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/

Chosing to be Chosen

I take my title from a comment by Mordecai in the 'Hand and Banner' discussion. He argues that "the sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them" (538). This question of chosenness connects with our discussions on Tuesday, our Kaufmann reading for today, and with larger questions of how race, religion, inheritance, history, nation, and desire are related to agency in the novel.

Consider these broad suggestions/questions for discussion either here or in class.

1) Does Kaufmann's reading of the relation between Jewishness and Englishness change how we might read this same relation in Deronda (the novel) and in Deronda the character? More broadly, what impact does the discourse of Jewish nationality have on our conversation about the anxieties / fantasies about the cosmopolitan / unassimilable Jew within the British state?

2) We briefly discussed the relationship between Jewishness and biological (specifically maternal) ties in the last class. First, think about whether, in today's reading, we see that discourse deployed and for what purpose. Second, think about the moment Sir Hugo reveals he is not Deronda's father. what do you make of the description by the narrator: "After a silence in which Deronda felt like one whose creed is gone before he has religiously embraced another, the baronet said..." How is inheritance figured here? Does the idea of "religiously embrac[ing]" a "creed" suggest a kind of agency while also aligning it with circumstances (birth) outside one's control?

3) "And Gwendolen"? Eliot asks at the beginning of Ch. 45 (echoing her line in Middlemarch, "But why always Dorthea"). What do you make of how agency and ethics are related in Gwendolyn's conversations with Deronda. I'm specifically thinking of pp. 563. On a related note, the (inevitable) disconnect between Gwendolen's projected sense of her importance to Deronda (as well as Grandcourt's level of knowledge) and her actual importance to him and the development of the plot also brings up problems of agency and control. See the narrator's discussion of projection on p. 547. But, also think about how the novel theorizes Grandcourt's power and Gwendolen's own control (or lack thereof) of her own desires and fantasies, as well as how she represents that control (see 606).

4) Broadly related to agency is the question of national aspiration, but I want you to be thinking about the relationship among history, chosenness, choice, inheritance, and national identity. Moreover please think about the way in which the nation and the body are often linked by Mordecai. What kinds of embodiments and re-embodiments does this novel imagine? We'll talk more too about the way assimilation and difference are figured in that conversation.

That's all for now!

Conversion and Tolerance: Britain's Paradox

Ragussis ocuses on the Protestant concept of Jewish conversion in the 19^th century—particularly, the strange double ideology of simultaneous toleration and conversion. The Jew, according to this strange double bind, is merely an “imperfect Christian” who should be converted. This notion of conversion is troubled somewhat by notions of race, in which the Jew does not become a Christian but a “Converted Jew” or an “English Jew.” In this view, there is something essential about the Jew that cannot be changed, even if a change in faith is professed.

Ragussis looks at the various literary forms around conversion—from conversion novels to conversion memoirs. Although he looks to some specific types of texts (like the conversion of the Jewess), he also identifies series of common tropes to most conversion novels, many related to reading:

The Jew to be converted reads Christian books (often in secret)

The Jew “reads anew” a Scripture and suddenly sees it from a Christian perspective

Child converts adult

Servant converts master

The converts are persecuted by other Jews after their conversion

There are secret believers in Jesus Christ throughout the Jewish community

1.) Questions:

1. 1. What role has literature and reading played in Daniel Deronda? Are we seeing the reading trope occurring backwards when Mordechai is disappointed that Daniel does not read Hebrew?

2.) 2. Ragussis notes that England wants to consider itself the “new Israel,” the new chosen nation (17). How do we square this with the inherent anti-Semitism of, for example, the London Society? In short, I guess I’m asking how England is able to balance the seemingly paradoxical ideas of conversion and tolerance?

3.) 3. How does “the Jewish question” relate to the concepts of British identity that we’ve dealt with all semester? How are the notions of inclusion and exclusion, assimilation and Othering, playing out here—and how does it differ from the way that the Irish were figured?

4.) 4, Does Mirah’s character thus far comply with or defy Ragussis’s definition of the Jewess in conversion novels?

