Op. Cit.

OP. CIT.: UMA REVISTA DE ESTUDOS ANGLO-AMERICANOS / A JOURNAL OF ANGLO-AMERICAN

STUDIES, 12 (2010)

FICHA TÉCNICA
Op. Cit.: Uma Revista de Estudos Anglo-Americanos / A Journal of Anglo-American Studies
é publicada pela ASSOCIAÇÃO PORTUGUESA DE ESTUDOS ANGLO-AMERICANOS. Com uma
periodicidade anual, a Revista pretende ser, segundo o art. 2º do seu regulamento,
“uma referência inequívoca à produção cultural em língua inglesa, trazendo para
Portugal os grandes debates da actualidade, e intervindo ao nível internacional nos
vários campos de estudo das anglofonias”. É dirigida por uma Comissão Editorial,
composta por um Director e pelo Presidente da APEAA, e por mais cinco elementos
de diferentes universidades portuguesas.

Presidente da Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Anglo-Americanos

Maria Antónia Lima
Universidade de Évora
Largo dos Colegiais 2, 7004-516 Évora
Tel. 351 266 740 875; Fax 351 266 740 831
Correio electrónico: garp@uevora.pt

Director da Revista
Isabel Fernandes
Departamento de Estudos Anglísticos
Faculdade de Letras – Universidade de Lisboa
1600-214 Lisboa – Portugal
Tel.351-217920000; fax 217920063
Correio electrónico: isacrfernandes@sapo.pt

Revisão de texto
Ana Raquel Lourenço Fernandes / Rita Queiroz de Barros

Membros da Comissão Editorial

Carlos Azevedo (cazevedo@letras.up.pt)
Isabel Ermida (iermida@ilch.uminho.pt)
Maria Jacinta Matos (jacinta.matos@sapo.pt)
Mário Jorge Torres (mjorgetorres@yahoo.com)
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©APEAA e os respectivos autores

 Op. Cit.

Nº 12: 2010
Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Anglo-Americanos
 ÍNDICE / CONTENTS

Editorial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

BÁRBARA ARIZTI
The Experience of Alterity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy . . . . . . . . . . 11

RUI VITORINO AZEVEDO

Not Quite White: the Ethno-Racial Identity of a Portagee . . . . . . . . 19

AMAIA IBARRARAN BIGALONDO

Depictions of fatherhood in contemporary Mexican/Chicano
corridos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

ANA CLARA BIRRENTO

Self – Negotiating Borders, Constructing Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

MARIA SOFIA PIMENTEL BISCAIA

Spellbound by matricide: the Christchurch affair in Angela Carter’s
The Christchurch Murder and in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures . . . 73

TERESA BOTELHO
Performing Selves in “post-Soul” literature: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia . .83

CARMEN CAMUS CAMUS

Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By & Martin Ritt’s Hud:
An Intersemiotic and Interlinguistic Paratextual Study . . . . . . . . . 97

ALEXANDRA CHEIRA
“A Walking Metamorphosis”: para uma Leitura da Fusão de Opostos nas
Construções e Figurações da Identidade Sexual Feminina em “A Stone
Woman” de A. S. Byatt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .115

TERESA COSTA
William Carlos Williams and Charles Sheeler: Modernist Depictions of
Arcadia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .135

LAURA ESTEBAN-SEGURA
Medicine for Children in Medieval English Texts:
A Corpus-Based Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .149

7
PAULA ALEXANDRA VARANDA RIBEIRO GUIMARÃES
Intimamente na Sombra do Bardo: Ressonâncias de Shakespeare na Lírica
Amorosa de Elizabeth Barrett Browning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .161

MARIA ANTÓNIA LIMA

From Videodrome to Dexter: ‘Long Live the New Flesh!’ . . . . . . . . .181

ELISABETE CRISTINA LOPES

Between the Beauty and the Beast: An Analysis of the Performativity of
Gender in Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters . . . . . . . . . . . . .189

JOÃO DE MANCELOS
Our Traumas, Our Hopes: The Dynamics of a Multicultural Community
in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .209

ANA CRISTINA MENDES

Mira Nair at the Bazaar: Selling the Exotic Erotic in Kama Sutra . . . .217

MARTA MIQUEL-BALDELLOU
A Case of Transatlantic Intertextuality: Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Edgar
Allan Poe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .223

ÁLVARO SEIÇA NEVES

A Literatura Como Eco: House of Leaves de Mark Z. Danielewski . . .241

LICÍNIA PEREIRA
A Brave New World: Using the Web for American Studies. . . . . . .257

MARIA DE JESUS CRESPO CANDEIAS VELEZ RELVAS

The Renaissance Portraits of Two Kings and One Cardinal . . . . . . .267

CARMEN MARÍA FERNÁNDEZ RODRÍGUEZ

Blurring the Lines Between the Nations: Slippery Identities in Maria
Edgeworth’s Patronage (1814) and Ormond (1817) . . . . . . . . . . . .277

EDGARDO MEDEIROS DA SILVA

Self and Nation in Henry Adams’s Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .289

LUÍSA MARIA VILHENA RIBEIRO DE SOUSA

O Corpo Humano como Ícone Vivo na Retórica Puritana de Winthrop e
na Estética Barroca de Caravaggio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .307

Recensões / Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .319

Resumos de Dissertações / Dissertations Abstracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
Notas sobre os Autores / Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
 EDITORIAL

The present volume of Op.Cit. will be the third under my editorial respon-
sibility and, as such, the last. It has the same main characteristics as the two
preceding volumes: it is miscellaneous in subject-matter, includes essays in
both English (16) and Portuguese (4) and has received a significant number of
contributions from abroad. However, the most notable feature of the current
issue is the fact that the majority of its contributions are papers written in the
field of American studies. This has led to the need of reinforcing the American
side of the Editorial Board through the incorporation of some extra members,
in order not to overburden the current ones with ever more work. A word
of thanks is due here to Carlos Azevedo and Mário Jorge Torres for their
willingness to accept my belated invitation and for their timely and precious
help.
At this stage, I firmly believe that, with these last three volumes, Op.Cit.
has reached a stage of maturity and a definite profile as an international
scholarly journal in the field of English and American Studies in Europe. This
became apparent also in the increasing number of contributions received and
published: from 9 in number 10, to 11 in number 11, and 22 in the present
issue. Moreover, the system of double-blind peer-reviewing guarantees its
academic excellence and affords indubitable credibility to a project that justly
deserves to be internationally indexed. To my mind, this could (should?) be
the next desirable step in the journal’s history.
Before leaving, I would like, first and foremost, to thank the Editorial
Board of Op.Cit., without whose strenuous efforts and invaluable help none
of this would have been possible. I consider myself a most fortunate editor in
having been able to rely fully on the competence and reliability of its members,
not only in all academic matters, but also in meeting the inevitable and often
untimely deadlines that had to be observed.
Ana Raquel Fernandes and Rita Queiroz de Barros were extremely
cooperative at all times and they are to be credited for their careful proofreading
of volumes 11 and 12. My most heartfelt thanks to them both!

9
 I would also like to thank the President of APEAA, Maria Antónia Lima
for her continuing support and trust, which has been invaluable to me over
these last couple of years. Being able to share the burden of responsibility in
this way has made everything so much easier…
Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to the contributors of the present
issue and to all those whose work was included in the previous two for their
implicit trust in our journal – without their efforts, Op.Cit. simply would not
exist! Thank you all!

ISABEL FERNANDES
University of Lisbon

10 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 THE EXPERIENCE OF ALTERITY IN JAMAICA KINCAID’S LUCY1

Bárbara Arizti

Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, published in 1990, recounts the story of a nineteen-

year-old black girl who leaves her unnamed Caribbean island in order to work
as an au pair in the United States. Like Kincaid herself, as well as many other
West Indians, Lucy becomes part of the twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean
diaspora. Migration to the ex-metropolis and to North America is, to a great
extent, a side-effect of colonialism, which brought about, in the words of
Philip Kasinitz, “chronic overpopulation, scarce resources, seclusion, and
limited opportunities to small island nations” (in Sagar 472). For Kasinitz, the
phenomenon of emigration is contemplated in the West Indies as “a survival
strategy […] a normal and expected part of the adult life cycle, a virtual rite of
passage” (in Sagar 472).
It becomes clear from the opening pages of the novel that Lucy’s physical
journey to the United States will trigger off an inner journey of self-discovery.
As a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, Lucy focuses on the process of
maturation of its main character and how she tries to forge an identity she
can feel relatively comfortable with. Lucy has her own personal reasons for
emigrating. Her one-time fulfilling relationship with Annie, her mother, has
turned into a suffocating link that threatens to engulf her as a person: “I had
come to feel that my mother’s love for me was designed solely to make me into
an echo of her; and I didn’t know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead
than become just an echo of someone” (36). So, having left behind a family
and a land that she both loves and hates, Lucy arrives in the United States
in the hope of freeing herself from the burden of a past that oppresses her.
The formation of an identity has a very clear relational component. It
is through the bonds Lucy establishes with various Others in the course of
the novel that she will progressively mould her identity. In particular, the
figures of her biological mother and Mariah, her employer, who fills the role

11
of mother figure in New York, appear as the most powerful Other-figures
in the text. Lucy’s search for a personal identity is further problematised by
the fact that it occurs against the backdrop of a colonial past. The figure of
the mother reverberates in Lucy, as in many other postcolonial texts, with
echoes of the Motherland. The Self/Other relationship is also enacted in Lucy
as the binary pair colonizer/colonized. As she tries to reshape herself as a
person, Lucy investigates into the many ways the coordinates of imperialism
traverse her as an ex-colonial subject. Her relationship with her mother and
her employer is also crucial in this sense, the former as a representative of the
colonial Self, and the latter as a colonial Other that has internalised some of
the dictates of imperial discourse and tries to impose them on her daughter.
It is my intention in this paper to explore the experience of otherness in Lucy,
both in its personal and political dimensions, with a view to positioning the
novel within the current discourses on narrative ethics. For this, I will mainly
draw on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity, which I now move on to
summarise.
Emmanuel Levinas is one of the main philosophical pillars of the turn
to ethics that has characterised literary criticism since the end of the nineteen
eighties. In particular, his theories have been invoked by critics concerned with
defining and endorsing a postmodern post-foundational ethics. This ethics
affirms the validity of making ethical claims without resorting to normative
codes, categorical imperatives or universal moral principles. Critics working
within this current address the text not as a source of timeless moral truths in
the manner of the old liberal humanist tradition led by Arnold and Leavis, but
as a complex structure, open to different perspectives.
That ethics precedes philosophy is possibly the main tenet of Levinas’s
work. Ethical responsibility is for him a “persecuting obsession” (Levinas
111), “a debt contracted before any freedom” (10), which “goes against
intentionality” (111). It does not originate in decisions taken consciously by
a subject on the basis of a set of external values: “The ego is not just a being
endowed with certain qualities called moral which it would bear as a substance
bears attributes” (117). Christina Kotte (71) summarises his approach to ethics
in the following words:
Rather than presupposing some universal, timeless moral norms or principles
that would rest on a secure rational foundation, there are no categories or
concepts knowable prior to what becomes the decisive ethical moment in
Levinas’ philosophy: the encounter with the singular, irreducible Other.

Ethical responsibility is prompted by the encounter with the Other, or the

face, as Levinas also puts it: “The Other (l’Autre) thus presents itself as human
Other (Autrui); it shows a face and […] infinitely overflows the bounds of
knowledge” (in Peperzak et al 12). The Other for Levinas is always already

12 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

radically different and resists “being dominated by or reduced to whatever
interests or assumptions condition my understanding” (Sim 263). Often,
our attempts to know the Other turn into movements of appropriation that
reduce the Other to the Same, and this ethical moment par excellence turns into
a rather unethical imposition. “Far from genuine ethical regard, Levinas calls
this an egoism” (Sim 263) and relates this mode of thinking, characteristic of
Western philosophy, with totalising and repressive political structures (264).
In the words of Andrew Gibson (65):
the cruelties and injustices of imperialism and patriarchy and the miseries
that have been their consequence may finally be inseparable from Western
ontology, from a habit of thought that deems it possible and necessary to
speak of and therefore master the other as whole, to reduce the other to the
terms of the same.

Is there a form of relating to the Other that resists the temptation of subsuming
it within the Self? The key for Levinas is to avoid bringing the Other to terms
and confidently open ourselves to the experience of alterity:
I offer myself to the other, with a gesture that Levinas expresses in the phrase
‘Here I am’. The will to know the other or to approach the other in terms of
knowledge becomes responsiveness to and responsibility for the other. The
ego is deposed, gives up its drive to sovereignty and enters into ethics, into
social relationship, dialogue, disinterestedness. (Gibson 25)

Meeting the Other on ethical ground requires, then, an escape from the limits
of the Self, a dissolution of the confines of our self-sameness which challenges
the conventional idea of the subject: “Subjecthood can only be conceived of,
not merely as radically and definitively incomplete, but as intrinsically a
projection towards the future, un sujet-à-venir. The subject is only thinkable
as already on its way elsewhere and, in that respect, primordially ethical”
(Gibson 38).
It is my contention that Lucy’s decision to build her identity outside
universal normative principles aligns the novel with a post-foundational
approach to ethics. Lucy will systematically oppose any external referent,
be it human-made codes or universal ethical imperatives attributed to God.
There are some instances in the novel in which she dismisses pre-existing
frameworks. As an example, she pours scorn on males in the following
terms:
Everybody knew that men have no morals, that they do not know how to
behave, that they do not know how to treat other people: It was why men
like laws so much; it was why they had to invent such things – they need a
guide. When they are not sure what to do, they consult this guide. (142)

In a similar vein, by the end of the novel, Lucy will reject transcendental
principles imposed ‘from above’: “I supposed I still believed in God; after

Bárbara Arizti 13
all, what else could I do? But no longer could I ask God what to do, since the
answer, I was sure, would not suit me” (146). These two comments support
a view of ethics always in the making in which the individual does not count
on external givens to act and make judgements. But beyond this, what I
would like to explore in this paper is the kind of ethics to be derived from the
portrayal of alterity in the novel.
The encounter with alterity takes different forms in Lucy. I here purport
to adopt a complementary perspective in which I will first approach Lucy
as Other and then move on to analyse her as Self and investigate the kind
of relationships she establishes with some of the Other figures in the novel.
Paraphrasing Levinas, Christopher Falzon (33) defines the Other as “an
absolute difference, a truly other, in the sense of that which is genuinely new,
unexpected, unpredictable, something which comes from ‘outside’”. “It is
that”, Falzon adds, “which has independence from us, which resists or eludes
our efforts to impose ourselves upon it, and which can in turn influence us,
affect and transform us”. The parallelisms between this definition and the
way Lucy is characterised as the figure of the Other are striking. From the
perspective of the North-American family she works for, Lucy does indeed
come from ‘outside’, not just because she comes from the West Indies but
because she refuses to be “at home” despite all their efforts to integrate her
into their community. “I seemed not to be a part of things”– she says, echoing
her employers – “as if I didn’t live in the house with them, as if they weren’t
like a family to me, as if I were just passing through, just saying one long
Hallo!, and soon would be saying a quick Goodbye! So long! It was very nice”
(13). This is the reason why they call her “The Visitor”, a label which points
to her status as a diasporic subject and lends her an aura of impermanence.
In the opinion of Arapajita Sagar (474), Lucy clings to this label and “chooses
always to be a Visitor in the first world”.
Lucy is also wholly Other in the sense that she overflows all ideas the other
characters have of her and belligerently resists definition. She is portrayed as
an unpredictable person, bent on transgressing social codes of propriety and
resisting interpellation into any naturalising discourses. As Diane Simmons
(133) puts it: “if Lucy is defined by anything […], it is her refusal to be
defined”. Her efforts are mainly directed towards warding off her mother and
Mariah’s attempts to make her in their own image: “[My mother] would have
been mystified as to how someone who came from inside her would want to
be anyone different from her” (36). Both Mariah and Annie, Lucy’s mother,
have a tendency to see others as extensions of themselves, while Lucy strives
to preserve her own particularity. Mariah, a well-meaning but patronising
upper-middle-class woman, tries to make sense of Lucy’s experiences through
various intellectual discourses, white liberal feminism in particular:

14 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Mariah wanted to rescue me. She spoke of women in society, women in
history, women in culture, women everywhere. But I couldn’t speak, so I
couldn’t tell her that my mother was my mother and that society and history
and culture and other women in general were something else altogether […].
Mariah had completely misinterpreted my situation. My life could not really
be explained by this thick book that made my hands hurt as I tried to keep
it open. My life was at once something more simple and more complicated
than that” (131-132).

In line with Levinas, for whom the ethical encounter is always concrete and
personal and is first and foremost an encounter with a face (Gibson 63), Lucy
resists Mariah’s abstractions and generalisations.
Annie, Lucy’s mother, is portrayed as a powerful woman, a phallic
mother that tries to inculcate in her daughter the dictates of colonialism she
herself has internalised. As a child, Lucy was very much attached to her: “my
mother knew me well, as well as she knew herself: I, at the time, even thought
of us as identical” (130). After the birth of her three brothers when she was
nine, Lucy felt neglected by her mother. She describes the new situation as
“the end of a love affair, perhaps the only true love in my whole life I would
ever know” (132). Since then on she will behave in a very rebellious way and
will try to short-circuit her mother’s efforts to make a proper Afro-Saxon girl
of her. Annie’s main concern is that Lucy should become a “slut”, the Other
to the “lady” in the Victorian moral paradigm generalised under colonial rule.
And this is precisely what Lucy is determined to become, as she admits in a
letter to her mother:
my whole upbringing had been devoted to preventing me from becoming a
slut; I then gave a brief description of my personal life, offering each detail
as evidence that my upbringing had been a failure and that, in fact, life as a
slut was quite enjoyable, thank you very much. (127-128)

Paradoxically, it is Annie herself that reinforces Lucy’s position as Other

when she tells her that her name is short for Lucifer: “I named you after Satan
himself. […] What a botheration from the moment you were conceived” (152).
Lucy’s identity acquires a mythical quality as she gladly assumes the role of the
antihero in the story of Genesis (O’Brien 76): “I was transformed from failure
to triumph. It was the moment I knew who I was” (152). Lucy’s response to
her mother and Mariah’s attempts to define her in their own terms is often an
angry one. For her, as well as for Kincaid, anger fulfils a therapeutic function
and is instrumental as a resistance strategy (Paravisini-Gebert 15): “You are
a very angry person, aren’t you?” and her [Mariah’s] voice was filled with
alarm and pity. Perhaps I should have said something reassuring; perhaps
I should have denied it. But I did not. I said, “Of course I am. What do you
expect” (96).

Bárbara Arizti 15
 In a West-Indian context Lucy’s anger and her insistence on embracing
the role of demoniacal scandalous Other resonate with literary echoes.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is, in fact, one of the most powerful intertexts
underlying Lucy’s search for identity. A must in the curriculum of colonial
education, Brontë’s novel was a cult text of colonial female subjectivity, and
also one of Kincaid’s favourites. However, its intertextual presence in Lucy
does not help its protagonist consolidate a sense of Self but rather points to
her identity crisis (Payette 2). Lucy is compelled to choose between “tame”
Jane – the symbol of the white, pure, and moral lady – and “wild” Bertha
– the sexually excessive immoral “other” woman. Although both Lucy and
Jane are young females who desire to be autonomous among oppressive
social circumstances, identification with her is very problematic for obvious
reasons. In the words of Patricia Payette (9), Jane “is a figure of white, English
womanhood whose life and lifestyle is not only denied to [her], but is dependent
on [her] exclusion”. Lucy is perfectly aware of the racial inequalities on which
her employers’ lifestyle rests: “The other people sitting down to eat dinner
all looked like Mariah’s relatives; the people waiting on them all looked like
mine” (32). Her identification with Bertha Mason also presents problems, first
because she is a white Creole while Lucy is a descendant of African slaves,
and second because taking her as a role model means grounding her identity
on a marginal character, described in infra-human terms, a character that is
silenced and suppressed in order to pave the way to Jane Eyre’s progress.
But, are there any other options for Lucy outside this oppositional model?
Her endeavours to find independence as an Other and to build her identity
as a reaction formation have led her to a personal cul-de-sac. The rest of this
paper will briefly outline the ways in which the absence of coherence in Lucy’s
identity and her openness to the Other as radically Other will provide a way
out of paralysis.
In the last chapter of the novel, significantly entitled “Lucy”, the first
person narrator relates her new life. She has left Mariah’s employment, found
a job as a secretary and is sharing an apartment with her friend Peggy. It is
not only the protagonist’s external circumstances that have changed. “It was
January”, the chapter starts, “I was making a new beginning again” (133).
And Lucy moves on to explain how she has evolved as a person: “I had been
a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as
a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and
worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl
had gone out of existence” (133). Yet, the fact that Lucy is now a new person
does not imply a stable and more coherent sense of identity. On the contrary,
Lucy’s Self is revealed as precarious and on the making: “I understand that I
was inventing myself” (134), she affirms. In the opinion of Susie O’Brien (72),

16 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

“[t]he self that emerges from the novel is both partial and fractured, offering
neither the integrity of the sovereign subject nor the anchoring security of a
grounding in a community”. The move towards the genre of the Künstlerroman
that takes place in the last pages of the novel hints at Lucy’s decision to define
herself in the way of an artist. “Around the time I was leaving [Mariah] for the
life I now led, I had said to her that my life stretched out ahead of me like a
book of blank pages” (162-163). Lucy’s comment prompts Mariah to give her
a notebook she had bought in Italy:
Then I saw the book Mariah had given me. […] Beside it lay my fountain
pen full of beautiful blue ink. I picked up both, and I opened the book. At
the top of the page I wrote my full name: Lucy Josephine Potter. At the sight
of it, many thoughts rushed through me, but I could write down only this:
“I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it”. And then
as I looked at this sentence a great wave of shame came over me and I wept
and wept so much than the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to
become one big blur. (163-164)

Two important consequences are to be drawn from this quotation: 1) the

precariousness of Lucy’s identity is reasserted in these last lines of the novel;
2) the dissolution of the Self provides the conditions in which love of the
Other is possible, since love begins when the Other escapes confinement by
the subject. Levinas’s words in Altérité et transcendence (in Gibson 39) become
most useful on this point, since Lucy appears “…without intentions, without
aims, without the protective mask of the personage contemplating itself in the
mirror of the world, reassured and posing […]. Without name, titles or place
in the world”. As Levinas says of Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu, Lucy’s
despair “is an inexhaustible source of hope” (in Hand 165). Her assertion as
a non-identity transcends the polarity Sameness/Otherness (Covi 78-79) and
opens the door to the dissolution of the binary thinking – Mariah/Annie,
Jane/Bertha, colonizer/colonized – that has so far guided her search for a
definition. I agree with Patricia Payette (166) when she states that “Kincaid
offers an optimistic solution to the postcolonial female’s mixed loyalties to
Jane and Bertha by demonstrating how Lucy begins to see the limits of both
choices and then makes a move toward becoming the heroine of her own life
story”.

NOTES

1
The research carried out for the writing of this paper has been financed by the Spanish
Ministry of Education and Science and the European Regional Development Fund
(FEDER), in collaboration with the Aragonese Governement (no. HUM2007-
61035/FIL. Proyecto Eje C-Consolider).

Bárbara Arizti 17
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MA: Birkhauser, 1994. 76-84.
Falzon, Christopher. Foucault and Social Dialogue: Beyond Fragmentation.
London & New York: Routledge, 1998.
Gibson, Andrew. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas.
London & New York: Routledge, 1999.
Hand, Seán, ed. The Levinas Reader. Malden, Ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2003
(1989).
Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy: A Novel. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002
(1990).
Kotte, Christina. Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction: Julian
Barnes, Graham Swift, Penelope Lively. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag
Trier, 2001.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1998 (1974).
O’Brien, Susie. “New Postnational Narratives, Old American Dreams: Or,
the Problem with Coming-of-Age Stories”. Postcolonial America. Ed. C.
Richard King. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 65-80.
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion. Westport,
Conn: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Payette, Patricia Ruth. “Living in Jane Eyre’s Shadow: Jane’s Intertextual
Presence in Works by Maya Angelou, Bharati Mukherjee, Michelle
Cliff, and Jamaica Kincaid”. Unpublished Dissertation. Michigan State
University. UMI Dissertation Services, 2001.
Peperzak, Adriaan T., Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, eds. Emmanuel
Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1996.
Sagar, Arapajita. “‘Doctor Freud for Visitor’: Afro-Caribbean Writers and the
Question of Diaspora”. Semiotics 1994. Ed. C.W. Spincks and John Deely,
1994. 472-480.
Sim, Stuart (ed). The A-Z Guide to Modern Literary and Cultural Theorists. London
& New York: Prentice Hall, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995.
Simmons, Diane. Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Twayne, 1994.

18 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 NOT QUITE WHITE: THE ETHNO-RACIAL IDENTITY OF A PORTAGEE

Rui Vitorino Azevedo

Charles Reis Felix’s Through a Portagee Gate portrays the life of a first generation
American of Portuguese descent and his father’s own immigrant experience. In
fact, it is Charles’s introspection into Joe’s (struggling) acceptance of American
society and values that resonate throughout this auto/biography1 as one of
the main themes. As Joe’s memories are imaginatively recalled and penned by
Charles, the fluid alternation between voices exposes the underlying qualms
shared by both father and son. However, one main difference persists insofar
as Joe’s overwhelming pride in his Portugueseness is juxtaposed to Charles’s
own misgivings regarding his ethnic background. Thus, it is Charles’s
identification as an “imperfect American” (Felix 177) accompanied by the
growing fears of being exposed as a “total imposter” (275) that delineate the
terminus a quo for my reading of this narrative.
By concentrating essentially on the first section of the auto/biography,
titled “I Come to California,” I will consider Charles’s initial inquiries about
his mode of self-identification and relate it to the historical denigration of
the Portuguese in America. It is therefore the connotation of the Portagee as
non-white or inferior that leaves Charles uneasy about his ethnic identification.
However, this leads further to the questioning of whether Charles is to be
considered an ethnic autobiographer. In other words, how can the author’s
conscious decision to disguise his true ethnicity allow him to represent an
ethnic group? Hence, this brief discussion focuses on two essential premises:
first, that the author questions his ethnic heritage ab initio because of the
discrimination that Portuguese immigrants and their descendents have
suffered; and second, that Charles’s battle with the social construction of
this racial or class categorization is a necessary requirement for him to be
considered an ethnic autobiographer.

19
 The Hierarchization of the Portagee
Our point of departure towards understanding why Charles initially questions
and then hides association to his ethnic heritage is connected to the structure of
the first section of the auto/biography. Although it begins in medias res as the
narrator moves westward to Escamil, California, – and which can be equated
to his father’s own migratory experience from Setúbal, Portugal to New
Bedford, Massachusetts in 1915 – the opening chapter is actually centered on
Francis A. Walker’s ethnocentric attitudes towards immigrants. Surprisingly
enough, it is an excerpt from Walker’s essay titled “Immigration,” published
in the Yale Review in 1893, which inaugurates Felix’s auto/biography.2 In fact,
every other chapter in the first section gives voice to this prejudiced warning
against mass immigration into the United States with quoted passages from
the above essay, thus offering an intriguing oscillation between Felix’s
story and Walker’s chapters. Felix’s narrative therefore begins in Walker’s
chauvinistic tone:
So open, and broad, and straight, now, is the channel by which immigration
is being conducted to our shores, that there is no reason why every foul and
stagnant population in Europe, from Ireland to the Ural Mountains, should
not be completely drained off into the United States. The stream has fairly
begun flowing and it will continue to flow so long as any difference of level,
economically speaking, remains; so long as the least reason appears for the
broken, the corrupt, the abject, to think that they might be better off here
than there. (19)

The book’s opening is not only strongly xenophobic, but also based on a
nativist ideal.3 Moreover, Walker’s restriction on immigration relies on the
character traits of the new immigrants which he deems as being economically
and culturally inferior to that of the native “American” population.
This stereotypical notion of inferiority is indeed troublesome for Charles
and it first surfaces as a hint about his ethnic misgivings in the exchange of
words with the rancher named Tom Post when his move to California might
be perceived as the need to get away from a community where he was labeled
as “Portagee” (Felix 22). In fact, the ensuing dialogue posits some differences
between us-Americans, to which Charles hoped to belong, and them-
foreigners. Furthermore, this division is routinely based on an economic and
class distinction between white Anglo Americans and the Portuguese. Thus,
it is at the outset of the auto/biography that we become well aware of the
stereotypical reputation that the Portuguese have gained for being stingy.
This is reinforced by Tom’s pernicious designation of the “Portagee gate”
which is understood as a hasty solution to a “good gate” since “the Portagees
are too tight to spend any money and do the job right” (22).
A predisposition for stinginess is not just the reason why anyone
should question his own ethnic heritage. In fact, what leads Charles to mask

20 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

his ethnicity is the class distinction inherent in the designation of the term
“Portagee” along with its association to a status of inferiority that is also
racially felt as will be shown. This is reinforced by the term’s usage as a
derogatory ethnic slur that relegates the Portuguese to an inferior standing
when compared to white Anglo Americans. In this context, the dialogue
between Charles and Harry is a good illustration of the issue. Harry is a
westerner who settled in California and expresses fears that his daughter will
elope with a “Portagee.” The prejudice betrayed by his words clearly affects
the autobiographer and at the same time shows that Harry is not aware of his
ethnic affiliation:
I was traveling incognito. I had long since learned not to advertise my
nationality. But those chilling words were like a bucket of ice-cold water
dumped over me. I don’t want a Portagee in the family. They cleared the head
of any fuzzy sentiments in a hurry. Just when I was lulled into thinking I
was a member of the club, I was being cast out.4 (42-3)

Although hurt, Charles admits that they should come to him as no surprise
given Harry’s own attitude towards the Mexicans. The reason for this is that
the majority of rural Californians place the Portuguese and Mexicans on a
similar social scale: at the bottom are the blacks, followed by the Filipinos, the
Mexicans and the Portuguese, who are only “slightly above them” (43).
Placing the Portuguese on a social or class scale is not limited to those
who identify themselves as white American for the Spanish had similar
beliefs. In an attempt to ingratiate a Spanish lady who knew about Charles’s
ethnic background, he suggests that the Portuguese and Spanish people are
almost the same. To this he is reminded by the lady that “the two people are
very different” given the fact that Portugal is very poor and that “they have
nothing” (29). In other words, it is this economic meagerness that has shaped
Portuguese culture and character in the popular view. Moreover, it is this
economic difference that also allows the Spaniards to be placed above the
Portuguese on the social scale.
At this point in the narrative Charles questions himself on the connection
between Portuguese character and poverty. He tries to come up with an
answer by drawing on examples of Americanization from his home town,
in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which he illustrates through stories. The
stories told are of Portuguese men who changed their names for “business
reasons” and patriots who worked two shifts to support the war and elevate
their financial wellbeing (31), thus offering testimonials as to why these
immigrants should be considered American. The presumption here is that
in order to become American – meaning “white” – and be treated equally,
one has to assimilate and achieve a high socioeconomic standing. However,
this example also demonstrates Charles’s initial move to accept his ethnic

Rui Vitorino Azevedo 21

background as he becomes cognizant of the “social blindness” that does not
provide any evidence on people’s actual traits (43).
Although Charles seems fully assimilated and enjoys his position as
an elementary school teacher in Escamil, it is noteworthy to mention that
he continues to feel this stratified divide between “us” and “them”. Here,
however, his disguise is not successful and he is consigned to occupy the
role of the latter. This kind of self-marginalization is exposed when he
decides not to attend a one day painting event at the principal’s house
because he couldn’t “afford to give up the day” (36, emphasis added). Not
becoming one of the “fellows” takes on an interesting turn when he describes
another principal that he calls “White-ass” (37). He says: “I called him
White-ass because I found his pale blue eyes, his wispy blond moustache,
and his general excessive whiteness to be an irritant” (37). There is a clear
division presented here regarding the private and public sphere because such
designation is only used in the family setting. Nevertheless, we must also
consider that it is Charles’s constant dismissal from the “us” category which
ultimately places him as an inferior other that leads to his responding with an
infuriating reaction.
The focus on ethnic inferiority is also dealt with in the chapter titled
“Polocks and Other People” which can be found in the third section of the
narrative. This chapter looks at the epithets and negative stereotypes of
several ethnic groups including “Jickies, Frogs, Polocks and Portagees, with
a sprinkling of Jews for flavor” (317). Despite Charles’s affirmation that they
“were all equal” because they were “foreigners or children of foreigners,”
the fact remains that the autobiographer was, at a time in his life, affected by
the way the Portuguese were described and identified as dumb. Felix writes:
“I heard the two words ‘dumb’ and ‘Portagee’ put together so many times,
that I had periods of doubting my own smartness. Could they be right? Were
all Portagees dumb?” (319).5 Such an uneasiness reveals someone who is
attempting to move beyond memories and experiences of manifest bigotry
and ethnic stereotyping.
As a matter of fact, these are stereotypes that have no critical foundation
as shown in Leo Pap’s The Portuguese-Americans, which is a book intent on
examining some of the inherent character traits attributed to the Portuguese
at the start of the twentieth century. Actually, the large number of sources that
he presents makes reference to the Portuguese as:
(1) “Law-abiding,” “obedient,” “peaceful,” “orderly.” Sometimes a negative
connotation is added: “docile,” “subservient,” “lacking in initiative.” In this
connection, also, crime statistics are cited showing the Portuguese ethnics
to have a very low crime rate. (But a rise in juvenile delinquency among
the second generation was noted on some occasions.) (2) “Hard-working,”
“industrious”—particularly in relation to farm work. They rarely turn to

22 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 public welfare or charity. (But some American-born descendants show
less industry and do apply for relief.) (3) “Thrifty,” “frugal,” “sober.” (4)
“Honest,” “loyal.” They don’t like to go into debt and they pay promptly.
(5) “Cleanly,” “neat.” They keep their homes clean despite poverty and slum
conditions. (6) “Quick-tempered,” “impulsive”; “melancholy,” “gentle;
“generous,” “hospitable.” (Pap 119)

Pap’s finding of the Portuguese as frugal is reflected in Charles’s own

questioning when he states that the defining character of the Portuguese is
based on Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper” where the credo is to
save for a day in need (Felix 57). Nonetheless, Pap’s research clearly does not
reflect the bigoted opinions of the many people Charles comes across in the
Californian section of the auto/biography. It merely shows that the spiteful
stereotypes of the Portuguese are not only unfounded but also fabricated.
Furthermore, it is demonstrative of how stereotypes based on ethnic or class
hierarchizations such as these affect the author’s self-identification.

The Portagee as “Colored”

The first section of Through a Portagee Gate focuses on the stereotypical
attributes that distinguish the Portagees in terms of class. Nevertheless, it can
be argued that this term also carries an embedded racial connotation that
affects social standing. In other words, it is the past meaning and usage of
Portagee as “colored” and its linkage to class that affects the way in which
Charles identifies himself in the first section of the narrative. Therefore, I
fathom the author’s choice to masquerade his identity as a result, in part, of
how the Portuguese have been historically attributed with the racially charged
category of non-white along with all the ensuing implications this may have
on self-identification.6 Furthermore, I believe that it is Charles’s intent to fight
against this categorization that actually allows him to be identified as an
ethnic autobiographer.
What actually sets the stage for attributing the Portuguese a racial category
other than white is linked to the cultural and linguistic affinities between the
Portuguese and Cape Verdean immigrants. This is expressly shown in Leo
Pap’s work as he explains: “since Cape Verdeans tended (until fairly recently)
to identify themselves as ‘Portuguese’, the popular impression arose among
many New Englanders earlier in this century that the Portuguese ethnic
group in general, including the Azorean majority, was more or less ‘colored’”
(Pap 114).7 However, this classification was not limited to the United States
because Pap also observes that the Cape Verdeans “were commonly known
as Portuguese – ‘Pokiki’ in older Hawaiian pronunciation – not as Negroes!”
in local statistics taken from the Hawaiian island of Oahu in 1853 (32).

Rui Vitorino Azevedo 23

 Conjoining the Portuguese and Cape Verdeans into the same racial
category is further complicated, as Marilyn Halter’s ethnographic study duly
notes, because the Cape Verdeans or “Afro-Portuguese” population is seen as
“never having belonged to a clearly defined racial or ethnic group” given “their
ability to traverse the worlds of black and white” (Halter xiv). In fact, Charles’s
father Joe also makes reference to the Cape Verdeans by distinguishing them
from the “blacks” in Philadelphia who are “truly black” and “bad.” In his
understanding: “What we call blacks here are in reality Cape Verdeans. They
are not very dark, are more brown-like, and they live at peace with us” (Felix
115). What is interesting about this affirmation is that Joe is not abiding by
the dualistic racial system in America where people can only be identified as
either black or white. Moreover, it is suggestive that the racial categorization
of the Cape Verdeans is socially constructed as opposed to a sole reliance on
biology or rigid racial structures. In other words, Joe’s perception of the Cape
Verdeans is based on his own validation of the cultural similarities between
the two ethnic groups, as opposed to the exclusively physical constitution.
Although Charles never identifies himself as “colored,” he is quite
cognizant of how physical appearance can be a cause for marginalization or
prejudice.8 This can be seen in the auto/biography when Charles encounters
a woman named Lois Bonhoffer. Being a former Navy wife, she had divided
society into a ranking of three classes, meaning “her superiors, her equals and
everyone else” (Felix 47). Unsure of where to place Charles because of her
own unawareness as to his lineage, she seems to be uneasy. Charles points
out that what must be bothering her is his physical appearance: “the dark
suspicion rose in her head that I was some bizarre specimen, an Arab perhaps
or a Jew, God forbid, a Mexican. Was I masquerading as an American?” (48,
emphasis added). This woman’s insistence on satisfying her own curiosity
leads her to ask him about his surname. To this, she is told that it is a French
name pronounced “Fay-leaks”. Although Charles is accepted as someone who
belongs to the right sort of people by means of this subterfuge, a series of
questions on why he assumes a different identity is suggested.
A further illustration of Charles’s need to disguise his Portuguese heritage
is provided by his given Portuguese proper name and its Americanized
version. His father has strong feelings against it: “You know, you shouldn’t
call yourself Charley … It is not your name. Your name is Carlos. That is what
it says on your birth certificate” (Felix 200). Although Charles states that his
parents only called him Carlos on special occasions, he recognizes that he
has had a hard time proving who he is (Felix 201). Once again, this entails
his initial desire to become an invisible “white” American which is based on
the belief that he must assimilate into the dominant society in order to be
accepted and valued as an equal.

24 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 This idea of assimilation is highly connected to the melting pot9 concept
of identity which reverts to Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer. In
these letters, we see the formation of a “new race of men” as the immigrants to
the United States lose their old identities and leave behind “ancient prejudices
and manners” (Crèvecoeur and Manning 44).10 However, Crèvecoeur’s
melting pot stressed the supremacy of a white Anglo American society
and way of life which conflicts with valuing a person’s ethnic culture or
language.11 By making this distinction and excluding many ethnic and racial
groups that today comprise the hub of Americanness, this concept of identity
can be interpreted as an indicator of discrimination as opposed to effective
integration. Indeed, this is applicable to Charles who tries to assimilate and
by doing so is confronted with discrimination.
Regarding the relationship between the Portuguese and the melting pot,
Clyde W. Barrow’s historical account of Portuguese immigration into the
United States shows that many Portuguese-Americans have also embraced
this concept since it allows them to be simultaneously Portuguese and
American (30). However, Barrow further illustrates in his surveys carried out
between 1999 and 2000 that about a third of Portuguese-Americans have felt
discrimination based on their ethnicity or race (29). He also explains that there
seems to be an even divide between the respondents when asked if applying
for minority status would lead to any real benefit regarding education or job
opportunities (29). The minority status that is being referred to dates back
to the Ethnic Heritage Program enacted into law in 1972, which as Robert
Harney reveals: “flatly described Portuguese as one of the nation’s seven
official ethnic/racial minorities.” This was in addition to “Negro, American
Indian, Spanish-surnamed American, Oriental, Hawaiian natives and
Alaskan natives” (117). Adhering to this minority status clearly presented the
Portuguese with a dilemma because it entailed not only how the Portuguese
are identified by others, but also how they come to identify themselves.12 In
other words, accepting this status meant embracing a “non-white” identity,
while most ambitioned to become “American” and join mainstream society.
However, I believe that this is more in tune with the consideration of
the Portuguese as hybrids or non-whites throughout the world and more
specifically how their racial categorization is socially created and based on
a class distinction as opposed to an actual color division. One such example
is given by Robert Harney’s study of the Portuguese in Bermuda who have
been phenotypically distinguished from other white settlers. Once again,
the “Portygees,” term often used to refer to Cape Verdeans as well, were not
seen as “real whites” by both English-speaking North Europeans and free
Afro-Caribbeans, but rather as indentured labor or peons, another variety of
“coolie-men” (Harney 115). Harvey’s argument moves on to demonstrate that

Rui Vitorino Azevedo 25

other peoples who resented acknowledging the “whiteness” of the Portuguese
include the African and the Indian populations of Guyana who referred
to them as “Potagees,” and the Afrikaans who referred to the Portuguese
settlers in South Africa as wit-kaffirs (“white-niggers”) (116). Moreover, this
study evinces that the classification of the Portuguese in Bermuda as non-
white was socially constructed, given their status as unskilled laborers. In this
manner, it allows us to see that racial categorization can also be based on a
class distinction as opposed to an actual color divide. That is, the role that the
Portuguese played in the local economies of where they settled along with the
intrinsic social structure of each land is what has allowed them to be racially
classified.
The non-white typology of the Portuguese can also be found in a study
carried out by James A. Geschwender, Rita Carroll-Seguin and Howard
Brill concerning their ethnic making in Hawaii. In this particular case the
Portuguese were not called Haole, which is a term that referred to any white
foreigner. Curiously enough, they had their own racial category which was
classified as “Local” meaning “Caucasian and Other” (Geschwender et al. 515).
According to these authors, ethnicity is not automatically attributed when a
group is different in terms of their physical and/or cultural characteristics
but it is rather based on a class struggle and structure. This social distinction
between the Haoles and Portuguese thus stresses the relationship between
class and ethnicity. It also permits us to understand how a racial category can
be constructed at the margins of a color divide based on phenotype.
At the same time, as this study shows, a problem of lexicon arises
between the concept of being white and Caucasian. As Matthew Frye Jacobson
discusses in Whiteness of a Different Color, the history of racial classification
has changed with each successive wave of European immigration.13 In other
words, people are not born Caucasian but “somehow made” so (3). Race
then has to be understood as an invented category that changes as societies
evolve. And so there is a misuse of the term “colored” when referring to the
Portuguese because it represented an assumption at a particular time that
being white could not include cultural or class differences. Therefore, the racial
connotation attributed to the term “Portagee” resides in both a cultural and
economic sphere of difference. This means that the class marker that relegated
the Portuguese to a poor and uneducated status is what should be understood
as Jacobson’s designation of “inborn racial characteristics” (21). Further to the
point, the use of race as an identity marker does not rely solely on a subjective
identity. In this particular case there are objective criteria which are used by
others in categorizing the Portuguese and it is these racialized biases that lead
Charles Reis Felix to initially question his ethnic background.
Nonetheless, it is quite clear in Through a Portagee Gate that a matter of

26 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

choice persists regarding Charles’s mode of self-identification.14 Viewing
racial or ethnic identity in this manner simultaneously problematizes and
reveals the malleability of these categories for many ethnic groups, including
the Portuguese, and Charles Reis Felix in particular. It further shows how
enigmatic race relations may be envisioned in these days, a situation that leads
Richard Alba to the following conclusion: “fundamental changes to ethno-
racial cleavages can take place” (Blurring the Color Line 6). One of the ways
in which this is achieved is through social mobility where socioeconomic
success can ultimately lead an ethnic minority to identify with and be fully
incorporated into white mainstream American society – a position that
Charles apparently enjoys.15 However, Alba’s reference to the “ethno-race”
combination is also important because the current use of racial and ethnic
identities in the United States allows race to signify an ethnicity or vice-versa.
In this sense it seems that ethnicity is still being used to replace race when
distinctions need to be made.

The Turning of the Page

In the current context of Portuguese immigration, the cultural values of the
more recent immigrants are not the same as their predecessors. The same can
be said of their children whose detachment from their ethnic heritage arises as
they choose the language and customs of their adoptive society. Nonetheless,
even though American identity is and has always been an opening process,
there seems to be a gap that naturally leads people to search for their ethnic
self. This seems to be the case for Charles Reis Felix who, in Through a Portagee
Gate, chooses to reveal his true identity to a family from the Azores when
he begins to speak to the elementary-age children in Portuguese. By doing
so, he is acknowledging the importance of language in retaining his ethnic
identity. This can also be illustrated in the encounter with Mr. Oliveira who is
the janitor at his school, as shown in the following passage:
Strangely enough, I did not mind the interruption. I welcomed it. I wanted
to hear Portuguese spoken. That language which had surrounded me
in my childhood, as plentiful as air, not valued, and then lost, forgotten,
had come back in his person, with phrases and expressions, echoes from
my childhood, precious slivers of memory, now valued, coin of the realm,
gold. In his speech I felt an overwhelming sense of loss, a world now gone
forever. (53)

It is the search for this lost world that becomes one of the central themes in the
book as Charles gives voice to his immigrant father and lets him tells his own
life story in Parts II and III, thus showing how ethnocentric categorization and
negative stereotyping towards Portuguese immigrants is misleading.

Rui Vitorino Azevedo 27

 Charles is therefore capable of crossing boundaries by giving life to
his father’s stories of immigrant experience and his own as an American of
Portuguese descent. In this sense, the title of the autobiography becomes an
appropriate metaphor for the author’s reconciliation with his ethnic identity.
Furthermore, as Charles builds on and creates his father’s as well as his own
memories, his own self-identification as an “imperfect American” shifts
and transforms as Americanization begins to look more like ethnicization
as opposed to becoming “white.” In other words, being an “imperfect
American” no longer entails a negative connotation, but rather includes a
newfound richness that he is intent on expressing, by recapturing and feeling
comfortable with his ethnic identity.
If Charles Reis Felix can be considered an ethnic autobiographer, then he
has been called upon to be the voice of the majority of Portuguese immigrants,
who like so many other ethnic groups have felt the need to assimilate – based
on the belief that ethnic differences were demeaning and prevented a social
climb or wellbeing – but then slowly moved to a rediscovery of their ethnic
identity in the more pluralistic era of the 1970s. In fact, Charles’s autobiography
becomes the story of a representative character as his experience may describe
that of many Portuguese-Americans in the past as well as in the present day.
These are lives that have perhaps gone through their own ethnic revival in an
attempt to free themselves from the strictures of what has been historically
considered a subordinate ethno-racial identity.
Thus, American identity cannot but be a complex configuration when
we consider the successive waves of immigration into the United States. The
motivation for those who first arrived entailed a spiritual struggle that crossed
over into an economic one for ensuing generations. However, each of those
immigrant populations faced the same challenge of self-definition which has
always been a complex mediation between their cultural backgrounds and
the newfound experiences in their adoptive society. American identity and
society today has to be understood as an admixture of immigrant peoples
and cultures. Furthermore, the creation of a culturally pluralistic nation is not
effortless with the juxtaposition of so many inherent differences regarding
class, ethnicity, race and religion. And yet, it has been the race issue that has
marked American history and sparked literary debate time and time again.
With each successive new wave of immigration, we can only assume that
authors like Charles Reis Felix will continue to give us the opportunity to
address the ever-expanding boundaries of ethnic identity and inquire into
societal relationships in this age of postracial issues.

28 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

NOTES

1
Auto/biography refers to the actual situation of Felix’s book as an autobiography,
the story of his life, which frames the biography of the father as told by the
autobiographer. For more on the interrelatedness between these two genres see
Sidonie and Watson’s (2010) proposed definition and distinction (256).
2
It should be noted that Francis A. Walker (1840-97) was president of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology at the time of this publication and was considered a
distinguished economist and educator. For a more elucidating commentary see
“Francis A. Walker on Restriction of Immigration into the United States” which
was published in the Population and Development Review in 2004.
3
This is echoed in another article by Walker which was published in the June 1896
issue of The Atlantic Monthly and is titled “Restriction of Immigration.” In it he
iterates the need to prevent new arrivals from Europe in order to protect “the
American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of
American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast
throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and
southern Europe” (822).
4
What is interesting and rather contradictory in the autobiographer’s feelings about
being cast out is that it also helps Charles come to terms with his identity. He
writes: “I confess, I felt a secret pleasure in being cast out, a verification. It was
where I wanted to be, where I felt at home. Anywhere else and I felt inauthentic”
(Felix 43).
5
This can be compared to his father’s own fears of being identified as a “dumb
greenhorn” (86) or a “simpleton” (96).
6
A study that reflects this non-white categorization and which may have affected
the type of racism that Charles encounters can be found in Donald Reed Taft’s
Two Portuguese Communities in New England, which was first published as a
Ph.D. dissertation in 1923. This study, subsequently published in book form,
focuses on the mores and racial constitution of the Portuguese as “a semi-negroid
type” (18). Taft arrives at this conclusion by tracing the physical characteristics
or “anthropology” of the Portuguese in the mainland which he believes differs
from those in the islands. Furthermore, he suggests “possible differences in the
racial types of different islands” (22). Attributing to the Portuguese this racial
composition and distinction clearly entails Portugal’s contact with the Moors,
along with the colonization and slave trade period during the sixteenth and
following centuries.
7
The reason the first generations of Cape Verdeans immigrating to the United States
identified themselves as “Portuguese” is related to the fact that Cape Verde only
achieved independence from Portugal in 1975. Thus, in terms of citizenship
and national identity they were “Portuguese” (see Williams xvi). Although this
association may have reinforced the perception of the Portuguese as non-white,
it was also a reflection of the concept of race in America in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century where most immigrants who were not Nordic or
Anglo-Saxon were seen as being biologically different and inferior. For further
discussion on this scientific racism and how Jews and other Europeans were
denigrated, see Paula S. Rothenberg (2008).
8
By way of comparison, Francisco Cota Fagundes’s memoir, Hard Knocks: An Azorean-
American Odyssey, presents many similarities to Charles Reis Felix’s in that both
attempt to overcome their inferiority status by creating a mask that allows them

Rui Vitorino Azevedo 29

 to disguise themselves. In Fagundes’s case, this entailed the Americanization of
his name when he moved to California. Yet, even more remarkable is that he
felt racially inferior as his “natural tawny color” (13) seemed to symbolize his
“low-born status” (37). In this line of thought, it seems only “natural” that his
godmother – who aspired his social prominence – would attempt to bleach him
in the Azores by forcing him to wash his face in urine (22). Another example of a
Portuguese immigrant who has experienced racial discrimination is Manuel Mira.
He writes: “… I left Portugal and immigrated to Brazil where I lived for five years.
Although the language is the same, I was discriminated against and recognized
that I was not one of them because I had lighter skin. … After five years in Brazil,
I came to the United States in 1957 and then to Toronto, Canada, where I lived for
the next 16 years. Again, I felt discrimination because of the language difference
and the color of my skin. I was not blonde; I had dark brown hair and brown eyes.
In Brazil, I stood out because I was lighter, and in Canada, I stood out because I
was darker” (Mira xv-xvi). Despite this personal account, Mira’s book focuses on
the Melungeons and relates the discrimination and prejudice they experienced.
9
Lynette Clemetson’s article, which appeared in a Newsweek special report,
“Redefining Race in America,” claims that “Americans are melting together like
never before” as the growing rate of interethnic marriages are reshaping current
concepts of ethnicity (62). Although “invisibility has its rewards,” the couples
she interviews state that whether or not future generations are a part of the
melting pot depends on how American diversity develops, thus emphasizing the
malleability of ethno-racial categories. For a more recent study on assimilation and
intermarriage that stresses the importance of ethnicity over race, see Morgan (2009).
10
This is suggested in Crèvecoeur’s opening question “What is an American?” in
“Letter III” to which he replies: “He is neither an European, nor the descendent of
an European: hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other
country” (44). However, this follows the no less pertinent question “…whence
came all these people?” which arouses the following response in Crèvecoeur:
They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Germans, and Swedes.
From this promiscuous breed, that race, now called Americans, have arisen. The
Eastern provinces must indeed be excepted, as being the unmixed descendents of
Englishmen. I have heard many wish that they had been more intermixed also:
for my part, I am no wisher, and think it much better as it has happened (42,
emphasis added).
11
In this manner, the melting pot can be compared with “classical assimilation theory”
which Dulce Maria Scott argues has been criticized for “the ‘blocked mobility’
experienced by exploited minority ethnic groups that have been prevented from
assimilating due to racism, discrimination and segregation” (Scott 44).
12
This is argued in Miguel Moniz’s recent essay which refers to the debate on whether
the Portuguese should accept this minority status as late as 1973 in the Portuguese
Congress in America (409).
13
This can also be seen in Warren and Twine’s essay which shows how the Irish
historically occupied a separate racial category. According to them, the Irish
are classified as people of color prior to the Civil War given their physical
distinctiveness, including “eye and skin color, facial configuration, and physique”
(203). In addition, they revert to some of the adjectives previously used to describe
the Irish, such as: “low-browed and savage, groveling and bestial, lazy and
wild, [and] simian and sensual” (Warren and Twine 203). For more on the Irish
and their racial identity see Ronald Bayor (2003). For a look at other European

30 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 immigrant groups that were placed above African and Asian Americans but
below “whites” – such as the Sicilians and southern Italians who came to the
United States as contact laborers and were called “guineas,” term also used to
designate the Portuguese but originally used in reference to African slaves from
the northwest coast of Africa, see Barrett and Roediger’s article “Inbetween
peoples: Race, Nationality, and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class.”
14
On the other hand, it can be argued that racial or ethnic identity does not involve a
choice since race has long been understood as pertaining to biology and ethnicity
to culture. This common distinction is made in the Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary
(see Alcoff, 103) and is also supported by both Morgan (2009) and Browder (2000).
However, there lies an intrinsic connection between both concepts as shown in
the entries for ethnic/ethnicity in the Oxford English Dictionary (1961) and its
supplement (1971): “pertaining to or having common racial, cultural, religious or
linguistic characteristics, esp. designating a racial or other group within a larger
system” (quoted in Sollors 5, emphasis added). This is accompanied by references
to “gentile, heathen, [and] pagan,” along with inferences to “exotic” and foreign
(quoted in Sollors 3-5). According to the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, its
entry for ethnicity is defined as “identity with or membership in a particular
racial, national, or cultural group and observance of that group’s customs, beliefs,
and languages” (Hirsch, Kett and Trefil 432). As ethnicity and race become nearly
interchangeable in these two dictionaries, with the notion of foreign or “un-
American” persisting in the former, the latter is more inclusive by concluding
with references to minority groups, immigrants and an indication for the reader
to compare with the entry for “melting pot,” which as we know can also be a
source for discrimination.
15
This can be understood “within the current construction of race in America, [where]
the Portuguese are considered to be white and as such do not face racial barriers
as they integrate socially, economically and biologically into American society”
(Scott 47).

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Barrett, James R., and David Roediger. “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality
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_______, “Charles Reis Felix’s ‘Through a Portagee Gate’: Lives Parceled out
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the Americas series; North Dartmouth, Mass.: University of Massachusetts
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Morgan, Charlie V. Intermarriage across Race and Ethnicity among Immigrants: E
Pluribus Unions. The New Americans. El Paso: LFB Scholarly Pub., 2009.
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Rothenberg, Paula S. White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of
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Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas 61 (2009): 41-64.
Silva, Reinaldo Francisco. Representations of the Portuguese in American Literature
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St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector and Susan Manning. Letters from an American
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Taft, Donald R. Two Portuguese Communities in New England. Studies in history,
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Williams, Jerry R. In Pursuit of Their Dreams: A History of Azorean Immigration
to the United States. Portuguese in the Americas Series. 2nd ed. North
Dartmouth, Mass.: University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, Center for
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Zangwill’s Jewish Plays: Three Playscripts. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 2006.

34 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 DEPICTIONS OF FATHERHOOD IN CONTEMPORARY MEXICAN/CHICANO
CORRIDOS

Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo

At the beginning of the 21st century and more than 500 years after the arrival of
the first Spanish boats to the shores of the “New World” with the subsequent
radical and violent change in the ways of understanding spirituality, nature,
society, personal relationships, and the imposition of “new” explanations
for all the former, there are things that seem difficult to change since they
were then established. The importance of the Church and its influence in the
formation of the ideological grounds of the so-called “new” nation and “new”
people was undeniable and paved the way for the creation and development
of institutions such as the family as we understand it today, which became the
pillars of the most respected and unquestionable social units in contemporary
Mexican and Chicano society. One of the smallest modes of interpersonal
social relationship, the family, thus reproduces to some extent the hierarchies
and modes of arrangement of the macrosociety in which it is settled, creating
internal power relations that affect and characterize the whole system.
Anthropologist George Murdrock described the nuclear family, basis
of the western communal organization, as a social group characterized by
a common residence, economic cooperation and reproduction, generally
formed by two adults who have an approved sexual relationship and one
or more natural or adopted offspring, whose main functions within society
are the sexual, economic, reproductive and educational ones (cf. Social
Structure, 1949). Mexican and Chicano families follow the structure described
by Murdrock and are the chore of the social organization of these groups,
becoming the natural space in which traditions, customs and individual roles,
among others, have been perpetuated. One of the most obvious and fixed
sources of the internal hierarchical organization of “traditional”, nuclear
families is its division based on gender. The masculine and feminine roles are

35
clearly defined and have been assimilated and transmitted throughout the
centuries along generations, remaining untouchable. Thus, the family, formed
by a father figure and a mother figure, together with their offspring, organized
and ruled by severe moral and behavioral norms, seems a motionless structure
within a society that keeps changing and moving on constantly, even though
there seems to be a gradual public acceptance of new, different modes of
personal relationships and family structures. The two adults that Murdrock
refers to are united by Holy Matrimony and the reproductive function of the
family is always developed within this established kind of relationship. The
father becomes the provider of economic stability and has the most authority
within the group, whereas the mother becomes the physical and spiritual
nurturer, generally works at home and has accepted her role within the walls
of the house, an acceptance which she many times transmits to her offspring.
Outside the limits of the microsociety that families represent, Literature from
and about the community, as well popular culture in all forms and art in
general, has served to maintain these roles, contributing to the subjugation
of women in the name of tradition and community unity. Nevertheless,
Feminism in general and Chicano Feminism in particular, have made big
efforts to deconstruct said stereotypes and celebrate a female voice that
vindicates equal rights and the capacity to choose one’s own way, thus
becoming an active individual within society, taking part in the productive
and social configuration of the group. The figure of the father has also had
to adapt to the new times and redefine its role inside and outside the family
structure as a consequence of the aforementioned changes, as explained by
Lynne Segal in the following words:

The growing stress on fathers occurred at a time when men’s actual power
and control over women and children is declining. In the fifties the father
was essential, but only, it seemed, for financial support, status and legitimacy:
his wife and children relied upon him even when he totally ignored them.
An alternative way of viewing the emphasis on the importance of fathering
today would be to see it as a reassertion of the essential nature, significance
and rights of fathers at a time when slight but significant shifts in relations
between men and women have meant that some women are better placed to
question any automatic assumption of paternal rights. Men’s hold on their
status as fathers is less firm and secure than ever before. (27)
The case of Mexican and Chicano males is no different to the one exposed
by Segal and they have witnessed a “coming out” of the women of their
community, who are now an active part of the configuration of society and
have consciously opted for a redefinition of their role, provoking, in a way,
the questioning of the clear-cut previous roles and gender-based internal
organization of families. However, regardless of the centuries of an obvious
male dominance over women, there are today men’s voices who claim that

36 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

said roles are also based on centuries of stereotyping and do not respond
accurately to reality. For this reason, and as consequence of the important work
fulfilled by feminist writers and thinkers in general and Chicana feminists in
particular, there has been a clear unbalance in the amount of studies that have
been carried out in an attempt to deconstruct female stereotypes in opposition
to male ones. According to Alfredo Mirandé:
Generalizations concerning the male role in the Chicano family abound
but tend, unfortunately, to be based on meager or non-existent evidence.
Much of this literature depicts an authoritarian, patriarchal unit where the
macho (i.e., male) is lord and master of the household and the woman is a
quiet, submissive, servile figure. Although the traditional view has begun
to be called into question by recent findings, which suggest that Chicano
males may be less dominant and Chicano females less submissive than was
previously believed, such studies have typically been concerned with the
female role or with conjugal decision-making rather than with the male role
per se. (2)

Following Mirandé’s idea, Mexican and Chicano fathers have always

been described as authoritative, decision-making, head of the family men.
However, things are changing. Recent studies on fatherhood in the US, as
explained by Taylor and Behnke, picture two kinds of contemporary fathers,
those who respond to the definitions of “uninvolved fathers”, who follow
the traditionally acquired male role, and the more contemporary ones, who
respond to the trend that has been labeled “new fathering” or “progressive
fathering” (100). In this sense, an early study developed by Scott Coltrane
at the dawn of the nineties among twenty middle-class Chicano families is
especially useful:
We found conventional masculine privilege as well as considerable sharing
in several domains. First, as in previous studies of ethnic minority families,
wives were employed a substantial number of hours and made significant
contributions to the household income. Second, (…), we found that couples
described their decision-making to be relatively fair and equal. Third, fathers
in these families were more involved in child rearing than their own fathers
had been, and many were rated as sharing a majority of child care tasks.
Finally, while no husband performed full half of the housework, a few made
substantial contributions in this area as well. (462)

In this context, the main aim of this essay is to observe the way fatherhood is
portrayed in a popular genre that is often overtly masculine, the corrido, and
has contributed to the perpetuation of masculine and feminine role models, in
an attempt to conclude whether it depicts a traditional or more contemporary
father figure, for, as stated by Laura Alonso and Antonia Miguela, “new Latino
fatherhood is emerging in a transfrontera contact zone where relationships
are examined and new possibilities are born” (93).

Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo 37

 Popular culture, among other means, has served to spread the stereotypes
Mirandé denounces, but may act in a reverse way, that is, deconstructing the
stereotype and opening the way to more contemporary and real definitions
of masculinity in general and fatherhood in particular. The corrido, concretely,
with its enormous audience, is one of the most important forms of contemporary
Mexican and Chicano popular culture, and as a consequence, may perfectly
serve as an example to be studied. Corridos have always portrayed the state
of affairs of the society in which they are produced and developed and could
thus be considered the thermometers of the contemporary social tendencies
regarding several societal issues and concerns. The case of Los Tigres del Norte
is highly remarkable, for they have become one of the most successful corrido
bands ever, and as explained by Herman Herlinghauss:
(…) they have been the first regional Mexican group that has become
internationalized while exclusively singing in Spanish (…) and have
maintained a special sympathetic tone that has been seldom achieved by
other groups. Paradoxically, having kicked off a massive commercial craze,
Los Tigres have continued to cultivate a style more distinct and diversified
than the one of the great majority of their followers. This has not just been
a stylistic issue but rather the way of working through immanent social
knowledge as well as pressing conflicts and violent encounters.

