Category: analysis

Spotlight on…Paul Beatty’s ‘The Sellout’

‘”It’s illegal to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, right?”
“It is.”
“Well, I’ve whispered ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.”’

I must admit, I usually find myself disappointed by highly praised literary works. I have lost count of the amount of award winning texts that have left me cold despite the hype generated by the established critical panels. With this in mind, I picked up Paul Beatty’s fourth Man- Booker winning novel The Sellout, fully expecting disappointment. However, Beatty’s novel not only completely proved my assumptions to be ill-founded, but has also firmly rooted itself as one of my favourite reads of 2018. Uncomfortable, heartbreaking and yet jarringly hilarious, The Sellout takes aim at racism and the lasting impact of white supremacist ideology on the black community. Through savage wit, Beatty forces the reader to face the deep underlying social tensions that still prevail throughout American society.

Focussing on a protagonist known only by his surname, ‘Me’, the novel follows the narrator in his radical and outrageous scheme to reintroduce segregation in his impoverished neighbourhood of Dickens. It is through this quest that the reader is made aware of the clear hypocrisy between political correctness and the reliance on racial stereotyping in American media. This hypocrisy is outlined from the very start by our protagonist, who declares:

‘This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I’ve never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face. But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of THE United States of America, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my back, my right to remain silent long since waived and said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn’t quite as comfortable as it looks.’

Addressing the reader, Beatty eviscerates the adverse racial tropes commonly used by the media; in doing so, he not only highlights the ridiculousness of such typecasting, but refuses to offer any easy explanations for his protagonist’s actions. It is in the destruction of these harmful cultural assumptions that Beatty’s angry humour is not only the most pervasively biting, but also the most successful. In the current climate of political violence and racial tension, Beatty’s scathing novel never loses sight of the fundamental issue at its very centre; the continuing institutionalised oppression of the black American community. Despite its title, Beatty’s novel is far from a sellout.

Written by Steph Reeves
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

Wuthering Heights: Reverse Colonialism and the Imperial Gothic Tradition

Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together?’ 
– Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, p.40.

In Gothic fiction of the Victorian period, concepts of the racial other become inextricably linked with fin-de-siècle fears of imperial decline and subsequent degeneration. More specifically, characters that are denounced as racially distinct are often viewed as figures of abjection and fear; they are the ‘marauding, invasive other[s]’ in which ‘British culture sees its own imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms’.[1] This monstrosity is accentuated through a denouncement of the racial other as recidivist, linked intimately to notions of both moral and physical degeneracy. However, this degeneracy in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights not only internalises fears of Victorian England’s ‘devolution’ into a more primitive and morally degraded state of being, but more widely comes to critique and accentuate the increasing fragility of the British empire itself. This Victorian Gothic work is an example of the ‘imperial Gothic’, playing on Victorian anxieties.[2] In their respective representations of the racial Other, the texts come to highlight anxieties surrounding Victorian societies supposedly morally supreme status, presenting images of reverse imperialism to accentuate the decline of the British empire.

Anxieties surrounding colonial decline are clearly accentuated in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a novel which Susan Meyer argues acts as ‘an extended critique of British Imperialism.’[3] Heathcliff, an orphan of ambiguous racial origin, becomes the embodiment of the racial ‘Other’; his social position and actions threaten the rigid imperialistic class structures engrained in the fabric of the rigid model of the Victorian family home, as well as the position of England as colonial superior. Throughout the novel, Heathcliff is repeatedly collocated with notions of racial inferiority; he is frequently compared to darkness and criminality, his uncertain race alluding to a supposedly corrupted underlying spirit.[4] These notions of otherness are first accentuated through Heathcliff’s introduction to the Earnshaw family. Nelly declares that:

We crowded round, and, over Miss Cathy’s head, I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk- indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s – yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand.[5]

From his very introduction, Heathcliff is displaced as a figure of ‘Otherness’ that is scarcely acknowledged to even belong to the same species as those surrounding him. His ‘black’ hair, coupled with his ‘dirty’ and ‘ragged’ appearance (p.25), places him entirely at odds with the middle-class Earnshaw children. Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity consequently becomes associated with the dirt that masks his face, contrasting starkly with the white skinned ‘purity’ of Catherine and Hindley.[6] Heathcliff’s otherness further becomes demarcated through the Earnshaw’s inability to comprehend his speech, resulting in the denouncement of Heathcliff as merely speaking ‘gibberish’ (p.25). It is in the adjective ‘gibberish’ that racial superiority is ultimately compounded; in speaking ‘gibberish’ (p.25), defined as ‘unintelligible or meaningless speech or writing; nonsense’, Heathcliff finds himself silenced through a racial prejudice that denounces his voice as unimportant ‘nonsense’. [7] In doing so the Earnshaw family, including Nelly, attempt to silence Heathcliff under the colonial gaze; the family denounce Heathcliff as racially inferior in order to affirm their own colonially superior social position.[8] As Susan Meyer observes, Heathcliff finds himself ‘pronounced upon as if he were a specimen of some strange animal species’, ‘subjected to the potent gaze of racial arrogance deriving from British imperialism.’[9] Through this gaze, Heathcliff finds himself marginalised and consigned to social and class inferiority.

However, although treated as an inferior racial other, continual interest in Heathcliff’s ambiguous racial ancestry accentuates the liminality of his position and the threat this poses to the surrounding gentrified families. Throughout the novel, Heathcliff finds himself continually collocated with countries synonymous with imperial resistance and political uncertainty.[10] These fears are clearly evoked in Nelly’s speculations; she tells Heathcliff that he is ‘fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together?’ (p.40). At the time of Wuthering Heights’ publication in 1847, both India and China proved to be countries fraught with colonial uncertainty. Although the British empire had almost entirely established political control in India, English rule in China had been marred by the effects of the Opium wars. The subsequent decline in trade left England with far less confidence surrounding their ability to control and assimilate countries into their once burgeoning empire.[11] Through a collocation of Heathcliff with an ancestry closely tied to notions of colonial decline and uncertainty, Nelly’s narrative essentially gives voice to ‘prospect of an alliance’ between the two countries ‘and the possibility of their joint occupation of Britain.’ [12] In the suggestion of Heathcliff’s families purported wealth, which would ultimately give him the ability to buy up both Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights for as little as ‘one weeks income’ (p.40), Brontë highlights the possibility of the conqueror becoming the conquered by countries before considered colonially inferior.

These economic fears appear to be realised on Heathcliff’s return, who subsequently subverts and monopolises the imperial gaze that once consigned him to racial inferiority. In his power over both the Linton and Earnshaw families, Heathcliff seemingly confirms Nelly’s conjectured anxieties. Revelling in his new position of economic power, Heathcliff enacts his revenge on his ‘colonisers’ and invokes a course of reverse imperialism. Through this reversal, Heathcliff’s position as racial ‘other’ provides him with the liminality to rise above and conquer those once considered his colonial superiors. This inversion is not only demonstrated through his economic ruining of Hindley and the stripping of Linton’s family home, but also in Heathcliff’s horrific oppression of Isabella Linton. Isabella, once superior to Heathcliff, finds herself subjected to a radical class inversion in the hands of her captor/husband. Isabella, who once looked from a position of social superiority on the man who looked ‘exactly like the son of the fortune-teller’ (p.34), finds herself oppressed by the same colonising gaze that she once deployed to belittle her husband. As Isabella is subjected to Heathcliff’s gaze, Brontë describes Heathcliff as looking upon her ‘as one might do at a strange repulsive animal: a centipede from the Indies, for instance’ (p.76). This results in Isabella turning ‘white and red in rapid succession’ and using ‘her nails’ to free herself from Cathy’s grip (p.77). Isabella, reduced under the imperial gaze inflicted upon her, becomes a figure collocated with animalism. She is not only colluded in the passage with both a ‘centipede’ (p.76), but is also denounced as a ‘tigress’ (p.77) by Cathy for her animalistic clawing of her arm in an attempt to escape Heathcliff’s gaze. Paralleled thus with the wildlife abundant in the West Indies Isabella finds herself, in the same way as her husband, ‘pronounced upon as if [s]he were a specimen of some strange animal species’.[13] Through this reduction, Heathcliff’s monopolisation of the imperial gaze is complete; his ability to wield this gaze, coupled with the class liminality provided to him through his ambiguous racial ancestry, subsequently allows him to enact his legal domination over the colonially superior figures that become the embodiment of the British Empire in the narrative.

