An Adonis is Upon Us

A lot of focus in not only my literature classes, but in many of my humanities classes, is put on how women and femininity are treated in society, and with good reason. Still, I feel compelled to talk about how masculinity gets portrayed. Not because I want to steal the spotlight away from women, but because I think that patriarchy hurts men too by defining what it means to be a man. Then men go chasing this unrealistic ideal and all sorts of misery comes out of this pointless pursuit.

I feel that Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" is ripe for this sort of analysis. Willy Loman is obsessed with performative masculinity. He lies about his reputation, his commission, and his own stature. He mocks his neighbor and his neighbor's son, saying "Between him and his son Bernard they can't hammer a nail!" and "A man who can't handle tools is not a man. You're disgusting."

Willy is old and tired and has never been all that successful. By America's standard of masculinity, he isn't much, which is one of the great tragedies about Willy Loman, he has bought into the lie that is unattainable to all despite being the sort of person that should criticize the mold that patriarchy wants its men to fit into. He calls his sons "Adonises," and attributes business savvy to them that they cannot live up to either.

In the end, the irony is that for all Willy's male posturing, he's just pathetic.

Booker T. Washington Was an Uncle Tom

Last quarter we read an excerpt of W.E.B. DuBois' book "The Souls of Black Folk." We read some of his sharp criticism of Booker T. Washington, specifically Washington's "Atlanta Compromise." This quarter Booker T. makes another appearance in the first chapter of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." The narrator says in the second paragraph, "they were told they were free...in everything social, separate like the fingers of the hand." That last part is a direct quote of Washington's Atlanta Compromise speech where he essentially told his fellow southern african-americans to stay in the south and help white people rebuild it. He advocated separate but equal segregationist policy, and white southerners loved him for it. This is why I call Booker T. Washington an Uncle Tom, he was an assimilationist that capitulated to the racist demands of the southern whites of his time.

Ralph Ellison's protagonist is raised in a family that upholds Washington's values, though the protagonist's grandfather seems to realize on his deathbed that this lifestyle is harmful to him and his people. Despite the grandfather's warnings, the protagonist lives the life of submission that whites demand blacks live in a white society. He is commended for his behavior, because his behavior maintains the inequity of power in the times of Jim Crow. The protagonist seems to go so far as to experience Stockholm Syndrome when he says, "I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks..." He feels guilt when a naked white woman is revealed at the Battle Royal because in the time of Emmett Till, even looking the wrong way at a white woman can be a death sentence.

This is the life of a black person in Jim Crow south. It is one of internalized racism, de facto and de jure societal racism, and constant fear. When the protagonist simply implies that "social equality" is a worthy goal as an abstract concept, the crowd of white men clamps down on him. "We mean to do right by you, but you've got to know your place at all times" one of them tells him.

But perhaps the most troubling part of our reading was when the protagonist is involved in the boxing match, and is the last of two men standing. When he asks the other man to take the fall, even promising him all of the pay, so that they can get this stupid brutal skeptical over with, the other guy refuses. "For them?" he asks. "For me, sonofabitch!"

I may have been reading too much into this, but it seemed like a metaphor for the internalized conflict within the black community. The ways that America's power brokers have fomented strife within the lower classes so that they don't realize that their true enemy is the bourgeois and the capitalists. The white folks force these black men to fight one another for their amusement. And while some participate out of fear, and some have bought into the pride and machismo of winning, even though you never really win anything. The game is rigged.

Render Muttons

Non-representational art is a conundrum for me. On one hand I would like to dismiss it because I'm a philosophy major and it is my job to seek out the rational and logical purpose of a thing. However, I also like my red plaid shirt, and the cover of Joy Division's album "Unknown Pleasures," and I hate houndstooth jackets on women. All of these are non-representational patterns and images, there is no narrative or character or moral, they just are abstract shapes for the most part. So I cannot say that non-representational art doesn't have validity and doesn't illicit an emotional response.

And after ending my blog for the last literature class with an exploration of the death of the author, it wouldn't be intellectually honest to say that my inability to discern Stein's authorial intent with Tender Buttons means it has no value. I shouldn't even allow my grudge against her for being a fascist color my opinion of her writing since authors don't matter.

But man, I just can't get into Tender Buttons. For a split second I thought I was going to like her, when I heard the title. I thought of a mother buttoning her child's jacket on a cold day. It gave me this nice comforting feeling of maternal bonds and I thought that I might be able to get other such interesting images out of her work.

I'm reminded of the movie Donnie Darko, when Drew Barrymore's character tells her class about a linguist that said that "cellar door" is the most beautiful phrase in the english language. The point being that the aesthetic sound is pleasing despite the semantic meaning being dull or even possibly negative if you think of musky basements. That scene was always perplexing to me because I could not figure out why "cellar door" was all that pleasant a sound. I also cannot figure out why Gertrude Stein's poetry is arranged in aesthetic terms instead of semantically.