This success, together with the fact that Los Tigres del Norte is a Mexican band,
but settled in the United States, provides it with a global, complex and real
vision of life in both countries, which makes it an interesting phenomenon to
look at for its “bridging” essence. Furthermore, the existence of the “Los Tigres
del Norte Foundation”, based in UCLA, whose main aim is to “further the
appreciation and understanding of Latino music, culture and history through
education and community outreach programs” (http://www.lostigresdelno
rtefoundation.org/), provides Los Tigres del Norte with a deep knowledge of
the reality of Mexican and Chicano realities, and their audience and impact
affects both communities. Lastly, and taking into consideration the difficulties
of making an extensive and deep study of oral corridos and the abundance
of contemporary corrido lyrics which are recorded and transcribed, together
with the prolific production of the band and its multithematic lyrics, Los Tigres
del Norte becomes a highly interesting phenomenon to observe, and thus, its
portrayal of masculinity in general and fatherhood in particular, a fascinating
example to be studied. As they observe, “Los corridos son los hechos reales
de nuestro pueblo… y en ellos se canta la pura verdad””(Los Tigres del Norte)
(Corridos are our people’s real facts…and what is sung in them is the plain truth).
The corrido, a short narrative song, whose origin is found during the 19th
century, deals with everyday life issues, such as love, war, revolutions, natural
disasters, heroes, political and social events, immigration, murders, etc. The
drawing of general conclusions and definitions about the structural form of

38 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

a genre that is in a continuous process of evolution and development due to
its own essence and mouth-to-mouth transmission would be pretentious and
probably a failure. Nevertheless, one could certainly affirm that the protagonist
of the corrido is almost always a solitary, frequently “ordinary” man, whose fate
and deeds transform him into a hero who acquires traditionally-described-as-
“masculine” attributes and characteristics, such as bravery, honor, patriotism,
etc., and consequently becomes a symbol of masculinity. Similarly, a quick
overview of the lyrics of Los Tigres del Norte may lead us to the conclusion that
the protagonists of the majority of their songs and the stories told in them are
men who respond to the previously mentioned characteristics. However, the
presence of women in their lives sometimes makes these men vulnerable, as
we will conclude if we observe the lyrics of their album “Detalles y emociones”
(“Details and emotions”, 2007).
The men depicted in its songs, in general terms, possess very traditionally
“masculine” attributes, such as roughness and toughness, but occasionally
appear defeated by the power of women in particular and love in general.
Thus, the protagonist of “Lagrimas de sangre” (“Tears of Blood”), for instance,
is an offended man, who says: “siento en mi pecho un dolor profundo, que ni
con todo el vino del mundo podría calmarse mi sufrimiento, porque la ingrata
que yo más amo no me comprende y me manda al diablo, solo Dios sabe lo
que yo siento. Pero en la vida todo se paga y cuando ya no te quede nada vas
a llorar lágrimas de sangre y aunque me pidas perdón mil veces no lo tendrás
pues no lo mereces…”1 (I feel a deep pain in my chest, which cannot be healed
with all the wine there is in the world, because the ungrateful woman I love does not
understand me and sends me to hell, just God knows what I feel. But we all pay for our
acts in this life, and one day you will have nothing left and you will cry tears of blood
and will come to me, asking me for forgiveness. But I won´t forgive you, you do not
deserve it); or like the hero in “Corazón herido” (“Wounded heart”), who sings,
“No se daña a quien te quiere, no, y todo pasa con el tiempo. Son dos frases
que al pensar en ti, pierden el sentido para mí, porque te amo y tú me haces
sufrir. Y pasa el tiempo y no te olvido, por darte todo, todo lo perdí, pensaba
en ti, jamás en mí. Si tuviera el corazón más frío no estaría llorando tu olvido;
si tuviera el corazón más fuerte, no, no podrías hacerme sufrir, si tuviera
el corazón de piedra no estaría llorando tu ausencia. Sólo tengo el corazón
herido y se que es por ti (…)” (“You should never harm the person you love”, no,
and” Time heals it all”. These two sentences lose their meaning when I think of you,
because I love you, and you make me suffer. But time goes by and I cannot forget
you. I lost everything because I gave you everything; I always cared for you, never
for myself. If my heart had been colder, I wouldn’t be crying for your disdain, If my
heart had been stronger, you couldn’t have made me suffer, if I had had a stone heart,
I would not be crying because you left. My heart is wounded now, because of you…);

Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo 39

or in “Tus ausencias” (“Your absence”), that deals again with an abandoned
man, or in “Fue una mujer” (“It was a woman”), that explains that “fue una
mujer, solo una de ellas, que vino a doblar al gigante que siempre fui yo, que
vino a quebrar al que no se quebraba y tan solo bastó una mirada. Yo que
luché contra titanes y jamás me ganó una batalla el mejor gladiador, yo que
fui un gran campeón, que gané mil coronas, una sola mujer me ha mandado
a la lona (…)” (a woman, just one woman, was able to defeat the giant that I had
always been, was able to beat the one who had never been beaten, with a simple look.
Me, who fought against titans and was never defeated by the best gladiator, who was
always the great champion who won thousands of crowns, just one woman has made
me kiss the canvas …).
All these lyrics describe a very masculine, self-conscious man, but who
overtly admits his weakness when it comes to deal with women. However,
the melodramatic, “soap-opera” like vision of love presented in the songs,
once again contributes to the creation of gender roles that limit and define
masculine and feminine ways of human relationships and love in general.
The wounded men presented in the songs find the abandonment of women
as an ultimate act of betrayal that needs to be condemned and punished, for
it attacks masculine honor and dignity, and they express their pain in these
terms, and not so much as a personal and intimate wound. In general terms,
even though there are always exceptions to the rule, the masculine hero of the
songs represents almost always a “free” man, whose relationship to women
occurs outside the frame of marriage or family relationships, who does not
respond to the role of the working class father, responsible for the material
and moral sustenance of his family.
“Detalles” (“Details”), for instance, in their album “Cosas que Contar”
(“Things to tell”, 2006), illustrates a dialogue that occurs in a radio program
between a man who asks for “a song that does not talk about love” in memory
of a woman who left him for a wealthier man, the program conductor, and
the woman’s supposed second man, who accuses him of having abandoned
her. The dialogue breaks down when the second man uncovers his real
personality, and discovers he is their son, saying “ya es demasiado tarde. Esa
mujer se murió de tristeza el día que nací yo. Es que eres tú mi hijo…(answers
the man). Discúlpeme Señor….padre no es el que engendra, un padre es todo
amor…Perdóname hijo mío….No puedo perdonar, pero a mi Santa Madre
déjela descansar” [It is already too late. That woman died of sorrow the day I was
born. So, are you my son? (answers the man) Excuse me,. Sir…engendering a
baby does not make one a father, a father is full of love…..Forgive me, my son….I
cannot forgive you, but let my blessed mother rest in peace…]. This dialogue, again,
depicts an image of a man who does not accept his responsibilities as a father
and abandons his wife and son, and responds to the traits of the “free” man

40 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

described in the previous songs. In very general terms, thus, we could state
that these examples correspond to the male figure that is most present in the
group’s stories.
However, the band also has some stories that deal with fathers and
their roles and duties. Among these songs and the stories they tell, we could
establish two big thematic lines with regards to the depiction of fatherhood.
On the one hand, corridos such as “El hijo menor” (“The youngest son”) from
“Raíces” (“Roots”, 2008), “El ejemplo” (“The example”, 1995), “Padres tristes”
(“Sad Fathers”), “Así como tú” (“Just like you”, 1997) or “Cuando se llega a
Viejo” (“When one gets old”), and “Incansables” (“Tireless”, 1991), describe
the father-offspring relationship and celebrate fatherhood and the life-long
compromise and bond that it creates. On the other hand, the second group of
lyrics presents a desperate father who has lost his kids for several reasons. The
commitment that fathers acquire towards their sons and daughters is taken to
its furthest limits as in the cases of “El ejemplo” (“The example”) and “Socios”
(“Partners”), “Directo al corazón” (“Directly to the heart”, 2005), that describe
that even though there is no more love between the parents and the couple is
broken, the father, who once again becomes the hero of the story, is prepared
to pretend their relationship is good in order to save his kids’ happiness.

No me digas
Que ahora te extraña
Por qué yo he cambiado contigo
Si tu misma me abriste las alas
Fue tu modo razón y motivo
No te olvides que tu me empujaba-as
A volar donde no era mi nido.

Muchas veces te veo sorprendida

Pues te beso y soy cariñoso
Solamente si estas con mis hijos
Por que a solas ya no te soporto
Es por ellos
Que no me decido
A exigirte el maldito divorcio.

Porque yo no he de dar el ejemplo

De dejar a mis hijos sin padre
Yo prefiero morirme a tu lado
Aunque vivamos como rivales

Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo 41

 Frente a ellos te haré una caricia
Pero es falsa de sobra lo sabes.
Si algún día te dijeran mis hijos
Que el destino nos ha distanciado
Tú le dices que no se preocupen
Que seguimos muy enamorados
Que tu cuerpo de hielo me brinda
El calor que yo siempre he deseado

Porque yo no he de dar el ejemplo

De dejar a mis hijos sin padre
Yo prefiero morirme a tu lado
Aunque vivamos como rivales
Frente a ellos te haré una caricia
Pero es falsa de sobra lo sabes.

(Don’t tell me that you are surprised because I act different with you now, because you
pushed me to fly to another nest. I see you are shocked when I kiss you affectionately. I
only do it in front of my children, because I really can’t stand you when we are alone.
If I never asked you for the dammed divorce for our kids, I do not want to set a bad
example and leave them without a father. I’d rather die next to you, even if we live as
enemies forever. I will give you a fake caress when we are with them, you know it’s
not real. If my children ever ask you whether destiny has separated us, tell them not to
worry, that we still love each other, that your frozen body provides me with the heat
that I have always longed for.)

This same situation is portrayed in “Socios” (“Partners”), where the

husband/father proposes that he and his wife should always try to have a
correct relationship for the benefit of their kids, who are innocent beings that
should not be the victims of their parents’ failures. The idea of the importance
of the family unit appears reinforced in these two corridos, as well as its
description as an untouchable and revered institution as it is understood in
“Socios” when the song says “estamos ofendiendo sin duda al ser supremo”
(“We are undoubtedly offending the Supreme Being”). The corrido shows a very
Catholic way of understanding marriage that is presented as a sacred rite. After
the divorce, which is not contemplated by the religious law, the relationship
between the couple turns into a cold, commercial one and the couple becomes
linked by a contractual relationship in favor of their sons and daughters.

Ya se firmo el divorcio y asunto concluido

Tú te vas por tu rumbo yo por el mío

42 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Así de fácil todo parece tan sencillo
Pero hay un lazo eterno que nos tendrá amarrados
Los años que nos queden nuestros amados hijos

No hablemos del pasado para qué hacer memoria

Este amargo fracaso se queda en nuestra historia
Estamos ofendiendo sin duda al ser supremo
Y ahora más que nunca para que sufran menos
Tendremos que apoyarlos y haber como le hacemos

Firmar aquel papel no fue ningún negocio

Nos hace tanto mal maldito y cruel divorcio
Por esas caras lindas que las empaña el llanto
Por esos inocentes seremos siempre socios

(We’ve finally signed the divorce, end of the story. You take your way and I take
mine. It all seems so easy, but there is an eternal bond that ties us forever, our beloved
children. Let’s not speak about the past, let’s try not to remember. This bitter failure
will remain in our personal histories; we are undoubtedly offending the Supreme
Being. Now, more than ever, we should support and help them so that they do not
suffer. Let’s see how we manage. Signing that paper was no good business at all; the
damned and cruel divorce does not do any good to any of us. This is why we will be
partners forever, for those pretty little faces.)

However, this commitment that parents in general, and fathers in

particular acquire with their kids is not always reciprocal, for the kids grow
up, the parents have educated them and given them all they needed, and when
they are young adolescents, they abandon their parents as it is described in
“El hijo menor” (“The youngest son”) from “Carrera contra la muerte” (“Race
against death”, 1983).

Hablaba yo con mis hijos

Para darles un buen consejo
Me contestó uno de ellos pa’ consejos ya estas viejo
Me dijo el menor de todos papa no sigas hablando
Mi vida esta comenzando tu vida esta terminando
Yo no pude contestarle de mis ojos brotó el llanto
Al escuchar las palabras a un hijo que quiero tanto

Amigos ésta es la historia, la historia de nuestros hijos

Que no ha quedado imprimida porque es la ley del destino

Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo 43

 Les damos todo el cariño es parte de nuestra vida
Gastar dinero en los hijos no es una cuenta perdida

Me contesto la señora la que antes era mi esposa

Mejor no les digas nada porque eres muy poca cosa
El hijo mayor de todos habló con palabras fuertes
Mi padre es nuestro padre y tienes que respetarle
Un hijo puede ser juez dentro de su propio hogar
Enséñales a sus hermanos a sus padre respetar

(I was talking to my children to counsel them and one of them told me: you’re too
old for this. The youngest one said: daddy, stop talking, your life is ending and mine
is starting. I couldn’t answer and I started to cry after listening to these words from
a son whom I love so much. Friends, this is the story of our children, a non-written
story, it’s destiny. We give them all our love; this is part of our lives. Spending money
on them is not a lost account. The woman who was my wife before said: you’d better
not tell them anything, you are nothing for them now. The eldest son spoke firmly: My
father is our father and you must respect him. A son can become a judge in his own
home and should teach his brothers how to respect their father.)

The lyrics show how a father can lose his authority and respect and be
paid back with disrespect from his wife and kids when they grow up after
having had to work hard to provide welfare and material happiness to them.
However, the song presents a final moral with the inclusion of an older son
who represents the safeguard of the family unity and the defense of the
traditional hierarchy within it and thus inherits the role of the father when the
latter gets old. The figure of the son who returns home in its real and figurative
way is present in other Los Tigres’s lyrics, “Padres tristes” (“Sad fathers”), “Así
como tú” (“Just Like You”, 1997), where the father laments the cruelty of the
offspring who abandon their fathers once they get everything from them and,
in contrast, praises the attitude of the prodigal son who returns home to take
care of him.

Hoy somos padres

Alegres por que vemos,
Crecer los hijos
Que dios nos regaló,
Pero más tarde
Seremos viejos tristes,
Cuando se marchen
Y digan el adiós.

44 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Así es la vida nacer para morirse,
Así es la vida crecer para volar,
Cuánto viejito se encuentra solitito,
Acompañado de su triste soledad.

Que dios bendiga

A los hijos que a los padres,
Les dan cariño
Y los saben respetar,
Que dios bendiga
A los hijos que regresan
Que por sus padres
La vida quieren dar.

Un viejo solo
Decía tengo a mis hijos,
Viven con lujo
Con dinero y con poder,
Y yo camino
Viviendo por las calles,
Pues se olvidaron
Quién cuidó de su niñez.

Son padres tristes

Aquellos viejecitos,
Que llegan solos
Hasta el fin de su vejez,
Así es la vida
Brindarle todo a un hijo,
Sin la esperanza
De cobrarle alguna vez.

Que dios bendiga

A los hijos y a los padres,
Les dan cariño
Y los saben respetar,
Que dios bendiga
A los hijos que regresan,
Que por sus padres
La vida quieren dar.

Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo 45

(Today we are happy parents because we see the children that God gave us grow, but
one day we will be sad old men, when they leave and say good-bye. This is the way
life is: we are born and then die, this is the way life is: we grow and then fly, how
many old men are alone, living alone with their sad loneliness. God bless the offspring
who care for their parents and love them. God bless the offspring who return home
and want to give their lives for their parents. A lonely old man once said: I have my
children, they live luxuriously and have plenty of money and power, and I wander
alone, living in the streets, they forgot who took care of them when they were kids. The
old men who are alone at the end of their days are sad parents. This is the way life is:
one offers everything to a son, with no hope of receiving anything back. God bless the
offspring who care for their parents and love them. God bless the offspring who return
home and want to give their lives for their parents.)

The corrido reveals a situation that is currently very common in western

societies, where the population is getting old and the young generations, who
have been educated in a clearly capitalistic, materialistic way, do not always
find the time to take care of their elders, who are considered “non-productive”
pieces of the social chain. The lyrics show fatherhood as an ultimate generous
act that is not always recognized by the young generations. This generational
gap and the different opportunities the old generation and the young one
have had is also present in “Cuando se llega a viejo” (“When one gets old”),
“Incansables” (“Tireless”, 1991), where the father tries to encourage his son so
that he studies and tries to be “better” than he is, as well as to make the most
of the opportunities the young ones have and the fathers lacked of.

Hijo oye este consejo...

Tienes razón soy un viejo
Quizá comienzo a estorbar
Yo también tuve tus años
Y los muchos desengaños son los que hoy me hacen hablar.

Mírame yo soy tu espejo

Un día llegarás a viejo, y tarde vas a entender...
Que tu vida, fue una historia
Y que pudiste escribirla
Para ganar o perder...

Y si piensas que yo he fracasado

No cometas los mismos errores
Prepárate estudia mucho
Y busca rumbos mejores

46 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 PARA TI HIJO

Porque ahora vas a jugar el amor de tu vida

Pero arrojando tu mismo como apuesta
Prepárate hijo, cuenta conmigo
Tú eres joven, puedes hacerlo y nada te cuesta
Solo evita caer en los vicios
Porque el vicioso no llega a parte alguna
Mira cuantos jóvenes se pierden
Y con su desgracia, otros amasan inmensas fortunas
Yo solo quiero que tú triunfes hijo
Que de malo tiene eso
Entiéndeme
El camino de la vida es largo
Y ese camino no tiene regreso

Y si piensas que yo he fracasado

No cometas los mismos errores
Prepárate estudia mucho
Y busca rumbos mejores.

(Son, let me give you some advice: You are right, I am an old man, I may have already
started to disturb you. I was also young once and the many disappointments I have
experienced in my life push me to talk to you today. Look at me as if I were your
mirror, one day you will also become old, and you will then understand, even if it
is too late that you could have written your life-story taking the role of a winner or
a loser. And if you think that I have failed do not make the same mistakes, prepare
yourself, study hard and look for a better future. FOR YOU, SON. Because you are
now going to play on the love of your life, but you are betting on yourself. Prepare
yourself, count on me, you are young, you can do it now, it is easy for you. Just do not
get involved in bad habits, vicious men get nowhere. See how many people get lost and
make other people incredibly wealthy with their disgrace. I only want you to succeed.
Is there anything bad in that? You should understand me. Life is long and there is no
way back. And if you think that I have failed, do not make the same mistakes, prepare
yourself, study hard and look for a better future.)

The majority of the proposed lyrics show a certain crisis in the role of the
father, revealing a figure that has lost its authority and seems to have had to
renounce his superior position within the family and is somehow repudiated
by his sons. The quick changes that western society is experimenting in the
last decades and the drastically different accessibility to material wealth and

Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo 47

money by the two generations has created an enormous gap between fathers
and sons, who oftentimes lament having given all to their kids. The most
dramatic outcome of this lamentation is seen in some of the band’ s lyrics where
one of other recurrent theme they present, the loss of a son by drugs, among
other ways, is intertwined with fatherhood and father-son relationship. Thus,
the lyrics of – “En nombre de tu padre” (“In the name of your father”), “La garra
de…” (“The claw of…”, 1993), “¿En qué fallé?” (“What was my mistake?”), “La
reina del Sur” (“The Southern Queen”, 2002), “Le compré la muerte a mi hijo”
(“I bought my son´s death”), “Historias que contar” (“Stories to tell”, 2006), “Mi
sangre prisionera” (“My imprisoned blood”), “Unidos para siempre” (“Together
forever”, 1996), “El dolor de un padre” (“A father’s pain”), “Jefe de jefes” (“Boss
of bosses”, 1997) show the devastating effects of the dramatic loss of a son
and the feeling of guilt parents assume when this occurs. In the case of “El
dolor de un padre” (“A Father’s pain”), for instance, the father feels guilty for
not having had enough time to spend with his kids, and as a consequence,
assumes his responsibility of the fact that his son is involved in drugs.

Qué cosas tiene la vida

Que nos censura y enseña
Cuando crees que estás
Más bien el barco se te ladea
Yo creo que al final de cuentas
La vida es como tu escuela.

De que me sirvió el dinero

Y todo lo que he ganado si
Aquel hijo consentido las
Drogas me lo quitaron si yo
Hubiera estado cerca tal vez
No hubiera pasado.

No quiero dar el consejo y yo

Quedarme sin él pero si te
Sobra tiempo disfrútalo siempre
Bien con los seres que más
Quieres y verás que te irá bien.

(Hablando): Así como yo perdí a

Mi hijo se que hay muchos padres
Que sufren el mismo dolor, porque la
Droga te hace perder la vida, la familia,

48 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 La vergüenza y tus facultades y sepan
Que por esa maldita droga hospitales,
Cárceles y panteones es el último final.

Yo conozco algunas gentes que

Ahora son traficantes sepan que
Yo perdí un hijo y ustedes son los
Causantes disculpen si los ofendo
Pero es el dolor de un padre.

(How is life, it censures and teaches you and when you think that you are fine, the
ship leans to one side. Life is a great school. What is money and all I earned good for
if drugs took my spoiled son away from me. If I had been next to him, this may not
have happened. I do not want to give advice and not have one for myself, but if you
have any spare time, enjoy it with your beloved ones, and things will be great for you.
(Speaking): I know there are many fathers who lost their sons like me and suffer the
same pain, drugs make you lose your life, family, shame and skills. You should know
hospitals, prisons and pantheons become the last stop for many because of the damned
drugs. I know many people who are now dealers. You should know that I lost a son
and you are to blame for that. Forgive me if I offend you, sirs, but this is the voice of
the pain of a father.)

The lyrics of “El dolor de un padre” (“A Father’s Pain”), “En el nombre de
tu padre” (“In your father’s name”) or “En qué fallé?” (“What was my mistake?”)
and “Mi sangre prisionera” (“My imprisoned blood”), all of which deal with
sons and daughters becoming drug addicts are somehow ironical, taking into
account that one of the main themes the lyrics of Los Tigres del Norte deal with
is drug dealing and the wealth that it brings with, and they oftentimes become
a celebration of the figure of the narcotraficante (drug-dealer), symbol of
power, bravery and dignity. However, even though drug dealing is presented
as something to denounce, all the lyrics show a regretful father, who blames
himself for not having spent enough time with his kid and not having cared
about his education. This is also de case of “En qué fallé?” (“What was my
mistake?”), where the protagonist is, quite rarely, a daughter who is involved
in drugs. The father, similarly, feels guilty for having done something wrong
and the man the daughter is with lectures the father, who is accused of not
having been a good one.

Hola señor ¿cómo le va?

¿Por qué tan triste esta?
¿Acaso esta usted enfermo?,

Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo 49

 ¿O algo anda mal?
Pues si sufriendo estoy,
Llorando de dolor, por mi hija que se me descarriló y se fue.

¿Que no la has visto tú? (no señor)

¿No sabes con quién se fue? (no señor)
¿Por qué me mientes si apenas los vieron juntos en un café?
¡Tú me la aconsejaste!
¡Me la echaste a perder!
Y lo peor fue que la enviciaste, ¡que malo debes de ser!

A mí no me eche la culpa,
¿Por qué no se culpa usted?,
Ella se sentía tan sola y usted no la supo entender.

¿Y qué querías que la entendiera, siempre tuvo que comer?

Ay señor no sea usted tonto,
Nunca padre supo ser usted con sus exigencias
Usted nada mas usted.
Predicándole sus faltas sin ver las faltas de usted.
Yo le di muy buenos ejemplos
No me explico en qué fallé
¡Nunca le negamos nada!,
¡Para ella siempre trabajé!

Eso no es suficiente
Hay algo de más valor,
Que y ni se compra ni se vende,
A ella le faltó el amor

Estás muy equivocado,

Amor siempre le sobró
Usted es el equivocado,
Pues nunca se lo demostró.

Y si alguien es culpable,
Ese culpable es usted
No basta decir soy padre
Sino hay que saberlo ser.

(Hello sir, how are you? Why are you so sad? Are you sick? Is there anything wrong?

50 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

Yes, I am suffering and crying with pain for a daughter who took the wrong road and
left. You didn’t see her?(No, sir). You don’t know who she left with? (No, Sir). Why
do you lie to me if they just saw you with her in a café? You advised her, you led her
to the wrong way, and worst of all, and you pushed her to the wild life! You must
be a terrible man! Don’t you blame me! Why don’t you blame yourself? She felt all
alone and you did not understand her. What should I understand? There was always
food on her table. Sir, don’t be a fool, you never knew how to be a father, you were too
demanding, telling he about her faults, but not seeing yours yourself. I gave her good
examples. I don’t know where I failed, we never told her “no” for anything, I just
worked for her. That is not enough, there is something more valuable, which cannot
be sold and bought, she lacked love. You are absolutely wrong, she had plenty of love.
You are the one who is wrong; you never showed your love to her. And if there is
anyone to blame, you are the one. Saying “I am a father” is not enough, one needs to
know how to be a father.)

Thus, the stereotype of the working father, who is responsible for the
material provision of his kids is still present in the contemporary popular
tradition, and as a consequence, we can infer that in the contemporary
popular code of behavior and morality also. In the cases presented in the
previous corridos, for instance, the image of the working father is recurrent and
omnipresent, and is reinforced by the idea of the father becoming successful
in his duties as provider of material wealth, as we can observe in the case of
“Le compré la muerte a mi hijo” (“I bought my son’s death”), where the father
buys a last generation car to his son, and he dies in a car accident, or in other
songs, where the father says he gave his kids all. The move towards a more
concerned father figure who is more worried about his kids is, however, seen
in all the songs, for the fathers regret not having had the time for their kids
and want to transmit this idea to the rest of the fathers, in an attempt to change
the custom and the acquired roles.
However, time does not always do all, and sometimes it is society that
takes sons away from fathers. “Mi soldado” (“My soldier”), presents, once
more, a moaning father who has lost his son because he has joined the army
and is ready to defend his nation. This father, in opposition to the others, has
spent enough time educating his son but it is the system that has separated
them. The duty to the nation is present and part of the pride and honor we
have talked so much about already, and as explained by George Mariscal
when writing about Viet Nam and the participation of Chicanos: “the material
conditions of poverty, job discrimination, and educational tracking together
with what was felt to be the overwhelming obligation to serve and prove
one’s loyalty according to traditional notions of nation and masculinity were
responsible for the relatively low number of Chicano draft resisters during

Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo 51

the Vietnam era” (28). The lyrics of the following corrido thus become a harsh
denunciation of warfare and condemn the fact that youngsters are killed in
unfair wars, but picture perfectly Mariscal’s words.

Lo adoré en las entrañas de su madre...

En mis brazos lo enseñaba a descifrar le enseñé
Cada salida... El respeto por la vida... Pero otros
Me lo entrenan pa matar...

Ya no juega a los soldados en mi casa

Ahora vive en una base militar es un hombre
De combate... un experto en el rescate
Y quién sabe si lo volveré a abrazar...

Cuántas guerras se han peleado cuantos

Héroes derrumbados por los hombres
El poder y la ambición...

Cuantos héroes han quedado con el corazón

Tatuado... Mutilados por las bombas
Y el cañón...

(No llores padre me dijo... Que me vas hacer

Llorar... Mi patria ha sido atacada
Y por ella voy a pelear... Le di un abrazo
Apretado dije adiós a mi soldado
Y me escondí pa llorar...)

(No quise manchar con llanto su traje

De militar si dios entregó a su hijo
Como eterno sacrificio por
El pecador mortal... Cómo iba a negar
Al mío... Aunque me muera vacío
Si no lo vuelvo a abrazar...)

Yo le canto a los soldados de la tierra

Los que empuñan la bandera con
Honor... Ahí va lo que más
Quiero... mi chiquillo peleonero
Defendiendo a su patria con valor...
(...)

52 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

(I adored him from the moment he was inside her mother, I taught him how to
understand things, gave him explanations, showed him respect for life, and they are
teaching him how to kill… He does not play soldiers at home anymore, he now lives
in a military base, he is a combat man… a rescue expert, who knows whether I will
ever hug him again. How many wars have been fought, how many heroes defeated by
men, power and ambition. How many heroes have ended up with their hearts tattooed,
mutilated by bombs and cannons. (Do not cry, father, he said, or you’ll make me cry,
my nation has been attacked and I am going to fight for it… I hugged him tight, said
good-bye to him and hid to cry). I didn’t want to stain his uniform with my tears.
If God gave his son as an eternal sacrifice for the mortal sinner… how could I deny
giving mine… even if I die empty and alone, if I never hug him again…) I sing to the
soldiers on earth, those who hold their flag with honor… here goes what I love most…
my fighting boy, defending his nation bravely...)

These lyrics contribute to the construction of both the father and the son
figures as heroes, as it is the tendency in this kind of genre. The father, who
once again is presented as an enduring man is convinced he should leave his
son join the army, so that he can become a hero. The references to God having
“given” his son for the benefit of all responds to the image of the God-like
father who does not dare to cry in front of his son and thus, preserves his
supposedly masculine, brave attitude, because, as explained by Segal: “The
father as God, God the father, may be one of our most powerful mythologies.
(…) The very power and authority they were supposed to possess turned
against them to create ghosts, so full and finally did they fail to embody these
qualities” (28). The son, on his part, acquires the most traditionally described as
masculine attributes: bravery, pride, honor, dignity and in this case, patriotism.
In conclusion, the overview of the lyrics of some of the corridos by Los Tigres
del Norte which deal with masculinity in general and fatherhood in particular,
proves that the stereotypical, traditional masculine figure is still prevalent in
many of the songs. A free man, who relates to women in a way that does
not tie him down, with strong and very marked masculine characteristics,
such as freedom, pride, bravery and so on, is still the protagonists of a genre
that represents the present state of affairs of Mexican and Chicano popular
culture. In this sense, the corridos, which are “los hechos reales del pueblo”,
tend to expose and indirectly favor the transmission and perpetuation of
gender roles which seem trapped in the past. The construction of masculinity
in general and fatherhood in particular, in this context, shows no proof of
development of change, and responds completely to Mirandé’s depiction of
fathers as representatives of the Chicano/latino macho figure, an individual
who claims his superior role and continuously performs it, fulfilling his
desires of freedom and autonomy.

Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo 53

 However, whenever the corridos present a man who has formed a family
and has become a father, his responsibility to his kids, but not always to his wife,
become unbreakable, and the man becomes committed body and soul to his
offspring. The loss of the latter for one or another reason, results in the depiction
of a sad man, who acquires behavioral attitudes that have traditionally been
attributed to women, such as endurance and even submission to his offspring.
In this sense, it could be well argued that this popular genre engages in the
construction of a “new masculinity” which includes child care and fathering
as some of its essential roles, following the figure that has been widely studied
and defined as “the new father” (Brandth and Kvande, 294). However, the
proposed corridos convey a very particular notion of this new masculinity,
which relates mainly to stereotypical notions of virility, macho identity and
honor (traits which are directly related to Mirandé´s depiction of latino
machismo), rather than with a more participative, equitable distribution of the
parental gender roles. The portrayal of fatherhood in the corridos of Los Tigres
del Norte, thus, presents a father figure that provides evidence of a gradual
change, which according to Saracho and Spodek, shows that: “the traditional
patterns of patriarchy are outdated and fail to satisfactorily represent the
complicated conceptualizations that Mexican American fathers exhibit
reporting their experiences of fatherhood” (85). The stereotypical concept
of machismo, and all its negative connotations, in this context, seems to be
shaping into a more positive, flexible, participative conception of masculinity
and fatherhood, but is still however, founded on “inherently” male attributes
such as virility, honor and defense of one’s community/family, which are
regarded as the basis of a Chicano male identity and ideology. In Rudolfo
Anaya’s words, thus: “Macho means taking care of la familia. Perhaps this
is the most important definition of macho, the real, positive meaning of the
word. And yet it is often given short thrift. Critics often look at the negative
behavior of the macho and forget the positive” (66). Los Tigres del Norte do not.

NOTES

1
The proposed translations respond to a free, thematic description of the storyline
rather than to a word-to-word translation of the lyrics, and do not attempt at
maintaining the rhyme and musical attributes of the songs.

WORKS CITED

Alonso Gallo, Laura and Domínguez Miguela, Antonia. “Performative

fathers and the Inessential Macho: Fatherhood in Contemporary Latino/

54 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 a Literature.” Naming the Father: Legacies, Genealogies, and Explorations
of Fatherhood in Modern and Contemporary Literature. Ed. Paulino, Eva.
Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2000. 67-95.
Anaya, Rudolfo. “I´m the King. The Macho Image”. Muy Macho. Latino Men
Confront their Manhood. Ed. González, Ray. Toronto: Anchor Books. 57-
75.
Brandth, Berit and Kvande, Elin. “Masculinity and child care: the Reconstruction
of fathering”. The Sociological Review 46: 2 (1989): 293-313.
Coltrane, Scott. “Stability and change in Chicano men’s family lives”. Men’s
lives. Eds. M. Kimmel & M. Messner. New York: Macmillan, 1989. 451-
-466.
Mariscal, George, Ed. Aztlán and Vietnam. Chicano and Chicana experiences of the
War. Berkeley: Universtiy of California Press, 1999.
Mirandé, Alfredo. “Chicano Fathers: Response and Adaptation To Emergent
Roles”. SCCR Working Paper No. 13. Stanford, Ca: Stanford Center for
Chicano Research, 1986.
_______, Hombres y Machos. Masculinity and Latino Culture. Bolder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1997.
Murdock, George. Social Structure. New York: MacMillan, 1949.
Herlinghauss, Herman. “Narcocorridos: An Ethical Reading of Musical
Diegesis”. Revista Transcultural de Música/Transcultural Music Review 10
(2006) <http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/herlinghaus.htm>.
Saracho, Olivia, and Spodek, Bernard. “Demythologizing the Mexican
American Father”. Journal of Hispanich Higher Education 2: 2 (April 2008):
79-96.
Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion. Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. London:
Virago Press, 1990.
Taylor, Brent & Behnke, Andrew. “Fathering Across the Border: Latino Fathers
in Mexico and the U.S.”. Fathering 3: 2 (Spring 2005): 99-120.

* This essay is part of the research project financed by the University of the
Basque Country NUPV08/24 and the FFI2008-03833 project, financed by
the MEC, Spain (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia).

Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo 55

 SELF – NEGOTIATING BORDERS, CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY1

Ana Clara Birrento

Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, in 1963, of French-Canadian parents. He

travelled with them around the world, in Europe (at the age of three he moved
to Portugal) and since then travelled to North America and Central America
due to his father’s position as a diplomat; as an adult, he continued travelling
spending time in Iran, Turkey and India. After graduating with a B.A. in
Philosophy from Concordia University in 1985, and while doing various odd
jobs – tree planting, dishwashing, working as a security guard – he began
to write at the age of 27. But only in 1993 did he publish his first work Seven
Stories, followed in the same year by The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
and Other Stories – a collection of four short stories about such issues as death,
memory and the nature of storytelling, with a markedly autobiographical
tone. Critics2 regarded this collection as ambitious, experimental fiction by
a promising young author. Reviewers applauded Martel’s ability to blend
resonant emotional storylines with atypical prose forms, notable on the one
hand for its warm human voice and on the other for a precocious pleasure in
experimenting.
In 1996, he published his inaugural novel Self, hardly noticed at the time.
Only his prize-winning novel Life of Pi (2001) – a remarkable spiritual journey
of a young Hindu-Christian Muslim boy, touching on questions of religion
and metaphysics - would bring Martel and his work to the attention of the
critics; it awarded him international recognition. He became an international
best-seller, with critics lauding Pi’s experiences as engaging, compelling,
and powerful, strengthened by Martel’s vivid descriptions and lyrical prose
style. However, some have commented that Martel’s narrative structure is the
weakest aspect of the novel. Nathan Whitlock, for example, has commented
that, while the portion of the novel that takes place in the lifeboat “might be
the most gripping 200 pages in recent Canadian fiction”, the narrative frame

57
of The Life of Pi is ultimately “superfluous”. Many reviewers have discussed
Martel’s central thematic concern with the nature of religious faith and doubt
in The Life of Pi, arguing that the novel presents a thought-provoking allegory
for the powers of religious faith. Charlotte Innes has described The Life of Pi as
“a religious book that makes sense to a nonreligious person”.
After the Canada’s 2001 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and the
English Man Booker Prize of 2002 for the above referred novel3, Martel
published in 2004 We Ate the Children Last, another collection of short stories,
and since 2009 he has been running an online project – What Is Stephen Harper
Reading? – with commentaries on books he sends to the Canadian prime
Minister. In April 2010 he published Beatrice and Virgil, where he deals with
the theme of the holocaust and its relation with art. A book that has been
qualified as a “pretentious and humourless follow-up” (Churchwell 2010)
to The Life of Pi and, like Self, with a resemblance between protagonist and
author. Between 2002 and 2003 he taught as the Samuel Fischer Professor of
Literature in the Department of Comparative Literature, Free University of
Berlin, and between 2003 and 2004 he was resident writer of the Public Library
of Saskatoon, in Canada. In November 2005, the University of Saskatchewan
announced that Martel would be scholar-in-residence.
Considered by some as a nomad storyteller, Yann Martel lives now
mainly in Montreal, where his parents have settled; Montreal is his base. As
he himself confessed in an interview published in The Guardian, in October
2002: “I can’t live for more than four years outside of Canada. I’m Canadian,
so ultimately that is my reference point”.
The literary glory, which as he commented in 2003 in The Guardian4,
meant a passage from silence, isolation, solitude and discretion to a feeling of
being a racehorse, due to the many reviews and invitations that have left him
exhausted and thrilled, has not affected him personally, because it praises
his creative act. With several prizes and awards that “are not felt the same
way as happiness or loneliness are felt” (Martel 2003) Martel has also known
a formidable career in the media, as his discourse on the philosophical and
the spiritual seems to please the audience, eager to know about questions
regarding Existence and the Essence of Life. Critics have also been very
eloquent in praising Martel. In the review quotes I could find, many consider
him not only an engaging, brilliant storyteller, a powerful and gifted writer,
with an almost otherworldly talent, almost a force of nature, but also the
greatest living writer, born in the sixties.
By the time Self was published, it was not so critically or commercially
applauded as it is nowadays. In fact, only after the resounding success of The
Life of Pi and very much in its shadow did the novel deserve any attention
from the critics. The novel that in Martel’s own words initially vanished

58 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

quickly and quietly has received mixed reviews, ranging from arguments
against Martel’s unusual narrative structure and ambiguous protagonist that
make the novel overly obtuse and unsatisfying for readers to claims that the
novel’s treatment of gender, self, and other is provocative. Some enthusiastic
critiques, mainly from the Canadian Press5, were unanimous in considering
it an engaging, even mesmerizing book, with things that ring true, allied to a
wildly, unusual, imaginative quality.
Charles Foran, for example, wrote that it was “an intelligent and
entertaining meditation on sexuality, language and identity, the nature of
longing, and on the very process of creating things: selves, characters, and
novels.” (Montreal Gazette); others, like Garan Holcombe (2004), wrote that
Self:
is an acute study of sexual orientation and identity. Bold, original and in
parts very funny, the novel is the story of a nameless narrator who struggles
to grasp the implication that he/she is ‘a ceaseless monologue trapped
within [him/herself.]’ Self concerns itself with the tension between fixed and
mutable notions of who we are. It is about the limits of our personalities;
the possibilities of transformation on a grand scale; the scope of fiction to
express our confusions.

Holcombe calls the attention to the fact that on the back cover of the book,
the reader is confronted with such questions a “What is fiction? What is
autobiography? What is man? What is woman? What is violence? What is
happiness?” He explains that being a rumination on what constitutes a
boundary, the novel allows the reader the freedom to find his own answer to
such complex questions through the examination that the narrator makes on
the loneliness of youth, on the melancholic hankering after a great purpose
and on the essential absurdity of longing and sexual desire.
Martel leaves to the reader the possibility of finding the answers to these
questions in the conditions of plausibility he creates for them and for the
protagonist, and of making sense out of a story of love, sex and ambiguity.
Regarding the act of writing as something that gives him pleasure, as an
act that enables him to understand issues that are important to him and to
express his creative energies, Martel fictionalizes a tale of sexual identity and
orientation, an Orlando-like transformation. Self narrates the story of a young
man who, in the course of an overnight transformation, becomes a woman,
only to morph back into masculine form in his mid-20s.
The novel is the fictional autobiography of the first thirty years of a
young writer who takes the readers to travel in Canada, Portugal, Greece
and Turkey, a young writer whose characteristics are similar to the author’s,
giving to its plot and action a certain autobiographical taste; like Martel, the
protagonist was born in Spain, in 1963, of student parents, who were his net,

Ana Clara Birrento 59

“such a harmonious, complementary couple” (Self 7): “they were at the central
periphery of my life. They were my loving authoritarian servants” (Self 4).
The intimacy and interconnectedness between his parents seems to set the
tone for the interchangeability of roles and open the path to an adventurous
change of gender, as he claims that:
I cannot recall noticing, as a small child, any difference between my parents
that I could ascribe to sex. Though I knew they weren’t the same thing twice
over, the distinctions did not express themselves in fixed roles (Self 5).

The indistinguishable roles between the genders, together with the prota-
gonist’s multiple travels as child of diplomats creates in him the idea, as he
himself confesses, that “transformation has been central to my life” (Self 8).
Each change of school, of friends, of countries, of languages gave him the
opportunity “to recreate myself” (Self 9), and to present the before and the
after of an individual who has undergone a transformation (Barros 1998), who
suddenly wakes up one morning, at the age of eighteen, to find out he has
inexplicably changed into a girl.
As Barros (1998) explains, change is the operative metaphor of the
autobiographical discourse; the novel, a fictional autobiography, envisages
two gendered positions and encompasses traumatic experiences of the
protagonist: the death of the parents and a rape that enhance the development
into adulthood and the consequent negotiations as far as her/his identity
is concerned. Life being discursive, this fictional autobiography, as all
autobiographies, according to Barros (1998), is a narrative of change and of
transformation, of human transformation, as a reflection on experience.
As it is constituted by language and directed toward its contemporary
audience, it speaks through metaphors that are held in common, that are
shared by the texts that surround it. As it is taken up into the ongoing
discourse, autobiography establishes its place as universal word for
transformation (Barros 214).

Exploring the themes of interrelatedness and isolation, selfhood and

otherness, the novel tells a tale that maps the self onto tellings of personal
and social experiences, becoming a narrative with a self at its centre. With
excerpts written in French, in Spanish, in Hungarian and in German,
followed by a translation in English, the narrative shows the multilingual
and multicultural background of the author, negotiating the borders of an
identity that is constantly being constructed and reconfigured in the voice(s)
of the main character. Like Martel, the protagonist reflects his very Canadian
multilinguistic identity.
So it was that, by a mere whim of geography, I went to school in England,
played outside in Spanish and told all about it at home in French. Each
tongue came naturally to me and each had its natural interlocutors. I no

60 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 more thought of addressing my parents in English than I did of doing
arithmetic in my head in French. English became the language of my exact
expression, but it expressed thoughts that somehow have always remained
Latin (Self 18-19).

According to Philip Marchand (1996), Martel emphasizes the young self’s

experience of flux, transformation and plurality. The plural identity, the
protagonist’s transformations, the representation of his/her inner feelings and
thoughts are narrative forms of negotiating the borders of his/her existence in
a process of meaning and construction of identity.
This fictional autobiography builds a map of possibilities of the self,
where the author (subject and object of the autobiography) and the reader
move and acknowledge conditions of possibility or plausibility (Sinfield
1992) for an individual and social existence; it becomes a landscape of a self
that is in quest of his identity in geographies of the possible (Probyn 1993).
According to Raymond Williams (1965) every human being needs to describe
his experiences because in this description he remakes himself, beginning a
creative change in his own personal organization, a change which includes
and controls experience. This is a change that frees the self, that is to say
creates another self, freeing the one subjected to the determinative power of
culture, creating an empowered subject, able to recreate both culture and his
place in it, paving the way for a geography of the possible.
Offering many avenues for exploration (Gudmundsdóttir 2003), many
landscapes where the self is represented, many possible geographies for the
existence of the self, autobiography is, according to Elbaz (1988) a discourse
not about the “I” but about a series of “he’s”, because a “he” does not conform
to the mystified consistency and continuity of the “I”: the narrative is made
up of a multiplicity of personae. Framed by a postmodernist vision of the self
as a discursive entity, an agent of discourse in the autobiographical narrative,
a producer of meaning and an organizer of knowledge (Ashley et al 1994), we
can read the self at the centre of the novel not as the essentialist self, but rather
as a dynamic subject that changes over time, and is positioned in multiple
discourses, as a set of techniques and practices (Probyn 1993).
The several enunciative modalities (Foucault 1988) do not refer to a
synthesis or to a unifying function of the subjects, but rather show dispersions,
revealing the different states, places and positions which the enunciative
subject occupies or is given in the moment of speaking or of writing. This
is a process that Foucault (1988) calls the “discontinuity of the planes” from
which one speaks. Emerging from modalities of power, identities mark the
difference and the exclusion, and can be understood, using Hall’s metaphor
(1996) as points of suture, of junction between the discourses and the
practices which put ourselves as subjects of particular discourses and the

Ana Clara Birrento 61

processes which produce subjectivities and that construct us as enunciative
subjects.
Recounting his own story, the protagonist constructs a dual landscape
(Ochs and Capps 1996), of action and of consciousness; while the former
focuses on what the protagonist does under certain circumstances, the latter
focuses on his beliefs and on his feelings. Oscillating between a narrative
structure framed by the past of the action and the present of the writing, Self
offers a process of self-comprehension that is reminiscent, in the sense that
it gathers together all the dimensions of the self, the dimensions which had
been until the moment of writing, unarticulated, dispersed, scattered or lost.
This reminiscence is a critical and active process that combines emotions and
moments of self-reflection and which gives access to omitted experiences,
allowing memory to see the events of the past in a new way, in a new
landscape. The order given to the events is not an order inherent to the events
themselves, but rather an option of the author and a reflection upon himself;
it is to give what he thought and lived to a possible reading, shaping events
into a story with an end.
The novel is composed of two chapters. The first one has got 329 pages
and the second only one paragraph, on one single page. It is only in the second
chapter that the reader gets to know in more detail, let’s say, in more physical
detail, the protagonist, as if we are looking at the information provided in an
identity card.
I AM THIRTY YEARS OLD. I weigh 139 pounds. I am five foot seven and a
half inches tall. My hair is brown and curly. My eyes are grey-blue. My blood
type is O positive. I am Canadian. I speak English and French (Self 330).

This is the final chapter of the novel and in it we can identify an important
technique in the rewriting of the self. The moment when past and present
intersect and when the author has to put an end to time, to knowledge and
to the self. These lines frame the whole narrative, giving to the reader a clear
signal that what he has been reading is a fictionalisation of the self, as the
present act of writing exerts a deliberate re-creation of the self. The image
that the reader is given of the self’s past life is necessarily distorted and
incomplete to the extent that the subject who remembers the past is not the
same being that as a child, an adolescent or as a young adult lived that same
past, showing that change, as mentioned above, is an operative metaphor in
the autobiographical discourse.
As a text of life we find a protagonist that assuming different identities
negotiates borders of uniqueness and difference in the relation with the others,
with the world and with his other self, in order to construct his identity,
through the representation of contexts of experience. According to Foucault
(1988), the notion of identity shifts the question of “what is the self” to “what

62 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

is the plateau on which I shall find my identity?” (25). In Self the reader can
find several plateaux on which the protagonist tries to find his identity. In
its narrative texture, we find an autobiography of a 30 year old writer who
tells about his life, who creates a fictional landscape for a possible life. In this
fictionalisation of the self and in the creation of possible contexts of experience
we can find two layers of existence: on the one hand the experience of the
writer, the anguishes and doubts in finding the best form of writing, and, on
the other hand, the experience of the self, put in several contexts, in several
filigrees of ontological and epistemological existence.
If we take into consideration that the representation of experience is a
form of understanding the self and the world, an experience which helps to
the creation of retrospective and prospective meanings (Pickering 1997), when
considering this novel as a fictional landscape of the self, we have to centre
our analysis on the processes of production of a subjectivity, of an identity
and of an agency.
Stuart Hall (1990) argues that the practice of representation implies
the positions from which one writes or speaks – the enunciative positions
– because, though we speak about ourselves, in our name and about our
experience, who speaks or writes, who determines the identity of the narrator
and the subject about whom it is written or spoken are not identical and are
not in the same place. We write and talk from a particular place and time,
from a specific history and culture, and what we say is always contextualized
and positioned; therefore we should think of identity not as a pre-existent
fact, but as a process, a production, never complete and always constructed
within representation.
Recollecting his earliest memories, the protagonist starts his autobiography
in his childhood with vague memories and distant feelings of someone
“unaware of itself”:
(...) no memories of mirrors, no memories of clothes, of skin, of limbs, of
body, of my own physical self as a child. As if paradoxically, I were then
nothing but a huge eager eye, an emotional eye, looking out, always looking
out (Self 11).

Disembodied of physical existence, what we perceive is that emotion and

feelings are the tools through which he constructs his identity because, as
he says: “Childhood, like wisdom, is an emotion. Feelings are what register
deeply of one’s early years” (Self). This disembodiment is, according to Sidonie
Smith (1993), a privilege of patriarchal culture, allowing us to conclude that
as a male figure, the self owes its existence to the system of representation
in which he develops and finds expression; indeed, it is in the text that the
subjective consciousness gives an order to itself and to the objective reality
and allows the author to relate the known self to an unknown world, creating

Ana Clara Birrento 63

new patterns of relationship, while, simultaneously, constructing a self.
In autobiographical narratives the narrator becomes the storyteller who
tells stories that delineate the self as part of the story, envisioning alternatives
“to conceive of other ways of being, of acting, of striving” (Bruner, Acts 110),
constructing narratives about a life. The male protagonist of Self, attempting
at being the unifying element of time, space and identity, explains various
events from his early childhood, living with a travelling family who finally
settle in Ottawa, Ontario. The moment of leaving Europe coincides with the
“metamorphosis that begins at puberty” (Self). Taken metaphorically, as he
puts it, departure meant his childhood was saying good-bye to him:
As I climbed the steps of the plane and turned and looked at the people on
the open terrace of the airport, I didn’t know it was not only Europe that was
waving its hands good-bye to me, but my childhood (Self 50).

Puberty is the next phase in his transformation; it is a physical and a mental

change, a moment when “knowledge and confusion increased exponentially”
(Self), when sexual need and loneliness seemed torture and when “I thought I
was the same as always, absolutely the same, until I realized that I no longer
enjoyed playing with toys quite so much, or being with my parents all the
time” (Self).
Explaining events in a chronological order, very much into to the formal
paradigms of autobiographical writing, from his years in private schools to
his graduation and the death of his parents, the protagonist accounts for his
adolescent doubts concerning identity and gender, seeming to a certain extent
that he is an asexual creature feeling “neither masculinity nor femininity” (Self
62), and playing hence with the question of identity and sexual boundary. His
male identity makes him feel at the age of sixteen like a zero, “unable to fit
for whatever reason – a curious physical appearance, a social awkwardness,
an ineptness of one sort or another” (Self 85). This sense of non-existence, of
unawareness, is suddenly disrupted by his parents’ death, witnessed only by
an “old man and the sea” (Self 89). Hemingway’s tale, which he was reading
at that moment, connects from then on with their death and in the figments of
his imagination the violence of the crash is blurred by the events of the tale, in
a seeming denial of the event.
This death, “another stage in my ever expanding, metamorphic life”
(Self 94), meant an emptiness and the collapse of the central periphery of his
universe and happens very near “the end of the assembly-line of education”
(Self 95), after which he decides to fly to Portugal grounded on no particular
reason but “the rectangularity of Portugal. I like rectangular countries, where
human will imposes itself on topography” (Self 101). And Portugal is the stage
where his other self is positioned, now in the voice of a woman, as on his
eighteenth birthday, he wakes up as a female:

64 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 I woke suddenly. I don’t know what I was dreaming, why I should have
awakened. I sat up. I was confused. I couldn’t remember anything – my
name, my age, where I was – complete amnesia. I knew that I was thinking
in English, that much I knew right away. My identity was tied to the English
language. And I knew that I was a woman, that also. English speaking and
a woman. That was the core of my being” (Self 107).

The turning point in the narrative allows the reader to know the core of a
being who becomes a woman with a “deep sense of peace” (Self), aware that
“everything was all right” (Self 108) and that “we are bodies and selves in a
social world” (Eakin 40). With this female voice, we understand that identity
“is always negotiated, interpersonally, relationally” (Eakin 1999: 40) and that
the protagonist has to deal with her body because she is, in Butler’s words
(1993), a subject of embodiment, a performative self, contrary to what she
had felt as male protagonist. As such, we are witnesses of her homosexual
relationship with a woman who “exuded an experience of life, a road travelled,
that made me want to listen to her” (Self 139), with whom she attains moments
of “perfect felicity” (Self 146). Interestingly, it is with men, for whom she later
starts to feel attracted, that she is conscious of a homosexual relationship. Her
stream of consciousness is clear in the perception that the relationship with a
man was wrong, but it is also revealing of the struggle between boundaries
that the protagonist experiences in the novel:
He’s a man. This is homosexuality. I’m a homosexual. This is what had flashed
through my mind downstairs when Tom had kissed the top of my head, and
what began racing through my mind as soon as our lips touched.(…) He’s
a man. This is homosexuality. I’m a homosexual. Which is crazy, I know. We
were doing the perfectly heterosexually normal, the banal even, but it came,
over and over, he’s a man, this is homosexuality. I’m a homosexual, though this
sense of committing the forbidden forbade nothing, only but my legs were
trembling and I needed air (Self 201).

An interesting feature in the construction of the self in the novel is the use
of the pronominal form “I”. The first person narrator, also protagonist, has
no name. The use of this pronominal form is a narrative technique and
a narrative strategy in the representation of the self and does not refer, in
Emile Benveniste’s words (1966), to a reality, or to objective positions in space
and in time, but rather to the enunciation itself. “I” refers to a reality within
discourse; the individual who utters the present instance of discourse contains
the linguistic instance “I”; each “I” has its own referential and corresponds,
in turn, to a unique being, placed as such. This is very important when we
analyse the instance “I” in the novel, as the different I(s) enunciated through
the text, the duplication of the “I” narrator and of the “I” narrated, as well
as the fragmentation of the narrated self into multiple enunciative positions,
marks the autobiographical process as a rhetorical artefact.

Ana Clara Birrento 65

 The autobiographical subject is no singular entity, but a net of differences
(Gilmore 1994) within which the subject inscribes himself, becoming multiple,
heterogeneous and conflictual, factors that expose the technologies of
autobiographical writing, namely the construction of several versions of the
self.
This construction is, in the particular case of Self, based on memories of
emotions and not on any temporal order:
I have difficulty remembering the order of things. In my memory the past
and the present tenses do not measure temporal sequences, but emotional
weight. What I cannot forget repeats itself in the present tense (Self 266-67).

These versions of the self are constructed by means of a technology of power

(Foucault, 1988) – memory; a memory that is “vague, no more than a distant
feeling that I can sometimes seize, most often not” (Self 2). Scouring memory,
the character tries to find the ingredients of his identity, assembling and
arranging them. Through each one of his affiliations, taken separately, the self
possesses a certain kinship with a large number of his fellow human beings,
but because of all these allegiances, taken together, he possesses his own
identity, completely different from any other.
Being born in Spain, of Canadian parents and having lived all over
Europe and America, the character tries not to compartmentalise his identity;
according to Amin Maalouf (2000), you cannot divide it up into halves or
thirds or any other separate segments. But this doesn’t mean, still in Maalouf’s
words, that one has got several identities, on the contrary; one has just got an
identity, made up of many components combined together in a mixture that
is unique to every individual who, without exception, possesses a composite
identity, a complex, unique and irreplaceable one, not to be confused with
any other.
As if in a play, Martel puts his character into action, manipulating it,
making of it the object /subject of writing; in fact, as Michel Foucault points
out (1988), the self is something to write about, a theme or object /subject
of writing activity. Thus, the self becomes simultaneously the object and the
subject of the autobiography. For Elspeth Probyn (1993), the self is not an end
in itself, but rather the opening of a perspective, a perspective which allows
us to transform ourselves.
It is in the opening of perspectives for the self that I consider we can
classify Martel’s work as tentative, in order to find a meaning for the self,
to find a form of writing, to find an answer to the relationship between
fiction and autobiography and, finally, to find an answer to the relationship
between being a man and being a woman. This search takes place through
the enactment of several identities, through a play that is at the centre of the
different narratives, namely the narratives that tell about the change of identity,

66 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

bringing the reality into the fantasy, into another possible geography for the
existence of a being, whose name is always unknown. Identity becomes then,
in this case, a shifting concept, moving from one body to another, making the
self oscillate between one identity and another, producing what Lidia Curti
(1992) calls, an aesthetics of flux, splits and fragmentations.
We find throughout the book unsuccessful attempts to write a novel
with the working title Crazy Jane, “a first-person religious allegory set in 1939
in a small Portuguese village some days away from Fatima” (Self 173), but
the character has “no idea how to write a novel” (Self 178); in the process of
reading, the reader finds ways, strategies and technologies of writing that,
in the end, come to be a possible way out for the character’s difficulty. The
novel written within the novel was “a form of rehearsal” (Self), as Self also is.
It is a rehearsal of imaginative creativity, of finding answers to ontological
questions of being a man and being a woman and also a rehearsal of contexts
of experience where bodies matter.
In a novel that develops along two chapters, the reader is a bit surprised
when he realises that the first chapter covers the whole journey in the
representation of identity, in a constant game between truth and fiction, and
that the second chapter has only got a few lines. By choosing and selecting
what he wants to remember, constructing his past by means of vague
remembrances, the character becomes an agent of power, refusing to have
memories of him as a child or not caring to write about painful memories,
as it is the case of his parents’ death. In these choices, Martel creates a fiction
about the meaning of being a male and a female, as in the development of
the plot we meet a split identity: in a first moment a man and in a second
moment a woman that after a traumatic and violent experience turns into
a man again. We should detain our attention on the representation of the
rape, on the graphic wording of the experience on the page, as if the female
protagonist is trying to squeeze and contain it into a tiny space, in an attempt
to confine and to discard it, but simultaneously telling it through 19 pages in
columns on the left-hand side of the page, paralleled by another column, on
the right-hand side, where we find blank spaces or the repetition at random of
the words baby, pain and fear. The protagonist is on the one hand prolonging
her pain and fear, her trauma in order to give the reader the sense of brutality,
the never ending moment of such an experience, but, on the other hand, deep
inside, as a woman and as an artist, she wants to reproduce the disruption it
caused in her as a human being, as a writer and as a mother who lost her baby,
containing it within the physical limits of a column.
This traumatic experience originates another gender transformation; this
time a painful one, an experience that kills her femininity and empties her
life:

Ana Clara Birrento 67

 I don’t know why they call it rape. To me it was murder. I was killed that
day and I’ve had to drag death around in me ever since, a roaming greyness
in my colourful interior; sometimes it’s my stomach that’s dead, sometimes
my head, sometimes my intestines, often my heart (Self 315).

The extreme sensation of death covers her whole body and heart, as well as
her life, which she left “abruptly and untidily” (Self 315), only to remember
it among the thousands of pages of the book of life as the “fear, the anxiety,
the nightmares, the sleepless nights, the panic, the depression, the loss, the
sadness” (Self 316).
The novel develops through several narrative strategies that compose
a fictional landscape of a self whose culmination into adulthood implies a
change of gender, which implies a change in the strategy of representation.
As a man the narrative structures and the forms of development and
interpretation were established by the res gestae, by social and intellectual
concerns; as a woman we find alternative narrative structures based on a
feminine sensitivity, with a deeper re-assessment of feelings and with greater
subjectivity. In Self, the androcentric paradigm represents an autonomous
individual who writes about conflicts and positions himself in the centre,
but the autobiographical representation of a feminine being gives us a more
flexible self and develops a vision of the world characterized by relationships
(both homo and heterosexual) which structure the autobiography and which
break with the monocultural imperatives of the being.
Getting hold of a feminine identity, the character is able to acknowledge
the presence of another consciousness, where the revelation of the feminine
self is tied to the identification of the other. The re-creation of the self into
another self is helped by the character’s endless capacity to “envision life as a
series of metamorphic changes, one after another” (Self 9) and the character’s
consciousness that each change enabled him to “present a new façade, to bury
past errors and misrepresentations” (Self 9).
By turns, man, woman and man, the narrator, also the protagonist,
flaunts its sexual undecidability and, meanwhile, by avoiding the demands
of realism to know the truth of the narrator’s sex, the fiction declares itself
as a fiction, a fantastic illusion. As if in a game, the narrator plays with the
reader’s wish to pin down the identity of the narrative voice, bringing into
the foreground the relationship between truth and experience, essence and
identity. As the character says, “I write to be truthful to the moment. But that
is nonsense” (Self 62).
In fact, the subversive character of Self does not satisfy the demand for
truth in experience, neither does it consolidate the meaning of being a man or
a woman. By complexifying sexual categories, the novel shows that to disturb
the certainty of the opposition male/female the only thing needed is to make

68 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

its meaning undecidable. It seems that there is an unwillingness to define
sexual essence except as something that is essentially indefinable, something
that both precedes and exceeds the communicative function of language. In
a redefinition, not as a unified presence but as a lack, as the lack of a unity
or oneness of being, sexual difference is undecidable and enigmatic, locating
the difference of man from a woman in a realm beyond politics, culture and
language. The meaning of masculine and feminine, male and female, man
and woman becomes, in consequence of all the strategies used in the novel, a
place of struggle and the location of change.
Dispersing himself into the past, the autobiographical I conceives
the subjects as subject to dissolution and by exploring the fragmented and
inchoate realms of existence, coded within the symbolic of masculine and
feminine, Martel undermines the unity of the universal “I”. The subject is
thus, constituted by gender but also by other divisions and representations
which belong to specific histories and locations. It is a self involved in the
modes of living the daily life, while, simultaneously, producing a mode of
questioning the material conditions of that same life.
The position one occupies in the social space, the practices and the
identities are not separated categories in a deterministic or hierarchical relation:
all these inform each other mutually, creating a dense and detailed texture
of narratives, of relationships and of experiences. This double articulation,
the knowing of the self and the care of the self, the constraints of daily life,
compensated by the density of the individual experiences, allow us to analyse
this text of life based on epistemological and ontological technologies of the
self. The artist shares with other men and women a creative imagination, that
is to say a capacity to organize and find new descriptions of experience. As a
technique, the care of the self articulates the different modalities of identity
and the experience of living through them.
The diverse enunciative modalities do not refer to a synthesis or a
unifying function of the subject, but rather to its dispersion, revealing the
different states, places and positions which the subject occupies or which
are given to him in the moment of producing a discourse. Emerging within
modalities of power, identities mark the difference and the exclusion, and can
be understood, using Hall’s metaphor (1996), as points of suture, of junction
between discourses and practices. An experience and an identity comprise in
themselves the other, the ruptures and discontinuities, as the cultural identity
is both a question of becoming as a question of being.
The identity constructed in representation by the autobiographical
discourse shows a non-unified identity, a fragmented and fractured identity,
constructed by means of multiple discourses, practices and positions, defining
the functions the subject has in the diversity of the discourse. The image the

Ana Clara Birrento 69

reader gets is not singular but multiple, an image that is constructed by means
of antagonist and sometimes intersecting practices and discourses.
The protagonist of Self constructs his identity by negotiating borders
of uniqueness and of difference with his other self, with the others and
with the readers; the centrality of the experiences produces an articulation
of the text, writer and reader, in a dynamic process of discursive alliances,
which, as configurations of certain practices, define where and how people
live specific practical relations within specific social contexts, drawing maps
of identification and landscapes of the self. Telling his life story, he gets to
know himself as he uses narrative to apprehend experiences and navigate
relationships with others. Through his life writing, his sense of entity is an
outcome of his personal involvement in the world and with others. This
involvement is mediated by a personal narrative that shapes how he attends
to and feels about events. The personal narratives we encounter in the novel
are but partial representations of the world and hence generate a self that
is multiple and relational. Being multiplicity possible to happen along such
dimensions as subject and object, past and present, male and female, the last
pair is the one that calls our attention due to the gender transformations and
all the political, ideological and emotional traits of the meaning of being a
man and a woman.
The representation of a fragmented self is constituent of the narrative
process of the novel; in it we find the subjective experience of continuity
and of discontinuity (Robins 1995), or as Smith (1987) argues the paradox
of the continuity in discontinuity. The autobiographical writing implies a
deliberate creation of the self, of a fictional persona who looks for conditions of
possibility of a critical enunciation, which by means of subjectification, creates
subjectivities that do not agglutinate the self in the same way.
Put before a blank page, the author, the only creator of himself, subject
and object of the work of art, draws, as if in a canvas, in white and black or in
colourful ways, the multiple identities, structures of feeling and of experience
that enable the self to get hold of his identity and thus construct himself in
literary, ethical and gender categories, stretching to accommodate the fluidity
and fragmentation of postmodern selves and of lives. The hybridism of the
categories in the novel points up the limitations and the fixed delineations
of boundaries between the self and the other(s) in an epoch that in Bauman’s
words is light and liquid (2000), revising to a certain extent, the existing
models of personhood, knowledge and ontology.