5.) 5. When Hans and Mirah discuss her stage-dress, Hans says, “’We must not make you a role of the poor Jewess—or of being a Jewess at all.’” Hans had a secret desire to neutralize the Jewess in private life, which he was in danger of not keeping secret. ‘But it is what I am really. I am not pretending anything. I shall never be anything else,’ said Mirah. ‘I always feel myself a Jewess’” (488).

What do we make of this passage, regarding the concept of Jewish essentialism and, perhaps, the idea of passing? Does Eliot’s novel consistently hold up the idea of Jewish essentialism—as it does here?

The good, the bad and Leavis's Daniel Deronda

In The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis offers a seemingly sexist, and perhaps an anti-Semitic reading of Daniel Deronda. Leavis seems to conflate Eliot’s Zionist inspirations with her femininity and emotion, and finds fault in these qualities because the “determining drive” is from within; her intellect lapses with the Zionist inspirations and are “flights not deriving their impulsion from any external pressure; “the nobility, generosity, and moral idealism are at the same time modes of self-indulgence” (82). He describes the character of Daniel Deronda as “a woman’s creation” (82). Leavis also offers perhaps an anti-Semitic reading of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Many of us may have not read the whole novel yet, and if not, the “bad part” is yet to come. Leavis calls the good part Gwendolen Harleth; the bad part “is represented by Deronda himself, and by what may be called in general the Zionist inspiration” (80). I will intermix questions from Leavis and the novel below, but, as usual, these are just suggestions.

1. Despite Leavis’s assertion that his judgment of the bad part of the novel is based on Eliot’s “diffusely ponderous and abstract” style, can Leavis be read as favoring the Anglican character over the eponymous Jewish character, since he names the good part Gwendolen Harleth? (This question might have to wait for later.)

2. Very early into the good part of the novel, after pawning the necklace that was once her father’s, Gwendolen remarks, “these Jew dealers were so unscrupulous in taking advantage of Christians unfortunate at play!” (19). Daniel Deronda will purchase this necklace and anonymously send it to her. What are we to make of the novel’s opening focus on Gwendolen gambling?

3. The novel’s narrator states that Gwendolen, “it must be owned, was a deep young lady” (36). How might the lines of the poem that preface the novel relate to her character?

4. If Daniel Deronda is “a woman’s creation,” what is Herr Klesmer? For that matter, what is Gwendolen?...What do you make of Eliot’s depiction of women, and her general comments on them—for example, on p. 124.

5. Leavis asserts, “it is quite plain that the ‘duty’ that Deronda embraces—‘ “I considered it my duty—it is the impulse of my feeling—to identify myself . . . with my hereditary people”’—combines moral enthusiasm and the feeling of emotional intensity with essential relaxation in such a way that, for any ‘higher life’ promoted, we may fairly find an analogy in the exalting effects of alcohol. The element of self-indulgence is patent” (84). What about this second attribution of self-indulgence? Prima facie, what do you make of Leavis’s criticism of Deronda’s commitment to Judaism? Is he simply favoring a secular world over a religious (religion=opiate of the masses) or what else is behind this statement?

6. Is it really a problem of the novel that “There is no equivalent of Zionism for Gwendolyn, and even if there were—: the religion of heredity or race is not, as a generalizable solution of the problem, one that George Eliot herself, directly challenged, could have stood by” (84-5). What does this comment mean? Do we judge novels because of the solutions they offer?

7. Interestingly, Leavis finds that elements in Daniel Deronda “seem to come from Dickens rather than from life" (85). Oliver Twist was published in 1837-8, while Daniel Deronda was published in 1876. Could Eliot’s adoption of a Dickensian tone be part of her metacritical response to his hostile handling of the Jew? What about Dickensian elements in Deronda’s prevention of Mirah’s suicide?