As Meyer thus comes to argue, ‘the “vivid and fearful” scenes in Wuthering Heights, of which Charlotte Brontë complained, are primarily scenes in which the ugliness of starkly wielded colonial power, usually exercised in areas remote from the reach of British law or putative moral standards, is enacted through Heathcliff’s fearful reversals.’[14] It is in this way that the novel proved so horrifying to its Victorian readership; Heathcliff’s enactment of ‘fearful reversions’, as well as his meteoric rise, threaten the imperial superiority engrained in the social and moral values of the British Empire. However, Meyer further suggests that this threat is felt most sharply through the location of Heathcliff’s reversions being in England.

References
Featured Image–  Illustration by Fritz Eichenberg, as taken from the 1943 Random House edition of Wuthering Heights. See Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847; London: Random House, 1943).

[1] Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation’ in Dracula: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Glennis Byron (London: MacMillan Press Ltd, 1999), pp.119-145, p.121.

[2] The term ‘imperial Gothic’ was first introduced by Patrick Bratlinger. For more background information on the term, see Patrick Bratlinger, ‘Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880- 1914’ in Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions, ed. Lyn Pykett (London: Longman, 1996), pp.184-210.

[3] Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p.100.

[4] For more information, see Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York City: D. Appleton and Company, 1895).

[5] Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847; Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2000), p.25. All further references to Brontë s text are to this edition, and page numbers will be presented parenthetically.

[6] Throughout the novel, Brontë continually deploys light imagery to contrast the racial ambiguity of Heathcliff with the purity of the middle-class Earnshaw and Linton families. The use of dirt and mud is once again evoked at the start of Chapter 7 on the return of Cathy to Wuthering Heights. Cathy’s passage from ‘savage’ (p.36) to gentrified is starkly contrasted with Heathcliff, who is described as having ‘thick uncombed hair’, ‘clothes […] which had seen three months’ service in mire and dust’, and a ‘beclouded’ visage (p.37).

[7] Oxford Dictionary Online. Available at: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/gibberish [Accessed 17/03/2018]

[8] In postcolonial theory, the imperial gaze is often defined by the observed finding themselves defined in terms of colonially superiors own set of social systems and moral values. From this perspective, the imperial gaze thus infantilizes the object of the scrutiny whilst simultaneously denouncing the observed as racially and socially inferior. This is the concept of the imperial gaze, as first introduced and subsequently developed by E. Ann Kaplan, that this blog post will focus on and expand in relation to the supposedly racial inferior monopolising this gaze to enact discourses of reverse imperialism. For more information on the imperial gaze, see E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism and the Imperial Gaze (London: Routledge, 2012).

[9] Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction, p.97.

[10] Not only is Heathcliff associated with India and China in the novel, but also with the American Civil War. As Lockwood conjectures of Heathcliff’s meteoric rise in fortune, did ‘he earn honours by drawing blood from his foster country [?]’ (p.67). This, as Susan Meyer contends, further places Heathcliff into a discourse of ‘successful colonial rebellion’. For more information, see Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction, p.114.

[11] For more information, see Ross G. Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

[12] Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction, p.114.

[13] Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction, p.114.

[14] Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction, p.118.

Written by Steph Reeves.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

The Robin Hood Tradition: Tensions and Bonds in The Early Modern Ballads

‘Were thou not my maister…/
thou shuldis by hit ful sore;/
get the a man wher thou wille,/
for thou getis me no more.’
-Robin Hood and The Monk, ll.59-62.

In the early modern ballads of the Robin Hood tradition, homosocial bonds are almost continually compromised by tensions surrounding masculinity and power. These tensions are seen throughout both Robin Hood and The Monk and Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne; such conflicts are most interestingly presented through the characters, and arguments, of Little John and Robin Hood respectively. In both ballads, Little John and Robin Hood’s friendship becomes compromised mainly by power struggles, as often instigated and challenged by Robin Hood himself. These struggles consequently lead to vulnerability and dissolution within the outlaw community.

In Robin Hood and The Monk, Robin instigates tensions between himself and Little John through his attempts to assert authoritarian control. Written in around 1450[1], the ballad is far removed from the later gentrification of Robin Hood, yet Robin still possesses an undeniable authority over the band of outlaws.[2] He declares that ‘Litull John shall beyre my bow, Til that me list to drawe’.[3] The use of the modal verb ‘shall’ accentuates his belief in his authority; in using a modal verb, which ‘expresses necessity or possibility’, Robin propounds Little John’s compliance as already accepted.[4] In this case, Little John is reduced to ‘a squire rather than a fellow’[5], a depreciating position that Little John clearly refutes. Little John declares ‘were thou not my maister…thou shuldis by hit ful sore; get the a man wher thou wille, for thou getis me no more’(l.59-62). As Bernard Lumpkin argues, ‘In his rebuke, Little John rejects the language of fellowship and substitutes for it the language of hierarchy…such words vividly convey his shame and bitterness over the demeaning role Robin Hood has made him play.’[6] This ‘language of hierarchy’ is exemplified by John’s use of ‘man’, which in turn suggests servant, as well as ‘maister’. In using these terms, Little John exemplifies his lower status to Robin. However, although defining himself as subordinate to Robin in this way, Little John refuses to remain in such a lowly position. Power, therefore, becomes the key area of contention between the two men, causing tension in the homosocial community.

Power tensions in the ballad also result from the archery competition between Robin Hood and Little John, which itself articulates the masculine aggression underpinning the outlaw community. In the early fifteenth-century, archery was seen as ‘the weapon of lesser men’[7]; it was often seen as the choice weapon of the yeomanry populace. However, archery competitions were often seen as a way of showcasing prowess and masculine dominance. In Robin and Little John partaking in a competition, masculine aggressions and tensions are thus underlined; it is with Little John’s success that Robin incites tension into the seemingly peaceful forest setting. Robin Hood ‘seid schortly nay’, ‘lyed Litus Jon’ and ‘smote hym with his hande’ (l.55-56); in denouncing Little John as a liar, Robin clearly refuses to admit his inferior position and the loss of the archery competition to one of his fellow, yet simultaneously ‘lower’, outlaws. Furthermore, in the active verb ‘smote’, defined archaically as the ‘a heavy blow or strike’[8], Robin appears to berate Little John for winning, verbally and physically attacking him and consequently blemishing his archery prowess over Robin himself. This berating arises once again in Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, where Robin Hood sets out to destroy any sense of superior prowess that Little John possesses. Robin remarks that ‘it is noe cunning a knave to ken’[9], suggesting that Little John has no more skill than Robin in deducing whether strangers be friend or foe. As remarked in the ballad itself, ‘often words they breeden bale, that parted Robin and John’ (l.43); as a result of this, both ballads become ‘a full statement of the danger of conflict within the band’[10], accentuating tensions of power and masculinity and the effect of this on the cohesive homosocial community.

Such dangers are accentuated through Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne; In the ballad, the tensions are more seriously positioned. Dissolution within the outlaw gang becomes marked by death and extreme violence. As Stephen Knight argues, this makes the ballad ‘a partner piece to Robin Hood and the Monk’[11]; Just like the previous ballad, Little John and Robin are left fundamentally more vulnerable after parting company. Once again, it is Robin who instigates the disbanding, taking offence at Little John’s attempts to protect him. From the opening stanza’s of the ballad, it becomes apparent that Robin’s characterisation has been elevated further than in Robin Hood and The Monk; his dream, in which he is ‘beete and binde’ (l.9) by ‘two wight yeoman’ (l.7), aligns Robin with the Medieval Romance genre, in which the heroes find themselves indulging in dream-like prophecies.[12] This elevation in characterisation is made further apparent through Robin’s overt awareness of his masculinity; Robin sees Little John’s remarks to be attacks upon his position as lead outlaw. He declares ‘A, John, by me thou setts noe store’, ‘how offt send I my men beffore, and tarry myselfe behinde?’ (l.37-38). In this, it is clear Robin takes Little John’s words as an accusation of cowardice, rather than ones of protection and allegiance. In the use of the prepositions ‘behinde’ and ‘beffore’, Robin, like Little John, ‘rejects the language of fellowship’ for ‘the language of hierarchy’[13]. Robin repudiates the notion of being one who delays the action, as ‘tarry’ suggests, refusing to be seen in any way as subordinate in masculinity to John. Moreover, in the use of ‘my men’, Robin once again compounds the notion of Little John’s inferiority; in his rebuke, Robin reduces Little John once more to a servant as opposed to his fellow, an action reminiscent of Robin’s similar treatment of Little John in Robin Hood and the Monk.