70 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

NOTES

1
All references to the novel are to the Faber and Faber edition (1996).
2
Most of the references to authors and quotations of comments included in this part are
taken from http://www.randomhouse.ca (accessed in June 2010). This link does
not offer any other information regarding publication, date or page. Nonetheless,
I have chosen to include these references, as they constitute the existing material
on Martel.
3
This book was also nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book
and for the Governor General’s Award; it was also featured on CBC Radio’s
Canada Reads series in 2003.
4
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/sep/06/featuresreviews.guardianreview35.
Retrieved July 2010
5
Toronto Star, Hour Magazine, Montreal Gazette and Calgary Herald.

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Ashley, Kathleen et al, eds.. Autobiography & Postmodernism. Amherst Univer-

sity of Massachusetts Press, 1994.
Barros, Carolyn. Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation. The University of
Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1998.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.
Benveniste, Emile. Problèmes de Linguistique Générale. Paris: Gallimard, 1966.
Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Harvard University Press: Massachusetts,
1990.
Burns, Tom and Jeffrey W. Hunter (eds.). “Martel, Yann – Introduction.”
Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed.. Vol. 192. Gale Cengage, 2005.
eNotes.com.<http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-
criticism/2006. Retrieved July 2010.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York:
Routledge, 1993.
Churchwell, Sarah. Review of Beatrice and Virgil. The Observer. 30 May 2010.
http:// observer.guardian.co.uk. Retrieved June 2010.
Curti , Lidia. “What is Real and What is Not: Female Fabulations in Cultural
Analysis”. Cultural Studies. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg et al. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1999.
Elbaz, Robert. The Changing Nature of the Self. A Critical Study of the Autobiographic
Discourse. London: Croom Helm, 1988.

Ana Clara Birrento 71

Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Eds.
Luther H. Martin et al. Massachusetts: The University of Massachusetts
Press, 1988.
Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Gudmundsdóttir, Gunnthórunn. Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in
Postmodern Life Writing. Postmodern Studies 33, Rodopi, 2003.
Hall, Stuart.“Cultural Identity and Diaspora”. Identity: Community, Culture,
Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1990, 222-237.
Hall, Stuart.”Who Needs Identity?”. Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart
Hall and Paul du Gay, London: Sage Publications, 1996.
Holcombe, Garan. “Critical Perspective”. 2004. http://www.contemporary
writers.com/authors/?p=auth03A14L010512634824#criticalperspective.
Retrieved June 2010.
Maalouf, Amin. On Identity, London: The Harvill Press, 2000.
Martel, Yann. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/sep/06/features
reviews.guardianreview35. Retrieved July 2010.
Marchand, Philip (4 May 1996). “An unforgettable exploration of a self”.
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com. Retrieved June 2010.
Ochs, Elinor and Lisa Capps. “Narrating the Self”. Annual Review of
Anthropology, Vol. 25 (1996), pp. 19-43. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.
org/stable/2155816. Retrieved 12/10/2009.
Pickering. Michael. History, Experience and Cultural Studies. London: Macmillan
Press, 1997.
Probyn, Elspeth. Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. London
and New York: Routledge, 1993.
Robbins, Timothy. “Remembering the Future: The Cultural Study of Memory”.
Theorizing Culture: An Interdisciplinary Critique after Postmodernism. Eds.
Barbara Adam and Stuart Allan. London: University College London
Press, 1995, 201-213.
Sinfield, Alan. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissent Reading.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical
Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1993.
Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus, 1961;
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.

72 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 SPELLBOUND BY MATRICIDE: THE CHRISTCHURCH AFFAIR IN ANGELA
CARTER’S THE CHRISTCHURCH MURDER AND IN PETER JACKSON’S
HEAVENLY CREATURES

Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia

“Next time I’ll write on this diary, mother will be dead”

Pauline Parker, diary 1954

In 1954 Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme became infamously known for a
crime which still haunts the collective memory of New Zealanders.1 Their
relationship was strongly rooted in the mutual affection of a sexual nature:
the girls were “morbidly close”, said Dr Haslam during the trial (“Closing
Stages of Teenagers’ Murder Trial” 1). But undoubtedly it also sprang from
the unusual intellectual abilities which gave way to secret fantasies. Once
the nature of their relationship was detected and labelled as inappropriate,
the families decided on their being separated. Unable to accept their fate, the
teenagers see defiance to authority as their only way out and therefore get to
planning and carrying out the gory death of Pauline’s mother.
The murder has been preserved in the memory of the nation and even
beyond it. In 1988 the British novelist Angela Carter writes a screenplay
(which unfortunately was never to be turned into a film) based on the case
and in 1994 director Peter Jackson launches Heavenly Creatures. The film
quickly acquired the status of cult work and was in fact a milestone for both
main actresses, Kate Winslet and Melanie Lysnkey. In this paper I propose to
investigate the manner whereby the historical event was reconstructed over
a period of forty years of national mythologisation and also its extraordinary
impact on the arts. The joint analysis of The Christchurch Murder and Heavenly
Creatures will allow me to disclose the different forms through which issues
such as national memory, adolescent utopia, and sexual fantasy filtered by the
parameters of propriety of a given time have been addressed.

73
 On late August 1954, Pauline Parker, 16, and Juliet Hulme, 15, were
sentenced for the murder of Pauline’s mother at Victoria Park by means of
blows caused by a brick in a sock. During the six-day long trial, the newspapers
followed the story closely, satisfying the curiosity of a nation both shocked
and mesmerized by the matricide. On the first day of the trial in the Supreme
Court, Star-Sun reports how the two girls, having carried out the terrible
deed, ran to the nearby caretaker’s tearooms crying “Please help us. Mummy
has been hurt – covered in blood” (“Two Teenagers Face Charge of Killing
Woman” 1). In addition to the cautious plans to kill Honora Parker, the jury
and the nation were also informed of the deceiving characters of the two girls.
By the time the trial began, the case was of public knowledge in New Zealand
and beyond, so much so that the Crown Prosecutor, Mr Adam Brown, feels
the need to warn the jury against their already formed opinion:
Most of you will have read in the newspapers, and no doubt discussed
among your friends, the story of this crime. A good deal of evidence has
already been given in throughout New Zealand, I am given to understand
even overseas. The circumstances of this crime are unusual, and indeed
unique [...]. Because of the unusual circumstances, the case has been given
a considerable amount of publicity and it would be foolish to suppose you
know nothing of the evidence, and therefore you may have formed opinions
upon it. (“Discovery of Body Described” 1)

The crime is therefore a matter of national debate and the trial’s outcome a
manifestation of the righteousness, morality and power of the British law
over its subjects, even on the corners of the empire. What I shall argue is that
besides the context of reinforcement of the lost imperial force (New Zealand
became an independent dominion in 1907 and an independent nation in 1947),
there is also the question of patriarchal law over female youth.
Juliet Hulme was an English girl whose well-off family had followed her
father’s career moves as he is positioned at Canterbury University College in
New Zealand; Pauline Parker was born into a local family of low resources,
a matter of great distress for the dreamy and restless Pauline. Following the
murder, it became public knowledge that in fact Honora and Herbert Rieper,
who owned a fish-shop, were not legally married. This situation enraged
Pauline when she learned about it, just prior to the murder. In her view, it
invalidated Honora from any rightful action against the girls’ decision to
go to Hollywood. There they planned the life due to celebrities: Juliet as an
actress, Pauline as a director/filmmaker. They also envisioned the publication
of the novels they were writing and which, they were certain, would bring
them fame and fortune.
Pauline and Juliet met at the Girls’ High School upon the latter’s arrival.
“The two girls at once became friendly”, said Mr Brown, “and their friendship
developed rapidly into what may be called an intense devotion for each other.

74 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

So much so that their main object in life was to be together, to share each
other’s thoughts and activities, secrets and plans, and if anyone dared come
between them that person should be forcibly removed” (“Court Told About
Families” 1). This “unhealthy relationship” is presented by the prosecution as
the motive for this crime (“Court Told About Families” 1).2 The girls’ sexual
orientation is not admitted by their doctor – the word “lesbianism” is not
spoken out - surely due to the heinous nature of that orientation which makes
it not only socially unacceptable but also literally unspeakable.3 The doctors
for the prosecution though, admit the strong possibility of their relationship
being physical.
The innuendoes however are insidious; Mr Brown refers to Pauline’s
visits to the Hulmes’ and during those stays the girls kept “very much to
themselves, scribbled in exercise books effusions they called novels, spent
a good deal of time in each other’s beds, and made plans for their future
life together” (“Court Told About Families” 1). The link is made therefore
between their criminal natures and their sexual “deviation” (Juliet suffered
from tuberculosis which the prosecution believed was sometimes associated
to the emergence of this “deviation”). Indeed, it is the parents’ decision that
Juliet should follow her family to South Africa and that Pauline is to stay in
New Zealand that seals their resolution to “remove the obstacle” separating
the heavenly creatures, as they referred to themselves in their writings, from
their edenic destiny in the USA.
The girls’ actual guilt was never disputed, given the weight of the
evidence. What was on trial therefore was only their sanity, the Crown
adamantly arguing for it while the defence tried to present a case of a folie
a deux, a documented situation of paranoia of the exalted type. This mental
illness, which has become known to the world with the case of Leopold and
Loeb in Chicago in 1924, was characterised by the estrangement of their
victims from reality. Implicitly what was on trial as well was the definition
of the suitable punishment for young women who decided on their lives,
regardless of family rules and who experimented with lesbianism. In the end
Pauline and Juliet were found guilty, the crime of female autonomy and sexual
responsibility thus also suitably reinforced as such, and were only spared the
death penalty because they were under eighteen. The jury came to a decision
in mere two hours.

The script Angela Carter prepared based on the Christchurch affair

presents little variation from the facts, as far as they had been publicly known.
The author’s attention seems to focus on providing the insight of the private
sphere so as to complement the public one. To that effect, Carter gives each
of the girls’ specific psychological, emotional and physical traits which point

Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia 75

to a possible and plausible frame of relationships based on the complex
expressions of femininity. This strategy investigates therefore the creation
of a setting promoting the relationship between Nerissa and Lena (fictional
counterparts to Juliet and Pauline) but, equally important, the relationship
with their mothers.
Juliet and Pauline were contrastive girls at several levels; some were
immediately evident: the physical appearance, class status and nationality.
The script opens with the girls running away from the site of the murder:
NERISSA LOCKE’s long, blonde hair blows romantically in the wind; she is
fifteen, strikingly good-looking in a fine-boned, English way. The other, LENA
BALL, fourteen, is smaller, darker. Although elsewhere in the film Lena walks with
a pronounced limp, here she does not limp. Both move with a fluid grace, unhindered
by their marooned gymslips [...] and their school blazers.
The girls throw back their heads and laugh but we cannot hear them. They look wild,
ecstatic, beautiful, free as they run down the hill. (Carter 340)

The characterisation of the girls is contrastive although always felt as

complementary too. Nerissa’s beauty derives directly from her Englishness.
At school Nerissa is a swan among geese, that is, New Zealander girls (Carter
350); her Englishness is terribly attractive to her fellow colleagues and even
to her teacher:
Nerissa sits, composedly changing her shoes. In the murk of the cloakroom, her hair
and wonderful “English” complexion shine.
MISS JOHNSON rushes up to her, beaming. (Carter 350)

It is Nerissa’s English hair which bewitches Lena in a moment of sacred

meaning as it happens during the morning prayers:
(A shaft of light falls on NERISSA through one of the high windows. LENA
stands behind her, watching light play on NERISSA’s hair.
The hymn ends.)
HEADMISTRESS: Let us pray.
(The girls incline their heads. As they do so, LENA reaches out and touches
NERISSA’s hair.
NERISSA jumps as though a charge of electricity has passed from LENA to
her. She turns; their eyes meet.)
HEADMISTRESS: (Intoning.) Dearly beloved... (Carter 350-351)

The headmistress’s first line of the prayer speaks out the immediate and fatal
infatuation in the most blasphemous of ways. Then it is Nerissa’s turn to
recite a poem, no other than Keats’s epithetic composition on the deadliness
of female beauty, “La Belle Dame sans merci”: “When NERISSA finishes the
poem, she catches LENA’s eye again, and almost falters, has to fumble for her chair
and sit down slowly; LENA’s gaze is of burning intensity” (Carter 351).
Nerissa is taken aback by the sheer passion of Lena which is intense
and uncompromising. Nerissa, on the other hand, is the centre of the town’s

76 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

fascination on her background and appearance alone. She represents the
centre, as if the heart of the empire has travelled to this remote part of its
frontiers, even when the empire is a ruin of itself. Nerissa’s father teaches
English literature at the university and even her name is borrowed from
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. It is the element of Englishness, of a
superior otherness which is subtler in Heavenly Creatures, that enthrals Lena:
“If you could teach me to talk like you, I’d give you anything you want”, she
says (Carter 352). By the end of that day, a lock of Nerissa’s hair is already
the object of Lena’s devout dedication for in her view the hair not only takes
her away from her geographical and subjective marginality but also towards
a given place, Hollywood, the land where dreams come true; Nerissa’s hair
is also like that of a film star, like Deborah Kerr’s herself (Deborah is also the
name of the female hero of their novel though it is pronounced in the special
heavenly creatures’ way).
The sexual nature of their attraction is related to the girls’ also unusual
awareness of their bodies. Nerissa has suffered from TB (like Keats), a
condition which has kept her away from her family, and especially from her
mother whose love she so passionately craves for, so that she can recover
in properly equipped health facilities. She feels, however, that she has been
removed from her mother’s way so that Mary can pursue her sexual conquests
unhindered. Lena fell victim of polio as a child and due to it, she displays
a limp, a limp which seems to disappear in Nerissa’s presence (another
difference to Heavenly Creatures where Lena only displays an awkward gait).
The illness also required that Lena had to be committed for many months and,
like Nerissa, she feels she has been abandoned by her mother. Lena’s parents
however have been kept away according to doctors’ advices.
Honora Parker’s and Mary Locke’s sexuality are defined as the veiled
motive which sets off the murdering plan. Nerissa watches Mary in sexual
activities with her lover in their own home, making her physically sick. Nerissa
therefore associates her mother’s sexual drive with maternal lovelessness. In
the absence of that love, Nerissa seeks to take her mother’s place as Quinn’s
lover (who rejects her) and putting on her mother’s clothes. But her rage is
triggered by the act: Nerissa and Lena rip Mary’s clothes to shreds as well as
the symbol of her lewdness, her diaphragm.
Lena also has frequent fits against her mother, especially after learning of
the irregular marital situation between her parents. Lena, who has a younger
brother with Down ’s syndrome, strongly believes Bobb’s handicap, as well
as her own limp, are the punishment for her mother’s sin. She sees Bobb as
a monster and by the same reasoning herself as well. Lena considers herself
a bastard whereas Nerissa, it is hinted, might not be her father’s daughter
either (another underplayed feature in Jackson’s film). They thus feel not

Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia 77

constrained to respect norms of sexual propriety. Hurt by being once again
sent to a sanatorium, Nerissa prompts Lena to prostitute herself in order
to raise the necessary funds for their great escape: “Our mothers do it with
men they’re not married to. Both of them. We’re just following an old family
tradition” (Carter 372). Lena will in the end lose her virginity to a foul man
who does not even pay her but she continues in the business of prostitution,
gladly caving in to Nerissa’s pressure to degrade her body like Nerissa would
like to do to her mother’s. Loving both of them, Nerissa acts on the one she
has access to.

In Frances Walsh and Peter Jackson’s screenplay, Pauline’s heterosexual

experience is similarly unpalatable but there is no mention to prostitution.
It begins innocently as one of the Riepers’ boarders falls foolishly in love
with Pauline, slips into her room and into her bed. She seems unaware of
his sexual intentions but to challenge her mother’s authority, she later loses
her virginity to him. However, the occasion is traumatic for Pauline, so
much so that during John’s sexual endeavour she escapes to the girls’ own
fantastic kingdom, Borovnia. There Pauline, as Gina, is so happy to encounter
Deborah that she cries, thus giving way to a lesbian affection even in their
fantasy world. In Heavenly Creatures, Pauline’s heterosexual activity seems
independent from Juliet’s encouragement and, in fact, when she learns of the
young man’s infatuation, she worries he might distract Pauline from their
own relationship.
In the film, the girls’ gender identity is also more complex, especially with
respect to Pauline. The construction of a frowning, discomfited, bulky girl
is masculinised first of all through Juliet who starts calling her Paul. In two
complementary scenes, the girls define their gender-assumed roles according
to the remarkable characteristics of their enclosed universe. Juliet bursts
through the screen as a giggling and blushing princess as part of the garden
games she plays with her brother. Later, when Juliet contracts tuberculosis,
Pauline refers to her as Julietta, clearly intended to make the viewer think of
the Shakespearean tragedy, and hence the clothes gain an added meaning
for their Renaissance flavour. Consequently, the viewer associates Pauline
with the male hero, Romeo. In the second scene Pauline pretends to be dying
after a bicycle accident. Realising it is a ruse, Juliet pretends to be angry and
calls Pauline “you toad”. They sing and laugh in ecstasy to the music of “the
greatest tenor in the world”, Mario Lanza, and they casually, naturally, start to
undress. The erotic quality of the adolescent bodies leads casually, naturally,
to a kiss. The kiss of the princess thus turns the toad into a prince; Pauline,
first seen as a murky creature is magically turned into a radiant happy girl.
Following Juliet’s long stay at the hospital to treat her TB, it is Pauline’s idea

78 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

that they should write one another as the royal characters of their novel: queen
Deborah and her husband Charles (Pauline has therefore ascended not to the
status of a prince but to that of a king). Immediately Pauline’s personality is
taken over by the fictional one: she writes 6 pages as Charles declaring his
love to his queen and only 2 as Pauline. As Luísa Ribeiro noted, tragedy is
brought about by the girls’ resolve to shape their own destiny which is to a
great degree a sexual statement. And she adds that besides the actual murder,
“an equal part of the horror of the story lies in the unaccustomed positioning
of desire and determination in the hands of two adolescent females” (Ribeiro
33).
This period seems to reveal a transitional phase of their sexual identities,
especially of Pauline’s. After the Hulmes and the Riepers take measures against
their “unhealthy” affection, Pauline gradually moves on to identify not with a
male referent but with the beautiful gypsy of their story. Juliet continues to be
queen Deborah and her status is not equalled. In fact, when Pauline explains
the novelistic plot to John, she informs him that Deborah would never be
involved with a commoner, in this case Nicholas, the tennis instructor, and
that his romantic involvement is instead with Gina, the gypsy.4 Towards the
end of the film, Pauline sees herself only as Gina to the extent of adopting the
name at home. The black and white scene representing their dreams coming
true shows the girls running on the deck of the boat which would take them
away from New Zealand and in that moment Pauline is fully-fledged Gina; in
the same way, the shattering of the dreams, intercalated with the scene of the
murder, portrays Pauline ashore and Juliet calling for her as Gina. By the end
of the film, the relationship has evolved to an affectionate bond between two
women though certainly still marked by alienation from their actual selves
and from others.
Nonetheless in Heavenly Creatures there is less emphasis on the older
women’s sexuality. There is instead the exploration of that element in the
dynamics of the family and even of maintenance of a sense of class. Pauline
has delusions of extracting herself from her own family as she feels they are
embarrassing. During the tea party she enthusiastically prepares for Juliet,
Pauline is ashamed by her father’s remarks on his “artistic” enterprises, wood
carving, and by the natural comment about his occupation (which Pauline tries
feebly to describe as management). But she is also ashamed by the Riepers’
poorness which is exposed as her mother shows their home to a potential
boarder. Furthermore, Pauline accuses her mother of being the most ignorant
person she knows, a stark contrast to Dr Hulme and most especially to Juliet
and herself as they consider themselves geniuses. From early on, Pauline
imitates Mrs Hulme’s ways regarding, for instance, etiquette. The imitation
reveals both the desire to enjoy a more sophisticated life style and to remove

Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia 79

herself from her family in order to be integrated in this one as a daughter. This
additional fantasy leads her to believe that the Hulmes love her and want to
adopt her, although they clearly find her only bearable until she eventually
is not anymore. The boat fantasy shows therefore not only the acceptance of
Pauline and Juliet as a couple (they kiss in front of the Hulmes) but also of
Pauline as a daughter (the Hulmes embrace both girls). Pauline even calls Mrs
Hulme “mummy”. In addition, it is the ultimate fantasy of not only being like
Juliet, but being Juliet herself.
The construction of a false parental love on the part of the Hulmes is clear
in the scene Mrs Hulme brushes Pauline’s hair while the latter exhibits a smile
of delight but even more poignantly when Dr Hulme takes Juliet home after
her convalescence in the clinic. They seem to be mad with happiness for being
reunited and they throw their arms around him as if both were his daughters.
At the same time, one hears/reads on the screen the well-known poem that
gave the title to the film, “The Ones I Worship”, about a man who has two
beautiful daughters:
The outstanding genius of this pair is understood by few,
They are so rare... compared with these two,
Every man is a fool,
The world is most honoured that they should deign to rule,
And I worship the power of these lovely two,
With that adoring love known to so few,
‘Tans indeed a miracle, one must feel,
That two such heavenly creatures are real, […]
Impassively, they watch the race of man decay and change,
Hatred burning bright in the brown eyes for fuel,
Ivy scorn glitters in the grey eyes, contemptuous and cruel
Why are men such fools they will not realise,
The wisdom that is hidden behind those strange eyes,
And these wonderful people are you and I.

As in Carter’s The Christchurch Murder, it is Mrs Hulme’s sexuality which

appears to be the root of all problems. The professor’s wife takes her lover
home and the sight of their love-making is shocking to Juliet who reacts
hysterically. The incident also forces the disclosure of the secret which
anticipates the dismantling of the Hulme family, the divorce. Ultimately it is
also the Hulmes’ impending divorce that seals the adolescents’ separation as
Juliet is to be sent to South Africa. In Heavenly Creatures both girls are depicted
as deeply traumatised in sexual terms: Pauline by heterosexual intercourse
and Juliet by the Freudian discovery of her mother’s sexual drive. Nonetheless,
the trauma seems to be unacknowledged; in fact it is repressed by Pauline,
whereas Juliet reacts in terror for it confirms the life-long fear of parental
abandonment, felt most acutely as the withdrawal of her mother’s love, and
which she had experienced for years as a sick child recovering from her illness

80 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

in the Bahamas and more recently with her parents overseas voyage in spite
of her relapse. This psychological trauma was prepared cinematically by their
physical scars, Pauline on her leg and Juliet on her lungs, as she proudly puts
it. Their corporeal difference and even freakishness (more clearly expressed
as a limp in Carter’s text) points to their emotional scarring and otherness.
Juliet is portrayed as having a blatant sense of superiority, undoubtedly
related with the lack of attention at home, which puts her in constant conflict
with figures of authority. The superiority is connected with her origin for
she is quick to emphasise in front of the class that she comes from England.
In another instance Juliet reads the Borovnian novel in class as a deliberate
strategy to enrage the teacher by attacking New Zealander values. The theme
for the essay was “The role of the royal family today” and confronted with
description of the Borovnian sexual adventures instead, the teacher reproaches
Juliet energetically: “I suppose you find it witty to mock the royal family, to
poke fun of the empire”. So Juliet takes advantage of the general subservience
in New Zealand towards any representatives of Englishness while Pauline’s
and her wild imagination and actions embody insubordination towards the
same venerated institutions of family, monarchy and empire.

Apropos of her play Daughters of Heaven (1991) also on the Parker-

Hulme case, Michaelanne Forster wrote: “It’s the story of Christchurch in
1954, restrained and nice with implicit British attitudes about class suddenly
being confronted with evil” (Forster 11). But it is also, as the American-Neo
Zealander playwright admits, about putting love above reason and moral
(Forster 11). In accordance with Forster, and despite the different approaches
to the crime, New Zealander Peter Jackson and British Angela Carter construct
their texts so as to demythologise a certain nationalistic structure which is
based on resilient imperialistic parameters regarding class and gender.
Therefore, from both geographic and power opposing sides of what was
once the British empire, artistic productions acknowledge the long imperial
shadow which renovates a homophobic and class biased construction of a
crime with national identity repercussions.

NOTES

1
The author wishes to thank Prof. David Callahan for the useful references which
helped in the research process for this paper.
2
The defence’s stance finds little room in the press.
3
In the film the doctor does use the word homosexuality.
4
Nicholas was the name of the man Pauline was mentioned in court to have sexual
intercourse with.

Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia 81

WORKS CITED

Carter, Angela. The Christchurch Murder. The Curious Room: Angela Carter
Collected Dramatic Works. Ed. Mark Bell. London: Vintage, 1996. 339-388.
“Closing Stages of Teenagers’ Murder Trial”. Star-Sun 28 August 1954:
1. Parker-Hulme Murder Case, 1954. Christchurch City Libraries. 22
July 2010 <http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/heritage/digitised/
parkerhulme/>.
“Court Told About Families”. Star-Sun 23 August 1954: 1. Parker-Hulme
Murder Case, 1954. Christchurch City Libraries. 22 July 2010 <http://
christchurchcitylibraries.com/heritage/digitised/parkerhulme/>.
“Discovery of Bodies Described”. Star-Sun 23 August 1954: 1. Parker-Hulme
Murder Case, 1954. Christchurch City Libraries. 22 July 2010 <http://
christchurchcitylibraries.com/heritage/digitised/parkerhulme/>.
Forster, Michaelanne. Daughters of Heaven. Auckland: Victoria UP, 1992.
Heavenly Creatures. Dir. Peter Jackson. Fontana Productions / Miramax, 1994.
Ribeiro, Luísa. “Heavenly Creatures” review. Film Quarterly. 49:1 Fall 1995:
33-38.
“Two Teenagers Face Charge of Killing Woman”. Star-Sun 23 August 1954:
1. Parker-Hulme Murder Case, 1954. Christchurch City Libraries. 22
July 2010 <http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/heritage/digitised/
parkerhulme/>.
www.heavenly-creatures.com. Ed. King Art. 2010. 22 July 2010 <http://
heavenly-creatures.com>.

82 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 PERFORMING SELVES IN “POST-SOUL” LITERATURE:
DANZY SENNA’S CAUCASIA

Teresa Botelho

A cultural mulatto, educated by a multi-racial mix of

cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world.
And it is by and large this rapidly growing crop of
cultural mulattoes that fuels the New Black Aesthetics.
We no longer need to deny or suppress any part of our
complicated and sometimes contradictory baggage to
please either white people or black.
(Ellis, 235)

In “The New Black Aesthetic”, the polemical essay that launched the
contemporary critical conversation on the direction of post-civil rights black
literature and arts more than twenty years ago, Trey Ellis charts what he
perceives to be the creative generational gap separating the younger post-
integration voices from their older counterparts. Though the analysis is
more intuitive than systematic, he submits as evidence a general positioning
of greater detachment from the burdens of history, a more fluid navigation
between the cultural realms associated with black and white experience and a
more flexible construction of webs of group allegiance. The work of these new
writers and artists, he argues, “shamelessly burrows and reassembles across
both race and class lines” (Ellis 233), heralding a kind of “post-black” artistic
stance that the essay, less concerned with theorizing than with reporting
cultural trends, does not coherently analyze or document.
Nevertheless, the debate opened in the late eighties by Ellis’ challenge
produced a rich tapestry of insights and critical inquiries1, as well as a
plethora of designations for the perceived shift in cultural sensibility, from
“postliberated”, “post-black” or “NewBlack” to “post-soul”, but it was not

83
until the special edition of the African American Review dedicated to the “Post-
Soul Aesthetic” published in 2007 that a vague notion that tended “to figure
in rhetorical gestures more than in fully formed arguments” (Taylor 625)
was subjected to a systematic work of clarification and theoretical scrutiny,
and a number of conceptual problems were addressed. These range from the
reliance on a chronological yardstick to identify shifts in creative directions,
to the implied suggestion of a radical discontinuity with past articulations,
and the ascription of a vague common aesthetic to a diversified body of work.
No less problematic is the concept of “cultural mulatto”, in that it seems to
assume a cross border exploration of fixed and disconnected cultural realms
of black and white practices, thereby confirming their ontological separate
reality.
In the introduction to the special issue the editor attempts to construct
an interpretative matrix of criteria that might give the concept of post-soul
aesthetics some consistency, based on a triad of identification signs: a time
frame that includes artists and writers who were born or grew up after
the Civil Rights years, a creative positioning that examines and “troubles”
blackness and is no longer concerned primarily with supporting a static view
of essential racialised identity, and a dynamic of “allusion-disruption” that
signifies2 “on earlier eras of African American history” to oppose “reductive
iterations of blackness in ways that mark this post-Civil Rights Movement
African American literary subgenre as compellingly different from those of
earlier literary periods” (Ashe 615).
Writers submitted as evidence of this sensibility shift include some who
started publishing in the early nineties, or even earlier, like Andrea Lee as
well as a younger crop of voices such as Paul Beatty, Touré, Emily Rabateau
and Colson Whitehead,3 whose writing careers started in the new millennium.
Danzy Senna, who has become a symbol of the huge creative achievement of
this generation, is of particular significance to this debate as her work teases
the questions of blackness from a unique point of view, signifying on the
tropes of passing literature to interrogate processes of identity construction
and group affiliation.
Born in 1970 into a mixed race family,4 her positioning offers a personal
insight into the workings of the complex constructions of selfhood, as she
explains when telling of finding herself “falling within the borderlines of
identities, forever consigned to the Never-Never Land of the Mulatto Nation”
wondering “how could I be black but look so white” (Senna, To be Real 13). The
discussion that follows will analyze how Senna´s Caucasia5 (1998) “troubles”
not only blackness but also whiteness as binary categories and practices, while
demystifying the conceptual simplicity of multiracial constructions that treat
race as if it “were simply like mixing colors in a paint box” (Senna, Callaloo

84 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

448). It will further examine how her avowed interest in “deconstructing the
premise of race itself” is enacted in the novel and how useful the concept of a
“post-soul aesthetic” is to interpret her reinvention and destabilization of the
conventions of the passing genre.

Passing: The Lies of the Body

Passing, both as a social gesture and as a literary motif, depends in the
American racial hegemonic architecture on a discourse of identity difference
that imposes an irreconcilable opposition between the categories of blackness
and whiteness, two spaces of self actualization to which the very logic of the
dichotomy attributes a quality of irreducible substance. In the passing literary
tradition, the passer inhabits a space of liminality, marked by an irreconcilable
dysfunction between her/his self-awareness of being both black and white
and the specular image reflected in the gaze of others that offers a reading
based on the visible and sees only whiteness. That visual evidence is, in
turn, negated by legal and social pre-existing racialised criteria that impose a
reading of exclusive blackness by virtue of an intangible unseen.
Early twentieth century African-American passing fiction, a direct
outcome of the legal one-drop rule dispensation, exposes the fragility of
the epistemological grounds of what Paul Gilroy has called “demo-politics”
(Gilroy 46), based as they are on a reading of the material evidence elicited
from potentially ambiguous bodies, exposing the contradictions of the
dominant criteria of racial classification which, on the one hand, require the
body to visibly carry signs of difference while on the other hand deny the
sufficiency of this visible evidence and locate difference elsewhere, in a vague
attribute called “blood”, “ancestry” or “culture”.
When the passing figures cross the racial border to reclaim and inhabit the
space of whiteness they see reflected in the gaze of others, they trespass (to use
Elain Ginsberg’s phrasing) into the territory of an available identity not only
to escape “the oppressions accompanying” their blackness and access “the
privileges and status” of their whiteness (Ginsberg 3), but to disentangle the
web of perplexities of their identity dilemmas. This puzzlement is described
by James Weldon Johnson´s unnamed protagonist in The Autobiography of an
Ex-Colored Man when he discovers as a young boy that the “ivory whiteness”
of his skin, the “softness and glossiness” of his “dark hair that fell in waves
over” his temples (Johnson 17) are unreliable signs that deceivingly led him
to believe he was part of a world of whiteness.
Criticism that approaches American passing narratives either through
the matrix of “racial betrayal”, reading them as repudiations of authentic
identities, or as liberating gestures of individual reinvention that transcend

Teresa Botelho 85
ascribed categorization, frequently assumes the existence of prior, stable,
racialized selves that are denied, of essentialized identities that are validated
by their negation, as one can only be seen as trying to “be” what one “is not”
if both positions are ontologically valid.
The assumption of the reality of these enclosures of bounded identity
tends to produce a simplified interpretation of the terms of passing. But even
in the classical American narratives, the passer emotionally inhabits spaces of
both blackness and whiteness, which blend and blur to a degree, because they
are negotiated by individual selves who are agents of their own reinvention,
albeit within externally imposed limitations. The tensions inherent to this
construction process which, in the sentimental tropes of the “tragic Mulatto”
conventions, are shadowed both by the constant danger of the disruption of
the performance of whiteness or by a never quite suppressed nostalgia for a
former secret self (and frequently by both) are only further evidence of the
psychological artificiality involved in claiming either blackness or whiteness
when one has grounds to claim both.
Senna’s investment in the passing trope at the turn of the twentieth
century when, in the context of the celebration of multi-racial America, it might
be expected to have faded away, rendered “oxymoronic” by social contexts
(Elam 749), might be puzzling; but Caucasia performs a reinvention exercise,
revisiting a familiar literary trope to disrupt it under a contemporary gaze. It is
shaped by authorial imagination that is skeptical about essentialized cultural
architectures and informed by the insights that performativity theory has
added to the understanding of the epistemology of social and racial identity
categories, and is as interested in exposing the artificiality of the illusion of
particularity that has come to be called race as in critiquing the effects of
racialized social articulations.

Learning the Art of Changing in Caucasia

Caucasia, described by Elam as a racial Buildungsroman (Elam 752), traces
the learning curve in the processing and performance of racial ascription
and identification of Birdie Lee, a young girl living in the 1970s, the second
daughter of a divorced mixed race couple (a radical WASP mother and an
academic African-American father) brought together by political commitment
and solidarity. This condition alone historicizes the narrative and creates a
different order of expectations in the consciousness of Birdie and her sister
who, unlike the protagonists of early twentieth century passing narratives, are
not marked by the stigma of past violent sexual predatory behavior, knowing
themselves to be the desired offspring of a consensual and once loving alliance
between two defiant misfits.

86 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 The narrative follows the trajectory of Birdie’s process of self-identification.
Unlike Cole who carries unproblematically the signs of her mixed heritage,
she is visibly and embarrassingly white-looking. Senna’s use of the motif of
sisters who look racially different is engaged in an obvious and deliberate
dialogue with Jessie Faucet’s Plum Bun (1928), where the white-looking sister
passes frequently in the company of her mother but never when she is with
her father and sister, even before she leaves the family to build for herself the
kind of life she imagines her specular whiteness promises. But unlike Angela
in the Faucet narrative, Birdie desires not whiteness but blackness, and her
childhood is imprinted by a deep sense of being betrayed by her body. Echoing
Lacan’s mirror recognition insight, she sees herself first reflected in her sister’s
brown body, and her assumption of sameness is automatic:
Before I even saw myself I saw my sister. When I was too small for mirrors,
I saw her as the reflection that proved my own existence. Back then I was
content to see only Cole, three years older than me, and imagine that her face
– cinnamon-skinned, curly haired, serious – was my own… That face was
me and I was that face and that was how the story went. (Senna, Caucasia 5)

But that face looking back was not a reflection of her and was not like her.
Birdie’s understanding of self is thus marked by the same disappointment
of difference that made James Weldon Johnson’s young protagonist puzzle
over his mirror reflection, except that the lie of that image engenders opposite
responses; he welcomes what that image suggests while Birdie rejects it.
The undesired whiteness of her body is continuously reflected back at her
through the eyes of others - she could be Italian, her white grandmother tells
her (107), Pakistani or Indian, a fellow airplane passenger speculates (379),
Hispanic, her school mates point out (66), anything but the identity of her
yearning, the object of her dreams of selfhood for which she mourns:
Before I went to bed that night, I stared at the bathroom mirror and saw
a twelve-year-old girl who might be a boy if it weren’t for the scraggly
ponytail falling down her back… There were no curls, no full lips, no signs
of my sister’s face on my own. There had been a time when I thought I was
just going through a phase. That if I was patient and good enough, I would
transform into a black swan. (180)

Thus, by placing dermo-blackness as the object of desire, the narrative subverts

the early conventions of the genre. Rottenberg, drawing on Judith Butler’s
concept of performativity, elucidates the interplay, in passing narratives,
between identification and desire-to-be, whereby one’s identification,
“constituted initially … by the interpellation through which a subject is
initiated into the dominant social order as a … raced … being” enforcing
a “primary identification” (Rottenberg 10), is pitted against the racial
normative discourse that constructs blackness as undesirable and whiteness

Teresa Botelho 87
as a desirable yet unattainable ideal for the racially othered subject, activating
and simultaneously disabling a desire-to-be mechanism. In Caucasia, not only
is the identification troubled, in that it ascribes to Birdie both blackness (in the
private sphere) and whiteness (in the public sphere), but so is the desire-to-
be, which subversively selects blackness as the denied but preferred identity
construct.
Hence, Birdie’s learning of what she calls “the art of changing” is first
generated by the refusal to be othered as white and to claim blackness, through
a kind of racial performance. Her parents are the unconscious catalysts of her
racial remaking attempts when they enroll the girls in the Nkrumah Black
Power School where she is hardly recognized as belonging, saluted as she is
by puzzlement. When her mother first takes both children to school it is on
Cole that the administrator focuses. When she asks “is this our new student?”
(43) excluding Birdie from the possibility of being a prospective member
of a Black Power school, she starts a process that exposes the girl’s “non-
belonging”. Students are more puzzled than aggravated by her intrusion,
asking themselves “she a Rican or something?” trying to identify where she
fits in the racialised world they inhabit. For some her presence in their midst
defies logic; “What you doin’ on this school! You white!” (43) she is asked,
leaving her paralyzed by discomfort and indecision:
All eyes were on me, and I tried to think of something to say. I felt the familiar
tightening in my lungs. The children stared at me, mouths hanging open. A
terrific silence had overtaken the room …. I was about to say “Sicilian” when
Mrs. Potter, the teacher, entered the room.” (43-44)

The racial pride ethos that pervades the school and every lesson does not,
nevertheless, feel alien to Birdie, linking her to a tradition she desperately
wants to claim. As the teacher introduced historical figures like Frederick
Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Nat Turner, “making each of her subjects seem
like superheroes” so that “even the baddest-looking of the boys rested their
heads in their hands and just listened,” she “forgot about the whispers of the
other children” (44), surrendering to a vision of untroubled racial belonging.
But the revisitation of recent African American history with which the
story engages is uncondescending, and the vagaries of the gestures through
which racial self-confidence was asserted then are now subjected to an ironic
gaze, their evocation rendered incongruous because they are read with
contemporary eyes.6 Birdie’s reverie is interrupted by the performance of the
school ritual that the teacher explains “looking directly at me”. The tradition
requires that, “at the end of each class everyone stands and says, ‘Black is
beautiful.’ Loud and clear.” “You got to be proud”, the teacher explains, “of
where your people come from. We are the first people and will be the last”
(44).

88 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 When it is Birdie’s turn, her voice “quavers” and the motto she utters
sounds “more like a question than a statement”, followed by the cold logic
of the comment of one of her classmates – “Guess you must be ugly” (44) –,
exactly what she thinks herself to be.
Performing blackness in Caucasia is, therefore, not an act of opportunity
or the resolution of a psychological puzzle, but a deliberate attempt to
construct an identity of desire for a self riddled by uncertainty about her
racial authenticity. Even Cole is anxiety-ridden about her racial know-how,
somehow endangered by her parents’ lack of fluency in the performance of
pure cultural identity, as when deciding that “we talk like white girls” she
uses an issue of Ebony to train herself and Birdie in the intricacies of what they
take to be “black English”:
They have examples in here. Like, don’t say, “I’m going to the store”, say
“I’m goin’ to de sto’.” Get it? And don’t say, “Tell the truth.” Instead, say,
“Tell de toof’.” Okay?
I nodded and whispered to myself, “Tell de troof.” (53)

For Birdie, telling the truth, especially about herself, involves playing a game
of self-deception, hoping to defeat her specular image and the sense of loss
that it engenders. It requires a kind of performance that goes beyond verbal
codes, transforming her body into a contested site of symbolic manipulation.
During a sleepover at Maria’s, her Cape Verdean school friend, a “racial make-
over” is attempted: her hair newly curled, she tries to see a transformed, new
black self:
The tint of the ceiling mirror darkened me, and with my newfound curls, I
found that if I pouted my lips and squinted to blur my vision in just the right
way, my face transformed into something resembling Cole’s. (70)

The family sphere, on the other hand, is not immune to the symbolic tug-
of-war that pulls parents and siblings apart, along racialized lines. Again
Senna’s dialogue with Fausset is instrumental to understand her comment
of the passing tradition. In Plum Bun the family is equally divided, but while
Fausset highlights the link between the white-looking mother and daughter,
who engage in a kind of recreational passing game when they are alone – in
one of the most brutal early scenes they pretend not to recognize the father and
daughter who look black in order to keep playing the game they both cherish
– Senna exposes the toll that the dermo-difference has on the relationship
between the girls and their othered parent.
Deck, the father, though occasionally affectionate, tends to keep an
emotional distance from Birdie that she cannot help but notice. He “never
had much to say to me” and “never seemed to see me at all”. Cole was “my
father’s special one. I understood that even then. She was his prodigy – his
young, gifted and black” (55). His remoteness suggests how the accusations

Teresa Botelho 89
of racial betrayal through marriage touch a nerve – “Don’t get black and
proud on me”, he is once told by another character, “You’re the one with a
white daughter” (18). But that emotional distance is explored and given an
historical texture through a scene where, on a rare occasion when he goes to
a park alone with Birdie, the police are called by an elderly couple convinced
that Deck has kidnapped the little white girl to molest her, and the dignified
Associate Professor of Anthropology is not believed when he explains Birdie
is his daughter. After the humiliating episode, rather than kissing her goodbye
as usual, he “just touched my forehead with the back of his hand, as if he was
checking for a fever” only to pull it away quickly “as if the touch had burned
him” (61).
Sandy, the mother, has no shortage of love for both her daughters and
expresses it vibrantly if clumsily, but her lack of literacy in the symbolic
codes of blackness – how to braid Cole´s hair, how to buy her the right skin
moisturizer – become signs of racialized incompetence that diminish her as a
mother in Cole’s assessment: “They all laughed at me last week. Just like the
time my knees were ashy. ‘Cause of my hair. It looks crazy. They were calling
me ‘Miz Nappy’. None of the boys will come near me”, the older daughter
complains, “Mum doesn’t know anything about raising a black child. She just
doesn’t” (53). In comparison, the fluency in accessorized “blackness” evidenced
by Deck’s girlfriend, Carmen, render her fit to be a surrogate mother to Cole,
but never to Birdie, because under her gaze the girl’s whiteness functions like
a veil that obscures, distorts and erases: “Others before had made me see the
difference between my sister and myself” Birdie observes, “but Carmen is the
one to make me feel that those things somehow mattered. To make me feel
that the differences were deeper than skin deep” (91).
In an ultimate act of racialization, when the parents leave Boston – Deck
leaving for Brazil with Carmen to study what he thinks is its racial utopia;
Sandy running underground to evade an imaginary FBI investigation of her
radical political activities – each takes the daughter who “looks like them”,
separating the family along color lines.

Hibernating Blackness in Caucasia Land

Driven by her mother’s paranoia, on the run across America, Birdie is now
required to perform a narrative of whiteness, according to a script imposed by
Sandy, who reads in the possibilities of her body the key for living incognito –
“You’ve got a lot of choices, babe. You can be anything, Puerto Rican, Sicilian,
Pakistani, Greek,” (130) – ettling on Jewish, on the basis of a kind of common
lineage. As Jewish, she would not be really passing, her mother argues,
“because Jews weren’t really white, more like an off-white”, and were, in fact

90 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

“the closest I was going to get to black and still stay white: tragic history,
kinky hair, good politics. It’s all there” (140).
Thus, Birdie is compelled to “hibernate” her internal blackness under the
not-quite-white identity of Jesse Goldman, given an imaginary dead Jewish
professor of classics for a father, and an alternative life story to memorize and
enact. Under maternal pressure to use her skills in the art of changing in the
small New Hampshire town where mother and daughter settle after months
of nomadic existence, her specular whiteness is now turned into a tool of a
much wider performance of identity.
The choice of this particular construct of an alternative self – white “with
a difference” – is of particular interest in that, as Harrison-Khan argues, it
draws attention to “the historical transformation of Jewishness from racial
otherness to whiteness” (Harrison-Khan 22), while complicating the concept
of whiteness which, far from being the natural, normalized, non-color
condition that it is taken to be in racialized social architectures, as opposed
to which everything else is othered, is in fact a conflicted and historicized site
of shifting borders and conceptual blind spots that, as Shelley Fisher-Fishkin
argued almost 20 years ago, needs to be “investigated, analyzed, punctured
and probed” (Fisher-Fishkin 430), with as little ontological reality as the
equally fragile concept of blackness.
But on the other hand, performing a kind of whiteness that carries a sign
of difference allows Birdie’s performance as the daughter of David Goldman
to add an emotionally rewarding layer to a self under flux, very different
from the self-conscious fakeness involved in acquiring the New Hampshire
girlhood pose she comes to master, modeled on her schoolmate, Mona, a
surface makeover that she describes as a spectator:
From the outside, it must have looked like I was changing into one of those
New Hampshire girls. I talked the talk, walked the walk, swayed my hips to
the sound of heavy metal, learned to wear blue eyeliner and frosted lipstick
and snap my gum. And when those inevitable words came out of Mona’s
mouth … – nigga, spic, fuckin’ darkie – I only looked away into the distance,
my features tensing slightly, sometimes a little laugh escaping. (233)

The fake girl, she knows, is not herself. She comforts herself with the knowledge
that Birdie Lee is still there “hidden beneath my beige flesh” waiting for the
right moment to reemerge, “frozen solid in the moment in which I had left
her” (233).
However, that self is no longer “frozen solid” as she discovers when
she is made vulnerable by her performed Jewishness and finds herself at the
receiving end of direct racist insults – she is called a “Fuckin’ kike.” Then, the
imaginary Goldman self acquires a particular shade of reality: she admits to
a “pang of loyalty toward this imaginary father”, (246) a father whom she

Teresa Botelho 91
“can see as clear as day, in a rumpled tweed suit, a yarmulke bobby-pinned
precariously to his loose afro, as he bent over some ancient text” (188), making
Jesse, as she will admit when she returns to her Birdie self and her search for
her sister in Boston, not “such a lie” (328).
This encompassing of the performed identity in her concept of self is
confirmed when she adds the cheap Star of David her mother had given her
as an acting prop to her treasured box of Negrobilia, the depository of all her
affections, kept throughout her years of exile in “Caucasia land”, where it
joins the cherished “Black Power Junk of the Seventies” that summarizes, as
she puts it, “the lies of my body and the artifacts of my life” (381).
Birdie’s inhabiting of desired and imposed identities enact the
“positioning” that Stuart Hall claims to be at the heart of cultural identity
(Hall 226) as her performance as black and as white produce not only the
de-essencialization of these categories but a critical gaze at social and racial
arrangements from viewpoints that are juxtaposed rather than opposed.
Early in her life, her father had recommended that, when encountering
manifestations of racism, she should “study them ... and take notes” (61). That
is precisely what she does, but her experience as both a racial spy and a racial
performer complicates her concept of self. At the end of her learning process,
reunited with her sister, Birdie no longer describes herself as half-black but as
mixed, having incorporated the “mixture” in her understanding of blackness
not as an obstacle but as a component.
This new insight is not only experiential but also conceptual, illuminated
by her father’s new academic project. Back from Brazil for five years, during
which time he never attempted to find his daughter, his first meeting with her
is marked in equal terms by his emotional indifference towards Birdie’s painful
experiences and by his professorial abstractions on the deconstruction of the
illusion of race. It is, he tells his stunned teenage daughter, a “make belief,” a
scientific mistake “of the magnitude of the error that the world was flat” (391).
His new passion, the correction of “somebody else’s four hundred year-old
mistake” (393), leaves no space for family bonds; he remains, as Birdie notices,
“the same father who cared more for books and theories than for flesh and
blood” (393). Nonetheless, she realizes that what he says gives shape to what
she has learned in her years of reluctant passing: “it struck me that the most
terrifying thing … was not that he was wrong but that he was right” (391).
In the last scene of the book, the knowledge of her many-layered self,
of the fragility of the simplicities of racial ascription and description and of
recognition of sameness, a process described Amy Robinson as “the almost
intuitive faculty of recognition of an in-group”, based on the reading “of visual
codes that evade the … spectators of the pass” (Robinson 715), complicates
the organization of her identities map.

92 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Looking through the windows of a school bus in Berkeley at “black,
Mexican, Asian and white faces”, she catches sight of the face of a “cinnamon-
skinned girl”, “black like me, a mixed girl”. But the hand she begins to lift in
a wave of recognition stops halfway, “remembering where I was and what
I had already found”, as the bus moves on and the face dissolves, no longer
unique, into a blend of colors, “just a blur of yellow and black in motion” (413),
a mixture where no single discrete unit remained solid and unchanged.

Conclusion
Going back to the “post-soul” matrix proposed by Ashe, it can be said that
Caucasia troubles blackness, rereading it as a complex site with unfixed and
porous borders, not a discrete, enclosed and encamped, historically frozen
given. It also troubles whiteness, exposing the layers and nuances of its
construction and the plasticity and temporality of its attributes.
Furthermore, it engages in a very deliberate process of signifying, using
the allusion-disruption methodology to revise recent historical experiences
and to articulate a conversation with the tradition of the passing narrative as
a privileged site to reflect on the limitations of readings of the body that see
it as a cipher of absolute difference, and to observe how racial identities are
imagined, desired, negotiated and performed.
Senna’s avowed interest in “deconstructing the premises of race itself”
(Senna, Callaloo 448) is shaped, in Caucasia, not by a naïve belief that race
does not matter, but by a creative vision that wants to interrogate its cogency
and its fictionality while recognizing its insidious and debilitating effects.
Her narrative may be post-soul, but it certainly is not post-historical in any
abstract or romanticized sense.
Paul Gilroy has challenged critics of the discourse of raciology to
inventively abandon the concept of encamped identity particularity that
narrows the sphere of belonging to “those like oneself”, as that sameness
tends to be based on a narrative of ethnic or racial essentialism that is the
result of the residual inheritance of the past rather than a blueprint for the
non-racial pragmatic humanism he advocates and defines as “hetero-cultural,
post-anthropological and cosmopolitan” (Gilroy 334). It is not, he argues, a
“question of trying to forget what it took so long to remember or to put the
past and its traumas aside” (335) but of understanding that the past’s claims
are qualitatively different now and that the challenge to make race appear
anachronic requires a different critical and creative approach. Quoting Franz
Fannon’s famous appeal, if one’s objective is to construct a future where “the
colour of one’s skin has no more significance than the color of one’s eyes”
(Gilroy 254), the premises of the narrativity of absolute identity have to be

Teresa Botelho 93
critiqued, deconstructed and exposed as the myth that they are and have
always been.
That is a challenge that Caucasia meets by actively exploring the mixed-
race condition as a site from which the cogency of racial categories can be
interrogated, by conflating them in non-oppositional terms, creating a
liminal third space of both black and white where, unlike in early passing
narratives, the passer’s racial performance does not imply vacating a prior
identity position but encompasses both, where “there is no given, no ‘always
and already’” and “no authentic self prior to the one [Birdie] chooses and
constructs” (Senna, Callaloo 449).

NOTES

1
Among other contributions to this debate in the 1990s are Nelson George’s 1992 Buppies,
B-Boys Baps and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture and Terry MacMillan’
introduction to the 1990 collection Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary
African-American Fiction as well as Mark Anthony Neal’s Soul Babies: Black Popular
Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetics (2000).
2
The concept used here is that developed by Henry Louis Gates to refer to a parodic
technique, based on repetition, revision and usurpation, reversing conventional
meanings. See The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of African American Criticism
(1989).
3
See Lee’s 1984 Sarah Philips, Beatty’s Tuff (2001), The White Boy Shuffle (2001) and
Slumberland (2009), Touré’s The Portable Promised Land (2003), and Soul City (2004),
Rabateau’s The Professor’s Daughter (2006) and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist
(1999), John Henry Days (2001), Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and Sag Harbor (2009).
4
Her father is the African American poet Carl Senna and her mother the Irish American
novelist Fanny Howe, who met and married during the Civil Rights campaigns.
5
Also published under the title From Caucasia, with Love, in the British 2000 Bloomsbury
edition.
6
The novel equally looks back critically at some aspects of the Civil Rights Movement,
namely the secondary role women were allowed to play, the homophobia of some
of its discourse and the nihilist practices of some of the radical fellow travelers
on its fringes.

WORKS CITED

Ashe, Bertram D. “Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic.” African-American

Review 41: 4 (Winter 2007): 609-624.
Elam, Michele. “Passing in the Post Race Era: Danzy Senna, Philip Roth and
Colson Whitehead.” African-American Review 41: 4 (Winter 2007): 749-768.
Ellis, Trey. “The New Black Aesthetic.” Callaloo 12: 1 (1989): 233-243.

94 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

Fisher-Fishkin, Shelley. “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Complicating ‘Blackness’:
Remapping American Culture.” American Quarterly. 47: 3 (1995): 428-
466.
Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Ginsberg, Elaine, ed. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1996.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity, Community, Culture,
Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1900. 222-237.
Harrison-Khan, Lori. “Passing for White, Passing for Jewish: Mixed Race
Identity in Danzy Senna and Rebecca Walker.” MELUS 30: 1 (Spring
2005): 19-48.
Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. New York:
Vintage Books, 1912/1989.
Robinson, Amy. “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of
Common Interest.” Critical Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994): 715-736.
Rottenberg, Catherine. Performing Americanness: Race, Class and Gender
in Modern African-American and Jewish American Literature. Hanover:
University Press of New England, 2008.
Senna, Denzy. “To be Real.” To be Real. Ed. Rebecca Walker. New York: Anchor
Books, 1995. 5-20.
_______, Caucasia. New York: Riverhead Books, 1989.
_______, “Interview with Danzy Senna.” Callaloo 25: 2 (2002): 447-452.
Taylor, Paul C. “Post-Black, Old Black.” African-American Review 41: 4 (Winter
2007): 625-641.

Teresa Botelho 95
 LARRY MCMURTRY’S HORSEMAN, PASS BY & MARTIN RITT’S HUD:
AN INTERSEMIOTIC AND INTERLINGUISTIC PARATEXTUAL STUDY

Carmen Camus Camus

1. Introduction
This article examines the reception of Larry McMurtry’s opera prima, Horseman,
Pass By and that of its adaptation or intersemiotic translation for the cinema
screen, Martin Ritt’s Hud, by examining the critical reviews that the works
received both in the source culture, when the book was published and the
film released, and in Spain, when the cinematic and literary texts were
translated into Spanish and sieved through the censorship filter in the context
of Franco’s dictatorship. These paratextual materials will help us to ascertain
how the works were received in the two cultures and whether their position
in the receiving cultural system paralleled or deviated from that enjoyed in
the source culture.
Genette proposed that the study of a text should not be limited to the text
proper, but should extend the borders of its textual frontier and incorporate all
the paratextual material generated around the literary text itself. The author
divides paratextual phenomena according to their spatial relationship with
the book into peritexts and epitexts (Genette 5). The former comprise those
paratextual elements physically located within the bounds of the printed book,
such as prefaces, table of contents, front page, title, etc. The latter consist of
all the documents generated outside the book such as letters and reviews. For
this study, in the context of an authoritarian regime with a strictly controlled
official censorship system, the epitexts are also considered to include the
documentation generated when works were submitted for authorization and
in their passage through the censorship procedures.

97
 2. Reception of Horseman, Pass By / Hud in the Source Culture
Horseman, Pass By was published by Harper & Brothers in 1961 and the
following year won The Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute
of Letters (Sonnichsen 5). This literary prize would be the first of a long
list of awards received by this prolific novelist, script writer and essayist.
Horseman, Pass By, McMurtry’s first novel, portrays a contemporary vision
of the archetypal West. The clash between Hud, the main character, and his
stepfather, the traditional rancher Homer Bannon, serves as a metaphor to
explore the collision between the traditional way of life and the complex,
urbanized realities of the modern West “with the greed and materialism
that was beginning to take over America” (Miller 53). The story is narrated
through the eyes of young Lon Bannon and explores the generational conflict
sparked off on his grandfather’s ranch when an outbreak of foot and mouth
disease is detected in one of the cows owned by the patriarch. Old Homer
Bannon represents the archetypal frontier values of honesty and decency,
and Hud his stepson is the epitome of hedonism and materialism as well as
a mirror held up to his society” (Degenfelder 83). The generational conflict
depicted in Horseman, Pass By is used to portray the tensions existing between
the romantic vision of the frontier and the demythologized, degraded and
desolate present reality in which Hud, the young rancher, feels alienated in a
hostile territory where the struggle for survival gives way to the struggle to
integrate into the new social order.

Table 1. Intersemiotic parallel texts

Narrative Film

Original title: Horseman, Pass By Original title: Hud

Author: Larry McMurtry Director: Martin Ritt
Editor: Popular Library Producer: Salem Productions
Publication date: 1961 Release date: 29th May 1963

Target title: Hud Target title Título Meta: Hud, el más

Editor: Plaza & Janés salvaje entre mil
Publication date: 19th October 1963 Producer: Filmax S. A.
Translator: Ana Mª de la Fuente Release date: 2nd September 1963

Hud, the screen adaptation of the literary work, was directed by Martin Ritt
in 1962 and in 1963 was selected to represent the American film industry
at the Venice Film Festival. The following year, on April 13th, at the 36th

98 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

annual Academy Awards, the film won three Oscars: Best Actress (Patricia
Neal), Best Supporting Actor (Melvyn Douglas), and Best Black-and-White
Cinematography (James Wong Howe). It was also nominated for the
following categories: Best Director (Martin Ritt), Best Actor (Paul Newman),
Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Irving Ravetch
and Harriet Frank) and Best Black-and-White Art Direction-Set Decoration
(Hal Pereira, Tambi Larsen, Samuel M. Comer, Robert R. Benton). As well as
these Academy nominations and awards, the movie received several other
distinctions.1
Horseman, Pass By was skilfully adapted by Irving Ravetch and Harriet
Frank into the screenplay for the contemporary Western Hud. The film, directed
by Martin Ritt, starred Paul Newman in the role of the debauched, violent
and indomitable Hud. When the scriptwriters adapted the literary work for
the screenplay, they accommodated its contents to the tastes and demands
required for the target audience of a mass market medium like the cinema,
which from the censorship point of view was more vulnerable than the novel.
In this regard, although remaining very faithful to McMurtry’s2 novel in some
passages, the script writers shifted the narrative focus from Lonnie onto Hud
“to show the despicable nature of someone who lived entirely without a sense
of responsibility” (Jackson 70). However, what they had conjectured would
serve to denounce the vices of contemporary amoral American society (Reilly
24), in fact, served to create a mass hero, as Newman himself pointed out in
an interview in 1991:
External graces; he was good with women, he did all those macho things,
he wore his pants right, he was a womanizer. But we thought that the fact
that he was rotten at the core would be the distinguishable feature. What
we didn’t realize was that all of the other things overwhelmed that single
flaw and he came away a folk hero. Yes they [audiences] couldn’t stand the
old man, but they love Hud. We just made a mistake. We thought people
would turn away from him. He betrayed his neighbors… he would betray
anybody, but apparently was a part of the American Dream (Jackson 75).

However, in spite of the underlying violence perceived in the film, some of

the passages from the novel were softened when adapted to the new medium
to make them more accessible for a mass cinema audience. In this regard, the
main changes introduced by the scriptwriters consisted in replacing Hud’s
brutal rape of the housekeeper (named Alma in the movie and Halmea in the
novel) consummated before the eyes of the powerless Lonnie and Jesse, one
of the ranchers, with attempted rape in the movie which was thwarted thanks
to Lonnie’s timely intervention. Lon’s father accidentally kills his own wife
in the novel while the incident is not mentioned in the film; in the same vein,
Hud kills his father out of compassion in the novel whereas in the film Homer
dies from the wounds after an accidental fall.

Carmen Camus Camus 99

 In addition to these major changes, Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank
made other minor adjustments to make the argument fit better the new
medium, such as not mentioning that Homer Bannon’s wife had previously
been married, thus making Hud his legitimate son rather than his stepson and,
in turn, making Lon Hud’s kinship nephew. In the novel, Halmea, the house-
keeper, is black but “Ritt did not feel that he could make the relationship
between Hud and a black woman work at the time” (Miller 54). Other
secondary characters in the novel like Jesse, who plays an important part in
developing Lon’s character, vanished in the movie.
In spite of these adjustments, McMurtry believed that the screen writers
were too faithful to his work on transferring the contents of the book to the
script:
Touches which were overpoetic in the novel became merely awkward in the
screenplay; occasionally a line of description from the book would be turned
into a line of dialogue, but with no change in the adjective, a practise hardly
recommendable (McMurtry 17).

In the film’s genesis Ravetch and Frank consulted McMurtry about possible
titles for the movie version. He sent them a list with at least twelve of them,
and due to the coarseness of some of them, the producer named the movie
Hud Bannon Against the World:
I mulled the matter over for a few days and then sent Paramount a list of
about a dozen titles; the best, as I recall, was Coitus on Horseback, a title I had
long hoped to fit onto something. In the rush of production, that and the
rest of my suggestion somehow got brushed aside – the next report I had,
Paramount was going to call it Hud Bannon Against the World (McMurtry 4).

Horseman, Pass By takes its title from a line in the poem by William Butler Yeats
Under Ben Bulben; the line closes the sixth and final section: “Cast a cold eye
/ On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!”. This intertextual reference serves
as the lettre d’introduction of the literary merits of the novel and establishes
Horseman, Pass By in the realm of major Western literature:
The novel’s title is a direct reference to the self-epitaph with which Yeats
concludes his poem Under Ben Bulben – an epitaph also fitting to Homer
Bannon… Under Ben Bulben in which Yeats exhorts the Irish poets to
celebrate native Irish themes rather than conventional genteel ones, and
more specifically, “Well made” themes of “other days”, of “heroic centuries”
now past (Folsom 366).