8. How might Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy inform the reading of Daniel Deronda so far?

Racing ‘the Jew’

In Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society, Bryan Cheyette attempts to trace the “slipperiness and indeterminacy of ‘the Jew’—as constructed within a semitic discourse—that enables an uncertain literary text to explore the limits of its own foundations, whether they be the ideal of literary ‘realism’; or of liberal ‘culture’; or the Empire; or socialist universalism; or nationalist particularism; or ‘modernist’ post-liberalism” (11-2). Cheyette begins with a study of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), focusing on Arnold’s prediction that Hebraism and Hellenism would provide a type of center for studies of British culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Arnold, Cheyette points out, sought to allow Jewish people to participate in British culture proper, seek public office, etc. Arnold’s idea ran contrary to his Dr. Thomas Arnold, his father, “who considered Jews to be fundamentally incompatible with the ‘teutonic’ element in ‘our English race’” (16). The younger Arnold’s position on Jewish people in England seems almost as violent as his father’s, though, when we consider that MA’s ambivalence about ‘the Jew’ (the idea that Jewish people were at once the embodiment of progress and the vestige of historical medievalism, the artist and the worldly man, etc.) led him to find ‘the Jew’ culturally malleable. Cheyette then discusses how Trollope and Eliot feature Jewish characters, comparing Trollope’s “stereotypical ‘Jew’” to Trollope, who was “an alien outsider needing to be accepted by a hostile society” (32). Cheyette aligns Eliot with MA, claiming that she emphasized “both a higher ‘affinity’ with ‘the Jews’ and, [at once], their ‘superlative peculiarity’” (43). For all three authors, ‘the Jew’ represented a harkening back to Englishness and the future, which allowed ‘the Jew’ (as well as others) into the fold (at the expense of each group’s particularity).

In Sander Gilman’s The Jew’s Body, Jewish bodies are thought about as raced from the start, when Gilman poses the question: Are Jews white? Gilman names and traces several racial stereotypes about Jewish people —beards, impure marriages, and noses—and offers a somewhat less ambivalent notion of ‘Jewishness’: one of utter degeneration. Gilman claims that this idea began to shift in the nineteenth century, however; by the fin de siècle, Anglo-Jewish people began to fear that “their visibility as Jews could come to the fore” and they would be seen as “bearing that disease” that ‘passing’ Jews sought to hide. This physignomical idea about Jewish noses, specifically, led to Jewish doctors like Jacques Joseph offering the modern nose job, seeking purifying fraternal dueling scars—attempting to modify the body to modify their “race.” Gilman ends by discussion how the notion of ‘race’ is often applied only to violently marginalize, aligning her discussion of cosmetic surgery with racial performance among African Americans.

Discussion Questions:

1. Gilman points to the tendency for race to be applied negatively, but Cheyette starts his piece with a discussion of the way “the humanities have … failed to engage with the implications of a post-Holocaust understanding of European civilization,” and that charges of “‘literary antisemitism’” are often omitted where claims of racism would not be (1-2). How might ‘racing’ a group lead to interesting scholarship? Should we be suspicious of that maneuver?

2. Cheyette begins by stating that the “homogenous ‘Western Judeo-Christian’ culture in current theories of ‘colonial discourse’” is problematic because it “does not recognize the ambivalent position of ‘the Jew’” (4). He then acknowledges that he will (admittedly) somewhat arbitrarily start with Matthew Arnold, but defends that point by claiming Arnold to be at the acknowledged “centre of liberal culture” (5). Are those two ideas in conflict, or is Arnold properly historicized?

3. What was the ‘effect’ of Cheyette’s ‘persistent’ use of ‘air quotes’ throughout the ‘entire’ ‘piece’ ‘?’

4. Cheyette seems to use biological linchpins for both Arnold (his relationship with his father) and Trollope (his own position as an outsider to aristocracy) in an argument that is ostensibly big picture. What do we make of that?

5. Gilman states that “[i]n being denied any association with the beautiful and erotic, the Jew’s body was denigrated” (174). What if we were to flip that model with the case of, say, the Irish Girl? Does eroticizing the body have the same effect?

The Spies (1933)

6. How might we respond to this clip from the Marx Brothers’ film The Spies (1933) after reading Gilman’s piece?

The Irish Dracula (?)

Joseph Valente tackles—or embraces, rather—“The Metrocolonial Vampire” (chapter 3) in his book Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. In this chapter, Valente first attempts to link textual evidence in Dracula to Irishness. Then he moves on to discuss broader ideas of postcolonialism in the novel, discussing national allegory, binary opposition, colonization, and reverse colonization.

