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/ 10036/3953/fournet_2010.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y, accessed August 2018. 32 Adele Keala Fournet, “Women Rockers,” 31. 33 Indigo Girls. “Romeo and Juliet.” Rites of Passage. Epik EK 48865, 1992, CD. ll. 36–37. 34 Indigo Girls. “Galileo.” Rites of Passage. Epik EK 48865, 1992, CD. l. 9. 35 Indigo Girls. “Virginia Woolf.” Rites of Passage. Epik EK 48865, 1992, CD.

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Bibliography Craig, Michael. “Alanis Morissette: I still have PTSD from the Jagged Little Pill. It was a profound violation.” The Guardian, 16 August 2012. https:// theguardian.com/music/2012/aug/re/alanis-morissette-profound-violation. Accessed 6 June 2021. Fournet, Adele Keala. “Women Rockers and the Strategies of a Minority Position.” Music and Arts in Action (Vol. 3, Issue 1. 2010): 20–48. https://ore. exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10036/3953/fournet_2010.pdf? sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Accessed August 2018. Gaar, Gillian G., ed. She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll. 2nd ed. New York: Seal Press, 2002. Hajari, Nhisid, “Natalie Merchant Launches a Solo Career.” Entertainment Weekly. 21 July 1995. https://ew.com/article/1995/07/21/natalie-merchant-launches-solo-career/. Accessed 2 August 2019. Lӧwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001. McLeod, Julia. “Mothers in the Romantic Period: Delight, Duty, and Danger.” Romantic Politics. University of Texas Department of English. http://web. utk.edu/~gerard/Romantic politics/mothersRomanticperiod.html. Accessed 14 June 2020. Nehring, Neil. Anger Is an Energy: Popular Music, Gender and Postmodernism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishing, 1997. O’Brien, Lucy. She Bop II: The Defnitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul. London: Continuum, 1995. Powell, Kat. “Women Writers.” Romantic Politics. University of Texas Department of English. http://web.utk.edu/~gerard/Romanticpolitics/womenwriters. html. Accessed 7 June 2020. Reynolds, Simon, and Joy Press. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock‘n’Roll. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Singer, Barry. “Music; Natalie Merchant, Accidental Prophet.” The New York Times. 1–4. 7 July 2002. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/arts/ music-natalie-merchant-accidental prophet.html. Accessed 4 August 2018.

Discography Indigo Girls. Rites of Passage. Epik EK 48865, 1992, CD. ———. “Galileo.” In Rites of Passage. Epik EK 48865, 1992, CD. ———. “Romeo and Juliet.” In Rites of Passage. Epik EK 48865, 1992, CD. ———. “Virginia Woolf.” In Rites of Passage. Epik EK 48865, 1992, CD. Merchant, Natalie. Motherland. Elektra 62721-2, 2001, CD. ———. “Motherland.” In Motherland. Elektra 62721-2, 2001, CD. ———. “San Andreas Fault.” In Tigerlily. Elektra 61745-2, 1995, CD. ———. Tigerlily, Electra 61745-2, 1995, CD. ———. “Wonder.” In Tigerlily. Electra 61745-2, 1995, CD. Morissette, Alanis. Jagged Little Pill. Maverick Reprise Records 9-45901-2, 1995, CD. ———. “You Oughta Know.” In Jagged Little Pill. Maverick Reprise Records 9-45901-2, 1995, CD.

160 Linda C. Middleton ———. “You Learn.” In Jagged Little Pill. Maverick Reprise Records 9-459012, 1995, CD. ———. “Ironic.” In Jagged Little Pill. Maverick Reprise Records 9-45901-2, 1995, CD. The Refections. “Just Like Romeo and Juliet.” Golden World. GW9, 1964, 45 rpm. The Rolling Stones. Through the Past Darkly (Big Hits Volume 2) London Records NPS-3, 1969, LP. ———. “Mother’s Little Helper.” In Through the Past Darkly. (Big Hits Volume 2) London Records NPS-3, 1969, LP.

8

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’ St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” Sherry R. Truffn

A terrifed woman hides in a closet, desperately trying not to breathe, cry, or make a sound so as to avoid detection by a black-clad fgure moving about the room. The woman, Mary, is the protagonist of “The Birthday Party,” a short flm directed by Annie Clark and included in the 2017 female-directed horror anthology flm XX. In Clark’s flm,1 Mary is not hiding from a serial killer: she is a frantic mother trying to keep a domestic employee from discovering the corpse of her husband, whose death appears to have been the unintentional result of a combination of prescription pills and booze. Mary drags the body into a closet to prevent her husband’s death from ruining the eighth birthday party of their shy, anxious daughter (Lucy). Mary eludes detection and decides, after some horror-movie startles and near-misses, to hide the body in a large panda bear costume. Of course, this ruse doesn’t hold, and the corpse is discovered in a comically grotesque fashion involving the birthday cake. Mary’s desperate efforts to be a good mom—before and after her husband’s death—actually harm the child, as the flm suggests with references to two of Lucy’s therapists: a childhood counselor who attributes the girl’s anxiety to behaviors modeled by Mary, and a therapist who counsels Lucy later in life and says that her “fear of intimacy,” while not exactly her mother’s “fault,” comes from the birthday party incident. 2 Maternal protectiveness, taken to absurd levels, becomes monstrous. Annie Clark is best known as singer/songwriter/guitarist St. Vincent, and she has achieved critical and commercial success with an eclectic, genre-fusing sound; evocative, sometimes cryptic lyrics; and arresting vocal and visual performances. St. Vincent has been lauded as a “Bowiesque shapeshifter”3 and champion of queer identity and aesthetics,4 and she has been faulted for concealing a lack of substance beneath an aura of “mystique.”5 Indeed, her elusive, allusive, layered work can seem like a jumbled mix of fragments, infuences, and images lacking coherence. However, the relationships and meanings of those fragments begin to make sense when viewed through the lens of the Gothic grotesque. Like “The Birthday Party,” many of St. Vincent’s songs, videos, and stage acts use grotesque scenarios and images to examine the roles we play and the DOI: 10.4324/9781003204855-9

162 Sherry R. Truffn identities we create and embody as well as the anxieties associated with them. They employ “exaggeration, distortion, or unexpected combination”6 to construct and inhabit subjectivities that are inescapably hybrid and often monstrous: simultaneously life-giving and death-dealing, ethereal and bestial, feminine and masculine, self and other. These semi-fctive selves are presented with no small share of the identifcation and “sympathy” that, in Catherine Spooner’s view, grotesque creatures threatened with “ostracism, prejudice, and [lack of] human contact” have elicited from audiences since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein attained the status of a “modern myth” and helped transform the monstrous other into a lovable victim.7 In representing self-constructed grotesques, St. Vincent explores the freedom of rejecting received identities and creating and recreating the self while expressing anxieties about the destruction, disintegration, duplication, and isolation of the provisional or constructed self. She also examines both the horror and the humor of grotesque subjectivities trying to connect with one another. In doing all this, St. Vincent achieves myriad effects, from ecstatic to sardonic to tragic to tragicomic. Seeking liberation from received identities via self-conscious self-creation may sound like a logical enough project, but the monstrous results characteristic of St. Vincent’s work raise the question, why would a free person consciously choose to construct and embody a grotesque self? The answer has at least three components. As already noted, the grotesque strategy refects the trend of embracing the monster as a fgure of fascination, power, and pathos as much as—if not more than—a fgure of horror and repulsion.8 Further, it participates in the contemporary Gothic tendency that David Punter characterizes as “not merely describing but inhabiting . . . distorted forms of life, social and psychic.”9 Finally, it represents an attempt to envision a female self that may evade certain kinds of objectifcation more readily than one that conforms to stereotypes of what is beautiful or even “normal.” As Milbank has argued, St. Vincent is not the frst artist to locate “a productive model of female subjectivity and also authorship” in “the active contradictions of the grotesque mode.”10 The extreme identities described here may seem to contrast with Clark’s stable middle-class background. She was born in 1982 in Tulsa, Oklahoma11 and grew up in a suburb of Dallas, Texas after her parents divorced when she was three.12 Her father was a stockbroker with a keen interest in literature, and her mother was a social worker.13 She started playing guitar at the age of 12,14 and her early musical infuences include classic rock (Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull) as well as Nirvana, Stereolab, PJ Harvey, and Nick Cave.15 During high school, she went on tour as a roadie for her aunt and uncle, the jazz duo known as Tuck & Patti.16 After graduating, she studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston for three years before leaving to start her career, playing

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 163 with the choral rock band Polyphonic Spree and the noise-rock band the Skull Fuckers, then joining Sufjan Stevens’ touring band.17 In 2007, she launched her solo career as “St. Vincent,” a stage name that refects the duality characteristic of her aesthetic. She selected the name partly for sentimental reasons (her great-grandmother’s middle name18) and partly as a gesture of dark humor (a reference to the Greenwich Village hospital where Dylan Thomas died, as mentioned in the Nick Cave song “There Goes My Beautiful World”).19 Regarding the latter reference, Clark says that the St. Vincent name unites “squalor” and “grandeur”20 because it’s “where poetry comes to die.”21 Additionally, Clark’s Catholic upbringing 22 suggests the Patron Saint of Charitable Societies as another likely infuence. St. Vincent’s frst solo record, titled Marry Me, appeared in 2007, and Clark was awarded the PLUG Independent Music Award for “Female Artist of the Year” in 2008. 23 Her 2009 sophomore record, Actor, quickly became another critical success. In 2010, her life took a dark turn when her father was convicted and incarcerated for his part in a stock fraud scheme, a “gut-wrenching” experience explored, sometimes cryptically so, in her 2011 record Strange Mercy 24 and beyond. Although she tried to “shield” her family (especially her youngest siblings) from public scrutiny, her father’s incarceration became widely known and publicized as a result of her two-year relationship with high-profle British model Cara Delevingne, which drew considerable tabloid attention. 25 Since Strange Mercy, in the midst of personal ups and downs, her critical success has been increasingly matched by commercial success. She has released Love This Giant (a collaboration with David Byrne, 2012), St. Vincent (2014), Masseduction (2017), MassEducation (an acoustic remix album, 2018), and Daddy’s Home (2021). Notable career highlights include fronting Nirvana at the 29th Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction ceremony in 2014 (performing the song “Lithium”)26 and receiving a number of music prizes, including Grammy Awards for “Best Alternative Album” (both St. Vincent and Masseduction) and “Best Rock Song” (“Masseduction”).27 Her most recent record, Daddy’s Home, an homage to 1970s music and culture, is both lyrically and musically inspired by her father’s release from prison in 2019. St. Vincent is known as one of rock’s shapeshifters. She describes making records as constructing “mythologies”28 and creating personae such as an “asexual Pollyana,”29 “near-future cult leader,”30 “dominatrix at the mental institution,”31 and a series of “down-and-out” characters.32 Critics have supplemented Clark’s monikers with their own: “woman who fell to earth,”33 “oddball thesp,”34 “domestic goddess with a chilling case of ennui,”35 “bored and tranquilised California housewife,”36 “90s grunger,”37 “American Gothic granddaughter,”38 “futuristic, space-esque rocker,”39 “dystopian dominatrix,”40 “John Cassavetes anti-heroine” and “Daddy.”41

164 Sherry R. Truffn While her work cannot be limited to any single genre (musical or literary),42 her lyrics often have surreal properties associated with the Gothic, and her thematic preoccupations are the familiar terrain of the Gothic: transgression and/or forbidden pleasure,43 anxiety,44 extreme paranoia,45 and fear of entrapment.46 She doesn’t consider herself a fan of the horror genre,47 but a number of her videos, like the flm “The Birthday Party,” employ recognizable conventions of Gothic horror. In the video for “Marrow” from Actor, a song inspired by The Wizard of Oz,48 Clark walks down an unpaved road between large felds and is soon silently followed by groups of people she has passed. Whenever she turns around to see what’s behind her, their bodies freeze, then unnaturally and menacingly jerk from one place to another and back.49 The video for “Cruel” from Strange Mercy shows Clark tricked into helping a wheelchair-bound girl, then kidnapped from a gas station convenience store, stowed in a car trunk, spirited off to a house, and forced to play the role of wife and mother. “Husband” and “children” evaluate her performance, fnd her wanting, and bury her alive.50 In addition to these mini-horror-shows, Clark plans to direct a flm adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s queer-Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray with a female protagonist.51

The Gothic Grotesque Central to a Gothic aesthetic, according to Charles Crow, is the strategic deployment of the “grotesque.”52 Coined in Renaissance Italy to describe decorations unearthed in the grotto of Nero’s House of Gold, the term “grotesque” has a continuum of defnitions, ranging from a limited one referring to “a type of decorative art combining human features with lithe beasts and fantastic birds in a fligree of vines and curlicues”53 to a more fexible, colloquial one pointing to “anything unseemly, disproportionate, or in bad taste.”54 Di Renzo defnes a grotesque work as one that “resides in the mismatched . . . [and] glories in the uncategorical nature of existence,”55 that places “the sublime and the ridiculous . . . side by side.”56 The grotesque uses “exaggeration, distortion, or unexpected combination”57 to produce problematic responses in audiences, including “a powerful fascination in the monstrous.”58 In so doing, it emphasizes dualities and crosses traditional aesthetic, ontological, or moral boundaries. Milbank analyzes the Gothic grotesque in gendered terms, arguing that Longinus’s “sublime,” which transports the reader and “produces ecstasy rather than persuasion” through a combination of “wonder and astonishment,”59 has traditionally been identifed with the masculine in contrast to the feminine “grotesque.” She contends that in eighteenth-century Gothic, as exemplifed by Walpole and Lewis, the grotesque comes to be associated frst with masculine freedom from

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 165 convention or restraint and with comedy. This positive grotesque gives way to a negative grotesque associated with limitations on masculine freedom supposedly imposed by female materiality and with tragedy. In the nineteenth century, according to Milbank, Mary Shelley critiques the masculine grotesque, using the character of Victor Frankenstein to challenge its “transgressive over-reach“ and “humbl[y]” describing her own literary achievement as a “grotesque . . . assemblage of disparate ideas and infuences.”60 From there, Victor Hugo moves the grotesque away from the supernatural and towards the realistic and tragicomic, distances the grotesque “from the abject and disgusting,” and unites “the male and female versions of the grotesque body together in a more positive version of Frankenstein’s hermaphroditic fgure.”61 For Milbank, it is Hugo’s model of the grotesque that Charlotte Brontë then embraces in order to critique received gender categories and locate “vitality and joy” in contradiction.62 Milbank concludes that “it is the active contradictions of the grotesque mode which not only enable a productive model of female subjectivity and also authorship, but also form a starting point for metaphysical exploration.”63 The Gothic grotesque continues to serve these same metaphysical and creative functions but has, of course, undergone developments over time as it’s been appropriated by—or perhaps merged with—a postmodern sensibility that revels in contradiction, questions the privileging of depth over surface, centers that which has been marginalized or repressed, and increasingly aligns itself with “the monster’s point of view.”64 Since “Gothic” evokes images of the medieval, “postmodern Gothic” might seem at frst glance a contradiction in terms, but underlying similarities suggest otherwise.65 Aesthetically, there are affnities between the postmodern strategy of “hybridization” or “pastiche,”66 which wrenches older aesthetic forms from their contexts and combines them into new forms, and Gothic literature, a tradition inaugurated with poems and stories contemplating (and appropriating) ruins of the medieval past.67 Further, Catherine Spooner points out that the longstanding “tendency” within Gothic fction for “props and accessories . . . to take over the narrative” corresponds well with a postmodern emphasis on “surface, spectacle and performance”68 and propensity for “vacating the traditional self,” which then “impersonates its absence even as death stalks its games.”69 Alongside this apparent “denial of depth,” however, Spooner sees in the contemporary Gothic “a counteractive pull towards interiority.”70 Maggie Kilgour sees the Gothic as “appropriate for a postmodern sensibility” because it “appears to offer an alternative to our Enlightenment inheritance: as it warns us of the dangers of repressing energies, natural, social, psychic, textual, or sexual, the Gothic offers itself a means of expressing otherwise taboo forces.”71 To the extent that expressing these repressed “taboo forces” return as grotesque creatures, the postmodern sensibility “identif[ies] with the monster.”72

166 Sherry R. Truffn St. Vincent’s lyrics can be cryptic or obtuse—Clark writes from the stance that “songs will go and mean whatever people will Rorschach test onto them”73 and that interpretations “say more about” listeners than the artists who write them,74 and one critic has described her songwriting strategy as conveying “emotion through a stained glass window.”75 Nevertheless, the patterns of hybridity, grotesquerie, self-conscious self-construction and performativity, and identifcation with the monstrous are unmistakable.