The Texas Observer critic, David L. Minter, emphasizes the novel’s literary
merit, separating it from the genre’s popular narrative, which at the time still
enjoyed the favour of the reading public: “Yet this compact, skilfully written
novel is significantly unlike the popular westerns which continue to haunt the
shelves of American bookstores and libraries” (6).

100 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Horseman, Pass By was considered by the critics an initiation story
which was to mark the coming of age of his author: “This wise novel
about the decline of the Western way of life is essentially a coming of age
story” (Limsky). This critical vision of the changing social structure of the
contemporary West, as reflected both in the language and in some of its
passages, led to some unfavourable reviews. However, due to its theme, the
novel was recommended for inclusion in the catalogues of libraries housing
complete collections on the theme of the American Southwest: “Some of the
language and some descriptive passages will be offensive to many readers.
Only for libraries having complete Southwestern collections” (Library Journal,
Horseman, Pass By 2.818).
This recommendation was not echoed by all the teaching staff at
McMurtry’s native Texan Catholic University, for whom the crude realism
narrated in its pages led to one of the professors asking for the book to be
withdrawn from the university library:
Some critics considered these works offensive. Tom Pilkington relates the
story of one such critic a professor at Texan Christian University, who
checked out the library’s copy of Horseman, Pass By on extended loan so that
students would not be exposed to its coarseness (Reynolds 117).

Other reviewers at that time discovered in its pages a talented new author
and the germ of an innovative mode of narrating the stories from this spiritual
and geographical enclave: “He is already well up among first novelists who
have appeared this year. What’s more, his promise is the kind that lasts. The
material he has at his command as a descendant of a Texas generation is
usable in all kinds of new ways” (Poore 21).
McMurtry, in an interview published on the occasion of the novel’s
publication, summarizes its main argumental themes: “It is possible to see
here, with a good deal of clarity, the changing structures of social life…I feel…
that the change from a religious, family-rooted, essentially rural way of life, to
an irreligious, existential, essentially urban way of life (Library Journal, Texas
is Home Country 603).
Lon Tinkle, literary critic for the Dallas Morning News, draws a magnificent
sketch of the novel though he considers as shortcomings the novel’s
excessive reliance on melodrama and violence: “What flaws this impressive
and admirable novel is his tendency to substitute melodrama for human
motivation, and to substitute details of violence for emotional intensity” (9).
In this respect, the reviewer points out the question of perspective in the
treatment of violence in the novel. In particular, while he finds the violence
depicted in the rape scene almost unreal and shocking as it was portrayed,
he considers the circumstances of Homer’s demise even more implausible:

Carmen Camus Camus 101

 Hud’s ruthlessness becomes arbitrary and melodramatic. He rapes the ranch’s
invaluable young Negro cook, despite her struggles and Lonnie shooting at
him and the opposition of the ranch hand. This scene, half-incredible as it is,
is a real shocker. How the old grandfather gets his punishment from Hud is
even more a challenge to normal probability (Tinkle 9).

Tom Giesen, in a review published in 1967 in the Northwestern Review,

considered McMurtry has given substance and form to the inability of
contemporary man to find satisfaction in the changing world in which he
lives. In this way, Hud emerges as the epitome of this alienated human being
that is contemporary man. Giesen finds a clear parallelism between the rape
of Halmea and the rape of the land with the erection of oil derricks in the soil
where before lay good pasture land:
And the rape of the land, the erection upon good pastureland of oil derricks
and the oil-money mentality, is a theme that begins Horseman, Pass By and
exists throughout the novel, evocative of notions of careless exploitation,
and a reminder of the loss of organic and rhythmic relations between man
and his environs (121).

Whitehall, in a highly favourable critique of the film entitled The Last Real Men
on Earth and published in Film and Filming, concedes Hud the merit of using
classical Western mythic values to question those of contemporary American
society. Hud represents the free man par excellence, “he is the hair-on-the-
-chest male, the prodigious womanizer, his masculine self-esteem has the
self-sufficiency of the traditional western hero” (26). However, the first scenes
of the film make clear the substantial difference separating him from the
stereotypes elaborated hitherto in both films and literature. Lonnie finds his
uncle Hud in the house of a married woman, taking advantage of the absence
of her husband: “Hud, when he finally appears, is immediately recognisable
as the devil-may-care hero” (Whitehall 26).
Dyer highlights the film’s latent sexuality and the materno-erotic
relationship established between Lonnie and the housekeeper (Patricia Neal),
with “a barbed sexuality to her role” (144) that endows the film with both tone
and consistency. The critic finds the death theme another of the central topics
in the film:
Death colours Hud’s philosophy: “the only helping hand you’ll get is the one
that lowers you into your grave”. And during the funeral, a well meaning
assurance that Homer has gone to a better place is rejected with dry-eyed
certainty: “Not unless dirt is a better place than air” (Dyer 144).

He concludes his critique by admitting that the main theme of the movie is
not the destruction of hope, of life or of the legend, but that Ritt has used those
elements with great lyric intensity to achieve through them a catharsis in the
process.

102 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Another critique published in Monthly Film Bulletin on the occasion of the
film première highlights the scene when the cattle are sacrificed: “But no scene
brings home the reality of life in such a country so vividly as the slaughter of
the cattle”. Curiously enough, in a genre where violence-laden scenes are a
staple of the genre, it is surprising that this critic should have pinpointed that
one for the absence of visual violence in the film: “the viewer does not see any
animal die (the movie’s crew was careful to abide by Texas animals Laws)”
(Jackson 72).
The novel Horseman, Pass By and its film version Hud deal essentially
with the same themes, that is, the clash between the traditional old West of the
cattlemen and ranchers and the contemporary West riddled with cars and oil
derricks, the generational conflict personified by Homer Bannon and Hud, as
well as the transition from adolescent idealism to the crude reality of the adult
world as reflected by the character of young Lonnie. In spite of this, there are
significant differences in the perspectives of the two media. Unlike the novel,
where all the action is narrated from Lonnie’s viewpoint, the movie has no
narrator and the only perspective presented to viewers is that of the camera;
the characters are created and developed through their own actions and the
opinions they express in the dialogues. It is, therefore, worth noting some
effects of the adaptations introduced in the film on the global characterization
of the novel.
In the movie, Homer Bannon is a widower and he is not Hud’s stepfather,
but his kindred father. This change emphasizes the generational conflict
between the two, as in the film the patriarch still symbolizes the traditional
values and principles of the old West. In the movie, Hud, who becomes the
main protagonist, is delineated as an ambivalent character whose ambiguity is
the consequence of combining the negative connotations of Hud in the novel
with the qualities of Jesse, who in the narrative is presented as the epitome
of the idyllic traditional cowboy – the errant figure in search of adventure
and emotion. In the film, the role of Halmea, the Bannons housekeeper, is
adapted to make Hud’s character stand out, especially in the sexual sphere.
Alma is an attractive separated or divorced woman whose husband left her for
gambling after six years of marriage. She is young enough to arouse Lonnie’s
sexual impulse and intelligent and mature enough to avoid the attentions and
intentions of the womanizing Hud. And Lonnie, who is the central character
in the novel, plays a minor role in the film. Nevertheless, as the narrative
evolves, he learns to accept life as it is and to judge people by their actions.
After his grandfather’s death and Alma’s departure, Lon rejects Hud’s
invitation to remain in Thalia with him, and leaves the ranch in search of a
better life. However, he does not leave as the prototypical cowboy, heading
off into the sunset; there is no happy ending and both in the novel and in the
film the argument remains open.

Carmen Camus Camus 103

 3. Reception of Horseman, Pass By / Hud in the Spanish Culture
The interlinguistic translation of Hud / Horseman, Pass By into the Spanish
culture took place during Fraga Iribarne’s term of office (1962-1969) at the
Ministry of Information and Tourism, a period that saw the introduction of
important changes in the censorship procedure and a period of splendour
for the Western genre. The study of the intersemiotically coupled parallel
texts will help to confirm whether there is a correlation between the overall
censorship incidence found for the genre for the period 1960-1970 in a corpus of
censorship files for narrative and cinema and that for Hud / Horseman, Pass By.
The parallel texts were selected because, as well as meeting the requirement
of having experienced cuts or suppressions on going through the censorship
procedure, the novel is one of the first examples of the contemporary Western
where archetypal horse gallops are replaced by Cadillacs being driven at
full speed, and “where the classical struggle between the good and the bad
vanishes and gives way to a psychological plot”.3 Moreover, the film première
took place on September 2nd, six months after a new set of film censorship
norms were passed, together with a Ministerial Order (2/03/1963) introducing
a two-tier age limit, one for over 14s and the other for over 18s, thus raising
the previous age limit from 16 to 18. An analysis of the paratexts will help
both to unveil the degree of permissiveness of the new censorship filter and
also to determine the extent to which the proclaimed “opening” introduced
by the newly promulgated “liberalising” measures was in fact applied.
We have not found any press reviews on the reception of the novel
in Spain. In this regard, the only information we have is that provided by
the censorship file (No. 4866/63), where the publishing house Plaza Janés
declared a print-run of three thousand. As well as the information contained
in the file, we have the paratextual information offered by the book proper;
the novel was distributed in hardback with a book cover in colour: the front
cover displays a sketch of the main characters in the film and the back cover
reproduces the catch phrases used by the publishing house to lure prospective
readers. Although the book was published to take advantage of the film’s
success, the phrases indicate that the book was aimed not at a mass market
but at an audience looking for some quality in their reading.
Subtle psychological study of an elementary man, with violent and
unpredictable reactions, the story of Hud draws us into life in rural America,
a region where the harshness of the environment seems to condition the
temperament of its dwellers. The suggestive style of the author, almost
poetic at times, and brimming with a breathtaking naturalism at others,
brings to mind the prose of the best Salinger.4

In Spain, Hud was released on 2nd September 1963, and Ángel Zúñiga, one
of the most renowned film critics of the period, defined the film as “one of

104 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

the most notable American film productions of our time”.5 Cine Asesor, the
regime’s official film magazine, published in its Hoja archivable de información nº
252-63 (Archivable Information Sheet no. 252-63) information on the technical
features of the film, as shown in table 2.

Ficha Técnica
Título: Hud, el más salvaje entre mil. (Panavisión. B. y N.)

(mayores de 18 años)

Intérpretes: Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal, Brandon de

Wilde, John Ashley, Whit Bissell, etc.

Director: Martin Ritt.

Producción: Norteamericana 1963. – Versión doblada.

Distribuidora Nacional: Filmax.

Local de Estreno en Madrid: P. la Prensa y Roxy A.

Fecha de su estreno: 2 Septiembre 1963.

Permanencia en cartel: Laborables y festivos.

Asunto: Relato dramático en el moderno Oeste. -Las luchas entre

un ganadero y su hijo, separados ambos por incomprensiones y

equívocos.

Clasificación censura moral: Rosa fuerte (3R)

Tiempo de proyección: 109 minutos.

Doblaje: Parlo Films, S. A.

Sonido: Westrex-Optico, no estereofónico.

Table 2. Technical features of the film Hud, el más salvaje entre mil

Cine Asesor presents the story in a neutral anodyne tone, stressing Paul
Newman’s physical attributes, and describing him as a philandering womanizer
whose “violent and sceptical character leads him to being frequently drunk”,6
but barely mentioning the fact that Lonnie accompanies his uncle on his night
outings. Hud’s violent character is focused on his drunkenness and hellraising
in town, but omits to mention his sexual assault on Alma, although it does
mention the fatal accident in which Norman, Lonnie’s father died as a result
of Hud’s drunken driving. In spite of the edulcorated argument presented by

Carmen Camus Camus 105

Cine Asesor, the film was given a strict moral rating: dark pink (3R), i.e. adults
only. In spite of Cine Asesor’s favourable critique, only 114,557 viewers saw
the film while it ran, and the box office amounted to a modest 16,446.43 Euros
(source: Ministry of Culture data base for classified films).
The synopsis published in the section “Commercial Opinion” in Cine
Asesor stressed that the presence of Paul Newman would serve to lure the
actor’s numerous admirers and augured this would help the film to achieve an
unparalleled commercial success. In the same document, they recommended
showing a trailer and the distribution of leaflets containing publicity phrases.
For this reviewer, the underlying violence and the dramatic contents of the
film were the main focus of interest, although he concedes the film’s ending
may not be to the liking of “viewers accustomed to easy solutions where
everything ends well” (252-63):
Paul Newman’s presence at the head of the cast and the eye-catching film
poster with its Western ambience, signal favourable prospects for the
commercial success of the film, which will draw to the box office numerous
film-goers, especially the actor’s admirers. A trailer and leaflets with
publicity phrases could increase takings on the opening night and later
shows. Against the backdrop of the contemporary West with the action set
in a modern Texan cattle ranch, the violent, profound and bitter plot of this
psychological drama is played out. The main theme, with hardly any action,
is a study of tough characters, confronted by problems which, if not exciting,
are at least interesting. There are scenes – like the cattle slaughter sequence
– that are impeccably executed and charged with strong dramatic effect. In
contrast, the unexpected and sudden ending, without easy concessions, may
not be to the liking of those viewers accustomed to easy solutions where
everything ends well. The most notable contribution to the film’s success
resides in the expertise of the directing, which succeeds in bringing out all the
drama contained in the story, and, above all, Paul Newman’s interpretation
in a role tailor-made for his characteristics. The photography is excellent and
the sound and dubbing are very good. We believe that the film will bring in
a good return and can be programmed for feast days.7

Opinions on the film published in the specialized press were mixed. In the
section of Primer Plano reserved for comments on newly released films,
J.R.S. authored a highly eulogistic review where he emphasizes the film’s
capacity to reflect the contemporary West, as well as recommending Paul
Newman’s superb acting. Although not all the reviews garnered by the film
were favourable, some like the one by Javier Vázquez for Cine Estudio were
really devastating. Under the headline, “Theatrical and Disappointing” the
reviewer focuses on Ritt’s shortcomings over his career as a film director, as
well as expressing his astonishment that the film should have been selected
to compete at the 1963 Venice film festival, where it won the International
Catholic Film Festival Award and was nominated for the Golden Lion. In a

106 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

similar vein, Miguel G. Barbero in a column published in Pantallas y Escenarios
also takes the film as a pretext to vent his wrath against the film director:
Regarding Martin Ritt’s artistic stature, let’s say that he is a difficult director,
who has a liking for romantic and decadent themes and who always chooses
abnormal characters or those with personal problems, and who likes to set the
action of his films in the mysterious Southern United States, with its peculiar
individuality in comparison with the rest of North America (Barbero).8

Similarly, Víctor Érice for Nuestro Cine rated the film as the worst of the four
he reviewed in the same periodical, though he admitted that underlying the
film there is a theme of some interest in that it encompasses different degrees
of evolution of American individualism within three generations of the same
family. For this critic, Hud’s destructive violence springs from the destruction
of individualist and traditionalist values of American capitalism: “Nowadays,
the American dream of the birth of a nation, once sung by Whitman, is slowly
and painfully drifting away in North American narrative” (Érice 51).9
Nevertheless, all the reviews published in Cine Asesor on the occasion
of the première in Madrid highlight the quality of the film, considered “an
amazingly modern production”, and they underline its value as a film
presenting “a drama set in the contemporary West, which parallels the world
we live in”,10 while at the same time claiming that in Hud Paul Newman plays
his best role.

4. Through the Censorship Board

4.1. Censorship reports on Horseman, Pass By / Hud: narrative
On August 23rd, 1963, the publishing house Plaza-Janés presented a request
to the General Director of Information asking for permission, in accordance
with the dictates of the Ministerial Order (25/03/1938), as well as the
Ministerial Order (29/04/1938), to publish the novel entitled Hud (File No.
4866/63), written by Larry McMurtry and translated into Spanish by Ana Mª
de la Fuente. The publisher stated that the book would be two hundred pages
long in 15x10.5 format (octavo) and that it would have a print-run of 3,000
copies; on the same form they declared that the book would be included in the
collection entitled Literatura.
According to the information contained in the censorship file, there was no
previous record for this work, so it was transferred to reader number 19 to be
reported on. The reader, whose signature is unreadable, produced the following
report on the 13th September, 1963, authorizing publication of the book:
The novel Hud describes the life of Texan ranchers. An epidemic kills
the whole herd and the owner, an old rancher, is unable to overcome the
disaster.

Carmen Camus Camus 107

 The author also highlights the difference in mentality between two
generations. The young ones do not feel so attached to the cattle, as those
were the early days when oil had been found.
The book ends with the old man’s death, while the young ones will start a
new life.
IT CAN BE AUTHORIZED11

After completing the report, the reader sent it to the head of the readers’
section, who on 14th October, 1963, authorized publication of the novel.
The report is succinctly worded and the reader omits any reference to the
violent, deceitful, brawling and unscrupulous personality of the novel’s main
character. Nor is there any mention of the brutal sexual assault on Halmea
in one of Hud’s drunken rages. The only indication of the work’s passage
through censorship is a crossing-out of the book’s initial title El más salvaje
entre mil, which was replaced by that of Hud, under which it was eventually
published. In the file there is no trace indicating that the change in title was
dictated by the censorship board and, therefore, it must be assumed that the
decision stemmed from editorial convenience so as to make the title coincide
with that of the film.
On October 7th, once printing permission had been received, the publishing
house presented another request for authorization of the book covers. A week
later, the Inspection Section permitted the circulation of the novel with the
proposed covers.
The censorial bureaucracy was completed on 18th October 1963, when
the publisher handed over the reglamentary three volumes of the novel on
deposit.

4.2. Censorship reports on Horseman, Pass By / Hud: cinema

According to the information contained in censorship file number 27.196,
corresponding to the film Hud, distributed by Filmax, S. A., the company
was given an Importation Licence from the Ministry of Information and
Tourism (no. 43797/62), for the American film entitled The Winner (Wildest
of the Thousand), on 14th September 1962 under the terms of the Hispano-
American importation agreement. The merchandise consisted of a working
copy and a trailer, music and sound effect tracks, a trailer and a film copy
as well as 25 copies and 25 trailers in Black and White. On the 6th March,
1963, the distribution company, Filmax, asked the General Director of Foreign
Trade for permission to change the title of Importation Licence no. 43797/62,
so that the film from then on was to be named Hud. The General Director
of Foreign Trade acceded to the requested change in title on the following
grounds: “Retitled by the producer as it was a black and white film, and not

108 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

a colour copy as had been expected”.12 However, this modification was not
carried out, since the cabin report at the viewing with the original soundtrack
had the film entered under the translation of the proposed title Wildest of the
Thousand El más salvaje entre mil, which was retained as the film’s subtitle. And
according to the information contained in that document, the film consisted of
twelve reels and was 3,105 metres long.
At a session of the Censorship Board held on 15th April 1963, the members
present proceeded to examine the original version of the American film
entitled: El más salvaje entre mil (Hud), distributed by Filmax, and unanimously
agreed to authorize its dubbing into Spanish, on condition that an adaptation
(a suppression) was introduced in reel 12, as is stated on the licence signed by
the Board’s Secretary:
VOTING RESULT: OVER 18; adaptation in reel 12 by unanimous
agreement13

The Board’s Vicepresident based his favourable vote on the following

grounds: “I believe the terms of the conflict were expressed in a general tone
of bitterness, but with a positive accent”.14
On May 27th, 1963, Filmax presented a request for an Exhibition Licence
for a dubbed version of El más salvaje entre mil on the grounds that the film
was authorized for viewing in Spain. Ten days later, on June 7th, the producer
applied to the Board for Classification and Censorship asking for the title
of the deposited dubbed version of the film to be renamed Hud, a change
approved by the Board on June 10th.
On the same date, Filmax requested an Exhibition Licence for the trailer
of the film Hud, and the compulsory separate file was opened (No. 28.078).
The members of the Board for Classification and Censorship, in a meeting
held on July 15th, proceeded to censor the trailer and agreed unanimously to
prohibit viewing of the trailer in all the country’s cinemas, and duly informed
the director of Filmax in a letter dated 17th July. In the report signed by the
censors who banned the trailer there is no indication as to which scenes were
considered offensive, so it must be assumed that the ban was due to the
transgressive tone of all the scenes in the trailer.
On July 16th, a censorship board composed of practically the same
members as those who had banned the trailer the previous day, met to
examine the dubbed version of Hud. The attending members unanimously
agreed to authorize the film for over 18s pending the introduction of the
following adaptations:
ADAPTATIONS
Shot 13 must be suppressed and the phrase pronounced by Lon as previously
indicated15

Carmen Camus Camus 109

The contents of their report indicate that the producer had introduced
the suppressions demanded when the film was viewed with the original
soundtrack. Censors refer to such as changes “voluntarily introduced”:
Dubbing is approved and the adaptation in the dialogue of reel 12 has
been verified, in accordance with the Board’s dictates and that shot 13 be
suppressed as indicated in the adaptations.16

Thus, this film received two contradictory dictates; the trailer was banned
but the film, with the introduction of the recommended modifications, was
approved. It should be noted that the two contradictory resolutions were
passed by censorship boards with a similar composition. This censorial
discrepancy implies that while file 27.196 was practically concluded, with
only the slogans and photographs to be approved, the trailer (File. 28.078)
had to go through the censorship procedure again.
On July 27th, Filmax requested authorization for the publicity phrases
and photographs to promote the film. These were examined and, after
suppression of some of the phrases and elimination of the subheading of one
of the publicity posters, returned to Filmax on 30th July, so that the file, if the
trailer had been passed, could have been closed.
Filmax applied to the General Director of Cinematography requesting a
reviewing of Hud’s trailer on 7th September. In the application, the producer
informed the Board that they had introduced some suppressions and expressed
the hope that the trailer could be exhibited with the adaptations introduced:
Entrance of Paul Newman in P. Neal’s bedroom
Part of Paul Newman and P. Neal kitchen scene17

The Board met on 8th October to review the trailer for Hud and with a majority
vote authorized it for over 18s.
According to the information contained in Cine Asesor, the première
of Hud took place in Madrid on 2nd September, 1963, so from the dates on
the documents consulted, we can deduce that the film was shown in the
cinemas prior to the authorization of the trailer. This is corroborated by the
recommendation in Cine Asesor that the film could attract more film-goers if a
trailer were shown in advance.

5. Conclusions
The analysis of the paratexts generated around Horseman, Pass By / Hud shows
that the reception derived from the narrative and film systems of production
and distribution were uneven in the source and the target culture.
In the source culture, both the novel and the film drew the attention of the
media and they both received a mixed reception from the critics. McMurtry’s

110 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

debut novel, Horseman, Pass By, met with some enthusiastic critiques but
also generated strong critical reviews. The coarseness of its language and the
crude realism depicted in some of its passages did not pass unnoticed. The
Jesse Jones Award won by this contemporary Western about the loss of the
frontier values of independence and freedom served McMurtry as a letter of
introduction in the literary realm. From the reviews analysed on, it can be
concluded that Horseman, Pass By was not received as just another Western
since some of the critics valued not only the theme and narrative design of
this modern Western, but especially the author’s promising talent.
Reviewers, on the whole, were quite positive in their coverage of Martin
Ritt’s cinematic adaptation of the novel. On transferring the plot to the new
medium, the intention of director and scriptwriters alike was to condemn
materialism and to expose the despicable nature of its callous antagonist, Hud.
However, by defying American conventions and creating a national ethos,
this antihero received popular acclaim. Thus, contrary to all expectation, Hud
ended up as a folk hero.
In the target culture, the work had a quite differentiated reception in
the two media. In Spanish, the novel was commercialised with the same title
as the film, but did not attract any attention from the press even though its
publication was made to coincide with the film’s release. On going through
compulsory censorship, the censors did not consider that its language or its
theme trespassed the ethical boundaries of the dictatorship, although the
translator had adapted its contents to the country’s cultural arena.
The film received quite enthusiastic reviews, and the criticism in the
few unfavourable ones was targeted at the director rather than the work
itself. The film’s première took place a few months after the 1963 Spanish
Censorship Norms were passed and the age limit for access to cinemas rose
to eighteen. Some of the film’s scenes were pruned by the distributor to meet
the requirements of the censorship board on moral grounds; however, in spite
of the violence of Hud’s sexual assault on Alma, only the trailer was banned.
Hud’s isolation and individualism reflected a generational and ethical conflict
that was too remote from the Spanish cultural milieu of the 60s for the concerns
encountered by this alienated misfit to be considered a potential danger by
the censorship officials of the time.
Both McMurtry and Ritt, by reflecting the issues of their own day and
time onto the scenario of traditional West, opened up new paths for narrating
the Western myth and introduced profound changes in the portrayal of the
American Western in fiction and film that were to transcend the borders of the
American frontier.

Carmen Camus Camus 111

NOTES

1
“Ritt was nominated for best director Oscar for Hud. The movie did win the Cleveland,
Ohio, critics’ award as best picture, and the Hollywood Foreign Press again
named him best director” (Jackson 75).
2
“It seemed to me clear that the screen-writers had erred badly in following my novel
too closely. Horseman, Pass By has its moments, but they do not keep it from being
a slight, confused sentimental first novel. The screen writers had the good sense
to shift the focus from Lonnie to Hud” (McMurtry 17).
3
“y donde la clásica lucha entre buenos y malos desaparece ante un problema de
corte más bien psicológico” (Primer Plano nº 1196, 13/09/63). All the English
translations of quotes from Spanish paratexts are mine.
4
“Matizado estudio psicológico de un hombre elemental, de violentas e imprevisibles
reacciones, la historia de Hud nos adentra en la vida del campo norteamericano,
en una región en la que la dureza del paisaje parece condicionar el temperamento
de sus habitantes. El estilo sugestivo del autor, a veces casi poético, y en ocasiones
de un naturalismo desgarrador, recuerda a la prosa del mejor Salinger.”
5
“Uno de los films más notables de la producción norteamericana de este tiempo”
(Cine Asesor nº 252-63).
6
“Su carácter violento y escéptico le lleva a embriagarse con frecuencia” (Cine Asesor
252-63).
7
“La presencia de Paul Newman al frente del reparto, y la atrayente cartelera del
film con su ambientación en el Oeste, hacen muy favorables las perspectivas de
explotación comercial de esta película, que atraerá a las taquillas a numerosos
espectadores, principalmente admiradores del citado actor. Un trailer previo y
frases publicitarias en folletos de mano pueden aumentar bastante la rentabilidad
del estreno y sucesivas proyecciones. Con el fondo del Oeste en época actual,
ambientada la acción en un rancho ganadero del moderno Texas, se desarrolla la
violenta, profunda y agria trama en esta cinta dramático-psicológica. El tema, sin
apenas acción, es un estudio de recios caracteres, enfrentados por unos problemas
que, si no llegan a emocionar, por lo menos interesan. Hay escenas, – como la del
sacrificio de las reses – totalmente logradas y de fuerte impacto dramático. En
cambio el final, inesperado y súbito, sin concesiones fáciles, puede que no guste a
públicos habituados a soluciones acomodaticias para que todo acabe bien. Labor
primordial en el éxito del film es la experta dirección, que sabe imprimir al relato
todo el dramatismo que encierra en sí, y sobre todo la interpretación de Paul
Newman, en un papel muy ajustado a sus característicos tipos. La fotografía es
excelente y muy buenos el sonido y el doblaje. Consideramos que será un film de
BUEN RENDIMIENTO, que puede ser programado para festivos” (Cine Asesor
nº 252-63).
8
“Respecto a la categoría artística de Martin Ritt, diremos que es un director difícil,
que gusta de temas románticos y decadentes, que escoge siempre personajes
anormales o con problemas íntimos y que sitúa la acción de sus películas en el
misterioso sur de los Estados Unidos con su individualidad propia respecto al
resto de Norteamérica” (Barbero).
9
“En la actualidad, el sueño americano del nacimiento de una nación, el que Whitman
un día cantara, se va evaporando en la narrativa de los Estados Unidos lenta y
dolorosamente” (Érice 51).
10
“Un drama en el moderno Oeste, haciendo consonancia con el mundo en que
vivimos” (Cine Asesor no. 252-63).

112 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

11
“La novela Hud describe la vida de los rancheros en Tejas. Una epidemia mata todo
el ganado y el propietario, un viejo, no puede sobrevivir al desastre.
El autor subraya también la diferencia de mentalidad entre dos generaciones. Los
jóvenes no se sienten más ligados al ganado, porque eran los primeros tiempos,
cuando había empezado a encontrarse el petróleo.
La novela termina con la muerte del viejo, mientras los jóvenes comenzarán otra
vida”.
PUEDE AUTORIZARSE (File No. 4866/63).
12
“Cambio de título por parte de la productora y por tratarse de una película en blanco
y negro en lugar de color como teníamos previsto” (File No. 27.196/63).
13
“RESULTADO DE LA VOTACIÓN: MAYORES DE 18; adaptación en el rollo nº 12
por unanimidad” (File No. 27.196/63).
14
“Creo que los términos del conflicto estaban planteados dentro de un tono general
de amargura, con acento positivo” (File No. 27.196/63).
15
“ADAPTACIONES: Que se suprima el plano 13 y la frase que dice Lon tal y como se
indicó en su día” (File No. 27.196/63).
16
“Aprobado el doblaje y comprobada la adaptación de diálogo en el rollo nº 12, de
conformidad con lo acordado por la Junta y siempre que se suprima el plano 13
como se indica en las adaptaciones” (File No. 27.196/63).
17
“Entrada de Paul Newman en la habitación de P. Neal.
Parte escena en la cocina Paul Newman y P. Neal.” (File No. 28.078/63).

WORKS CITED

Barbero, Miguel G. “Ritt.” Pantallas y Escenarios, 29 October, 1963.

Cine Asesor. Hoja archivable de información. Hoja número 252-63. 1963.
Degenfelder, E.P. “Film: McMurtry and the Movies: Hud and The Last Picture
Show.” The Western Humanities Review 29 (1975): 81-91.
Dyer, P. J. “Hud.” Sight and Sound Summer 1963: 144.
Érice, Victor. “Hud.” Nuestro Cine 24 (1963): 51-52.
Folsom, James K. “Shane and Hud: Two Stories in Search of a Medium”. The
Western Humanities Review 24 (1970): 359-372.
Genette, Gerard. Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997.
Giesen, Tom. “Novels by Larry McMurtry.” Northwest Review 9 (1967): 120-121.
Jackson, Carlton. Picking up the Tab: The Life and Movies of Martin Ritt. Bowling
Green, ON: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994.
Library Journal. “Texas is Home Country.” 1 February 1961: 603.
Library Journal. “Horseman, Pass By.” 1 September 1961: 2818.
Limsky, Drew. “Larry McMurtry” St. James Encyclopaedia of Pop Culture 29
January 2002.

Carmen Camus Camus 113

McMurtry, Larry. In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1968.
Miller, Gabriel. 2000. “The Death of the Western Hero: Hud and Hombre.”
The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man. Ed. Gabriel Miller.
Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. 52-66.
Ministerio de Cultura. Base de Datos de Películas Clasificadas http://www.
mcu.es/bbddpeliculas/cargarFiltro.do?layout=bbddpeliculas&cache=in
it&language=es. Access 16/07/2010.
Minter, David L. “To Live and Die in Texas.” Texas Observer, 15th September,
1961: 6.
Monthly Film Bulletin. “Hud.”. Vol. 30 (1963): 79.
Poore, C. “Books of the Times.” New York Times, 10 June, 1961: 21.
Primer Plano. “Crónica de estrenos.” Vol. 1196, 13 September 1963.
Reilly, John M. Larry McMurtry. A Critical Companion. Westport, Connecticut
and London: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Reynolds, Clay, ed. Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook. Dallas: Southern
Methodist University Press, 1989.
Sonnichsen, C.L. From Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on Western Fiction. College
Station and London: Texas A&M University Press, 1978.
Tinkle, Lon. “Raw and Rough Look at Ranching Texas.” Dallas Morning News,
28 May, 1961: 9.
Vázquez, Javier. “Teatral y decepcionante”. Cine Estudio 14, 14 October, 1963:
17.
Whitehall, Richard. “Richard Whitehall sees the last real men on earth.” Film
and Filming 9, 9 June, 1963: 26.

114 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 “A WALKING METAMORPHOSIS”: PARA UMA LEITURA DA FUSÃO DE
OPOSTOS NAS CONSTRUÇÕES E FIGURAÇÕES DA IDENTIDADE SEXUAL
FEMININA EM “A STONE WOMAN” DE A. S. BYATT

Alexandra Cheira

I am a woman giving birth to myself.

(Feminist poster)

Conta a lenda que dormia / Uma Princesa encantada

/ A quem só despertaria/ Um Infante, que viria / De
além do muro da estrada (...) A Princesa Adormecida,
/ Se espera, dormindo espera, / Sonha em morte a
sua vida, / E orna-lhe a fronte esquecida, Verde, uma
grinalda de hera. / (...) Mas cada um cumpre o Destino
Ela dormindo encantada, / Ele buscando-a sem tino /
Pelo processo divino / Que faz existir a estrada. / (...)
E, inda tonto do que houvera, / À cabeça, em maresia, /
Ergue a mão, e encontra hera, E vê que ele mesmo era /
A Princesa que dormia.

Fernando Pessoa, «Eros e Psique»

O conto de encantar1 “A Stone Woman” é um sofisticado jogo de sedução

que aproxima, de forma simultaneamente telescópica e microscópica, o leitor
ao texto: a lente que projecta, pela imaginação, a paisagem mais próxima de
um apartamento citadino mergulhado no branco do luto para a paisagem
mais distante da brancura imaculada da Islândia é, também, a lente que
amplia, pela linguagem, as formas, cores e brilho dos mais pequenos minerais
constitutivos da mulher de pedra. Verificamos assim a existência de uma
dicotomia que opõe domesticidade (quase domesticação) a independência
– emblema da contraditória condição feminina que, aliás, Byatt tem vindo a
esboçar na sua ficção. Parecendo indiciar precisamente a resolução do conflito

115
na assunção consciente e escolhida por Ines, a mulher de pedra, da vida que
é, em todos os sentidos, morte aos olhos dos demais, este é o verso e reverso
de uma questão que Byatt irá ensaiar, quer na sua voz, quer ficcionalmente.
Comparemos:
I think artists recognise the distancing of glass and ice as an ambivalent
matter, both chilling and life-giving, saving as well as threatening (...)
Preserving solitude and distance, staying cold and frozen, may, for women
as well as artists, be a way of preserving life. (OHS 156-158)
The phrase came into her head: Those are pearls that were his eyes. A song
of grief made fantastic by a sea-change. Would her eyes cloud over and
become pearls? Pearls were interesting. They were a substance where the
organic met the inorganic, like moss agate. Pearls were stones secreted by a
living shellfish, perfected inside the mother-of-pearl of its skeleton to protect
its soft inward flesh from an irritant. (SW 146)

Tal prenuncia, desde logo, um entrecruzar de caminhos que se confundem,

se tocam para logo se afastar, numa busca de sentidos simultaneamente
encobertos e desvendados pelo conhecimento, que ordena histórias desiguais,
não imitáveis (e, contudo, semelhantes) a relembrarem-se – mas sempre outras:
ao guiar o leitor pelos labirintos da cor e da linguagem, o texto esboça universos
que parecem distantes e, mesmo, antagónicos – branco/vermelho, morte/
vida, fogo/gelo – até serem unidos pela imaginação e metamorfoseados em
simétrica assimilação de opostos na construção singular da mulher de pedra.
Esta aparente dicotomia é, aliás, recorrente na ficção de Byatt: a identidade
feminina é sempre entendida como processo, devir, numa perspectivação
labiríntica do modo como esta se vai construindo de forma plurifacetada e
contraditória, procurando, por meio de uma abordagem caleidoscópica,
traduzir a complexidade do que é ser pessoa e mulher – preocupações
delineadas, em meu entender indelevelmente, na obra de A. S. Byatt.
Procurarei, desde já, reforçar esta dicotomia e examinar a forma como
se manifesta neste conto, problematizando o conceito de metamorfose nas
construções e figurações da identidade sexual feminina, ou a demanda - e
conquista – do espaço interior da autonomia feminina em equilíbrio com o
espaço exterior em que a mulher de pedra se move. Para tal, desdobrarei o
conceito de metamorfose na tripla articulação da literatura, da crítica literária
e da ciência, a partir, respectivamente, de estudos teóricos de Jack Zipes e
Marina Warner - bem como do próprio posicionamento crítico de Byatt2 - sobre
os contos de encantar, do debate sobre a obra de A. S. Byatt tendo como ponto
de partida a formulação feita por André Brink, e dos estudos geológicos de
Lyell e do evolucionismo de Darwin – já que todas estas dimensões convergem
na construção da mulher de pedra. Procederei, finalmente, à desconstrução
do «eu» feminino nos seus elementos simbólicos, tendo em conta dois espaços
distintos, para revelar várias das faces que a identidade feminina pode revestir,

116 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

desmontando ainda o modo como Byatt retoma, subvertendo, elementos do
conto de encantar tradicional e os reescreve, metamorfoseando-os, na sua
ficção.
De forma a explicar o conceito crítico de metamorfose na estética byattiana,
afigura-se-me necessário, desde já, enfatizar o que André Brink considera o
deslizar de um texto / tipo de texto para outro:
“Metamorphoses”, says Ash on p. 280 (Possession) “are our way of showing,
in riddles, that we know we are part of the animal world.” If this is very
much a nineteenth-century view, the Postmodernist view would make use
of metamorphosis to demonstrate the gliding movement from one text –
and one kind of text – to another. It would encompass, too, what Blackadder
describes as “the false or fictive bringing to life of the dead” (p. 299), and
Ash’s acknowledgement, in the poem “Mummy Possest” that “Our small
deceptions are a form of art” (p. 408). (Brink 301)

Analisando primeiro o conceito de metamorfose tal como é expresso

pela personagem do poeta vitoriano Randolph Henry Ash em Possession,
é inegável a omnipresença darwinista no passo citado a partir do uso
de vocábulos como riddles – que pode ser outra forma de dizer metáfora
como modo de ultrapassar os limites de significado que lhe são atribuídos,
podendo inclusivamente reverter as implicações explícitas de um argumento,
desestabilizando assim significados até então mais ou menos dogmáticos e
revelando a heterogeneidade inerente ao sentido e à ideologia – ou animal world
– que remete para uma consciência explícita das mudanças na cosmovisão
vitoriana introduzidas já por pensadores como Lyell e desenvolvidas
posteriormente por Darwin a partir das suas teorias evolucionistas. Gillian
Beer comenta, aliás, que o conceito darwinista de metamorfose ultrapassa a
morte a partir da rota alternativa da continuidade e da sobrevivência do ser
essencial transposto mas não obliterado pela transformação, enfatizando a
ideia de identidade – embora o nome (da pessoa, da rocha, da planta) mude,
os elementos permanecem constantes (Beer 104-105). Esta perspectiva vai
ser central ao meu argumento, já que defendo a permanência de elementos
fundamentais da escrita de contos de encantar por mulheres na produção
específica de Byatt: apesar da extinção aparente que esta escrita sofreu após
o término do seu apogeu, pela pena das prècieuses3 na França do século XVII,
afinal sobreviveu e desenvolveu-se, metamorfoseando-se, de modo diferente
noutro meio (Inglaterra do século XIX, pela pena de escritoras como Christina
Rossetti ou E. Nesbitt),4 voltando ainda a fazê-lo nos nossos dias.
Discutamos agora o conceito de metamorfose tal como é explicitado
por André Brink na citação supra. Como este crítico sugere, a metamorfose
poderá constituir um termo de análise crítica para textos anteriores ao
nascimento do conceito de pós-modernismo – já que, de facto, o termo «pós-
-moderno» tem sido usado em literatura há pouco mais de um quarto de

Alexandra Cheira 117

século (Harries 15), o que não exclui que determinadas técnicas normalmente
associadas ao pós-modernismo (nomeadamente, a paródia como revisão
/ revisitação do cânone) tenham sido utilizadas antes do aparecimento do
termo. Assim, a própria noção de “the text of life as story, and as performance”
(Brink 293), consubstanciada na descoberta de que as origens são ilusórias e
a originalidade é irrecuperável num mundo em que todos os textos literários
são tecidos a partir de outros textos – em suma, no «fazer de conta» que as
construções da linguagem (não) são o que parecem, reafirmando assim «a vida
da linguagem» pela ressurreição textual – enforma o conceito de metamorfose
como modo de aproximar textos separados pela distância do tempo e da
própria crítica literária: “the novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
has always incorporated forms of myths and fairy tales, working both with
and against them” (OHS 130). Enfatizemos agora a noção de metamorfose à
luz do vitorianismo e do pós-modernismo visível nas próprias palavras de
Byatt:
My own fairy stories are written primarily for the pleasure of entering that
other world, a world of imaginary apples and forest paths, greener and
darker than any encountered in everyday life, a world of powerful beasts
and satisfactory endings. But they are modern literary stories and they do
play quite consciously with a postmodern creation and recreation of old
forms. (FS)

Colocando-se explicitamente numa longa tradição híbrida (FS) que se

move entre a verdade da imaginação e o realismo do sonho, também Byatt,
à semelhança de antecessoras como as précieuses ou as escritoras vitorianas
de contos de encantar, pensa conscientemente sobre os seres humanos e o
mundo a partir da combinação do novo – o pensamento do tempo da escrita
– e do antigo – o motivo intemporal da metamorfose –, mediados pelo jogo
auto-reflexivo da linguagem.
Por outro lado, interessa-me iluminar as palavras de Byatt quando
afirma: “I want to look at some of the ways in which these old tales and forms
have had a continued, metamorphic life” (OHS 124), já que a escritora – como
outras do século XX – irá deliberadamente reescrever as expectativas dos
leitores a partir de «velhos contos e formas», de modo a que da velha matriz
se identifique e se separe simultaneamente um novo jogo de sentidos – ou,
como Byatt aduz, “telling a story in a new-old form” (FS).
Examinemos agora o conceito de metamorfose, enquanto estratégia de
desnaturalizar a metáfora aparentemente simples da transformação, ligando-
-a à ficção de Byatt, a partir das suas próprias palavras:
All novels begin, like metaphors, when two things thought separate come
together. I interweave things growing at one extreme, things cut and dying
at the other. I was interested in the metamorphosis of one thing into another

118 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 as I was involved in the mainstream of life with my small children. My
characters are real and also metaphors. (Talk in Morley College, 1985)5

Para A. S. Byatt, a metáfora e a metamorfose constituem dois pontos de

um círculo que entretece no seu interior coisas que outros poderiam julgar
distintas: enquanto figura de estilo que associa duas coisas diferentes, a
metáfora liga-se à metamorfose, na sua tripla definição de «transformação,
como por magia ou feitiçaria; mudança pronunciada na aparência, carácter,
condição ou função; (Biologia) mudança na forma e hábitos de um animal
durante o desenvolvimento normal após o estado embrionário: a metamorfose
inclui, nos insectos, a transformação de uma larva numa mosca adulta e de
uma lagarta numa borboleta»6 – definições estas que serão extremamente
produtivas na leitura de “A Stone Woman”.
Na primeira definição de metamorfose – «transformação, como por magia
ou feitiçaria» –, é feita uma associação explícita entre magia e metamorfose,
que tem sido, aliás, amplamente debatida no seio dos estudos teóricos sobre o
conto de encantar: segundo Jack Zipes, a magia é nada mais do que a percepção
dos poderes criativos divinos que cada pessoa encerra em si (Zipes 23); para
Marina Warner, a magia manifesta-se sobretudo na mudança de forma, e, na
verdade, pode dizer-se que a metamorfose é uma das características distintivas
do conto de encantar (Warner, Wonder Tales 5). Consubstanciando-se, por um
lado, na tradição literária do conto de encantar, esta definição remete também
para o universo deste conto de Byatt em particular, em que Ines, a protagonista,
se transforma progressivamente em pedra, como que por magia, após a morte
da mãe, (re)criando desta forma o seu verdadeiro «eu»: “Her metamorphosis
obeyed no known laws of physics or chemistry” (SW 142).
De igual modo, a segunda definição – «mudança pronunciada na
aparência, carácter, condição ou função» – remete, desde logo, para as
profundas transformações ocorridas no universo do conto de encantar literário,
a que o género deu o mote. Verdadeira (re)volta das fadas, o conto de encantar
parece ser um género instrumental que reemerge ciclicamente em períodos
culturalmente conturbados ou sob pressão para equacionar as ansiedades
e tensões que acompanham as transformações sociais e epistemológicas
subjacentes a esses períodos. De facto, a história literária do conto de encantar
tem sido, ao longo dos séculos, um caleidoscópio que, mediante a rotação das
faces e dependendo da inclinação da luz ou do alastrar da sombra, revela toda
a sucessão de imagens simétricas que o espelho reflecte e devolve ou constrói:
a transformação e metamorfose de escritoras, narradoras e protagonistas.
Podendo ser visto como uma história contra as mulheres, é também a história
de mulheres fortes e inteligentes, que invertem / subvertem uma situação
potencialmente hostil sem (aparentemente) se desviarem das regras sociais
vigentes.7 Com efeito, repetidamente escrita com a tinta da resistência contra

Alexandra Cheira 119

o poder instituído do seu tempo e espaço específicos por escritoras que
reclamam para si a agência subversiva de Fadas Madrinhas ou Feiticeiras
por meio de estratégias discursivas próprias, a história literária do conto de
fadas é protagonizada por mulheres em demanda do que, em última análise,
poderá ser considerado o rosto escondido da sua identidade: pela quebra
do encantamento (petrificação), tornam-se emancipadas (mudança de vida),
encorajadas pelas fadas que as inspiram a mudar e a mudar o seu mundo.
Como se verá mais adiante, em “A Stone Woman” Byatt irá metamorfosear
habilmente este pressuposto pela (con)fusão de opostos.
Se aqui aduzirmos o que Adrienne Rich defende ser a dicotomia poder
/ ausência de poder (Rich 64-68) sobre a qual se estabelecem de modo basilar
todos os binómios que as teorias feministas têm desmantelado, verificaremos
que, para algumas teóricas do conto de encantar (Warner, The Absent Mother
90), o poder feminino se constrói precisamente no centro do sistema patriarcal
por meio da estratégia de infiltração insidiosa de uma quinta coluna que,
aproveitando a capa de invisibilidade que oprime as mulheres na própria
representação patriarcal destas como seres destituídos de poder, irá minar e
subverter esse sistema a partir de dentro (qual borboleta que se metamorfoseia
invisivelmente no interior de um casulo do qual um dia se libertará, mesmo
que ainda se pense que o habita). Por seu lado, outras pensadoras críticas há
que concebem o poder feminino estabelecido de forma aberta e desafiadora
nas margens do sistema patriarcal, reclamando em termos showalterianos
para as mulheres “a wonder tale of their own” (Harries 73) - tal como a fada
madrinha tradicional se situa fora do enredo amoroso ao qual dará contudo
assistência na metamorfose exterior da heroína, com a diferença de que estas
mulheres empunham como varinha mágica a pena e a dirigem também a si
próprias.
Deste modo, muitas escritoras feministas usaram o conto de encantar
para explorar desejos e sonhos femininos, e reescreveram também várias
narrativas da tradição literária do conto de encantar, dando à mulher o poder
que a sociedade patriarcal lhe negava, mediante a criação de heroínas fortes;
por vezes, e de forma mais extrema, este modo particular de reescrita foi
levado a cabo por se acreditar que todas as protagonistas dos contos eram
vítimas frágeis, objectos passivos comandados pelos homens. Byatt salienta
a inexactidão desta leitura, referindo precisamente a existência de princesas
poderosas e de camponesas cheias de recursos na tradição literária do conto
de encantar (FS), que emulará na própria ficção, aproveitando, pelo menos
parcialmente, vários ensinamentos na sua escrita.
Finalmente, a terceira definição de metamorfose – «(Biologia) mudança
na forma e hábitos de um animal durante o desenvolvimento normal após o
estado embrionário: a metamorfose inclui, nos insectos, a transformação de

120 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

uma larva numa mosca adulta e de uma lagarta numa borboleta» – pode ser
articulada com as teorias evolucionistas de Darwin a partir do entendimento de
metáforas específicas (que serão fundamentais na análise deste conto). Aliás,
de acordo com Gillian Beer, uma das questões mais importantes levantadas
por The Origin of Species é saber até que ponto é que as metáforas podem
ultrapassar os limites de significado que lhe são atribuídos, ou mesmo reverter
as implicações explícitas de um argumento, já que termos aparentemente
estáveis podem gradualmente operar como metáforas generativas, revelando
deste modo uma inerente heterogeneidade de sentido e de ideologia (Beer 50)
– ou, como Byatt refere, na novella Morpho Eugenia, “[n]ames, you know, are a
way of weaving the world together, by relating the creatures to other creatures
and a kind of metamorphosis, you might say, out of a metaphor which is a figure
of speech for carrying one idea into another” (ME 131-132). Justifiquemos,
pois, esta leitura.
A primeira geografia do eu em que Ines, a etimologista que se tornará
literalmente uma metáfora viva de petrificação, se move é o espaço doméstico
por excelência: a sua casa, onde vivia com a mãe. Na intimidade do seu
apartamento, um segundo andar de uma casa do século XIX situada numa
pequena praça de uma cidade não nomeada, o espaço próprio do seu sentir
assemelha-se a um casulo que, se protege Ines, também a confina. De igual
modo, a construção discursiva da maternidade neste conto remete para um
sítio de ambiguidade, simultaneamente espaço que protege mas pode sufocar.
Note-se desde já a reescrita da maternidade: contrariamente a contos de fadas
como «Cinderela» ou «Branca de Neve» – em que a mãe da protagonista morre
antes do início da história –, ou «A Bela Adormecida» – em que, apesar de
estar viva, a mãe não consegue proteger a filha da maldição que lhe é rogada
–, em “A Stone Woman” a mãe de Ines morre inesperadamente no início do
conto.
Simbolicamente, a morte da mãe sinaliza a destruição do casulo como
espaço protector, assistindo Ines à sua desintegração:
Inside the flat, she found herself preoccupied with time and dust (…) The
life had gone out of the furnishings and objects. The polish was dulled and
she left it like that: she made her bed with one crumpled pull. She had the
sense that the dust was thickening on everything. (SW 133-134)

As cores apagam-se progressivamente, sobretudo o branco – assinatura

identitária de várias mulheres byattianas – que pode situar-se nas duas
extremidades da gama cromática e «significa ora a ausência, ora a soma das
cores; por isso às vezes coloca-se ora no início ora no fim da vida diurna e
do mundo manifesto. Mas o fim da vida, o momento da morte, é também
um momento transitório, na charneira do visível e do invisível e, por isso,
um outro ponto de partida» (Chevalier e Gheerbrant 128). Em “A Stone

Alexandra Cheira 121

Woman,” verifica-se precisamente a inversão simbólica do branco, que passa
do brilhante ao fosco, já não a soma das cores, mas a sua ausência:
Her mother’s hair had shone silver and ivory (...) Ines found her dead one
morning, her bloodless fingers resting on an open book, her parchment
eyelids down, as though she dozed (...) She quickly lost this transient
lifelikeness, and became waxy and peaked (...) White face on white pillow
amongst white hair. Colourless skin on lifeless fingers. (129-130)

Estamos assim perante as duas representações limite do branco, situado

nas duas extremidades da gama cromática, brilho e opacidade, morte e vida:
«o branco do Oeste é o branco mate da morte, [que] conduz à ausência, ao
vazio» – morte – que se opõe «[a]o branco do Este, (…) branco da alvorada,
(...) fonte de toda a energia» (Chevalier e Gheerbrant 128) – vida. O branco tem
aqui um valor negativo: no pensamento simbólico a morte precede a vida e,
por isso, o branco é primitivamente a cor do luto. Neste texto, sinaliza ainda o
facto de Ines se situar numa condição de semi-vida: encontra-se na charneira
do visível (o apagamento exterior das cores) e invisível (a brancura interior do
luto), movendo-se em direcção a uma nova condição, ainda não identificada,
carregada duplamente de promessa e de ameaça – a sua metamorfose que, ao
tornar literal a metáfora da petrificação interior causada pela morte da mãe,
redime um símbolo de morte ao conduzir Ines a uma vida totalmente nova.
Esta impressão inicial da casa enquanto casulo, baseada na descrição das
cores predominantes escolhidas pela mãe para decorá-la – “mole and dove”
(SW 129) – é intensificada pelo facto de Ines sentir o seu corpo como uma
ausência de substância num espaço desprovido de cor e de luz, comparando-
-se a uma traça que voa erraticamente de quarto em quarto: “Grief made her
insubstantial to herself; she felt herself flitting lightly from room to room,
in the twilit apartment, like a moth.” (129) Aliás, a simbologia da borboleta
(usada aqui no sentido lato de lepidóptero) reforça ainda a simbologia da
cor branca enquanto momento charneira entre dois mundos: «a crisálida
é o ovo que contém a potencialidade do ser; a borboleta que dele sai é um
símbolo de ressurreição. É também, se se preferir, a saída do túmulo (…) [A]
psicanálise moderna vê na borboleta um símbolo de renascimento» (Chevalier
e Gheerbrant 126-127). A morte do casulo é, simultaneamente, a vida da
borboleta, perdendo morte e vida as suas cargas negativas e positiva para se
fundirem no seu oposto.
Contudo, não será certamente por acaso que Ines se compara a uma traça
(também ela um símbolo de morte) e não a uma borboleta: de acordo com
Darwin, muitas espécies de traças têm uma coloração pálida como protecção
contra os predadores, de modo a tornarem-se o mais inconspícuas possível,
para além de não haver grande diferença de cores entre os dois sexos; pelo
contrário, se as cores garridas das asas das borboletas podem igualmente

122 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

servir como protecção para um corpo mais vulnerável, já que serão elas as
primeiras a ser atacadas, são indubitavelmente uma forma de exibição e
chamariz no processo de selecção sexual, sendo os machos normalmente mais
coloridos do que as fêmeas (Darwin 386-421). Tal como as traças, também
Ines usa as cores da invisibilidade para se proteger dos predadores da sua
autonomia, num perfil de simulação (ou dissimulação) que depende de uma
lógica de disfarce gerada pela necessidade de encobrimento e/ou evasão,
não lhe sendo atribuídas quaisquer relações que não o escultor, Thorsteinn
Hallmundurson (esta sem qualquer pendor sexual, e apenas após a morte
da mãe); tal como muitas outras mulheres byattianas – Christabel LaMotte e
Maud Bailey em Possession, Matty Crompton em Morpho Eugenia, Frederica
Potter em The Virgin in the Garden ou Cassandra em The Game –, que são, a
nível intelectual, traças assumidamente andróginas num mundo de borboletas
fêmeas tradicionalmente menos brilhantes do que os machos, também Ines
corporiza a figura andrógina cuja recusa em ser espartilhada pela identidade
sexual liberta energia criativa (Kenyon 75):
Elizabeth Ist became my alter ego because she refused to marry. As a result,
she became the archetypal virgin, with power… A paradoxical female figure
began to rise in my mind, hermaphrodite as she “hath both kinds in one” as
was said by Spenser. This linked with my feeling then… that an artist’s mind
should be androgynous, as Coleridge and Virginia Woolf believed. (Talk at
Morley College, 1985)8

Ines não corporiza contudo a mente andrógina do artista, quer na

acepção de Virginia Woolf9 (casamento mental de qualidades opostas em
uma só mente/corpo) quer na acepção de George Eliot10 (casamento mental
de qualidades opostas em comunhão espiritual de duas pessoas de sexo
diferente) quer na própria simbiose destas duas dimensões a que Byatt
procede na sua ficção, a partir da junção dos princípios feminino e masculino
em cada um dos elementos dos casais (de escritores ou de artistas) que se
apaixonam no universo dos seus textos. Nestas mentes andróginas a que falta
o corpo do outro, o processo criativo de cada um deriva da união de elementos
díspares e da fusão de opostos, alterando-se com o encontro do corpo que
completa a mente em gelo que se pode transformar em fogo pela simbiose de
duas mentes e de dois corpos, no que Olga Kenyon considera ainda um eco
da análise jungiana dos conceitos de anima (qualidades femininas) e animus
(princípio masculino) – que indica que conceitos arquétipos do sexo oposto
estão presentes em cada ser humano (Kenyon 63).
Contrariamente a outras mulheres byattianas, Ines não é a mulher artista
que coloca o seu trabalho acima de tudo, muito embora se feche como elas no
isolamento, cultivando a distância como forma de preservar a sua autonomia:
no final da sua metamorfose, é ela própria que constitui uma obra de arte,

Alexandra Cheira 123

que irá ser incansavelmente desenhada e esculpida por Thorsteinn – ou, nas
suas palavras: “I do not need a monument. I have grown into one” (SW 158).
Esta metamorfose não foi, porém, sempre bem aceite por Ines: com efeito,
quando retira os pensos que cobrem a incisão que lhe foi feita numa cirurgia
de urgência ao abdómen e descobre que o seu corpo se começou a transformar
em pedra, Ines considera a área afectada uma mancha que a desfigura – “the
blemish” (SW 136) – chegando, inclusivamente, a considerar-se um monstro
devido à sua grotesca transformação. O corpo de Ines muda, tornando-se
cada vez mais anguloso e brilhante à medida que os minerais vão surgindo e
se vão aglomerando:
Her fingers felt whorls and ridges, even sharp edges (…) Each day the bumps
and sharpness, far from calming, became more pronounced (…) What she
saw was a raised shape, like a starfish, like the whirling arms of a nebula in
the heavens. It was the colour – or a colour – of raw flesh, like an open whip-
wound or knife-slash. It trembled, because she was trembling, but it was
cold to the touch, cold and hard as glass or stone. From the star-arms the red
dust wafted like glamour. (SW 137-138)

Byatt reescreve, deste modo, a pedra simples, sólida e cinzenta do

arquétipo dos contos de encantar, a estátua imóvel devido a um encantamento,
num caleidoscópio vivo de mosaicos resplandecentes de cor e luz, que, por
isso mesmo, se recusa a ocupar um lugar ao lado dessas estátuas mortas no
cemitério que visita quando pensa numa morte iminente – no que constitui
uma recusa explícita da mensagem cristã dos contos de Hans Christian
Andersen:11
She might take her place near [almost certainly ancient and pagan eyeless
elders in Etruscan robes, standing each in his pillared alcove], she thought,
but was dissuaded by the aspect of their neighbours, a group of the
theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity, simpering lifeless women
clutching a stone cross, a stone anchor, and a fat stone helpless child. They
had nothing to do with a woman who was made up of volcanic glass and
semi-precious stones, who needed a refuge for her end. No, that was not
true. They were not nothing to do with her, for they frightened her. She
did not want to stand, unmoving, amongst them. She began to imagine an
indefinite half-life, looking like them, yet staring out of seeing eyes. She
walked faster. (SW 150-151)

O primeiro sinal de que a borboleta já abandonou a crisálida é,

precisamente, a explosão das cores que começam a cobrir o corpo de Ines,
sendo a primeira, significativamente, a cor vermelha, cor primordial da vida
que substitui o branco do luto:
[U]niversalmente considerado como o símbolo fundamental do princípio de
vida, com a sua força, o seu poder e o seu brilho, o vermelho, cor de fogo
e de sangue, possui, entretanto, a mesma ambivalência simbólica destes
últimos, sem dúvida, visualmente falando, conforme seja claro ou escuro. O

124 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 vermelho claro, brilhante, centrífugo, é diurno, masculino, tónico, incitando
à acção, lançando como um sol o seu brilhante sobre todas as coisas com um
imenso e irredutível poder. O vermelho escuro, pelo contrário, é nocturno,
feminino, secreto e, no limite, centrípeto; ele representa não a expressão, mas
o mistério da vida (…) [o] vermelho é perpetuamente o lugar da batalha – ou
da dialéctica – entre céu e inferno, fogo ctoniano e fogo uraniano. (Chevalier
e Gheerbrant 686-687).