Robin’s preoccupation with cowardice highlights the multi-faceted nature of power dynamics amongst the outlaws; preoccupations with masculinity and courage become the focal point of tension in the homosocial community. It is this that fundamentally weakens the group, leaving the community vulnerable to attack from false foresters, as embodied by Guy of Gisborne, and the corrupting force of the Sheriff. As Lumpkin argues, ‘The medieval ballads thus reveal Robin Hood’s band as a dynamic community’, in which ‘the limits of individual power are continually negotiated’ and ‘the potential for the tyranny of one man is lessened by others who act, as it were, as checks and balances.’[14] It is apparent, then, that tensions arise from Robin’s supposed superiority over the group; it is up to characters, such as Little John, to advise and placate Robin, reminding him continually of his place amongst his fellow yeomen.

References
Featured Image: Illustration of Robin Hood and The Guy of Gisborne.

[1] Although the exact dating of The Monk is unclear, this essay will take 1450 as its contextual basis for analysis.

[2] Robin, although possessing certain levels of elevation in character, does not become gentrified until The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, written by Anthony Munday and produced by the Admiral’s Men in 1599. See Anthony Munday, ‘The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington’ in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), pp.303-402

[3] ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’ in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamzoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), pp.31-57, p.38, l.37-38. All further references to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

[4] Oxford Dictionary Online. Available at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/shall [Accessed 28/02/2017]

[5] Bernard Lumpkin, ‘The Ties that Bind: Outlaw and Community in the Robin Hood Ballads and the Romance of Eustace the Monk’ in Robin Hood in Popular Culture, ed. Thomas Hahn (Boydell & Brewer: Cambridge, 2000), pp.141-151, p.146.

[6] Lumpkin, ‘The Ties that Bind: Outlaw and Community in the Robin Hood Ballads and the Romance of Eustace the Monk’ in Robin Hood in Popular Culture, p.146.

[7] Jim Bradbury, The Medieval Archer (Boydell & Brewer: Suffolk, 1985), p.1

[8] Oxford Dictionary Online. Available at: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/smite [Accessed 26/02/2017]

[9] ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’ in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamzoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997),pp.169-184, p.174, l.39. All further references to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

[10] ‘Introduction to Robin Hood and the Monk’ in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamzoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997),pp.31-36, p.33.

[11] ‘Introduction to Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’ in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamzoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), pp.169-172, p.171.

[12] In the Medieval Romance genre, heroes experiencing prophecies and dreams was a common trope which elevated the position of the heroic characters. Such elevation can be seen in Medieval romances such as Guigemar, who receives a prophecy from an ambisexual stag after fatally wounding the animal with an arrow. See Marie De France, ‘Guigemar’ in The Lais of Marie De France, trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby (London: Penguin, 1986),pp.43-55.

[13] Lumpkin, ‘The Ties that Bind: Outlaw and Community in the Robin Hood Ballads and the Romance of Eustace the Monk’ in Robin Hood in Popular Culture, p.146.

[14] Lumpkin, ‘The Ties that Bind: Outlaw and Community in the Robin Hood Ballads and the Romance of Eustace the Monk’ in Robin Hood in Popular Culture, p.147.

Written by Steph Reeves.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

The Racialised ‘Other’ in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

‘Everybody remembers the first time that they were taught that part of the human race was Other…It’s as if I told you that your left hand is not part of your body.’
-Toni Morrison

Throughout American history and literature, race has always played a huge, and often debilitating, role in the construction of Black American identity. This is most notably seen through the differentiation between the ideal of ‘Americanness’ and the alienated Black African American. In the cult novels of Post-1945 America, Black characters consistently find themselves trapped by societal conceptions, ideologies, and notions of inferiority. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird undoubtedly highlight these oppressive principles. The novel evokes American racist societal concepts, as well as use discriminatory racial tropes, to highlight and essentially criticise the fragmented nature of Black American identity in post-war American  society.

Black American identity is most clearly stifled by the notion of ‘Americanness’, an ideology that seemingly suggests the true embodiment of the ideal and ‘true’ American are middle-aged, white Protestant men. The Marlboro man, a figure created to sell

marlboro.jpg
The Marlboro Man 

Marlboro cigarettes, appears to be the true embodiment of this notion; his rugged individualism, independence and, most obviously, his position as a white American serves to highlight both his position as an individual, whilst also representing simultaneously a mass of individuals. This ideology, defined as ‘a system of ideas that governs the way we experience the world’,[2] singlehandedly foregrounds the oppressive racial attitude towards the Black African American, who in turn is seen as the ‘Other’ figure. This notion of ‘alien’ races and cultures was paramount to both the political and cultural movements of Twentieth-century America. This paranoia and fear of the other is highlighted through earlier war propaganda posters, such as America’s 1918 conscription poster entitled ‘Destroy this Mad Brute-Enlist’[3]. The representation of the German enemy as a looming African gorilla serves not only to accentuate the fear of the ‘unknown’ and enemy ‘Other’ of the German cultural movement, but can also be read as accentuating the fear of ‘known’ alien threat to white supremacy- the Black African American.

invisible man
Harry R. Hoops, Destroy this Mad Brute Enlist- US Army.

This ‘known’ internal threat grasps the helpless female figure (reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty and, therefore, a metaphor for America itself) in his right arm, whilst also carrying a bloodied bludgeon in his left hand. Such propagandist pieces ultimately led to the formation and continuance of a handful of discriminatory racial tropes; as Tommy L. Lott argues, the metaphor of the Black African American as an ape-like figure ‘satisfies the need to provide a biological justification of antiblack racism, and supplies a convenient rationale for ongoing subordination of Black people.’[4] The representation of the Black man as an ape is perhaps most popularly demonstrated through King Kong[5], created in 1933, which plays on the notion of the predatory sexual nature of the Black individual, as well as notions of violent primitivism. King Kong encapsulates and plays upon the supposed violent hyper-sexuality of the Black Man; popular portrayals of the Black American as barbarous and primitive continue to pervade to this day.

This same racial typecasting is demonstrated through Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird. The reader finds the construction of Tom’s identity based almost solely on a handful of prejudiced tropes, the most obvious of these being the Myth of the Black Rapist. Angela Davis, who coined the latter term, argues, ‘In the history of the United States, the fraudulent rape charge stands out as one of the most formidable artifices invented by racism.’[6] This trope, built on the stereotype of Black men being hyper-sexual and dangerous, is foregrounded in the film The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915. The film famously depicts a white woman throwing herself off a cliff to escape from the barbarous Black rapist.[7] As explained by Michael Phillips, ‘The Myth of the Black Rapist provided a powerful counter-discourse’ that led to ‘Negrophobic images of the black man as ravishing beast’, which suffused ‘the language of even counter-hegemonic movements’.[8]

Despite there being a forty-five-year difference between the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird and the Birth of the Nation, this racial stereotype clearly comes to shape the way in which Tom Robinson is portrayed and framed for the sexual assault of Mayella. Despite being physically handicapped and the blatant fraudulence of Mayella and her father’s testimonies, Tom Robinson is still asked if he is ‘strong enough to choke the breath out of a woman and sling her to the floor?’.[9] Regardless of his clear innocence, the court continues to focus on Tom’s strength in a negative light. The verbs ‘choke’ and ‘sling’ highlight Tom Robinson’s conceptualisation as a barbarous and dangerous primitive. This negativity is clearly still informed by such prolific cultural creations as the ape-like other presented in Destroy This Mad Brute-Enlist; his identity, therefore, is colluded with the criminal ‘other’, an alien figure that is in complete opposition to the pure white ‘ideal’ of Americanness. This same ideological stereotyping informed the outcome of the trial of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of young African American men falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931. All 19 men were convicted and 18 were sentenced to death. Although later acquitted, the case undoubtedly represents the prevalence of the stereotype of the African American man being sexually primitive and violent.