The trouble with his chapter is that he does not sufficiently connect Irishness to Dracula: What makes the text inherently Irish? It’s more acceptable to read Dracula through a postcolonial lens in general, but linking the text to the Irish specifically is problematic. Valente ties the novel to the Irish in many ways, but many of his links are tenuous. Let’s take a look at some of them (general format: evidence in the novel/Valente's associating it to Irishness):

I. Transylvania means “beyond the forest”/ “beyond the Pale” refers to “the broad expanse of Ireland that remained outside and resistant to British military and political control for most of the colonial epoch” (51)

a. “the name of Dracula’s self-identified tribal group, the Szekelys…means ‘at the frontier or beyond’” (51)

My response: I think the connections are weak and do not provide sufficient links to the Irish.

II. Jonathan Harker describes the Eastern European peasants as immodest, idolatrous/Valente says this is in line with perceptions of the Irish at the time (52)

My response: I don’t see how any “Othered” group wasn’t viewed as immodest and idolatrous.

III. Harker identifies four nationalities in the region: Wallachs, Saxons, Magyars, and Szdkelys/Valente says this provides “a suspiciously neat symmetry with the four main ethnicities of modern Ireland (Anglos, Celts, Norse, and their subdivision, the Normans) (53)

My response: Harker lists four nationalities in Transylvania, and Ireland has four major ethnicities, and this is supposed to be a connection? Next!

IV. Valente quotes Auerbach and Skal that "the history of Transylvania is the history of whom it belongs to" / Valente follows up to say “the same has of course been true of Ireland, which James Joyce likens to a ‘pawn shop’" (54). V. There was anxiety at the time of devolution/Valente identifies current Anglo-Irish distrust. VI. “Stoker’s Transylvania has suffered a famine and plague”/19^th-century Ireland did as well (55). VII. Dracula is a vampire/Irish had long been viewed as “a species of parasite for which the dominant metaphor was none other than the vampire” (56)

My response: In categories IV-VII, Valente uses details from Dracula to link them to Ireland, but they all seem to be details that could be linked to many other countries. They’re not inherently Irish.

VIII. From Valente: “Although Dracula's aristocratic bearing, standing, and pedigree would seem to exempt him from any direct allegorical association with the urban underclass, it has been remarked that the Victorian bourgeoisie often divined a similar laxity, dissoluteness, impropriety, and unrespectability in the aristocratic and working classes, a likeness that the Transylvanian Count, with his rank odor, his nocturnal dissipations, his performance of menial household chores, and his fondness for dirt naps, might well be seen to embody. But what is important to remember for our purposes is that only in Ireland did this convergence of high and low social grades constitute a regular and obtrusive feature of both cultural stereotype and self-representation.” (59-60)

My response: Valente begins to make this a class issue, but it still doesn’t ensure inherent Irishness.

IX. Valente asserts that “‘Dracula-in-England’ seems to have been built trait by stereotypical trait as parody of stock perceptions of the Catholic Irish in England” (60).

a. Valente goes on to lists the traits of vampires/the perception of the Irish as follow: (1) live in squalor and spread disease, (2) reckless overbreeders, (3) congenitally and pathologically lawless, (4) resemble children in their underdeveloped rationality and want of discipline, (5) alien subversives whose arrival amounted to an ‘invasion,’ (6) just drink too much. (61)

My response: All six items listed here are superficial. How are these different from the general perception of an “Other”?

X. “As several critics have noted, the name Dracula puns on the Gaelic phrase droch fhola, meaning "bad blood," a tag that seems to trace the social anomie plaguing the imperial metropole to its Irish occupants.” (61)

My response: Can “Dracula” simply be a clever use of Gaelic phrase droch fhola, meaning "bad blood," and it doesn’t necessarily establish him as Irish?

XI. Valente notes that the Irish are depicted as blood-sucking bats in 1885 (64-65)

My response: What immigrant group at the time wasn’t viewed as vampiric?

XII. Valente says the novel pulls more from Irish tales than “vampire lore” (52-53)

My response: Bram Stoker was of Irish descent. Where else would he get his fairytales from? What if Stoker was Swedish and incorporated Swedish lore? Would we think Dracula was actually a Swede? Admittedly, that’s an oversimplification; however, a person will pull from what he or she knows, and I feel that Stoker is just pulling from the lore with which he is familiar. I realize that this kind of opens the door to a potential connection. One could posit that Stoker could have been acutely aware of England’s treatment of Ireland and this could have emerged unconsciously, but I’m not so sure this is the case.