Vermelho cor de sangue, princípio feminino, sinaliza desde logo meta-

foricamente o nascimento de uma nova identidade a partir do desapareci-
mento literal do seu umbigo, recordação do cordão umbilical que a ligava à
mãe: “The next thing she noticed was a spangling of what seemed like glinting
red dust, or ground glass, in the folds of her dressing-gown and her discarded
underwear. It was a dull red, like dried blood, which does not have a sheen”
(SW 136-137). Vermelho cor de fogo, princípio masculino, o sangue que corre
agora nas veias de Ines, longe de ter petrificado, tornou-se literalmente lava,
evocando o arquétipo da regeneração pelo fogo, no valor simbólico positivo
do elemento, «o fogo criador e destruidor de onde surge o mundo e aonde
voltará por fim» (Chevalier e Gheerbrant 319):
She watched the thick red liquid run down the back of her hand, on to the
bread, on to the table. It was ruddy-gold, running in long glassy strings,
and where it touched the bread, the bread went up in smoke, and where it
touched the table, it hissed and smoked and bored its hot way through the
wood and dripped, a duller red now, on to the plastic floor, which it singed
with amber circles and puckering. Her veins were full of molten lava. (SW
156)

Fogo e sangue – que se encontram ainda unidos no modo como vestígios

sólidos de sangue em fina poeira na roupa de Ines assumem a forma de vulcões
miniaturizados (SW 137) –, princípios feminino e masculino, fundem-se na
multiplicidade de tons vermelhos que povoam agora o corpo de Ines: “It was
many reds, from ochre to scarlet, from garnet to cinnabar” (SW 138). De certa
forma, neste conto a cor desdobra-se na substância essencial da vida, tal como
se esta fosse uma pintura: os pigmentos de cor, os matizes policromáticos,
verdadeiros átomos de um mundo cujo significado se vai construindo na
tela, concentram intensamente a urgência e o estado de estar, e saber-se, vivo,
reiterado inúmeras vezes no texto – verdadeira celebração da vida que explode
na miríade de cores radiosas que irrompem do corpo de Ines com a pujança
dos vegetais a brotar do solo: “One day she found a cluster of greenish-white
crystals sprouting in her armpit. These she tried to prise away, and failed.
They were attached deep within; they could be felt to be stirring stony roots
under the skin surface, pulling the muscles” (SW 138-139).
À medida que a petrificação avança, Ines assiste a uma paradoxal
revitalização do seu corpo: os seus sentidos – sobretudo o olfacto e o paladar

Alexandra Cheira 125

- apuram-se, antecipando o momento em que estará em sintonia total com a
natureza: consegue sentir o cheiro das gotas de chuva ainda por cair, identificar
o carbono no fumo dos tubos de escape, detectar os minerais em poças de
gasolina e cheirar os odores da putrefacção orgânica dos mercados (SW 144);
descobre ainda uma nova predilecção por sushi, gostando de degustar o iodo
das algas e o sabor salgado do peixe cru (SW 160), e bebe a água da chuva,
deliciosamente mineral (SW 145). A rigidez dos seus músculos e tendões
petrificados por artroses dá lugar à flexibilidade de músculos e tendões de
pedra que encaixam sem dor quando Ines se move (SW 143), e a sua pele
transforma-se, literalmente, numa carapaça ou crosta protectora: tal como a
Islândia, país geologicamente jovem cuja paisagem continua a mudar devido
a erupções vulcânicas, géisers e glaciares, em constante turbulência devido
à energia da crosta terrestre que ainda não se fixou (SW 166), também a pele
de Ines muda de minuto a minuto, antecipando igualmente o momento do
encontro com a geografia final da sua identidade. A pedra é sinónima de
vida, metáfora agora tornada literal da preservação da autonomia feminina,
envolvendo-se Ines numa crosta protectora:
She saw that her stony casing was not static – points of rock salt and milky
quartz thrust through glassy sheets of basalt, bubbles of sinter formed like
tears between layers of hornblende (...) The first apparition of the stony
crust outside her clothing was strange and beautiful. She observed its
beginnings in the mirror one morning, brushing her hair – a necklace of
veiled swellings above her collar-bone which broke slowly through the skin
like eyes from closed lids, and became opal – fire opal, black opal, geyserite
and hydrophane, full of watery light (...) For the moment she had grown no
more than a carapace. (SW 139-140)

Como Ines observa, a sua metamorfose não obedece a leis físicas ou

químicas: os minerais que compõem as rochas que revestem agora o seu
corpo parecem ter composições químicas e estruturas cristalinas definidas em
combinações aleatórias, do mesmo modo que as rochas parecem aglomerar-se
em combinações improváveis (“ultramafic black rocks and ghostly Iceland spar
formed in succession, and clung together” – SW 142-143) e ter surgido todas ao
mesmo tempo no seu corpo – quando, geologicamente, as mais antigas são as
rochas ígneas, seguidas das rochas metamórficas, sendo as rochas sedimentares
de formação mais recente. No seu estudo The Student’s Elements of Geology,
Charles Lyell propõe a classificação das rochas em quatro grandes classes
quanto à sua formação: sedimentares (“aqueous rocks”), ígneas (“volcanic
rocks”), plutónicas (“plutonic rocks”) e metamórficas (“metamorphic rocks”)
– esta última designação tendo sido criada pelo próprio Lyell na primeira
edição de The Principles of Geology, datada de 1833. Do mesmo modo, Lyell
considera que estes quatro grupos (actualmente apenas três, já que as rochas
vulcânicas e as rochas plutónicas são hoje consideradas subclasses das rochas

126 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

ígneas) podem ser estudados a partir de dois pontos de vista distintos: podem
primeiro ser estudados simplesmente como massas minerais que têm uma
certa composição, forma, características como a presença ou ausência de
vestígios orgânicos, e posição na crosta terrestre, cuja origem deriva de causas
particulares; as rochas de cada grupo podem também ser entendidas como
uma enorme série cronológica de monumentos que atestam uma sucessão de
acontecimentos na história anterior da terra e dos seus habitantes (Lyell I).
No caso de Ines, ambos os estudos são possíveis: a partir da sua nova
perspectiva mineral – já que pensamentos e sentimentos humanos abrandaram
para a velocidade das rochas (SW 139) – Ines compreende a diferença entre o
tempo biológico e o tempo geológico, metamorfose e metamorfismo:
But as she became mineral, and looked into the idea of minerals, she saw
that there were reciprocities, both physical and figurative. There were whole
ranges of rocks and stones which, like pearls, were formed from things
which had once been living. Not only coal and fossils, petrified woods and
biohermal limestones, formed round dead shells – but chalk itself which
was mainly made up of micro-organisms, or cherts and flints, massive
bedded forms made up of the skeletons of Radiolaria and diatoms. These
were themselves once living stones – living marine organisms that spun and
twirled around skeletons made of opal. (SW 146-147)

Ines é agora uma obra de arte viva, verdadeiro monumento orgânico no

qual rochas e seres vivos convivem em harmonia:
She had planted small gardens in the crevices of her body, trailing grasses,
liverworts. Creatures ran over her – insects first, a stone-coloured butterfly,
indistinguishable from her speckled breast, foraging ants, a millipede.
There were even fine red worms, the colour of raw meat, which burrowed
unhindered. She began to walk more, taking these things with her. (SW
181)

Por outro lado, Thorsteinn Hallmundursson, o escultor que Ines

conhece durante as suas deambulações pelo cemitério, reconhece também
o monumento vivo em que Ines se transformou, ao afirmar: “Beautiful (…)
Grown, not crafted” (SW 158). Um anti-Pigmalião moderno (SW 154) que,
longe de esculpir uma linda mulher e desejar que ela ganhe vida, antes esculpe
uma mulher viva enquanto ela se metamorfoseia em pedra, Thorsteinn
reconhece em Ines a figuração das mulheres de pedra que dançam na tradição
dos contos de encantar do seu país e explica a sua metamorfose no tempo dos
homens e no tempo das pedras:
Thorsteinn said that she was, what he had only imagined. All my life I have
made things about metamorphosis. Slow metamorphoses, in human terms.
Fast, fast in terms of the earth we inhabit. You are a walking metamorphosis.
Such as a man meets only in dreams. He raised his wineglass to her. I too,
he said, am utterly changed by your changing. I want to make a record of it.
(SW 173-174)

Alexandra Cheira 127

 Na sua nova casa escandinava, para onde viaja com o escultor, Ines
deixa de ser o modelo estático desenhado e esculpido por Thorsteinn – que,
contrariamente a outros homens byattianos, coadjuva Ines na sua autonomia
– e regressa às montanhas, acorrendo ao chamamento das figuras que dançam
numa tempestade de gelo. Não deixa, aliás, de ser significativo que Ines, uma
mulher troll que encontrou a liberdade no seu estado petrificado, celebre a sua
nova identidade dançando sobre a branca infinitude da neve: o branco, cor que
define a identidade e o poder femininos, é intensificado pela neve e pelo gelo,
outro dos símbolos da identidade feminina na ficção byattiana, relacionando-
-se este ainda com a crosta de Ines por meio da forma que assume – os cristais.
Com efeito, na natureza encontram-se cristais de formas muito diversificadas,
dependentes da forma de arranjo dos átomos que formam o cristal e das
condições em que a cristalização se deu. Assim, a água pode assumir múltiplas
formas cristalinas em função do ambiente em que o cristal se formou: a neve
e um cubo de gelo são formas completamente distintas de cristais de água,
com estrutura diferenciada em função das condições de cristalização. O
mesmo acontece com a formação dos cristais no magma: a partir do material
fundido vão-se formando cristais que crescem por arranjo dos átomos que
os constituem (Nesse 57-71). No caso de Ines, a centelha de fogo que reflecte
exteriormente nas rochas ígneas da sua crosta irá reclamar o seu semelhante
no coração da diferença: na simbologia do fogo e do gelo, os dois princípios
são por vezes complementares, por vezes antagónicos, e a fusão dos dois faz
tomar um pelo outro, sendo o gelo o outro lado do fogo – já que é preciso não
esquecer que o gelo, como o fogo, também queima (Chevalier e Gheerbrant
128) A própria terminologia de Lyell, que já referi anteriormente – “aqueous
rocks” e “volcanic rocks” – é produtiva na construção de Ines a partir destes
dois princípios, incorporando esta fluidamente sentidos aparentemente
incompatíveis:
[O] fogo é também, nesta perspectiva, na medida em que queima e consome,
um símbolo de purificação e de regerenescência. Encontramos assim, de
novo, o aspecto positivo da destruição: nova inversão do símbolo. Também
a água é purificadora e regeneradora. Mas o fogo distingue-se dela por
simbolizar a purificação pela compreensão, até à sua forma mais espiritual,
pela luz e pela verdade; a água simboliza a purificação do desejo até à sua
forma mais sublime, a bondade. (Chevalier e Gheerbrant 333)

Em síntese, ao escrever numa linguagem feita de cores, Byatt cria um

universo rico em detalhe e textura, iluminado por tonalidades prismáticas.
Nesta tela de palavras, as pinceladas da sua paleta fazem despertar no leitor a
sensibilidade para a primazia da cor dentro da paisagem (humana e natural)
do romance. A cor assume-se como itinerário de construção de uma voz e de
um sentir simultaneamente individuais e partilhados, numa especificidade a

128 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

que o género dá o mote. O branco e o gelo/ neve, símbolos unos da identidade
feminina em “A Stone Woman,” são também bi-unívocos na medida em que
encerram ambos a contradição morte/vida que será resolvida neste conto por
meio da metamorfose (leit-motif dos contos de encantar em todos os tempos).
Byatt interpreta a história geral da metamorfose como transformação
do cânone do conto de encantar, das convenções de género e da natureza
da narrativa: os contos de Byatt também subvertem o género, submetendo a
forma a uma revisão feminista dado que, pela rejeição da fórmula que associa
o casamento à felicidade eterna, Byatt usa o conto de encantar para explorar as
possibilidades e limitações da vida das mulheres no mundo contemporâneo.
Byatt distancia-se neste ponto da tradição, dado que, embora os seus contos
contenham instâncias de metamorfose comuns ao conto de encantar, irão
também alterar a forma do conto convencional pela percepção dos laços
existentes entre o género literário e a ideologia: ao situar o texto individual na
história desse género literário particular, Byatt irá revelar o sentido ideológico
dessa história e, consequentemente, dará às mulheres poder sobre as suas
próprias vidas enquanto expõe o controlo masculino que constitui uma das
imagens de marca do género (Campbell 135). Não constitui, deste modo, uma
surpresa o facto de os seus contos de fadas aproveitarem as lições da tradição
do conto de fadas literário, rescrevendo por vezes o «e viveram felizes para
sempre» na assimilação de opostos, inscrevendo, para logo subverter, o
pensamento simbólico subjacente.
De facto, na sua ficção, as coisas não são o que parecem: as expectativas
do leitor são constantemente alteradas na eterna interacção de aparentes
opostos, a identidade é fluida como o mercúrio e a princesa adormecida – Ines
antes da morte da mãe – é, em simultâneo, o príncipe que a desperta com o
seu beijo – Ines após a morte da mãe –, já que a sua transformação depende,
essencialmente, de si própria:
Red and white, ice and fire, snow and blood, life and death. In all the stories
the frozen sleep, or death-in-life, of the ice-princess is a kind of isolation, a
separate virginal state, from which she is released by the kiss, the opener, the
knight on horseback. (OHS 154)

NOTES

1
Tradução minha de wonder tale. Como salienta Marina Warner, se nem sempre as
fadas surgem neste tipo de conto, é certo que neles o elemento maravilhoso está
sempre presente (razão pela qual prefiro esta designação a fairy tale / conto de
fadas): “The French conte de fées is usually translated as fairy tale, but the word
Wundermärchen was adopted by the Romantics in Germany and the Russian
folklorists to characterise the folk tale or fairy tale. It’s a useful term, it frees this

Alexandra Cheira 129

 kind of story from the miniaturised whimsy of fairyland to breathe the wilder air
of the marvellous” (Warner, Wonder Tales 5).
2
Vários ensaístas enfatizam a relevância da auto - leitura crítica de Byatt: “A. S. Byatt
is a thoughtful and articulate critic of her own work” (Franken xi); “Byatt is
acutely aware of what she is doing – a critical awareness developed by working
concurrently on theoretical books (…) The gap between her creative writing and
her criticism of her own work is less than with most writers, which is why her
own exegesis is so illuminating” (Kenyon 65-66). É, pois, enquanto ensaísta – e
Byatt refere por diversas vezes a convivência pacífica daquilo que designa como
o seu «eu» narrativo e o seu «eu» crítico – que considero a sua análise da própria
ficção.
3
As prècieuses eram mulheres aristocratas muito instruídas, assim chamadas por
almejarem impor-se como sujeitos únicos e distintos dos outros. Muitas delas
– vítimas de casamentos de conveniência ou celibatárias por opção, como forma
de preservar a sua independência, e afastadas da corte – tentaram desenvolver
um estilo de pensar e falar que celebrasse os talentos inatos que as distinguiam
dos elementos vulgares da sociedade, ao serviço da intenção de crítica social e de
costumes a que queriam proceder – e que lhes granjeasse o direito de ser tratadas
mais consistentemente como intelectuais pelos seus pares masculinos. A partir de
1630, o seu espaço de eleição era o salon que, longe de ser um gineceu animado
apenas por tópicos como a liberdade feminina que lhes era tão cara, o amor e
o casamento, era sobretudo um espaço de tertúlia – presidido por uma mulher
– onde homens e mulheres inteligentes discutiam espirituosa mas seriamente
também questões de arte, literatura, política, moralidade ou metafísica. Para uma
leitura mais aprofundada deste tópico, cf. Harries.
4
Gilbert e Gubar traduzem a polaridade “angel in the house” vs “madwoman” em
termos simbólicos, representando Branca de Neve o primeiro pólo do binómio
e a Rainha Má o segundo – conceitos que serão extremamente produtivos pela
ligação com o conto de encantar (Gilbert e Gubar 39-53): de facto, muitas escritoras
vitorianas de contos de encantar são assumidamente subversivas Rainhas Más à
luz de uma crítica feminista contemporânea que ouve nas entrelinhas dos seus
textos uma voz muito pouco «feminina» (porque zangada) que se insurge contra
a permanente infantilização a que os seus congéneres masculinos pretendem
submeter as mulheres, idênticas em termos legais a criminosos, idiotas e
menores (como sublinha Frances Power Cobbe no seu ensaio “Criminals, Idiots,
Women, and Minors”). Estas escritoras socorrem-se de múltiplas estratégias para
questionar a política sexual vitoriana, das quais destacarei apenas algumas: crítica
à passividade feminina por meio da construção de belas adormecidas que tanto
atraíam os homens vitorianos que as tentavam despertar com um beijo, elogio
de uma incaracterística impropriedade feminina em heroínas que fazem gala em
exibir a sua virtude publicamente em vez de a esconderem pudicamente no recato
da sua intimidade, inversão de estereótipos de género a partir da construção de
personagens femininas resolutas e práticas e de personagens masculinas indecisas
e passivas.
5
Cit. por Kenyon 62.
6
Microsoft Bookshelf 2000, “Metamorphosis” (tradução minha).
7
Scheherazade é um exemplo paradigmático: embora As Mil e Uma Noites possam
ser uma história contra as mulheres, são também, e sobretudo, como a crítica
tem sublinhado, a história de uma das mulheres mais fortes e inteligentes da
literatura mundial, sendo a narrativa uma forma de adiar a morte (quer a morte

130 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 da protagonista da narrativa enquadrante, Scheherazade, quer a morte de
muitos personagens das narrativas enquadradas). Indubitavelmente, assiste a
Scheherazade, desprovida de poder sobre o seu destino em cada amanhecer, o
poder narrativo de contar ou não – e, por meio dele, o direito de conquistar o
seu fado (a palavra dada a quem, por tradição, cumpria ouvir e silenciar; a vida
para além do final do último conto). Contudo, se se considerar que As Mil e Uma
Noites são também uma história da aquisição de códigos de conduta e valores
no contexto da cultura islâmica, o papel chave desempenhado por Scheherazade
torna-se claro: enquanto cura a loucura homicida de Sharyar – provocada por
outra mulher – por meio da sua narrativa, modo pelo qual este poderá voltar
a confiar nas mulheres e perceber que estas têm muitas faces, Scheherazade
transmite simultaneamente à sua irmã mais nova, Dunazade (e ao leitor implícito
da sua – e nossa – época), a sabedoria milenar dos seus contos para que esta esteja
preparada para lidar com homens como o sultão e saiba transformar um código
social masculino numa vantagem feminina.
8
Cit. por Kenyon (75).
9
O conceito de androginia de Woolf é crucial para que Byatt reforce a sua própria
convicção de que o género não deveria ser um critério relevante quer na ficção quer
na crítica literária (Franken 29). No final de A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
introduz o seu conceito de androginia a partir da invocação de Coleridge (Woolf
97-103). A sua androginia da alma apresenta-se como concepção romântica da
organização da alma a partir da fusão de elementos tradicionalmente atribuídos a
ambos os sexos. A mente é apresentada como terreno em que coexistem qualidades
ditas femininas e masculinas, que só poderá ser fertilizado pela fusão harmónica
destes princípios diferentes. O fruto dessa cooperação espiritual é a mente
andrógina, que usa agora todas as suas capacidades: «naturalmente criativa», é
«una», «incandescente», «porosa» e transmite «emoção sem impedimentos» (Woolf
97-103). Em suma, Woolf defende que a mente andrógina é “man-womanly”
ou “woman-manly,” sendo em qualquer dos casos “sex-unconscious;” a arte,
traduzida pela integridade de quem escreve, é a filha desse casamento mental:
“Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the
man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites
has to be consummated.” (Woolf 103)
10
Já em 1854, George Eliot defendera o casamento das mentes masculina e feminina
como forma de esbater as diferenças de oportunidade de acesso à realidade, visto
entender que é aí que reside a diferença entre a capacidade intelectual de homens
e mulheres: “Women become superior in France by being admitted to a common
fund of ideas, to common objects of interest with men; and this must ever be the
essential condition at once of true womanly culture and of true social well-being
(…) Let the whole field of reality be laid open to woman as well as to man, and
then that which is peculiar in her mental modification, instead of being, as it is
now, a source of discord and repulsion between the sexes, will be found to be a
necessary complement to the truth and beauty of life. Then we shall have that
marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and feeling in
one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of human happiness” (Eliot 36-37).
Não quer isto dizer, contudo – antes pelo contrário – que George Eliot insinue
sequer que o que define como «diferença psicológica entre os sexos» deva ser
igualmente elidida. Porém, enquanto Woolf defende o casamento mental de
qualidades opostas em uma só mente/corpo, Eliot entende esse casamento como
comunhão espiritual de duas pessoas de sexo diferente (naquilo a que se poderia

Alexandra Cheira 131

 chamar marriage of true minds and bodies).
11
Byatt é, aliás, bem clara a este respeito: “Andersen makes a standard opposition
between cold reason and warmheartedeness and comes down whole-heartedly
on the side of warmheartedness, adding to it his own insistent Christian message
(...) Science and reason are bad, kindness is good. It is a frequent, but not a
necessary opposition” (OHS 155-156).

OBRAS CITADAS

Auerbach, Nina e U.C. Knoepflmacher (eds. e int.) Forbidden Journeys: Fairy

Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1992.
Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and
Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: C.U.P., 2000 (1983).
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Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino. New York: N. Y.
University Press, 1993. 288-308.
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_______, On Histories and Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000.
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2004. 127-183.
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Women and Narrative in ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,’” Alfer e
Noble (eds.), Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real. London:
Greenwood Press, 2001. 135-146.
Cobbe, Frances Power. “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors”, Susan
Hamilton (ed.),“Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors” – Victorian Writing
by Women on Women. London: Broadview Press, 1995 (1868). 108-131.
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Rodriguez e Artur Guerra]. Lisboa: Editorial Teorema, 1994.
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in Relation to Sex. Int. John Tyler Bonner & Robert M. May. Princeton:
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Franken, Christien. A.S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity. Hampshire: Palgrave,
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the Seventies and Eighties. Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1988. 51-84.
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(acedido 06/01/10)
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New York: Routledge, 1999.

Alexandra Cheira 133

 WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AND CHARLES SHEELER:
MODERNIST DEPICTIONS OF ARCADIA

Teresa Costa

It belongs to the very character of the creative mind to

reach out and seize any material that stirs it so that the
value of that material may be pressed out and become
the matter of a new experience.
John Dewey

New York avant-garde – Williams and Sheeler

In the early decades of the 20th century, the period of affirmation of Moder-
nism in the U.S., New York became the backdrop of the social and artistic
gatherings and cross-fertilization in the arts that indelibly marked the art
scene of the city through a variety of – more or less formally structured
– isms: Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism Dada and Surrealism. In strictly
verbal matters, there was Imagism soon followed by Objectivism. Poets,
writers and painters, a few of them European expatriates fleeing the war (e.g.,
Philip Gleizes, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp), circulated in the city’s
artistic centres, mainly around bohemian Greenwich Village. Their gatherings
were the opportunity for debate, experimentation, reciprocal influence and
boundary-breaking. Their ‘European counterparts’ were Pound and Eliot, in
London, or Stein, in Paris. The list of names corresponding to the New York
avant-garde is extensive: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Amy Lowell, Lola Ridge,
Alfred Kreymborg, Wallace Stevens, Marsden Hartley, Man Ray, Charles
Demuth, Joseph Stella, John Marin, Alfred Stieglitz (the latter a leading figure)
are but a few examples. All of them were challenged in their aesthetic tenets
by the revolution in the arts they either witnessed in their respective – artistic
– Grand Tours of Europe or in the contacts with European artists and Europe-
based American expatriates. Thus, New York replaced Boston, and outstaged

135
Chicago, as home of the cultural elite: “one cannot find in the Chicago
milieu anything like the programmes, manifestos and obsessive concern for
technique that existed in New York and the Cosmopolitan centres of Europe”
(Homberger 154). Besides, from 1913 onwards, the New York avant-garde
worked on the aftermath of what proved to be the iconic breakthrough in
New York’s artistic scene: the Armoury Show (Halter 8-9; Homberger 151-
161; for a comprehensive account of the Armoury see Hughes 353-362).
Within the artistic gatherings which set the aesthetic pace of the city,
three circles proved to be particularly important: the first was spearheaded
by Alfred Stieglitz who since 1905 owned the Little Gallery of the Photo-
Secession (nicknamed ‘291’). If he exhibited work by Matisse, Picasso, Picabia
or Brancusi, he also steadfastly supported several young American visual
artists, besides editing the influential magazine Camera Work. The second
was the group issuing the magazine Others, initiated by Alfred Kreymborg
and sponsored by Walter Arensberg (1915-1919), which revealed many of the
poets who ultimately came to embody the modernist canon. Finally, Walter
Arensberg’s 33 West 67th Street apartment welcomed regular meetings of
visual artists and poets, between 1915 and 1921, and became, too, Duchamp’s
studio. Invaluable was the work carried out by the little magazines, from the
long-time well-established (or even genteel) ones like The Dial or Poetry to the
least canon-like, most innovative, experimental or iconoclastic even: Camera
Work, Blast, Broom, The Soil, Little Review, The Blindman, Wrongwrong, Contact
or transition (for extensive assessment of the role of the little magazines see
Tashjian, Skyscraper).
Though living and working as a doctor in the industrial suburb of
Rutherford, New Jersey, William Carlos Williams actively frequented all
three groups1 and was fully engaged with the avant-garde during the first
decades of the 20th century. Even before becoming a voice of the avant-garde,
his personal friends and fellow students Charles Demuth and Ezra Pound
were early companions to his tentative beginnings in the art world, when the
poet still hesitated between paint and words. Williams’s interest in painting –
influenced by heredity, he himself was an amateur painter in his younger years
(Mariani 40; IWWP 3-4, 29; AUTO 6-7, 48-49, 61-62, 131) – dictated a lifelong
admiration for painters. Exposure to the avant-garde circles resulted in his
translation of the modernist revolution, initially pioneered by the visual artists,
into the verbal mode through concision, sentence decomposition, polyphony,
juxtaposition of depictions, intense visuality and ekphrastic reference. Firstly
attracted to the innovations of European painters like Cézanne, Matisse or
Juan Gris, Williams soon developed a taste for his contemporary American
painters who better suited his belief in a true local American art of universal
standing, as he defended in essays and strove for in poetry. Literature

136 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

exploring the visual mode in Williams’s poetry generally uncovers a web
of connections with different modernist visual artists; however, the present
essay focuses specifically on the affinities between Williams and Sheeler, by
highlighting a shared interest in the techniques of depiction and themes of the
industrial Arcadia.
When Charles Sheeler moved to New York in 1919, upon the death of his
first close friend (and former fellow student), the painter Morton Shamberg
(Lucic 42), he orbited in Stieglitz’s and Arensberg’s groups (Dijkstra 39).
Sheeler was not exactly a stranger: in 1913 he was invited to exhibit at the
Armoury Show. Sheeler worked both as a painter and a photographer. As a
painter, he developed into the epitome of the restricted precisionist group, also
formed by Charles Demuth and Georgia O’Keeffe. His work as a photographer
followed the tenets of “straight photography”: intense visual perception,
minimal interference of the camera between the photographer and the object,
avoidance of influence of painting techniques, objectivity, no manipulation
in the revelation process (Dijkstra 92, 169; Weaver 57). From 1912 onwards,
Sheeler took up commercial photography to increase his meagre income as an
artist. He worked for architects as a photographer of Philadelphia buildings
and accepted commissions from industry (Pezzati 6-7; Shulman 39-40). By the
1920s he achieved success and received lucrative commissions working as a
free-lancer, for Condé Nast or for several advertising agencies. Among his
commissions are Firestone tires, Champion sparkplugs and Kodack cameras
(Brock 72). In fact, his commercial work would indelibly influence his artistic
photography and painting in a move towards realism and objectivity. His
paintings are impersonal, devoid of emphatic brushstroke and hyperrealistic
even: this became his signature in terms of style (Lucic 66-68).
Though both Williams and Sheeler frequented the same circles, they only
first met in the summer of 1923, at a dinner arranged for by Broom’s editor,
Matthew Josephson, at a New York speakeasy (Tashjian 74; Halter 167). The
date marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship, artistic empathy and
communion – the same bound Williams to Charles Demuth and Marsden
Hartley. It relied on a celebration of the American local condition in its
universal dimension, devoid of any parochial or regionalistic overtones: such
undertaking Williams and his friends shared with several other writers and
visual artists – a common agenda to the American avant-garde.

The local is the only universal

Williams’s apology for the local can be better understood on close reading of
his essays. His emphasis on a locally bred culture of universal status which
might develop into a truly native alternative to European models is evident

Teresa Costa 137

in essays like “The Neglected Artist” (1936), “Walker Evans: American
Photographs” (1938), “Charles Sheeler” (1939) or “The American Spirit in Art”
(1951). Williams connects a genuine culture to place and in “Marsden Hartley:
1940” he states: “(...) unless you paint pure nothing, you paint a place−and in
that place you will reveal all places in the world,” while in “Axioms” (1943)
he, symptomatically, further claims: “Place is the only universal” (essays to be
found in RI 82, 136, 140, 210, 155, 175; to these mentioned above can be added
“Yours, O Youth” (1932) in SE 32).
A clear apology for the local is further underscored in the magazine
Contact, a project Williams co-developed, on the aftermath of Others’ demise,
with Robert McAlmon. The magazine was issued six times between 1920 and
1923 and its name, based on McAlmon’s experience as a fighter pilot during
the war, evoked the contact of the plane with the ground. The project implied
an involvement of the artist with his past and immersion in the cultural
conditions of the present, so as to enable production of a true native art. Its
objectives can be epitomized through a selected excerpt from “Contact I”:
Contact is issued in the conviction that art which attains is indigenous of
experience and relations, and that the artist works to express perceptions
rather than to attain standards of achievement: however much information
and past art may have served to clarify his perceptions and sophisticate
his comprehensions, they will be no standards by which his work shall be
adjudged. Otherwise any standard of criticism is mere mental exercise, and
past art signifies nothing.
We are here because of our faith in the existence of native artists who are
capable of having, comprehending and recording extraordinary experience;
who possess intellect sufficient to carry over the force of their emotional
vigor; who do not weaken their work with humanitarianism; who deal with
our situations, realizing that it is the degree of understanding about, and
not situations themselves, which is of prime importance, and who receive
meagre recognition. (RI 64)

Looming centrally over the aforementioned essays and revealing his longest,
most substantial and mature approach to the matter is “The American
Background: America and Alfred Stieglitz” (1934) (SE 134-161). In this long
essay, Williams dwells on the existence of two antagonistic poles in the
cultural history of America: one linked to Europe, the other linked to the real-
life conditions faced by early settlers like Boone, but still depending on the Old
Continent. Such poles originated two cultures: a primary one (native, local)
and a secondary one (non-native, imported). Regrettably, instead of assuming
their own creativity, Americans, prompted by financial wealth, surrendered
to an imported canon which promoted copy and a-critical cultural stagnation,
as exemplified by the excerpt below:
The thing that Americans never seem to see is that French painting, as an

138 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 example of what is meant, is related to its own definite tradition, in its own
environment and general history (which, it is true, we partly share), and
which, when they have done with some one moment of it and have moved
on to something else, they fatly sell where they can – to us, in short. And that
American painting, to be of value, must have comparable relationships in its
own tradition, thus only to attain classic proportions. (SE 157)2

Though praising Stieglitz unconditionally in the essay above (and most

likely quite influenced by his contacts with artists from that photographer’s
group, among whom were Demuth and Hartley), Williams links his apology
for the local to John Dewey (AUTO 391). Between 1920 and 1921, Dewey
published some articles in The Dial and The New Republic which struck a cord
in Williams’s own artistic concepts. According to Beck, “Americanism and
Localism” (published June 1920 in The Dial) was the source of Williams’s
notion that the local is the only universal (82). In fact, Beck unravels deep
grounds of proximity/influence of thought between Dewey and Williams:
(…) Williams lexicon is unmistakably a Deweyan one: “embodiment,”
“contact,” “invention,” “faith,” “imagination,” “field of action,” “no ideas but
in things.” These are some of the terms of Williams’s optimistic, pragmatic,
experimental, progressive democratic poetics, terms that resonate with the
confidence and vitality that Dewey brought to American liberal political
culture during the first half of the twentieth century. (3)

It is precisely the choice of themes grounded in the American experience

that Williams praised in two essays on his friend – “Charles Sheeler” (1939)
and “Charles Sheeler – Postscript” (1954) where he stresses the evolution of
a mature style in Sheeler’s art, the logic of form he explored in his works, the
paramount relevance of the eyes, the importance of lifting “what is about our
feet to the level of imagination” (“imagination” is a charm-word incessantly
repeated in Williams’s essays and in Spring and All) and, first and foremost,
the capacity Sheeler had to find the universal qualities in the local particulars.
Evoking the ‘industryscapes’ of the painter, the poet claims, in the first essay,
originally published in Sheeler’s 1939 exhibition catalogue:
Sheeler has devoted himself mainly to still lives, landscapes with little direct
reference to humanity. This does not in the least make him inhuman, since
when man becomes insignificant in his attributes and swollen to fill the
horizon the representation of the human face is not enlightening. Inhuman
is a word commonly used to describe the efficiency of the modern industrial
set up, as in some minds coldness is often associated with Sheeler’s work—
incorrectly. Sheeler chose as he did from temperament doubtless but also
from thought and clear vision of the contemporary dilemma (…) It was
an early perception of general changes taking place, a passage over from
heated surfaces and vaguely differentiated detail to the cool and thorough
organizations today about us, familiar in industry, which Sheeler has come
more and more to celebrate. (RI 144)

Teresa Costa 139

 Modernist Arcadia & industrial sublime
Epithets as the ‘Raphael of the Fords’, ‘iconographer for the religion of
technology’ or ‘the true artist of corporate capitalism’ (Brock 2-6) are common
to designate (or denigrate) Sheeler’s mature, crisp, clean and hard-edged
industrial depictions, which became synonymous with Precisionism. First
appreciated for his paintings, he has more recently been recognized for his
photography which, too, underscores a nationalistic, apparently industry-
friendly agenda. His stature as an artist relies on the photographic qualities
of his paintings which re-enact an ongoing dialogue with photography. The
canvas Upper Deck (1929), depicting electric motors and ventilator stacks,
marks the turning point in his career. Sheeler photographed the German
ocean liner SS Majestic (Upper Deck, 1928, gelatine silver print) and projected
the image on canvas, probably, by means of an opaque projector (Brock 81;
Lucic 66; Stebbins 123). From then onwards, Sheeler frequently departed from
his work as commercial photographer to paint using photographs as either
blueprints or inspirational matter (as in the case of the Rouge series). He also
used photography as a preparatory study to his canvases (as in the case of the
Power series).
Appraisal of the themes Sheeler chose to celebrate might be made through
Williams’s words in the prologue to Kora in Hell: “the things that lie under the
direct scrutiny of the senses.” Among these things, in the first decades of the
20th century, the most striking and defining characteristics of the nation were
the city and industry. Together with Charles Demuth and Alfred Stieglitz or
Paul Strand, Sheeler celebrated America as the 20th century industrial Arcadia,
a country where the Puritan work ethic embodied a form of worship and
factories were a sort of new religious temples. As Paul Rosenfeld wrote, in
1931, in The Dial: “The Book of Genesis was rewritten, and made to declare ‘In
the beginning God created the heavens, the earth and industrial competition’”
(Paul Rosenfeld quoted by Lucic 17).
Sheeler’s commercial work prompted the production of his probably best-
known series of works, which came to define him as an artist. In 1927, pressed
by competition from General Motors, Ford Motor Company was forced to
discontinue production of the mythic model T and abandon the Highland
Park facility:
In 1927, Ford transferred his operations from the outdated Highland Park
plant to the Rouge River site about 10 miles from Detroit. When completed, the
Rouge became the largest and most technically sophisticated manufacturing
complex in the world. A virtually self-sufficient industrial city, it consisted
of 23 main buildings and over 70 subsidiary structures, 93 miles of railroad
tracks, 27 miles of conveyors, 53,000 machines and 75,000 employees. All
aspects of automobile production occurred at this industrial metropolis,
from the smelting of steel to the final assembly of vehicles. (Lucic 89-90)

140 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

To stage the promotional campaign, Ford secured the services of N.W. Ayer
& Son who, in turn, engaged Sheeler. The River Rouge plant, back then the
largest industrial plant in the world, was photographed between October
and November 1927 (Brock 72-74) and the 32 official photographs were used
both as promotional material by the Ford Motor Company and published
by Sheeler independently as artworks, though never all together (Lucic 90).
Some of these photos became icons of 20th century photography as Criss-
Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company (1927, gelatine silver
print) or Stamping Press (1927, gelatine silver print). Besides, they further
prompted Sheeler to produce, at first, smaller works, such as Industrial
Architecture, Smokestacks and Ballet Mecanique (all in 1931, Conté crayon on
paper), Industrial Series, #1 (1928, litograph) and River Rouge Industrial Plant
(1928 watercolour). Finally, the painter produced the impressive canvases
American Landscape (1930), Classic Landscape (1931), River Rouge Plant (1932)
and City Interior (1936). American Landscape was painted after the photograph
Ford Plant, River Rouge, Canal with Salvage Ship (1927), while Classic Landscape’s
model was, most likely, a photograph now lost (Brock 81).
Literature addressing the connection between painting and poetry
in Williams’s poetics repeatedly identifies his 1937 poem “Classic Scene”
(CPI 444) as the intersemiotic equivalent of Classic Landscape (see Dijkstra
191; Marling 84-85; Tashjian, William 84-85 for in-depth analyses on the
ekphrastic relationship). Though not an absolutely exact verbal rendering of
the painting – the poem’s closest characteristic to the canvas is its concision
and verbal economy – Williams’s quasi-sentence synthesizes to perfection
the atmosphere of the painting once even the little square stanzas seem to
emulate the painting’s volumes, dominated by abstracted geometric forms.
But, challenging Sheeler’s canvases, which are invariably deprived of human
presence – if available, then peremptorily dwarfed by machines –, Williams
personifies the metal stacks, thus counteracting the unsettling lack of human
presence and borrowing to this interpictorial dialogue the missing human
scale we can find in his poetics. Williams further appraises Classic Landscape
in “Charles Sheeler – Postscript” (1954) asserting:
Sheeler is a painter first and last with a painter’s mind alert to the significance
of the age that surrounds him. The emotional power of his work comes also
from that. It is hard to believe that a picture such as Classic Landscape, which
is a representation of the Ford Plant at River Rouge, owes its effectiveness
to an arrangement of cylinders and planes in the distance, maybe it isn’t
entirely that but that contributes to it largely. It is, however it comes about, a
realization on the part of the artist of man’s pitiful weakness and at the same
time his fate in the world. These themes are for the major artist. These are the
themes which under cover of his art Sheeler has celebrated. (RI 148)

Teresa Costa 141

Except for “Classic Scene”, Williams is rather unconcerned with machines
or industry per se,3 but the 1940 poem “Sketch for a Portrait of Henry Ford”
(CPII 12) might well be linked to Sheeler’s Rouge series. Though closer in
tone to the mordacious Dadaistic irony found in Charles Demuth’s pictures
– e.g., End of the Parade, Coatsville, Pa. (1920), Aucassin and Nicolette (1921) or
My Egypt (1927) – or Picabia’s mecanomorphs – e.g., Ici, C’est ici Stieglitz Foi
et Amour (1915), Portrait de une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (1915),
Prostituition Universelle (1916-17) – the poem does describe in nuts, bolts,
pivots, handles and oil – perhaps modern counterparts of Arcimboldo’s fruits
– the invisible tycoon-turned-into-machine hiding behind Sheeler’s paintings,
who became a synonym for mass production, scientific management and
standardized parts. “Sketch for a Portrait of Henry Ford” may be a verbal
response to the Rouge series while, at the same time, it may, too, evoke
Sheeler’s self-rendition as a machine (a telephone) in Self-Portrait (1923), the
latter less overtly ironic than Demuth’s and Picabia’s respective works. The
poem’s haphazard assembly of parts is in keeping with the dehumanized
ambiances resulting from mass production and loss of individual creativity
that Ford developed and Sheeler depicted.4 Interesting too is the use of the
words “sketch” and “portrait,” clearly hinting at the visual mode. In a certain
way, they recall Sheeler’s technique of “sketching” industrial scenes pulled
out from photographs (while the poem becomes a kind of poetic assemblage
re-enacting the visual arts).
Sheeler’s solemn portrayals of ‘industryscapes’ (static, like classic
temples) are epic. It is worthy of notice that, unlike Diego Rivera’s heroic
portrayals of labourers, they obliterate Man. At times criticized – especially
by left-wing – for his unconditional commitment to the great industrialists
and his enthusiastic admiration for the machine, as revealed in his writings
(Lucic 14-5, 102, 114), Sheeler’s canvases are, in Lucic’s interpretation, “equally
provocative and elusive. They epitomize the problematic nature of industry
and technology as subjects in American art during this period” (76). Pervaded
by inertia, they expose a society subdued by material values and the Puritan
work ethic. Indeed, their oppressive silence is ambiguous to the point of
suiting both the celebratory an the ominous, leaving us between awe of the
‘industrial sublime’ and fear of dehumanization, not to mention sheer job loss
fostered by mechanization: for example, the construction of the Ford Motor
Company Rouge plant between 1917 and 1927 plunged 60,000 workers of the
Highland Park facility into unemployment (Brock 72). Sheeler’s seemingly
panegyric Rouge paintings are produced precisely during the Depression;
Williams’s portrait of Henry Ford, Dadaistic and revenge-like, satirizes Ford,
and Fordism by extension, at the end of a particularly difficult decade for
workers he, as an industrial suburb doctor, knew quite well.

142 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Though Williams’s texts pay – understandably – little attention to
industrial or mechanistic depictions,5 the only poem he dedicated to a
machine does play a central role in his poetics: “The Red Wheelbarrow.” I
forego analysis of the poem considering it has elicited an immensity of critical
debate and interpretation (interesting analyses can be found in Dijkstra 167-
168 and Halter 170-174, 179-180) but would like to stress how a wheelbarrow
can only be considered a rather primitive machine. Nevertheless, even as an
uncomplicated apparatus consisting of a few interrelated parts, it does fulfil
a specific and irreplaceable function within definite working contexts. Thus,
however simplistically, when taken against the backdrop of technological
evolution and mass production, a wheelbarrow may serve as the token of
what Sheeler’s first painting in the Power series symbolizes: inventiveness
and thrift as the foundation stones of the industrial Arcadia.
Sheeler’s 1939 Primitive Power, depicting a primitive waterwheel, hints
at the 19th century practical inventiveness of Americans which led to the
subsequent technological advance documented in the remaining five paintings
of the series.
This second group of iconic paintings Sheeler produced was commissioned
by the Fortune magazine in 1938. He produced a series of six canvases on the
theme of Power. As in most of his previous work, painting was preceded
by extensive photography of different facilities in the U.S. The result was
finished and divulged by Fortune in 1940: six paintings – Primitive Power (1939,
tempera), Yankee Clipper (1939), Rolling Power (1939), Suspended Power (1939),
Steam Turbine (1939), Conversation –Sky and Earth (1940). Suspended Power and
Steam Turbine are particularly unsettling for their forceful lack of human scale
and reveal the full truth of Williams’s far from simplistic patersonian credo
“no ideas but in things.” Sheeler’s paintings focus intensely on material things
and unveil immaterial conditions that are not mentioned, but subsumed or
implied in the scale of the urban epic Paterson.
Within the Power series we can find further affinity between Williams’s
poem “Overture to a Dance of Locomotives” (CPI 146-147) and Rolling Power.
Williams’s poem encompasses a multifaceted reality made up of passengers,
staff, named landscapes, rushing time, movement, and communication
infrastructures which are evoked in a polyphonic structure of voices that
includes the machine itself. Read by the poet at the 1917 Independents
Exhibition, in a space in New York’s Grand Central Station, the poem contains
a reference to a locomotive carriage, as we can read in the excerpt below:
two – twofour – twoeight!
Porters in red hats run on narrow platforms.
This way ma’am!
– important not to take

Teresa Costa 143

 the wrong train!
Lights from the concrete
ceiling hang crooked but –
Poised horizontal
on glittering parallels the dingy cylinders
packed with a warm glow – inviting entry –
pull against the hour. But brakes can
hold a fixed posture till –
The whistle! (CPI 146)

Sheeler portrayed likewise a train by metonymically painting the crankshaft

and wheels of a New York Central locomotive. His painting is restricted to a
single machine detail, while “Overture to dance of Locomotives” assimilates
Futurist speed and movement with the Cubist simultaneity of scattered
dissimilar details that, collage-like, are compressed in time and space together.
Sheeler’s painting, in his very own line, is rather static when compared to the
poem that captures seething rush. Still, a cloud of steam, released from the
wheels, hints at the movement while both text and picture dwell on the same
reality: the machine.
Besides the examples analyzed above, where thematic closeness or
conformity can be detected, Williams’s proximity to Sheeler may instead be
found in the technical qualities of his poetics which comply with the overall
beliefs of the Stieglitz circle (“straight photographers” and Precisionists)
and simultaneously reveal the legacy of Imagist and Objectivist principles:
objectivity (which does not stand for lack of emotion or incapacity to convey
cultural or psychological depth), intensity of perception of an object/
person/scene, avoidance of symbolism and genteelness, direct approach of
matters regardless of their unpoetic resonance, clear design which becomes
perceptive through the technical and structural qualities of the art work. The
verbal equivalents Williams created to match these principles can be found
throughout his work – good examples of concision and perceptual intensity
are poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “Metric Figure,” “Willow Poem,”
“Lines,” “Lovely Add,” or “Between Walls,” (respectively, CPI 224, 66, 150-
151, 159, 455 and 453) the latter very close to Precisionist views of the urban
reality:
the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie

cinders

144 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

In keeping with the spirit of Precisionism, Williams’s alignment with Sheeler’s

practice can be further unveiled in what Schmidt (1988) named urban
modernist pastorals. The Precisionists defended an art free of the European
academic constraints and imbedded in the American past and present, which
might continue Whitman’s celebrations of innocence and the spiritual values
inherent in technology and inventiveness. Thus, America became the new
industrial Arcadia in which the Edenic potential of the New World became
refashioned and made to suit America’s urban and industrial attributes (15-
19, 47). A long list of poems makes up the corpus of Williams’s modernist
pastorals; nevertheless, none could be a better example, in view of the topic
at hand, than “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper.” The poet himself speaks
of the poem saying “(…) this was a time when I was working hard for order,
searching for a form for the stanzas, making them little units, regular, orderly.
The poem “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper” is really telling about my
struggle with verse” (IWWP 57). Admittedly a metaphor of Williams’s own
concern with technical (and visual) aspects of writing, the poem places side
by side, in democratic fashion, the poet and the craftsman.
The first stanza starts with a break from work which, like a text or a
painting, allows the contemplation of the outcome of labour. The poem does
not describe the monumental ‘industryscapes’. Nonetheless, it highlights the
workmanship and precision inherent in the industrial Arcadia. We can read in
this poem the raw materials, the order, and the exactness we see in Sheeler’s
paintings – which propagates to the stanzas, just like in “Classic Scene”.
The words (sacks, sifted, stone, stacked, copper, strips, centre, angles, edge,
coping), if not necessarily linked to the reality of a major industrial plant,
are still expression of a work environment and technical exactness, further
highlighted by measure (eight/ foot strips), identification of material and
regularity. The last line of the poem (“and runs his eye along it”) describes
the situation of workers, painters and poets alike: running their eyes over the
very reality under the scrutiny of their sharp, discerning senses.
To conclude this short incursion into the industrial Arcadia, a more suitable
agreement in perspectives between Williams and Sheeler could hardly be
found than in the poet’s 1944 metapoetic statement in the introduction to The
Wedge: “There is nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small
(or large) machine made of words. When I say there is nothing sentimental
about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that
is redundant” (CPII 54).

Teresa Costa 145

NOTES

1
Williams’s degree of proximity to Alfred Stieglitz cannot be easily established. In
his Autobiography Williams mentions 1925 as the date they met, which may be a
way of avoiding an earlier intellectual debt to Stieglitz’s important work. In any
case, through painter-friends Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley he was well
acquainted with Stieglitz’s work, as further proved by the essays he wrote on the
photographer (for further discussion see Dijkstra 83-85).
2
Note the use of the word “classic”, the very same that Williams uses in the poem
“Classic Scene”.
3
Direct references to machines are scarce in view of the bulk of his poetics. Perhaps
because of that, the few existing ones are especially meaningful. For example, in
1944, the poet wrote “The Yellow Chimney” a poem mentioning a brick stack
which “through the tense interaction or fusion of its abstract (stanzaic) and
concrete (iconic) design” (Halter 197) reenacts the object it describes against the
natural background.
4
Earlier, in Spring and All, Williams had already hinted at the industrialist in his cubo-
dadaistic scherzo “At the Faucet of June” (“And so it comes/ to motor cars—/
which is the son// leaving off the g/ of sunlight and grass— (…)”) and explicitly
evoked another tycoon, J.P. Morgan.
5
Insight on Williams’s consideration of technology is given by Halter thus: “At the
beginning of the 1920s Williams’s notion of the poet as bricklayer or architect
also helped him to blend his need for an indigenous art based on here and now
with the current propagation of American technology and a new popular culture
based on it, as advocated by Duchamp and Picabia in such periodicals as 291,
391, The Soil, Secession, and (in later issues) Broom.” (33) Halter further quotes and
comments on an excerpt from “Yours, Oh Youth” which enables us to realise how
far Williams was aware of the relevance of technological evolutions as a token
of Americanism and expected arts to follow the very same path: “It has been by
paying naked attention first to the thing itself that American plumbing, American
shoes, American bridges, index systems, locomotives, Printing presses, city
buildings, farm implements and a thousand other things have become notable in
the world. Yet we are timid in believing that in the arts discovery and invention
we will take the same course. And there is no reason why they should unless our
writers have the inventive intelligence of our engineers and cobblers. ” (SE 35)

WORKS CITED

1. Works by William Carlos Williams (with abbreviations used in the text)

A Recognizable Image. William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists. New York:
New Directions, 1978. (RI)
Collected Poems I 1909-1939. Eds. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan.
Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000 (1987). (CPI)
Collected Poems II 1939-1962. Ed. Christopher MacGowan. Manchester:
Carcanet Press, 2000 (1988). (CPII)

146 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

I Wanted to Write a Poem. The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet. New York:
New Directions, 1977 (1958). (IWWP)
Kora in Hell. Improvisations. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1957 (1920).
Paterson. Ed. Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1995
(1992).
Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams. New York: Random House, 1954.
(SE)
The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1967
(1951). (AUTO)

2. Articles and books of established authorship

Beck, John. Writing the Radical Center. William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and
American Cultural Politics. New York: State University of New York Press,
2001.
Brock, Charles. Charles Sheeler. Across Media. Washington: National Gallery of
Art and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Dijkstra, Bram. Hieroglyphics of a New Speech. Cubism, Stieglitz and the Early
Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1969.
Halter, Peter. The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos
Williams. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Homberger, Eric. “Chicago and New York: Two Versions of American
Modernism.” Modernism. A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930. Eds.
Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1976. 151-161.
Hughes, Robert. American Visions. The Epic History of Art in America. London:
The Harvil Press, 1999 (1997).
Lucic, Karen. Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine. London: Reaktion
Books, 1991.
Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams. A New World Naked. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1990 (1981).
Marling, William. William Carlos Williams and the Painters 1909 – 1923. Athens,
Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1982.
Pezzati, Alex. “Charles R. Sheeler. Jr.” Expedition 50. 1 (Spring 2008): 6-8.
Schmidt, Peter. William Carlos Williams, the Arts, and Literary Tradition. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Teresa Costa 147

Schulman, Daniel. “The Glorious Art of Business.” The American. A Magazine
of Ideas 1.1 (November/December 2006): 38-42.
Stebbins, Theodore E. et al. The Photography of Charles Sheeler. American
Modernist. New York and London: Bullfinch Press, 2002.
Tashjian, Dickran. Skyscraper Primitives. Dada and the American Avant-Garde
1910-1925. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1975.
_______, William Carlos Williams and the American Scene, 1920-1940. New York:
Whitney Museum of American Art and University of California Press,
1978.
Weaver, Mike. William Carlos Williams. The American Background. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971.

148 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 MEDICINE FOR CHILDREN IN MEDIEVAL ENGLISH TEXTS:
A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH

Laura Esteban-Segura

1. Introduction
Medicine in the Middle Ages is a wide-ranging topic which has been considered
from different perspectives. The classical historical view, for instance, has
taken into account its place in the general development within the field,
sometimes focusing on specific countries, such as England (Rawcliffe 1995;
Getz 1998). Philological scholarship has produced a large number of textual
editions which have paid attention to linguistic and/or palaeographical
aspects (Ogden 1938; Seymour et al. 1975-1988), whereas more modern
studies have dealt with sociological or gender-related issues, including the
function of family (Gies and Gies 1987; Hanawalt 1986) or women (Green
2000) within this science. There is some literature on issues such as childbirth
and childhood (Hanawalt 1993; Orme 2001); however, little has been written
about medieval medicine for children. Halfway through the sixteenth century,
in the Renaissance period, Thomas Phaer published The Boke of Chyldren,
which was England’s first paediatrics’ text. Phaer drew attention to “health
care issues specific to the treatment of children” (Bowers 1), thus making a
distinction between medicine for adulthood and childhood.
Nevertheless, the role of children in medieval society has had its share
of controversy, since the view that there was not a conception of childhood
as a distinct stage in human development contrasts to that which states that
children performed a part in medieval culture (Shahar 4).
Looking at how children were represented in medical knowledge can
be a way to ascertain how they were perceived within society. The Middle
Ages were not a safe time for people in general, and for children in particular.
Contagious diseases, such as the Plague, and illnesses, such as pneumonia
and the flu, were amongst the greatest dangers to children during that period.

149
The inability of medieval medicine to cure them caused many infants to die.
Another important cause of mortality was childbirth, both for babies and
mothers. Approximately one third of medieval children did not live up to
the age of one (Elliott 7). Several questions arise: How did medical authors
address children’s diseases in treatises of a general nature? Were there specific
remedies or recipes for them included in those texts?
This article sets out to analyse how the figure of children is described in
medical writings by examining medical texts in Middle English and assessing
the information contained therein. Although the approach is primarily
linguistic, the analysis might also provide valuable insights into the role of
children and childhood from a sociohistorical point of view as it will allow
considering the implications of the presence (or absence) of explicit information
concerning them in a concrete type of writing. Even though the texts are in
a particular language, the situation does not have to relate to England alone,
given that most of the texts were translations from classical works. However,
on occasions, adaptations to the English culture (in ingredients of recipes, such
as herbs, spices, etc., for example) took place. The methodology employed is
corpus-driven, since a medical corpus will be examined for the purpose.

2. Methodology
The corpus of Middle English Medical Texts (Taavitsainen, Pahta and Mäkinen
2005), MEMT hereafter, has been surveyed in order to find occurrences of
the term ‘child’ or related ones, such as ‘childhood’, ‘childbirth’, etc. MEMT
contains 86 texts from about 1375 to 1500 and aims to cover the Late Middle
English period of medical writing as exhaustively as possible (Taavitsainen,
Pahta and Mäkinen 80-81). The total word count amounts to 495,322 words.
In order to retrieve all the instances making reference to children, the
files were loaded to AntConc (Anthony 2008), a freeware concordance
programme available online. Wild-card searches were employed, including
search elements like ‘child*’ or ‘cild*’, etc. in order to retrieve all the possible
spellings. A total of 179 tokens belonging to the semantic sphere of ‘child(ren)’
was obtained. These data were saved as a txt file and then copied into an Excel
spreadsheet (a fragment of which is shown in figure 1).

150 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

Figure 1 Example of Excel spreadsheet with occurrences
A B C
15 [{with{] a knafe childe or a mayden childe.}] Tak welle watyr and late þe woman 20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
16 watyr and late þe woman þat is with childe mylke a droppe þer-in &, if it synke to 20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
17 þe grounde, þan is it taken of a knafe childe &, if it flete a-bown, þan es taken of a 20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
18 it flete a-bown, þan es taken of a mayden childe. Ipocrase says þat þe woman þat is 20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
19 says þat þe woman þat is with a knafe childe, scho es ruddy & hir ryghte tethe are 20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
20 about, and, if scho be with a mayden childe, scho es blak & hir lefte tethe are 20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
21 bygynnes a charme for trauellyng of childe.}] In nomine patris & filij & spiritus 20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
22 charme thris & scho sal sone bere childe, if it be hir tyme. |P_57 Tak polipodie & 20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
23 [}For to delyuer a woman of a dede childe.}] Tak þe blades of lekes & schalde 20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
24 the wambe & it sall caste out þe dede childe &, when scho is delyuerde, do a-waye 20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt
25 þat purges þam ouer mekill after childynge.}] Tak þe rute of pion & dry it & mak 20 Liber de diversis medicinis.txt

Column A displays the number of occurrence, column B contains the

occurrence or keyword in bold in the middle, preceded and followed by its
context (approximately 8-9 words in each case), and column C shows the
reference to the text in the corpus.
Although MEMT is a large and untagged corpus, the retrieval of data
has not posed a significant difficulty since there was not an overgeneration
of forms, all the instances were relevant and the number of returned hits
was reasonable for manual analysis. However, when carrying out this task,
sometimes the context of 8-9 words fell short, not being informative enough;
for this reason, it has been necessary to resort to the specific part in the corpus
so as to obtain a larger context, and thus a more detailed meaning or usage.

3. Analysis
The texts in the MEMT corpus fall into four categories: ‘Remedies and
materia medica’, ‘Specialized texts’, ‘Surgical texts’ and ‘Verse’. ‘Remedies and
materia medica’ consist of 35 files with recipes, medical charms and works (or
fragments of works) such as Liber de diversis medicinis, Crophill’s books or John
of Burgundy’s Practica phisicalia. ‘Specialized texts’ comprise 24 files, in which
treatises on phlebotomy, women diseases or works by Benvenutus Grassus,
Trevisa’s On the properties of things, etc. are included. In ‘Surgical texts’, on the
other hand, 14 files holding the most important surgical writings (Lanfranc’s
Chirurgia magna and Chirurgia parva, Mondeville’s Chirurgie, Arderne’s Fistula,
etc.) are found. Finally, the ‘Verse’ part incorporates 10 files of medical writings
on different aspects of medieval medicine, such as bloodletting, astrology or
herbs. They were produced in verse, thus resembling poetry, probably with
the intention of making the process of learning and recalling them easier.

Laura Esteban-Segura 151

 The examination of occurrences has shown that terms referring to children
appear in the four categories. First, in ‘Remedies and materia medica’, the texts
which contain relevant data are: Gilbertus Anglicus, Compendium; Caxton,
Gouernayle of helthe; Queen Isabel’s dietary; Crophill’s books (remedies); Leechbook
1; Leechbook 2; Liber de diversis medicinis; Killeen Medical Texts; Rupescissa,
Remedies; Antidotarium Nicholai; Medical charms; Medical works; Macer De viribus
herbarum; Agnus castus; and Seven herbs, seven planets.
As for ‘Specialized texts’, appropriate records for the research have been
found in: Sekenesse of wymmen 1; Sekenesse of wymmen 2; Off the xij synys; Daniel,
Liber uricirisiarum 2; and Caxton, Ars moriendi.
Regarding ‘Surgical texts’, information about children is present in:
Trevisa, On the properties of things 1; Arderne, Fistula; Arderne, Clysters; Chauliac,
Wounds; Chauliac, Ulcers; Lanfranc, Chirurgia magna 1; Lanfranc, Chirurgia magna
2; Lanfranc, Chirurgia parva; Chirurgie de 1392; Mondeville, Chirurgie.
Lastly, tokens have also been retrieved in ‘Verse’ in the following: Practical
verse; Bloodletting; Sidrak and Bokkus; and A tretys of diverse herbis.
A casuistry of term usage in the texts has been established by scrutinising
all the instances, which have been classified according to whether they make
direct or indirect reference to health matters about children. Terms with direct
reference cover elements, such as exposition of diseases, recipes, etc., employed
for children. Terms with indirect reference, on the other hand, consist of
instances which may occur in relation to the preparation of medicinal recipes
for general use, not specifically for children; terms can also appear linked to
discussion of women issues, that is, forming part of gynaecological material.
References made to childhood have also been included under this heading.
Finally, a last set of various uses has been gathered.

3.1. Direct reference

Terms related to well-being, diseases, remedies, etc., and connected to
children as patients appear in 35 instances. Of them, 12 occurrences belong to
the group of texts in ‘Remedies and materia medica’ (examples (1) and (2)), one
to ‘Specialized texts’ (example (3)), 10 to ‘Surgical texts’ (examples (4) and (5))
and 12 to ‘Verse’ (examples (6) and (7)).1
(1) “[}For to make þe teþe of children wex wiþ oute | ache.}] | Tak þe brayn
of an hare and seþe it and frote þe gomes | þer wiþ of hem.” (Medical charms,
in MEMT)
“In order to make the teeth of children come in without ache: Take the brain
of a hare and boil it and rub their gums therewith.”

(2) “[}The vj remedie is for thoo that been consumed in alle the body and
ouer | leene men, as men of tendre complexion and tendre wymen and

152 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 children and thoo | that han the tisik and the ethike.}” (Rupescissa, Remedies,
in MEMT)
“The sixth remedy is for those that have all their body enfeebled and for very
lean men, as men of fragile constitution and fragile women and children and
those that have the phthisic and the hectic fever.”

(3) “To this portonarie is knet and tyed a tharme þat is kallid duodenum,
| þe duodene, and for þis skyll, for he berith in leynthe 12 | fyngir brede
vpon þe proporciown of euery man, woman, or | childe.” (Daniel, Liber
uricirisiarum 2, in MEMT)
“To this first division of the small intestine is knit and tied an intestine that
is called duodenum, the duodene, and for this reason, for it has in length 12
fingers’ breadth upon the proportion of every man, woman or child.”

(4) “And petite morel is called in fflaundres | ‘Naghtstach.’ And witte þou
þat þe iuse of it doþe | best awey þe pustules in childres mouþes.” (Arderne,
Fistula, in MEMT)
“And petty morel [the Black Nightshade (OED)]2 is called in Flemish
‘Naghtstach’. And be aware that its juice is the best to do away the pustules
in children’s mouths.”

(5) “But euacuacioun wiþ | ventusis and watir-lechis is able to | hem þat
ben feble, children & olde | men.” (Mondeville, Chirurgie, in MEMT)
“But evacuation with cupping glasses and water-leeches is appropriate for
them that are feeble, children and old men.”

(6) “Children ben hotter of kynde | Þan any olde man þat men may fynde |
And curiouser þei ben also | To þing þat men hem sette to, | Lightly takyng
and holding, | For her wit is euer wexing.” (Sidrak and Bokkus, in MEMT)
“Children are hotter of kind than any old man that men may find. And they
are also more curious to things that men set them to, lightly taking and
holding, for their wit is always developing.”

(7) “For many evill must be vndo. | xvj in the hefde full right | And xvj
by nethe I 3ow plight. | In what place thei shall be founde | I shall 3ow
telle in this stounde. | Bi side the eere there ben too | That on a childe
must be vndoo | To kepe his hede from evilturnyng | And fro scabbe…”
(Bloodletting, in MEMT)
“For many evils must be undone: sixteen in the head full right and sixteen
beneath, I assure you. In what place they shall be found, I shall tell you now.
Beside the ear there are two that on a child must be undone to keep his head
from turning evil and from scabs…”

At times, the information appearing in the instances which concern a children’s

disease or a recipe for them is not exclusive or restricted to children, since
allusion to adult patients is also found, as seen in examples (2), (3) and (5).

Laura Esteban-Segura 153

 3.2. Indirect reference
3.2.1. General cures
Children’s urine is used as part of recipes or remedies to cure different illnesses
in adult patients. With only five occurrences, this use does not represent a
significant trend. However, it is interesting to note the distinction made
between male and female children:
(8) “…if þe kankir be on a | P_82 | man, wesche it ilk a daye with þe pys of
a knafe childe | &, if it be on a woman, wesche it ilk a day with þe pys of |
a mayden childe…” (Liber de diversis medicinis, in MEMT)
“… if the ulcer is on a man, wash it every day with the urine of a male infant
and, if it is on a woman, wash it every day with the urine of a girl child…”

In medical texts, there is sometimes a differentiation (in the making up of

remedies or in the type of medicines to administer, for instance), depending
on the type of patient and taking into consideration aspects such as social
class (whether the patient is wealthy or poor), a weak or strong constitution
(see example (2)), or even the patient’s age (example (5)) or sex (example (8)).
Gender differences are also found in the texts analysed regarding children, as
seen in the previously mentioned contrast between mayde and knave child (note
also example (12) below).

3.2.2. Gynaecology
This is by far the group with more occurrences, which amount to 132. The
topics are pregnancy-related, such as conception (example 9), spontaneous
or induced abortion (example 10), childbirth (example 11), breastfeeding
(example 12) or the reproductive system (example 13).3
(9) “[}If a man will þat a woman conceyue a childe sone.}] | Tak nept &
sethe it with wyne to the third part & | gyf hym to drynke fastande thre
dayes.” (Liber de diversis medicinis, in MEMT)
“If a man wants a woman to conceive a child soon: Take catnip and boil it
with wine to the third part and give him to drink fasting three days.”

(10) “Saueyne wole delyuere wel women of her floures and do þe dede |
childe in his modur wombe to be bore, if she be drunke ofte with | wyn or
stampid be leide to þe matrice mouth.” (Macer De viribus herbarum, in MEMT)
“Savin will deliver women well of their flow and do the dead child in his
mother’s womb to be born, if it is drunk often with wine or, pounded, is laid
to the uterus’s mouth.”

(11) “Do þe nurrice drenk it and þe childe shal be deliuered; | and þis þe
nurrice most drenk whan she shalle 3if þe | childe soke, wiþ þe melke of a
white gote.” (Medical charms, in MEMT)
“Make the wet nurse drink it and the child shall be delivered; and this the
wet nurse must drink when she shall, if the child suckles, with the milk of a
white goat.”

154 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 (12) “And poudir hem and medle hem with popilion, and with | þe mylke
of a woman þat fedeþ a meide childe, and with | þe iuse of syngreen.”
(Gilbertus Anglicus, Compendium, in MEMT)
“And sprinkle them and mix them with popilion [an ointment made of the
buds of the Black Poplar (OED)], and with the milk of a woman that feeds a
girl child, and with the juice of houseleek.”

(13) “The matrix ys a skynne þat þe | childe ys closed yn in his modere

wombe, and mony of the | greuaunce þat wymmen hafe ar caused of þe
moder þat we calle | þe matrix.” (Sekenesse of wymmen 1, in MEMT)
“The uterus is a skin where the child is enclosed within his mother’s womb,
and many of the grievances that women have are caused by the womb that
we call the uterus.”