It is apparent, then, that the violent actions of a minority of African Americans come to encompass the entire community. Ellison’s criticism of this is further apparent through Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch, who declares ‘you know the truth, and the truth is this: some negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral…but this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men’ (p.226). However, despite Atticus attempting to rebel against the idea of the African American as a criminal other figure, his call for social equality is entirely undermined by his use of the term ‘negroes’. In using the latter phrase, Atticus further accentuates the notion of the Black African American as ‘Other’; they are a ‘different’ ‘race of man’, singled out for the colour of their skin and the ingrained ideology that preaches African American’s to be alien to the true notion of Americanness. Although Atticus attempts to bring justice to the court system by banishing such racist tropes as the Black rapist figure, he in fact complicates and inhibits further the racial identity and progression of the Black American. He unwittingly comes to represent the figure of the White Saviour, a ‘genre in which a white messianic character saves a lower-or working class, usually urban or isolated, non-white character from a sad fate’.[10] Through this embodiment, Atticus allows the reader to feel morally superior and comfortable with the trial. Consequently, morality is racialized as white, with the Black man being presented as incapable of saving themselves. As argued by Roslyn Siegal, ‘[T]he Negro[…] is usually depicted as stupid, pathetic, defenceless and dependent upon the fair dealing of the whites, rather than his own intelligence, to save him.’[11] Rather than representing one truth, then, the figure of Atticus perpetuates another racial trope, one that suggests the Black American to be both morally and physically inferior.    The exploitation and monopolisation of the Black African American figure by white supremacist figures is also apparent in To Kill a Mockingbird. The motif of the Mockingbird greatly accentuates this notion. Upon Scout and Jem asking Miss Maudie why it’s a sin to kill a Mockingbird, they are told that:

‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a Mockingbird. ‘
-(p.99-100)

Miss Maudie’s explanation contains several troubling aspects; in particular, it suggests the only reason for not killing a Mockingbird is due to their entertainment value, not for their sentient nature and individual identity. This disturbing idea, when coupled with a reading of Tom Robinson is being a major Mockingbird in the tale, suggests that Tom should only be kept alive for the sake of ‘us’, ‘us’ in this instance being the white American population of Maycomb County. Tom is only there to ‘sing’ and please the community, performing menial, low wage work to please the white superior figures. As Isaac Saney argues, ‘by foisting this Mockingbird image on African Americans, the novel does not challenge the insidious conception of superior versus inferior ‘races’; rather, Miss Maudie’s comment simply states ‘that Black people are useful and harmless creatures- akin to decorous pets…’.[12] Ultimately, it is this same ‘dancing’ and Tom’s frequent attempts to please Mayella, a figure of white ideal ‘Americanness’, that leads to his death. His identity is essentially belittled to little more than his aesthetic use and his physical ability to work and entertain.

References
Featured Image: Front Cover of Heinemann’s 2003 edition of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).

[1]  Toni Morrison, as cited in Toni Morrison, ed. by Jill L. Matus (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1998), p.23

[2] Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Routledge, 2003), p.4

[3] Harry R. Hoops, Destroy this Mad Brute Enlist- US Army, 1918, Colour Litograph, 106 x 71cm. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010652057/ (Accessed 18/12/2016)

[4] Tommy L. Lott, The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 1999), p.7

[5] See King Kong, dir. By Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (RKO Pictures inc., 1933)

[6] Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), p.173

[7] See Birth of a Nation, Dir. By D.W. Griffith (Epoch Producing Co., 1915)

[8]Michael Phillips, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), p.30

[9] Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird (London: Arrow Books, 2006), p.217. All further references to Lee’s text are to this edition, and page numbers will be presented parenthetically in the body of the essay.

[10] Matthew Hughey, The White Savior Film: Content, Critics, and Consumption (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), p.1

[11] Roslyn Siegal, ‘The Black Man and the Macabre in American Literature’ in Black American Literature Forum, 10.2 (1976), pp.133-136, p.136)

[12] Isaac Saney, ‘Racism in To Kill a Mockingbird’ in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2010), pp.58-62, p. 60-61.

Written by Steph Reeves.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

Immortality and Transcendence in John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale

‘Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death’
–Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, l.51-52.

The wish for transcendence adopts an arousing vision for the second-generation Romantic poets, as they strongly believed in the healing power of the imagination and the ability to escape real life with their creative thoughts. Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers a theory for creative transcendence in one of his famous passages in Biographia Literaria (1817). He establishes a harmonious relationship between the ideal world and the real world: ‘[the imagination] dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create: even where this process is rendered impossible’.[1] Shortly after Coleridge’s work was published, poets including John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley shed a new light onto the transcendent powers of poetry. Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) explores the transcendent influence of the human mind through the presence of nature as an immortal symbol. The use of imaginative transcendence from a real world to the ideal in both poems exposes the transition of multiple other binaries. The wish to transcend between the real and ideal can question whether the human imagination is subject to the limitations of human experience.

In Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the bird is presented as an immortal icon. The speaker admires the happiness that the nightingale possesses: ‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot/ But being too happy in thine happiness’.[2] The nightingale embodies an excess of joy which is incomparable to the speaker’s. The superlative ‘too’ portrays the extremity of the nightingale’s immortality, invoking an excess of emotion onto the speaker. The overbalance of pleasure from a natural object links to the themes encompassing the Sublime. In The Prelude, William Wordsworth recognises nature’s superiority in the lines:

‘The Power which these/
Acknowledge when thus moved, which Nature thus/
Thrusts forth upon the senses.’[3]

The all-consuming ‘Power’ of the bird’s songs in Keats poem invokes a raw emotion that shows how the transcendence is initiated by a Subliminal, aesthetic experience.

Whilst the nightingale is an immortal entity, it is also a bird of darkness. The dark imagery in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ resembles the death-wish of the speaker; there is ‘no light’ (l. 38) except from where the breeze causes the trees to part. The stanza is full of absences and presences caused from the transcendence from reality to the ideal, reflecting the glimpses of life and death:

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
…
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
(ll. 41-52)

Keats’ bird is invisible in the shadowy forest of ‘embalmed darkness’, resembling the death-wishes connected to the transcendent thoughts of the speaker. The dark imagery plunges the speaker into confusion; he ‘cannot see’, blinded by the powers of his imagination. Furthermore, he addresses the nightingale as ‘Darkling’ to emphasise his loneliness in a dark world. Although the nightingale is immortal in the ideal world, Keats is suggesting that when combined with the real world, the bird brings deathly connotations because of its black colour. He views death as a welcomed prospect; ‘I have been half in love with easeful Death’. Death to Keats seems partly desirable because of the mortality of the world he lives in. The presence of the nightingale in reality makes him see death as an escape to release him from his troubles. The dark symbolism of the nightingale draws a close association between life and death, which blurs the boundaries between the two.

Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ contrasts the immortality of the bird with the reality of mankind to remind us of the permanent sorrow in the world, emphasising the human desire to escape it. The speaker wishes to ‘fade far away’ from the death and decay of the real world:

‘Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan’
(ll. 21- 24)

The verb ‘dissolve’ stresses Keats’ desire to disappear from the destructive world around him. The added emphasis of ‘dissolve’ in parenthesis separates the word away from the rest of the stanza; resembling Keats distancing himself from the decay of reality. Furthermore, the imagery of the miserable men visualises a world of grief and suffering that is not apparent in the nightingale’s world. The sensory ‘groan[s]’ interfere with the beauty of the nightingale’s song that ‘Singest of summer’ (l. 10). This contrast grounds Keats in the realms of reality and stops him from transcending. The regular rise and fall of the iambic pentameter syllables arguably represent the sound of a heartbeat; further keeping Keats connected to the physical body whilst transcending to an idealised state. This suggests that the mortality of the world cannot be escaped even if mankind wishes to be free. With regards to Keats’ poetry, Bernice Slote summarises that ‘because of the particular poetic quality of his life, Keats’ poems are nearly always viewed autobiographically’.[4] Contextually therefore, it is likely that Keats is referring to the death and sickness occurring in his life at the time he wrote the ode. His family’s misfortunes and impending struggle with tuberculosis enabled Keats to envision a world surrounded by life’s suffering and decay. This belief is exemplified in his letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May 1818:

‘I compare human life to a Mansion of Many apartments… [in which occurs the] sharpening of one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man- of convincing one’s nerves that the world is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression.’[5]

The degenerated earth that Keats lives in opposes the nightingale’s infinite life; as the bird ‘wast not born for death’ (l. 61). The age and decay of the real world in Keats’ ode contrasts with the state of the bird to suggest that mankind is inferior. Combining the world of imagination with the real world is important to Keats because without imagination, the real world is confined to ugliness. On the other hand, merging the two worlds with the speaker’s imagination shows how one cannot simply transcend into the other. Earl Wasserman argues that Keats’ juxtaposition of immortality and pain emphasises the instability of reality, ‘for the perfection of the nightingale’s happiness underscores an uneasiness of the poet’s’.[6] In a universe of suffering and pain, seeing the nightingale triggers the speaker’s imaginative thoughts. Keats binds a world of pain and fear by forging the ideal and real world as one: ‘Still wouldst though sing, and I have ears in vain-/ To thy high requiem become a sod’ (ll. 59- 60). In these lines, Keats is implying that even with the joyous sounds of the nightingale, death inevitably still surrounds him. It is not a jubilant celebration of life but a ‘requiem’ for the dead.

Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ highlights his awareness of the transcendent power of art when he rides on the ‘viewless wings of Poesy’ (l. 33). Furthermore, Keats transcends beyond admiring the nightingale when he notes that ‘Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes’ (l. 29). The nightingale is no longer an aesthetic beauty but a metaphor for poetic inspiration. For Keats, the power of poetry is not the only motivator for his transcendent experience. The poem’s rich imagery of intoxication emphasises a desire to escape into a world of hallucinogenic bliss. The imagery of the ‘beaded bubbles winking at the brim’ (l. 17) suggests that alcohol is an overwhelming factor to the quality of Keats’ thoughts. The plosive alliteration is onomatopoeic and captures the action of sparkling wine fizzing. The ‘winking’ is suggestive of bubbles forming and bursting, which personifies the alcohol as opening and shutting like an eye. This can allude to Keats’ imagination flitting from reality to the ideal through the influence of alcohol. The ode begins with ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk’ (ll. 1- 2) to suggest that the speaker is drinking to escape his misery. The decadent start of the poem concentrates on the suffering of the speaker, through the repetition of the first-person determiner ‘my’ to emphasise the speaker’s unstable state of mind. The ‘drowsy numbness’ adds delusion and portrays the real world as blurred and uncertain. Furthermore, Keats uses Greek myth in his ode to express his desire to transcend from the uncomfortable reality of modernity. Greek myth is used to describe the transcendence of Keats flying to the nightingale ‘Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards’ (l. 32). In Greek myth, ‘Bacchus’ is the god of agriculture, wine and fertility; encompassing the earthly consciousness of the real world. To ‘not’ use reality as a way to transcend to the ideal suggests that alcohol is an insufficient source of inspiration for his imagination. John Strachan disapproves of Keats’ work, describing it as ‘neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium’.[7] In disagreement with Strachan’s criticism, the intoxication of the speaker in the ode can be seen as a symbol of the real world’s chaos as opposed to the poet himself. Keats criticises the self-indulgence of mankind and shows its interference with the poetic inspiration.

References
Featured Painting: Joseph Severn, Keats Listening to a Nightingale on Hampstead Heath, 1845, Oil on Canvas, 114 x 97cm, Guildhall Art Gallery, London.

[1] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. The Floating Press (Auckland: The Floating Press, 2009) pp. 365- 366.

[2] John Keats ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4th ed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012) pp. 1464- 1466 (l. 6) (All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text).

[3] William Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’ in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4th ed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012) pp. 554- 558.

[4] Bernice Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1958) p. 4.

[5] Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May, 1818 in Keats, John. Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (New York: Modern Library, 2001).

[6] Earl Wasserman. The Finer Tone: Keats’s Major Poems. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1953) p. 188.

[7] John Strachan, A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on The Poems of John Keats (London: Routledge, 2013) p. 39.

Written by Emily Warren.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

The Robin Hood ballads: Regurgitating Traditional Tropes or Deeply Influenced by Historical Context?

‘Not a Frenchman will I spare
[…]
Not a Frenchman will he spare.’
– ‘Robin Hood’s Fishing’, ll.104-108

Although Stephen Knight and  Thomas H. Ohlgren point out that the tropes, the ‘augmentation of the outlaw band’ and ‘Robin Hood meets his match’ are prevalent in the Robin Hood tradition, certain late ballads are more influenced by their historical military context than any previous Robin Hood material in the tradition. (1) ‘Robin Hood’s Fishing’ is shaped by the Anglo-French relations of the seventeenth century and ‘Robin Hood Prince of Aragon’ reflects the powerful threat of the Ottoman Empire.

Joseph Ritson recognises that the ‘most surviving common broad-sheet ballads were printed between the Restoration of 1660 and the Revolution of 1688’. (2) The relationship between France and England throughout the whole of the seventeenth century is characterised by war and military conflict, but it is most aggressive during, and shortly after the time Ritson refers to. The Anglo-French war of 1627-29 was sparked by the French refusal to ally with England against the Habsburg Spain and Austria. In the second Anglo-Dutch war (1665-1667), the French allied with the English enemy. (3) Similarly, the War of the League of Augsburg (1688-97) brought William III to the throne and therefore caused England’s alliance with the Dutch against the forces of Louis XIV. (4) This Anglo-French rivalry is undoubtedly articulated in the late Robin Hood ballad ‘Robin Hood’s Fishing’. Stephen Pincus notes that ‘[t]he streets of London and provincial towns were littered with pamphlets, broadsides and poems offering glosses on witticisms about the most recent doings of European dignitaries.’ (5) This confirms that this ballad could be a form of political propaganda. In it, the enemy is politicised. Robin Hood states, ‘not a Frenchman I will spare’ (6) and the narrator repeats, ‘not a Frenchman he would spare’ (l.108). Although ‘Frenchman’ is in the singular, it is symbolic of the entire nation which, is confirmed through the celebration of the violence in the ballad. The narrator repeats how Robin took his ‘noble bow’ (l.125). Despite the fact that the ballad comes after Munday’s gentrified version of Robin Hood, the adjective ‘noble’ is not connected with Robin, but with his weapon, and therefore with the violence. The bow is no longer being used for sport and archery competitions as it is in the early ballads, but is turned into a war weapon. The narrative of the ballad is celebrating the violence because of the political nature of the enemy which adds something new to the larger tradition, and shows its contextual influences. (7)

This celebration of violence in the ballad coincides with the negative portrayal of the French enemy. The fishermen were ‘awar of a French robber/Coming toward them most desperately’ (ll.79-80). This description, with the reference to robbery and the adverb ‘desperately’, suggests French greed and links with the absence of the fish in sea; Robin, disguised as Symon ‘neither gott great nor smaw’ (l.52). This lack of fish metaphorically suggests an impending French threat to goods on English soil as well as in the sea. This threat is confirmed towards the end of the ballad when Symon ‘found within that ship of war/[t]welve hundred pounds in gold so bright’ (ll.163-164). Pincus writes that in the late seventeenth century there was a ‘well-known Francophobia of Londoners’ and this shows how the ballad is responding to this popular negative feeling towards France and its ruler Louis XIV, who emerged from the Second Dutch War as immensely powerful. (8) This French power is reflected in the contrast between the ‘fisher and the waryer free/[…] the noble ship’ (ll.158-159). The English ‘fisher’ is unlikely to defeat the ‘noble’ French ship and this unprecedented success, alongside the greedy portrayal of the French, shows the ballad to be acting as a form of political propaganda. The ballad portrays the French as an easy defeat whilst also encouraging hatred towards them. Although the date of the ballad is ambiguous, the violence within it confirms that the negative attitude towards the French is shaped by the contextual military conflict between England and France in the late seventeenth century.

II

By the late sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire had established a large area of territory. However, the seventeenth century marked a change for the Empire. Their focus was now to defend existing land and trade routes, rather than further expansion. (9) Historian Cathal Nolan states that ‘by 1650 […] the empire was one of the largest states in the world at 800,000 square miles and 20 million inhabitants’ and because of wars, such as the Austro-Ottoman War (1683-1689), ‘much of Europe came to view the Ottomans as a lasting and direct security threat where previously it had been a distant and unknown country’. (10) This threatening perception of the Ottoman Empire is articulated through the late Robin Hood ballad, ‘Robin Hood Prince of Aragon’. (11) This ballad is particularly concerned with a racial othering of the enemy. The ‘proud Prince of Aragon’ (l. 49) is joined by two giants ‘most horrid for to see’ (l.56). They have ‘grisly looks, and eyes like brands, […] with serpents hissing on their helms,/[i]nstead of feathered plume’ (ll.57-60). The description of their eyes ‘branding terror’ and the ‘serpents on their helms’ makes the giants explicitly monstrous and inhuman. This othering of the enemy is taken further through use of the conjunctive adverb ‘instead’ which allows the narrator to show what is perceived as normal. It is not until later in the ballad when Robin encounters the Prince of Aragon and calls him a ‘tyrant Turk’ (l.141) that the significance of this othering is revealed. The Turks of the Ottoman Empire and their impending threat is allegorically dramatized through the otherness of the giants. Like, ‘Robin Hood’s Fishing’, this ballad is responding to the English perception of a potential military threat. This time the threat is the Ottoman Empire, which still confirms the large influence of the historical context.