In sum, a postcolonial approach can be applied to the text, and Valente does a fine job in doing this. However, he does not provide sufficient evidence that issues in colonialism/reverse colonialism in the novel are inherently Irish.

Are there any thoughts on this? Do you believe that Valente’s connections are strong? He provides more examples than the twelve that I provided here. I didn’t strategically leave out the most compelling, so please provide any that you think should be included in the discussion.

I also have a question of form. I believe most critics don't try to pretend that they are presenting the author's intent, but Valente seems to assert that Stoker was envisioning an Irish Dracula. He says that "Stoker set about representing Ireland's otherness to itself" (51), and "Stoker entertains the popular association of Irishness with racial inferiority for the express purpose of disrupting the logic of essentialism whereby such an association might be sustained" (67). Valente seems to be making the case that Stoker consciously intended for the Irish Question to emerge in his text. Is this an acceptable approach?

Stoker, Craft, Schaffer (and Wilde)

Most of what Craft and Schaffer wrote seemed pretty straightforward and coherent.  Here are a few questions that came to me as I read the articles.

How does Craft’s discussion of desire relate to the “New Woman,” or at least, the characters’ view of it?  Does Dracula reflect a fear of a woman who is masculinized? or simply one liberated? 

To what extent is the apparent anxiety over homosexual desire also anxiety over nonreproductive sex?  Vampirism involved reproduction in a nonsexual/nonreproductive way.  Dracula reproduces to increase his kind, yet in a sense there is no unique offspring.  Instead of creating a new life, the vampire transforms an existing one.  Is the vampire’s rejection of any maternal role related?  Rather than birth children, the vampire women in the novel devour them. 

Craft identifies some specific dualisms—“life and death, spirit and flesh, male and female” (116)—for which the text shows ambivalence.  What of science and religion?  Is there any  possibility of a rapprochement for any of these dualisms?

Craft notes that “Van Helsing exhausts his store of ‘brave men,’ whose generous gifts of blood, however efficacious, fail finally to save Lucy from the mobilization of desire” (121).  Are the men in Dracula anxious about virility, consumed by fears or doubts about sexual performance?  If so, how does that relate to the (ambivalent?) attitude toward gender roles that develops in the novel?

If male relationships are mediated by women (e.g., the vampire women mediate the homosexual moments between Dracula and Harker), how really does that represent women and their sexuality?  Are the women simply beards for the men in their lives?  It strikes me that their role is more than that.

Schaffer’s discussion of imprisonment was interesting but seemed underdeveloped, perhaps relying to heavily on comparison’s with Wilde’s suffering in prison.  I wonder if its metaphoric weight bears further discussion, in terms of desire, repressions, etc.

Dion Boucicault The Octoroon: or, Life in Louisiana (1859)

David Mayer: Encountering Melodrama

Mayer’s “Encountering melodrama,” avoiding the monolithic definition of the genre, characterizes melodrama by its social function as a sort of secular ritual and its rhetoric of disguise. In the age wherein traditional sources of authority were lost, melodrama has provided the audience with an imaginary solution for social anxiety in place of the lost authority. With its Manichean structure of the hero vs. the villain and the final expulsion of the latter, melodrama makes the world emotionally legible, directing itself toward the restoration of the sense of community. At the same time, melodrama oftentimes represents the immediate social concerns in apparently escapist disguise, a “non-threatening metaphor which enables an audience to approach and contemplate at close range maters which are otherwise disturbing to discuss” (147). Like allegory, melodrama’s central rhetoric is metaphor/personification, in which the villain, a major driving force of the play, functions as a tangible metaphor for such “unresolvable contradictions and conspicuous incongruities,” (150) which is to be exorcised from the stage as the microcosms of the world.