As illustrated in example (12), some of the information is linked to the previous

section since the preparation of recipes is mentioned as well. Recipes can be
classified according to at least two traditions: those present in remedy-books
and those appearing in scientific treatises (Carroll 176).
The conventions of recipes in medical texts have been analysed by Jones
(1997), who has studied the language and style of a late-medieval medical
recipe book. Her analysis is based on the schematic structure, or ‘staging’, of
individual recipes in modern texts developed by Hasan (1989) and applied
to modern recipe texts by Eggins (2004). The sequential order of elements
of a text (‘staging’) is used in order to predict patterns in texts. The stages
are the following: ‘Title’, ‘Ingredients’, ‘Procedure’, ‘Application’, ‘Storage’,
‘Additional information’, ‘Efficacy phrases’. Some of these stages may not
occur within all texts and their order can be altered depending on the recipe.
Recipes have been found in the data obtained from the evaluated corpus
and, in the majority of cases, the above-mentioned stages are present. The
‘Title’ usually consists of a phrase which points out the intention of the recipe,
as in examples (1) and (9) respectively: “For to make þe teþe of children wex
wiþ oute | ache”; “If a man will þat a woman conceyue a childe sone”.
As far as the ‘Ingredients’ are concerned, most of the terms belong to the
field of botany, since they allude to plants, herbs, flowers, etc. (e.g. “petite
morel” (example 4); “nept” (example 9); “saueyne” (example 10); “popilion”,
“syngreen” (example 12)). However, the animal world is also present in
many remedies, as well as items regarded as Dreckapotheke (filthy ones), such
as blood and organs of animals, excrements, etc. (e.g. “þe brayn of an hare”
(example 1); “pys” (example 8)).
One of the most common linguistic features in the ‘Procedure’ stage –
the stage which deals with the methods employed for the combination and
preparation of the ingredients– is the usage of the imperative form of verbs:
“tak”, “seþe” (example 1); “tak”, “sethe” (example 9); “poudir”, “medle”
(example 12).

Laura Esteban-Segura 155

 Imperative verbs are also used in the ‘Application’ stage, which involves
the way in which the remedy is administered to the patient, such as the time
(e.g. “wesche it ilk a daye” (example 8)) or whether it is taken as a drink (“gyf
hym to drynke fastande thre dayes” (example 9); “if she be drunke ofte with
| wyn or stampid be leide to þe matrice mouth” (example 10); “Do þe nurrice
drenk it” (example 11), or in any other manner (e.g. “frote þe gomes | þer
wiþ of hem” (example 1)). The addressee of these instructions is generally the
practitioner, who is in charge of dispensing the remedy to the patient.
The ‘Additional information’ stage may include further details or
alternative ingredients: “and þis þe nurrice most drenk whan she shalle 3if þe
| childe soke, wiþ þe melke of a white gote” (example 11). Finally, ‘Efficacy
phrases’, which are characteristic of recipe texts, emphasize the effectiveness
of the recipe under consideration: “And witte þou þat þe iuse of it doþe | best
awey þe pustules in childres mouþes” (example 4); “Saueyne wole delyuere
wel women of her floures” (example 10); “and þe childe shal be deliuered”
(example 11).

3.2.3. Childhood
References to childhood are also found (three instances), as in the following
instances:

(14) “Also thies 4 complexions reigne in þe foure | ages of man, þat is to wite:
Colerik in Childhed, Sangweyn | in manhed, Flewme in age and Malyncoli
in elde. | Childhed is from birthe til 10 yere and þen ful doone.” (Crophill’s
books (remedies), in MEMT)
“Also these 4 constitutions predominate in the four ages of man, that is to
say: Choleric in childhood, sanguine in youth, phlegm in adulthood and
melancholy in old age. Childhood is from birth until 10 years and then full
done.”

(15) “… ne of teþe, for þai ar | gendred not only in childe-hode, bot in oþer
age3, for þai ar not | gendred of materie ordinate, bot of superfluite, not of
vertue first | informatif, bot of nutrityue, inducyng þe acte of the generatif,
| As said Albertus Bononiensis in lectura amphorismorum.” (Chauliac,
Wounds, in MEMT)
“… nor of teeth, for they are produced not only in childhood, but in other
ages, for they are not produced of regular matter, but of superfluity, not of
virtue first formative, but of nutritive, inducing the action of the generative,
as said Albertus Bononiensis in lectura amphorismorum.”

The terms occur when explaining part of the theory of the four humours,
a theory which dominated medieval science, especially medicine. The four
humours included ‘blood’, ‘phlegm’, ‘choler, and ‘melancholy’ and had four
qualities: ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘dry’, and ‘wet’ (see example (6)), which were “applied

156 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

to objects in virtue either of an extreme degree of one of these qualities or of
the dominance of one of them” (Singer 266).
The humours were also present in the human body and depending
on their prevalence, a person could be ‘sanguine’, ‘phlegmatic’, ‘choleric’,
or ‘melancholic’; each type of individual had a different “complexion” or
constitution. Good health was the result of a balance among the four humours.
The theory also relied upon a series of analogies with the number four; they
encompassed, for instance, the ages of man (‘childhood’, ‘youth’, ‘adulthood’,
and ‘old age’) or the seasons of the year.
This theory, as well as the rest of medical theories and practices, reached
England via Latin. Most Middle English texts were translations of Latin
medicine or were derived from it (Voigts 315). In this sense, acknowledgment
to the authorities consulted is sometimes found in the vernacular texts. In
example (15), an instance which belongs to the category of ‘Surgical texts’,
a clear reference is made to the source of what is being discussed, with an
indication of the name of the author “Albertus Bononiensis”4 and of his work
“lectura amphorismorum”.

3.2.4. Other
Finally, terms for children are used in a general way, without a medical sense,
even though they form part of medical writings (four occurrences):

(16) “In þe þridde day y spak to hym, & | he answerde me bablynge as a

childe þat begynneþ to speke, but he | my3te formen non worde.” (Lanfranc,
Chirurgia magna 2, in MEMT)
“In the third day I spoke to him and he answered me babbling as a child that
begins to speak, but he might form no word.”

4. Conclusions
The research carried out throws some light on the ideas and thoughts about
childhood held in the Middle Ages, and particularly in medieval medicine.
The fact that there is specific material and coverage of children’s issues
and that authors devoted time and space for discussion of special diseases,
conditions, recipes, cures or remedies for this type of patient is valuable proof
that there was indeed a notion of childhood as a separate period in human
life. It also attests that children were not ignored or simply treated as small
adults. This is corroborated by the appearance of Phaer’s book in 1544; the
book consists of a collection or compilation of recipes specifically for children,
many of which come from the medieval tradition. Therefore, the idea of a
differentiated treatment for children was already present during the Middle

Laura Esteban-Segura 157

Ages, thus giving rise to the publication of specific works at later periods.
The special mention to children in some of the texts analysed in this article,
however, does not necessarily imply that the rest of medical treatments were
contraindicated or inadvisable for them.
The linguistic features of the recipes have been briefly discussed, showing
that most of the stages typical of medieval medical recipes are fulfilled, although
a wide variety in terms of form and structure is attested. The scrutinised data
indicate that, despite occurring in different types of medical texts, recipes are
more frequent in the ‘Remedies and materia medica’ category.
In medical texts, distinctions are sometimes made (in the type of remedy
to apply, for instance) depending on whether the patient is male or female.
As with adults, differences are also established in terms of gender regarding
children, as seen in the opposition mayde versus knave child.
Surgical and specialized texts were considered scientific and learned,
as opposed to recipe texts and medicine in verse, which were of a more
popular and lay nature (Taavitsainen, Pahta and Mäkinen 87-89).5 Records or
data referring to children appear in the four categories of texts, a fact which
reveals that children were taken into account at different levels of society; it
also demonstrates a medical interest in them by professionals ranging from
the physician, trained at university and user of specialized texts, to those
practitioners who did not possess academic instruction and relied on recipe
books.

Acknowledgments
Research for this article has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science
and Innovation (grant number FFI2008-02336/FILO “Grupo Consolidado”)
and from the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (grant number 07/
HUM-2609). These grants are hereby gratefully acknowledged.

NOTES

1
The translation, following the examples, from Middle English into Present-Day
English has been carried out by the author of the article. The dictionaries consulted
for the purpose have been the Middle English Dictionary (MED, McSparran 2001-)
and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, Murray et al. 1970).
2
Oxford English Dictionary (see previous note).
3
There is a long tradition of studies on gynaecological texts; see for example Rowland
(1981) and Green (2000, 2001).
4
Alberto de’ Zancari, also known as Albertus Bononiensis or Albert of Bologna, was a
well-known physician and medical author born in Italy circa 1280; see Prioreschi
(2003: 410-413) for further details.

158 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

5
However, recipes could also contain elements from learned classical sources as they
belong to the remedy-book tradition, a text-typology which includes several
interweaving features (Taavitsainen, Pahta and Mäkinen 88).

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160 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 INTIMAMENTE NA SOMBRA DO BARDO:
RESSONÂNCIAS DE SHAKESPEARE NA LÍRICA AMOROSA DE ELIZABETH
BARRETT BROWNING 1

Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães

And I’ll be sworn upon’t that he loves her;

For here’s a paper written in his hand,
A halting sonnet of his own pure brain.

William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, V, iv, 85-87

There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb

The crowns o’ the world: O eyes sublime
With tears and laughter for all time!
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Vision of Poets, 1844

Muito tem sido escrito sobre o significado cultural de Shakespeare,

nomeadamente a sua influência sobre períodos particulares e ainda a sua
apropriação e subsequente transformação. Por exemplo, Robert Sawyer, em
Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare (2003), examina a apropriação por parte
de autores como George Eliot, A. C. Swinburne, Robert Browning e Charles
Dickens, demonstrando como críticos, poetas e romancistas vitorianos fazem
uso de obras de Shakespeare com a finalidade de questionarem as noções de
forma, género, identidade e família e, assim, se moldarem a si próprios e à sua
cultura oitocentista.
Tal como sobressai da afirmação exaltada de Thomas Carlyle em Heroes
and Hero-Worship de 1840, “Yes this Shakespeare is ours; we produced him;
[…] we are of one blood and kind with him” (19) e, já em 1829, do desabafo
emocionado de Anna Jameson em The Loves of the Poets, “He belongs to us all!
– the creator of Desdemona, and Juliet and Ophelia, […] was not the poet of

161
one woman but the POET OF WOMANKIND” (10), Shakespeare na qualidade
de “poet-hero” e de “poet of womankind”, parece ter sido indispensável para
os vitorianos de um modo geral. O bardo de Avon forneceu-lhes formas de
pensar sobre a autoridade do passado, sobre o surgimento de uma nova
cultura de massas, sobre as relações entre a produção artística e industrial,
sobre a natureza da criatividade, sobre as diferenças raciais e sexuais e sobre
a identidade nacional e individual. Como afirmou o profeta vitoriano perante
os seus conterrâneos, “we speak and think by him” (Carlyle 31).
No entanto, a atenção concedida à relação específica entre Shakespeare
e a escritora vitoriana, e nomeadamente à sua influência na respectiva obra,
tem sido algo escassa. O único estudo crítico recente, o de Gail Marshall
(Shakespeare and Victorian Women, 2009), analisa de forma genérica a recepção
de Shakespeare nas artes femininas de representação e de escrita; isto é, não só
as actrizes que tiveram um papel essencial no redimir do texto shakespeariano
nos palcos vitorianos mas também as escritoras que o incorporaram na tecedura
da sua própria escrita, assim como nas suas vidas pessoais. Marshall prefere
usar o termo ‘tradução’ como a metáfora mais apropriada para compreender
a simbiose existente entre Shakespeare e a artista vitoriana, uma vez que o
público leitor feminino como um todo já estava particularmente atento e
receptivo às vozes femininas de Shakespeare.2
Tendo escrito muitas das suas obras durante o reinado de Isabel I,
Shakespeare criou heroínas que tanto funcionam dentro de uma estrutura
social maioritariamente determinada pelos homens como se rebelam contra,
tentam dominar e, em última análise, são esmagadas por essa mesma estrutura.
Com outra rainha no trono da Grã-Bretanha do século XIX, tanto a figura da
mulher como o próprio Shakespeare acabaram sendo idealizados; isso mesmo
se pode depreender do comentário de William Hazlitt (1817-69), a propósito
de Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays:
It is the peculiar excellence of Shakespear’s heroines that they seem to
exist only in their attachment to others. They are pure abstractions of the
affections. […] No one ever hit the true perfection of the female character,
the sense of weakness leaning on the strength of its affections for support, so
well as Shakespear. (16)

A corroborar esta tendência estão as edições das obras de Shakespeare

que foram especialmente produzidas com o público leitor feminino em mente
durante o reinado de Vitória (1837-1901): qualquer passagem que pudesse ferir
o sentido de delicadeza da mulher vitoriana era extirpada do texto original.
Por outro lado, livros sobre as heroínas shakespearianas, cuidadosamente
ilustrados com os seus retratos, eram usados com o propósito de disseminar
ideias sobre o bom comportamento moral entre as jovens.3 Mas da mesma
forma que muitas das heroínas revelam personalidades fortes nas peças de

162 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

Shakespeare, muitas mulheres vitorianas não eram propriamente “Angels in
the house” (Coventry Patmore). As revistas femininas deste período também
exibiam a forma como o século XIX recriou as personagens de Shakespeare
à imagem da sua própria rainha.4 Uma das personagens favoritas das
actrizes vitorianas foi precisamente a de Rosalind devido à sua vivacidade e
espirituosismo, mas também curiosamente ao facto de usar roupas masculinas.
Lady Macbeth, uma das mulheres mais rebeldes criadas por Shakespeare, foi
algo difícil de assimilar pelos vitorianos mais respeitáveis; estes tentaram
ver nela uma esposa vitoriana cujas ambições serviram o marido mas que foi
rejeitada depois do sucesso por ele atingido, conduzida à loucura e por fim
a uma morte solitária.5 O simples facto de Shakespeare dramatizar muitas
faces da mulher ou do feminino – a sua “infinite variety” – fez dele uma fonte
inesgotável de inspiração para os vitorianos.
Procurando responder à questão central (de Virginia Woolf) de porque é
que não existe um “equivalente” feminino a Shakespeare na literatura inglesa,
Germaine Greer refere não só as limitações na educação das mulheres mas
também o facto de elas só terem referências de sucesso literário no masculino,
tornando-se “dazzled spectators of male achievement” e emulando poetas
como Byron.6 Segundo Greer, “We can usually tell from a woman’s work
which male poet she most admires because she will offer him the sincerest
flattery: imitation”7. De facto, muitas das mulheres que escreviam poesia
usavam uma forma de emulação ou de ventriloquismo, isto é, as suas vozes
eram disfarçadas dentro de identidades estereotipadas que as próprias
criavam.
Num poema inacabado, escrito entre 1842 e 1844, que começa “My
sisters! Daughters of this Fatherland / Which we call England”, a poetisa que
se assinava Elizabeth Barrett Barrett apela às mulheres inglesas: “Give me
your ear & heart – grant me your voice / Do confirm my voice – lest it speak
in vain” (5-6). Este apelo demonstra que EBB procurou inserir e reafirmar a
voz feminina (a sua) numa tradição predominantemente masculina de poesia
pública.8 E, de facto, por volta de meados do século, ela surgia juntamente
com Tennyson entre a primeira linha de poetas ingleses, celebrada não só
pelo público como também por outros escritores e artistas. Ela seria a única
escritora a ser incluída na lista de “Imortais” traçada pela jovem Irmandade
Pré-rafaelita em 1848, apenas dois anos antes de ser nomeada pelo Athenaeum
como uma candidata à posição de “Poet Laureate” na sequência da morte de
Wordsworth, em 1850.
No entanto, à poetisa que famosamente lamentou a falta de ‘literary
grandmothers’ não parece ter faltado um conjunto de notáveis masculinos,
nomeadamente Shakespeare e Homero, os quais ela descreve em The Book of
the Poets (1842) como “colossal borderers of the two intellectual departments

Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães 163

of the world’s age… the antique and modern literatures” (The Works, 1994,
23). O relacionamento de EBB com estas figuras é representado e reconhecido
através dos encontros de “Aurora Leigh” com vários poetas do passado, em
que esta reclama por igual o seu papel numa história literária essencialmente
masculina:
My own best poets, I am one with you,
That thus I love you, – or but one through love?
Does all this smell of thyme about my feet
Conclude my visit to your holy hill
In personal presence, or but testify
The rustling of your vesture through my dreams
With influent odours?
(AL 1: 881-87)

Tal como muitos dos seus precursores masculinos, Elizabeth Barrett

estava empenhada num estudo rigoroso e disciplinado dos autores antigos
– que ela lia, traduzia e estudava nas décadas de vinte e trinta – com o firme
objectivo de adicionar a sua voz à dos grandes poetas que a tinham precedido.
Para além dos previsíveis poetas gregos e latinos, a Parte II do seu diário
(1831-32) contém uma curiosa lista de sete páginas com nomes de poetas
espanhóis e portugueses, isto é, um total de cinquenta e oito representantes
dos períodos medieval, renascentista e barroco e respectivos géneros.9
Após uma breve exploração do conhecimento eventual que EBB poderia
ter do poeta português Luís de Camões e da literatura portuguesa de um modo
geral, pode-se concluir que esta poetisa vitoriana traçava até ele, e até outros
como ele, a sua fiel linhagem e impensável reputação como “poeta amorosa”.
EBB escreveu a primeira versão da sua balada “Catarina to Camoens” em
1831, precisamente o período coincidente com o seu estudo dos poetas
peninsulares, o que revela que ela sabia muito mais sobre a vida e a obra de
Camões do que qualquer antologia traduzida lhe poderia fornecer. Para além
disso, no seu poema “A Vision of Poets” (Poems, 1844), EBB menciona o poeta
e os seus Lusíadas, juntamente com os espanhóis Lope de Vega e Calderon
de la Barca.10 Dado o interesse escolar e artístico ao longo da sua carreira em
fazer as suas próprias traduções do latim, do francês e do italiano, nada disto
nos poderá surpreender. A acrescer a esta informação têm surgido algumas
provas de que as referências portuguesas e espanholas presentes nos Sonnets
parecem compreender muitos mais poetas para além de Camões (incluindo
Soror Maria do Ceo e Luís de Gongora),11 o que revela a complexa construção
estética da lírica de EBB: a subtileza das suas alusões, a complexidade das suas
metáforas (exibindo qualidades barrocas), o alcance do seu saber – revelando
algo mais acerca das suas motivações nesta escrita.
A razão pela qual EBB escolheu como título para os seus quarenta e quatro
sonetos amorosos “Sonnets from the Portuguese” tem sido tão famosa entre o

164 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

público como unânime entre a crítica: uma forma de disfarce ou encobrimento
do carácter intimamente pessoal dos mesmos. No entanto, outras razões se têm
apresentado para esta escolha: Dorothy Mermin, por exemplo, defende que a
designação deriva do encanto causado em Robert Browning pela composição
do poema de EBB intitulado “Catarina to Camoens”, eventualmente aliado
ao propósito fictício de darem a entender que se tratava de uma “mera”
tradução (103). Numa carta dirigida à sua irmã após a publicação dos Sonnets
(1850), EBB explicaria, no entanto, que o título tinha sido escolhido “after
much consideration” e que “from the Portuguese” não significava “from
the Portuguese language” (Mermin 104). A ambiguidade do título, a qual
aliás os Browning não desejavam desfazer, poderá ser explicada pelo facto
de o mesmo não se apresentar completo, faltando-lhe – entre outras coisas
– nomear o destinatário dos poemas. A versão completa deveria ter sido
originalmente “Sonnets from the Portuguese [Lady to Camoens]”, assim
revelando explicitamente que o falante dos poemas é não só uma mulher, mas
também uma que deseja exprimir os seus sentimentos por um poeta através da
poesia. Através da sugestão daquele título, EBB imagina-se, assim, ocupando
o lugar de uma dama da corte a quem subitamente foi dada voz e Browning o
lugar de poeta cortês, cujos versos de amor são finalmente correspondidos.12
Se os sonetos do poeta renascentista português estão presentes na nossa
mente, os sonetos de Shakespeare estão inevitavelmente presentes na mente de
quem lê os Sonnets from the Portuguese, parecendo indiciar uma relação latente
entre ambas as sequências. As semelhanças entre a linguagem escrita do bardo
inglês e a de EBB foram notadas por um crítico dos finais do século:
[…] Mrs. Browning was Elizabethan in her luxuriance and her audacity, and the
gigantic scale of her wit. We often feel with her as we feel with Shakespeare,
that she would have done better with half as much talent. The great curse of
the Elizabethans is upon her, that she cannot leave anything alone, she cannot
write a single line without a conceit […] (Varied Types, Gilbert Keith Chesterton,
31, minha ênfase)

A avaliação do “génio” de EBB envolve inevitavelmente extensas compa-

rações com Shakespeare, tanto em termos gerais como no contexto das
sequências de sonetos respectivas. Os Sonnets de EBB foram encarados por
alguns críticos, como William T. Arnold e Edmund Gosse, como a sua melhor
obra. Para Mary Russell Mitford e a North American Review, eles eram “the
finest love poems in our language” (quoted in Marshall 49). No entanto, e tal
como Tricia Lootens nota no seu estudo acerca da recepção crítica dos Sonnets,
estes estão longe de ser poemas típicos sobre o amor, revelando peculiaridades
psicológicas na posição de EBB partilhadas por poucos leitores (117). Na
verdade, e segundo G. B. Smith no Cornhill Magazine, os Sonetos “are more
explanatory […] of her own very distinct individuality” do que qualquer

Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães 165

outra obra sua (Lootens 119). Para muitos críticos, no entanto, os Sonetos
ofereciam uma oportunidade para comparar EBB com outros poetas, que o
resto da sua obra mais experimental não possibilitava. A medida rigorosa
implícita na forma do soneto foi vista pelos críticos como um disciplinar da
exuberância imagética e sonora da sua lírica (“chains of adverbial caprices”
e “tempestuous assonances”, Lootens 120). Se, para uns, a admiração por
Shakespeare e Wordsworth “drove her to emulation”, para outros EBB
igualava ou excedia estas figuras (120).
Os desafios que EBB encontrou parecem ser óbvios: ela teve não só
de resolver questões formais – a adaptação de uma forma tipicamente
renascentista a uma linguagem quase coloquial e a um contexto contemporâneo
– mas também de contrariar a convenção central da tradição sonetista de que
à mulher é tradicionalmente atribuído o papel de objecto amado e nunca de
sujeito poético. Como afirma Angela Leighton, “To write a sonnet sequence
is of course to trespass on a male domain”, o domínio de Dante, Petrarca,
Sidney e Shakespeare (98). Por outro lado, o facto de EBB falar de outro poeta
(Robert Browning) como amado coloca-a na posição algo delicada de escrever
sobre alguém que tinha uma voz própria e que muito dificilmente ocuparia a
tradicional posição de sujeito mudo – como musa ou inspiração.13
Nestes seus textos, e como enfatiza Marshall, EBB não é uma copista
servil e circunscrita das palavras de Shakespeare (46); as citações e alusões
ao bardo, que são bastante notáveis e frequentes na sua correspondência
pessoal, reconhecem a devida diferença histórica e enfatizam transmissão e
interrelação. Trata-se de uma relação de reconhecimento mútuo, de cooperação
e de potencial criatividade, de um enriquecimento da fonte através de um
novo conjunto de ressonâncias (Marshall 47). A partir desta relação íntima,
EBB constrói uma linguagem da intimidade na qual se dirige aos seus amigos
mais próximos e ao seu amado Robert Browning. É uma linguagem que lhe
permite, através do jogo de papéis, da liberdade de conhecimentos partilhados
e da alusão quase silenciosa, encontrar um meio de articulação e de exposição
de pensamentos íntimos fora das convenções vitorianas.
Apesar da disciplina conferida pela forma do soneto à arte poética de
EBB, os Sonnets from the Portuguese, quando comparados com os belamente
elaborados ‘conceitos’ de Shakespeare, parecem algo tensos e (es)forçados ao
procurarem transmitir uma experiência amorosa que o soneto ainda não tinha
abarcado, o amor de uma poetisa vitoriana por um escritor contemporâneo.
EBB parece considerar as potencialidades da forma, tal como ela foi explorada
por Shakespeare, insatisfatórias para os seus próprios fins, procurando alterá-
-las no sentido de concretizar o efeito visceral da sua paixão, cujas raízes estão
no amor familiar, e de tentar encontrar uma forma de acomodação para ela e
para a poesia de Robert Browning.

166 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Comparativamente, e em certo sentido, os sonetos de Shakespeare
podem ser vistos como bastante mais problemáticos para os vitorianos. Nos
finais do século XIX, Edmund Gosse descrevia os Sonetos de EBB como “more
wholesome” pois tratam “a mood that [by comparison with Shakespeare’s]
is not rare and almost sickly, not foreign to the common experience of mankind,
but eminently normal, direct, and obvious” (10).14 Como Tricia Lootens faz
notar, se críticos como Gosse consideram os Sonetos de EBB mais ‘inteligíveis’
é claramente porque eles exprimem “a love that dares to speak its name”
(Lootens 143). Embora estes declarem quase escandalosamente o direito de
uma mulher a amar, é óbvio que são apesar de tudo menos transgressivos que
aqueles que se reportam a um amor então considerado como sendo anormal
ou desviante e, por isso, doentio.15
Segundo Kerry McSweeny em Supreme Attachments (1998), as relações
amorosas assumiram um valor comparativamente importante para os
vitorianos que tinham de algum modo aceite que não existia um além, uma
ordem providencial, uma dimensão transcendente da existência humana
(6). O amor veio, assim, em certo sentido compensar o crescente declínio da
fé religiosa. Mas, em marcado contraste com períodos anteriores em que se
celebrou aquele sentimento de forma mais artificial ou idealizada, a poesia
amorosa vitoriana foi sobretudo uma poesia de relações actuais e reais entre
homem e mulher (inclusive no matrimónio) e, adicionalmente, uma poesia
com uma crescente ênfase no ponto de vista feminino.16 Por outro lado, foi
durante o período vitoriano que uma tradição de poesia amorosa escrita por
mulheres se estabeleceu e que foi principalmente originada por poetisas como
Felicia Hemans e Letitia Elizabeth Landon, as quais foram lidas de forma
atenta mas crítica por Barrett Browning.
Em alguns poetas vitorianos, o constrangimento ou embaraço rela-
cionado com a experiência amorosa manifestou-se na escrita de poesia
amorosa, em particular na preocupação reflexiva com a relação da sua
actividade criativa com as formas, convenções e discursos da poesia amorosa
tradicional. Segundo McSweeny, as características distintivas da poesia
amorosa vitoriana são as seguintes: uma preocupação com a relação entre o
amor e a mortalidade e a possibilidade de uma transcendência futura, com o
ponto de vista de ambas as partes na relação amorosa, mais particularmente o
da mulher; um reconhecimento da importância do contexto (social, ideológico
ou institucional) e, finalmente, um constrangimento em relação ao amor
romântico e à sua expressão poética (19-20).
Publicado em 1844 por EBB, “L.E.L.’s Last Question” é um poema que
critica a auto-comiseração egocêntrica e debilitante do amor romântico não
correspondido e que termina exactamente onde os Sonnets from the Portuguese
começam, isto é, no próprio limiar da morte e com o credo cristão como único

Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães 167

consolo e apoio para a poetisa (EBB, The Works 251-252). A sequência de
sonetos de EBB constitui uma refutação implícita daquela atitude pois conta
a história de como uma mulher poeta (a própria), não amada e resignada a
essa sua condição, consegue contra todas as expectativas encontrar o amor
e a felicidade. Inicialmente, EBB afirma que ela e o seu pretendente não são
compatíveis nem em idade nem em vigor, “We are not peers” – “Unlike our
uses and our destinies” (sonetos IX e III). Enquanto ele irradia vida, “[a] great
heap of grief” está escondida dentro dela e “frequent tears have run / The
colours from my life, and left so dead / And pale a stuff” (sonetos V e VIII).
Enquanto ele é chamado a cantar poemas grandiosos “[on] some palace-
floor”, a casa dela é uma ruína, tendo como únicos habitantes “bats and owls”
(soneto IV). Em suma, as diferenças entre ambos parecem ser insuperáveis,
mas sobretudo para ela própria: “O Belóved, it is plain / I am not of thy worth
nor for thy place!” (soneto XI).17
Na sua tentativa de renúncia deste amor aparentemente desigual, a
falante não é bem sucedida e o ponto de viragem ocorre somente quando ela
se decide por fim aceitar tal sentimento: “Here ends my strife. If thou invite
me forth, / I rise above abasement at the word” (soneto XVI). Depois desta
mudança, o abandono definitivo da sua postura deliberada de rebaixamento,
pouco mais parece suceder do ponto de vista conflitual nos restantes vinte e
oito sonetos da sequência. Alguns destes limitam-se a registar os estádios na
crescente intimidade entre ambos os poetas – as suas cartas, o primeiro beijo,
a troca de madeixas de cabelo; outros oferecem fortes imagens figurativas do
inesperado regresso da poetisa à vida e ao amor. Num deles, EBB recorda
que quando o amado entrou na sua existência ela se via “more like an out-of-
tune / Worn viol”, da qual um bom ‘trovador’ como Browning só faria uso
se fosse insensato (soneto XXXII).18 Num outro, ela manifesta um desejo de
transcendência por via desse amor:
[…] to shoot
My soul’s full meaning into future years,
That they should lend utterance, and salute
Love that endures, from Life that disappears!
(soneto XLI, The Work, 327)

Passagens como esta fazem da escrita de sonetos amorosos um dos

próprios assuntos da sequência e convidam à reflexão sobre o tipo de ‘música’
que Barrett Browning fazia – a sua escolha de equivalentes verbais para o
‘novo ritmo’ pelo qual a sua vida foi arrebatada (soneto VII): “To let thy music
drop here unaware/ In folds of golden fulness at my door?” (The Works 319).
No seu capítulo sobre a recepção crítica de EBB em Lost Saints, Tricia
Lootens vê como indispensável à nossa compreensão da perda gradual dos
Sonnets como obras de arte, o reconhecimento crítico “of [their] strangeness,

168 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

heaviness, and eccentric richness” (118).19 Por exemplo, a imagem do Amor
puxando a falante pelo cabelo, presente no primeiro soneto da sequência,
parece refutar a genuína expectativa da morte mas estabelece uma exigência
íntima cujo poder erótico é profundamente vitoriano:
[…] a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair:
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove, –
‘Guess now who holds thee?’ – ‘Death,’ I said. But, there,
The silver answer rang, – ‘Not Death, but Love.’
(The Works 318, minha ênfase)

O discurso torna-se assim abstracto, transgressivo e ambivalente,

parecendo reescrever e reverter um outro tipo de cortejamento, “the courtship
of Death and the Maiden”.20 Esperando a “forma mística” da Morte, a falante
desgastada vê que o Amor tomou o seu lugar: enquanto a donzela medieval
tinha insistido na vida, esta insiste agora na morte. No entanto, tal como a sua
predecessora, a falante de EBB acaba por aceitar a substituição de pretendentes
feita por Deus. Ela aceita, então, um amado terreno “not unallied / To angels”
– um orquestrador de milagres da vida, assim como poeta: “budding, at thy
sight, my pilgrim’s staff / Gave out green leaves” (soneto XLII). Ao mesmo
tempo salva e vencida, ela abandona a disciplina heróica do seu ascetismo: “I
yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange / My near sweet view of Heaven,
for earth with thee.” Tal como o próprio Browning previu, os sonetos formam
“[a] strange, heavy crown”, isto é, uma arte ao mesmo tempo difícil, ambiciosa
e profundamente pessoal (citada em Lootens 118).
Como acabámos de ver, os Sonnets from the Portuguese têm sido conside-
rados simultaneamente a obra mais popular mas também a mais desvalori-
zada de Barrett Browning. No entanto, eles seriam o primeiro trabalho a
mostrar sinais de maturidade e também o primeiro poema longo em que EBB
escreveria sobre a sua experiência pessoal fazendo uso da sua própria voz.
De facto, depois das incursões mais ou menos insatisfatórias por uma grande
variedade de géneros e formas, incluindo a épica homérica, o verso didáctico
ao estilo de Pope, a tragédia grega cristianizada e uma combinação híbrida do
verso dramático renascentista e da épica Miltoniana, EBB enveredava agora
pela lírica, a mais íntima e expressiva das formas.21 A tradição da sequência
de sonetos, cujo revivalismo oitocentista foi a própria EBB a inaugurar,
encorajava a análise psicológica densamente elaborada na qual a autora se
distinguia e permitia igualmente uma forte linha narrativa. A apresentação
inesperada de um cenário contemporâneo e de pequenos acontecimentos do
dia-a-dia faz dos Sonnets uma experiência ousada, nas palavras de Dorothy
Mermin, “a novelistic poem of modern life” (122).22

Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães 169

 O próprio auto-retrato da falante de EBB é muito pouco lisonjeiro, já que
dele sobressai a imagem de uma mulher doente e precocemente envelhecida,
recusando deste modo representar-se como objecto de desejo convencional
(qual Laura ou Catarina). Presume-se que esta descrição que a poetisa faz de
si mesma é para ser tomada como verdadeira e não como mero artifício, ao
contrário do auto-retrato como homem envelhecido que Shakespeare apresenta
nos seus Sonnets (nomeadamente em “That time of year thou mayest in me
behold”). A alusão à imagem de envelhecimento frequentemente adoptada
por este poeta surge, de forma mais reveladora, no final do soneto X, que
afirma precisamente o poder regenerador do Amor:
And what I feel, across the inferior features
Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show
How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s.
(The Works 320, minha ênfase)

Embora na maioria dos casos Shakespeare pareça funcionar primaria-

mente como o estímulo para um conjunto de expectativas nem sempre
concretizadas, os sonetos de EBB possuem alguns ecos bem distintos e
detectáveis do bardo. Por exemplo, podemos ouvir ressonâncias do soneto
116 de Shakespeare (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit
impediments. Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or
bends with the remover to remove”) na parte final do soneto II de EBB, que
começa “But only three in all God’s universe” e faz referência aos mesmos
obstáculos colocados ao amor:
[…]
Men could not part us with their worldly jars,
Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend;
Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars:
And, heaven being rolled between us at the end,
We should but vow the faster for the stars.
(The Works, 318, minha ênfase)

Também podemos revisitar o par amoroso, Romeu e Julieta (Works 764-

794), na imagem genericamente invertida do amado que olha superiormente
“from the lattice-lights” para “[the] poor, tired, wandering singer, singing
through / The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree” do soneto III de EBB
(“Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!”). Podemos relembrar o destino
condenado de Ofélia (Hamlet, em Works, 870-907) nas imagens que referem
o medo da poetisa se ‘afundar’, “[…] the dreadful outer brink / Of obvious
death, where I, … thought to sink”, no soneto número sete (“The face of all
the world is changed”), e ainda a recuperação da imagem floral associada à
mesma personagem feminina no soneto XLIV:
Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers

170 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Plucked in the garden, all the summer through
And winter, and it seemed as if they grew
In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers.

So, in the like name of that love of ours,

Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too,
And which on warm and cold days I withdrew
From my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers

Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue,

And wait thy weeding; yet here’s eglantine,
Here ‘s ivy!—take them, as I used to do

Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.
Instruct thine eyes to keep their colors true,
And tell thy soul their roots are left in mine.
(The Works 327, minha ênfase)

Este é um simile natural estabelecido entre as flores oferecidas por

Browning e os poemas de amor escritos por EBB, em que a falante espera o
mesmo tratamento cuidado para as criações da sua mente. Mas as imagens
que em Shakespeare significam um desespero impotente são transmudadas
em EBB para os sinais inequívocos do seu amor. As significações folclóricas
que constituem a única forma de Ofélia transmitir o seu desespero tornam-se
em EBB num meio de aproximação a Browning, declarando o seu amor de
maneira a convidar também à sua participação como o “cultivador” das suas
palavras.
No entanto, Barrett Browning sabe que para ser senhora do que ela
designa como “the power at the end of my pen” (citada em Mermin 120)
é forçoso entrar num jogo político entre sujeito e objecto. Esta é a situação
que ela encena no soneto XIII, que devido quer à sua qualidade dramática
– presença de diálogo e argumento – quer ao seu uso de elaboradas metáforas
e paradoxos, é talvez um dos mais Shakespearianos do seu repertório.
Embora o poema pareça, à primeira vista, sancionar as convenções associadas
ao comedimento, reserva e silêncio femininos, ele afirma na realidade que
elas servem apenas para proteger o amado do poder ameaçador das palavras
femininas:
And wilt thou have me fashion into speech
The love I bear thee, finding words enough,
And hold the torch out, while the winds are rough,
Between our faces, to cast light on each?—

I drop it at thy feet. I cannot teach

My hand to hold my spirit so far off
From myself—me—that I should bring thee proof
In words, of love hid in me out of reach.

Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães 171

 Nay, let the silence of my womanhood
Commend my woman-love to thy belief, –
Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed,

And rend the garment of my life, in brief,

By a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude,
Lest one touch of this heart convey its grief.
(The Works 320-321, minha ênfase)

Neste soneto, EBB declara-se incapaz de exprimir o seu amor nos moldes
esperados, isto é, por meio de palavras eloquentes, mas também de conseguir
o distanciamento e a frieza necessários ao artista (usualmente pugnados
por Browning). Deixa essa tarefa a cargo do seu interlocutor. Ela apenas
pode facultar uma demonstração mais genuinamente feminina, por via do
silêncio e da tristeza. EBB transforma, deste modo, alguns dos símbolos mais
plangentes de Shakespeare nos sinais do seu amor, mas inova ao enunciá-los
como uma mulher, recuperando finalmente o silêncio de algumas heroínas de
Shakespeare e transformando a tradição ao imergi-la nas particularidades da
sua modernidade. Assim, em vez da paixão ao mesmo tempo crua e artificial
dos primeiros sonetistas, podemos encontrar a intimidade delicada e detalhada
do ardor vitoriano em toda a sequência amorosa, como é o caso do soneto
XXXVIII (“First time he kissed me, he but only kissed”), em que os inequívocos
sinais de afecto servem sobretudo para purificar os amados (The Works 326).
Os sonetos de EBB também operam dentro de um quadro temporal
diferente. Enquanto Shakespeare está convencido de que os seus sonetos
podem conferir imortalidade – ao seu amor, ao seu amado ou à própria
poesia – tal como se depreende de composições como “Shall I compare thee
to a summer’s day”, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments” e “Or I shall
live your epitaph to make”, para EBB a morte não é um término mas antes o
começo do amor pós-vida num céu especificamente cristão. Para EBB, quando
muito, a poesia poderá conferir imortalidade à sua alma e somente através
desta ao seu amor, como sobressai do soneto XLI: “[…] Oh, to shoot / My
soul’s full meaning into future years, / That they should lend it utterance, and
salute / Love that endures, from Life that disappears!” (327, ênfase minha).
Por vezes, EBB constrói todo um soneto a partir da “matéria prima”
fornecida por Shakespeare, apropriando-a mesmo a um contexto radicalmente
diferente do contexto original, embora de forma inconsciente ou irreconhecida.
É o caso do famoso soneto XLIII, “How do I love thee? Let me count the
ways”, cuja pergunta retórica inicial é comparável à pergunta que o Rei Lear
faz a suas filhas na peça trágica com o mesmo nome: “Which of you shall we
say doth love us most […] ?” Mas, paradoxalmente, é a eloquente resposta da
filha mais velha, Goneril que, apesar da sua latente insinceridade, parece ter
inspirado mais EBB na composição do seu poema:

172 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter;
Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty;
Beyond what can be valu’d, rich or rare;
No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour;
As much as child e’er lov’d, or father found;
A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable;
Beyond all manner of so much I love you.
(Works 1. 1. 51-61)

Também no soneto – presume-se sincero – dirigido a Browning, a falante

está implicitamente respondendo a uma pergunta colocada pelo destinatário,
que na realidade parafraseia a difícil mas fulcral questão colocada por Lear.
Além disso, o soneto contém elementos que se assemelham especificamente à
enunciação de Goneril e que ocorrem na mesma sequência. As palavras “depth
and breadth and height” que ocorrem na segunda linha do soneto especificam
as três dimensões do “espaço” físico mencionadas na segunda linha do
discurso de Goneril. Em ambos os textos a forma adoptada é um catálogo de
modos de amar o destinatário, consistindo sobretudo de abstracções; ambos
começam e terminam da mesma forma, com a declaração “I love thee” / “I
love you” (The Works 327).
No Livro I de Aurora Leigh (1857), Shakespeare seria mesmo associado à
figura paterna. Na passagem em que Aurora descreve a forma como seu pai
a ensinava, podemos detectar ecos dos ensinamentos de Próspero a Miranda:
“My father taught me what he had learnt the best / Before he died and left me,
– grief and love” (1. 185-6). O poeta narra como, durante vários anos, Miranda
tinha vivido sozinha com seu pai, de quem dependia completamente quer para
comunicar quer para adquirir conhecimento. Através da sua autoridade como
pai e como dono de escravos, assim como da sua habilidade como mágico,
Próspero controlava o ambiente, o conhecimento e os relacionamentos de
sua filha (The Tempest, Works 1-22). Tal como Miranda, EBB estava realmente
às ordens de seu pai até que Robert Browning aparece para literalmente lhe
“dar” uma voz e, assim, pôr em questão esse domínio. Miranda parece, assim,
partilhar com ela esse primeiro isolamento social, assim como a tendência para
ser “emocionalmente declarativa”. Através desta analogia com a personagem
de Shakespeare, os críticos vitorianos do final de século pretendiam recuperar
a imagem de EBB como filha exemplar – que ela, na realidade, não tinha sido.23
Embora ecoando em muitas outras peças de Shakespeare onde a função da
“filha” é frequentemente crucial, as peculiaridades desta relação são extremas
mas também reveladoras das circunstâncias pessoais de EBB e da natureza
autoritária do relacionamento destes pais com suas filhas. E, mais tarde, Aurora
acaba por acreditar que “I thought my father’s land was worthy too / Of
being my Shakespeare’s” (1. 1091-92); isto apesar da sua incredulidade inicial
ao chegar a Inglaterra vinda de Itália de que “Shakespeare and his mates”

Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães 173

pudessem “Absorb the light here” (1. 266-267). Inicialmente, Shakespeare
carrega o peso e a ressonância daquela autoridade paterna, mas à medida
que o poema progride ele passa a estar mais firmemente associado à pessoa
de Aurora e também a possibilidades emocionais mais do que pedagógicas:
“God has made me, – I’ve a heart / That’s capable of worship, love and
loss; / We say the same of Shakespeare’s” (7. 734-746). Uma parte crucial da
narrativa de Aurora Leigh consiste, deste modo, no feito alcançado de uma
relação capacitante com aqueles predecessores literários que informam a
poética de EBB.
Tanto no caso dos Sonnets from the Portuguese como em Aurora Leigh, EBB
retira um momento ou uma sugestão de Shakespeare e transpõe-na para um
novo cenário, vertendo-a para um outro mundo. Assim, ela não pretende
aquilo que Aurora descreve como “lifeless imitations” (AL 1. 974) de poetas
mais velhos, mas sim uma poética que possa ser “the witness of what Is /
Behind this show” (7. 834-835, minha ênfase). Trata-se de uma forma de
transferência em que o texto original permanece imperturbado e discreto mas
em que as palavras de Shakespeare “habitam” de modo imanente o poema
de EBB, parecendo pertencer tanto ao passado como ao presente. As obras de
Shakespeare parecem viver dentro de e dar vida às palavras de EBB que, por
sua vez, testemunham a riqueza criativa do bardo, mas a partir de uma outra
esfera e de outro século.
Dentro da própria escrita de EBB, um tipo de diálogo completamente
diferente se estabelece entre os dois escritores. Como as cartas dela mostram
de forma ainda mais acutilante do que os poemas, esse diálogo emana
de dentro do contexto familiar, ao mesmo tempo que “ilude” as suas
convencionais estruturas de poder. O primeiro “encontro” registado de EBB
com Shakespeare surge numa carta dirigida a sua tia quando aquela tinha
apenas onze anos de idade (Marshall 63), em que cita Othello, identificando-se
com a rudeza mas também com o carácter encantatório da personagem (Works
I. iii. 81). Esta é, juntamente com Hamlet, uma das peças das quais EBB cita
mais frequentemente na sua correspondência. A linguagem de Shakespeare
oferece-lhe os meios de abordar o assunto familiar mais delicado ou sensível
com tacto e humor. Por vezes, EBB ironiza as palavras de Hamlet, descrevendo
a sua cabeça dorida como “a distracted globe” (I. v. 97); outras vezes, usa a
peça como pretexto para escrever a muitos correspondentes. Por exemplo,
numa carta dirigida a Mary Russell Mitford, EBB faz alusão às palavras que
Cordelia dirigiu a seu pai em King Lear, “[…] Let me be silent and love you”
(Works I. i. 63,), numa das primeiras referências à questão das vozes femininas
e ao seu silêncio/silenciamento naquela peça.24
É na correspondência de EBB com Robert Browning, onde ela se ocupa
igualmente das questões relacionadas com identidade e escrita, que podemos

174 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

assistir ao culminar deste modo de “tradução” na sua partilhada intimidade
com Shakespeare e na sua expressão daquilo que o poeta significa para
ela.25 A relação entre ambos os poetas parece ter sido fundada em parte
numa leitura partilhada das obras de Shakespeare. Ao escrever a Browning,
em 1845, acerca das circunstâncias traumáticas da sua vida, a sua infância
isolada e a sua reclusão em casa, EBB afirma: “I was as a man [sic] dying
who had not read Shakespeare … & it was too late!” (Karlin 33-35). Neste
desabafo, Shakespeare não funciona simplesmente como uma analogia da
vida num modelo genericamente invertido, mas como a vida que lhe foi
negada em si mesma. EBB invoca a experiência de “viver” em Shakespeare
não como um mero substituto mas como um símbolo ou representação do
que essa vida mais activa potencialmente pode ser. Por outro lado, Robert
Browning “entra” na vida de EBB literalmente através de uma citação de
Shakespeare, que ela usaria ao explicar o seu entusiasmo por Paracelsus: “I
do think and feel that the pulse of poetry is full and warm and strong in it,
and that […] it ‘bears a charmed life” (Macbeth V. viii. 12). Apreciação que
levaria o autor a enviar a sua primeira carta a EBB e, deste modo, a encetar
o relacionamento amoroso entre ambos. Não é, por isso, surpreendente que
EBB respondesse à proposta de casamento de Browning com uma referência
a Shakespeare: “How would any woman have felt who could feel at all …
hearing such words said though ‘in a dream’ by such a speaker?” (Tempest I.
ii. 487). Com o progredir da intimidade, as citações de Shakespeare tornam-
-se mais subentendidas ou silenciosas, quase tácitas, parecendo reconhecer o
seu estatuto e conhecimento partilhados como poetas, e Shakespeare como a
verdadeira essência do relacionamento entre ambos.

NOTES

1
Parte deste ensaio foi apresentada em forma de comunicação, “Shakespeare e a
Poetisa Vitoriana: Sujeito e Género nos Sonetos de Elizabeth Barrett Browning”,
na XXX Conferência da Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Anglo-Americanos
(“Sujeito, Memória e Expressão”), Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto,
19-21 de Fevereiro de 2009.
2
Um outro estudo, o de Phyllis Rackin sobre Shakespeare and Women (2005), procura
situar as personagens femininas de Shakespeare em contextos históricos múltiplos,
desde o período renascentista ao mundo ocidental contemporâneo, onde os nossos
encontros com elas são encenados. Rackin argumenta, nomeadamente, que a
reescrita que Shakespeare faz nos seus sonetos da musa petrarquista idealizada
antecipa as críticas feministas modernas acerca da misoginia da tradição poética
petrarquista.
3
A primeira obra mais aprofundada sobre as personagens femininas de Shakespeare,
incluindo vinte e uma das peças mais conhecidas do bardo, foi publicada em 1832
por Anna Jameson – Shakespeare’s Heroines. Characteristics of Women […]. Uma

Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães 175

 outra autora, Mary Cowden Clarke imaginou histórias sobre as heroínas antes de
elas entrarem nas peças, isto é, no período da sua infância e primeira juventude,
em Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850-51).
4
É o caso de The Lady’s Newspaper, que num dos seus números mostra uma cena
ilustrada do Theatre Royal Covent Garden com Lady Capulet junto da cama de
Juliet, cujas feições espelham a face da jovem Rainha Vitória e aquela se assemelha
à viúva que Vitória viria a ser.
5
Uma ilustração do artista popular vitoriano Kenny Meadows mostra Lady Macbeth
com a boca em formato botão-de-rosa e as feições perfeitas de uma senhorita
vitoriana, apenas o seu sobrolho franzido e o punhal empunhado revelando o seu
firme e nefasto propósito.
6
Este terá sido o caso não só de poetisas vitorianas como L.E.L. (Letitia Landon) mas
também da própria Elizabeth Barrett Browning e das irmãs Brontë, entre muitas
outras.
7
Germaine Greer, “Women with Rhyme, Reason and Rhythm”, Guardian, Sunday
November 4, 2001.
8
Daqui em diante, e por razões de ordem prática, faremos uso da popular abreviação
‘EBB’ para designar Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
9
EBB parece ter construído a sua lista a partir da obra contemporânea de John Bowring,
Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain (1824), uma antologia traduzida e das poucas
acessíveis ao público inglês de então.
10
“And Camoens, with that look he had, / Compelling India’s Genius sad / From the
wave through the Lusiad, – // The murmurs of the storm-cape ocean / Indrawn
in vibrative emotion / Along the verse.” (62-67).
11
Para uma análise mais pormenorizada destas referências, ver o artigo de Barbara
Neri intitulado “Cobridme de flores: (un)covering flowers of Portuguese and
Spanish poets in Sonnets from the Portuguese”, em Victorian Poetry (2006).
12
EBB tinha aparentemente lido, por volta de 1831, uma tradução das líricas de
Camões com uma introdução biográfica pelo Visconde Strangford. Este conta
o amor do poeta português por Catarina, uma dama da corte cuja família se
opunha à sua pretensão; embora todo o reconhecimento da paixão dela tivesse
sido suprimido pelas convenções sociais da altura, aquela acabaria por confessar
os seus sentimentos pelo poeta no preciso dia em que Camões era enviado para
o exílio. Esta informação deve ter servido a EBB como inspiração para a escrita
não só do seu poema “Catarina to Camoens” mas também de Sonnets from the
Portuguese.
13
Tal como afirma Leighton, “Barrett Browning must not only reverse the roles, but
she must also be sensitive to the fact that Robert was a lover and a poet in his own
right, and disinclined to be cast in the role of the superior muse”; deste modo,
EBB “[…] takes care in these poems not to disturb the precarious balance of their
imagination of each other” (99).
14
Edmund Gosse, “The Sonnets from the Portuguese”, 1896 (a ênfase é minha).
15
Por volta de 1894, quando Gosse escrevia e precisamente um ano antes da condenação
por homossexualidade de Óscar Wilde, tinha-se introduzido a novidade
Eduardiana de Shakespeare como poeta homossexual ou bissexual.
16
A poesia amorosa de Philip Sidney e John Donne, para referir apenas dois
exemplos da poesia isabelina (e metafísica), contém exclusivamente o ponto de
vista masculino. Por outro lado, na poesia romântica, o enunciador masculino
habitualmente transforma o elemento feminino numa mera projecção narcisística
do seu próprio ser. Pelo contrário, como salienta McSweeney, na poesia amorosa

176 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 vitoriana as questões de género constituem o foco central da ansiedade e do
debate entre poetas, nomeadamente nomes masculinos como os de Tennyson,
Browning, Clough e Meredith.
17
E.B.B., The Works, 318-320.
18
E.B.B., The Works 321 e 325.
19
Em contraste com a ideia generalizada de que os Sonnets from the Portuguese retratam
um amor convencional de forma convencional, Lootens reafirma o carácter
profundamente individual e original da situação descrita nos mesmos, assim
como a sua linguagem rebuscada ou trabalhada (“One has to revise and edit to
render such a lover generic”, 118).
20
A ‘Morte e a Donzela’ é um motivo recorrente na arte renascentista, especialmente na
pintura. O tema desenvolveu-se a partir da Dança da Morte, a que foi acrescentado
um subtexto erótico. Um dos representantes mais proeminentes deste motivo é
Hans Baldung Grien. Foi novamente adoptado pela arte romântica, nomeadamente
por Franz Schubert na sua lied intitulada “Der Tod und das Mädchen.”
21
Como explica Amy Billone (47), EBB publicou inicialmente apenas vinte e oito
sonetos, em 1844. Os restantes catorze sonetos só seriam publicados em 1850. Isto
numa altura em que a poetisa tinha estado igualmente ocupada com a tradução
dos sonetos de Petrarca, o que implica não apenas conhecimento da convenção
do soneto mas também uma forma de “diálogo” com este predecessor.
22
Os Sonnets representam, na realidade, a segunda abordagem de EBB à
contemporaneidade vitoriana, já tratada em “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” – uma
balada que, por sua vez, antecipa Aurora Leigh. Por outro lado, devido ao seu
carácter semi-autobiográfico e ao seu contexto contemporâneo, eles antecipam
outras sequências da lírica amorosa vitoriana como Maud (1855) de Tennyson,
The Angel in the House (1854-62) de Coventry Patmore, Modern Love (1862) de
Meredith, The House of Life de D. G. Rossetti e, de forma mais directa, Monna
Innominata de Christina Rossetti.
23
Como refere Lootens ao citar um contemporâneo de EBB, “The English love[d] to
call her Shakespeare’s Daughter […] and in truth she bears to their greatest poet
the relation of Miranda and Prospero” (139). Mas Lootens acrescenta também
que “few literary heroines can have been proclaimed the dutiful metaphoric child
of more or greater patriarchs than was Moulton-Barrett’s disobedient daughter”
(139).
24
No entanto, o primeiro correspondente com quem EBB foi intimamente
shakespeariana foi Hugh Stuart Boyd, o classicista cego com quem ela estudou
em criança e a quem inclusivamente dedicou vários poemas.
25
Como afirma Marshall, “she uses him as a medium, a bridge, through which she
can reach Browning. She uses his words to translate herself to Browning, but also
perhaps to present her emotions to herself as well, to give them form” (70).

WORKS CITED

Billone, Amy Christine. Little Songs. Women, Silence and the Nineteenth-Century
Sonnet. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2007.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. Introduced by
Cora Kaplan, London: The Women’s Press, 1989.

Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães 177

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Works. The Wordsworth Poetry Library,
Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994.
Carlyle, Thomas. Collected Works. Vol. XII. Heroes and Hero-Worship. London:
Chapman and Hall, 1869.
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Varied Types.
BiblioLife, 2010.
Clarke, Mary Cowden. The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines in a Series of Tales.
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1878.
Craig, W. J., ed. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. London, New York,
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1943.
Gosse, Edmund. “The Sonnets from the Portuguese.” In Critical Kit-kats, 1-17.
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1896.
Greer, Germaine. “Women with Rhyme, Reason and Rhythm”, Guardian,
Sunday November 4, 2001.
Hazlitt, William. Characters of Shakespear’s Plays. London: John Templeman,
1838.
Jameson, Anna. Memoirs of The Loves of the Poets. Boston: Ticknor and Fields,
1866.
Jameson, Anna. Shakespeare’s Heroines. Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical,
and Historical. Ontario and Plymouth: Broadview Press, 2005.
Karlin, Daniel, ed. Robert Browning & Elizabeth Barrett. The Courtship
Correspondence 1845-1846. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990.
Leighton, Angela. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Brighton: The Harvester Press,
1986.
Lootens, Tricia. “Canonization through Dispossession: Elizabeth Barrett
Browning and the ‘Pythian Shriek.’” Lost Saints. Silence, Gender, and
Victorian Literary Canonization. Charlottesville and London: University
Press of Virginia, 1996, 116-157.
Marshall, Gail. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: Translating the
Language of Intimacy.” Shakespeare and Victorian Women. Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 45-71.
McSweeney, Kerry. Supreme Attachments. Studies in Victorian Love Poetry.
Aldershot and Brookfield USA: Ashgate, 1998.
Mermin, Dorothy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Origins of a New Poetry.
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Neri, Barbara. “Cobridme de flores: (un)covering flowers of Portuguese and

178 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Spanish poets in Sonnets from the Portuguese,” Victorian Poetry (22
December 2006): 27-34.
Rackin, Phyllis. Shakespeare and Women. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Sawyer, Robert. Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare: George Eliot, A. C.
Swinburne, Robert Browning, and Charles Dickens. Cranbury NJ and London:
Associated University Presses, 2003.

Paula Alexandra Varanda Ribeiro Guimarães 179

 FROM VIDEODROME TO DEXTER: ‘LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH!’

