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!