St. Vincent’s Hybrid Work St. Vincent’s work is hybrid in imagery, sensibility, and subjectivity, embracing duality and contradiction through images like the “Black Rainbow.”76 The songs resist distinctions between life and death, soul and body,77 self and other,78 male and female,79 sacred and secular,80 tragic and comic.81 Even when drawing inspiration from historical fgures, as in the song “Huey Newton,” she emphasizes contradiction and duality: she describes the Black Panthers as “cardboard cutthroats/ fuckless porn sharks, toothless but got a big bark.”82 Her music is also hybrid in that it crosses generic boundaries and features abrupt sonic and lyrical shifts. Like Bowie, Clark synthesizes a wide range of infuences and aesthetic forms and has described herself as “a fan of taking concepts that are supposed to be for other mediums—from art, from theater—and applying those concepts to what I do.”83 Best known as a guitarist,84 she is actually a multi-instrumentalist whose sound blends different genres and subgenres of jazz, rock, pop, and funk. One critic refers to her as “study in dualism” who “sings with a fragile beauty . . . while making [her guitar] scream in uniquely harsh tones in songs that exemplify the fne line between order and chaos.”85 Critics note her penchant for “disarming leaps”86 and surprising combinations and juxtapositions: the “bohemian” and the “suburban,” “transcendence and ordinariness,”87 “concealment and disclosure,”88 “virtuosity and accessibility,”89 “beauty and ugliness,”90 “serene calmness and bristling aggression,”91 “bright hooks with macabre,”92 “eerie,”93 and/or “perverse”94 lyrics, wild “desires” imprisoned in “robotic rhythms.”95 Dualities and tonal shifts defne her work. For instance, “Now, Now,” the frst track of the debut album Marry Me, has been described as “danc[ing] around a tricky little guitar pattern and Clark’s sweet vocal melodies” until the “grace of the track suddenly gives way to explosive guitar, the previous precision dissolved into distorted passion.”96 Similarly, the frst track from Daddy’s Home, “Pay Your Way in Pain,” opens with a few seconds of festive, inviting, almost vaudevillian piano music before a cry cuts off that sound, which is then replaced by what one critic refers to as “pounding drums, gurgling synths, and loads of vocal layers” that “drow[n] the listener.”97 Meanings seem to shift through

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 167 repetition and addition of words. “Los Ageless” asks the question “how can anybody have you?”, suggesting the image of a diffcult, distant, or elusive lover. But the question is then repeated with additions that shift the meaning and emphasis: “how can anybody have you and lose you,” then “have you and lose you and not lose their minds too?”98 The focus shifts from the character of the addressee to the mental and emotional state of the speaker. “Down” from Daddy’s Home, the tale of an abused woman plotting revenge, uses a similar strategy. At one point, a breathy voice repeats “I’ll take you” in a way that comes across as straightforwardly sexual until the third repetition of the phrase adds the word “down,” expanding the word into several syllables for emphasis: “I’ll take you dow. . . ow-ooh-ow. . . ow-ooh-ow. . . ow-ooh-own,” a threat echoed almost in staccato by back-up singers. Seduction is threat. St. Vincent’s hybrid sensibility is typically and aptly seen through the lens of queerness, a lens that Clark invites and embraces. She describes being drawn to groups like Nirvana, Bikini Kill, and Sleater-Kinney partly because their “scene was so radical, punk, and queer.”99 She identifes as neither gay nor straight and “believe[s] in gender fuidity and sexual fuidity.”100 Some of her songs, like “Paris is Burning” from Marry Me and “Candy Darling” from Daddy’s Home, make explicit references to transgender history, culture, and icons, while others, such as “Prince Johnny” from St. Vincent, are commonly interpreted to represent queer subjectivities.101 Although queer sexuality features prominently in her work, Clark defnes “queerness” more broadly, as something that “transcends sexuality.”102 For her, “queerness” is “a banner for being ‘Other.’”103 In this, her views coincide with queer theorists like Annamarrie Jagose, who argues that the “queer” can have “neither a fundamental logic, nor a consistent set of characteristics,”104 and David Halperin, who says that “queer is by defnition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant . . . not a positivity but a positionality.”105 Contested as this defnition might be among some queer theorists and activists,106 it provides a useful lens into her work. Shifting from her public pronouncements on queerness to her music reveals the relevance of yet another defnition: queerness as a “deconstructive practice” rather than an ontological status (even a positional one). As Sewell explains, “the term ‘queer’ operates similarly to Derrida’s . . . neologisms (especially différance) because of its infnitely multiple meanings and for its capacity to erode traditional subject/structure binaries.”107 That St. Vincent’s work can be identifed as both queer and Gothic should, however, not be surprising, since “Gothic has, in a sense, always been ‘queer.’”108 Like the queer, the Gothic is notoriously resistant to “absolute defnitions of identity and substance,” as well as “poised astride the uneasy cultural boundary that separates the acceptable and familiar from the troubling and the different.”109 In addition, some of the most important Gothic works have been produced by writers with

168 Sherry R. Truffn avowedly “queer” identities and sensibilities,110 perhaps because the Gothic provides an “image-language” through which “to examine . . . social fears,”111 including fears surrounding sexuality, and in part because it prominently features “narratives of abuse, concealment, and secrecy”112 that resonate with real-life experiences of queer individuals.

St. Vincent’s Grotesque Performances The hybrid images and sounds of St. Vincent’s work are not only queer: they’re also grotesque. Clark is best known for her guitar work, which has been described in grotesque terms. Her former collaborator, Sufjan Stevens, said that her guitar playing put him in mind of “the Loch Ness monster giving birth inside a silo.”113 Pollard has described St. Vincent’s lyrics as “both profoundly moving and a little grotesque,”114 an effect that comes from “unexpected combination[s]”115 of images with a disorienting or unsettling effect. The speaker of “What Me Worry?” from Marry Me, for example, describes her “skies” as “the hue of a ruddy bruise.”116 The title track of Marry Me is a proposal characterizing the would-be husband as “a rock with a heart like a socket I can plug into at will,”117 a mixed metaphor serving a similar function to the giant helmet that falls from the sky in Horace Walpole’s Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), which, as Milbank puts it, “crosses and confuses mental categorization.”118 Other songs compare humans to machines, often in disturbing combinations and scenarios. “The Sequel” from Actor describes “bodies like wrecking balls,”119 and the speaker of “Sugarboy” from Masseduction is a self-described “casualty hangin’ on from the balcony” who offers herself to lovers as a “pain machine,”120 possibly a reference to a 2003 horror novel of the same title by Marcy Italiano about an abused child who becomes a doctor and creates a literal “pain machine” allowing patients who can’t describe their pain to transfer it to doctors, with horrifying results.121 In addition to mechanized bodies or identities, we fnd a range of other potentially grotesque juxtapositions and comparisons that blur ontological lines. The video for “Pills” from Masseduction features human-mannequin hybrids, usually in pairs, popping pills of various kinds and awkwardly, stiltedly engaging in various everyday activities, some sexual in nature.122 “Bring Me Your Loves” from St. Vincent, which references the Lorrie Moore story “Beautiful Grade,”123 compares lovers to dogs (“I took you off your leash, but I can’t . . . make you heel”).124 “Severed Crossed Fingers” takes its titular image from the same Lorrie Moore story, whose protagonist muses on a newspaper article describing human rubble discovered from the site of a plane wreck,125 providing a darkly funny juxtaposition of hope and tragic death. Similarly, St. Vincent’s videos incorporate grotesque imagery that “provoke[s] epistemological dubiety.”126 The video for “Los Ageless” from Masseduction provides a particularly compelling example. It opens

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 169 with Clark pressing “play” on what looks like a 1980s-era tape recorder, and it is partly an homage to a popular 1980s commercial for Maxell brand high-fdelity tapes.127 In St. Vincent’s video, Clark, lounging in a chair, uses a remote control to switch on a television set. The sound waves emanating from the stereo in the original commercial are replaced by shapely legs with stiletto-heeled feet that begin to emerge from the television and move uncertainly and perhaps menacingly towards Clark, suggesting a grotesque, backward birth and a media-constructed femininity that is monstrously “ageless” and inhuman as well as potentially dangerous to the actual woman/media consumer. The rest of the “Los Ageless” video offers a parade of grotesque images that raise questions about the line between the real and the constructed, the person and the environment, the beautiful and the disgusting, production and consumption, pleasure and pain, healing and damage, resignation and renunciation. Early in the video, a plastic fgurine of Clark feeds a piece of paper with the word “no” on it into a bottomless shredder that releases debris to the foor. The rest of the video uses “exaggeration, distortion, and unexpected combinations” to merge the human with the inhuman (machines, furniture, objects, animals) and erase the line between the organic and the inorganic (especially but not exclusively skin and plastic). Hospitals merge with spas, examining different kinds of “treatment” and critiquing the confation of health with beauty and beauty with danger, pain, consumption, and luxury. Several women in the video, including nurse fgures, wear rings with absurdly large (and potentially dangerous) jewels and/or have extremely long nails painted bright red, suggesting bloody talons. Clark, in bright red lipstick, lies in a hospital bed with a bandage wrapped over her nose after what appears to be plastic surgery. Later, the bandage is gone, and hands with long red nails pull at her cheeks, which appear plastic and extend well past the stretching point of human skin. People merge with their environments: there are spa scenes where everything is pink, including the lipstick and clothing worn by the guests, as well as scenes of inhuman-looking bodies on blue mats covered head to toe in blue body suits doing various yoga poses on matching blue mats. At one point, Clark stands in a bowl flled with green goo, presumably a pedicure treatment product, that starts to crawl up her leg like a monster in a science fction flm. The camera pans over sushi plates containing pulsating objects that look like sea anemones, one of which Clark eventually picks up and eats alive. A phone appears and transforms into a cake. By the end of the video, the plastic fgurine of Clark becomes agitated, goes to the pulp-covered foor, and starts throwing the paper pulp around. It’s not clear if the “no” on the original paper represents a refusal of “Los Ageless” and all that it represents, if the shredding of “no” represents acquiescence or surrender to “Los Ageless,” and/or if Clark gets on the foor and grabs the pulp in a futile attempt to fnd, reconstruct, or become the refusal. Whatever the

170 Sherry R. Truffn case, the construction or reconstruction of the self cannot be separated from the destruction of the self or the comic grotesque.

Grotesque Self-Construction and Liberation The “Los Ageless” video’s examination of constructed subjectivity and femininity refects a sensibility commonly associated with postmodernism that pervades St. Vincent’s public comments and creative work. As Clark put it in a 2018 interview, “so much of identity is construct, and so much . . . is arbitrary.”128 In her shapeshifting strategies, she joins not only David Bowie, her most commonly discussed infuence,129 but also a long line of female rock artists such as Siouxsie Sioux, Madonna, Annie Lennox, and Kate Bush who, as Reynolds and Press put it, contest the misogyny of the rock world by adopting a “masquerade” tactic that incites then frustrates “the male gaze.”130 She describes Masseduction as “performing femininity to the point of it being ridiculous.”131 Many commentators understandably also see this strategy as a way to defy the expectation that female artists work in a confessional mode132 or make themselves “relatable” to audiences. As Kornhaber puts it, she works hard to evade objectifcation, steadfastly refusing to make herself “known, defnable, usable,”133 a view reinforced by Clark’s sometimes contentious relationship with the press.134 In interviews, she not only rejects the confessional label, she also pointedly rejects the binary between playing a role and disclosing the “real” self: “all performance is in some part authentic, and all authenticity is in some part performance.”135 Her view of self isn’t strictly secular, however: she has credited her uncle with introducing her to Indian spiritualist Meher Baba’s concept of the “provisional ego,”136 a sense of self that provides “a certain amount of stability to conscious processes and also secures a working equilibrium which makes for a planned and organized life” but that “arises only to vanish in the end.”137 Her work features numerous references to provisional, constructed, and/or performative selves. “Your Lips are Red,” from the debut record Marry Me, includes the line “my face is drawn on with this number two pencil.”138 The speaker of “Jesus Saves, I Spend” says, “while people have cheered on the awful mess we’ve made/through storms of red roses we’ve exited the stage.”139 The second album, inspired by a period of extensive and intense movie-watching140 and titled Actor, features many theatrical images. On the St. Vincent record, a self-proclaimed “Psychopath” promises her listener to “keep you in my soft sights/when all of the crowd has gone home.”141 “Savior” from Masseduction is about trying on a series of presumably sexy but inevitably ill-ftting Halloween costumes at the behest of a needy partner as a way of examining the roles we play for each other. Much of St. Vincent’s work insists not only that

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 171 role-playing—both for ourselves and for others—is a defning feature of life but also that there can ultimately be no perfect “ft.” Given the assumption that there is no true, fnal self and no end to role-playing, it’s not surprising that St. Vincent presents self-conscious self-construction as a potential escape from received or normative identities. Clark said in one interview that “it’s . . . an exciting time to broaden the idea of what human beings get to be,”142 suggesting an impatience with culturally imposed limitations on the self. Some songs, like “Jesus Saves, I Spend” from Marry Me, employ a playful irreverence in rejecting traditional belief systems and the identities associated with them, while others, like “Now, Now” from Marry Me and “Cheerleader” from Strange Mercy, directly and aggressively voice a refusal to accept conventional roles. The latter is quite blunt: “I—I—I—I—don’t wanna be a cheerleader no more.”143 “Rattlesnake” from St. Vincent is a “creation myth”144 told by a new Eve, sans Adam, who “follow[s] the power lines back from the road” to a place where she feels like “the only one in the only world,”145 strips naked, and outruns a snake. This Eve is not defned by her relationship to her creator or husband or, in the end, a reptile antagonist. She is unfettered and unashamed, free to decide what and who she will be.

Disappearance, Destruction, and Isolation While St. Vincent’s grotesque celebrates the freedom of self-creation and locates “vitality and joy” as well as pathos in the contradictions of mixed, grotesque identities,146 it doesn’t ignore the pains, pressures, anxieties, and losses that come with self-creation broadly and hybrid, grotesque self-creation specifcally. “Digital Witness” from the St. Vincent record, which was included in National Public Radio’s list of “The 200 Greatest Songs by 21st Century Women” in July of 2018,147 focuses on the dark sides of constructing and curating the self via social media: “if I can’t show it, if you can’t see me/what’s the point of doing anything . . . of even sleeping?”148 The performative self requires an audience and threatens to disappear without one. The “Digital Witness” video features actors in identical clothes lined up in structured formations, suggesting another looming threat of self-creation in the digital age: duplication.149 Who can tell the original from the copy—or even if there is an original? The video takes us into the realm of the Baudrillardian “hyperreal” where the simulation displaces the authentic.150 Many other songs feature images of the absence, disappearance, or loss of the self. The title track of Marry Me immediately follows a marriage proposal (“Marry Me, Johnny”) with the line, “you won’t realize I’m gone,”151 and the narrator of “Jesus Saves, I Spend” refers to herself as an “absentee.”152 “Now, Now” lists several things that the speaker is not, before saying “I’m not anything at all,”153 while the narrator of

172 Sherry R. Truffn “Your Lips are Red” seems to be absorbed into a partner and her surroundings: “my face is red from reading your red lips . . ./my hands are black inside this downtown taxi cab.”154 “Save Me From What I Want” from Actor features the lines, “I’m a wife in watercolors/I can wash away what seventeen cold showers couldn’t wash away.”155 Although the song doesn’t name what is “washed away” (likely the listener’s desire, perhaps the speaker’s as well), the wife herself seems to have a limited defnition that threatens to disappear. The speaker of “Just the Same but Brand New,” also from Actor, does her “best impression of weightlessness” in the certainty that she can “foat away.”156 “What, Me Worry?” from Marry Me is more direct: “Would you think me queer if while standing beside you I opted instead to disappear? Disappear?”157 The speaker of one song on Masseduction describes her graceful exit from a “slow dance”: “slip my hand from your hand/ leave you dancing with a ghost.”158 More indirectly or abstractly, “My Baby Wants a Baby” from Daddy’s Home presents the choice to have a child or not as a question of how to lose oneself or disappear. Either way, the speaker seems fated to lose a “legacy”: either the “symphony” she hopes to write (while free from parental obligations) or the “baby” itself.159 Some songs and videos dramatize the loss, destruction, or disintegration of the self more dramatically or violently. The video for “Cheerleader” from Strange Mercy features a larger-than-life St. Vincent sculpture in a museum that comes to life and leaves its designated spot, signaling freedom—but then it/she breaks apart into pieces.160 The speaker of “Landmines” from Marry Me is “crawling through landmines” in search of a lover, and the song eventually reveals that she’s the one who planted them.161 The destruction of the self can be painful and violent, but it is often presented as a neutral or inevitable occurrence or even a desirable, sought-after one. “Surgeon” from Strange Mercy was inspired by an entry in Marilyn Monroe’s diary about working with acting coach and mentor Lee Strasberg: “Best fnest surgeon—Strasberg, come cut me open.”162 The song presents the mutilation of the self, and its attendant pains, as a necessary part of a successful creative life and perhaps a natural corollary to self-creation, part of a cycle. Again, we see St. Vincent’s hybrid sensibility at work: it’s not that constructing the self is a positive, liberating activity while taking apart the self (with or without help) is a negative, suicidal gesture. Acts of creation are predicated upon acts of destruction. Understanding St. Vincent’s hybrid way of looking at the world, however, does not erase the disturbing effect of the invitation to “come cut me open,” a hypnotic refrain in “Surgeon.”163 The song raises the possibility that a masochistic sensibility may be at work, a possibility raised in other songs, such as “Sugarboy,” whose speaker has a “crush on tragedy.”164 Although “surgeon” isn’t gender-specifc, the explicit reference to Marilyn Monroe’s diary and a relationship between a powerful male