Maria Antónia Lima

Recent symptoms of obsessive addiction to TV series such as C.S.I., Criminal

Minds, The X Files, Buffy – the Vampire Slayer and Dexter show a tendency
to substitute television soap operas for the Gothic novels and also reveal a
perverse attraction to watch violence through the same media that transmits
daily news about violent events in different war scenarios all over the
world. Perhaps one could consider that this irrational attraction to violent
images, where reality and illusion can become as confused as in a psychotic
mind, explains our constant state of psychic stress that Marshall McLuhan
considered as the most negative effect of technology. Being psychologically
infected through media, our minds are dangerously trained to receive
stronger stimulants that seem specially designed to increase our desires for
violence. Immunity to this condition can only be achieved through art, where
we can feel the true nature of our present and be deeply aware about our most
perverse impulses. David Cronenberg was able to express this awareness in
Videodrome (1983), where TV viewers suffer from hallucinations created by
electronic signals which provoke brain tumours. We too as potential victims
of this disease, whenever we watch some programs that depict torture and
murder, we still remain faithful to our TV screen which we have converted
into a domesticated monster we love and where we can see reflected our
most obscure desires. No wonder we can feel sympathy for Dexter Morgan’s
violent impulses and for his consciousness of being a “clean, crisp outside and
nothing at all on the inside” (Lindsay 49). After all, we share a common dream:
we look for another, more inventive, satisfying fleshy existence, perhaps on
the other side of death.
The desire to live a more intense and gratifying existence, to escape
the emptiness and the mechanism of daily routines, creates strong needs
to experience new emotions and sensations that people hope to find in the

181
new technologies, in general, and in TV in particular. Paradoxically, this
urge can cause an addiction to other kinds of repetitive acts creating an
inescapable entrapment that turns viewers into victims of an illusive world
where the most transgressive acts of violence can be experienced and lived
with the same intensity as if they were real, in spite of being simulated. The
involuntary repetition, created by TV, on its domestic viewers is what makes
them familiar with all the unfamiliar atrocities they watch, which denotes the
presence of the Freudian uncanny in this medium, that led Hellen Wheatley to
conclude “the uncanny provides the initial point of dialogue between Gothic
studies and television studies” (102). This “uncanny” effect is at the centre of
the ambivalence that blurs the boundaries between desire and fantasy, reality
and imagination, transgression and norm, an ambiguity experienced by every
person who sits in front of a small screen that has the power to produce a
constant effect of uncertainty that makes everyone loose his sense of reality.
That’s why TV is so attuned to the aesthetic purposes of the Gothic, which
is defined as “a genre of uncertainty” by Catherine Spooner, who considers
television “a space as well suited to the Gothic as any other” (242), an idea that
was also partaken by Davenport-Hines, when he stated that “television soap
opera provides the 20th century equivalent of Gothic novels” (144). As in gothic
fiction, the effects of horror in television are sometimes used to recuperate
some sense of the real, but instead they can “make the unreal of familiar horror
images real”, as Fred Botting concluded, when he also considered that “bloody,
violent, horrifying reality – shaped by Gothic figures and horror fictions – is
returned as Gothic horror by media” (5). This is the reason why simulated
violence can be perceived as real violence, and violent acts can be practiced in
reality with huge indifference as if they were quite banal, and didn’t require
any kind of responsibility for the consequences of their dangerous nature.
Being, at the same time, real, unreal and overreal, images of violence on TV
can originate a sense of loss in face of contradictory and ambivalent scenes,
because the difference between shock and repetition is erased. In a chapter
entitled “The small scream”, Fred Botting noticed this contradiction when
he characterized the television not only as a banal, mundane and repetitive
media, but also as a box of flows, shocks, sensations and strangeness, which
made him conclude that “Shock has been steadily incorporated in the circuits
of broadcasting and spectorial pleasure: ‘television contains (and pleasures
us) by contradictions’, the very ambivalence of the impulses of shock and
repetition marking the rates of bored familiarity and excited attention on the
pulses of the viewers” (131).
Being aware of these contradictory effects of television and trying to
denounce its horrific potentiality, David Cronenberg created Videodrome (1982),
a narrative about a man’s exposure to violent imagery via videocassettes and

182 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

broadcast signals. This victim was ironically, Max Renn, the President of a
cable station named Channel 83/Civic TV, which was known as “the one you
take to bed with you”, because of its interests in televised sex and violence.
Cronenberg’s sense of humour allowed him to approach his subject through
the detection of many contradictions that deconstruct an apparently controlled
communication system, revealing the dark side of its main responsible
interveners. Civic TV was never interested in civic service nor in promoting
any kind of moral sense because it was a pornographic TV channel. Max
Renn, its President, was so concerned about finding new audacious means
of shocking his TV viewers, through the most perverted sexual violence, that
he became completely addicted to it and totally deranged. Nicki Brand, a pop
psychologist, the soul saviour of CRAM Radio in a show called “Emotional
Rescue”, seemed to possess enough moral credibility to be invited to a TV
talk show to contest Renn’s obscene activities, but when later she was invited
to his apartment, she showed an uncontrollable curiosity for his porno tapes
and also for sado-masochist sexual practices. The character of Prof. Brian
O’Blivion, a media prophet obsessed with the metaphysics of television, was
humorously modelled on Canadian essayist Marshall McLuhan, famous for
his cryptic statements about media, which didn’t protect him, in Cronenberg’s
film, from being Videodrome’s first victim, reducing his existence to his
discourses recorded in a video-cassette. Bianca O’Blivion, his daughter, had
the mission to stop the side effects of the Videodrome signal, which induced
brain tumours in the viewers, but she was described as “her father’s screen”,
which creates certain doubts about the reality and efficiency of her messianic
purpose that departed from the suicidal principle that was necessary “to kill
your old flesh to become the New Flesh”.
Revealing their hidden duplicity, none of these characters seems to
escape from his darkest impulses which are stimulated by the spectacle of
TV violence, a fact that interested Cronenberg and that was also commented
by Fred Botting, when he concluded that “Unless the horror is spectacular
no interest will be excited: human feeling is extinguished or anaesthetised
or boredom sets in” (Spooner 62). Justifying his interest to delve deeper into
these perverse impulses, the Canadian director confesses: “I’ve always been
interested in dark things and other people’s fascination with dark things. The
idea of people locking themselves in a room and turning a key on a television
set so that they can watch something extremely dark, and, by doing that
allow themselves to explore their fascinations … That’s closer to the bone in
terms of an original impulse” (Lucas 27). On account of this primitive impulse
people feel uncontrollably attracted by repulsive and horrifying images that
are the cause, in Videodrome, for their hallucinations, because as Cronenberg
explains: “With Videodrome I want to posit the possibility that a man exposed

Maria Antónia Lima 183

to violent imagery would begin to hallucinate (…) there is a suggestion that
the technology involved in Videodrome is specifically designed to create
violence in a person” (Rodley 94).
This explanation about the influence of a technologic world on our human
senses and its power to cleave the mind into the real and the imagined can be
associated with a thought expressed by Paul Virilio, when he says that “giving
way to the technological instant, vision machines would make derangement of
the senses, a permanent state, conscious life becoming an oscillating trip whose
only absolute poles would be birth and death” (92). Videodrome represents this
“oscillating trip” between life and death till it’s no more possible to recognize
their difference, because every character can fall victim of a death drive, a
kind of mechanistic and daemonic compulsiveness based on a desire for
immortality, for a dimension that Zizek found very similar to “what horror
fiction calls ‘undead’, a strange, immortal, indestructible life that persists
beyond death”, or “beyond the ‘way of all flesh’” (Zizek 294). This state of
“undead” is what seems to be offered to Max Renn by Bianca O’Blivion,
when she proclames “Death to Videodrome; Long Live the New Flesh!”. This
programmatic imperative was created to fight against the terrible effects of
a biomechanical concept called “The Flesh TV”, whose name came from the
influence on Cronenberg of a science fiction novel by William Burroughs,
entitled The Soft Machine (1961). As one of the side effects of Videodrome’
virus, “The Flesh TV” meant that the viewers could have access to a new kind
of TV, that seemed to be ironically inspired by many famous aphorisms based
on McLuhan’s theory about mass media, such as “TV is a physical structure
of the brain”, “TV is reality and reality is less than TV”, “The viewer is the
screen”, “There is nothing real outside our perception of reality”, “Technology
is an extension of our own bodies; it’s part of our bodies”; “The medium is the
message or massage”.
After having experienced the reality of all these abstract thoughts, Renn’s
visions became flesh, according to the machine-becomes-man principle, which
means that his human flesh suffered mutations to incorporate technological
devices that were literally the extension of his body, such as the stomach
slit where he kept his flesh gun, the hand grenade, the flesh cassettes and
many other organic fusions as the breathing screen, a mechanical effect
used when Max Renn was seduced by a television close-up of Nicki Brand’s
mouth. Confused and puzzled by his strange and bizarre experiences, Renn
lives in a constant anxiety and existential uncertainty about the reality of his
hallucinations without being conscious of the permanent derangement of
his senses, which justifies his final mechanistic impulse to kill himself and
become “the new flesh”, an ambiguous and very unheimlich scene that leaves
open the question to know if he really attained a new plane of existence or

184 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

if he committed a pointless suicide. According to Fred Botting’s perspective
about the Freudian concept of the death drive presented in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, we may say that we are dealing here with a very uncanny impulse
that confounds the safe distinctions between life and death. Consequently,
what Max Renn attained cannot be called “life” nor “death”, because his
enthusiasm for destruction comes from a force that is as much internal to the
organism as it is external, being the final scenes of Videodrome a representation
of that fantastic apocalypticism originated by a machinic desire, an artificial
death drive that is totally inhuman, as Botting noticed: “Nor more life. Nor
death. No more mother and father: just genetic materialisation and digital
recreations of doubles. No more humanity, history, or modernity. Just
more and more ghosts gliding across screens. Beyond life and death, but
insisting as an alien, daemonic, repetitive rhythm of life-death” (Botting 216).
However, Cronenberg was very explicit about his refusal to find in Videodrome
a simplistic message that could say this film is an attack on the television
industry, because he wanted to be subtler than that, being his intention to deal
with the complexity of things and to focus on TV as a thing we do, because
his interest was always directed at the attempts to unify human physiology
and psychology in order to understand better what we are. He clarified his
concept of “New Flesh” saying that: “The most accessible version of the ‘New
Flesh’ in Videodrome would be that you can actually change what it means to
be a human being in a physical way. (…) We are physically different from
our forefathers partly because of what we take into our bodies, and partly
because of things like glasses and surgery. But there is a further step that
could happen, which would be that you could grow another arm, that you
could actually physically change the way you look – mutate” (Rodley 80).
In Videodrome these mutations result from the interpenetration of man and
machine through a seductive and fatal attraction that we also found in Crash,
where all the erotic terms are so technical that sexual pleasure seems to have
always been mediated and transmitted by a mechanic system of fantasies that,
like TV, originates a hyperrealistic impersonalization caused by the fusion
between technology, sex and death. In Sex, Machines and Navels, Botting
expands this idea, saying that: “The object of anxiety and desire appears the
same: a horrifying or eroticised technology takes sexual energy beyond sex,
beyond corporeality and beyond difference in an ultimate obliteration of
every human race” (Botting 1).
Something very inhuman is also represented in Dexter, an American
Gothic TV soap opera, where there isn’t a direct association between body and
technology, but the main character, a serial killer with ethic purposes, lives
as hallucinated as Max Renn, without being able to distinguish his illusions
from reality, because he was also victim of a long period of exposition to

Maria Antónia Lima 185

violence, when his body remained for several days covered by his mother’s
blood, after she had been brutally murdered. After this traumatic experience,
Dexter had good reasons to feel psychologically damaged, being only able to
act mechanically to respond to his murder impulse, a death drive driven by
his Dark Passenger, whose secret presence inside himself forced him to be
a total simulacra, “a perfect imitation of human life”, like the media through
which his image is transmitted and like the viewers who watch the series
with an increasing interest in Dexter’s violent crimes developing an uncanny
identification with a monster. Dexter’s strangeness becomes surprisingly
familiar, not only because there is a deep ambivalence in the Freudian concept
of the “Uncanny” (Das Unheimliche), but also because Gothic television is
a hybrid domestic medium, as Helen Weatley observed in her study of the
Gothic on British and US television, where we are constantly reminded that
this terror/horror television is viewed, within a domestic milieu. This explains
why Dexter’s monstrosity is defined through so many connections with all
common American citizens who are obsessed in keeping up appearances
possessing dark hidden truths, empty lives, violent and uncontrolled impulses,
psychotic personalities, inhuman behaviours and dysfunctional families,
which make Dexter proud of being “a neat and polite monster, the boy next
door” (Lindsay, 42), allowing him to pass as a fully emotional member of the
human race, and not the unfeeling predator he really is. As a consequence,
this smart, funny and thought provoking TV series brings the horrid and
the normal into juxtaposition until the viewer is unsure what is normal
anymore (Wheatley 167). On account of this proximity between Dexter and
his viewers’ psychological and social realities, he can become their double,
abolishing the distance between his image on the screen and everyone who
sits in front of it, because it’s impossible not to feel identified with a monster
that makes us perceive our inhuman condition. Being a modern equivalent to
Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dexter succeeded in making a serial-killer
seem very familiar, showing that we suffered a posthuman transformation
that changed all of us into Frankensteinian monsters, who anxiously live in
the same uncanny reality, that seems to be simultaneously real, unreal and
overreal, what makes us so unsure, as Dexter, of who we are and what we
do. Consequently, Richard Davenport-Hines concluded that: “In films and
novels, serial killers have become emblems of the evil duality supposedly
haunting every modern individual: They are the external embodiment of all
the inner anxieties, interdictions and guilt of the age, and they are represented
as behaving like soap-operatic goths” (Davenport-Hines 314).
Because it dissolves the boundaries between a serial killer and his
viewers, Dexter stimulates their perverse pleasures transforming them into
the reality of a TV monster whose identity is defined as being “a perfect

186 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

hologram”(Lindsay 41) made flesh, like every character who appears
on “Flesh TV” in Cronenberg’s Videodrome. This condition makes them
particularly receptive to body mutations and as fascinated as Dexter to
explore their aesthetic impact, whenever he transforms his dead bodies into
real works of art abolishing the differences between a crime scene and an art
exhibition. Practising crime as one of the fine arts, Dexter’s morbid sense of
composition could remind us of Cindy Sherman’s assemblages of body parts,
Robert Gober legs protruding from walls, Abigail Lane’s wax corpses, Keith
Edmier’s monstrous fabrications of human beings, and Von Hagen’s plastic
corpses, where flesh has been replaced by plastic without leaving any trait of
the original tissue, which can be compared to Dexter’s beautifully bloodless
and wrapped body packages. In a chapter entitled “Fake Plastic Corpses”,
Catherine Spooner concludes that “contemporary Gothic is more obsessed
with bodies than in any of its previous phases: bodies become spectacle
provoking disgust, modified, reconstructed and artificially augmented. (…)
Gothic bodies are frequently presented to us as simulations, as replacements
of the real” (Spooner 63).
“Long Live the New Flesh!” translates this replacement, which reveals
a desire, common to Videodrome and Dexter, to transcend the body, giving
flesh to an obsessive ideal for a more perfect life, which ironically becomes
a monstrous ideal, because in both cases the main characters’ obsession lead
them to build a new life out of corpses or out of their own dead bodies, making
them lose their sense of reality what justifies Baudrillard’s belief that the rate
of reality is falling every day. Existing in an inhuman dimension, Max Renn
and Dexter are very similar to all mad artists and scientists in several gothic
fictions. Transforming the body into simulacra that replace the real life, they
are like Frankenstein, victims of their destructive impulses, that instead of
creating “new life” create “new deaths” or mere simulations of life or death.
Their narratives, completely dependent on their perceptions, have also the
ethic purpose of showing the dark side of the creative process. They expose
not only the dangers and costs of creativity, but also alert against all fatal art
and scientific projects revealing certain paradoxes of creation. Their images of
violence make us aware, as Elisabeth Bronfen also perceived, that “art needs
dead bodies, art creates dead bodies” (Williams 122) and that “the perfection
of aesthetic idealization can meet its opposite: monstrosity” (123).
Subverting the distinction between the real and the phantasmic and
provoking extensive effects on our minds and bodies, Max Renn and Dexter
make us feel more death than alive, or mere products of an artificial reality
whose limits and processes of creation should always be questioned. The
relevance of this subject was underlined by Christoph Grunenberg: “In an
era of genetic manipulation, disintegrating subjectivity, and the technological

Maria Antónia Lima 187

extension of human consciousness, the classic Gothic topoi of intervention
into the process of creation, as established in Frankenstein and the related
motif of the double (…) are more pertinent than ever” (Grunenberg 63).

WORKS CITED

Botting, Fred. Limits of Horror – Technology, bodies, Gothic. Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2008.
_______, Sex, Machines and Navels. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1999.
Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic – Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil
and Ruin. New York: North Point Press, 1999.
Grunenberg, Christoph. Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art.
Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1997.
Lindsay, Jeff. Darkly Dreaming Dexter. London: Orion, 2005.
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2008.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. London and New York:
Routledge, 1964.
Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.
Rodley, Chris, ed. Cronenberg on Cronenberg. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.
Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman. New
York: Semiotexte, 1991.
Wheatley, Helen. Gothic Television. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2006.
Williams, Gilda, ed. Gothic – Documents of Contemporary Art. London:
Whitechapel, 2007.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. London and New York: Verso, 1999.

188 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 BETWEEN THE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST:
AN ANALYSIS OF THE PERFORMATIVITY OF GENDER IN
CHUCK PALAHNIUK’S INVISIBLE MONSTERS

Elisabete Cristina Lopes

Chuck Palahniuk is widely believed to be one of the most controversial

American contemporary writers, well-known for bringing up contentious
subjects in his novels, namely those social issues that seem to haunt society,
displaying its fragilities and contradictions. In Invisible Monsters he sets out
to examine the way society understands the concept of “woman” and gender
related matters, calling our attention to its paradoxical situation in Western
culture. By means of this dark humoured story, tarnished by a heavy social
critique, the writer undertakes a deconstruction of the concept of sex, as
incarnated in the classical patriarchal paradigm, particularly exploring and
dissecting both the concept of woman(liness) and the role which has been
historically attributed to women.
The story presents itself as a sort of autobiographical report and is
narrated by Shannon McFarland, a girl who is a supermodel and embodies
the ideal of the All-American girl. This girl suffers a car accident and goes to
the hospital, where she learns that she will have to start a new life, because her
face has been disfigured. There, she meets Brandy, a transsexual undergoing
operations in order to become a woman who, in turn, ends up being her best
friend and advisor. Depicted like this, the plot of Invisible Monsters would
appear another melodramatic novel with a predictable storyline. However,
what later comes as a surprise to the reader, and operates as a disruptive
factor, is that the apparently random accident that Shannon suffered and
which left her without a face and unable to speak was, in reality, self-inflicted:
“The Truth Is I Shot Myself In The Face” (Palahniuk 282). Bearing this new fact in
mind, some questions begin to take form: What is the meaning of Shannon’s
deed? By becoming a monster what does she intend to de-monstrate? And,

189
once deprived of speech, how, then, can she manipulate the social constructs
without using words? Indeed, by trying to re-construct her self, she seems
to be trying to undermine the conception of feminine/woman traditionally
proclaimed by the patriarchal archetype. Bearing this framework in mind,
I will examine the way Shannon tries to escape the concept of woman as an
object, by injuring her face and hence becoming a hideous monster. Moreover,
I will try to show how the concept of “woman” is explored and deconstructed
through the other characters of the novel: Brandy Alexander (a transsexual),
Manus (ex-boyfriend of Shannon’s) and Evie (former Shannon’s best friend).
Consequently, in order to discuss how the category of “woman” is revised
in the novel, I will use as a support for my interpretation some of the
famous theories put forward by well-known feminist authors, such as Judith
Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray and Mary Anne
Doane.
To create a new personal history, to forge a new identity, is the mission
which Brandy assigns to Shannon, when the two meet at the hospital, just
after Shannon’s accident. Brandy, a transsexual who has currently undergone
a series of operations so as to become a woman, seems to be a vivid example of
the ideas put forward by Judith Butler, in her work Gender Trouble: Feminism and
Subversion of Identity (2007), conveying the idea that gender is situated beyond
the boundaries of a physical and biological sex instituted by nature. It is not
something fixed but fluid, susceptible to suffering alterations: “…gender is in
no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed;
rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted
through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 194). This assertion pervades the
entire novel, through the voice of the transsexual character, who claims that
one can be whoever he/she wants to be, echoing Butler’s definition of gender
as “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly
rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of a
substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler 45). At some point in the novel,
Brandy appears to be reiterating this idea, when she states that: “I have to live
one whole year on hormones in my new gender role before my vaginoplasty.
They call it real life training” (Palahniuk 182).
In fact, this life training to be a female points to the fact that the category
of “woman” is something that can be created. As Simone de Beauvoir states:
“One is not born a woman, one becomes one” (de Beauvoir 310), meaning that
being a woman is something that can be made up, created. Sandra Lee Bartky
in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Opression (1990)
agrees with this theory, remarking that “We are born male or female, but not
masculine or feminine. Femininity is an artifice, an achievement, a mode of
enacting and reenacting received gender norms which surface as so many

190 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

styles of flesh” (Bartky 65). Indeed, Brandy seems to embrace the idea that the
fact of being a woman appears to be based more upon a cultural performance,
rather than implicit in a natural or biological fact, confirming that “the body is
not merely matter but a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities”
(Butler, Performative Arts 393). Thus, being a woman is an act of transformation,
of becoming, of deconstructing the feminine pre-established notions deep
rooted in the patriarchal ruled society. As Judith Butler confirms in her article
“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution-An Essay in Phenomenology
and Feminist Theory” (2006):
To be female is…a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is
to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to a historical
idea of woman, to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize
oneself in obedience to a historically delimited possibility, and to do this as
a sustained and repeated corporeal project. (394)

There is, in fact, a manoeuvre of deconstruction of the imposed patriarchal

codes at the heart of Palahniuk’s novel, to the extent that gender is regarded
as something different from biological sex, conveying the idea that the former
constitutes, above all, a cultural product. So, in order to become a woman,
Brandy, a naturally born male, has to engage in some feminine-specific
practices to discipline the body. As Sandra Lee Bartky remarks, “a woman’s
body is an ornamental surface too, and there is much discipline involved
in this production” (Bartky 69). The author even states some examples
included in the disciplinary practices that contribute to reinforce the idea of
an accomplished femininity: “A woman’s skin must be soft, supple, hairless,
and smooth” (69) and she has to take special care with her hair or check if the
make-up is properly applied. Susan Bordo further adds that “Through these
disciplines, we continue to memorize on our bodies the feel and conviction of
lack, of insufficiency, of never being good enough” (Bordo 166). Indeed, these
demands that are made daily upon women turn them into artificial gendered
beings or, using Palahniuk’s words, into fabricated products.
Interestingly, at the end of the novel, the reader realizes that all the
naturally born males, Brandy and Evie, find that becoming a woman is not such
a great achievement after all: they all seem to feel the restraints underneath
such a gender category. Brandy is on the verge of changing the biological sex,
while Evie has already undergone all the necessary surgical procedures so as
to become a perfect female. However, looking back on her past, Evie states that
“The whole time, growing up…I just thought being a woman would be… not
such a disappointment” (Palahniuk 166). Corroborating Eve’s words, Brandy
remarks that “…Not that it is bad being a woman. This might be wonderful, if I
wanted to be a woman.1 The point is…being a woman is the last thing I want. It’s
just the biggest mistake I could think to make” (Palahniuk 259).Whereas for

Elisabete Cristina Lopes 191

Evie, the fact of having become a woman is described as “a disappointment”,
for Brandy the process of becoming a woman is rated as “a mistake” and,
although she2 desires the bodily essence of women, she seems to repudiate the
concept within. Even though Brandy wishes for a female body in aesthetical
terms, she refuses the status granted to that gender category. Brandy and
Evie – these two former males – are characters who parody the concept of
the male sex, to the degree that both want to find out what it is like to be a
female. In the end, they seem to come to terms with the fact that performing
the woman role does not give them any advantages, but only brings them the
weight of social limitations and prejudices. Hence, the experience of trying to
be a woman ultimately reveals itself unrewarding and personally unfulfilling
as it seems to be the case with Shannon, who, in a certain sense, can be
said to have given up being a woman, solely appreciated for her physical
attributes.
When Brandy is showing Shannon how she got such a slim waist, she
explains that: “They cut out two of my ribs, and I never saw them again…
There is something in the Bible about taking out your ribs” (Palahniuk
196). Shannon immediately parodies this statement when she, as a narrator,
ironically thinks for herself: “The creation of Eve” (Palahniuk 196). Shannon’s
reasoning seems to indicate once more that “woman” is a social construct,
an object of cultural fabrication. Thus, for Brandy, a naturally born male, it
is possible to become a woman if “she” wishes to: apart from the required
anatomical necessarily alterations to give her the physical appearance of a
female, “she” only needs to adopt certain manners and postures that society
sees as being woman-specific. This means that she only needs to rehearse
her feminineness, that is to say, according to Joan Rivere, she only needs to
perform the so called “masquerade”. The author implies that the concept of
masquerade is a sort of artificial appearance that women use to exaggerate the
feminine characteristics that society believes they are naturally born with: a
mask of femininity. As the author observes:
Womanliness therefore can be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide
the possession of masculinity, and to avert the reprisals expected if she was
found to possess it – much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be
searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods. The reader may now
ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine
womanliness and the masquerade. My suggestion is not, however, that
there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same
thing. (Rivere 213)

By abandoning the former masculine body and its socially standardized

male behaviour, Brandy sets out to construct a feminine persona, therefore
rehearsing all the feminine poses, attitudes and ways of behaving that society
believes being womanly-defining and natural attributes of the so called female

192 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

sex. Mary Anne Doane stresses that “Masquerade is not as recuperable as
transvestism precisely because it constitutes an acknowledgement that it is
femininity itself which is constructed as a mask - as the decorative layer which
conceals a non-identity” (Doane 25).
Eventually, both Evie and Brandy realize, at some point in the novel, that
the loss of full subjectivity afforded to them by their new acquired feminine
status constitutes, in fact, a burden – a heavy lack.3 In addition, in trying to
assume a feminine role, they are simultaneously forced to conform to a kind of
limbic existence: although they are not fully women, they are not men either.
The problem of the definableness of the category of “woman” is also
felt by Shannon who, after the accident, hides her disfigured face behind
the layers of a veil. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the
Attic - The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (1980),
call our attention to the fact that being a woman seems to label someone as
“anomalous, indefinable, alienated, a freakish outsider” (Gilbert & Gubar 48).
This description echoes the words of Brandy, when she is depicting Shannon,
beneath her veils, as: “A sphinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined.
Unknowable. Indefinable” (Palahniuk 261). Brandy’s words seem also to
recall Mary Anne Doane’s words in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory,
Psychoanalysis (1991), when she refers to the enigmatic quality of woman’s
discourse within a male-dominated society:
The hieroglyphic is summoned, particularly when it merges with a discourse
on the woman, to connote an indecipherable language, a signifying system
which denies its own function by failing to signify anything to the uninitiated,
to those who do not hold the key. In this sense, the hieroglyphic, like the
woman, harbors a mystery, an inaccessible though desirable otherness.
(Doane 18)

These veils worn by Shannon also emphasize the notion of a certain domesticity
and confinement, to which she has to conform, since Brandy claims that wearing
“a good veil is the same thing as staying indoors” (Palahniuk 108). This sort of
confinement is hence confirmed when Shannon refers to her peculiar situation
as if she were “caged behind my silk, settled inside my cloud of organza and
georgette” (Palahniuk 111). From this point of view, and although Shannon
is not locked up in some tower, reproducing the experience of Charlotte
Bronte’s character Bertha Mason in the famous novel Jane Eyre (1864), she still
remains hidden behind the walls of a fabric veil. The veils work here also as a
metaphor, due to the fact that they erase the visibility of the female character.
Moreover, as she is unable to speak coherently by virtue of the “accident”
she has undergone, she is left speechless and dispossessed of identity, a fact
which definitely places her outside the realm of patriarchal discourse. In this
way, Shannon McFarland incorporates the manifested destiny of women as

Elisabete Cristina Lopes 193

absence to which Irigaray and other feminist scholars refer to. In fact, this
concept of woman as nobody (as an absence) is actually put forward when
Shannon makes a description of her veiled face covered with “muslin and
cut-work velvet, brown and red, tulled threaded with silver, layers of so
much you’d think there’s nobody inside” (Palahniuk 24). This claustrophobic
image of Shannon behind the veils seems to evoke Luce Irigaray’s image of
the imprisoned woman:
Stifled beneath all those eulogistic and denigratory metaphors, she’s [woman]
unable to pick the scams of her disguise and indeed takes a certain pleasure
in them, even gliding the lily further at times. Yet, even more hemmed in,
cathected by tropes, how could she articulate any sound from beneath this
cheap chivalric finery? (Irigaray 125)

As Margaret Homans, in Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in

Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (1989), reminds us: “In a literary culture
dominated by the symbolic order and its values, the word that women writers
and their female characters most often bear is the word of their won exclusion
from linguistic practice…” (Homans 33). This image of women’s absence from
discourse is actually brought out in one of Brandy’s remarks: “There isn’t
one native tongue among us” (Palahniuk 84), reinforcing the fact that there
is no discourse available for women amidst an androcentric-based society.
Actually, Brandy’s admonitory voice heightens this metaphor, when she tells
Shannon that: “Some guys will deny you’re a real person, and some will just
ignore you” (Palahniuk 111). In fact, there is, at the heart of the novel, an
interesting interplay between the visible and the invisible: whereas before the
self-mutilation Shannon was a too visible a girl, she will later be described
as “the invisible showgirl” (Palahniuk 273). Therefore, what Shannon wants
to demonstrate is that before the self-inflicted accident, she performed the
concept of “woman” strictly in patriarchal terms (a perfect incarnation of the
concept of womanliness), a performance based on beauty and shallowness.
After the incident, Shannon sets out to engage herself in a different
kind of representation, this time grounded on the premise of the invisibility
of “woman”. In effect, this invisibility grants Shannon a privileged position
behind those veils, since she remarks that: “When nobody will look at you,
you can stare a hole in them. Picking out all the little details you’d never
stare long enough to get if [someone] just return your gaze, this, this is your
revenge” (Palahniuk 24, 25). The fact of being veiled, endows Shannon with a
position of power, because even though her eyes are able to see, they cannot
ever be met. Wrongly, men will think that she will not be able to return
the gaze (since they aren’t able to see the pair of eyes that hide themselves
behind the veils), thereby becoming prisoners of her own scrutiny. As Jane
Marie Todd remarks, “the veiling and unveiling of the human body... is

194 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

closely associated with the castration complex” (Todd 522). Therefore men
find themselves immersed in a false security, because although they may
fear what lies beneath the veils, they aren’t able to guess if they are being
looked at, an aspect that places them reversely in the position of objects.4 It
is precisely Shannon’s privileged position in terms of the gaze that identifies
her with the monstrous Sphynx, as it has been previously remarked. As Susan
Gubar and Sandra Gilbert remark: “… women ultimately embrace the role
of that most mythic of female monsters, the Sphynx, whose indecipherable
message is the key to existence, because they know that the secret wisdom so
long hidden from men is precisely their point of view” (Gilbert & Gubar 79).
Brandy’s assertion that “Behind a veil, you’re the great unknown” (Palahniuk
111) seems to account for Shannon’s sphynxic mythic condition, enhancing
her mysterious qualities.
Margaret Homans notes that women are always linked to the literal and
to physical realms, whereas the privilege of the intellectual and figurative
realms remains the precious treasure of men alone:
…the different valuations of literal and figurative originate in the way our
culture constructs masculinity and femininity, for if the literal is associated
with the feminine, the more high valued figurative is associated with
masculinity. To take something literally is to get it wrong, while to have
a figurative understanding of something is the correct intellectual stance.
(Homans 5)

However, Shannon’s decision to become a monster counters this belief,

because her new status moves her from the literal plan (woman as body and
flesh, objectified) to the figurative (woman as metaphor). Nevertheless, in
discursive terms this option does not make any difference, as she is unable
to whisper a word capable of making any sense. Actually, in Shannon
McFarland’s case we can observe a return to what Susan Bordo designates as
a kind of mother-tongue, “the semiotic babble of infancy”, a kind of primal
“language of the body” (Bordo 175), which places her locked in what can be
linked to an imaginary realm, according to a Lacanian point of view, therefore
unable to access the symbolic dimension of discourse. In this context, we
can note that Shannon’s manoeuvre to deconstruct herself as female is, to
some extent, counterproductive because, once she is outside the discursive
practices, she remains an outsider with respect to her access to language,
and this status does not grant her any agency. Moreover, by hiding her face
behind the opaque veils, she gets to symbolize another version of the concept
of “woman”: the actual lack or absence in discursive terms.
Before the incident, Shannon was fully aware of her status as woman-
object. In fact, she felt imprisoned in a world ruled by aesthetic ideals of
feminine beauty: “Trapped in a beauty ghetto is how I felt. Stereotyped”

Elisabete Cristina Lopes 195

(Palahniuk 286). This means that she felt the weight of an external surveillance,
a panoptical pressure which robbed her of her originality, of her true identity.
Corroborating Shannon’s feelings, Sandra Lee Bartky observes that: “In the
regime of institutionalized heterosexuality woman must make herself ‘object
and prey’ for the man… In contemporary patriarchal culture, a panoptical
male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women” (Bartky
72). Bartky’s theory of women as object of prey goes in tandem with the belief
stated by Luce Irigaray in “This Sex Which Is Not One” (1985), according
to which women are envisioned as commodities, objects of transaction, and
therefore implicitly linked to materiality, as previously stated by Margaret
Homans: “For woman is traditionally a use-value for man, an exchange
value among men; in other words, a commodity. As such, she remains the
guardian of material substance” (Irigaray 255). Looking back on her life, the
former model realizes that she was a mere object to be displayed in shop-
windows and placed on the cover of magazines. It is precisely in this light
that the character of Shannon McFarland, before the auto-mutilation, can be
said to incarnate the concept of woman as commodity, in accordance with the
thoughts of Luce Irigaray.
In effect, throughout the novel, Brandy describes people (not only women)
as products, commodities, conveying the idea that, during the process of
evolution, humankind has come closer and closer to the definition of object,
hence alienating its essence as subject. Somehow, the golden era of evolution
appears to culminate in the widespread objectification of people and their
feelings.5 This idea resonates in Shannon’s discourse, when she comments:
“Shot gunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of
killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Probably that goes for killing
everybody in the world. We’re all such products” (Palanhiuk 12). Brandy
herself reinforces this concept of an objectified and disposable humanity, in
one of the passages, when she is consoling Shannon: “Honey … in times like
these, it helps to think of yourself as a sofa or a newspaper, something made
up by a lot of other people... but not made to last forever” (Palahniuk 216).
Within this materialistic universe, both law and language, features of the
symbolic order and milestones of the patriarchal system, are evoked as signs
of insurmountable power, as Brandy’s words attest:
You’re a product of our language, Brandy says, ‘and how our laws are
and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you
has already been thought out by some million people before you’ she says.
Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You’re safe
because you’re so trapped inside your culture. (Palanhiuk 219)

In Invisible Monsters human beings appear as victims of a sort of cultural

determinism, by which they are entrapped and from which they cannot escape

196 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

without falling into another cultural cliché, as if this process of change was
submitted to a kind of vicissitude that offers no escape beyond the established
cultural boundaries:6
It’s because we’re so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on
this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and two legs
everybody has. We’re so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape
would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we’re trained to
want. (Palahniuk 259)

Brandy’s admonitory voice warns Shannon that: “You’re a product …

A product of a product of a product. The people who design cars, they’re
products. Your parents were products. Their parents were products. Your
teachers, products. The minister in your church, another product” (Palahniuk
217), giving emphasis to the idea that humans are stuck in an endless ongoing
enculturation process.
However, Shannon seems to undermine the distinction between the literal
dimension and the figurative dimension, put forward by Homans, since she
appears to embody both definitions: literally she is a young woman with a
mangled face, a “sponge made of skin” (Palahniuk 209), but figuratively she
is the monster, which stands for the absence of meaning.
By having disfigured herself (or, we can risk saying her self, because her
face could be considered here as a synecdoche, since it was enough to define
her as a model and as a person-object), Shannon seems to be consciously
refusing her position as an object within the patriarchal paradigm, since she
critically refers to herself as being “an anatomically correct rag doll” (Palahniuk
37). Effectively, we are reassured that Shannon’s decision of having her face
disfigured was actually intentional, as she observes: “and in the mirrors, I
look at the pink reflection of what’s left of my face… This is exactly what I
wanted” (Palahniuk 31).
By becoming this monster behind a veil, thus preventing people from
looking at what is left of her face, she abandons the feminine aesthetical ideal
of beauty and steps into the category of female as monstrous and grotesque.
Therefore, in trying to escape the entrapment implicit in the woman-as-
-object relationship, she falls under the label of the grotesque or carnivalesque
definition of woman. It is precisely this transition, chosen on purpose by
Shannon, which enables her to undermine the concept of woman as a mere
aesthetical object to be contemplated. This constitutes the key behind her
attempt at subversion. As Mary Russo notes in “Female Grotesques: Carnival
and Theory” (1994): “the hyperboles of masquerade and carnival suggest…
some preliminary acting out of the dilemmas of femininity” (Russo 331).
Thus, by becoming the antithesis of the beauty queen, Shannon decides to
explore the possibilities that this new role as “monster woman” can open to

Elisabete Cristina Lopes 197

her. We can venture using the word carnivalesque, since there is, throughout
the novel, a kind of bitter sweet irony embedded in Shannon McFarland’s
inner thoughts and feelings. In fact, she parodies herself: when she is taken to
the hospital and is placed almost naked on a gurney, she jokes around with
the fact that she now exhibits a perfect body in contrast to a disfigured face, an
aspect which raises a kind of irony between womanliness on the one hand, and
the grotesque, on the other: “No, really, it was funnier than it sounds. It got
funny when there I was sprawled on this gurney, this anatomically correct rag
doll with nothing but this little patch on and my face was the way it is now”
(Palahniuk 37).
As Judith Butler remarks, parody and irony help undermine the arche-
types ingrained in a male dominant society, hence operating as real tools of
subversion:
This perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggest an
openness to re-signification and re-contextualization; parodic proliferation
deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or
essentialist gender identities. (Butler 186)

This reasoning put forward by Butler seems to resonate in Brandy’s words,

when she mentions that she wants to be out of labels, to re-contextualize
herself: “I’m not straight, and I’m not gay’ she says. ‘I’m not bisexual. I want
out of the labels. I don’t want my whole life crammed into a single word. A
story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that’s not
on the map. A real adventure” (Palahniuk 261).
From a feminist point of view, Brandy appears to be suggesting ways
in which the concept of gender can be re-defined. According to her, people
(men and women) must step out of the old labelled cocoons, and start up a
progressive dis-engendering of their bodies, blurring the natural differences,
trying out new concepts of self-assertion, and innovating the ways in which
they conceive themselves as human beings. To be out of labels, means here
to disrupt the established duality of being either a man or a woman, to be
capable of engaging in an original “corporeal project” (Butler 394).
Another gender-deconstruction manoeuvre stands out in Invisible
Monsters, as the names of the characters, by hiding secret meaning, are
themselves subjected to some degree of irony. The name Evie is undoubtedly
linked to the supposedly first woman, Adam’s wife. Brandy evokes the
consumerist fever that assaults our globalised world. To confirm this notion
of a “Brandilized” world is the message that occurs throughout the novel that
implies that people are products, artificial fabrications. Nothing is original
anymore. Manus, Shannon’s former boyfriend, stands for the symbol of
the male figure, the embodiment of manhood. However, he doesn’t stand
for a perfect example of maleness, since the reader is later informed that he

198 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

is, in fact, homosexual and, to a certain extent, a pedophile.7 Therefore, in
Palahniuk’s novel, manhood is portrayed with flaws, hence the subject of
deconstruction within the novel, pointing out the fragilities embedded in the
values of our patriarchal society. In a similar manner to Brandy, who enacts
the excesses of a feminine masquerade, Manus also exaggerates his masculine
qualities, engaging himself in a kind of male masquerade, voluntarily created
by Pahalaniuk to show that the concept of masquerade can be read both ways.
Curiously, if one inverts the letters of the name of the only male character in
the novel, Manus, it becomes a sort of a statement: Us Man. This observation
is relevant, in the sense that it signals that there is only one sex within the
patriarchal/heterosexual system – the masculine – not two as it is proclaimed,
a fact which conveys once more the ideas put forward by Luce Irigaray, Judith
Butler or Monique Wittig:
Gender is the linguistic index of political opposition between the sexes.
Gender is used…in the singular because indeed there are not two genders.
There is only one: the feminine, the ‘masculine’ not being a gender. For the
masculine is not the masculine, but the general. (Wittig 53)

Shannon, herself, plays a very important role in the process of undermining

pre-established social gender categories, when, as an act of revenge for Manus’s
betrayal (she discovers that he was dating her former best-friend Evie), she
tries to turn him into a woman by administrating feminine hormones into his
drinks (regardless of getting his consent):
The conjugated estrogens, the Premarin, the estradyol, the ethinyl estradiol,
they’ve all found their way in Seth’s diet cola.8 Of course there’s the danger
of liver damage at this current daily overdose levels. (...) I’m willing to take
that chance. Sure it’s all just for fun. Watching for his breasts to develop.
Seeing his macho-babe magnet swagger to go fat and him taking naps in the
afternoon. (Palahniuk 77, 78)

Bearing in mind Butler’s performative gender theory, we are left to wonder

that, if Shannon succeeds in her task of turning Manus into a woman, all
“insecure and emotional” (Palahniuk 115), the latter will eventually lose
those features typical of a male figure, thus becoming himself a “freakish”
carnivalesque figure. This constitutes another manoeuvre carried out by
Shannon with the purpose of showing that gender is indeed a fluid and plastic
category, not a fixed one.9 Hence, the parodic figure of the grotesque body is
prone to pose a serious threat both to the integrity of the essentialist theory of
gender identity and to the hegemony that it implies, paving the way for new
configurations of feminine meaning.
As we have seen, by having her face disfigured and, consequently, straying
away from the concept of womanliness, Shannon becomes the so called
monster. Elaine Graham considers monsters to be transgressive figures: on the

Elisabete Cristina Lopes 199

one hand they have a capacity to “destabilize axiomatic certitudes” and on the
other they signal a “terrible breach in formerly inviolate categories” (Graham,
39). The figure of the monster constitutes for Shannon a vehicle for subverting
the institutionalized values that surround the pre-determination behind the
concept of woman. Klaus Theweleit, in Male Fantasies (1987), highlights that
once a woman has been deprived of all signs of identity, she will eventually be
“reduced to a pulp, a shapeless bloody mass” (Theweleit 196). This description
seems to be in tandem with the way Shannon sees herself: “My face, you touch
my blasted scar-tissue face and you‘d swear you were touching chunks of
orange peel and leather” (Palahniuk 197). Moreover, this description appears
to reproduce the words of Victor Frankenstein with reference to the monster he
has just created, when he describes it as “the filthy mass that moved” (Shelley
142). The problem is that, by becoming this auto-designated “vandalized
product” (Palahniuk 218), Shannon is not able to achieve the desired position
as a subject within patriarchal society. Paradoxically, in an attempt to get rid
of the label of object, she becomes this monstrous “bloody mass”, getting
therefore trapped into Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject. In Powers of Horror:
An Essay on Abjection, the author defines the abject as that category which
“disturbs identity, system order. What does not respect borders, positions,
rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 4). The abject
appears as something that threatens to dismantle social order by exposing
its fragility and vulnerabilities, by rendering the symbolic as always in
a state of a menaced disintegration. This notion of the abject that seems to
draw us “toward a place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2) emerges, in
the novel, associated with the kind of food that the character has to eat after
the presumed accident: “Baby foods. Everything mashed or pulverized or
crushed. You are what you eat” (Palahniuk 48). Food, here is a metonymy
for Shannon herself and her abject appearance. This notion of abjection as
something which violates borders and threatens to reveal the internal biology
is also present in Shannon’s accurate and impressive description of what is
left of her face after the accident:
...Brandy catches me with my hands up under my veil, touching the seashells
and ivory of my exposed molars, stroking the embossed leather of my scar
tissue, dry and polished from my breath going back and forth across it. I’m
touching the saliva where it dries sticky and raw down the sides of my neck.
(...) The open edge of my throat feels starched and plastic, ribbed-knitted
and stiff... Hard but warm the way pink looks. Bony but covered in soft,
touchable skin. (Palahniuk 217)

As Peter Hutchnigs remarks “various bodily fluids and substances passing

from inside the body to outside become abject inasmuch as they breach
the body’s borders. Similarly, the sight of our own internal organs is abject

200 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

because it reminds us of a [primal] connection with a biological world”
(Hutchings 36). This connection between the abject, biology and the trespass
of physical boundaries, enunciated by Hutchings, brings to mind the concept
of “polluting person” that Mary Douglas defines as follows: “A polluting
person is always in the wrong. He [She] has developed some wrong condition
or simply crossed over some line which should not have been crossed and
this displacement unleashes a danger for someone” (Douglas 114). Thus, by
becoming this abject monster, this “polluting person”, Shannon incarnates
what in Invisible Monsters is referred to as a “deadly virus” (Palahniuk 121)
– a disguised synonym for woman – because even though it keeps changing
or trying to change its configurations, it still remains the same. This so-called
lethal virus bears close resemblance to Judith Butler’s definition of the concept
of woman as something in process and therefore fluid: “Woman itself is a
term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to
originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice it is open to intervention
and resignification” (Butler 45).
By becoming this somehow dual creature – perfect body / no face, Shannon
is no longer acknowledged as a whole, but as a fragmented being instead.
This bodily fragmentation is clearly put into evidence when the former model
decides to write to her booker at the agency, asking if she, although deprived
of a face, can now become a body part model instead:
I wrote my booker at the agency and asked about my chances of getting
hand or foot work. Modeling watches and shoes. (...) To be a hand model, he
wrote back, you have to wear a size seven glove and a size five ring. A foot
model must have perfect toenails and wear a size six shoe. A leg model can’t
play sports. She can’t have any visible veins. My hand’s an eight. My foot, a
seven. (Palahniuk 219, 220)

As a matter of fact, without the wholeness provided by her former body with a
perfect face, her body parts, when isolated, appear to be inadequate, as the last
observation shows: “My hand’s an eight. My foot, a seven.” As Luce Irigaray
remarks, this position “puts a woman in the position of experiencing herself
only fragmentarily, in the little structured margins of a dominant ideology, as
waste, or excess, what is left of a mirror invested by the (masculine) subject”
(Irigaray 254).
Indeed, after having abandoned the role of the object, the role provided
by the abject seems to offer no door to the symbolic order whatsoever;
Shannon remains unnoticed, invisible, at the margins, as herself seems to
reckon: “The already dead-ghost I am, the not occurring, the completely
empowered invisible that I’ve become…” (Palahniuk 158). The possibility of
being a subject seems to be out of reach for Shannon, whether embodying the
role of the outstanding model or conversely incorporating the monster.

Elisabete Cristina Lopes 201

 From a Lacanian perspective, after the “accident”, the former model
remains somehow attached to the imaginary order, enclosed in a kind
of nostalgic narcissism: “My breath smells hot and sour inside my veils,
inside the damp layers of silk and mesh and cotton georgette I lift for the
first time all day; and in the mirrors, I look at the pink reflection of what’s
left of my face. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?”
(Palanhiuk 31). Ironically, Shannon, in an attempt to escape the role as too-
visible-a-woman-object, appears to have fallen into another cultural trap, the
invisible monstrous woman category, recalling Brandy’s admonitory view
that human beings are “so trapped that any way [they] could imagine to
escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything [they] want, [they]’re
trained to want” (Palahniuk 259). Regardless of the fact that terms such as
monster or invisible appear to be contradictory, this association must be
assessed from a figurative perspective, since both feminine roles, the first as
object and the second as grotesque, are not fitted to spell the “Name of the
Father”.
At the end of Invisible Monsters, Shannon decides to offer her identity, her
self, to Brandy (who is, in fact, her supposedly dead brother Shane,10 who a
long time ago, fled their parents’ home), and she is willing to move on with
her life, to bury her old self image, thus stepping out of the narcissistic scheme
implicit in the imaginary order: “The truth is… I’m giving you my life because
I don’t want it anymore” (Palahniuk 293). She dares to break the mirror and
is willing to set out on this new adventure, which will be that of re-defining
herself. She acknowledges that, if she decides to remain too close to Brandy,
she will never free herself from the haunting of her previously flawless
appearance. Brandy figuratively represents her former self, which she now
intends to bury definitely: “I met Brandy Alexander. This is how I found the
strength not to get on with my former life. This is how I found the courage not
to pick up the same pieces” (Palahniuk 61). By rejecting her former self, she
is somehow rejecting the portrait of the proclaimed ideal American woman.
Even when confronted with the possibility of undergoing a series of plastic
surgeries, which could, in time, improve her looks, she bluntly refuses it: “The
books on plastic surgery, the pamphlets and brochures all promised to help
me live a normal happy life; but less and less, this looked what I’d want”
(Palahniuk 220), and she continues this line of thought, by insinuating that
all the things that she had been trained to desire, such as, attention, beauty, a
loving relationship and a happy home, constituted by now a remote landscape
in her horizon.
Indeed, Shannon decides to “offer” her former life to her brother, Shane,
letting him assume her “previous” identity:

202 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Shane, I’m giving you my life, my driver’s license, my old report cards,
because you look more like me than I can ever remember looking. Because
I’m tired of hating and preening and telling myself old stories that were
never true in the first place. I’m tired of always being me, me, me first.
Mirror, mirror on the wall.
And please don’t come after me. Be the new center of attention. Be a big
success, be beautiful and loved and everything else I wanted to be. I’m over
that now. (Palahniuk 295)

Determined to adopt an alternative lifestyle, free from materialistic and

narcissistic assumptions, Shannon, with a touch of irony and sarcasm, starts
to enumerate the only possible jobs now left at her disposal: “I’ll become a
belly dancer in my veils. Become a nun and work in a leper colony where
nobody is complete. I’ll be an ice-hockey goalie and wear a mask. These
big amusement parks will only hire women to wear the cartoon character
customs” (Palahniuk 295).
Eventually we are left with a set of important questions regarding
monstrosity: who are the real monsters after all? The visibles or the invisibles?
Couldn’t Shannon’s former self be considered monstrous in terms of its
shallowness, superficiality and narcissism? Couldn’t this hidden monstrous
figure beneath the veils be a metonymy for Shannon’s former self? – the real
monster finally meets its real imago – complying with Judith Halberstam’s
theory that monstrosity “always unites monstrous form with monstrous
meaning” (Halberstam 11).
The closing remarks of Shannon, at the end of the novel, show that, all in
all, she embodies a cultural product that was addicted to playing “the looking
good game” (Palahniuk 288), and eventually reckons that the role of the ugly,
the role of the monstrous, opens no exit door for abandoning the feminine
status as it is perceived within a dominant patriarchal framework:
The truth is I panicked a little bit after that [the accident]. (…) The future is
not a good place to start lying and cheating all over again. None of this is
anybody’s fault except mine. I ran because just getting my jaw rebuilt was
too much temptation to revert, to play the game, the looking good game.
(…) The truth is, being ugly isn’t the thrill you’d think, but it can be an
opportunity for something better than I ever imagined. The truth is I’m
sorry.11 (Palahniuk 288)

Finally, we are lead to conclude that “woman” – whether depicted as a fashion

doll or disfigured monster – can never be a part of the discourse proclaimed
within the strict parameters of a male dominant society. Interestingly,
Palahniuk, by assigning Shannon the role of narrator of his novel, seems to be
granting Shannon a chance of telling her story, providing her therefore with
the opportunity to take part in the realm of the symbolic. For once, Shannon
can write (despite the fact that she cannot speak) and make her experience

Elisabete Cristina Lopes 203

public. She can come forward in words, she can be a textualised being.
However, does this gesture constitute a subversion of the institutional male
conventions, or does it ironically invoke the premise that a woman can only
be acknowledged as a literary agent under the “Name of the Father” (in this
case, the author himself, Chuck Palahniuk)? Margaret Homans argues that
“literal meaning cannot be present in a text. It is always elsewhere” (Homans
4 ). In a far land, maybe?
As we have stated, Palahniuk lends his voice to the monster embodied
by Shannon and lets her tell her story, but the author of the novel is still
himself, which leads us to the conclusion that the author might well be
parodying this historical paradox that has been inherent in the category of
“woman”:
the paradox of a being that is at once captive and absent in discourse,
constantly spoken of but of itself inaudible or inexpressible, displayed as
spectacle and still unrepresented or unrepresentable, invisible yet consti-
tuted as the object and the guarantee of vision; a being whose existence and
specificity are simultaneously asserted and denied, negated and controlled.
(Lauretis & White 151)

Susan Bordo argues that the human body is more than a biological entity;
in fact she says that the body is a text upon which culture inscribes itself, a
“text of culture” (Bordo 90), and in this particular case, Shannon is figuratively
depicted as a mangled text since she claims that “in the end my whole
body is my story” (Palahniuk 259) which equates her with the character of
Frankenstein’s monster, that figuratively is perceived by many scholars
as a metaphor for the traditional masculine vision of female texts as being
“mutilated.” Palahniuk seems to be questioning this historical paradigm that
sees female literary productions as something flawed. However, and despite
the fact of being disfigured, Shannon can indeed be “read” as an intelligible
and coherent text, a credible narrative, a fact which can be said to be at the
heart of the subversion that is carried out by the author.
Palahniuk, while approaching the delicate themes that involve femininity
and gender, also appears to be weaving a parody about the interplay between
the female body and monstrosity. If we take as an example the paradigmatic
case of Frankenstein (1918), we can see that it bears a strong resemblance with
Invisible Monsters. The threat posed by the female monster toward Victor, both
a scientist and her creator, is here in Invisible Monsters object of irony to the
extent that Palahniuk himself can be held accountable for having produced
a female disfigured monster that, in literary terms, is liable to work as a
rival feminine writer and storyteller. In this light, we can say that Palahniuk
aligns his voice with the feminist stream of thought because, unlike Victor
Frankenstein, that violently tears the body of the female monster apart, he

204 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

endows Shannon with the opportunity to write a new story and to ultimately
perform the role of the “monstrous” female writer.12 In essence, he is willing to
disrupt the traditional patriarchal order and set forth his “hideous progeny”
(Shelley 25) to thrive and prosper upon the literary world.

NOTES

1
It is important to note that although Brandy desires a physical female body, she doesn’t
seem to accept the status it grants her, as we shall see throughout this analysis.
Therefore, she refuses the designation “woman” as it is socially instituted and
generally perceived.
2
The reference to the transsexual character as “she” seems appropriate, bearing in
mind the context of the novel, because Brandy’s behavior, attitudes, and looks
place her closer to the attributes of the feminine sex.
3
This reasoning stands in conformity with the theory put forward by Luce Irigaray
in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), in which she critiques psychoanalysis as
one of many phallocentric texts that have contributed to the exclusion of woman
from discourse. Irigaray shows a fundamental concern with the question of
female subjectivity and the possibilities for feminine expression in a symbolic
order controlled by the phallus. This primacy of the phallus places woman in a
position of otherness, therefore prevented from accessing all the benefits inherent
to a “full subjectivity.” This idea is also contended by Ann J. Cahill in Rethinking
Rape (2001) who says that in reality “women have been traditionally excluded
from full subjectivity and all its requisite rewards and responsibilities” (Cahill
92), being therefore left in a less privileged social position when compared to
men.
4
Palahniuk seems to be alluding to the Freudian premise that equates the eyes with
the masculine fear of castration. So, he portrays Shannon as a “safe object” to be
looked at, when, in reality, she is assuming the traditional male position as the
controller of the gaze.
5
Ironically, Shannon´s parents give her the nickname “Bump” when she’s a young
girl, recalling the times when her mother was pregnant and had a “bump” in her
belly: “My folks, they call me Bump. I was the bump inside my Mom’s stomach
for nine months; they’ve called me Bump since before I was born” (Palahniuk 96).
6
This sense of irrevocability seems to resonate in Shannon’s words, when she
complains: “How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?”
(Palahniuk 121).
7
In fact, Shannon’s ex-boyfriend, Manus, actually abused her brother when the latter
was younger. That was the circumstance that triggered Shane’s fugue from their
parents’ home.
8
Manus is the official name of the character in the novel. However, Brandy had the
habit of ascribing different names to Manus. In the course of the novel he becomes
Seth Thomas, Denver Omelet, Eberhard-Faber, Chase Manhattan, Hewellet-
Packard, Harper Collins or Alfa Romeo, so as to show that people are nothing
but products, brands.
9
As we have seen before, biology may define the feminine and the masculine “sex” on
a biological level. However the notion of “gender” stretches further than that. It

Elisabete Cristina Lopes 205

 is a plastic category in the sense that it is constituted by a series of social practices
that enables individuals to overcome the determinism posed by the dualism
feminine/masculine. Authors such as Moira Gatens in Imaginary Bodies (1996),
Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) and Catharine Mac Kinnon in Toward a
Feminist Theory of the State (1989) have criticized this deterministic point of view,
claiming that genital difference does not necessarily signify different roles or
identities.
10
Brandy/Shane is Shannon’s double in the novel. As it unfolds, the reader realizes
that the woman that Shane aspires to become is precisely the former Shannon. She
realizes this, when she sees a picture of herself in the flat where Brandy used to
live. In fact, at some point, the former model points out that: “My brother … has
come back from the dead to upstage me” (Palahniuk 198). The verb “to upstage”
points once more to the performative theory of gender defended by Judith Butler
in Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (2007).
11
The expression “The truth is that I’m sorry” shows some ambivalence, because on
the one hand we can assume that, after all, Shannon regrets her self-mutilation,
but on the other, we can interpret this apology as a nonconformist attitude, in the
sense that she is apologizing to the reader, due to the fact that she is unable to
comply with the universal ideals promoted by nowadays society.
12
As a matter of fact, women writers in the nineteenth century were overlooked as
freakish women, a sort of unnatural creative monsters to the extent that the
role of the writer wasn’t in accordance with the condition of a proper lady. An
illustrative example of this fact occurred when Horace Walpole, a male writer,
compared Mary W. Shelley to a “hyenna in petticoats.”

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_______, “Performative Acts of Gender Constitution: An Essay in
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Conboy, Kate, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Writing on the Body:

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 Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
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208 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 OUR TRAUMAS, OUR HOPES:
THE DYNAMICS OF A MULTICULTURAL COMMUNITY IN TONI MORRISON’S
A MERCY

João de Mancelos

“I got shoes you got shoes all God’s children got shoes
When I get to heaven gonna put on my shoes
I’m gonna walk all over God’s heaven.”

— “I Got Shoes”, a traditional African-American spiritual

1. An American Genesis
A Mercy (2008), Toni Morrison’s eighth novel, could be described as a New
World Genesis, the title sounding like America. Proceeding with the project of
writing about various important moments in African-American History, from
the colonial period until contemporary times, this novel is, chronologically, a
prequel to Beloved (1987), the author’s most celebrated book. However, as a
historic novel, A Mercy concentrates less in grandiose events and more in the
way the frame of slavery affects the quotidian life of several women who live
in a farm in Virginia, in particular. In the essay “The Art of Fiction CXXXIV”
(1993), Morrison emphasizes her interest in “the kind of information you can
find between the lines of history. (…) It’s right there in the intersection where
an institution becomes personal, where the historical becomes people with
names” (Morrison, Art 105).
In this context, private narratives help us understand History in a
dimension that transcends the factual coldness of scientific works, and
empower voices that have been silenced for belonging to ethnic minorities.
Fictional characters present a singular characteristic: they condense
innumerous traces of real people and, therefore, propitiate a more intimate
perspective of the nation (Bennington 121).

209
 2. Trouble in Paradise
In A Mercy, historical background is fundamental to contextualize the plot.
In the second chapter, Morrison alludes to an event that legitimated the
development of slavery in the colonies: the People’s War, also known as
Bacon’s rebellion, which took place in 1676 (Morrison, A Mercy 8). As it occurs
in the vast majority of revolutions, this one took place at a time of social crisis,
and simmering tensions, aggravated by a fall in the price of tobacco and a
rise in taxes. Poverty was so much that Governor William Berkeley stated:
“a People where six parts of seven at least are poor, indebted, discontented
and armed” (Tindall and Shi 62). The leader of this rebellion between the
common man and aristocracy was Nathaniel Bacon, a twenty-nine-year-old
Englishman with a hot temper, according to his companions. Reacting against
the status quo, black slaves, white servants and groups of Native Americans
united efforts against the powerful planters of Virginia. The rebellion was
quickly contained by Governor Berkeley, twenty-three men were hanged and
several estates confiscated (Tindall and Shi 83). This aborted attempt justified
a series of laws that reinforced slavery and European-American dominance.
As Morrison explains, in A Mercy:
By eliminating manumission, gatherings, travel and bearing arms for black
people only; by gathering license to any white to kill any black for any reason;
by compensating owners for a slave’s maiming or death, they separated and
protected all whites from all others forever. (Morrison, A Mercy 10)

Most of the action of A Mercy occurs in 1690, fourteen years after Bacon’s
Rebellion, in a farm with one-hundred and twenty acres, in Virginia. This
is the property of Jacob Vaark, a Protestant of Anglo-Dutch origin, who
inherited the farm from an uncle, and, therefore, decided to try his luck in
the New World. I argue this space constitutes a microcosm of some of the
differences and inequalities existent in the colonies, during the age of slavery.
It is possible to establish a series of contrasts, varying according to:
a) The status of characters: Vaark and his wife, Rebekka, are free, while
all the other workers in the farm are either white servants (Scully,
Willard and young Sorrow), or slaves (Lina and the protagonist,
Florens);
b) Gender: Morrison reflects upon the condition of women, especially
European immigrants or European-American females belonging to
middle or lower classes, in a patriarchal system;
c) Ethnic group: some characters are Europeans (particularly English,
Portuguese and Dutch immigrants), European-Americans, Native
Americans and Africans.
Of the intersection of these differences results the great American paradox,
as explained by Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary

210 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

Imagination: “The need to establish difference stemmed not only from the Old
World but from a difference in the New. What was distinctive in the New
was, first of all, its claim to freedom, and second, the presence of the unfree
within the heart of the Democratic experiment” (Morrison, Playing 48).
Vaark’s farm, a small multicultural community, mirrors tensions, alliances
and challenges arising from differences and asymmetries. In the context of this
paper, I’m interested in analyzing the interaction between Vaark, his wife, and
two young slaves: Florens and Lina, a Native American. I wish to understand
how these women represent their ethnic groups, juxtaposing their fictional
private narratives and History; and also to anticipate the challenges Abraham
Lincoln would face, when he declared that all slaves would be forever free.

3. Two Eves in the distant garden

Florens and Lina are two Eves in the garden of the New World, victims
of the circumstances, trying to survive — a keyword in this novel —, by
communicating and understanding their differences. Each section of A Mercy
concentrates on the background of a specific character, presented by the first
or third person narrator — a strategy Morrison had already resorted to in
other books, such as Paradise (1994) or Love (2003). This polyphony allows
the reader to have a comprehensive knowledge of each character, especially
Florens, who assumes the voice of the narrator in chapters one, two, five,
seven, nine and eleven.
The arrival of Florens results from an act of mercy from Vaark, and justifies
the title of the novel. Portuguese D’Ortega, owner of Jublio, a plantation in
Maryland, offers Vaark the eight or nine-year-old servant, in order to meet
a debt. Initially, the Dutch farmer refuses, on the basis that slavery is against
his principles and Protestant ethics (Morrison, A Mercy 24). However, an
interesting detail, which reveals the importance of hazard, makes him change
his mind and accept the payment in human flesh: “On her feet was a pair of
way-too-big woman’s shoes. Perhaps it was the feeling of license, a newly
recovered recklessness along with the sight of those little legs rising like too
bramble sticks from the bashed and broken shoes, that made him laugh”
(Morrison, A Mercy 24).
His roar of laughter allows the transference of Florens from the cruelty
of D’Ortega’s plantation to the amenity of Vaark’s farm; however, it does
not free her from slavery. The girl’s ordeal echoes the journey of numerous
Africans and African-Americans during the process of colonization, since the
first slaves originated precisely from Angola. According to a recent research
by historian Tim Hashaw, Spanish ship San Juan Bautista, which carried three
hundred slaves, was attacked by two pirate vessels, The White Lion and the

João de Mancelos 211

Treasurer, in the Gulf of Mexico. Thirty of those slaves, with Portuguese names
such as António, Maria and Francisco, were sold to five or six planters in the
Bermudas or in Virginia, in 1619 (Hashaw 71).
Being Vaark against slavery, why did he accept Florens as payment for
the debt? On one hand, this would be the sole way of receiving the amount
due; on the other hand, the proprietor understood the potential of slave
workmanship as an agent for economic development in the New World. As
Peter Jones, an investor, told him, referring to sugar cane plantations: “Crop
plentiful, eternal. Slave workers, same. Buyers, eager. Product, heavenly. In
a month, the time of the journey from mill to Boston, a man can turn fifty
pounds into five times as much” (Morrison, A Mercy 29).
Two centuries later, Lincoln would face this tension between ethics
and economic matters. Even though he loaded slavery, and believed in its
extinction, the future president was neither an abolitionist, nor believed in the
possibility of a peaceful coexistence between the two ethnic groups (Tindall
and Shi 708-709). As late as August 1862, Lincoln stated: “My paramount
object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or destroy
slavery” (White 504). The measures he undertook against slavery — with
prominence to the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863 — occurred too late in
History.
In the seventeenth century, the situation of Native American slaves didn’t
differ much from the one experienced by Africans. In A Mercy, Lina’s tribe
succumbs to diseases brought by European colonizers, viruses being carried
in blankets distributed by the army. Recent studies suggest the transmission
of smallpox may have been involuntary, at first, but was used with the
purpose of extinguishing certain tribes, later. In 1763, the commander-in-chief
of the British troops, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, ordered Bouquet, a subordinate:
“You will do well to [infect] the Indians by means of blankets as well as to try
every method that can serve to extirpate this exorable race” (Jaimes 32). It is
estimated that one hundred thousand Native Americans, mainly belonging
to Mingo, Delaware or Shawnee tribes, perished due to this bacteriological
war (Jaimes 32). The event is described in this step, where Morrison reveals
her artistic power:
(…) her family and all the others dying around her: on mats of rush, lapping
at the lake’s shore, curled in paths within the village and in the forest beyond,
but most tearing at blankets they could neither abide nor abandon. Infants
fell silently first, and even as their mothers heaped earth over their bones,
they too were pouring sweat and limp at maize hair. (Morrison, A Mercy
44)

In the novel, French soldiers surround with fire Lina’s village and hand her
to the care of a group of Presbyterians. The religious community sees the

212 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

girl as a typical pagan, descending from a poor and lazy tribe, that doesn’t
transform nature, simply living in communion with it (Morrison, A Mercy 45).
This misinformed perspective of Native Americans as vagrants would persist
during several centuries (Cronon 55).
Shortly after receiving the Native American child, Presbyterians began a
process of acculturation through baptism: “They named her Messalina, just in
case, but shortened it to Lina to signal a sliver of hope” (Morrison, A Mercy
45). The act of naming symbolizes the power over the invaded people — and
slavery starts precisely there. According to the Bible, to give a name is the
equivalent to creating, and, therefore, to possessing. The loss of one’s name is
recurrent in Morrison’s writing, as the author acknowledges in an interview
granted to Thomas LeClair: “It is particularly problematic because it is not just
your name but your family, your tribe. When you die, how can you connect
with your ancestors if you have lost your name? That’s a huge psychological
scar” (LeClair 126).
In the context of the imposed acculturation, Lina’s customs are demonized
and replaced by Christian beliefs: “She learned that bathing naked in the river
was a sin; that plucking cherries from a tree burdened with them was theft;
that to eat corn mush with one’s fingers was perverse” (Morrison, A Mercy 45-
46). Interestingly enough, this acculturation presents several contradictions,
because even though it is perceived as necessary to the integration of the
individual in the community, it does not result in a social promotion: Messalina
was mentioned in the Presbyterians’ prayers, for instances, but forbidden to
take part in the religious ceremonies, and was enslaved and sold, when she
was fourteen, to Vaark.

4. An ambivalent interaction in the multicultural kaleidoscope

A Mercy proves that, in the quotidian interaction, there is a wide variety of
attitudes towards difference, ambivalence predominating. For instances,
Vaark admires Native Americans and respects their ways of life, “mindful of
their fields of maize, careful through their hunting grounds, politely asking
permission to enter a small village here, a larger one there” (Morrison, A Mercy
11). However, he has an Indian slave, Lina, in his farm. Similarly, he believes
slavery is “the most wretched business” (Morrison, A Mercy 26), and still he
owns Florens, who does all sorts of jobs and keeps company to his wife. In
spite of feeling downright uncomfortable with having slaves, Vaark does not
exclude the possibility of a future investment in sugar cane plantations in
the comfortably distant Caribbean islands: “there was a profound difference
between the intimacy of slave bodies at Jublio and a remote labor force in
Barbados” (Morrison, A Mercy 33).

João de Mancelos 213

 Similarly, his wife, Rebekka, experiences mistrust and animosity towards
Lina, at an early stage of their relationship: “(…) hostility between them was
instant. The health and beauty of a young female already in charge annoyed
the new wife, while the assumption of authority from the awkward Europe
girl infuriated Lina” (Morrison, A Mercy 51). However, soon Rebekka will
consider her essential for the productivity of the farm, since the Native
American young lady knew the secrets of nature and tried to understand the
new agricultural techniques.
The novel also reflects upon the Native American views and opinions
about European-Americans, marked exactly by the same ambivalence. About
Vaark, Lina states: “He mystified Lina. All Europes did. Once they terrified
her, when they rescued her. Now they simply puzzled her” (Morrison,
A Mercy 42). Gradually, the young slave understands that not all the pale
faces are the same, and that the small community only survives thanks to the
interaction between all its members, since they were not “like Adam and Eve,
like gods from nowhere. (…) they were orphans, each and all” (Morrison, A
Mercy 56-57).
Lina is the character who better understands the dynamics of this
community — almost a tribe — and, therefore, is able to transcend the fear or
aggressiveness generated by differences, and to concentrate in the similarities
between all the individuals, such as Florens and herself, both slaves:
Lina had fallen in love with her right away, as soon as she saw her shivering
in the snow. A frightened, long-necked child who did not speak for weeks
but when she did her light, singsong voice was lovely to hear. Somehow,
some way, the child assuage the tiny yet eternal yearning for the home
Lina once knew where everyone had anything and no one had everything.
(Morrison, A Mercy 58)

The words “home”, “community” and “family” are recurrent in this novel and
refer, macroscopically, to the future nation, which Lawrence Fuchs described
as “a cultural kaleidoscope”, replacing static images, such as “mosaic”, “salad
bowl” or “rainbow”: “The most accurately descriptive metaphor, the one that
best explains the dynamics of ethnicity, is ‘kaleidoscope’. American ethnicity
is kaleidoscopic, i.e., complex and varied, changing form, pattern, color”
(Fuchs 276).
In the United States, or in any other multicultural country, national
cohesion and social progress depend upon mutual understanding. Abraham
Lincoln understood the difficulty of governing a house divided between
North and South, lords and slaves, Native Americans, African Americans
and European Americans. One century and a half afterwards, citizens still
debate identity politics and affirmative action policies, the reconstruction
of the literary canon and academic syllabi, among many other contentious

214 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

issues. As contemporary Native American poet Joy Harjo, the voice of a new
generation that tries to transcend the traumas of History and turn the page in
multicultural relations, states: “If these words can do anything / I say bless
this house / with stars. / Transfix us with love” (Harjo 3).