This ballad places a larger focus on the violence between Robin Hood and the enemy in comparison to ‘Robin Hood’s Fishing’. This could contextually suggest that the Ottoman threat is stronger than the French threat. In terms of setting, the enemy is already on English soil, not out at sea. The Prince of Aragon commands ‘bring forth my bride, or London burns’ (l.127). The narrative of the enemy is engaging directly with the Great Fire of London of 1666. This not only shows how the ballad is responding to its context but also supports the idea that it is a form of political propaganda, encouraging a national wariness towards the Ottoman Empire. This threatening persona of the enemy is mostly articulated through the violence in the ballad. At the battle, Little John ‘clove the giant to the belt,/[a]nd cut in twain his heart’ (ll.175-176) and to the other giant Will Scadlock ‘with his faulchion he run through/ [a] deep and gashly wound’ (l.181-182). The violence, which structurally takes up a large section of the ballad, is littered with adjectives associated with aggression such as ‘hewd’ (l.155), ‘deep and gashly’ (l.182), and verbs such as ‘struck’ (l.158), ‘slain’ (l.160), and ‘clove’ (l.175). In ‘Robin Hood’s Fishing’, Robin uses his ‘noble bow’ and shoots the Frenchmen from afar whilst being ‘bound to the main mast tree’ (RHF, l.105). Here, the ‘noble bow’ is replaced with the ‘faulchion’ which in itself is symbolic for the greater intimacy of the battle because it means Robin and the enemy must fight closer together than with the use of a bow. This change in weaponry coincides with the greater focus upon the descriptions of the wounds – ‘blood sprang from every vain’ (l. 56) – and suggests the Ottoman threat to be greater than the French threat because the narrative is much more focused on the action. Despite the difference in the way that the threats are portrayed, these late ballads still show how the military context shapes their themes.

References
Featured Photo: Image from page 20 of ‘Robin Hood; a collection of ancient poems, songs, and ballads, not extant, relative to that celebrated English outlaw, to which are prefixed historical anecdotes of his life’, accessed from https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14766209342, [accessed on 29/11/18].

1)      Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren, ‘Later Ballads: Introduction’ in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), available online at <http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/later-robin-hood-ballads-introduction> [Accessed 11/04/2017]

2)      Joseph Ritson, quoted in Rhymes of Robyn Hood by Richard Barrie Dobson and John Taylor (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1989), p. 51.

3)      Ronald H. Fritze and William B.  Robison, Historical Dictionary of Stuart England (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996), pp.203-204.

4)      John Childs, The Nine Years’ War and the British Army, 1688-1697: The Operations in the Low Countries, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp.21-25.

5)      Stephen C.A Pincus , ‘From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in English Popular Sentiment from Anti-Dutch to Anti-French in the 1670s’ in The Historical Journal, Vol. 38, No. 2 (1995), pp. 333-361 (p.335).

6)      ‘Robin Hood’s Fishing’, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales , ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), l. 104 available online at <http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/gest-of-robyn-hode> [Accessed 28/02/2017]. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically within the body of the essay.

7)      In the medieval ballad ‘Robin Hood and the Guy of Gisborne’, the violence is casual; Robin kills Sir Guy and cuts him in the face in order to make it seem as though it is him who is dead. ‘Robin Hood and the Guy of Gisborne’, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales , ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), available online at <http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/gest-of-robyn-hode> [Accessed 08/04/2017]. In Munday’s play The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, the enemies are personal. Prince John is a rival for the love of Maid Marian. Anthony Munday, The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales , ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), available online at <http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/downfall-of-robert-earle-of-huntington> [Accessed 08/04/2017].

8)      Stephen C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy: 1650-1658, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 254.

9)      Cathal C. Nolan, Wars of the age of Louis XIV, 1650-1715: An Encyclopaedia of Global Warfare and Civilisation (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2008), p. 344.  

10)  Nolan, Wars of the age of Louis XIV, 1650-1715, p. 344.

11)   ‘Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon’ in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales , ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), available at <http://d.lib.rochester.edu/robin-hood/text/child-ballad-129-robin-hood-and-the-prince-of-aragon> [Accessed 14/04/17]. All other references to this text are to this edition and are given parenthetically within the body of the essay.

Written by Estelle Luck.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

Conscience and Morality in Graham Greene’s Ministry of Fear

‘In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality – heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities […] that is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood – for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we know the rules’.
Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear, p. 88-9.

Graham Greene classified his novel The Ministry of Fear as an entertainment, due to its espionage plot. However, many critics would disagree, arguing that it contains serious underlying themes.[1] The narrative focuses on the protagonist Arthur Rowe’s struggle with grief and his journey as he comes to terms with his mercy killing of his wife. Focusing on the character’s own identity and conscience, Greene brings into question the meaning of morality and the definitions of good and evil as his protagonist struggles to perceive himself as an innocent man.

Opening with the presentation of a village fete, the protagonist enters a state of nostalgia; this is triggered by the innocence of the event and the childhood memories that this evokes. The author leaves the reader feeling empathetic; it becomes clear that the character Arthur Rowe is a lost man searching for his childhood innocence and naivety. In his search for release from the burden of guilt, the protagonist reverts to his past in an attempt to recreate the childlike innocence that he remembers, refusing to accept this as an unattainable goal. Throughout the novel, Greene focuses on the theme of childhood versus adulthood, as Arthur Rowe, an adult man, reminisces about his own childhood, avoiding the horrors that his adult-self has experienced. The protagonist often looks to children’s literature and, through these references, Greene indicates the problems that come with looking to fiction as moral guidance. Whilst describing his reading of these children’s stories, the narrator states that he does so ‘not so much because he liked them as because he had read them as a child, and they carried no adult memories’.[2] The protagonist is clearly using literature as a means of escape from his adult identity, rather than facing his guilt. He narrates that ‘in childhood we live under the brightness of immortality – heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities […] that is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood – for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we know the rules’ (p. 88-9). He recognises that adult literature is tainted and confused by complexity and ambiguity through experience, looking to simplistic childhood literature as a moral guidance.

In Book Two of the novel, Greene disorientates the reader by introducing Arthur Rowe as Digby; this disruption reflects the confusion and disorientation that the character also feels. Mary Ann Melfi notes that ‘subconscious growth in Rowe’s case is an inadvertent process wherein the subconscious takes control, working at its own pace. Here, the conscious mind relaxes, and the subconscious fulminates before manifesting itself.’[3] The protagonist’s forgetting of his identity works as a kind of healing process, administered by his own subconscious. His own pain and vulnerability become unbearable and, rather than facing his fears and facing himself, it is easier to forget and live a lie. The character’s conscience is so burdened with guilt that he entirely recreates his own identity, erasing the torturous memories of his wife’s death in a final desperate attempt to move forward. His disturbing memories have been erased and at this point in the narrative he is demonstrated to be at peace, viewing himself as an innocent man. The character of Digby represents the Arthur Rowe that would have been had he not killed his wife and suffered with the guilt. Arguably, the character has achieved his goal of innocent content through the erasure of his adult memories. However, this is shown to be only a temporary state, in which his subconscious is allowing him to heal and decipher his identity without the pain of facing his crime head on. As Arthur contemplates his childhood, he reflects on the fact that ‘he learned before he was seven what pain was like – he wouldn’t willingly allow even a rat to suffer it’ (p. 88). The reader learns of the character’s inability to witness pain and suffering due to his empathetic nature. As Digby, the protagonist feels great sympathy for the character of Stone; he remarks that ‘he felt capable of murder for the release of that gentle tormented creature’ (p. 141). Despite his identity being entirely forgotten and recreated, the sense of empathy that Arthur Rowe possessed seems ever-present. His core human nature remains the same, indicating a contingency and suggesting that even Digby, undisturbed by the burden of an ill wife, would have committed the same crime due to his own moral code. The protagonist’s tendency to empathise and pity others has ultimately led to his mental destruction; through Digby, it becomes clear that this is inherent in his human nature.

References
Featured Image: Front cover of the 1974 Penguin edition of the novel.