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 173 teacher and an eager and submissive female pupil (and well-known victim of “abuse,” as another St. Vincent song acknowledges165) suggests a gendered nature to the masochistic dynamic: man as pain-giver and woman as pain-seeker and receiver. Here again, the Gothic tradition provides a useful lens into her work. Like the grotesque characters and imagery we have seen in St. Vincent’s work, female masochism represents a recurring motif in the literature of the Gothic. In fact, as Michelle Massé sees it, the Gothic is fundamentally about apparent, provisional or tactical masochism. Massé argues that “what characters in [Gothic] novels represent, whether through repudiation, doubt, or celebration, is the cultural, psychoanalytic, and fctional expectation that they should be masochistic if they are ‘normal’ women.”166 In other words, Gothic literature suggests that women are culturally trained not only to renounce the self broadly via self-sacrifce for the good of others but also to redefne painful experience as desirable and perhaps even pleasurable. While it would be characteristic for St. Vincent’s work to destabilize or problematize the binary between pleasure and pain rather than disavowing masochism, references to pharmaceuticals in “Surgeon” (“blue and red, something to get along”167) clarify that the speaker, like many Gothic heroines, isn’t seeking pain for pain’s sake.168 Cutting and pain accompany surgery as treatment or reconstruction, to be sure, but there’s also an underlying power dynamic in the delivering or experiencing of pain. For Massé, masochistic or potentially masochistic women in the Gothic aren’t typically presented as naturally enamored of pain but rather strategically, if not always consciously, seeking experiences that are painful. For them, masochism becomes control, a “psychic strategy that makes the best of a bad business, that insists on wrestling identity and self-affrmation from the biased social contract that traumatizes women.”169 If pain inficted by an authoritative male fgure for one’s improvement is inevitable, better to have the satisfaction of seeking it out than being passively resigned to it. Along with pain, erasure, or annihilation (self-inficted or not), the makeshift self as St. Vincent presents it is also prone to isolation. “Birth in Reverse” from the St. Vincent record, whose title comes from the description of a Celtic passage grave in the Lorrie Moore story “Which Is More than I Can Say About Some People,”170 is a “report from the edge” offered by an isolated character whose “ordinary day” is to “take out the garbage, masturbate.”171 The song combines its titular image of disappearance or movement into non-being with otherness and isolation. Other songs examine feelings of alienation, sometimes as a simple fact of life and sometimes as an experience explicitly linked with the constructed and/or grotesque self. “Regret” from St. Vincent bluntly identifes alienation as a defning feature of existence in its refrain, “Who’s the one animal? / All by yourself, all of us.”172 The speaker of “The Strangers” from Actor, a seeker of “thrill[s]” with a perverse

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inclination to “paint the black hole blacker,”173 wonders, “What do I share? What do I keep / from the strangers who sleep where I sleep?”174 These “strangers” may be family, friends, or neighbors, but either way, physical space—even space in which the comfort and vulnerability of sleep are shared—does not ensure understanding, warmth, or emotional intimacy, and in fact generates anxiety for the grotesque self who anticipates misunderstanding and/or rejection. “Laughing with a Mouth of Blood,” also from Actor, describes the “amnesiac” experience of moving away from familiar people and places in pursuit of “big plans” and fnding oneself living a Gothic nightmare: “all my old friends aren’t so friendly/and all my old haunts are now haunting me.”175 In some songs, like “Los Ageless,” isolation is directly connected with grotesquerie: “I try to tell you I love you but it comes out all sick.”176

Haunting and Humor Although disintegration, loss, and isolation are presented as inevitable or in some cases desirable for the constructed and/or liberated self, the songs still register a need and longing for authenticity, connection, or both. In this, like other things, the songs evince the “desire for plenitude, for interiority and depth” that Spooner claims “haunts many contemporary Gothic texts.”177 “Prince Johnny” from St. Vincent describes the title character, typically interpreted as either gay or transgendered, “holding court in bathroom stalls” bragging about sexual conquests (including encounters with the speaker) and “pray[ing] to all” to become “a real boy.”178 The speaker, who outwardly “laugh[s]” along with Johnny, quietly wishes to be something “more” to him and other lovers and fnally prays to become “a real girl.”179 “Severed Crossed Fingers” calls attention to the performative aspects of identity while emphasizing the collaborative nature of performance: the speaker promises, “when your calling ain’t calling back to you/I’ll be side-stage, mouthing lines for you,”180 suggesting a powerful connection between broken people struggling to fnd and play their parts in life. As always, a resolutely hybrid sensibility is at work: we are constructed and authentic, isolated and connected. St. Vincent’s intense focus on the grotesquerie, absence, destruction, loss, and/or alienation of the self may seem to suggest that her work is dark or bleak, but “tragicomic” is a more ftting description. Clark enjoys comedy in general and has even made two appearances in the comedy sketch show Portlandia alongside show creator and Sleater-Kinney member Carrie Brownstein.181 Clark is, however, particularly known for her macabre humor. In one interview, for example, she describes staying in a hotel room with “a particularly disconcerting red stain all over the sheets” and “consol[ing] [herself] by thinking it was just the Kool-Aid stain from a cult suicide.”182 Her music, of course, employs a similar strategy: one song from Daddy’s Home, “The Laughing Man,”

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 175 reminisces about younger days, rhyming “Playstation” with “suicidal ideation,” and concluding that “if life’s a joke, then I’m dying laughing.”183 For Clark, horror and humor are always intertwined and infused with pathos. People may be “crawling through landmines”184 of their own darkly ironic devising, but that does not disqualify them from empathy. The tragicomic effect is, of course, familiar to readers and students of the Gothic, a mode that unsettles by evoking contradictory responses as well as evading binary oppositions and easy categorization. As Richard Davenport-Hines sees it, “even in the direst extremes of the gothic imagination, the evasiveness of burlesque and parody is never far away.”185 For some, “evasiveness,” ambiguity, and duality contribute to the appeal of the Gothic. For others, they’re a sign of ultimate meaninglessness. A similar bifurcation characterizes critical responses to St. Vincent. Kornhaber reports being pleasantly “surprise[d]” while reading responses to a press snafu involving the artist’s decision to block publication of an interview186 that he wasn’t the only critic “mystifed by the acclaim” Clark has received.187 He compares her unfavorably to predecessors like David Bowie, Prince, and Grace Jones, also known for cultivating an aura of “mystique.”188 In his view, Clark’s elusive persona and ambiguous lyrics represent little more than “repression, introversion, and control” disguising a lack of substance, paradigmatically but not exclusively displayed in discussions of her father’s incarceration.189 While Clark’s “fear of vulnerability” may be understandable, Kornhaber’s view is that “mystery is cheaper than meaning.”190 Although Kornhaber’s criticisms of particular comments, interviews, and lyrics have merit,191 St. Vincent’s work taken as a whole offers more than vague “mystery.” As we have seen, like the artists that Milbank discusses, St. Vincent employs a Gothic grotesque strategy for multiple purposes: notably to “provoke epistemological dubiety,”192 “mak[e] sense of female subjectivity,”193 and harness “tensions” to “produce energy.”194 In doing so, she invites listeners to witness, and perhaps participate in, grotesque performances that provoke discomfort and resist easy categorization without ignoring the vulnerabilities, horrors, and potential for damage wrought by grotesque fgures or inherent to grotesquerie. As noted in “The Birthday Party,” the simultaneously heroic, horrifc, and humorous choices made by the mother haunt her daughter for years to come. Even so, Clark invites us to regard grotesque others and selves with empathy and kindness. She also invites us to laugh with them, even if we are “laughing with a mouth of blood.”195

Acknowledgments Warmest thanks to Eric Dunnum and James Rovira for generous feedback on multiple drafts of this article and to former student Alex McKee, whose concert review for an Advanced Writing course sparked my interest in St. Vincent.

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Notes 1 Surprisingly, “The Birthday Party” was partly “based on actual events” that happened to a friend of Clark’s and partly inspired by a frightening experience that took place on the day of her own eighth birthday party. On that day, she and her family were en route to a celebration at a putt-putt golf course when a pink sofa fell out of a truck in front of her family’s car. Her mom “swerved to avoid hitting the sofa,” and the car “jackknifed . . . and hit the guardrail on the left side of the street—[spinning] around across three lanes of Texas traffc to the shoulder of the road.” No one was hurt, and her mom got out of the car and started taking pictures of the scene, accidentally stepping into a pile of fre ants, sustaining multiple bites, and going into anaphylactic shock. She was treated at a hospital, and the family ended up playing putt-putt golf as planned. From Ryan Dombal, “St. Vincent on her Directing Debut, The Birthday Party,” Pitchfork, 23 January 2017. Accessed 5 August 2021. https://pitchfork.com/ thepitch/1419-st-vincent-on-her-directing-debut-the-birthday-party/. 2 “The Birthday Party,” directed by Annie Clark, in XX (Magnolia Pictures, 2017). https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B06W9J5DZS/ref=atv_ dp_share_cu_r. 3 Meagan Fredette, “Is St. Vincent Our New David Bowie-esque Shapeshifter?”, 4 March 2021. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://www. wmagazine.com/fashion/st-vincent-look-evolution-hair. 4 Michael Cuby, “St. Vincent is the Queer, Genre-Bending Musician of our Dreams,” 9 August 2018. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://www.them. us/story/st-vincent-lollapalooza. 5 Spencer Kornhaber. “St. Vincent and the Limits of Rock-and-Roll Mystique.” The Atlantic, 11 May 2021. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.theatlantic. com/culture/archive/2021/05/st-vincents-daddys-home/618854/. 6 Bernard McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 1. 7 Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 69–70. 8 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic. 9 David Punter, The Literature of Terror, Vol. 2 (London: Longman, 1996), 178. 10 Alison Milbank, “Bleeding Nuns: A Genealogy of the Female Gothic Grotesque,” The Female Gothic: New Directions, edited by Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 78, author’s emphasis. 11 Heather Phares, “St. Vincent,” AllMusic.com, n.d, Accessed 5 August 2021. https://www.allmusic.com/artist/st-vincent-mn0000574035/ biography?1628167670502. 12 Nick Paumgarten, “St. Vincent’s Sexy, Cheeky Rock.” The New Yorker, 21 August 2017. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2017/08/28/st-vincents-cheeky-sexy-rock. 13 Ibid. 14 Phares, “St. Vincent.” 15 Paumgarten, “St. Vincent’s Sexy, Cheeky Rock.” 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Phares, “St. Vincent.” 19 Rebecca Nicholson, “St. Vincent: ‘I always felt like a Weirdo, and I was,” The Guardian, 7 August 2014. Accessed 15 July 2021. https://www.theguardian. com/music/2014/aug/07/-sp-st-vincent-interview-always-felt-like-weirdo.

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 177 20 Ibid. 21 Melena Ryzik, “Friendly, and Just a Bit Creepy: St. Vincent Defes Categories,” The New York Times, 6 May 2009. Accessed 15 June 2021. https:// www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/arts/music/07vince.html 22 Ann Powers. “St. Vincent: SXSW Interview.” YouTube Video, 54:15, 12 November 2014. https://youtu.be/7ySiGEIRaHo. Accessed 7 June 2021. 23 Ibid. 24 Eve Barlow, “St. Vincent,” The Forty-Five, March 2021. Accessed 5 August 2021. https://thefortyfve.com/interviews/st-vincent-interview-daddys-home2021/. 25 Ibid. 26 Phares, “St. Vincent.” 27 “Award Nominations and Winners.” Accessed 5 August 2021. https:// www.grammy.com/grammys/awards. 28 Chris Kelly, “At the Anthem, A Seductive Solo Set from St. Vincent,’ The Washington Post, 28 November 2014. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/st-vincent-goes-italone-and-its-more-than-enough/2017/11/28/a2605928-d44f-11e7-9ad9ca0619edfa05_story.html. 29 Referring to the albums Marry Me and Actor. 30 St. Vincent (record). 31 Masseduction (record). 32 Daddy’s Home (record). 33 Sophia McDonald, “A Brief History of St. Vincent’s Brilliant Musical Personas (So Far!),” NME (New Musical Express), 31 March 2021. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.nme.com/features/st-vincent-daddyshome-personas-so-far-2911642. This description refers to the album Marry Me. 34 Ibid., in reference to Actor. 35 Cady Lang, “St. Vincent Talks about Her New Album ‘MASSEDUCTION’ and Why She’s ‘Happy to Be Misunderstood.’ Time, 13 October 2017. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://time.com/4971487/st-vincent-misseduction-interview/. Reference is to Strange Mercy. 36 El Hunt. “St. Vincent: ‘I Wanted to Tell My Story with Humour and Compassion.’” NME (New Musical Express), 2 April 2021. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.nme.com/big-reads/st-vincent-cover-interview-2021-daddyshome-2912166. Reference is to Strange Mercy. 37 McDonald, “A Brief History of St. Vincent’s Brilliant Musical Personas (So Far!),” in reference to Strange Mercy. 38 Ibid., in reference to Love This Giant (with David Byrne). 39 Lang, “St. Vincent Talks about Her New Album “MASSEDUCTION’ and Why She’s ‘Happy to Be Misunderstood.” in reference to St. Vincent. 40 McDonald, “A Brief History of St. Vincent’s Brilliant Musical Personas (So Far!),” in reference to Masseduction. 41 Barlow, “St. Vincent,” in reference to Daddy’s Home. 42 In fact, most of the literary infuences she discusses in interviews are “gritty” modern/contemporary writers whose work aren’t always or typically identifed with the Gothic, such as Charles Bukowski, Philip Roth, David Mamet, and Cormac McCarthy. See Tom Murphy, “Q&A with Annie Clark of St. Vincent,” Westword, 12 February 2010. Accessed 15 June 2021. https://www.westword.com/music/qanda-withannie-clark-of-st-vincent-5699926. 43 Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), 6–13.

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44 Mark Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of the Gothic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 12. 45 Punter, The Literature of Terror, 183. 46 Chris Baldick, ed., “Introduction,” The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), xix. 47 Laura Snapes, “St. Vincent on Making a Horror Movie in a Time of ‘Extreme Turmoil,’” FactMag, N D., Accessed 3 August 2021. https:// www.factmag.com/2017/01/31/st-vincent-birthday-party-interview/. 48 “St. Vincent Shredding to The Wizard of Oz,” National Public Radio, 23 May 2009. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=104499182. 49 Annie Clark, “Marrow,” YouTube Video, 3:15, 21 September 2009. https:// youtu.be/-9prpAv6kvo. Accessed 21 September 2021. 50 Annie Clark, “Cruel,” YouTube Video, 3:19, 24 August 2011. https:// youtu.be/Itt0rALeHE8. Accessed 21 September 2021. 51 Adam Epstein, “‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ Is Getting a Gender-Swapped Adaptation,” Quartz, 17 August 2017. Accessed 23 July 2021. https:// qz.com/1056201/the-picture-of-dorian-gray-st-vincent-is-directing-agender-swapped-flm-adaptation-of-oscar-wildes-novel/. 52 Charles Crow, American Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 6–7. 53 McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque, 1. 54 Ibid., 2. 55 Anthony DiRenzo, American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque (Carbondale: Southern Indiana University Press, 1993), 1. 56 Ibid., 9. 57 McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque, 11. 58 Ibid., 1. 59 Longinus, “On Sublimity,” trans. D.A. Russell, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), 137. 60 Milbank, “Bleeding Nuns: A Genealogy of the Female Gothic Grotesque,” 85. 61 Ibid., 88. 62 Ibid., 89. 63 Ibid., 78, author’s emphasis. 64 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, 70. 65 Allan Lloyd Smith’s “Postmodernism/Gothicism” lists multiple correspondences between the postmodern and Gothic not addressed in this analysis, including “indeterminism,” “refexivity,” “ontology,” etc. Allan Lloyd Smith, “Postmodernism/Gothicism.” Modern Gothic: A Reader eds. Victor Sage and Allan Loyd Smith (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996), 6–19. 66 Ihab Hassan, “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 3 (1986), 506. 67 Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin (New York: North Point Press, 1998), 3. 68 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, 27. 69 Hassan, “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective,” 505. 70 Ibid., 27.