And here is the paradox because I enjoy the idea of the death of the author. Screw all your context, the text is all that matters. However, when it comes to "cellar door" and "The time to show a message is when too late..." they are meaningless to me without context. I do not give a damn about "cellar door" as a phrase in and of itself. But throw some Polish Jews in 1939, hiding in the cellar, and they can see the uniform of a Nazi through a hole in the cellar door, well now I care quite a bit about a cellar door.

Death of The Author 2: Death Harder

"For Reuben and Charles have married two girls,
But Billy has married a boy.
The girls he had tried on every side,
But none he could get to agree;
All was in vain, he went home again,
And since that he's married to Natty."

-Excerpt of poem authored by Abraham Lincoln

Our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln, had a friend named Joshua Fry Speed. The two were very close friends, even sharing a bed for four years, though this wasn't a social taboo like it might be today. There are many historians that point to evidence that Abraham Lincoln was actually homosexual. The Log-Cabin Republicans, a group of gay republicans, take their name from the belief that Lincoln was gay. There are many historians that disagree though. They point to the obvious fact that Lincoln had children with wife Mary Todd Lincoln, though Lincoln certainly wouldn't be the first gay man to reproduce with a woman. Additionally, the poem quoted above has allusions to a man marrying another man instead of a woman.

What could this possibly have to do with disregarding authorial intent? When we discuss historical context and the life of the author, we pretend that we are quite sure of what actually occurred and what was actually meant by the piece. However, we have a historical figure in Lincoln that has likely been examined by scholars far more than any of the authors we come across in an American literature class, and there is still much we aren't sure about. If we can't figure out things about a famous President, what makes us so sure that Dunbar didn't recognize that women also wear masks, and wrote his poem to befit women and african-americans?

Even if we could resurrect one of these authors and ask them very specific questions about their work, that doesn't mean we have the final answer on that work. We learned about psychoanalytic critical theory in Professor Cassel's class, a critical lens where we consider the effect sub-conscious thoughts have on a piece of literature. The fact remains that these authors themselves might not even know what the piece is about!

Batman, of all things, is a great example of this. When Bob Kane created Batman in the late 1930s, did he realize the psychologically disturbed themes present in Bruce Wayne/The Batman? The Jungian duality (Hey, Batman Wears The Mask!) of a leisure class slacker by day, and a serious "Dark Knight" by evening? Likely not. We can now look at Batman and see that he is a bit of a fascist. He is a vigilante that takes the justice system out of the people's hands and places it in his own. He, being a wealthy billionaire, uses his wealth to enforce justice as he sees fit. He's a plutocrat. This is very much like Plato's ideal Republic, which is hierarchial, and very much not a democracy. Bob Kane wasn't thinking that deeply when he put the cowl and cape on Master Bruce, but these themes of vigilantism and corrupt bureaucracy existed in the sub-conscious of society, and I believe Bob Kane tapped into it unbeknownst to himself.

The beauty of this lens to me is that it can turn almost anything into something exciting. Keeping with Batman, when I was a young boy I found the movies and cartoon and comics to be wonderful. I just liked the action and the courageous hero fighting evil. Then, when I grew up a bit and discovered that life is far more complicated than good versus evil and heroes swooping in to save the day, I dismissed Batman as childish and boring. Now, I can reexamine it in the context of not just Bob Kane's desire for an action hero with a limitless bank account, but in the context of culture and society and politics and psychology. It breathes new life into spent pages.

Death of the Author (Part 1)

"One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder"

-W.E.B. DuBois "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903)

It is totally not cheating to break this up into multiple parts. It's going to be a long examination of an esoteric concept that I'm admittedly not extremely familiar with and am only beginning to explore. Plus if anybody is masochistic enough to read my pretentious ramblings, it would be kind of me to alleviate their misery by serializing it.

I was reminded of this topic in class on Thursday when we read and analyzed Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear The Mask." Most of the class, including myself, concluded that the poem was about the duality of the African-American experience. Having their own culture, but assimilating to white culture when around white people in public. I believe it was Martin that put forth the suggestion that this poem could be about women. Professor Cassel didn't seem all that convinced and we moved on.

However, I feel that Martin had a great point. It could be about women. In fact, the that is why the DuBois quote above, which is very much like the Dunbar poem, has always appealed to me: It is a universal experience. DuBois has zero ambiguity in his writings, making it clear that he is speaking of the African-American experience, but it still works for all sorts of experiences.

As an example, when I was writing a paper on Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel "Persepolis" for my Women in Religion class last fall, I began noticing how DuBois' quote applied to this story of a Persian woman living in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Other side of the world, around seven decades after DuBois wrote "The Souls of Black Folk", but it still applied. Satrapi loves her home country of Iran, but could not reconcile this love with the oppressive religious regime, especially the misogyny of that regime. Satrapi knew her twoness. Not African and American, but Iranian and liberated woman. It turns out that this concept is within all of us. If you don't think so, next time you see your grandmother, tell her in detail how you feel about your first sexual experience.