Katy L. Chiles: Constructinos of American Whiteness

Chiles’ reading of The Octoroon echoes with Mayer’s formulation of melodrama, with its emphasis both on social function of the genre and on its central trope of disguise. According to Chiles, what The Octoroon restages under the guise of the traditional theme of tragic mulatto is anxiety over American whiteness, which in fact is leveraged by the presence and exclusion of racial Others other than black population—Native Americans, Irish, and Mexicans. With its sensational themes best exemplified by miscegenation between white (George) and black (Zoe), social disquietude over “other Others” is made invisible on the surface of the play. Yet, Boucicault’s palimpsestic character formation of M’Closly as Yankee/Irish and Wahnotee as Native American/Mexican enables the community of Terresbonne plantation as the microcosms of the U.S. to dispel those racially liminal characters, thereby ultimately establishing the normative American whiteness. Chiles further argues Boucicault’s strategy of international surrogation, in which the North/South binary itself becomes the disguise of the British/Irish conflict, showing the intricate metaphorical structure of The Octoroon.

How should we expand Chiles’ nuanced reading of the interlocked relationship between race and nation imbricated manifold in The Octoroon? Following are my questions, but I’m afraid they might be too specific. Please feel free to add discussion questions.

① Employment of racial stereotype: If an Irish playwright Boucicault, as Chiles argues, projects the stereotype of Stage Irish onto M’Closky the villain, what does this racial self-representation possibly mean? In The Wild Irish Girl, Owenson also avails herself of racial stereotypes formed by the English gaze in characterization of Irish characters (albeit positive one). How does Irish writers’ employment of racial stereotypes ascribed by English serve to Irish self-representation?

② Historical context: After over five decades from WIG and the Act of Union, how the relationship between Ireland and England has changed, and how the play reflects the change? Immediate historical situation we might have to take into consideration is Great Famine (1845-52). The famine, whose enormous damage is often ascribed to the mismanagement by England, caused the Irish mass emigration to the US, which provides a background of the social anxiety lurking under the play. Did the discursive relationship between Ireland and England change after introducing the United States as a third term?

③ Significance of surrogation: The Octoroon is based on the novel by an Irish-American novelist Thomas Mayne Reid, The Quadroon (1856). Neither Boucicault nor Reid actually resided in the South (though Reid stayed in New Orleans for six months, upon whose experience he is said to have written The Quadroon). Why both writers with Irish origin are attracted to the South as a source of their creation? If, as Chiles argues, Boucicault relocates Irish/British conflict onto the South, why did he need such relocation/surrogation? What is the significance of the form of melodrama for this surrogation?

④ George as an “European”: According to Chiles, George, as opposed to “illegitimate” American whiteness of M’Closky, represents normative American whiteness, which M’Closky desires. Yet, the play highlights George’s outsider position as a quasi-European, and his “European air” is associated specifically with France. What does this twist, in which George’s legitimacy as an American is leveraged by his European education, possibly mean? How does “Europe” (represented by France) function in this play?

⑤ Function of Law: “Law,” both literally and figuratively, is highlighted throughout the play in many ways. In particular, the dialogue between M’Closky and Scudder (167) seems to focus on the opposition between the law (whose judgment M’Closky cries out for), and Nature (by which Scudder condemn M’Closky). What does this contrast mean? How does the law function in this play?

⑥ Representation of race: How is race represented in this play? The scene in which Zoe confesses her racial origin (147), she uses physical signs (the color of the nails, eyes, the roots of her hair) as indication of the “one black drop” of her blood. In what other ways is race figured in the play?

Again, please feel free to add questions to the list!

How can we read (Wild Irish Girl) IG in light of Trumpener’s article? Can we do it the other way around?

Trumpener does not provide an elaborate interpretation of the novel but focuses her attention largely on how Scott’s legacy has overshadowed and perhaps obliterated any nuanced understanding of the complex legacy of the national tale as a genre and its relationship to the better known historical novel famously inaugurated by Scott.

In her conclusion she recapitulates her thesis that was implicit throughout the article. “Progress” is nothing but a retroactive (re)construction. In her opinion, the national tale in its later, more complicated incarnations embodies how past turns into legend which is even true of our understanding of the historical novel.

Back to our own novel that Trumpener regards as one of the formative, pre-Waverly specimens of the national tale. Perhaps we could focus a little bit on the three motifs that she identifies as important features of the genre as a whole: the journey, the marriage, the national character. What about it? What about her account of the relationship between the formation of generic conventions and perhaps that history that frames, marks those literary developments? What is the relationship between literature (genre) and history? What about a historicized account of this relationship? Which one comes first, history or literature? How does the answer to this question shall affect our own attempts at understanding the past both literary and historical?