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 179 71 Maggie Kilgour, “Dr. Frankenstein Meets Dr. Freud,” American Gothic: New Interventions In a National Narrative, edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1998), 40. 72 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, 70. 73 Claire Stern, “St. Vincent on Women in Entertainment: ‘We Need More Voices in the Room,” YahooLife!, 6 October 2017. Accessed 24 July 2021. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/st-vincent-women-entertainment-more204500384.html. 74 Carrie Battan, “St. Vincent on her High-Profle Romances and Her Confessional New Album,” Vogue, 20 September 2017. Accessed 24 July 2021. https://www.vogue.com/article/st-vincent-annie-clark-vogue-octoberissue-interview-2017. 75 Laura Snapes, “St. Vincent Is Telling You Everything,” Buzzfeed, 10 September 2017. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ article/laurasnapes/st-vincent-is-telling-you-everything. 76 Annie Clark, “Black Rainbow” on Actor, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 2919, 2009, compact disc. 77 Example, “The Apocalypse Song.” 78 “Your Lips Are Red.” 79 “Prince Johnny,” “Sugar Boy.” 80 “Jesus Saves, I Spend,” “Masseduction.” 81 “Pills,” “The Laughing Man.” 82 Annie Clark, “Huey Newton” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. 83 Murphy, “Q&A with Annie Clark of St. Vincent.” 84 Guitar World ranked her as #12 in its list of “20 Best Guitarists” of the 2010s. Richard Bienstoc, “The 20 Best Guitarists of the Decade,” Guitar World, 30 December 2019. Accessed 24 July 2021. https://www. guitarworld.com/artists/the-20-best-guitarists-of-the-decade. 85 Tristan Schmid. “Interview: St. Vincent on Cheerleaders, Hip-Hop.” NUVO, 9 May 2012. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://nuvo.newsnirvana.com/ music/interview-st-vincent-on-cheerleaders-hip-hop/article_0e7b89e5efa1-5402-8c8a-548e8f45ee2a.html. 86 Tom Lamont. “St. Vincent: ‘I’m in Deep Nun Mode.’” The Guardian, 19 August 2017. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/ music/2017/aug/19/st-vincent-interview-deep-nun-mode-cara-delevingne. 87 Matt Fink. “Throwback Thursday: St. Vincent Interview from 2007.” Under the Radar. 12 June 2014. Accessed 7 June 2021. https:// www.undertheradarmag.com /interviews/throwback_thursday_ st._ vincent_interview_from_2007. 88 Paumgarten, “St. Vincent’s Sexy, Cheeky Rock.” 89 “Album Review: St. Vincent—Strange Mercy.” NME (New Musical Express). 14 September 2011. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.nme. com/reviews/reviews-st-vincent-12313-323804//. 90 Alexandra Pollard, “‘It’s Cool That Some People Hate My Show’: St. Vincent on Fan Backlash and Chinese Massages.” New Statesman. 9 November 2017. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.newstatesman.com/ culture/music-theatre/2017/11/it-s-cool-some-people-hate-my-showst-vincent-fan-backlash-and-chinese. 91 Geoffrey Himes, “The Totally Original Sound of St. Vincent.” Smithsonian Magazine, December 2013. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/the-totally-original-sound-of-st-vincent-180947634/.

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92 Max Cea. “Even in Pop Turn. St. Vincent Sends Jolt Through Dying Rock’N’Roll.” Salon, 13 October 2017. Accessed 7 June 2021. https:// www.salon.com /2017/10/13/even-in-pop-turn-st-vincent-sends-joltthrough-dying-rock-n-roll//. 93 Kornhaber. “St. Vincent and the Limits of Rock-and-Roll Mystique.” 94 Himes, “The Totally Original Sound of St. Vincent.” 95 Kornhaber, “St. Vincent and the Limits of Rock-and-Roll Mystique.” 96 Joshua Klein, “St. Vincent, Marry Me,” Pitchfork, 27 July 2007. Accessed 14 August 2021. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10457-marry-me/. 97 Anthony Fantano, “St. Vincent, Daddy’s Home Album Review.” Needle Drop YouTube Video, 12:02. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://youtu. be/Nm2K9usYpfY. 98 Annie Clark, “Los Ageless” on Masseduction, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR00223, 2017, compact disc. 99 Jonah Weiner, “The Dream World of St. Vincent,” Rolling Stone, 23 June 2014. Accessed 20 July 2021. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/ music-news/the-dream-world-of-st-vincent-101044/. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1996), 96. 105 David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 62. 106 See, for example, Alan McKee, “‘Resistance is Hopeless’: Assimilating Queer Theory,” Social Semiotics 9, no. 2 (1999): 230–250. 107 John Ike Sewell, “‘Becoming rather than Being’: Queer’s Double-Edged Discourse as Deconstructive Practice,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 38, no. 4 (2014): 302. 108 William Hughes and Andrew Smith, eds., “Introduction: Queering the Gothic,” Queering the Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 1. 109 Ibid., 1. 110 Ibid., 2 111 Punter, The Literature of Terror, 117. 112 Ibid., 208. 113 Paumgarten, “St. Vincent’s Sexy, Cheeky Rock.” 114 Pollard. “‘It’s Cool That Some People Hate My Show’: St. Vincent on Fan Backlash and Chinese Massages.” 115 McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque, 11. 116 Annie Clark, “What Me Worry” on Marry Me, Perf. St. Vincent, Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. BBQLP 254, 2007, compact disc. 117 Annie Clark, “Marry Me” on Marry Me, Perf. St. Vincent, Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. BBQLP 254, 2007, compact disc. 118 Milbank, “Bleeding Nuns: A Genealogy of the Female Gothic Grotesque,” 79. 119 Annie Clark, “The Sequel” on Actor, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 2919, 2009, compact disc. 120 Annie Clark, “Sugarboy” on Masseduction, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR00223, 2017, compact disc. 121 Marcy Italiano, Pain Machine (Holicong, PA: Cosmo Books, 2003).

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 181 122 Annie Clark, “Pills.” YouTube Video, 4:51, November 29, 2017. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://youtu.be/7sfrCVYZV7k. 123 In this story, a protagonist attending an awkward dinner party puzzles over the meaning of lines from a “Chilean folk song” playing in the background: “Bring me all your lovers, so I can love you too.” Lorrie Moore, “Beautiful Grade,” Birds of America: Stories (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 135. 124 Annie Clark. “Bring Me Your Loves” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. 125 Moore, “Beautiful Grade,” 139. 126 Milbank, “Bleeding Nuns: A Genealogy of the Female Gothic Grotesque,” 79. 127 In that commercial, a butler plays a Maxell tape of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” for a man who is lounging in a low-backed chair with a glass of wine on an end table beside him. The sound waves coming from the speakers create gusts of wind that blow back the man’s hair and slide the wine glass toward the edge (without looking over, he smoothly reaches down and stops before it falls off). See “Famous Maxell Blown Away Guy Over 500 Plays Tape C.” YouTube Video, 32 seconds, 16 August 2015. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://youtu.be/Zjf5pdJJ44Q. 128 Krishnan Guru-Murthy, “St. Vincent Interview on Sexuality, Gender and Disrupting the System,” British Public Broadcasting Service, Channel 4, June 7, 2018, YouTube Video, 4:55. Accessed 11 September 2021. https:// youtu.be/gTlW7Trc35Y. 129 Paumgarten, “St. Vincent’s Sexy, Cheeky Rock.” 130 Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock’n’Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 3. 131 Liam Hess, “How St. Vincent Got Her Groove Back,” Vogue, 17 May 2021. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.vogue.com/article/ st-vincent-daddys-home-interview. 132 Carl Wilson, “St. Vincent’s Newest Record is also Her Worst,” Slate, May 17, 2021. Accessed September 11, 2021. https://slate.com/culture/2021/05/ st-vincent-daddys-home-review-annie-clark.html. 133 Kornhaber, “St. Vincent and the Limits of Rock-and-Roll Mystique.” 134 Kaelen Bell, “St. Vincent Explores Moral Grey Areas to Tell Her Story,” Exclaim, 11 May 2021. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://exclaim.ca/music/ article/st_vincent_daddys_home_cover_story_interview. 135 Ibid. 136 Murphy, “Q&A with Annie Clark of St. Vincent.” 137 Merwan Sheriar Irani (Meher Baba), Gems from the Discourses of Meher Baba (New York: Circle Productions, 1945), 44. 138 Annie Clark, “Your Lips Are Red” on Marry Me, Perf. St. Vincent, Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. BBQLP 254, 2007, compact disc. 139 Annie Clark. “Jesus Saves, I Spend” on Marry Me, Perf. St. Vincent, Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. BBQLP 254, 2007, compact disc. 140 “St. Vincent: Shredding to The Wizard of Oz.” 141 Annie Clark, “Psychopath” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. 142 Guru-Murthy, “St. Vincent Interview on Sexuality, Gender and Disrupting the System.” 143 Annie Clark, “Cheerleader” on Strange Mercy, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 3123, 2011, compact disc.

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144 Patrick Rodgers, “St. Vincent’s Annie Clark on Aesthetics, Confdence, and Crafting Her Own Creation Myth,” Nashville Scene,6 March 2014. Accessed 9 September 2021. https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/st-vincentsannie-clark-on-aesthetics-confidence-and-crafting-her-own-creationmyth/article_f5e3b095-71eb-5305-a119-dcdbe07d8370.html. 145 Annie Clark, “Rattlesnake” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. 146 Ibid., 89. 147 “The 200 Greatest Songs by 21st Century Women+,” National Public Radio, 30 July 2018. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.npr. org/2018/07/30/627395449/turning-the-tables-the-200-greatest-songs-by21st-century-women-part-1. 148 Annie Clark, “Digital Witness” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. 149 Annie Clark, “Digital Witness,” YouTube Video, 3:25, 31 January 2014. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://youtu.be/mVAxUMuhz98. 150 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1994). 151 Annie Clark, “Marry Me.” 152 Annie Clark, “Jesus Saves, I Spend” on Marry Me, Perf. St. Vincent, Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. BBQLP 254, 2007, compact disc. 153 Annie Clark, “Now, Now” on Marry Me, Perf. St. Vincent, Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. BBQLP 254, 2007, compact disc. 154 Annie Clark, “Your Lips are Red.” 155 Annie Clark, “Save Me From What I Want” on Actor, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 2919, 2009, compact disc. 156 Annie Clark, “Just the Same But Brand New” on Actor, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 2919, 2009, compact disc. 157 Annie Clark, “What Me Worry.” 158 Annie Clark, “Dancing with a Ghost” on Masseduction, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR00223, 2017, compact disc. 159 Annie Clark, “My Baby Wants a Baby” on Daddy’s Home. Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR01959, 2021, compact disc. 160 Annie Clark, “Cheerleader,” YouTube Video, 3:30, 2 February 2012. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://youtu.be/LEY9GJAm8bA 161 Annie Clark, “Landmines” on Marry Me, Perf. St. Vincent, Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. BBQLP 254, 2007, compact disc. 162 “For St. Vincent, Music is the Easy Part.” National Public Radio, 15 September 2011. Accessed 15 July 2021. https://www.npr. org/2011/09/15/140463596/for-st-vincent-music-is-the-easy-part. 163 Annie Clark, “Surgeon” on Strange Mercy, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 3123, 2011, compact disc. 164 Annie Clark, “Sugarboy.” 165 Annie Clark, “The Melting of the Sun” on Daddy’s Home. Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR01959, 2021, compact disc. 166 Michelle Massé, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1992), 2. 167 Annie Clark, “Surgeon.” 168 A recurring motif in St. Vincent’s song is the idea of pain as payment. See Annie Clark, “Pills” on Masseduction and Annie Clark, “Pay Your Way in Pain” on Daddy’s Home. 169 Massé, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic, 42. 170 Lorrie Moore, “Which is More Than I Can Say about Some People” in Birds of America: Stories (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 26–46.

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 183 171 Annie Clark, “Birth in Reverse” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. 172 Annie Clark, “Regret” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. 173 Clark quotes this image from Philip Roth’s The Plot against America. See Kathryn Savage, “Interview: St. Vincent on Actor, Onstage Laugh Attacks, and Seizures.” The Village Voice, 20 May 2009. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://www.villagevoice.com/2009/05/20/ interview-st-vincent-on-actor-onstage-laugh-attacks-and-seizures/. 174 Annie Clark, “The Strangers” on Actor, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 2919, 2009, compact disc. 175 Annie Clark, “Laughing with a Mouth of Blood” on Actor, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 2919, 2009, compact disc. 176 Annie Clark, “Los Ageless.” 177 Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, 28. 178 Annie Clark, “Prince Johnny” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. 179 Ibid. 180 Annie Clark, “Severed Crossed Fingers” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. 181 “St. Vincent,” Internet Movie Database (IMDB), n.d, https://www.imdb. com/name/nm3554264/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1. 182 Tony Pierce, “An Interview with Annie Clark aka St. Vincent.” LAist, 9 May 2007, Accessed 6 August 2021. https://laist.com/news/ interview-with-annie-clark-aka-st-vincent. 183 Annie Clark, “The Laughing Man” on Daddy’s Home. Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR01959, 2021, compact disc. 184 Clark, “Landmines.” 185 Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin, 21. 186 Clark gave an interview to journalist Emma Madden, then her PR representatives prevented its release. See Eleanor Halls, “Emma Madden on the Viral Fallout From Their St. Vincent Interview,” 29 April 2021. Accessed 5 August 2021. https://eleanorhalls.substack.com/p/ emma-madden-on-the-viral-fallout 187 Kornhaber, “St. Vincent and the Limits of Rock-and-Roll Mystique.” 188 Ibid. 189 Ibid. 190 Ibid. 191 For example, Kornhaber points out that while Clark speaks broadly and apparently earnestly in interviews about too much “judgment” and not enough “understanding” when it comes to incarcerated people in ways that connect with calls for criminal justice reform, the song “Daddy’s Home” seems “mocking” when it refers to “all good Puritans” who “pray about reform.” In his view, Clark’s creative engagements with her father’s incarceration falter because she refuses to “push into reckoning, revelation, or vulnerability.” See Annie Clark, “Daddy’s Home” on Daddy’s Home. Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR01959, 2021, compact disc. 192 Milbank, “Bleeding Nuns: A Genealogy of the Female Gothic Grotesque,” 79. 193 Ibid., 88. 194 Ibid., 88. 195 Clark, “Laughing with a Mouth of Blood.”

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Bibliography “Album Review: St. Vincent—Strange Mercy.” NME (New Musical Express). 14 September 2011. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.nme.com/reviews/ reviews-st-vincent-12313-323804/. “Award Nominations and Winners,” The Grammy Awards, n.d. https://www. grammy.com/grammys/awards. Accessed 5 August 2021. “The 200 Greatest Songs by 21st Century Women+,” National Public Radio, 30 July 2018. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/30/627395449/ turning-the-tables-the-200-greatest-songs-by-21st-century-women-part-1. Baldick, Chris, ed. “Introduction.” The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, xi–xxiii. Barlow, Eve. “St. Vincent,” The Forty-Five, March 2021, Accessed 5 August 2021, https://thefortyfve.com/interviews/st-vincent-interview-daddys-home-2021/. Battan, Carrie. “St. Vincent on her High-Profle Romances and Her Confessional New Album,” Vogue, 20 September 2017. Accessed 24 July 2021. https://www.vogue.com /article/st-vincent-annie-clark-vogue-octoberissue-interview-2017. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1994. Bell, Kaelen. “St. Vincent Explores Moral Grey Areas to Tell Her Story,” Exclaim, 11 May 2021. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://exclaim.ca/music/ article/st_vincent_daddys_home_cover_story_interview. “The Birthday Party,” directed by Annie Clark, in XX (Magnolia Pictures, 2017). https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B06W9J5DZS/ref=atv_dp_ share_cu_r. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Cea, Max. “Even in Pop Turn. St. Vincent Sends Jolt through Dying Rock’N’Roll.” Salon, 13 October 2017. Accessed 7 June 2021. https:// w w w.salon.com /2017/10/13/even-in-pop-turn-st-vincent-sends-joltthrough-dying-rock-n-roll/. Crow, Charles. American Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009. Cuby, Michael, “St. Vincent is the Queer, Genre-Bending Musician of our Dreams,” 9 August 2018. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://www.them. us/story/st-vincent-lollapalooza. Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin. New York: North Point Press, 1998. DiRenzo, Anthony. American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque. Carbondale: Southern Indiana University Press, 1993. Dombal, Ryan, “St. Vincent on Her Directing Debut, The Birthday Party,” Pitchfork, 23 January 2017. Accessed 5 August 2021. https://pitchfork.com/ thepitch/1419-st-vincent-on-her-directing-debut-the-birthday-party/. Edmundson, Mark. Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of the Gothic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Epstein, Adam. “‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ is getting a Gender-Swapped Adaptation,” Quartz, 17 August 2017. Accessed 23 July 2021. https:// qz.com/1056201/the-picture-of-dorian-gray-st-vincent-is-directing-a-genderswapped-flm-adaptation-of-oscar-wildes-novel/.

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 185 “Famous Maxell Blown Away Guy Over 500 Plays Tape C.” YouTube Video, 32 seconds, 16 August 2015, https://youtu.be/Zjf5pdJJ44Q. Accessed 11 September 2021. Fantano, Anthony. “St. Vincent, Daddy’s Home Album Review.” Needle Drop YouTube Video, 12:02. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm2K9usYpfY. Accessed 11 September 2021. Fink, Matt. “Throwback Thursday: St. Vincent Interview from 2007.” Under the Radar. June 12, 2014. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.undertheradarmag. com/interviews/throwback_thursday_st._vincent_interview_from_2007 “For St. Vincent, Music is the Easy Part.” National Public Radio, September 15, 2011. Accessed 15 July 2021. https://www.npr.org/2011/09/15/140463596/ for-st-vincent-music-is-the-easy-part. Fredette, Meagan. “Is St. Vincent Our New David Bowie-esque Shapeshifter?”, 4 March 2021. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://www.wmagazine.com/ fashion/st-vincent-look-evolution-hair Guitar World. 30 December 2019. Accessed 24 July 2021. https://www. guitarworld.com/artists/the-20-best-guitarists-of-the-decade. Guru-Murthy, Krishnan. “St. Vincent Interview on Sexuality, Gender and Disrupting the System,” British Public Broadcasting Service, Channel 4, 7 June 2018, YouTube Video, 4:55, Accessed 11 September 2021. https://youtu.be/ gTlW7Trc35Y. Halls, Eleanor. “Emma Madden on the Viral Fallout from Their St. Vincent Interview,” 29 April 2021. Accessed 5 August 2021. https://eleanorhalls. substack.com/p/emma-madden-on-the-viral-fallout Halperin, David. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hassan, Ihab. “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 3 (1986), 503–520. Hess, Liam. “How St. Vincent Got Her Groove Back,” Vogue, 17 May 2021. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.vogue.com/article/st-vincent-daddyshome-interview. Himes, Geoffrey. “The Totally Original Sound of St. Vincent.” Smithsonian Magazine, December 2013. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/the-totally-original-sound-of-st-vincent-180947634/. Hughes, William, and Andrew Smith, eds., “Introduction: Queering the Gothic,” Queering the Gothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009, 1–10. Hunt, E. “St. Vincent: ‘I Wanted to Tell My Story with Humour and Compassion.’” NME (New Musical Express), 2 April 2021. Accessed 7 June 2021. https:// www.nme.com/big-reads/st-vincent-cover-interview-2021-daddys-home2912166 Italiano, Marcy. Pain Machine. Holicong, PA: Cosmo Books, 2003. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1996. Kelly, Chris. “At the Anthem, a Seductive Solo Set from St. Vincent,’ The Washington Post, 28 November 2014. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://www. washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/st-vincent-goes-it-alone-and-itsmore-than-enough/2017/11/28/a2605928-d44f-11e7-9ad9-ca0619edfa05_ story.html.