Sociologists even have terms for this. "Front-stage self" and "Backstage self." We act differently in public as we do at home. We talk differently to our sweet Aunt Betty than we do when we've had a few drinks with our friends. We all wear masks.

So, what does all of this have to do with "Death of the Author"? Well, all of this begins to illustrate why we don't have to take into consideration authorial intent. We can ignore it completely. We can put our fingers in our ears at the moment that somebody starts discussing "historical context." Or as the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text."

I'll explain this all in more depth in my next thrilling installment. I'm being facetious because only the biggest philosophy/literature nerds on earth could possibly care about this sort of crap, but hey...I promise that my next post will feature a gay Abraham Lincoln. That's fun, right?

Happy Valentine's Day (Every day the 14th)

It's two weeks from Valentine's Day, a holiday created by chocolate companies and card companies and antidepressant manufacturers. It is appropriate that the past two weeks in Literature class, two stories about relationships have been assigned.

Both Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Theodore Dreiser's "Free" are anti-love stories in their own way. Really, other than Chopin's mastery of brevity, (Get to the point Dreiser!) and the differing gender of the protagonists, the two stories have much in common. They both involve married individuals, that when faced with the death of their spouses, privately revel in the freedom that this will allow.

At first this seems quite cynical, and, well, it is, but is that really all that bad? This fairy tale belief our culture has about two souls united as one is, in my experience, largely bullshit. It also leads to unrealistic expectations. This perfect image of a romanticized spouse is built in our imaginations, and we become sorely disappointed at these mere humans we meet that don't fulfill all of these ideals.

Mr. Haymaker in "Free" suffers for decades with the knowledge that Mrs. Haymaker is not his ideal mate. He can't leave her because of social and religious pressures. Chopin's Mrs. Mallard is even worse off, living in a time where a middle-class woman had no autonomy. But in a time when most marriages end in divorce, maybe we should see something noble in Mr. Haymaker's commitment no matter what. I think maybe marriage is the problem, and our society is moving beyond it.

Now, anybody reading this might think that I'm a cynic, and, well, you would absolutely be correct, but I'm not a love-hater...hater of love. I simply think that it can be fleeting, and we should accept that and not see it as a failure. I very much love my partner, and we might not be together forever, but if it ends I won't be bitter. I will appreciate the time we spent together and know that this was a valuable part of my life. I will recognize that the two of us grew apart and that this is natural and okay.

Actually, I will probably cry while watching stupid movies that we watched together, but still...I will definitely look back fondly instead of dismally.

This ideal that was encouraged in the time period of these two stories was incredibly harmful to people. Poor Mrs. Haymaker, who knows how much happier she could have been if she could have been with somebody that truly and passionately loved her. Who knows what wonderful experiences Mrs. Mallard could have had if she had been able to be independent.

Creepy Crape

The best horror stories have no supernatural monsters in them. Jason could never scare me more than Silence of the Lamb's Buffalo Bill. The Creature From The Black Lagoon could never send shivers down my spine like Black Swan. This is why The Yellow Wallpaper is such a great piece of horror fiction. And speaking of Black Swan, The Yellow Wallpaper is a commentary on how society's strict gender roles frequently shatter the sanity of women.

In Black Swan the insanity came out of the Jungian Madonna/whore duality that Nina is pushed into by the (both figurative and literal) roles she must play. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator isn't given the same exact pressures, but she is given directions that drive her insane all the same. The narrator, suffering from postpartum depression is relegated to the bedroom for rest by her physician husband. Isolated, she loses her mind and starts seeing herself trapped in the wallpaper in the room. While this certainly seems like an insane woman's ramblings, there's almost a weird rationale to it. Wallpaper is merely decorative, and the narrator, being disallowed from working, is merely decorative as well.

It's funny that this patronizing effect still lives on today. In 2005, Tom Cruise expressed his disappointment in an interview about the fact that Brooke Shields used antidepressants to treat her postpartum depression. He suggested she use vitamins. I say, if it worked for Brooke Shields, then Tom Cruise should probably shut the hell up and keep making crappy action movies.

We should also, as a society, examine how our expectations create mental illness in women. Going back to The Black Swan, that pressure we put women on to simultaneously be virginal and sexy is schizophrenic in and of itself. The background of this blog is a portrait of W.E.B. DuBois, because his famous quote of "One ever knows their twoness" resonates with me and I see it being applicable to so much more than the african-american context in which he meant it originally. Women also know this twoness, this pull from two opposite directions at once by one society. And it drives them fucking crazy, so maybe we should stop?