[1] James M. Welsh and Gerald R. Barrett, ‘Graham Greene’s Ministry of Fear: The Transformation of an Entertainment’, Literature and Film Quarterly, 2 (1974), p. 312.

[2] Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), (pp.20-1). All other references are to this edition and are given in parenthesis in the main body of the text

[3] Mary Ann. Melfi, ‘The Landscape of Grief: Graham Greene’s ‘The Ministry of Fear’’, South Atlantic Review, 69 (2004) <http:// www.jstor.org/stable/20064577 > [accessed 19 April 2018] pp. 54-73, p. 64.

Written by Amy Fretwell.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

The Presence of the Past in Alan Garner’s Red Shift

‘Think of the odds. In all space and time. I’m scared.’
-Alan Garner, Red Shift, p. 8.

Throughout Alan Garner’s novel Red Shift, the protagonist Tom frequently engages with elements from the past which help him to overcome difficulties in the present day. Garner splits the text into three narratives, the first explores Tom and Jan’s story as the present narrative, accompanied by two other tales from the past, one set in civil war England and the other in Roman Britain. Although Garner presents three separate narratives from varying time periods, connections are made between the different points in history because remnants of the past exist in Tom’s present.

It can be suggested that Garner’s presentation of the three narratives in such a way assumes a link between the past, present and future which are inextricable. The idea that it is impossible to separate the three time periods is valid, because it is hard to discuss time without having an awareness of each form. Linda Hall supported the past, present and future as being inextricably bonded and argued that the security of the present and future is determined by the fate of the past (p. 154).[1] Hall’s suggestion is good but the reliance on the fate of the past is context dependant. For example, in Red Shift by Alan Garner, the modern protagonist Tom has a close friendship with another character called Jan, which is depicted through extracts written in a dialogue style. The entries are short and mainly exhibit conversations between Jan and Tom.

At the beginning of the book Jan announces to Tom that she is leaving Cheshire their current place of residence to live in Germany. Tom then contemplates how he met Jan and exclaims, ‘Think of the odds. In all space and time. I’m scared’ (p. 8).[2] Here Tom shows an awareness towards time by discussing the odds of fate in allowing him and Jan to first meet. As a context, Tom’s interest in movements across time allows him like Hall to understand that events within different time periods can intertwine and influence one another. He finds comfort knowing that the fate of the past originally brought him and Jan together. However, in the future he now fears that Jan’s move to Germany will put a strain on their relationship and contemplates if fate will allow their paths to cross again. As a young boy, Tom expresses an advanced understanding about the progression of their relationship through time, suggesting that he finds a sense of security using experiences from the past to deal with situations in the present.

However, although Tom expresses an enjoyment in his awareness of the past, the time period is not presented explicitly as a safe haven because it does not exist in a format which Tom as the modern protagonist can physically escape to. For example, in the narrative set in Roman Britain an army invade a settlement killing all members bar a young girl who they rape and take hostage. One of the weapons used in the killing is an axe which belongs to a man called Macey and then in the present it is eventually discovered by Tom and Jan. Tom explains ‘It was an axe. Beaker Period. It was a votive axe. The best ever found’ and again, ‘It was an artefact. Not a toy. It was three thousand five hundred years old, and it’d survived’ (p. 131). The extensive knowledge that Tom displays towards the axe emphasises its position as an anachronism. Tom identifies that the axe does not belong in the present and labels the object as an artefact. The observation is significant because it creates a connection between Macey’s story in the past and Tom’s in the present, the axe was used by Macey and now years later has been found by Tom. Therefore, even though Tom cannot physically experience the therapy of escaping through time, he can still gain an understanding of the past through his life in the present, which for him provides some level of comfort.

As a form of comfort, the past presents Tom with an era which he can engage with because history is repetitive. For example, the third narrative in Red Shift is set in civil war England and it is based on the character Thomas Rowledge who lives with his wife Margery in Cheshire. Prior to Tom and Jan in the present, Thomas and his wife Margery also discover the axe which they label the ‘thunderstorm’.

A little time after coming across the axe, Thomas and Margery experience some trouble with some Royalist Troops. For their personal safety, they are forced to leave their village and take the axe with them. It is decided they will bury the axe in the chimney of their new home which they propose to build in a new village called Mo Cop, ‘And when it’s built, you’ll put the thunderstone in the chimney, for luck’ (p. 154). This action is significant because it places the axe in a position ready for Tom and Jan to discover it in the future. For Tom as the modern protagonist his narrative exists in the present, but for Thomas and Margery in civil England, Tom’s time period is their future. Therefore, the ‘personal and cultural continuity’ of the axe across history from the past into the present, expresses Tom’s relationship with the past as consistent. Tom can mentally engage with the past constantly depending on when he wishes to do so.

For Tom his interest in the past helps him to consciously deal with situations in the present both in a consistent and comforting matter. Therefore, to ensure the modern-day protagonist continues to benefit from his interest in the past, it is important that he continues to apply his knowledge to the present day in a way which will help him to shape his future.

References
Featured Image– Front cover, taken from the First Edition of the novel.

[1] Linda, Hall “House and Garden”: The time-slip story in the aftermath of the second world war (United States: Green Wood Publishing, 2003).

[2] Alan, Garner Red Shift (New York: Collins Publishing Group, 1975). All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the body of the essay.

Written by Imogen Barker.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

Fragile Masculinity and the Development of Industrial America in ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”

‘Male authors fixated on factory women’s sexual identity in an attempt to control their activities rhetorically, but in the process they symptomatized the many ways women’s labor no longer clearly evidenced male dominion.’
Megan M. Wadle, ‘“Rightly Enough Called Girls”,  p.55.

The American short story traces the development of women’s role in industrial America. In ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’ it becomes clear that women are integral to the new, industrial America as they work tirelessly in the paper mill. Over the course of the nineteenth century, women were fundamental workers within the factory. Thomas Dublin notes how they encouraged industrial and capitalistic progress. He says, ‘over the second half of the nineteenth century, employment in New England textiles doubled and cloth production quintupled in value.’[1] The women’s industrial importance is particularly noteworthy when contrasted to the lives of the bachelors in Melville’s short story. Kevin J. Hayes suggests:

‘the descriptive trappings of a bachelors’ Elysium in “The Paradise of Bachelors” would have been familiar to most of Melville’s readers […] like many nineteenth-century bachelors, he is a flaneur, one who cloaks himself in an identity presaged on leisurely observation.[2]

Against the backdrop of the growing industrial world, which women were so involved in, Melville’s story is a contemporarily relevant way of depicting idleness of men. The bachelor’s behaviour, recognisable to the contemporarily reader, depicts a world in decline. Their lifestyle is rendered obsolete when noted against the economic growth emerging from the mills and factories women worked in. Thomas Dublin highlights the success as he notes, ‘in 1850, cotton and woollen textile mills in New England employed about eighty-five thousand workers producing goods valued at just over $68 million.’[3] The growing industrial success of the female factory workers further renders the bachelor’s lifestyle and idleness as outmoded. Melville makes reference to the outdated aristocracy of the Templar Knights, an old fashioned European organisation shrouded in mystery and romance. He says, ‘do we understand you to insinuate that those famous Templars still survive in modern London? […] Surely a Monk-Knight were a curious sight picking his way along the Strand’[4] (p.86) Melville’s constant references to the past hint that the world of the bachelors is a product of fantasy, one which is being romanticised so the men can cling onto an outdated lifestyle. The narrator continues to call them ‘degenerate’ and says, ‘the bold Knights Templars are no more.’ (p.87) The narrator himself sets off the idea of the outdated, anachronistic lifestyle of the Templars. Even the current day bachelors, who he claims have ‘wit and wine […]of sparkling brands’ are depicted as idle. In the story, all they do is eat, drink and take ‘snuff very freely’ before returning to the street to either ‘call a hack’ or ‘be driven snugly to their distant lodgings.’ (p.93) The masculine past that the narrator is clinging to no longer has a place in society. The old, Christian world in London contrasts so greatly to the new industrial present. Kevin J Hayes argues that:

‘at a moment of cultural transition, when gender and sexual categories were solidifying and many Americans had become interested in labelling identities […] he [Melville] styled himself “the last lingerer on a generational threshold.’[5]

Melville’s story recognises a societal change which renders the bachelor lifestyle obsolete. He clings onto an outdated aristocratic lifestyle, knowing that is no longer has a noteworthy place in America. Gender categories were being redefined and Melville’s story is one way to track the process of change in America.