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Kilgour, Maggie. “Dr. Frankenstein Meets Dr. Freud,” American Gothic: New Interventions In a National Narrative, eds. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy. Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 1998, 40–53. Klein, Joshua. “St. Vincent, Marry Me,” Pitchfork, 27 July 2007. Accessed 14 August 2021 https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10457-marry-me/. Kornhaber, Spencer. “St. Vincent and the Limits of Rock-and-Roll Mystique.” The Atlantic, 11 May 2021. Accessed June 7, 2021. https://www.theatlantic. com/culture/archive/2021/05/st-vincents-daddys-home/618854/. Lamont, Tom. “St. Vincent: ‘I’m in Deep Nun Mode.’” The Guardian, 19 August 2017. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/ aug/19/st-vincent-interview-deep-nun-mode-cara-delevingne. Lang, Cady. “St. Vincent Talks about Her New Album ‘MASSEDUCTION’ and Why She’s ‘Happy to Be Misunderstood.’ Time, 13 October 2017. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://time.com/4971487/st-vincent-misseduction-interview/. Reference is to Strange Mercy. Longinus. “On Sublimity,” trans. D.A. Russell. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, 136–154. Massé, Michelle. In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. McDonald, Sophia. “A Brief History of St. Vincent’s Brilliant Musical Personas (So Far!).” NME (New Musical Express), 31 March 2021. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.nme.com/features/st-vincent-daddys-home-personas-sofar-2911642. McElroy, Bernard. Fiction of the Modern Grotesque. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. McKee, Alan. “‘Resistance is Hopeless’: Assimilating Queer Theory.” Social Semiotics 9 no. 2 (1999): 230–250. Merwan Sheriar Irani (Meher Baba), Gems from the Discourses of Meher Baba. New York: Circle Productions, 1945. Milbank, Alison. “Bleeding Nuns: A Genealogy of the Female Gothic Grotesque.” The Female Gothic: New Directions, edited by Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith. New York: Palgrave, 2009, 76–97. Moore, Lorrie. “Beautiful Grade,” Birds of America: Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1998a, 122–141. ———. “Which is More Than I Can Say about Some People,” Birds of America: Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1998b, 26–46. Murphy, Tom. “Q&A with Annie Clark of St. Vincent,” Westword, 12 February 2010. Accessed 15 June 2021. https://www.westword.com/music/ qanda-with-annie-clark-of-st-vincent-5699926. Nicholson, Rebecca. “St. Vincent: ‘I Always Felt like a Weirdo, and I Was.” The Guardian, 7 August 2014. Accessed 15 July 2021. https://www.theguardian. com/music/2014/aug/07/-sp-st-vincent-interview-always-felt-like-weirdo. Paumgarten, Nick. “St. Vincent’s Sexy, Cheeky Rock.” The New Yorker, 21 August 2017. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2017/08/28/st-vincents-cheeky-sexy-rock. Phares, Heather. “St. Vincent.” AllMusic.com, n.d. Accessed 5 August 2021. https://www.allmusic.com/artist/st-vincent-mn0000574035/biography? 1628167670502

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 187 Pierce, Tony. “An Interview with Annie Clark aka St. Vincent.” LAist, 9 May 2007. Accessed 6 August 2021. https://laist.com/news/interviewwith-annie-clark-aka-st-vincent. Pollard, Alexandra. “‘It’s Cool That Some People Hate My Show’: St. Vincent on Fan Backlash and Chinese Massages.” New Statesman. 9 November 2017. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music-theatre/2017/11/ it-s-cool-some-people-hate-my-show-st-vincent-fan-backlash-and-chinese. Powers, Ann. “St. Vincent: SXSW Interview.” YouTube Video, 54:15, 12 November 2014. https://youtu.be/7ySiGEIRaHo. Accessed 7 June 2021. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror, Vol. 2. London: Longman, 1996. Reynolds, Simon, and Joy Press. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock’n’Roll. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Rodgers, Patrick. “St. Vincent’s Annie Clark on Aesthetics, Confdence, and Crafting Her Own Creation Myth.” Nashville Scene, 6 March 2014. Accessed 9 September 2021. https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/st-vincents-annieclark-on-aesthetics-confdence-and-crafting-her-own-creation-myth/article_ f5e3b095-71eb-5305-a119-dcdbe07d8370.html. Ryzik, Melena. “Friendly, and Just a Bit Creepy: St. Vincent Defes Categories.” The New York Times, 6 May 2009. Accessed 15 June 2021. https://www. nytimes.com/2009/05/07/arts/music/07vince.html. Savage, Kathryn. “Interview: St. Vincent on Actor, Onstage Laugh Attacks, and Seizures.” The Village Voice, 20 May 2009. https://www.villagevoice. com/2009/05/20/interview-st-vincent-on-actor-onstage-laugh-attacks-andseizures/. Accessed 11 September 2021. Schmid, Tristan. “Interview: St. Vincent on Cheerleaders, Hip-Hop.” NUVO, 9 May 2012. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://nuvo.newsnirvana.com/music/ interview-st-vincent-on-cheerleaders-hip-hop/article_0e7b89e5-efa1-54028c8a-548e8f45ee2a.html. Sewell, John I. “‘Becoming rather than Being’: Queer’s Double-Edged Discourse as Deconstructive Practice.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 38, no. 4 (2014), 291–307. Smith, Allan L. “Postmodernism/Gothicism.” Modern Gothic: A Reader. Victor Sage and Allan L. Smith, eds. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996, 6–19. Snapes, Laura. “St. Vincent Is Telling You Everything.” Buzzfeed, 10 September 2017. Accessed 7 June 2021. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ laurasnapes/st-vincent-is-telling-you-everything. ———. “St. Vincent on Making a Horror Movie in a Time of ‘Extreme Turmoil.’” FactMag, N.d., Accessed 3 August 2021. https://www.factmag. com/2017/01/31/st-vincent-birthday-party-interview/. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. “St. Vincent.” Internet Movie Database (IMDB), N.d. https://www.imdb.com/ name/nm3554264/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1. “St. Vincent Shredding to The Wizard of Oz.” National Public Radio, 23 May 2009. Accessed 11 September 2021. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=104499182. Stern, Claire. “St. Vincent on Women in Entertainment: ‘We Need More Voices in the Room.” YahooLife! 6 October 2017. Accessed 24 July 2021. https://www. yahoo.com/lifestyle/st-vincent-women-entertainment-more-204500384. html.

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Weiner, Jonah. “The Dream World of St. Vincent.” Rolling Stone, 23 June 2014. Accessed 20 July 2021. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/ the-dream-world-of-st-vincent-101044/. Wilson, Carl. “St. Vincent’s Newest Record Is also Her Worst.” Slate, 17 May 2021, Accessed September 11, 2021. https://slate.com/culture/2021/05/st-vincentdaddys-home-review-annie-clark.html.

Discography Clark, Annie. “Birth in Reverse,” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. ———. “Black Rainbow,” on Actor, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 2919, 2009, compact disc. ———. “Bring Me Your Loves,” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. ———. “Cheerleader,” on Strange Mercy, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 3123, 2011, compact disc. ———. “Cheerleader,” YouTube Video, 3:30, 2 February 2012, https://youtu. be/LEY9GJAm8bA, Accessed 11 September 2021. ———. “Cruel,” YouTube Video, 3:19, 24 August 2011. https://youtu.be/ Itt0rALeHE8. Accessed 21 September 2021. ———. “Daddy’s Home,” on Daddy’s Home. Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR01959, 2021, compact disc. ———. “Dancing with a Ghost,” on Masseduction, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR00223, 2017, compact disc. ———. “Digital Witness,” YouTube Video, 3:25, 31 January 2014. https:// youtu.be/mVAxUMuhz98, Accessed 11 September 2021. ———. “Digital Witness,” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. ———. “Huey Newton,” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. ———. “Jesus Saves, I Spend,” on Marry Me, Perf. St. Vincent, Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. BBQLP 254, 2007, compact disc. ———. “Just the Same But Brand New,” on Actor, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 2919, 2009, compact disc. ———. “Landmines,” on Marry Me, Perf. St. Vincent, Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. BBQLP 254, 2007, compact disc. ———. “Laughing with a Mouth of Blood,” on Actor, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 2919, 2009, compact disc. ———. “Los Ageless,” on Masseduction, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR00223, 2017, compact disc. ———. “Los Ageless,” YouTube Video, 3:46, 3 October 2017. https://youtu.be/ h9TlaYxoOO8, Accessed 17 September 2021. ———. “Marrow,” YouTube Video, 3:15, September 21, 2009. https://youtu. be/-9prpAv6kvo, Accessed 21 September 2021. ———. “Marry Me,” on Marry Me, Perf. St. Vincent, Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. BBQLP 254, 2007, compact disc. ———. “My Baby Wants a Baby,” on Daddy’s Home. Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR01959, 2021, compact disc.

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque” 189 ———. “Now, Now,” on Marry Me, Perf. St. Vincent, Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. BBQLP 254, 2007, compact disc. ———. “Pay Your Way in Pain,” on Daddy’s Home. Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR01959, 2021, compact disc. ———. “Pills.” YouTube Video, 4:51, 29 November 2017, https://youtu.be/ 7sfrCVYZV7k. Accessed 11 September 2021. ———. “Pills,” on Masseduction, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR00223, 2017, compact disc. ———. “Prince Johnny,” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. ———. “Psychopath,” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. ———. “Rattlesnake,” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. ———. “Regret,” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. ———. “Save Me from What I Want,” on Actor, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 2919, 2009, compact disc. ———. “Severed Crossed Fingers,” on St. Vincent, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings & Republic Records B0019906-02, 2013, compact disc. ———. “Sugarboy,” on Masseduction, Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR00223, 2017, compact disc. ———. “Surgeon,” on Strange Mercy, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 3123, 2011, compact disc. ———. “The Laughing Man,” on Daddy’s Home. Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR01959, 2021, compact disc. ———. “The Melting of the Sun,” on Daddy’s Home. Perf. St. Vincent, Loma Vista Recordings LVR01959, 2021, compact disc. ———. “The Sequel,” on Actor, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 2919, 2009, compact disc. ———. “The Strangers,” on Actor, Perf. St. Vincent, 4AD CAD 2919, 2009, compact disc. ———. “What Me Worry,” on Marry Me, Perf. St. Vincent, Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. BBQLP 254, 2007, compact disc. ———. “Your Lips Are Red,” on Marry Me, Perf. St. Vincent, Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. BBQLP 254, 2007, compact disc.

9

“I Can’t Believe We Made It” Romanticism and Afropresentism in Works of African American Women Hip Hop and R‘n’B Artists Kirsten Zemke

Scholars assert that Romanticism is an historic, aesthetic, and ideological movement that remains “a living popular creed,”1 with Romantics being “the creators of habits of thought we still use.”2 Through its meanings for poets, writers, and artists, Romanticism has arguably remained continually resonant3 —but for whom? Who is the “we” in “habits of thought we still use”? Romanticism can be seen as a core tenet of rock music—its notions of the tortured artist, its poetic aspirations, and its “energy, honesty, and integrity.”4 Löwy and Sayre5 highlight Romanticism’s necessity as a foil for capitalism, which opens a position for art and philosophy to respond to the alienation of high capitalism, suggesting that Romanticism may remain a feature of any capitalist formations. It is this very tension that gives rock music its core predicament of “art versus commerce.” Another problematic of Romanticism for rock (and therefore North American pop music in general) is Romanticism’s pernicious racism,6 which I will show instigated the very origins of rock and roll. Romantic ideologies of racial categories and hierarchies fed into the mythologies of white artists drawing from supposedly vulgar, primitive Black music for sexuality, physicality, and authenticity.7 While Romanticism is certainly worth continued study and analysis in relation to popular music, especially due to its ubiquitous persistence, how is Romanticism understood in relation to African Americans and their music? How can academic publications around rock/pop music not reproduce white-only academic spaces when dealing with racially exclusionary discourses? As the intention of this book was to ensure that women rockers had representation in the discourse around Romanticism and rock music, this chapter was conceived with the objective to make sure that African American women’s performance and voices were not overlooked in this “elite” space. Three music videos from African American women hip hop/r‘n’b artists appearing to have Romantic components are the focus of this chapter. Rapper/producer Missy Elliott’s 2005 video for “Lose Control” has a segment with “old timey” couples dancing in oldfashioned dress, in a barn or wooden building, with flters and lighting to make the setting look vintage. This section strongly contrasts with DOI: 10.4324/9781003204855-10

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the postmodern, even surrealist visuals, fashion, and dance of the rest of the video. The video for Erykah Badu’s 1997 debut single “On & On” is set in rural Georgia in the early 1900s, alluding to Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple8 (and the 1985 Oscar-nominated flm of the same name directed by Steven Spielberg). The African American woman-centric story and author affrm feminine relationships (mother, sister, lover) and celebrate the empowerment and metamorphosis of the main character Celie.9 In the music video, Badu plays both Celie and Shug Avery, the confdent, sexual blues woman. Beyoncé’s Lemonade series of videos feature a number of allusions to Southern history and historic dress, restoring a Black-centric vision of the U. S. South, which is itself a Romantic construction (as place and culture).10 There are a number of frames and tableau in the Louisiana set of Lemonade which directly reference the African American woman-directed 1991 flm Daughters of the Dust set in early nineteenth-century coastal South Carolina. These three videos present the Romantic features of pastoralism,11 nostalgia,12 history,13 literary intertextuality,14 and pantheism.15 While these videos offer an opportunity for the exploration of Romanticism expressed in African American women’s music videos, they also exhibit the temporal and African diaspora elements of Afropresentism—a more femme, more global, and less serious Black aesthetic/movement than Afrofuturism. Elliott’s old-fashioned dancers at one point levitate, recalling the Afro-Caribbean West African-derived religion and practice of voodoo. Erykah Badu’s head wrap and overall aesthetic in her debut album (of which “On & On” was the frst single) codifed the then-new genre of neo-soul and confrmed her Afrocentric perspective. The Color Purple itself has a signifcantly African plot component, highlighting the diasporic linkage between Afro-communities. Lemonade has many African cultural and fashion nods, but the Daughters of the Dust homage and inclusion links to a world with immersive and refexive African infuences. These temporal and spatial nodes show that Afro-presentism, in its embryonic negotiations, provides a more fruitful and revealing extrication of the Blackness and connections of these videos. Grounded in the visual arts and technology, Afropresentism centers on history, transnationalism, and the unity and dialogue of the African diaspora. Afropresentism engages with the ancient and contemporary, possibly positioning itself as inside the central space of the present which the Afrofuturist often sidesteps; or, Afropresentism presents a “futurist reality lived now.”16 The works of visual artists Stan Squirewell, Elizabeth Colomba, Charles White, and Kehinde Wiley offer some of the vibrant cultural and political codes of Afropresentism which are echoed in the 2018 music videos for Janet Jackson’s “Made for Now,” Janelle Monáe’s “Django Jane,” and Beyoncé’s “Apesh*t,” One of the fundamental tenets of Afropresentism is inserting Black art, Black identities, and Black bodies into high-art Western spaces as “a way for Black historical fgures

192 Kirsten Zemke to regain their prestige in history.”17 Afropresentism was injected into mainstream discourse when Beyoncé and Jay Z (the Carters) flmed the video for “Apesh*t” in the Louvre Gallery in Paris, inserting themselves, their marriage, their fashion, their politics, Black dancers, and hip hop tropes (trap beats, bragging, word play, swag) into one of the most iconic of elite Western spaces. This mandate of Afropresentism thus fulflls the mission of the chapter itself, ensuring that African American femme/ women’s music and stories maintain a presence in this potentially white discursive space. I am not suggesting that there not be a welcome place for explorations of Western, Eurocentric Romanticism’s sustained reach and relevance in the world of popular music. However, such discourse must not shy away from Romanticism’s fundamental role in the shaping and perpetuation of contemporary racism.18 Rather, Romanticism’s racism should be highlighted, recapped, and unpacked. Explorations around Romanticism should mitigate the effects of its racism by attempting to encourage dialogue and development around African-American and non-white practices and aesthetics. This chapter offers the emergent negotiations of Afropresentism as a more germane and inclusive method of exploring the nostalgia and intertextuality of some prominent woman-created African American hip hop/r’n’b music videos.

