When Harry Bit Sally

An awesome 'funny or die' video courtesy of Jordan Stone. "Grandpires" and "Grombies" are now in my vocabulary.

Operas of Verdi, Balfe, and Gilbert

I. Il Trovatore by Verdi

In Il Trovatore, Asucena ultimately avenges the death of her mother through the execution of Manrico, but this is complicated in several ways. She raises Manrico as her own, and it appears that they have a loving familial bond (i.e. she is not just raising him as a mechanism for revenge). After all, he comes to her aid when she needs him, and he calls out to her just prior to his execution. However, there is a gap about Manrico’s upbringing, and viewers have limited access to Asucena’s thoughts of Manrico. At one point, she tries to tell him that he is not her son, but retracts it (13). Further, Asucena is overcome by Manrico’s execution. Count di Luna, reneging on his promise to spare Manrico, unknowingly executes his own brother. Count di Luna is the active agent here, so the situation/execution of Manrico seems to implicate the Count more than Asucena. What do you make of it?

a. Do you think the opera highlights the cruelty of the ruling class? What about its representation of “gipsies”?

b. Does this opera become a commentary on how an established power (in this case, nobility) imposes itself upon a smaller group (“gipsies”)?

c. What do you make of the depiction of Asucena? Is she vilified? Consider her act of infanticide.

d. Some argue that Il Travotore teeters on a fine line between tragedy and melodrama. Where would you place it?

II. The Bohemian Girl by Balfe and The Merry Zingara by W.S. Gilbert

Balfe’s and Gilbert’s operas (the latter a parody of the former) take a lighter tone.

a. What do you make of the deus ex machina twist that Thaddeus is nobility and acceptable to be married to Arline? How does this link to Nord’s discussion of the marriage plot (14)?

b. What to you make of the fact that Thaddeus is an adult/soldier when he first meets the six-year-old Arline, and that a love affair ultimately springs from their relationship? More specifically, do you sense a high “ick” factor?

c. What is the purpose of Gilbert’s parody? Does the parody work to act as a correction of The Bohemian Girl? How are “gipsies” depicted in both operas?

III. Closing thought

Il Trovatore is taken from a drama by Antonio Garcia Gutierrez, the plot of The Bohemian Girl is borrowed from Cervantes’s “Precioso,” and The Merry Zingara is a parody of The Bohemian Girl. What do you make of this constant making and re-making?

288 pages of "Nature v. Nurture": George Eliot's Identity Question

"The Spanish Gypsy" hinges upon the legend of Gypsy kidnapping/child swapping/foundlings, although in this case Fedalma, Gypsy child, is stolen and raised by whites. Fedalma is set to wed a duke when her long-lost father reappears, as a prisoner of the Spanish court, and calls his daughter back to her "rightful" place as the leader of her people. Drama and heartache ensues.

It would not be unfair to call Eliot's poem heavy-handed, as she nearly beats to death the question of nation, identity, and roots. However, the poem offers several points of departure that relate to our discussions this semester. I've included some general questions that occurred to me while reading--feel free to add your own.

1. Based on the "rules" of this text, would Fedalma have been able to marry Silva and become a duchess if she had never seen or known her father? Would her heritage have lain dormant?

2. What role do Jews and/or Judaism play in the text? (For ex: Sephardo) Can we compare this text to Daniel Deronda?

3. Within the poem, do we have any hope that people of different backgrounds can ever mingle? Does Eliot herself believe that mingling can occur?

4. Zarca's great goal for his people is to establish a homeland for them, a place that will be their nation. What do we make of this longing for stability--and do we read it as Eliot's English gaze imposing English values on Gypsy characters?

I don't have more specific questions, but I do have topics that I think we should consider here or discuss in class: the representations of Christianity within the text, the form of the poem, the angels of Memory and Reason.

"From Shire to Shire, and Place to Place": Gypsy as other Others?

As a starting point of thinking about “Gypsyhood,” I would like to propose several questions related to differences between characteristics assigned to the Gypsies and those attached to the Irish and the Jews.