Whilst it becomes clear that the aristocratic male world is in decline, Melville still does not depict the industrial female experience in a positive way. The women live trapped to the patriarchal world and are treated as human machines. The story begins with a description of the bleak landscape, correlating with the bleak experience of the women inside the mill. Melville manipulates the language to dramatize the harsh setting of the story. The mountain the mill is placed on is named ‘Woedolor’.  This name immediately introduces the fundamental theme of commerce and transaction in connection with sadness. These themes are then placed in the feminine landscape. The journey the narrator takes in order to arrive at the ‘Devil’s Dungeon’ is described as ‘bleak’, with a wheel-road that is ‘dangerously narrow.’(p.94)  The story mediates gender politics through the landscape, particularly since the river is named ‘Blood River.’ Melville connects the hellish, unpleasant and dangerous landscape with blood to evoke images of pain, but also menstruation, an innate female experience. The location of the paper mill is a direct contrast to the ‘paradise’ of the Temple Bar, which is described as being ‘dreamy’ and ‘charming.’ (p.86) Melville depicts the old, aristocratic world of men as idle and outdated. However, the new, industrial female world is likened to hell and described in cold, harsh language. It becomes clear that the gender discourse of new America has not yet been figured out. Martin Schofield argues, ‘the luxury depicted [in the first story] can be seen to depend, economically and psychologically, on the suffering in the second story.’[6] It seems that old, masculine America needs to depend on female suffering in order to reaffirm patriarchal superiority. The male world needs to reconfirm its own identity within the ever-growing female industrial space. The aristocratic Templars are depicted as outmoded, the new discourse of industry and women workers has not yet been figured out. Megan M. Wadle argues:

‘Male authors fixated on factory women’s sexual identity in an attempt to control their activities rhetorically, but in the process they symptomatized the many ways women’s labor no longer clearly evidenced male dominion.‘[7]

Therefore, in this instance, Melville uses female suffering in order to highlight the fragility of masculine identity within the development of industrial America. Melville’s story depicts the male anxiety of trying to reconfirm an identity in the growing industrial society. The American short story traces the decline of the bachelor’s world and the rising female industrial world. In doing so, it notes the patriarchal response to the continuous growth of capitalist America.

References:
Featured Painting: Gustave Courbet, The Ornans Paper Mill (c.1865), Oil on Canvas, Musée Courbet, France.

Megan M. Wadle, ‘“Rightly Enough Called Girls”: Melville’s Violated Virgins and Male Marketplace Fears’ in American Literature: A Journey of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography (2018) Vol.90 No.1 p.55.

[1] Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (New York: Cornell University Press, 1995) p.230the-ornans-paper-mill.jpg!Large

[2] Kevin J Hayes, Herman Melville in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) p.g n/a

[3] Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution, p.228

[4] Herman Melville in The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, ed. by Joyce Carol Oates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) pp.86-106 (p.87) All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically within the body of the essay.

[5] Kevin J Hayes, Herman Melville in Context p.g n/a

[6] Martin Schofield, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story,  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) p.50

[7] Megan M. Wadle, ‘“Rightly Enough Called Girls”: Melville’s Violated Virgins and Male Marketplace Fears’ in American Literature: A Journey of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography (2018) Vol.90 No.1 p.55

Written by Sarah Culham.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

Impaired Parent/Child Relationships in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

‘Dear Father. The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me without question or condition…I have a modest competence now. I will no longer be a disgrace to you or to my dear brother the son you love…I have sold my soul or you have sold it.’
-Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, p.39.

In Jean Rhys’ novella Wide Sargasso Sea, relationships between parents and children are shown to be entirely unhealthy, leading to warped perceptions of the self and oppressive monopolisation of the impressionable children. Ultimately, relationships between parents and children in Wide Sargasso Sea are entirely governed by patriarchal social codes. Rochester is used as pawn by his father, who rejects him due to the feudal codes of primogeniture. As a result, he finds himself essentially traded into a marriage, as well as his personality and moral centre being warped and moulded by his experiences; it is his unhealthy relationship with his father that forms the basis of his treatment of Antoinette.

Rochester’s unhealthy relationship with his father stems from his father’s patriarchal adherence to primogeniture, the idea of ‘the right of succession belonging to the firstborn child, especially the feudal rule by which the whole real estate of an interstate is passed to the eldest son.’2 Rochester’s position as the second born son leaves him penniless; as Spivak comments, ‘Rhys makes it clear that he is a victim of the patriarchal inheritance law of entailment…’3 However, unable to endure the idea that ‘a son of his should be a poor man’4, Rochester’s father ‘sought me [Rochester] a partner betimes’5. In Rhys’ use the verb ‘sought’, the idea of Rochester’s inferiority to patriarchy and his father is first introduced; in his father’s seeking of a bride, Rochester is forced to play the role ‘sought’ by his father. In essence, Rochester is treated as a pawn in order to gain further social position, his relationship with his father being little more than a relationship of transaction. This is most clearly shown in Rochester’s first letter to his father after the marriage:

‘Dear Father. The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me without question or condition…I have a modest competence now. I will no longer be a disgrace to you or to my dear brother the son you love…I have sold my soul or you have sold it.’ (p.39)

The language of transaction is paramount within this letter; the use of the terms ‘paid’ and ‘sold’ suggesting Rochester’s inferiority and to his father, as furthered in the idea of his father’s selling of his sons soul for money and status. Moreover, the transactional language connotes greatly to a semantic field of slavery; just like a slave, Rochester is owned by his father, and therefore the patriarchal society that his father embodies. In this way, Rochester’s own journey can very much be seen as mimicking the Middle Passage, this being ‘the part of the [slave] trade where Africans, densely packed onto ships, were transported across the Atlantic to the West Indies.’7 Despite travelling to the West Indies in luxury, Rochester is basically transported and sold to the West Indies by his father to an uncertain fate. In order to keep his father happy, Rochester carries out his wishes; ‘…it meant nothing to me. Nor did she, the girl I was to marry. When at least I met her I bowed, smiled. Kissed her hand, danced with her. I played the part I was expected to play’ (p.44). The latter phrase emphasises Rochester’s pawn-like status; he is nothing but a game piece monopolised by his overbearing and ‘avaricious, grasping’8 father. It is this unhealthy relationship with his father that sculpts Rochester into a patriarchal emblem; Rochester, like his father, comes to embody rigid nineteenth-century social codes, later on using them to lock up and dominate his wife, Antoinette. As Purdue and Floyd argue, ‘Rochester represents patriarchy that births patriarchy as an unbroken chain’9; ultimately, his fractured and volatile relationship with his father warps his morality- for him, oppression and transactional relationships are acceptable and normal. As Rochester himself remarks, ‘how old was I when I learned to hide what I felt? A very small boy. Six, five, even earlier. It was necessary, I was told, and that view I have always accepted’ (p.63). It is clear then that Rochester’s unhealthy relationship with his father thus leads to his internalising of ‘male-dominance ideology’ and ‘blind obedience to…cruel social rules’ that ‘result[s] in his tragic marriage life’10, as well as his oppressive attitude towards Antoinette. Rochester and his relationship with his father, therefore, acts as a clear example of the flawed and unhealthy relationships between parents and children within Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.

References 

Featured Image: Illustration by Edmund Henry Garrett, as created for the publisher Bernhard Tauchnitz’s 1850 edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

1. Oxford Dictionary Online. Available at: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/primogeniture [Accessed 24th March 2018).

2. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Enquiry, Vol.12 (1985), pp. 243-261, p.251. Available at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/pg/masters/modules/femlit/gayatri_spivak_three_womens_texts_and_a_critique_of_imperialism.pdf [Accessed 20th March 2018].

3. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London: Penguin, 2006), p.351.

4. Brontë, Jane Eyre, p.351.

5. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Penguin, 2000), p.39. All further references to Rhys’ text are to this edition, and page numbers will be presented parenthetically.

6. ‘The Middle Passage’, The Abolition Project (2009). Available at: http://abolition.e2bn.org/slavery_44.html [Accessed 22nd March 2018].

7. Brontë, Jane Eyre, p.351.

8. Melissa Purdue and Stacey Floyd, New Woman Writers, Authority and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), p.104.

9. Yang Shuang-Ju, ‘A Feminist Study of Rochester in Jane Eyre’, Sino-US English Teaching, Vol.9 (2012), pp. 1258-1263, p. 1260.

Written by Steph Reeves
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.