Romanticism, Rock, and Race Most commonly understood, Romanticism emerged from the poets, writers, and even scientists and economists of a particular era (1825– 1900) and space/place (Western European elite thought). However, Romanticism is also a “collective mental structure (Weltanschauung, or worldview)”19 which is transferrable to any time and place if the political or ideological situation arises which generate its response as opposition and mitigation. 20 There is evidence that Romanticism is observable in various decades and incarnations of rock music; for example, Coeckelbergh 21 sees the craving for freedom, self-expression, and spirituality of the nineteen sixties and seventies counterculture as a twenty-frstcentury form of subjectivity shaped by Romanticism. Rovira argues that rock as a whole project is a twentieth-century expression of Romanticism, which can be seen in rock’s emotion and introspection, 22 the celebration of individual artistic genius, 23 its rebellion and antiestablishment themes, 24 the fgures of the cowboy and the dandy, 25 and the creative genius in a stereotype of struggle and isolation. 26 However, Romanticism carries with it a toxic foundation of racism, which is therefore embedded in rock mythologies and ideology. Romanticism as a response to the alienation of industrialism and capitalism saw an idealization of the past grounded on racist notions of simplistic primitive societies who were in touch with nature and the natural world. 27

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The Romantic era was also a time of the development and expansion of anthropology, global exploration, colonization, travel, orientalism, and even ethnomusicology, 28 all of which axis on exoticism and a fascination with the “other.” The literary Romantic texts that became equated with white Englishness and Christianity, with Shakespeare and Milton, were embraced and taught as part of the project of cultural, political, and moral imperialism: “the colonised taught us to think the thoughts of the poets and philosophers of the Mother country.”29 Fulford and Kitson cite the works of Said, Appiah, Gates, Babha, and Fanon as postRomantic critical responses to this sort of philosophical colonization. Romantic (Western) anthropologists had a longing for the world of man to mirror the order they saw in the “natural world.”30 They sought to replicate and preserve this notion in the progression of societies and classifcations of peoples.31 This concept of stages and hierarchies in human societies then entailed seeing “the African” as a “distinct, if problematic, subject of human classifcation” became elucidated as “science.”32 Romantic ideals of democracy had to be tempered with excuses for the enslavement of people.33 The darkest of such ideas emerged from the mind of Gobineau, who conceived that the Black race was the lowest of men with increased animality and limited intellect. He saw the Aryans, the white race, as having an innate superiority and the highest of intellects.34 Gobineau was heralded by the Romantic composer Richard Wagner, and segments of Hitler’s Mein Kampf utilize Gobineau’s exact words.35 Gobineau foretold the emergence of rock, claiming that the “passion of artistic temperament is a negroid characteristic” and that the “creation of great art” needed both the intellectual refection of the white race and the emotion at the core of the negro capacity, declaring that great art could only come about as the result of the blending of “the White and the Black.”36 How horrifying then is it that rock music was built on these racist mythologies which stem from Romanticism, and where does this leave Romanticism for contemporary African American artists and their artistic references to Romanticism? Pattison shows how rock began with a white Romantic myth imposed on Black Southern music, citing “great” rock groups who reproduce this cornerstone of their music relying on Black origins and inspirations for its authenticity. Rock saw itself as a “musical return to the primitive”37 seeking out Black rhythm and blues for its supposed “animalism and vulgarity” which was essentially Rousseau’s “noble savage” re-versioned for the mid-twentieth-century United States.38 Frith explains how this rock mythology defes actual musical analysis and actuality. He points out that African music is not more physical or sexual but was read this way due to racist attitudes, and such notions can still be found in rock and jazz histories.39 Black music is not “more intuitive” nor “charged with emotions,” neither does rhythm equate with sex or simplicity, except in biased European interpretations.

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Rock’s “sexuality” supposedly relied on its “Blackness” which makes sense only under the fear and awe of the Romantic Black primitive.40 Frith points out that rock sees itself within the Romantic opposition of nature and culture fetishizing an African culture abstracted as signifying the body, the primitive, as uncorrupted by culture, and close to “human essence.” This is in contrast to the bourgeois “white”—sophisticated and over-civilized, who, having lost their innocence, are now expressing this loss as melancholy.41 The historicism and pastoralism of the frst three hip hop/r’n’b music videos discussed here, then, cannot hearken back to an idyllic primitive past as these notions only existed in racist imaginations and presumptions. Instead, the works of these women weave Afro-diasporic connections with references to lived pasts, and literary and inter-textual associations with Black art, Black histories, and West African spirituality. The Afrofuturists understood this rejection of Western thought: for Afrofuturism, Western progress and white supremacy are inseparable and “therefore could not possibly capture any real truth.”42

Missy Elliott “Lose Control” “It’s about music, how music makes you feel and makes you lose control.”43 The 2005 rap song “Lose Yourself” by Missy Elliott (also featuring Fatman Scoop and Ciara) went up to a number three position on the U. S. music charts and won a Grammy Award for best music video. The video is highly complex and visually spectacular, invoking surrealism (which Löwy and Sayre argue is also Romantic due to its rebellious and revolutionary transformations; it was an attack on rationalism and progress, featuring an attraction to myth), as well as modernism with its agile group dance features. Yet, its central section jarringly transitions to a nostalgic barn dance that features vintage-dressed dancers doing spectacular African American 1930s’ and 1940s’ dance moves, although modernized. While initially hearkening to rural history, the dancers start levitating, presenting an exhilarated magic sparked by the dance and sexual energy. This echoes the trope of the “magical negro” found in mainstream American flms which Hughey argues constitutes a “cinethetic racism”44 that may outwardly appear as racial cooperation and egalitarianism but is actually an underlying expression of white normativity, arguably also hearkening to Romantic thinker Rosseau’s “noble savage.” These foating dancers instead, from an Afrocentric perspective, utilize the magic of losing control in celebration to evoke the Afro-Caribbean practice of voodoo. The oft-misunderstood and exoticized trope of “voodoo” acts as a “generic signpost of Afro-creole spiritual crossroads.”45 When appropriated by non-Africans, signifcations of voodoo magic call forth imagery of Africa as the Dark Continent, reiterating Romantic constructions of

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Black superstition and eroticized Black primitivism.46 Black artists such as Jimi Hendrix and D’Angelo played with and incorporated voodoo imagery to signify possession and sensual religious ecstasy47 which also applies to the “Lose Control” video as the dancers foat and fy. Voodoo elicits fear and fascination for outsiders alluding to bizarre rites and Black magic.48 Voodoo’s African and Caribbean origins and associations also call for alliance with the Black diaspora and transnational populations of the American South.49 Columbus’s mistaken “discovery” of the Indies saw the “creole Caribbean” as “the frst protagonist of the New World cauldron.”50 Guterl51 asserts that the American “South” is a liminal space “halfway between the palms of the tropic and the millworks of the north” with the Black communities between them sharing linguistic, religious, and cultural practices. The North American Gulf coast (which includes “the South” for North Americans) was a site for intercontinental commerce, immigration, slavery, and transport, and had politics and history gone a different direction, the “South” could have ended up being a part of the Caribbean instead of the United States. Guterl calls the Caribbean “the great switching point for commercial traffc, human bondage, and racial fantasy in the nineteenth century.”52 Besides its Afro-diasporic implications and deconstruction of “the South,” voodoo has both erotic and spiritual functions, 53 with “New World” Black music enabling Black communal solidarity and voodoo provoking magical transfgurations explaining how the mixed sensual and spiritual pleasures of Black music can co-exist.54 Voodoo magic iconography and imagery is in defance of Romantic racist stereotypes. In contrast, but still arguably Romantic, the next song/video explored weaves femme, West African magic with pastoral literary themes.

Erykah Badu “On and On” Erykah Badu, born in 1971 in Dallas, Texas, has been unabashedly assertive about her Blackness, incorporating African elements into her dress, politics, music, and imagery.55 She also utilizes African American feminist revolutionary and aesthetics from the 1970s and 80s (Angela Davis, Pam Grier Black, Audre Lorde).56 Included in that trajectory is setting her debut music video in the iconography of Alice Walker’s Jim Crow era Southern novel The Color Purple. While the lyrics summon Black Nationalist ideals from the Five Percent Nation (a U. S. Black Nationalist movement/culture), the music video places her in rural Georgia in the early 1900s.57 “On and On” was her frst commercially released song, and since Badu co-directed the video herself, its allusions and alliances cannot be overlooked. Despite its pastoral setting, the song debuted at number two on the Billboard music charts and won a 1998 Grammy for Best R&B Female Vocal Performance. The track appeared on her album

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Baduizm which some argued instigated a new genre, neo-soul, or at least established it as a viable commercial entity.58 Alice Walker’s 1982 book, despite some detractors, 59 won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was made into a 1985 flm directed by Steven Spielberg starring Whoopie Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. The flm was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture (which it did not win). The book and the flm’s Black woman-centered story was no doubt an important referent for Badu to embrace. Hite60 interprets the story as having elements of a pastoral Shakespearian tragicomedy with an innocent pastoral protagonist who has a capacity for wonder, and therefore a capacity for experience. Hite describes other plot conventions and tropes within the Color Purple which support this notion and also highlights the novel’s “nurturing pantheism” which affrms a “a pre-existing Edenic norm that must be restored,”61 both core qualities of Romantic thought. In the African segment of the novel, Hite sees parallels to the “Bohemia of the Winter’s Tale” with a simple agrarian economy. Löwy and Sayre explore how the Romantic “appreciation of primitive communal societies” is not only an idealized trope but offers the “sublayer material for advanced communist societies” as outlined by Marx.62 Other explorations of the novel highlight the “bonds of sisterhood”63 and offer shared knowledge of the afro-diasporic network with the book having narrative points set in England, Africa, and the U. S. Marvin explores how the character of Shug Avery hearkens to West African religion by having characteristics of a child of Legba,64 a spirit associated with musicians because they open the door to the spiritual world due to the spiritual power of music: Shug Avery expresses African religious concepts in an African American idiom that is a synthesis of diverse infuences such as the blues, the sermon, and the folk tale, the spiritual—keeping alive the vital connections between the past, the present and the future.65 Marvin posits that white folks actually knew of this power, which is why African music and its American derivatives were considered the work of the devil. While it is Shug who incorporates African, pantheist, and femme gods and magic, it is the timid Celie who at the end of the story becomes possessed by supernatural (or natural?) forces, giving her the power to fnally stand up to her tormentor/husband.66 Badu plays both Celie and Shug in her music video, no doubt absorbing the magic, transmutations, diaspora, and multiple temporalities called forth by both the book and the flm drawing from Black women-centered creations to announce her alliances and politics. In an important coda to the Color Purple used by Badu for such a signifcant project in her career, Alice Walker was one of the initial signifcant voices around the concept of “womanist” as a replacement for

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“Black feminist,” a core part of the discourse around intersectionality and the failings of white feminism.67

Beyoncé Lemonade Lemonade was a visual “concept album” released as a series of songs in a sixty-fve minute “flm” in 2016. Co-directed by Beyoncé and Kahlil Joseph (and six other directors for various segments and interludes) numerous fragments and visuals play the notion of a different “South,” inserting Black women and Black femme affrmations into its present against the grain of its past. Filmed in Louisiana, Beyoncé and a number of actresses, models, mothers, sisters, daughters, and dancers re-place themselves in and around cabins, homes, and plantations where enslaved ancestors lived. The project utilized sugar plantations along the Mississippi River including Destrehan Plantation, Madewood Plantation, and Evergreen Plantation. Simmons sees this purposeful decision as a statement of Black women’s freedom set upon previous spaces of pain and captivity, depicting a fem-centric community as a healing of the land and people. Various costumes signify past and present, urban and pastoral, but one of the most signifcant allusions is to the “low-country gothic aesthetic”68 of the 1991 flm Daughters of the Dust, directed by Julie Dash—the frst African American woman to direct a wide theatrical release.69 The flm centers on a patois-speaking family from the creole Gullah-Geechees culture of South Carolina set in 1902 on the island of Dawtuh.70 Taking place all in one day, part of the narrative sees the family sitting for photographs and having a picnic, which Felsenthal sees as Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte restated in a “mosquito-ridden, sunbaked low country.”71 The production designer is himself the painter Kerry James Marshall,72 who uses his art to challenge the marginalization of African Americans by using protagonists “who are always, in his words, ‘unequivocally, emphatically Black.’”73 Wallace in The Guardian calls the flm “a visual theory of diasporic beauty” and sees it as “a utopian escape from the thuggish, broken, scarred and suffering images we typically see of Blackness.”74 The “white dresses, indigo dyeing, and azure skies” create an “extraordinary aesthetic”75 which saw the cinematographer Arthur Jafa win the top cinematography prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991. Phillips points out thematic parallels between the flm and the visual album, citing that they both share “rare glimpses of Black womanhood and Black women’s relationships with one another when men or white people aren’t around,”76 that they both celebrate the diversity of Black women (“the wide array of Black hairstyles and skin tones”), and that both projects include indigenous and diasporic cultural and religious traditions. In an interview, director Julie Dash comments on Lemonade, declaring that it was “sumptuous” and saw it adding to a culture of art that

198 Kirsten Zemke “reimagines and redefnes the diaspora.”77 Lemonade incorporates and displays multiple layers of history, Black history—the Gullah people of 1902, the 1991 woman-axis flm, the slave souls of the flm locations, the current women in the video, and the idealized future it celebrates. These temporal nodes are not the utopian pasts or futures of Romanticism, but possibly fnd a better description in the recently elucidated concept of Afropresentism.

Afropresentism What’re we supposed to remember, Nana? How, at one time, were we able to protect those we loved? How, in Africa world, we were kings and queens and built great big cities? NANA PEAZANT: Eli, I’m trying to teach you how to touch your own spirit. I’m fghting for my life, Eli, and I’m fghting for yours. Look in my face! I’m trying to give you something to take north with you, along with all your great big dreams. (Daughters of the Dust 1991) ELI PEAZANT:

Afropresentism is an innovative discourse currently being explored by a handful of artists, bloggers, and academics. Coined by Neema Githere, she asserts that Afropresentism is about “affrming cross-culturalism and unity between Afro-descendants.”78 According to the exploration of an installation by an artist collective in London, Afropresentism celebrates Black roots, Black resiliency, Black creativity, and Black millennial culture with an emphasis on diasporic representation, elevating hybrid identities, people and cultures “forged over time.”79 Afropresentism is about diaspora, Blackness, historical interplay, Instagram, collage, photography, and fashion, and it has a precarious relationship with Afrofuturism. Afropresentist discourse has been mostly situated around visual art (especially photographic and mixed media), encouraging consultation, gathering, exchange, and interdisciplinarity. There is an emphasis on technology and social media, and it embraces queerness.80 Another of its core tenets is confronting “Western aristocratic spaces,” occupying them with Black aesthetics.81 Part of its mandate is “reclaiming space and time” with a politics of inserting “Blackness” into locations considered “classically Western or elite.”82 Three painters offered here, not necessarily themselves identifying as representatives of Afropresentism or its concepts, offer examples of the color and style of Afropresentism and are possibly an infuence, or part of a zeitgeist, which we can see in the three further African American women’s music videos discussed below. The visual artists introduce the color, patterns, admixture, transnationalism, Africanism, and multidimensional temporality seen in Janet Jackson’s 2018 “Made for Now,” Janelle Monáe’s 2018 “Django Jane,” and Beyoncé’s “Apesh*t.”