   ① What are the Effects of Soft-Orientalism?

Nord points out that “fascination with Gypsies in Britain was a form of orientalism” (3 italics added). When compared with the Irish or the Jews, the “racial” marker—in terms of their physical feature, including their color of skin—attached to the Gypsies seems to be more distinct, creating a certain distance from the Western population and rendering them closer to the Oriental figure. Like the Oriental or the colonized subject, Gypsies operated as a site of projection of the repressed desire and fear of the West. Also, perhaps, John Hoyland’s strong desire to associate Gypsies with Indians dissociating them from Egyptians reflects the Western desire to see Gypsies as the Oriental existence (though also in modern ethnographic discourse, the Romany’s Indian origin seems to be established as a scientific fact). Yet, at the same time, they were, unlike the “real” Oriental subjects, a domestic or an internal other, inhabiting within the Occident. How does this physical proximity function for the quasi-oriental imagination? Should we see the Gypsies as "other" Others or straightforward Others? How does their intermediate status—not quite Oriental, not quite Occidental—operate within postcolonial discourse? 

② Difference between Gypsies and Jews: Time, Space, and Modernity?

As Nord argues, though the Gypsies shared “transnational (or at least non-national) and stubbornly distinct minority identities” with the Jew (5), these two groups differed greatly especially in terms of their relation to modernity. The Jewish desire (even if it might have been a little over-emphasized partly because of a construct/projection of British desire for quarantine the Jews) for modern nation state observed in Zionism marked a stark contrast with nonchalance about a specific land of the Gypsies, who apparently were satisfied with their nomadic life. Also, while the Jews were closely associated with urban or cosmopolitan cultures, situated within the center of the capitalism, the Gypsies functioned as embodiment of antiquity, especially British past, “allied with an aesthetic of the picturesque and with protest against modern encroachments” (Nord 6). In other words, it seems that whereas the Jew functioned in Victorian mind as an ominous incarnation of “hypermodernity,” the Gypsies played a role of antithesis/antidote of modernity. What do we make of this distinction in terms of their relation to modernity?

③ Gender Representation of the Gypsies: Dream of Androgyny?

Also remarkable is gender representation of the Gypsies. In contrast to the gender representations of the Irish and the Jews, in which female Irish/Jews are rendered desirable (whether ethereal or hyper-sensual) while male Irish/Jews are rendered repugnant, there seems no such gender distinction of aesthetic value in Gypsy representation. As Nord points out, the Gypsy was often represented in Victorian fiction as androgynous, a hybrid figure of male and female. Nord only argues about the imagery of masculinized female Gypsy, which provided Victorian female writers with fantasy of heterodox femininity reveling against patriarchy. Yet, Hoyland pointed out that male Gypsies, when they are young, “they are generally handsome,” which I found atypical for describing the male figure of racial minorities. As I have had an impression that the difference in aesthetic values associated with two genders in both Irish and Jewish cases might be related to the politics of interracial marriage, I am wondering how to interpret this androgynous representation of the Gypsies. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, though it is not a “Victorian” novel but a modernist exploration of androgynity, concerns with Gypsy representation, too, by the way.

④ How Do We Make of Dracula’s Minions?

Although we don’t have many literary examples of Gypsy representations yet, the presence of the Gypsies in Dracula’s last scene is memorable. Narrated from Mina’s point of view, the final moment of the novel documents the fight between Crew of Light and Gypsies as minions of Dracula (though, whether they are really Gypsies or not is unclear: “Outlined against the snow as they were, I could see from the men’s clothes that they were peasants or gypsies of some kind” (Dracula 322). ) What does this scene of the battle with Gypsies, which strangely substitutes for anti-climactic moment of Count’s death possibly mean? By the way, I couldn’t help smiling at Mina, who, though she must be busy watching her husband’s gallantry, is distracted by the gypsy male’s fascinating appearance: “The leader of the gypsies, a splendid looking fellow who sat his horse like a centaur, waved them back, and in a fierce voice gave to his companions some word to proceed” (323).