Published in 1806, in post-Union GB, IG perhaps is a straightforward allegorical postcolonial novel. If we regard the Union Act as a sort of internal colonization that transforms Ireland into the periphery and England into the metropolitan center, the novel thus enacts a defensive re-humanization, reconstruction of culture and population that has been denigrated, emptied of significance and perhaps simply appropriated by the colonialist center. Thus everything within the novel has to become typically representative, pure essence that is emblematic of a distinct cultural, historical, and geographical territory (we could perhaps recall Jameson’s argument about the inevitability of national allegory in the composition of 3^rd world literature). Trumpener I recall somehow briefly emphasized the significance of place within the generic conventions of the national tale, how can we account for the allegorical, spatially-centered nature of this genre as they are enacted in IG? How can culture or nation be spatialized, or put differently how can space be culturalized, nationalized?

What do you make of the detailed, elaborate footnotes that accompany the narrative? I am reminded of the slave narratives that had to be authorized, vouched for by white abolitionists in order to gain public acceptance. Aside from that desire to augment plausibility for the narrative, what else can we learn from a meditation on their parallel presence within the novel?

What about the desire on the part of the Irish characters within the novel to link their past to that of Greece? What about the detailed descriptions that were given of rites, rituals, and ceremonies along with an explanation of their relevant mythologies and superstitions?

What about the characterization of Glorvina? Can we, should we, take her as the gendered embodiment of her nation, culture? What about her marriage at the end? What about the question of gaze that becomes central if we focus on her part within the narrative? She as the object of the gaze? She objectified, abused, expropriated? What about she objectifying the protagonist? What about she performing another fictional narrative for the protagonist who has assumed a false identity? What about the protagonist being fascinated by a fictional performance that he takes to be nothing but true? What about the protagonist as object of another gaze?

Can we look at the novel as an example of destructive creation? An attempt to resuscitate (reconstruct) a less powerful nation’s cultural heritage (past) that is simultaneously antithetical to its specificity and heterogeneity and deadly of its irreducible vitality? How can we represent ourselves, how can we represent others? How can we not to?

What does the novel reveal to its contemporary English readership? What kind of reaction did this novel provoke in its English audience? Can we imagine (at least some of them) reflecting on the significance of retroactive reconstruction to the consolidation of traditions and cultural and national continuities? Did it occur to them to perhaps question the essentialized homogeneity that is enacted obtrusively in the narrative and perhaps is the cause for the defensive reaction that the novel is within Britain?

What do we make of the epistolary form of the narrative, If we go beyond a traditional reading of it as an effect of the nascent evolution of the novel as a genre at the time?

The protagonist reveals how he wanted to learn more about the secret life of Glorvina through an attentive reading of the wordy narrative elicited from her garrulous servant? A sort of search for the valuable latent content from its surface; what if we regard the whole novel, as perhaps I have been doing so far, as such a verbose account that contains some telling symptoms that reveal the important hidden content? What is the hidden content?

What does the novel reveal about the English? If Irishness is something that can be distinctly narrativized, what about Englishness? And if something can be narrativized, which one comes first, that something or the narrative? Or perhaps together dialectically?

What about the political effectiveness of the narrative as a whole? How can we counter deleterious effects of essentialized reductive stereotypes that mediate our relations with others (individuals, religions, nations, cultures, narratives)? Can we neutralize their harmful reductiveness by counter salubrious stereotypes? Can we send a careful observer among them to record for us their humane excess that cannot be contained within those stereotypes? How can they know us without stereotypical narratives?

What about the long discussion about the origins of Ossianic poetry within the novel? What about the persistent emphasis that is placed on hospitality? What about reading the novel as a shameless attempt at touristic commodification? How can culture be commoditized? What about nation? How can that be objectified, elaborated, located in the essence of a particular geography or tradition? Is the novel a re-enactment of the invention of traditions (here self-consciously by a peripheral nation or culture to re-assert its value)? What does it leave out? What does it gain?

My questions, thoughts are admittedly perhaps deliberately broad. What other questions can we add to our list?