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For instance, Elizabeth Colomba, “a representational artist,”83 paints classical-looking portraits of historical Black women (some fctional, some not) in garb of wealth and prestige. Of Martinique descent, Colomba was raised in France and purposely uses her style and subjects to center Black women when they have historically been invisible in Western art.”84 Called “The Black Vermeer,”85 her pieces of “visual reappropriation” “reference Old Masters’ techniques” re-versioning the signifer of skin color, using Blackness as representation and iconography86: I needed to represent Black people in that classical style, as if they were part of that history, with the same social background and social equality. (Colomba interviewed in Kazanjian) . . . generating an environment for my subjects to inhabit a space that honors their presence and place in and through culture and time allows me to redefne not only how Black people have been conditioned to exist, but also how Black people have been conditioned to refect upon themselves.87 Stan Squirewell, a New York painter, performance artist, and photographer, uses collage to “play with Black identity by combining disparate, historically specifc costumes with found imagery.”88 For instance, his “King Kane” (2017) utilizes a profle bust of rapper Big Daddy Kane draped in medieval armor and gold fligree.89 Painter Kehinde Wiley, also American, racially deconstructs the Western canon of portraiture by putting Black men (and women) in front of elaborate, colorful wallpapers. Carrington calls his work “worldmaking efforts of Black diasporic cosmopolitanism” and asserts that his work presents “a powerful response to the norms of racial, gendered, and class representation that we have inherited from modernity” by bringing young Black men into the galleries and museums where they are ordinarily “woefully underrepresented.”90 Wiley famously was chosen to paint the offcial presidential portrait of Obama in 2018. From a less recent time frame, Charles White from Chicago (b. 1918) “magnifed the power of the Black fgure”91 in his depictions of African American people and history. His works centered on people, Black fgures, looking in particular at their lives, their struggles, their labor, and their dignity. Two recent visual arts presentations collected artists around similar themes and identities, possibly expanding and further codifying Neema Githere’s notions of Afropresentism. The 2018 photo exhibition “Refraction: New Photography of Africa and Its Diaspora” curated by Niama Safa Sandy and Cassandra Johnson at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York City, featured photographic artists of African descent from all over the world who “portray black bodies in acts of cultural meditation” playing with African rites of masking, costuming, quilting, and body ornamentation.92 The works offer a visual representation of African

200 Kirsten Zemke diasporic movement and changes through dress and body adornment where “masking, costuming, and spirit invocation are reinterpreted by image makers of African descent born.”93 Similar merging of Africanness past and present were seen in the hairstyles (knots, cornrows, braids, puffs) and looks (patterns, markings, cloth, crowns, jewelry) in Beyonce’s Lemonade. A second 2018 exhibition entitled “Harlem Perspectives” in New York featured local talent that acknowledged diasporic heritages.94 The collection included Jamaican-born Renee Cox as well as Elizabeth Colomba and Stan Squirewell with the intent of challenging audiences to “confront their own stance and subjectivity in relation to global issues and identities.”95 So, how does Afropresentism align or contrast with Afrofuturism? Afropresentism could be said to sit inside the outer time reaches of Afrofuturism’s distant past and imagined futures. The three videos discussed, as well as the visual artists included, center on twentieth-century landscapes and stories in contrast to the Ancient Egyptian and outer space iconographies employed by Afrofuturists. Some offer that Afropresentism depicts an Afrofuturist lived reality.96 Hilair argues that Afrofuturism idealized distant utopian futures, whereas Afropresentism is “without a chronological limit.”97 Referring to the “Refraction” exhibit Rodney asserts that the works are both documentary as well as “afro-futurist forecast.”98 The artists invoke the past but use their heterogeneous unifying practice to project themselves onto an idealized future within the present. The futility and pessimism of Derrick Bell’s 1992 sci-f short story “The Space Traders” set the tone for one possible outcome of Afrofuturist analysis.99 His ending, where Black folks were sold back into slavery to save the earth, is still as yet a possible outcome which echoes the racebased exclusion and exotifcation of Romantic thinkers—the attainment of the idyllic Eden, the return to simplicity, the success of the European project of expansion and domination. Instead, this treatise of Afro-futurism evokes exodus and escape as a “mode of meaning making and historical production.”100 Wallace argues in The Guardian that the flm Daughters of the Dust refects the exodus and escape of Afrofuturism, as the plot centers on the Peazant family deciding which is the safest place: remaining in the home slavery gave them, or risk ending up somewhere worse.101 This has apparent parallels to Bell’s sci-f. Wallace elucidates the connection between Beyoncé and Daughters as going beyond the visuals and the obvious homage, highlighting that both call upon the Afro-diasporic notion of the spirit (souls, ancestors, death, gods, connection, past, future) as the “place” of freedom and solace: For African Americans, present circumstances have led to a rise in utopian thinking; a collective search for a place in which we will not

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be murdered, hounded, over-policed and constantly re-traumatized with the legacy of slavery, lynchings and virulent white supremacy. After all these many years we are still, in effect, searching for a place to be free. Predictably we seek this place in the past as well as the future, for what they both have in common is that they are away from here. The reason Afrofuturism looks so very much like the Afro-past depicted in Lemonade and its progenitor Daughters of the Dust is because both the past and the future involve the spirit beyond the material world.102 Rollefson argues that Afrofuturism, as found in the work of music artists Sun Ra, Kool Keith, and George Clinton, is able to manifest an anti-anti-essentialist third way which relies on a Blackness forged in the history of Black oppression but negates Romantic racial classifcations.103 Afrofuturist Blackness is binary in opposition to white racist universalism, a universalism which only weakly cloaked the Romantic racist project.104 Afropresentism goes even further in acknowledging the complexity and cohesiveness of Blackness by expanding the emphasis globally, for all Afro-diasporic people, directly referencing the historic, cultural, technological, and contemporary interplay but set in the present. Afropresentism is more queer, refecting intersectional realities and activisms. Three further music videos from African American women offer glimpses of what could be Afropresentism in popular music. In Janet Jackson’s 2018 “Made for Now,” the very title suggests Afropresentism, and the fashion aesthetics are multi-historical and Afro-diasporic, looking similar to the photography of Ethel Tawe.105 The dancers—their bodies and moves—augment this transnational affrmation, coming from Ghana, Nigeria, Grenada, Trinidad, and the United States.106 The track’s producer Harmony Samuels is of Nigerian background but was born in London; he says he is culturally African and likes to celebrate Afrocentrism in his productions.107 Having Daddy Yankee rap in Spanish may merely be capitalizing on a current trend in charting pop music (Justin Bieber, Luis Fonsi, and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito,” as well as Cardi B, Bad Bunny, and J Balvin’s “I like it Like That”) but it also results in acknowledging and representing Afro-Latinos. Janelle Monáe has produced numerous projects and videos which embrace Afrofuturism: “I have always loved science-fction and Afrofuturism. Octavia Butler is a hero of mine.”108 However her “Django Jane” video incorporates an eclectic visual mix of eras, fashions, stereotypes, and Black beauty invoking instead Afropresentism. While her 2010 “The ArchAndroid” explored cyborgs and sci-f, the technology referents in “Django Jane” stem from the politics and phrases of Black Twitter.109 She mentions being “highly melanated,” mansplaining, having “Black girl magic,” the future is fem, speaking truth to power, and being a G.O.A.T.

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Each of these transitory cultural referents stir up immediate recognition of disseminated negotiations manifested in cyberspace. Her palm-dotted femme tableau references Africa, royalty, and hip hop, and they reiterate the boundary-breaking portraiture of the artists discussed previously. To return once again to Beyoncé, her 2018 video “Apesh*t” fully embodies the Afropresentist principle of inserting Black folks into white spaces, claiming their narratives and representation. In this video Beyoncé and her husband, rapper Jay Z, foreground themselves—in contrast, in celebration, and in reclamation. She alternatively stands and dances in front of iconic historical works such as Aphrodite (Venus de Milo) (c. 100 BC), The Mona Lisa (c. 1503), The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819)— painted by a pioneer of the Romantic art movement— The Coronation of Napoleon (1806–1807), and The Winged Victory of Samothrace (C. 190 BC).110 She also includes works which feature Black subjects: Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Negress (1800) and The Great Sphinx of Tanis (ca. 2600 B.C.), not only affrming her right to be present in the gallery with other Black subjects but also her right to produce Black art from a Black lens.111 The intention was not lost on fans and commentators: Without a doubt, Beyoncé and Jay-Z are inserting themselves into the Western art canon and advocating for the importance and inclusion of persons of color in the hallowed halls of Western civilization.112 The visual feast that is this video is a very Black defance and triumph in a traditionally white space.113 Throughout the “Apeshit” video, Beyoncé and Jay-Z repeatedly upstage some of Western classical art’s most famous images in one of its central sacred spaces.114 In front of David’s The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine, a court scene of relentless white extravagance, Beyoncé and eight Black dancers hold hands and begin to dance. It takes just a few synchronized sashays to upstage David’s massive painting, replacing an ornate symbol of white authority with a celebration of Black bodies in motion.115 This type of online discourse is now a primary way of popular music transmission, response, and circulation. This more open, accessible discourse is one of the core ways that Afropresentism is being shaped as an artistic political aesthetic, with the goal of dismantling racist foundations and philosophies of the past and present.

Conclusion It is now up to Neema Githere and other Afro-diasporic artists, photographers, writers and academics to confrm whether these artists and

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music videos qualify as part of the canon of Afropresentism, to further codify and negotiate the concept so that scholars, artists, and musicians can have contemporary, non-racist frameworks with which to understand and create popular music and its visuals. While Romanticism had a hand in constructing Western (and colonially global) perspectives on art and artists, and seems almost intractable, possibly due to its beneft in mitigating the suffering under capitalism, its colonial and racist accoutrement leaves it objectionable and untenable for contemporary generations. Afropresentism’s exhumation of “memory and ancestry”116 as well as its Afrodiasporic emphasis was a primary feature of the frst three videos explored by Badu, Elliott, and Beyoncé. Afro-diaspora themes are present in the voodoo of “Lose Yourself,” as one of the main plot points of The Color Purple as Celie’s sister was in Africa, and the Peazant family of Daughters of the Dust retained some West African customs and Caribbean semiotic systems.117 So while the billowing white dresses and nostalgia of the videos on the surface saw them ripe for Romantic readings in contemporary culture, their Afrocentrism was instead better read as being part of a movement repudiating Western culture’s racism and asserting Black artistry and allegiances. The second group of three African American music videos offered here tap into a possible zeitgeist of Afropresentism which is still being named and negotiated. This companion to Afrofuturism gives meaning to the multilayered mix of time and place of these colorful music videos and highlights how Beyoncé and Jay Z’s insertion of Black celebration into a normally exclusive white hegemony is being augmented by visual artists, photographers, and social media infuencers. This chapter ends with the words of painter Elizabeth Columba, who outlines how her work uses reconsiderations of history and Western ideologies to dismantle the racism of the present and to create new identities, especially in the area of mythology and white elite spaces: To become the leader of your own destiny, you have to be able to see yourself represented visually. It’s an acknowledgment of your importance and your active participation in building a History, a country, a past. As you peruse through a national museum, very rarely would one stumble on Black representation and if you do it will be secondary to the narrative of the image. The inequity is blatant and refective of our status in Western visual culture at the time. That’s when I realized the erasure of the Other in art (and I am part of the “Other”), and that invisibility inspired me to re-confgure Western myths, religious iconography and folklore by pigmenting them, re-writing them with Black ink. I do this to re-open the areas in our psyche that have been conditioned to label and suppress the Other, and be able to construct new identities.118

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Notes 1 Robert Pattison, The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 2 Michael O’Brien, “The Lineaments of Antebellum Southern Romanticism.” Journal of American Studies 20, no. 2 (1986): 165–188. 3 Ibid.; Mark Coeckelbergh, New Romantic Cyborgs: Romanticism, Information Technology, and the End of the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). 4 Pattison; Theodore A. Gracyk, “Romanticizing Rock Music.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 27, no. 2 (1993): 43–58. 5 Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity (New York: Duke University Press, 2001). 6 Marlon B. Ross, “The Race of/in Romanticism: Notes toward a Critical Race Theory.” In Paul Youngquist, ed. Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic (London: Routledge, 2016): 41–74; Timothy Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, eds. Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 7 Pattison; Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 8 Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Pocket, 1985). 9 Thomas F. Marvin, “‘Preachin’the Blues’: Bessie Smith’s Secular Religion and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” African American Review 28, no. 3 (1994): 411–421. 10 James M. McPherson, “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question.” Civil War History 29, no. 3 (1983): 230–244; Michael O’Brien, “The Lineaments of Antebellum Southern Romanticism.” Journal of American Studies 20, no. 2 (1986): 165–188; John Radford, “Identity and Tradition in the Post-Civil War South.” Journal of Historical Geography 18, no. 1 (1992): 91. 11 Sherry Truffn, “‘Crying Like a Woman ‘Cause I’m Mad Like a Man’: Chrissie Hynde, Gender, and Romantic Irony,” in James Rovira ed., Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 61–82. 12 Mark Coeckelbergh, New Romantic Cyborgs: Romanticism, Information Technology, and the End of the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). 13 Löwy and Sayre. 14 Wil Greckel, “Rock and Nineteenth-century Romanticism: Social and Cultural Parallels.” Journal of Musicological Research 3, no. 1–2 (1979): 177–202. 15 Molly Hite, “Romance, Marginality, Matrilineage: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 22, no. 3 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989): 257–273; Pattison. 16 Ashley Samone, “This Photo Series Disrupts White Spaces with Black Renaissance, Pan-/Africanism & afro-Futurism” Afropunk (2018), http://afropunk.com/2018/07/this-photo-series-disrupts-white-spaceswith-black-renaissance-pan-africanism-afro-futurism/. Accessed 8 January 2022. 17 Kalia Brooks, “The Black Vermeer,” Ubikwist Magazine 3 (2016), http:// www.ubikwistmag.com/issue3/. Accessed 8 January 2020. 18 Timothy Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, eds. Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Alan Richardson, “Darkness Visible: Race and Representation in

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45 Keith Cartwright, “Notes toward a Voodoo Hermeneutics: Soul Rhythms, Marvellous Transitions, and Passages to the Creole Saints in Praisesong for the Widow.” Southern Quarterly 41, no. 4 (2003): 127. 46 Rollefson. 47 Loren Kajikawa, “D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology: African Cultural Memory and the Ritual of Popular Music Consumption.” Black Music Research Journal 32, no. 1 (2012): 137–159. 48 Kajikawa; Aaron Lefkovitz, Jimi Hendrix and the Cultural Politics of Popular Music (Cham: Palgrave Pivot, 2018), 1–24. 49 Lefkovitz. 50 Cartwright, 127. 51 Matthew Pratt Guterl, “‘I Went to the West Indies’: Race, Place, and the Antebellum South.” American Literary History 18, no. 3 (2006): 446–467. 52 Guterl. 53 Cartwright. 54 Ibid. 55 Steven Horowitz, “Erykah Badu Recalls Recording ‘Baduizm,’” 2011, https://hiphopdx.com/news/id.16781/title.erykah-badu-recalls-recordingbaduizm. Accessed 8 January 2022. 56 L. Johnson, Ph.D. diss., “The Iconography of the Black Female Revolutionary and New Narratives of Justice,” The Ohio State University (2008). 57 Candice Marie Jenkins, “Queering Black Patriarchy: The Salvifc Wish and Masculine Possibility in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 4 (2002): 969–1000. 58 Vanessa Okoth-Obbo, “Where Neo-Soul Began: 20 Years of Erykah Badu’s Baduizm,” Pitchfork (2017) https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1440-whereneo-soul-began-20-years-of-erykah-badus-baduizm/. Accessed 8 January 2022. 59 Jenkins. 60 Hite. 61 Ibid. 62 Löwy and Sayre. 63 Lindsey Tucker, “Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: Emergent Woman, Emergent Text.” Black American Literature Forum 22, no. 1 (St. Louis University, 1988): 81–95. 64 Thomas F. Marvin, ““Preachin’ the Blues”: Bessie Smith’s Secular Religion and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” African American Review 28, no. 3 (1994): 411–442. 65 Marvin, 419. 66 Ibid. 67 Collins. 68 Julia Felsenthal, “Director Julie Dash on Daughters of the Dust, Beyoncé, and Why We Need Film Now More Than Ever,” Vogue, 2016, https://www. vogue.com/article/daughters-of-the-dust-julie-dash-interview. Accessed 8 January 2022. 69 Yohana Desta, “How Beyoncé’s Lemonade Helped Bring a Groundbreaking Film Back to Theaters,” Vanity Fair, 2016, https://www.vanityfair. com/hollywood/2016/08/daughters-of-the-dust-exclusive. Accessed 8 January 2022. 70 Stephanie Phillips, “Beyoncé vs. Daughters of the Dust: How an American Indie Classic Inspired Lemonade,” Film Forever, 2017, https://www. bf.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bf/features/beyonce-lemonade-julie-dashdaughters-dust. Accessed 8 January 2022.