That’s all for now, but please feel free to add more questions!

Fruit and Seed

Since we haven’t much time to engage in discussion here, I’ll throw up a couple of quick questions for now and return to make some additional comments.

“Hep! Hep! Hep!” refers several times to separateness:  “a sense of separateness unique in its intensity” (175), “a separate people”  (177), “the separateness which was made their badge of ignominy” (179), “steadfast in their separateness” (192).  What entirely is Eliot getting at?  How does that relate to difference, race, or nationality/nationalism?

I wonder about the differences in the histories of Deronda and Klesmer and the position of each by the end of the novel.  Are the differences in their outcomes coherent?  How is that informed by “Hep! Hep! Hep!”?

In Search of a Nation(al Allegory)

In the “The Cultivation of Partiality” Anderson argues that Eliot’s rendering of Judaism and Jewish nationalism in Daniel Deronda represents her cosmopolitan ideal of the modern citizen that “balances the claims of the particular against those of the universal”(122) by testing the (possibly alienating) tenets of modernity “against the articulated experience of the excluded particular” (146). In Deronda, Anderson reads Eliot arguing for a “form of cultural understanding” that Anderson terms “reflective dialogism,” in which individuals relate to and articulate their national and cultural identities through “passionate argumentation, not simple embrace” (121). This “reflective dialogism” takes its most prominent form in the relationship and conversations between Mordecai and Deronda. Their conversation is one of a “double discourse” that represents different models of nationality, the Jews relationship to modernity and a broader “split response to the challenges of modernity” (137).

This reading runs counter to previous criticism that, according to Anderson, conflates the views of Deronda and Mordecai, creating a false binary between the utopianism of the “Jewish section” or the story of Deronda and Jewish nationalism and the realism of Gwendolen Harleth (to steal from Leavis), which draws Judaism and its culture as traditionalist and in stark contrast—and naturally opposed—to modernity. In her construction, Eliot negotiates the paradoxical tension of “European” models of modern nationalism that call for both cosmopolitanism, and a homogenous “national character” which engenders “national cohesion”—a character often delimited along racial and ethnic lines that indicates the failure of civic ideals meant to transcend this very definition. The Jewish figure, whether cosmopolitan or traditional, represents a “separatist character” that threatens “national cohesion” by either exploiting the culturally unmoored nature of the cosmopolitan state through transnational forces like capitalism for individual gain, or by refusing to participate in this modern, political establishment.

To Anderson, it is the specified distance of opinion between Mordecai and Deronda, and Deronda’s detachment and “universal sympathy, that exemplify Eliot’s attempt to strike a balance between the “cultivated particular” of a tradition-bound cultural heritage that impedes participation in the modern state, and the alienation of a cultural and historical repudiation modernity seems to require. While the desire to “steer a middle course between traditionalism and hypermodernism” is not unique to Eliot, her modeling this ideal through the language of Jewish nationalism and idealism “radically challenge[s] the dominant cultural rhetoric” (129) which places Judiasm at each of these polarities. Rather than a figure of the extreme, Eliot asserts that the modern European Jew, as a figure with a culture but not a nation, a “rootedness” without a spatial association and a religion but not necessarily an occluding religious practice, the best suited to negotiate this liminal space and respond to its cultural quandary.

For me, this article made me wonder how the Jewish characters other than Deronda and Mordecai—the two most critics are concerned with—operate in relation to the ideas of nationalism and cultural identity and Jewish nationalism and cultural identity, specifically, that Anderson argues Eliot advocates. But first, before we move to those considerations, a few questions about the article that, hopefully, will inform he later discussion of the literature:

1. Anderson ties the conception of the Jew as potentially both too cosmopolitan and too traditional, a dangerously “untethered” individual and a recalcitrant culturally-bound separatist—which allows Eliot’s manipulation of this discursive space—to Mill’s concern over “national cohesion” and Arnold’s ideas of Hebraism. This underlying discourse ties into last week’s discussion of “chosenness” and the simultaneous need for the existence and rejection of the Jew in the creation of British nationalist identity. For Anderson as well, Judaism represents to Victorian England the informing tradition of Christianity that has been transformed and improved, rendering those within the tradition either static separatists or “unmoored” individualists based on their embrace or rejection of Judaism, unless they are able to be “absorbed” into the more universal and modern British culture. This posits that both universalism and modernism are necessarily Christian ideals. Therefore, the Jewish figure must “convert” or (as Gideon argues) mix, in order to assimilate and participate in the modern state. Does Anderson’s reading of Deronda provide any solution to this in trying to articulate a way to maintain cultural heritage and modern identity? Is that answer Jewish nationalism or revision of both Judaism and modernity or both? What is the role of the “external” or what Arnold claims calcified, nature of a Judiasm bound by “the Law” in placing the Jew at one extreme or the other? Are other non-Protestant/non-Christian figures as irrevocably bound by a religious tradition? If not, why?

2. The tacit connection between universalism and Christianity and Mill’s argument that the benefits of cosmopolitanism cannot overcome a “national cohesion,” seem related to our discussion of Mordecai’s assertion that through the separateness of the Jewish nation, it will become universal (534-35; Hand and Banner conversation). Yet, Anderson states that Deronda’s conception aligns with Mill’s “universalist civic model of nationality” while Mordecai represents a “collectivist-romantic model” of Germain idealism which requires a “national unity” (122-23). How do we read Deronda as an individual which symbolizes a nationalist conception that transcends but does not subsume the individual, in contrast to a concept that “reifies national community…[in] the single individual” and demands “total subsumption into the state” (134)? Is Mordecai’s nationalist doctrine different from the British “universalism” which requires homogeneity in order to sustain the modern state? Is this not both organic and advocating complete “subsumption”? How does Mordecai’s argument tie into the “balancing [of] claims of the particular against those of the universal” (122) that Anderson argues Eliot achieves through Deronda’s cultural journey? Does the “excluded particular” require a certain separateness that enables both cultural ties and modernity?

3. Anderson asserts that Deronda never fully accepts Mordecai’s idea of “guaranteed cultural transmission” (135) which relies on the conception of an organic and racially based bond that is inescapable—an idea that runs counter to what Anderson calls Deronda’s belief in the need for “informed consent” that represents a “profound rejection” of Mordecai’s nationalism (751 in Deronda). Yet, Deronda does come to a “gradual accord” with Mordecai and feels an innate connection before returning to a cultural heritage most prominently represented by Mordecai and his ideas. Does Anderson’s distinction hold up? Are Deronda and Mordecai—and their doctrines—manifestly different enough to maintain Anderson’s delineation? Or does this apparent slippage between the two representations underpin the “reflective dialogic” in the text?

4. If the narrative follows Anderson’s distinctions, how can we view it in terms of the national allegory that we previously rejected as a possibility because there is no nation? Anderson calls Deronda’s history an “allegory about cosmopolitanism.” In light of the role of cosmopolitanism established within the article, could we consider Deronda an allegory of the concept of modern (Jewish) nationalism?

5. If we are to think of Deronda as an allegory, of either cosmopolitanism or nationalist conceptions, what could the following events (listed in no particular order) signify or symbolize: Deronda’s rejection of his grandfather’s exact belief but acceptance of his notion of “separateness with communication (725); Deronda’s marriage to Mirah, and her own stance on her heritage; the Klesmer marriage plot; Lapidoth’s absconding with Deronda’s “heritage” ring; Mordecai’s death, before the trip “East”; the description of and attitudes taken toward the Cohens; the “wandering” Kalonymos and Lenora.

6. Topics I would like to discuss but for which I have no particular questions: femininity in Deronda; the Jew as a “post-colonial subject”; the Meyricks’ stark prejudice; Deronda’s prejudice toward the Cohens.

Jewish Identity and Genetics

Via Matt Yglesias:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/jews-are-by-definition-jewish/