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71 Felsenthal. 72 “Kerry James Marshall,” WikiArt, https://www.wikiart.org/en/kerry-james-marshal. Accessed 8 January 2022. 73 “Blackness is Non-Negotiable: The Art of Kerry James Marshall,” Vsionvry, 24 July 2021, https://vsionvry.com/editorial/blackness-is-non-negotiablethe-art-of-kerry-james-marshall. Accessed 8 January 2022. 74 Carvell Wallace, “Daughters of the Dust: Julie Dash’s Lush Drama Remains a Vital Portrait of Black Life,” The Guardian, 12 April 2017, https:// www.theguardian.com/film/2017/apr/12/daughters-of-the-dust-juliedash-beyonce. Accessed 8 January 2022. 75 Tara Brady, “Daughters of the Dust: The Film that Inspired Beyoncé’s Lemonade,” Irish Times, 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/flm/daughters-of-the-dust-the-film-that-inspired-beyonc%C3%A9-s-lemonade1.3101556. Accessed 8 January 2022. 76 Stephanie Phillips, “Beyoncé vs. Daughters of the Dust: How an American Indie Classic inspired Lemonade,” Film Forever, 2017, https://www. bf.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bf/features/beyonce-lemonade-julie-dashdaughters-dust. Accessed 8 January 2022. 77 Yohana Desta, “How Beyoncé’s Lemonade Helped Bring a Groundbreaking Film Back to Theaters,” Vanity Fair, 2016, https://www.vanityfair. com/hollywood/2016/08/daughters-of-the-dust-exclusive. Accessed 8 January 2022. 78 Ashley Samone, “This Photo Series Disrupts White Spaces with Black Renaissance, Pan-/Africanism & afro-Futurism,” Afropunk, 2018. http:// afropunk.com/2018/07/this-photo-series-disrupts-white-spaces-withblack-renaissance-pan-africanism-afro-futurism/. Accessed 8 January 2022. 79 Tobi Onabolu, “Afropresentism: Black Presence in the Diaspora,” 2018, https://bettershared.co/blogs/news/afropresentism-black-presence-in-thediaspora. Accessed 8 January 2022. 80 Molongui, “Brazil | Gabriel Hilair and Dúdús Fight Racism and Homophobia through Fashion and Art,” 5 March 2017, https://griotmag.com/en/ brazil-gabriel-hilair-and-dudus-fght-racism-and-homophobia-throughfashion-and-art/. Accessed 8 January 2022. 81 Onabalu. 82 Samone. 83 Elizabeth Colomba, “Reclaiming History: A Visual Essay.” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 38 (2016): 196–201. 84 Julia Craven, “Elizabeth Colomba Is Painting the Black Body in a Different Way,” 25 March 2019, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elizabeth-colombablack-women-art_n_5c912eaee4b05d2b09550236. Accessed 8 January 2020. 85 Janell Hobson, When God Lost Her Tongue: Historical Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2021). 86 Dodie Kazanjian, “Painter Elizabeth Colomba Is Giving Art’s Hidden Figures Their Close-Up,” 10 October 2018, https://www.vogue.com/article/ elizabeth-colomba-interview-vogue-october-2018. Accessed 8 January 2020; https://www.elizabeth-colomba.com/press 87 Elizabeth Colomba.com. Accessed 8 January 2020. 88 Seph Rodney, “Photographers Connect Africa’s Diaspora Back to the Continent,” Hyperallergic, 2018, https://hyperallergic.com/445408/ photographers-connect-africas-diaspora-back-to-the-continent/. Accessed 8 January 2022. 89 Rodney.

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90 André M. Carrington, “The Cultural Politics of Worldmaking Practice: Kehinde Wiley’s Cosmopolitanism.” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 8, no. 2 (2015): 245–257. 91 Art Institute of Chicago, 2018, https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/2663/ charles-white-a-retrospective. Accessed 8 January 2022. 92 Antoinette Isama, “These Photographers from Africa and Its Diaspora Expose the Complex Link between Black Stereotypes and Black Reality,” Okayafrica, 2018, http://www.okayafrica.com/photographers-from-africadiaspora-expose-complex-link-between-black-steretypes-and-black-reality/. Accessed 8 January 2022. 93 Rodney. 94 Nico Wheadon, “Harlem Perspectives: Decolonizing the Gaze & Refguring the Local,” Brooklyn Rail, 2018, https://brooklynrail.org/2018/05/ artseen/Harlem-Perspectives-Decolonizing-the-Gaze-Refiguring-theLocal. Accessed 8 January 2022. 95 Wheadon. 96 Samone. 97 Ibid. 98 Seph Rodney, “Building a Black Identity That’s Both Ancient and Contemporary,” Hyperallergic, 2016, https://hyperallergic.com/325349/buildinga-black-identity-thats-both-ancient-and-contemporary/. Accessed 8 January 2022. 99 Derrick Bell, The Space Traders (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 158–194, 212–213. 100 Rollefson. 101 Carvel Wallace, “Daughters of the Dust: Julie Dash’s Lush Drama Remains a Vital Portrait of Black Life,” The Guardian, 2017, https://www. theguardian.com/film/2017/apr/12/daughters-of-the-dust-julie-dashbeyonce. Accessed 8 January 2022. 102 Wallace. 103 Rollefson. 104 Ibid. 105 Tobi Onabolu, “Afropresentism: Black presence in the Diaspora,” BetterShared, https://bettershared.co/blogs/news/afropresentism-black-presence-inthe-diaspora. Accessed 8 January 2022. 106 Althea Legaspi, “See Janet Jackson, Daddy Yankee Dance in the Streets in New ‘Made For Now’ Video,” Rolling Stone, 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/see-janet-jackson-daddy-yankee-dancein-the-streets-in-new-made-for-now-video-712468/. Accessed 8 January 2022. 107 Steven Horowitz, “Harmony Samuels Talks Producing Janet Jackson’s New Single ‘Made for Now’ & Her Upcoming EP,” Billboard News, 2018, https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8470665/harmony-samuels-janet-jackson-made-for-now-ep. Accessed 8 January 2022. 108 Stephanie Smith-Strickland, “Janelle Monáe Talks New Album ‘Dirty Computer’ & Her Artistic Responsibilities,” Billboard, 2018, https:// www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/8454878/janelle-monaeinterview-dirty-computer-pharrell-williams. Accessed 8 January 2022. 109 Sanjay Sharma, “Black Twitter? Racial Hashtags, Networks and Contagion.” New Formations 78, no. 78 (2013): 46–64; Sarah Florini, “Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifyin’ Communication and Cultural Performance on ‘Black Twitter,’” Television & New Media 15, no. 3 (2014): 223–237.

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110 Shannon Connellan, “Every Artwork to Look Out for in Beyoncé and JayZ’s ‘Apesh*t’ Video,” Mashable, 2018, https://mashable.com/2018/06/18/ beyonce-jay-z-apeshit-art/#YkovTP0Mhkqc. Accessed 8 January 2022. 111 Sarah Cascone, “‘I May Need to Lie Down’: The Art World Goes Nuts over Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Louvre Takeover on Social Media,” Artnet, 2018. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/beyonce-jay-z-louvre-apeshit-1304711. Accessed 8 January 2022. 112 Ibid. 113 Whitney Alese, “Beyoncé’s and Jay Z’s Apesh*t is Black Defance in the time of Trump,” Medium, 2018, https://medium.com/@TheReclaimed/ beyonc%C3%A9s-and-jay-z-s-apesh-t-is-Black-defance-in-the-time-oftrump-70f8a6d7fa3c. Accessed 8 January 2022. 114 Leight. 115 TwitterQueen Curly Fry@itsmeheidi_h, cited in Leight. 116 Gabriel Hilair, “We AfroTranscend and Are Landing in Presentism,” Culture Lime, 2018, http://www.culturelime.com/culture-blog/we-afrotranscend. Accessed 8 January 2022. 117 Tara Brady, “Daughters of the Dust: The Film that Inspired Beyoncé’s Lemonade,” Irish Times, 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/ culture/flm/daughters-of-the-dust-the-flm-that-inspired-beyonc%C3%A9-slemonade-1.3101556. Accessed 8 January 2020; Cartwright, 127. 118 Kalia Brooks, “The Black Vermeer.” Ubikwist Magazine 3 (2016): 214, http://www.ubikwistmag.com/issue3/. Accessed 8 January 2020.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. abject, -tion 127, 149, 165 abuse 31, 134, 167, 168, 173 Africa, -an xiii, 6, 71, 86, 190–203; diaspora 191, 194–203 Afropresentism 3, 6, 191–192, 198–203 androgyny, -ous 5, 111–115, 136 Augustine of Hippo 13, 26 Badu, Erykah 3, 6, 27, 191, 195–196, 203 Beat, Beats, Beat Poets 62, 65–6, 71, 74 Beethoven 1, 13–19, 22–25, 36n29, 36n42, 100n42 Beyoncé 3, 27, 191–192, 197, 200, 202–203 Bible (Christian) 103, 105–107, 110, 114 Big Brother and the Holding Company see Joplin, Janis Blake, William xiii, 2, 3, 27–29, 103–107, 110–112, 114–116, 124 Blondie 127–128 blues 42, 59–60, 64–75, 95, 95n1, 191, 193, 195 Bowie, David xiv, 112, 161, 166, 170, 175 Brontës, Charlotte and Emily 2, 165 Bush, Kate 2, 170 Byron 28–29, 48, 94 capital, -ism, -ist 3, 6, 9–10, 24, 30–32, 34–35, 145–150, 152–153, 156, 190, 192, 203 Caribbean 191, 194–195, 203 Carters, The 27, 192

Cixous, Hélène 5, 13, 27, 60, 67, 70, 74 Clairmont, Claire 48–49 Clark, Annie see St. Vincent Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 4, 14, 27, 28, 62–63, 68–69, 124 confession, -al 47, 82, 148–149, 170 counterculture 47, 71, 74, 192 Dacre, Charlotte 5, 27, 125 death xiv, 4, 12–13, 26, 46, 48, 53, 60, 62, 69, 83, 85, 88, 136, 147, 155, 161–162, 165–166, 168, 200 divine see God domestic 30–31, 46, 49, 53, 86, 129, 132, 158n23, 161, 163 Dylan, Bob 61, 64, 66, 106 eco -logical, -critical 88, 100n19, 158; see also nature Elliott, Missy 3, 6, 27, 192–193, 196, 205 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 4, 27, 65, 71 Enlightenment 9, 21–22, 31–32, 34–35, 49, 167 exotic, -ization 42, 94, 193, 194, 200 family romance 126, 128–133, 135, 137 Fay, Elizabeth 2, 28–31 feminine, -ity 5, 11, 24, 30–34, 112–113, 126, 130, 149–150, 156, 162, 164, 169–170, 191 feminism, -ist 2–5, 11, 13, 28–33, 35n19, 61, 109, 145–146, 148, 150, 153–156, 157n10, 195, 197 flm 132, 161, 164, 169, 191–192, 194, 196–198

216 Index folk xiv, 5, 62, 64, 81, 85, 91, 92, 93n1, 96n21, 100, 147, 179n123, 194, 200 French Revolution xiii, 32, 35n19, 143–145, 157n9, 157n12 gender xiv, 5, 6, 30–35, 43, 47, 106, 109, 111–117, 124, 127–129, 133, 136, 143–144, 148, 153–156, 164– 165, 167, 172–174, 199; fuidity 34, 111–112, 154, 167 God, god(s), goddess(es) 12, 19, 24, 42, 43, 45, 53, 54, 62, 72–73, 103–109, 115, 158n30, 163, 196, 200 Godwin, Mary see Mary Shelley Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 5, 17–18, 26, 94, 96n8, 98n19 goth (music) xiii, 123–124, 127, 134, 137 Gothic xiii–xiv, 3, 5–6, 27, 123–137, 139n43, 139n44, 148, 161–165, 168, 173–175, 177n42, 178n65, 197 grotesque 6, 133, 161–162, 164–165, 168–171, 173–175 Hendrix, Jimi 59, 162, 195 heroin 59, 62, 67, 69–72 hip hop 6, 192, 194, 202 hippie 61, 62, 64–65, 70–71, 74–75, 98n21 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 1, 3, 5, 13–19, 22–28, 30, 33, 36n42, 47, 48, 85–86, 88, 91, 100n42, 100n43 Holiday, Billie 70, 72, 74 horror 30, 53, 100n42, 125–126, 129–132, 134, 161–162, 164, 168, 175 Indigo Girls, The 3, 6, 27, 146–147, 153–156 industrial, -sim, -ist 10, 14, 24, 30–31, 192 irony 5, 8, 25, 86, 148–150 Jackson, Janet 27, 191, 198, 201 Jay Z. 192, 202 jazz 94, 95n1, 162, 166, 193 Joplin, Janis 3–5, 27, 59–75 Kant, Immanuel 16, 19, 21–22, 28, 36n42 Kerouac, Jack 61, 62, 64–66, 71

Lilith Fair 146, 157n10 Looser, Devony xv, 34 Löwy, Michael and Robert Sayre 4, 6, 8–11, 14, 16, 24, 26–28, 31–32, 34, 36n29, 125, 127, 143–145, 157n2, 158n25, 190, 194, 196, 204 male gaze 112, 115, 133–134, 136–137, 170 Marx, -ism 10, 157n9, 196 masculine, -ity 24, 30, 34, 43, 109, 111–112, 115, 126–127, 143–144, 146–151, 153, 155–156, 162, 164–165 masochism 172–173 masquerade 136, 170 Mellor, Anne 30–34 Merchant, Natalie 3, 6, 27, 146–147, 150–153, 156, 158n23, 158n25 misogyny 11, 25–26, 150, 156, 170 Mitchell, Joni 3, 5, 27, 81–95, 95n1, 96n5–6, 97n8, 97n18, 98n19, 98n21, 99n32, 100n50, 100n52 modern, -ism, -ist, -ity 9–10, 12, 33, 35, 70, 86, 94, 149, 156n2, 162, 177n42 Monáe, Janelle 27, 191, 198, 201 monstrous 6, 133, 161–162, 164, 166, 169 Morrisette, Alanis 3, 27 Morrison, Jim 105–106, 113–114 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 15, 17, 24, 44, 47, 55n16 nature 3–4, 17, 22–24, 28, 30–31, 33, 62–63, 66, 68, 86, 93, 96n5, 132, 147–148, 150–153, 156, 157n12, 158n25, 192, 194 non-binary (sexual identity) 3, 5–6, 29–30, 32–35, 112, 150, 170, 173 Novalis 5, 22, 90, 94 objectify, -ifcation 6, 23, 68, 109, 123, 129, 134, 135, 137, 145–148, 155–156, 162, 170 ocean see sea Paris 47, 91, 157n9, 167, 192 pastoral xiii, 3, 6, 191, 194–197 patriarch, -al, -y 3, 5, 30, 32, 44–45, 61, 115, 123–127, 128–137, 150–151

Index 217 performance (identity) 35, 66, 113, 149, 153, 164, 166, 170–171, 174 performance (public, musical or artistic) 2, 4, 15, 18, 35, 44, 47, 49, 53, 59–62, 65–67, 69–70, 72–74, 81–84, 87, 90–92, 95, 97n18, 100n52, 104, 106, 116, 128, 137, 143–144, 146–149, 151, 156, 157n10, 161, 163, 165, 174–175, 190, 195, 199 philosophy, -er 1, 3–4, 8–9, 11–15, 19–20, 22–24, 26–28, 34–35, 55n16, 81, 90, 94, 97n8, 116, 132, 145, 190, 193, 202 Plato 12–13, 17, 19–21, 26, 36n45 pop 42, 103, 166, 189, 201 postmodern, -ism, -ist 148, 165, 170, 178n65, 191 privilege 10, 14, 23–24, 26, 31, 34–35, 42–43, 60, 65 psychedelic 64–65, 67, 69–72, 75 queer 113, 161, 164–166, 172, 174, 198, 201; see also non-binary racism, -ist 3, 6, 70–71, 98n23, 190, 192–195, 199, 200–203 Radcliffe, Ann 27, 30, 125, 132, 138n10 religion, -ous 33, 63, 65, 71, 103–111, 113–115, 170, 191–197, 203 rhythm and blues 192–194 Rilke, Rainer Maria 89, 96n7, 99n31, 99n32 Rolling Stones, The xiii, 27, 42–43, 149–150 Romanticism xiii–xiv, 1–6, 42–43, 46, 48, 52–53, 61–67, 70, 74, 76n40, 81, 96n5, 96n7, 103, 116, 124–127, 133, 143–156, 156n2, 157n12, 158n25, 158n30, 190–196, 198, 201–203; defnition 8–10; electric Romanticism 60–62, 64–65, 74–75; German Romanticism 15–18, 21–22, 25–26, 81–87, 88–95, 96n8, 97n11–13, 98n23, 100n42, 100n43, 100n48; and music 13–18, 36n29; and women 10–11, 24–35 Schlegel, Friedrich 5, 8, 22, 81, 84, 90, 95, 96n8, 97n11, 100n48

Schiller, Friedrich 64, 84, 97n13 Schopenhauer, Arthur 1, 3, 16, 19–28, 30, 33 sea 44, 52, 86, 88, 90, 92–93, 109, 169 sex, sexuality xiv, 3, 4, 13, 24, 30, 33–34, 46, 60–61, 65, 72, 75, 111, 114–115, 123, 125, 128–137, 144, 149, 163, 165, 167–168, 174, 190–191, 193–194 Shakespeare, William 8, 27, 89, 193 Shelley, Mary 27, 28, 48, 132, 153, 165; Frankenstein 125, 132–133, 153, 162, 165; Last Man, The 153, 158n30 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 2, 4, 27, 28, 43–44, 49, 52–54, 62–63, 94, 96n5 Sioux, Siouxsie xiii, 3, 5, 27, 123–125, 127–129, 131–137, 138n36 Smith, Bessie 70, 72 soul (music) 191, 196 spiritual, -ality see religion Smith, Patti 2, 3, 5, 27, 45, 49, 103, 105–116 St. Vincent 3, 6, 27, 161–163, 166–175, 176n1 sublime 16, 18, 30, 33, 36n42, 100n42, 109, 127, 164 terror 125–126, 132 Thoreau, Henry David 4, 27, 63, 64 Tieck, Ludwig 5, 8, 89, 91, 100n43 transgender 167; see also queer Tristan and Isolde 87–88, 92 Vietnam War xiii, 92, 157n12 voodoo 132, 191, 194–195, 203 Walker, Alice 27, 191, 195–196 Walpole, Horace 27, 130, 164, 168 Waters, Muddy 2, 27, 42, 48 Williams, Ann 124–131, 135, 139n43 Williams, Jane 3–4, 27, 43–45, 48–49, 52–53 Wollstonecraft, Mary xiv, 24, 27, 33, 35n19, 145 Woodstock 96n5, 98n19, 147, 151, 156, 157n12; song 100n52 Wordsworth, William 14, 27–29, 31, 48, 63, 70, 124, 152