WORKS CITED

Bennington, Geoffrey. “Postal Politics and the Institution of the Nation.”

Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 121-
137.
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New
England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.
Fuchs, Lawrence. The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity and the Civic Culture.
Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1995.
Harjo, Joy. The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. New York: Norton, 1996.
Hashaw, Tim. The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the
Pursuit of Freedom in Jamestown. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2008.
Jaimes, M. Annette. The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and
Resistance. Boston: South End Press, 1992.
LeClair, Thomas. “The Language Must not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni
Morrison.” Conversations with Toni Morrison. Ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie.
Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994. 119-128.
Mancelos, João de. “Temas e Dilemas do Multiculturalismo nos Estados
Unidos da América.” Máthesis 12 (2003): 73-85.
Morrison, Toni. “The Art of Fiction CXXXIV.” Paris Review 128 (Fall 1993):
82-125.
_______, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP.
_______, A Mercy. London: Chatto & Windus, 2008.
Tindall, George, and David E. Shi. America: A Narrative History. New York:
Norton, 1989.
White, Ronald Cedric. A. Lincoln: A Biography. New York: Random House,
2009.

João de Mancelos 215

 MIRA NAIR AT THE BAZAAR:
SELLING THE EXOTIC EROTIC IN KAMA SUTRA

Ana Cristina Mendes

Since the release of the film Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love in 1996, critics have
almost unanimously accused diasporic Indian filmmaker Mira Nair of
marketing India for western audiences. The general tone of the heavy
criticism the film has received is put forth by Roger Ebert when he bluntly
states that “[n]othing in [Nair’s] previous work […] prepared [him] for this
exercise in exotic eroticism.” This essay is divided between two closely related
arguments. In the first half I argue that Kama Sutra capitalises on the crossover
appeal of the exotic and the focus rests on the increasing visibility of the exotic
within globalised cultural industries (of which a fascination with South Asian
culture is part and parcel of), most often through the circulation of highly
marketable commodities such as Nair’s film. In the second half of the essay
I suggest that the film illuminates how contemporary postcolonial cultural
discourses articulate gendered forms of social regulation and normalisation;
in fact, the orientalising frame within which Kama Sutra is received is built on
the stereotypical association of India with the feminised erotic tale. In sum,
while addressing aspects of re-orientalist representations in Nair’s film, this
essay traces the connection between the exotic and the feminised that runs
through the film, in particular through well-demarcated lines of orientalised
desire.
According to current criticism, the rise of the New-York based Indian
filmmaker Nair to caterer of exoticism for western consumption is, as
Laura Marks puts it, “but one example of how the commercialization of
cultural hybridity tends to evacuate its critical effects” (4). In her account
of intercultural cinema, Marks draws on works such as Nair’s to argue that
filmmaking coming from cultural minorities living in western metropolitan
centres evokes “memories both individual and cultural, through an appeal to

217
nonvisual knowledge, embodied knowledge, and experiences of the senses,
such as touch, smell, and taste” (2). Indeed, Kama Sutra comes across as one
of Nair’s most sensuous and sumptuously visual films, making the most of
a carefully crafted photography. In keeping with Marks’s analysis, when
interviewed in 2000 by the on-line Indian magazine Tehelka, Nair stated: “I
felt that the film is very kamasutric […] in the philosophical way of engaging
your senses. It’s a very sensual experience. I don’t mean in the sexual sense – I
mean it engages all your senses, visually, orally, musically, and aesthetically
it was really what I wanted” (qtd. in Rajan 63). Marks exemplifies an anxiety
over the relinquishing of intercultural cinema’s critical potentials as difference
becomes incorporated into the logic of late global capitalism by drawing her
attention to Kama Sutra, almost echoing Nair’s words in the interview to
Tehelka:
[…] in large and violent dislocations caused by colonialism and exile, it is
especially disingenuous to try to offer up the sensuous experience of the
homeland on a plate. Mira Nair might represent a mythical and richly
sensuous India in Kama Sutra […], but the film’s kaleidoscope of gleaming
bodies, saturated colors, trails of incense, and accented English seems to
pander to Western wet dreams rather than appeal to the emigrant’s longing
for the homeland. (232).

This orientation towards the West has been persistently noted by film
commentators as blatant self-exoticisation, or re-orientalisation, verging on
appeals to voyeuristic delight. For instance, Sunil Sreedharan writing for
IndiaStar, a magazine catering to the Indian diaspora, declares: “What was
disappointing to me about Kama Sutra was that this movie appeared to be
aimed squarely at the Western audience in its exoticizing of Vatsyayana’s
turgid and tedious compilation of the sexual mores of classical India.” Along
these lines, the article “Lessons of Love,” published in India Currents by the
time of the film’s release, refers to those viewers and critics “who question
whether Nair herself has not cashed in on the Western perception of the
ancient scholarly treatise on sex as a mail-order catalog of esoteric sexual
delights.” The filmmaker declared to Jennie Yabroff that she was after “an
anti-exotic film,” but how can its settings, costumes and art direction come off
as anything but exotic? If she admitted in the article in India Currents to being
“quite aware of the burden of the title,” why does she deploy in it the very
words Kama Sutra that in the western imaginaire stand in for exotic sex and
India? On the basis of such reading, how can we begin to explain the play on
re-orientalist representations of India as the exotic other in Kama Sutra? Part
of the answer lies in the sinuous workings of the global cultural industries, in
which the fashioning of India or Indo-chic trend (inspired by Madonna and
Gwen Stefani’s “Indian” period) functions as a powerful and profit-making
trend in late-capitalist consumer culture.

218 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Saadia Toor, in an article on Indo-chic and the cultural politics of
consumption in post-liberalisation India, reads the phenomenon of Indo-
chic as a subtext to Nair’s film and accuses the filmmaker of self-orientalising
gestures in her return to India: “Indians (both within and outside of India)
are increasingly the ones turning the Orientalist gaze back upon India, almost
as if looking at themselves through ‘Western Eyes’, leading to a cultural
cannibalism of sorts” (20). Contrary to current criticism, Alpana Sharma
proposes that Kama Sutra’s narrative introduces alternative modes of resistance
to such appropriation by western consumption. She argues that, “[g]iven
that the history of the exotic itself has come to inform what we know about
India’s erotic past, the exotic must be taken seriously in order, finally, to be
dispensed with as an inadequate means of representation” (101). In Sharma’s
view, this accounts for the difference between the exotic in Nair’s film and the
exotic as a mere fetishistic and essentialist colonial construction. Thus, when
Toor refers to Kama Sutra as a “movie which, almost too obviously, plays on
[an] Orientalist discourse and its attendant stereotypes of India” (11), she
also seems to notice in the film what Graham Huggan would call a strategic
exoticism – the process whereby “in a postcolonial context, exoticism is
effectively repoliticised, redeployed both to unsettle metropolitan expectations
of cultural otherness and to effect a grounded critique of differential relations
of power” (ix-x).
Taking my cue from Sharma, but without fully endorsing her celebrative
and recuperative tone, and following Huggan, I might suggest, for argument’s
sake, that while Nair has indeed capitalised on the exotic appeal of her film, she
has equally succeeded in sustaining a critique of exoticism by appropriating
exoticist codes of cultural representation. This writing back achieved within
neo-colonial market forces could be attained through strategies of cultivated
exhibitionism, similar to the ones used by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children. According to Huggan, this self-conscious use of exoticist procedures
works to expose the fallacy behind exotic India and can be translated into,
for instance in Kama Sutra, the deliberately melodramatic grouping of Indian
romance and political intrigue, and the emotional staging of a sad tale of love.
However, does Nair manage to present in Kama Sutra a meta-exoticism, that
is, a strategic redeployment of the exotic? Alternatively, why must we assume
that writing back on the face of metropolitan economic dominance is, after
all, what the filmmaker is after? On another level, still, participation in the
spectacle, understood in a Debordian fashion as a social relationship between
people that is mediated by representations, does not imply passivity on the part
of viewers. In effect, why should we assume the viewer to be a passive node
in this process? Can’t we envision that the viewer might sense a participation
in the power structures sketched out by the film and certain uneasiness? Are

Ana Cristina Mendes 219

not the viewers even slightly aware that a cosmopolitan connoisseurship of
world cinema is symptomatic of cultural capital and social distinction?
These questions take us into the issue of the burden of representation – a
predicament “whereby the artistic discourse of hitherto marginalized subjects
is circumscribed by the assumption that such artists speak as ‘representatives’
of the communities from which they come” (Mercer 214) – which is closely
connected to the heavy criticism Nair has received from those who felt she
steered clear of the responsible politics of representation of race and ethnicity
that was expected of her. For instance, in Gita Rajan’s words, Nair seems
“governed more by market forces and commercial contingencies than by
anticolonial, aesthetic ones” (54). From the outset, institutional support – Kama
Sutra was originally produced by Channel 4 in the UK – created expectations
that the film would speak against dominant discourses and would “speak
for the margins.” Diasporic filmmakers frequently occupy the position
of mediators, under the guise of native informants or cultural insiders,
but Sharma defends Nair against political agendas as being “not simply a
mouthpiece for her time and generation, reduced and answerable only to the
exigencies of her historical moment” (97). Sharma’s opinion runs counter to
general criticism, when she defends her against expectations of correcting
representational inequalities by replacing stereotypes. These expectations,
the critic argues, have led to the controversy over Nair’s films and, while this
is true, I would also add that they reflect how the binary logic of dominant
discourses continues to affect postcolonial representation.
At this juncture, I will try to further elucidate the questions I have been
addressing by referring to the connection between the exotic and the erotic, in
particular, to the ways in which, through spectacle, representations of Indian
bodies come to be circulated as exotic commodities. Writing a couple of years
after the film’s release, Ratna Kapur in the essay “‘A Love Song to Our Mongrel
Selves’: Hybridity, Sexuality and the Law” (1999) examines the importance of
recuperating and theorising desire as an important political project within
postcolonial India. She posits that sexuality and culture have been inextricably
bound as a result of the nineteenth-century colonial encounter and nationalist
resistance, which resulted in a recasting by Indian nationalists of women
and the private sphere of family and home as a space of pure Indian culture
uncontaminated by the colonial encounter. Kapur draws our attention to the
fact that this contention of sexuality as an untarnished space was resurfacing
in Indian culture and, as a consequence, the representation of sexual pleasure
was becoming a site of strong political conflict, which accounted for the
difficulties Nair faced with the Central Board Of Film Certification when
she attempted to release Kama Sutra in India, being forced into court battles
over ordered cuts. Nair, in several interviews given to Indian and diasporic

220 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

magazines, recurrently described the film as feminist in its depiction of sexual
politics. In fact, in a strategy that is half social activism and half publicity
stunt, she made it a contractual condition in the distribution deal for India to
have special women-only screenings three times a week.
Sharma terms as “Nair’s politics of provocation” the performance of
transgressive acts Kapur deems vital for the postcolonial project in India. This
subversive performance, Sharma writes, “takes as its site the spectacle of the
body as its excesses of pleasure and pain call attention to the social codes of
normativity at the same time as these codes are transgressed” (96). However,
Rajan looks at the filmmaker’s work differently. In her essay addressing the
construction of female bodies in Nair’s films she discerns major continuities
between older forms of imperial exoticist representation of the female body and
the work by some diasporic film directors. Rajan brings up many of the issues
I merely sketch within this essay, including the construction of orientalised
desire throughout Kama Sutra. The critic concludes that feminine sexuality
can be merchandised even by enlightened, cosmopolitan postcolonial women,
and she wonders why Nair is “enmeshed in antiquated, orientalizing modes,
and why she continues to deploy colonial stereotypes as late as 1997” (51).
To reinforce Rajan’s point about the portrayal of women’s bodies as objects
of mere desire in Kama Sutra, I would argue that the transgressive approach
of the film reaches its own limit when it sets up a heterosexual register. Jigna
Desai has already suggested that heteronormativity is determinant to the
success of Nair’s films (33). It is precisely the evacuation of lesbian desire and
non-heteronormativities that enables a heterosexual feminist subject to come
into being in Kama Sutra. Indeed, by drawing attention to areas such as the
heteropatriarchal control of sexuality and the obstacles to class mobility, Nair’s
so-called politics of provocation is limited to contesting the representation of
Indian and diasporic women as submissive victims of patriarchy.
To conclude, in the context of the appropriation of difference within
the global cultural industries, it could be argued that, on the one hand, the
representation of female desire for women as secondary and, on the other,
the selection of the exotic title Kama Sutra to trade in the female body via
stereotypical images discloses Nair’s failure to repoliticise identifiable
orientalist imagery thus resulting in its re-orientalisation. Indisputably, the
image of the East as a site of eroticism and sexual indulgence has had a lengthy
history and continues to be part of the stock of cosmopolitan pleasures of the
global cultural industries betraying a fascination with the exotic, and often
erotic, allure of non-western cultures. In line with this larger trend, a disruptive
and radical subtext – lesbian desire – is unexplored and left unquestioned and
that undermines the redeployment of orientalist narratives in this re-turning
of Nair’s camera to her homeland. Thus, the argument with which I would

Ana Cristina Mendes 221

like to conclude is twofold: a) by appropriating Vatsayana’s Kama Sutra, the
filmmaker indexes the colonial history by which erotic expressions of Indian
sexuality were censored, rerouted, domesticated, or otherwise exoticised
(Sharma 101); and, consequently b) Nair does not counter representations of
an imagined India which profit from clichés of exotic heterosexual romance
(Huggan 80).

WORKS CITED

Desai, Jigna. Beyond Bollywood: the Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic
Film. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.
Ebert, Roger. “Kama Sutra. A Tale of Love”. rogerebert.com. 7 Mar.1997
<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID
=/19970307/REVIEWS/703070302/1023>.
Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London and
New York: Routledge, 2001.
Kapur, Ratna. “‘A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves’: Hybridity, Sexuality
and the Law”. Social & Legal Studies 8.3 (1999): 353-368.
Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
Senses. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000.
Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies.
London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Rajan, Gita. “Pliant and Compliant: Colonial Indian Art and Postcolonial
Cinema”. Women: a Cultural Review 13.1 (2002): 48-69.
Sharma, Alpana. “Body Matters: the Politics of Provocation in Mira Nair’s
Films”. QRFV: Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18.1 (2001): 91-103.
Sreedharan, Sunil. “‘Kama Sutra’ by Mira Nair”. IndiaStar.com. n.d. <http://
www.indiastar.com/kamasutra.htm>.
Toor, Saadia. “Indo-chic: The Cultural Politics of Consumption in Post-
liberalization India”. SOAS Literary Review 2 (2000): 1-33.
Yabroff, Jennie. “‘Kama Sutra’ Director Mira Nair Talks About Sex in 16th
Century India, and What It Means to Us Today”. Salon.com 7 Mar. 1997.
<http://www.salon.com/march97/nair970307.html>.

222 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 A CASE OF TRANSATLANTIC INTERTEXTUALITY:
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON AND EDGAR ALLAN POE

Marta Miquel-Baldellou

The American scholar Burton R. Pollin established literary connections

between Edgar Allan Poe and the Victorian English writer Edward Bulwer-
-Lytton, tracing the influence the latter exerted over many of Poe’s tales (1965;
1996; 2000). Similarly, Allan Conrad Christensen stated that Bulwer-Lytton
was one of the writers that had exerted a most powerful influence on Poe’s
early prose (2004). Moreover, as a literary critic, Poe also reviewed many of
Bulwer-Lytton’s novels and declared himself an admirer of the English writer
(1835; 1836; 1840; 1841a; 1841b; 1842). In 1830, when Poe was expelled from
West Point Academy, Bulwer-Lytton was already a highly acclaimed writer
about to publish Paul Clifford; the novel that inaugurated his cycle of Newgate
fiction which incorporated the novelty of featuring a criminal as the hero of
the story. This characteristic would be widely displayed in many of Edgar
Allan Poe’s subsequent short-stories such as “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The
Black Cat”, “The Imp of the Perverse”, or “The Cask of Amontillado.” Taking
these precedents into consideration, this article aims at gaining insight into
the intertextuality established between Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Edgar
Allan Poe, identifying thematic links and disparities through a comparative
analysis of Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford and Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, as well
as examining the idiosyncratic characteristics which differentiate the novel
and the short-story in nineteenth-century England and America.

1. Intertextuality between Bulwer-Lytton and Poe

Except for critics such as Burton Pollin, Allan Conrad Christensen and
George H. Spies, not many scholars have profusely contemplated any
literary connection between Poe and Bulwer-Lytton. Pollin referred to several

223
thematic links that could be established between Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”
and Bulwer-Lytton’s shorter piece “Monos and Daimonos” (1965), and he also
analysed the influence Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi exerted over many of Poe’s tales
(1996). It is also acknowledged that not only had Poe read some of Bulwer-
Lytton’s novels but he had also perused some of his allegedly lesser-known
writings. As regards Poe’s review of Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi, published in the
Southern Literary Messenger in February 1836, the American writer stated that
we have long learned to reverence the fine intellect of Bulwer. We take up any
production of his pen with a positive certainty that, in reading it, the wildest
passions of our nature, the most profound of our thoughts, the brightest
visions of our fancy, and the most ennobling and lofty of our aspirations
will, in due turn, be enkindled within us. We feel sure of rising from the
perusal a wiser if not a better man. In no instance are we deceived (198).

Nonetheless, not all of Poe’s reviews were positive. Poe also evaluated Bulwer-
Lytton’s gothic novel Night and Morning in Graham’s Magazine in April 1841,
claiming that
in regard to Night and Morning we cannot agree with that critical opinion
which considers it the best novel of its author. It is only not his worst. It is
not as good as Eugene Aram, nor as Rienzi – and is not at all comparable with
Ernest Maltravers. Upon the whole it is a good book. It merits beyond doubt
overbalance its defects, and if we have not dwelt upon the former with as
much unction as upon the latter, it is because the Bulwerian beauties are
precisely of that secondary character which never fails of the fullest public
appreciation (197).

Through his “Review of The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Sir Edward
Bulwer Lytton”, published in Graham’s Magazine in November 1841, Poe seems
to reach a balance as regards his views on the Victorian writer stating that
Mr. Bulwer is never lucid, and seldom profound. His intellect [is] rather
well balanced than lofty – rather comprehensive than penetrative. His
taste is exquisite. His style, in its involution and obscurity, partakes of the
involution of his thoughts. Apart from his mere intellect, however,- or rather
as a portion of that intellect – we recognize in his every written word the
keenest appreciation of the right, the beautiful and the true. Thus he is a man
worthy of all reverence, and we do not hesitate to say that we look upon the
charges of immoral tendency which have been so pertinaciously adduced
against his fictions, as absurdly little and untenable, in the mass (no page).

Furthermore, there are other reviews of Bulwer-Lytton’s works which have

been attributed to Poe by different scholars. In his article “Bulwer-Lytton’s
Influence on Poe’s Works and Ideas, Especially for an Author’s ‘Preconceived
Design’”, Burton R. Pollin considers Poe the reviewer of Bulwer-Lytton’s
Zanoni in Graham’s Magazine in June 1842. A notice of Bulwer-Lytton’s The
Student, published in the American and Daily Advertiser in July 1835, was also

224 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

tentatively ascribed to Poe by T. O. Mabbott in his article “A Few Notes on
Poe”, published in 1920. Furthermore, an especially unkind review of Bulwer-
Lytton, entitled “Bulwer Used Up”, published in the Alexander’s Weekly
Messenger in May 1840, was attributed to Poe by Clarence S. Brigham in Edgar
Allan Poe’s Contributions to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, published in 1943.
Moreover, Poe referred to Bulwer-Lytton through some of his letters, such as
the one addressed to T. H. White, thus showing his reaction to Bulwer-Lytton’s
publication of his ghost story “The Haunted and the Haunters”, highlighting
“the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque; the fearful coloured into the
horrible; the witty exaggerated into the burlesque; the singular wrought out
into the strange and mystical […] You may say this is bad taste. I have my
doubts about it” (Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Edward Bulwer-Lytton’ 86).
In spite of Poe’s ever-changing appreciation of Bulwer-Lytton’s works, it is
undeniable that not only had the American author read many of the Victorian
writer’s novels but he also appreciated and esteemed Bulwer-Lytton’s style
on numerous occasions, as the excerpts quoted above corroborate. In any
case, despite their different financial circumstances and national origins,
both authors examined similar lines of fiction during their productive years.
Tenets of Bulwer-Lytton’s early Newgate fiction resemble Poe’s gothic tales,
Bulwer-Lytton’s historical romances find their counterpart in Poe’s taste for
the classics, Bulwer-Lytton’s late domestic novels bear some resemblance to
some of Poe’s more bucolic tales such as “Landor’s Cottage”, and some of
Poe’s most well-known gothic pieces are often remindful of Bulwer-Lytton’s
occult and metaphysical novels.
Throughout Poe’s evaluation of Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, the American
author praised the English Victorian writer’s themes and ideas, but disagreed
with his treatment. In this respect, George H. Spies lists a series of Bulwer-
Lytton’s features that Poe regarded as some of the Victorian’s writer most
remarkable weaknesses. First of all, Poe disliked the extensive length of Bulwer-
Lytton’s novels, claiming that “narratives, even one-fourth as long as the one
now lying upon our table [Night and Morning], are essentially inadapted to
that nice and complex adjustment of incident at which he [Bulwer-Lytton] has
made this desperate attempt” (Spies 3). Moreover, Poe refers to the disunity of
place that characterises Bulwer’s novels stating that the author [Bulwer-Lytton]
“floundered ‘in the vain attempt to keep all his multitudinous incidents at one
and the same moment before the eye’” (3). On the other hand, Poe praised
Bulwer-Lytton’s style, but complained about his language and his complex
mode of expression, which led Poe to admit that “beauty of simplicity is not
that which can be appreciated by Mr. Bulwer-Lytton” (4). Moreover, Spies
also remarks that Poe despised Bulwer-Lytton’s use of melodrama, arguing
that the “refined and delicate sensibilities of the characters populating his

Marta Miquel-Baldellou 225

[Bulwer-Lytton’s] esteemed romantic novels are obviously much too acute
for Poe’s critical taste” (4). Poe also referred to Bulwer-Lytton’s excessive use
of the metaphor, claiming, as Spies points out, that he “could not ‘express a
dozen consecutive sentences in an honest manly manner’” (4). Finally, Spies
also mentions Poe’s significant reference to Bulwer-Lytton’s suspected literary
theft stating that “his novels are all echoes” (5). In any case, despite Poe’s
remarks about Bulwer-Lytton’s weaknesses, Spies admits that the American
author was “still greatly enamoured of Bulwer-Lytton as an author” (4) and
concludes stating that
it should be made clear that Poe did not end his days as a literary critic
altogether negating the artistry of the man he had at first so highly and
unreservedly praised. Although his flattering estimation of Bulwer-Lytton
modified considerably on specific points after 1836 and later became what
a modern reader would consider more realistic, Poe continued to feel that
there were ‘many fine thoughts’ in Bulwer-Lytton’s novels and that his
works should always be considered a ‘valuable addition to our imaginative
literature’ (6).

Consequently, in Spies’ words, as opposed to Poe “Edward Bulwer-Lytton

is perhaps one of the finest examples of a literary figure who was greatly
revered during his lifetime and almost completely forgotten after it” (1).
Similarly, Mulvey-Roberts admits that Bulwer-Lytton’s fiction “was read
almost as widely as that of his fellow novelist and close friend Charles Dickens
[while] at the present time in his native Great Britain, however, almost all of
his novels are out of print” (“Fame, Notoriety and Madness” 115-6). In any
case, Bulwer-Lytton was a man of his time, representative of the Victorian
mindset and compromised with his own society; an aristocrat capable of
advocating for social reform while acknowledging the hidden satisfactions
of Victorian injustice (Lane 615); a writer capable of providing an exhaustive
realistic portrait of Victorian society, while becoming increasingly concerned
with theosophical and occult issues. In any case, as Leslie Mitchell concedes,
Bulwer-Lytton was a multi-faceted character (xv), as his fiction examined a
wide scope of thematic issues, from domestic novels to Newgate texts, ranging
from gothic fiction to romantic tales.

2. Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford and the influence of the Newgate novel

over Poe’s tales
Paul Clifford was Bulwer-Lytton’s fifth novel, written when he was twenty-
eight and published in three volumes in 1830. According to Campbell, “the
first edition, the largest printing of any modern novel up to that time, sold
all its copies the first day” (38), becoming an immediate commercial success.
After leaving behind his early novels of Byronic apprenticeship, Paul Clifford

226 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

inaugurated the series of Bulwer-Lytton’s four crime novels, acknowledged as
the precedents of Newgate fiction. In Campbell’s view, this newly established
genre was different from other crime works such as the gothic novels, the
picaresque and rogue stories, or the romantic accounts of banditry, because
in Newgate fiction, the hero who took the lead was the criminal himself (38).
The types of criminals that usually populated Newgate novels were middle-
class stock swindlers, common housebreakers, humble servants that robbed
their employers, or highwaymen, the so-called ‘aristocrats of crime’, and it is
precisely the highwayman type to which the hero, Paul Clifford, belongs.
Hollingsworth designed a three-partite thematic variant which can
be applied to the difficulties these criminal-heroes must face. They can be
either the object of a search in an exciting chase-adventure, a representative
victim of social evils in a problem novel calling for legal or social reforms, or
even the subject of a moral or psychological case study in a story examining
criminal motivation (14). Definitely, Paul Clifford belongs to Hollingsworth’s
second type, as he perfectly embodies Rousseau’s romantic archetype of the
noble savage, whose inherent innocence is disrupted by social corruption and
turns him into a victim of the system in a novel which calls for social reform.
Actually, of all of Bulwer-Lytton’s crime novels, Paul Clifford is not only
the first to inaugurate this series, but it is also the piece which more likely
resembles the novel of purpose, echoing Bulwer-Lytton’s mostly admired
writer William Godwin, as it seeks to effect a change in the legal system.
Actually, as Worthington asserts, “Paul Clifford […] is criminalized by the
system intended to prevent crime” (59). In the preface of the 1840 edition,
Bulwer-Lytton himself mentioned the two purposes he endeavoured to fulfil
through Paul Clifford:
First, to draw attention to two errors in our penal institutions […] the habit
of corrupting the boy by the very punishment that ought to redeem him,
and then hanging the man, at the first occasion, as the easiest way of getting
rid of our own blunders. […] A second and a lighter object in the novel
“Paul Clifford” (and hence the introduction of a semi-burlesque or travesty
in the earlier chapters) was to show that there is nothing essentially different
between vulgar vice and fashionable vice – and that the slang of the one
circle is but an easy paraphrase of the cant of the other (Bulwer-Lytton v).

Therefore, Bulwer-Lytton claimed that it is often the environment and

circumstance that combine to create a criminal so that it is necessary to mend
the circumstance to redeem the criminal as opposed to mending the criminal
to inflict the law, as the legal system has traditionally defended. Moreover,
at another level, Campbell even goes further and describes Paul Clifford as “a
roman à clef political burlesque, part satire and part allegory, that suggests that
politicians are no better than thieves” (40).

Marta Miquel-Baldellou 227

 Bulwer-Lytton focuses on the social evils that led his hero to resort to
crime. Paul, orphaned at an early age, is raised by his drunken foster mother,
Margery Peg Lobkins and her pickpocket friend, Dummie Dunnaker. Paul
spends his early years at the Mug – an inn kept by mother Lobkins – which
many London criminals use as a meeting place. Fascinated by the splendidly
attired highwaymen, their humour and their pretensions to gentility, Paul gets
acquainted with the highwayman Augustus Tomlinson. On one occasion, Paul
is falsely arrested, charged as a pickpocket, and as a result, he is sentenced to
three months in a house of correction. Nevertheless, Paul manages to escape
from prison with Tomlinson, and he joins him to rob a farmer and secure
food and clothing. Actually, convinced that he will no longer be able to
return to a life of respectability, this is the first criminal act that Paul commits.
He assumes the alias of Captain Lovett and becomes the leader of his own
gang of highwaymen. At the same time, Paul, due to the early instruction he
received from his tutor Peter Mac Grawler, is enabled to lead a genteel life as
a fashionable man of the town, calling himself Captain Clifford then. Paul’s
dual existence, as a highwayman and as a fashionable figure, leads Bulwer-
Lytton to remark that there is not such an enormous distance between vulgar
and high-class vice. In any case, at a ball, Paul meets Lucy, the daughter of
the wealthy country squire, Joseph Brandon. Urged on by his love for her,
Paul resolves to abandon crime and begin an honest life. Nevertheless, Paul
and his band are captured while committing a robbery and Paul is tried by
Judge William Brandon, Lucy’s uncle, who plans to marry his niece to Lord
Mauleverer. Brandon pronounces the sentence – death by hanging – while he
discovers Paul to be his own son, whom he repudiated when he discovered
his wife’s adultery. Eventually, Brandon gets Paul’s sentence commuted
to transportation to Australia. Nonetheless, Paul escapes and joins Lucy in
America, where he begins an honest and successful life.
Paul Clifford was published for the first time in 1830, when Poe was only
twenty-one years of age. Thematically and stylistically, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel
contains many of the features that would subsequently echo in Poe’s tales. In
terms of plot, Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” is apparently the tale that most
closely resembles the situation depicted in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel in which a
criminal-victim faces his own condemnation. Nevertheless, the treatment of
the apparently same theme is rendered in a significantly different manner in
both texts. Bulwer-Lytton’s novel focuses on the causes that lead an innocent
man to crime, while Poe’s tale rather deals with the excruciating circumstances
the condemned man is obliged to face. In his essay “On Art in Fiction” (1838),
Bulwer-Lytton remarked that “in the delineation of a criminal, the author will
take care to show us the motives of the crimes” (Worthington 54). In “The Pit
and the Pendulum,” although he never mentions the circumstances that led

228 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

to his imprisonment, the narrator refers to the “sentence – the dread sentence
of death – [which] was the last of distinct accentuation which reached [his]
ears” (Poe, The Complete Tales 246). Similarly, Paul Clifford also bears witness
to Judge Brandon’s reading of his sentence to death, and it is mentioned how
“as these dread words struck upon his ear, slowly the prisoner rose” (Bulwer-
Lytton 388), so that the development of the legal case which brings about the
criminal’s final punishment, rather than its agonizing effects, acquires a major
prominence in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel.
Despite the allegedly emphasis on social order that often characterises the
Victorian novel, Paul Clifford precisely inaugurates a sub-genre in which the
main character is a criminal, that is, a social outcast. As stated before, many
of Poe’s gothic tales also share this central feature. However, Bulwer-Lytton
is very careful to remark that Paul is merely a highwayman, not a murderer,
and as such, he is not to blame as he is merely a victim of his circumstances.
Moreover, as Conrad Christensen argues, Paul Clifford also has a creative
vein, resembling the Romantic hero, as “he uses the sword and pistol not
only in his exciting adventures as swashbuckling highwayman but also in
an interestingly figurative sense as man of letters” (60). Likewise, he goes on
to ascertain that “highway robbery becomes an especially exquisite form of
chivalry, and the novel propounds, as one of its major themes, the notion that
criminals are really no worse than lawyers and politicians” (60).
Through his tales, Poe is not generally concerned with the reason why his
characters feel the impulse to murder, since he is mainly interested in the act
itself, and the viciously psychological thoughts and feelings that overwhelm
the individual, instead of the causes that originated them. Moreover, in
Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, even though Paul is a criminal, he is not alone, since
he leads his band of criminals in addition to the fact that, due to his alter ego,
he is warmly welcomed in the elegant gatherings of the upper-class society.
Thus, Paul is both an outcast and an exponent of society. This duality in the
main character is not frequently found in Poe’s tales, in which the criminal
is only capable of despicable actions and his behaviour is never judged.
Nevertheless, this duality is translated to the readership, since the fact that
the figure of the criminal and the narrator often coincide inevitably leads the
reader to establish an ambiguous relationship with the criminal narrator.
Similarly, one of Poe’s mainly acclaimed characters, Auguste Dupin, bears
some resemblance with Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford precisely with regard
to this ambiguity. Clifford is described as “a youth of high spirit, and though
he was warm-hearted […], yet he was rough in temper, and not constantly
smooth in speech” (Bulwer-Lytton 39-40). As for his origins, Clifford is Judge
William Brandon’s legitimate lost son who fell in disgrace after his mother’s
dissolute behaviour. Similarly, Poe describes Auguste Dupin as a “young

Marta Miquel-Baldellou 229

gentleman of an excellent, indeed of an illustrious family, but, by a variety
of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his
character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in the world,
or to care for the retrieval of his fortunes” (Poe, The Complete Tales 143).
In addition to Paul Clifford’s both noble origins and dubious life, he also
entertains another type of explicit duality through his post as the leader of
the highwaymen and his wish to enter high society to gain Lucy Brandon’s
love. William Wilson is precisely the character whose duality acquires more
prominence in Poe’s tales. In the tale, Wilson finally manages to kill his
alter ego, while in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, the genteel Paul Clifford and the
unlawful Captain Lovett are also the same person despite the fact it is Paul
who eventually remains. Despite Paul’s dual relationship with society, he
shares some degree of the loneliness and aloofness that can be often ascribed
to Poe’s characters. At the very beginning of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, which
has become specially popular as one of the allegedly worst beginnings in
fiction, Bulwer-Lytton describes Dummie Dunnaker in the following terms:
“Through one of the obscurest quarters of London, and among haunts little
loved by the gentlemen of the police, a man, evidently of the lowest orders,
was wending his solitary ways” (Bulwer-Lytton 1). To some extent, this
descriptive approach is remindful of Poe’s “The Man in the Crowd”, when
the narrator scrutinises the different social groups. It is worth noticing that, as
regards the band of the pickpockets, Poe’s narrator concedes
there were many individuals of dashing appearance, whom I easily
understood as belonging to the race of swell pick-pockets, with which all
great cities are infested. I watched these gentry with much inquisitiveness,
and found it difficult to imagine how they should ever be mistaken for
gentlemen by gentlemen themselves. Their voluminousness of wristband,
with an air of excessive frankness, should betray them at once (The Complete
Tales 477).

Poe’s reference as regards the difficulty in distinguishing pickpockets from

gentlemen is remarkably significant and explicitly evocative. Furthermore, the
reversal of roles between criminals and gentlemen is often found throughout
Bulwer-Lytton’s novel. Paul, an alleged criminal, is of good nature, while Judge
William Brandon, a member of the upper social class, constantly entertains
the hope of becoming rich through his niece’s marriage to a noble man. The
issue of not taking for granted people’s nature through their appearance is
also often explored in Poe’s tales as is the case with “The System of Doctor
Tarr and Professor Fether”, whereby it is eventually discovered that the polite
managers of the asylum are actually its own insane residents, thus illustrating
this exchange of roles once more.
Moreover, through Poe’s denominated ‘marriage tales’, the widower
and narrator often describes the death of his late wife, quoting her very

230 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

same words, while he bears witness to the gradual transformation of his
young daughter into his late aged wife. In the initial chapters of Paul Clifford,
Dummie assists Paul’s foster mother, Margery Lobkins, on her deathbed.
While beholding her infant, Margery Lobkins wishes he was different from his
despicable father (Brandon), while she ascertains the child has his very same
features, exclaiming: “You have his eyes, – you have! Out with them, out!
The devil sits laughing in them!” (Bulwer-Lytton 14), which bears a particular
resemblance with Poe’s “Ligeia” and the narrator’s mesmerised state with her
eyes. Moreover, in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Margery swears to haunt Dummie
in case he ever reveals to her child the identity of his father. The death of the
mother figure thus acquires a special transcendence in both texts.
It is also worth noticing that when Margery is about to die, the narrator
draws our attention towards the “large gray cat, curled in a ball, […] with
half-shut eyes, and ears that now and then denoted, by a gentle inflection,
the jar of a louder or nearer sound than usual upon her lethargic senses”
(Bulwer-Lytton 14). In Poe’s tale “The Black Cat”, there is a kind of implicit
parallelism set between Pluto and the narrator’s wife since, wanting to strike
the cat, the narrator ultimately strikes his wife. Furthermore, in Margery’s
sick chamber, there is “a watch, the regular and calm click of which produced
that indescribably painful feeling which, we fear, many of our readers who
have heard the sound in a sick chamber can easily recall” (Bulwer-Lytton
13). This image is also remindful of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” in which,
once the murder of the old man has taken effect, the guilty narrator confesses
“there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when
enveloped in cotton” (Poe, The Complete Tales 305). These references exemplify
the numerous intertextual links which can be identified between Bulwer-
Lytton’s novel and several of Poe’s subsequent tales.
Furthermore, Paul’s first coming out in society bears some resemblance
with Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”. Despite the fact that Paul is
presumed to belong to the gentlemen of society, nobody knows his real
identity, and so said the schematic journal entry of the following day after
the gathering: “Mysterious affair, – person lately going about, – first houses
– most fashionable parties – nobody knows – Duke of Dashwell’s yesterday.
Duke not like to make disturbance – as royalty present” (Bulwer-Lytton
82-3). As if wearing his mask of gentility, the highwaymen Captain Lovett,
otherwise known as Clifford in society’s highest spheres, comes out at a ball.
As in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, society cannot prevent an outcast from entering
their luxurious gathering, in Poe’s tale, Prince Prospero cannot avoid the Red
Death entering his sumptuous palace when “before the last echoes of the
last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the
crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked

Marta Miquel-Baldellou 231

figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before” (Poe,
The Complete Tales 272). It is precisely at this ball that Paul encounters Lucy
Brandon, the young beauty he had previously beheld at the theatre. The
description of this previous encounter is again reminiscent of Poe’s grotesque
tale “The Spectacles”, in which the narrator falls in love with Madame Lalande
despite his short-sightedness, precisely while attending a play at the theatre.
In Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Paul is instructed to become a professional
writer by the editor Peter Mac Grawler. His advice as to how to write in order
to be published in his periodical “The Asinaeum” bears some resemblance
with Mr.Blackwood’s teaching Miss Psyche Zenobia in Poe’s sarcastic piece
entitled “How to Write a Blackwood Article”. As Paul prefers Romance to
Epics and Philosophy, he tells Mac Grawler “I should never be able to read an
epic in twelve books, and I should fall asleep in the first page of the Inquiry”
(48). As opposed to Mac Grawler, who encourages Paul to write ‘serious’ and
classic literature, in Poe’s tale, Mr. Blackwood urges Zenobia to be original
and aim at sensational writings claiming that “sensations are the great things
after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of
your sensations – they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet. If you wish to
write forcibly, Miss Zenobia, pay minute attention to the sensations” (Poe, The
Complete Tales 341). Thus, both characters in these two texts also share their
interest in writing.

3. Some notes on the short-story and the novel as transatlantic literary

genres
In addition to being one of the most acknowledged masters of the short-story,
Poe was also one of the first to theorise about this literary genre. In his “Review
of Twice-Told Tales”, Poe defined some of the tenets related to the short-story
which have become canonical through time. It is particularly meaningful to
notice that he described the features of the short-story as opposed to those
attached to other genres such as the poem or the novel. He stated how “the
unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance [and how]
this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal
cannot be completed at one sitting” (Poe, ‘Review’ 46). In this respect, Poe
objected to the novel mainly because of its length which “deprives itself
of the immense force derivable from totality” (Poe, ‘Review’ 47). Thus, he
favoured the tale instead of the poem or the novel because it is through it
that “the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention [and it
is during the hour of its perusal that] the soul of the reader is at the writer’s
control” (Poe, ‘Review’ 47). Poe also argued that because of what he called
“the preestablished design”, the tale allows the reader “a sense of the fullest

232 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

satisfaction” (Poe, ‘Review’ 48), which cannot be attributed to the novel, in
which “worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify,
annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book”
(Poe, ‘Review’ 47). As regards the purpose, Poe concedes “truth is often […]
the aim of the tale” (Poe, ‘Review’ 48), and as opposed to the poem, the prose
tale amalgamates “a vast variety of modes or inflections of thought and
expression” (Poe, ‘Review’ 48). All of Poe’s tenets as regards the short story
are applicable to the thematic transposition from novel to tale on which this
article focuses, precisely because Poe was concerned with defining the main
features of the tale as opposed to those that characterised other genres. In any
case, the most idiosyncratic feature attached to the tale is its unity of effect, or
using Reid’s terminology, “the unity of impression” (54).
According to Shaw, “[i]f this is so, then narrative method [in the short-
story] is likely to be strung to a correspondingly high pitch” (49). This
seems particularly true of Poe’s story “The Pit and the Pendulum”, which
he completed by the summer of 1842. Shaw goes on to define Poe’s tale as
“the most celebrated instance of narrative wrenched away from the gradually
emerging patternings characteristic of longer fiction” (49). Through “The
Pit and the Pendulum”, we gradually discover that the nameless narrator is
imprisoned as a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, although we never discover
the reason for his imprisonment. As opposed to this, the uncommitted theft
which ultimately leads to Paul Clifford’s undeserved incarceration serves
the purpose of highlighting the inappropriateness of the English Penal Code
to question, by extension, the effectiveness of the current English system of
justice. Thus, the underlying basis of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel is the development
of a thesis, whereas Poe focuses on the effect his tale attains, and it is to that
purpose that in “The Pit and the Pendulum”, Poe “eliminates variables of time,
character and the outside world, choosing instead to deepen progressively an
initial impression of terror” (Shaw 50).
While reading through Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, one often feels the
“gratifying sensation that we are accompanying characters in a journey
from which some knowledge is to be gained” (Hernáez 13), whereas Poe’s
tales often lead us to the uncertain feeling that reality proves intelligible and
overwhelming. Bulwer-Lytton’s detailed account of Poe’s similar theme gives
us a sense of order and control over reality. On the other hand, most of Poe’s
tales rather focus on the intense grip produced on the reader. Thus, not only
the treatment but also the aim differs from novel to tale. Bulwer-Lytton’s
Paul Clifford provides the illusion of completeness and continuity through the
generous amount of information allowed by its length. Poe’s tales sacrifice
the richness of characterisation and exhaustive information for the sake of
the last turn. As María Jesús Hernáez states “the ending in the short story

Marta Miquel-Baldellou 233

is not exclusion, but inclusion” (30). The ending of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel is
an epilogue rather than a conclusion, whereas with Poe’s tales, especially in
the case of “The Pit and the Pendulum”, the final salvation of the tormented
narrator reveals a trick or surprise ending. In other words, Poe’s tales open
possibilities at the end, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel closes them.
In addition, Poe’s tales focus on a single centre of interest, while Bulwer-
Lytton’s novel develops a different focus of attention through a series of
episodes, that is, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel masters the continuity, while Poe’s
tales rather master the instant. Through all of Poe’s tales, a concentration,
a reduction of spatial and temporal scope is conveyed, “starting from the
assumption that the short story develops an idea and the novel a process”
(Hernáez 36). As pointed out before, Poe’s tales usually exclude variables of
causality and context for the sake of effect. Through Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul
Clifford, the centre of attention constantly shifts from one place to another, from
Paul’s stylish society to Captain Lovett’s reprobate endeavours. Paul develops
through the novel as a character, conveying a sense of gradual passage of
time, whereas in Poe’s tales the rhythm is usually hectic and moves forward
towards its own dénouement. Bulwer-Lytton’s novel provides us with accurate
portraits and exhaustive descriptions, whereas some carefully selected traits
are enough to describe Poe’s characters. In any case, as Friedman has argued,
the fact that “a short story cannot deal with the growth of character, as has
also been frequently done” (132) should be defied. There is, though, a generic
difference in the approach to description. Characterisation tends to be more
visual in Bulwer-Lytton, who generally focuses on the appearance of the
characters, while Poe is rather concerned with describing their sensations, or
even, referring to some physical traits in order to describe their inner nature.
Taking into consideration these different variables that characterise both
Bulwer-Lytton’s novel and Poe’s tales, the effect on the reader is also worth
remarking. In this respect, it has often been argued that
the main aim of the novel is apparently to ‘satisfy’ the reader with fiction.
The reader of short stories, in contrast, is led to ponder on the meaning of
what has been presented. Reading a novel involves primarily identification,
reading a short story involves primarily reflection. The first is based on
expectation and recognition, the second is a pact between showing and
discovering (Hernáez 47).

Bulwer-Lytton’s novel follows, using Bates’ terminology, the accepted

convention of explaining everything, which characterised the nineteenth-
century novel (Hernáez 48). Thus, Paul Clifford, despite inaugurating Bulwer-
Lytton’s series of Newgate crime novels, provides the reader with certainty
and guidance through its lengthy narration. Poe’s tales, through their brevity
to be perused at one sitting and their necessarily fragmented nature, cause

234 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

the opposite effect. In this respect, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel accounts for a
social portrait of reality, even if from its margins, whereas Poe’s tales offer an
exposition of a particular perception of reality, moving towards subjectivity.
The Victorian novel provided a well-rounded and completed narration,
through linearity, as if resembling a sphere, “a short-story’s end is in its
beginning” (Hunter 138). Paul Clifford focuses on complexity and redundancy,
whereas Poe’s tales dwell on a limited amount of information and limiting
viewpoint. In that respect, Nadine Gordimer has argued that, even though the
novel offers a more generous portrait of reality, it is through the short story
that “experience is more truthfully conveyed” (Hernáez 54), since in real life,
we hardly ever have the sense of exerting a total control over our own reality.
On the other hand, the particular vision and detached nature often attached to
the short-story have traditionally defined it as a suitable form for the fantastic.
It seems plausible that the intensiveness and symbolic nature of Poe’s tales are
better achieved through the short story. Actually, as Rohberger points out,
The short story derives from the romantic tradition. The metaphysical view
that there is more to the world than that which can be apprehended through
the senses provides the rationale for the structure of the short story which is
the vehicle for the author’s probing of the nature of the real (81).

It has often been argued that the short story technique differs significantly
from that of the novel because “the information provided in the short story
does not originate from rationality, but from perception of the senses”
(Hernáez 41). In any case, Poe’s tales, as opposed to Bulwer-Lytton’s novel,
usually present experience closer to our perception of it, and thus, according
to Genette’s terminology, Bulwer-Lytton’s omniscient narrator turns into
Poe’s homodiegetic, or even, an autodiegetic narrator.
All in all, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel and Poe’s tales bear resemblance in terms
of topic and style, while they differ in their treatment in terms of development
of characters, restrictions of time and place, the complexity of the plot, the
emphasis on facts and ideas, and obviously, their differing taste for synthesis.
Alberto Moravia successfully summarises the features attached to both the
novel and the short story claiming that
the short story is distinguished from the novel in the following ways: non-
ideological characters of whom we get foreshortened and tangential glimpses
in accord with the needs of an action limited in time and place; a very simple
plot, even nonexistent in some short stories – when they become prose
poems – and in any case one that gets its complexity from life and not from
the orchestration of some kind of ideology; psychology in function of facts,
not of ideas; technical procedures intended to provide in synthesis what, in
the novel, needs long and extended analysis (151).

Marta Miquel-Baldellou 235

 Likewise, in his seminal essay, The Philosophy of the Short-Story, Matthews
argued that “the dominance of the three-decker novel had ‘killed the short-
story in England’, while in France and America conditions had favoured the
development of the short-fiction which was different in kind, not merely in
length, from the novel” (Shaw 4). Matthews went on to state that in the late
nineteenth-century, English writers lacked the tradition of storytelling as an
instinctive literary art, and the main reason that accounted for this was the
dominance of the Victorian novel. Similarly, Shaw claims that the rise of the
short story in England was closely linked with the emergence of the modern
artist and the arousal of anti-Victorianism in the widest sense towards the end
of the nineteenth-century. Furthermore, Pritchett suggests that the “essentially
poetic” quality of the literature produced under tense pioneering conditions
in America has nothing to do with the literary polish which characterises the
Victorian novel, since the origins of American literature stem its power from
something “raw and journalistic” (Shaw 5).
Hanson argued that “the novel can still adhere to the classical concept of
civilized society, of man as an animal who lives in a community, as in Jane
Austen and Trollope it obviously does; but the short story remains by its very
nature remote from society – romantic, individualistic, and intransigent”
(Hernáez 55). Other critics such as Gordimer or O’Connor have alluded to
the short story as the narrative form which almost exclusively focuses on
showing the marginality of society. Similarly, Baym argues that “detailed,
circumstantial portrayals of some aspect of American life are also, peculiarly,
inappropriate” (3), and that, “the novel in America diverges from its classic [i.e.
British] intention which is the investigation of the problem of reality beginning
in the social field” (5), since “the essential quality of America comes to reside
in its unsettled wilderness and the opportunities that such a wilderness offers
to the individual as the medium on which he may inscribe, unhindered, his
own destiny and his own nature” (6). Thus, the Victorian novel was rooted in
the individual as a social member and his endeavours in society, whereas, the
origins of the American short-story lay in the individual and his relationship
with an alien environment. The English social hierarchy and its obsession with
order gave way to the detailed and extensive Victorian novels, whereas the
origins of a new life in a new country prompted the development of a more
intimate, though limited-in-length and less assuring type of composition such
as the short story. According to Stroud, it was precisely Poe who, through
his theory and practice, “promoted the idea of selecting episodes and words
which contributed to a single mood and thus permitted the short story to
compete with the Victorian lyric” (117).
Consequently, it seems that “the nature of the nineteenth-century novel
in England was such as to make it very difficult for the short story as we

236 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

know it to flourish or even to exist [since] it was too deeply entrenched in
English cultural life [and thus] its supremacy was unchallenged” (Allen 11).
Likewise, some other dichotomies have contributed to establishing national
idiosyncrasies between the novel as a predominantly European genre and the
short–story as a deeply-rooted American form: Charles E. May’s metaphoric
motivation in the short story and the metonymic nature of the novel (1998);
Mary Louise Pratt’s definition of the short story as an unmarked form and
the novel as the marked form in America (Leitch 143); and finally, Suzanne
Ferguson’s dichotomy between “the short story’s focus on ‘being’ rather than
the ‘becoming’ that characterises the plot of the Romantic and the Victorian
novel” (Ferguson 191). Thus, from the origins of the short-story in America,
particularly after the recent independence of the United States from England,
there was an ongoing debate to claim national rights over both forms of
composition, the novel and the short-story. This transatlantic link is particular
exemplified through the literary relationship between the Victorian writer
Bulwer-Lytton and Edgar Allan Poe. At this stage, Bulwer-Lytton’s influence
on Poe seems undeniable. Nevertheless, the thematic links established between
both authors were rendered through the different forms that characterised
their respective nations at that time, the novel and the short-story, and from a
different national point of view, being both representative of their own time
and society.

WORKS CITED

Allen, Walter. The Short Story in English. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Baym, Nina. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American
Fiction Exclude Women Authors.” American Quarterly 33 (1981): 1-11.
Brigham, Clarence S. “Bulwer Used Up.” Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions to
Alexander’s Weekly Messenger (1943): 82-83.
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George (Lord Lytton). Paul Clifford. New York:
International Book Company Publishers, 1848.
Campbell, James L, Sr. Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Boston: Twayne’s Studies in
Short Fiction Series, 1986.
Conrad Christensen, Allan. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions.
Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1976.
_______, ed. The Subverting Vision of Bulwer-Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections.
Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004.
Ferguson, Suzanne. “The Rise of the Short Story in the Hierarchy of Genres.”

Marta Miquel-Baldellou 237

 Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey.
Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. 176-192.
Friedman, Norman. “What Makes a Short Story Short?” Short-Story Theories.
Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985. 131- 146.
Hernáez Lerena, María Jesús. Short-Story World: The Nineteenth-Century
American Masters. La Rioja: Servicio de Publicaciones, 2003.
Hollingsworth, Keith. The Newgate Novel 1830-1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens
and Thackeray. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963.
Hunter, William J., ed. The Short Story: Structure and Statement. Exeter: Elm
Bank Publications, 1996.
Lane, Christopher. “Bulwer’s Misanthropes and the Limits of Victorian
Sympathy.” Victorian Studies (Summer 2002): 597-625.
Leitch, Thomas M. “The Debunking Rhythm of the American Short Story.”
Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey.
Baton Rouge and London: Lousiana State University Press, 1998. 130-
-147.
Mabbott, T. O. “A Few Notes on Poe.” Modern Language Notes XXXV (June
1920): 373-374.
Matthews, Brander. “The Philosophy of the Short-Story.” Short Story Theories.
Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985.
May, Charles E. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne’s
Studies in Short Fiction Series, 1991.
_______, “Metaphoric Motivation in Short Fiction: ‘In the Beginning Was the
Story.” Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn
Clarey. Baton Rouge and London: Lousiana State University Press, 1998.
62- 73.
Mitchell, Leslie. Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters.
London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2003.
Moravia, Alberto. “The Short Story and the Novel.” Short-Story Theories. Ed.
Charles E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985. 147-151.
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. “Edward Bulwer-Lytton.” Gothic Writers: A Critical
and Bibliographical Guide. Ed. Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller and
Frederick S. Frank. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001.
83-89.
_______, “Fame, Notoriety and Madness: Edward Bulwer-Lytton Paying the
Price of Greatness.” Critical Survey 13:2 (2001): 115-134.
O’Connor, Frank. “The Lonely Voice.” Short-Story Theories. Ed. Charles E.
May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985. 83-93.

238 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

Poe, Edgar Allan (?)1. “Notice of Bulwer’s The Student.” American and Daily
Advertiser (Baltimore) (July 1835).
_______, “Review of Rienzi.” Southern Literary Messenger (February 1836): 198-201.
_______,(?) “Bulwer Used Up.” Alexander’s Weekly Messenger (May 1840): 2.
_______, “Review of Night and Morning.” Graham’s Magazine (April 1841): 197-202.
_______, “Review of The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Sir Edward Bulwer
Lytton.” Graham’s Magazine (November 1841).
_______,(?). “Review of New Books.” Graham’s Magazine (June 1842): 354-356.
_______, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Penguin,
1982.
_______, “Review of Twice-Told Tales.” Short-Story Theories. Ed. Charles E.
May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985. 45-59.
Pollin, Burton R. “Bulwer-Lytton and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.” American Notes
and Queries (September 1965): 7-8.
_______, “Bulwer’s Rienzi as Multiple Source for Poe.” Poe Studies 29.2
(December 1996): 66-68.
_______, “Bulwer-Lytton’s Influence of Poe’s Work, Especially for an Author’s
‘Preconceived Design’.” Poe Studies Association Newsletter XXVIII: 1
(Spring 2000): 1-3.
Reid, Ian. The Short Story. London and New York: Methuen, 1982.
Rohrberger, Mary. “The Short-Story: A Proposed Definition.” Short-Story
Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985. 80-82.
Shaw, Valerie. The Short-Story: A Critical Introduction. London and New York:
Longman, 1983.
Spies, George H. “Edgar Allan Poe’s Changing Critical Evaluation of the
Novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton.” Kyushu American Literature 17 (1976):
1-6.
Stroud, Theodore A. “A Critical Approach to the Short Story.” Short-Story
Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985: 116-130.
Worthington, Heather. “Against the Law: Bulwer’s Fictions of Crime.” The
Subverting Vision of Bulwer-Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections. Ed. Allan
Conrad Christensen. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. 54-67.

1
This sign (?) implies this particular text has been attributed to Poe.

Marta Miquel-Baldellou 239

 A LITERATURA COMO ECO:
HOUSE OF LEAVES DE MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI

Álvaro Seiça Neves

1. A múltipla autoria como estratégia e motivo

Uma das estratégias que, desde o início, ressalta na obra House of Leaves
(2000), de Mark Z. Danielewski, é a sobreposição de planos narrativos e a
consequente criação de camadas, através da atribuição desses mesmos planos
a diferentes autores.
O conceito de ‘autor’ é colocado em causa, logo no bastidor do romance:
House of Leaves

by
Zampanò

with introduction and notes by

Johnny Truant (Danielewski iii)

A autoria do romance no qual o leitor está prestes a entrar é, assim,

colocada num jogo de reflexos e simulacros. O romance, House of Leaves, da
autoria de Zampanò, é apresentado e comentado por Truant, o seu editor.
Não é só por puro jogo formal que o romance é deste modo exposto. Trata-se
de encetar a ficção através de uma metaficção. Trata-se de anunciar a longa
ekphrasis, o manuscrito que Truant encontrou na casa de um velho, cego e
solitário homem, que levou os seus últimos anos de vida a escrevê-lo, como
um documento real de um testemunho verídico, dentro do contexto ficcional
da obra.
Dir-se-ia que, por um lado, a figura autoral do escritor se desmaterializa1
e que, por outro, o escritor passa a actuar como um maestro – um congregador,
um condutor de diversas formas de escrever e diversas autorias – e como um
compositor polifónico. Dir-se-ia que Danielewski compõe melodias diferentes

241
para a mesma partitura, operando um efeito semelhante a uma obra composta
para diferentes instrumentos, cada um com a sua própria linguagem e estilo, e
com os seus próprios tempos musicais e suspensões.
Danielewski coloca três narrativas a decorrer em simultâneo – desfazendo
por completo as noções de ‘narrativa principal’ e ‘secundária’, já que estas
perdem a hierarquia e a organização clássicas –, mas em níveis distintos, ora
com momentos de conexão, ora com momentos de suspensão. A primeira
narrativa corresponde ao filme documental “The Navidson Record”,
realizado pelo fotojornalista, vencedor de um Prémio Pulitzer, Will Navidson,
registando a história da sua família (Will, Karen e os dois filhos Daisy e Chad)
na sua nova casa em Ash Tree Lane, na Virgínia rural. A segunda narrativa,
The Navidson Record, que funciona como texto-âncora, é um ensaio detalhado
sobre o próprio filme, da autoria de Zampanò, o primeiro narrador, ambíguo
e paradoxal,2 já que é um cego que tece um ensaio crítico em torno de um
filme (ficcional). A terceira narrativa consubstancia-se em todas as bifurcações
que saem desse texto-âncora – os comentários de Johnny Truant a esse mesmo
ensaio crítico, na forma de notas de rodapé e introdução.
Não é necessário retroceder muito, na história da literatura norte-ame-
ricana, para encontrar escritores que se serviram de estratégias semelhantes
para exponenciar a complexidade das suas obras. Num primeiro patamar,
teríamos William Faulkner, com a obra The Wild Palms and The Old Man (1939),
um romance único, ligando dois romances, em que cada capítulo de The Wild
Palms é sucedido por um capítulo de The Old Man, intercalando não só as duas
narrativas, mas também estabelecendo pontos de contacto, por diferença e
por similitude, entre as personagens e a acção de cada história. Faulkner, para
além de ter aberto caminho com esta proposta ousada, foi também fulcral ao
introduzir longas enumerações numa só frase – influência sem dúvida eficaz
quando pensamos na escrita caótica e truncada ensaiada no estilo de Truant
–, conseguindo chegar ao ponto de construir uma só frase de mil e seiscentas
palavras, ocupando seis páginas, no conto “The Bear” (1955), segundo Jorge
de Sena (1993). Num segundo patamar, teríamos Vladimir Nabokov, com a
obra Pale Fire (1962), na qual primeiro se publica um poema de novecentos e
noventa e nove versos (um manuscrito), do poeta Shade, para depois, numa
segunda parte, ser analisado teórica e academicamente por um suposto
amigo do poeta, Kinbote. Mais ainda, o artifício do índice final de House of
Leaves constitui-se como uma alusão muito forte ao índice que o leitor pode
encontrar em Pale Fire. Num terceiro patamar, teríamos David Foster Wallace,3
com a obra Infinite Jest (1996). Wallace emprega, amiúde, o estilo torrencial e
encavalitado devedor das frases de Faulkner, acrescentando-lhe o desvio para
notas de rodapé gigantescas, que completam muitas das vezes a forma total
da página, sobrepondo-se à narrativa principal.

242 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Penso que, cozendo estes três exemplos, teríamos uma trajectória que
culminaria, por agora, e dado o foco deste ensaio, no romance de Danielewski:
um estilo torrencial e emotivo, aplicado em Truant, que opera apenas na
medida em que se opõe, por alto contraste, ao estilo descritivo, normativo e
cuidado, aplicado em Zampanò. A estas características, de índole estilística,
podemos adicionar outra, de índole formal: as notas de rodapé, que ganham,
pontualmente, uma força superior à do texto-âncora, para logo se desvanecerem
e darem lugar à narrativa do filme, à narrativa de Zampanò em torno do filme,
aos comentários de outra entidade denominada “– Ed” – os reais (ficcionais)
editores do romance –, às referências de outros teóricos que se debruçaram
sobre o filme (autores ficcionais), voltando de novo à narrativa de Truant. Com
o auxílio de um texto-âncora, à guisa de comentário (Zampanò), Danielewski
inclui o texto de Truant que se desloca como um comentário do comentário,
ou seja, um metacomentário (apesar deste metacomentário ser altamente
anti-erudito); junta-lhes ainda uma parafernália de paratextos, metatextos e
hipertextos, que funcionam no sentido de adensar o labirinto físico (textual/
formal, narrativo/espacial) e psicológico (das personagens, do próprio leitor),
e aumentar o grau de verosimilhança da sua obra enciclopédica.
Estas três instâncias autorais são igualmente guarnecidas e fortalecidas
com o uso de fontes de letra diferenciadas, criando camadas não só de autoria
mas também graus distintos de leitores. O texto de Zampanò usa a fonte
de letra “Times”, associada ao registo jornalístico e a uma escrita cuidada,
objectiva – com pretensão a erudita (trata-se, num certo sentido, do leitor em
primeiro grau do filme-texto “The Navidson Record”) – e bem legitimada pelas
referências que convoca, sem nunca traduzir as fontes originais, incluindo
línguas estrangeiras, como o alemão e o francês, e línguas mortas, como o
latim e o grego. O texto de Truant usa a fonte de letra “Courier”, associada
ao registo da máquina de escrever e ao rascunho, fornecendo ao leitor (o
leitor ex opera, fora da obra, em quarto grau) algumas chaves de interpretação
do manuscrito de Zampanò e, por vezes, da tradução das suas citações, que
estariam falsamente inacessíveis se não fosse a sua leitura e edição. Este
acérrimo leitor (o leitor in opera, dentro da obra, em segundo grau, em relação
ao filme-texto, mas em primeiro grau em relação ao manuscrito) actua como
o copista e o único intérprete do manuscrito: “No one wanted the old man’s
words – except me” (20); “I’m alone in hostile territories” (41). Apesar de lidar
com o manuscrito académico de Zampanò, actua como um anti-académico,4
informal, calão, aprendiz de tatuador, viciado em drogas e em sexo, que
prepara a edição crítica do manuscrito, com introdução, notas e comentários.
Truant consegue até ser filosófico – “the already foreseen dissolution of the
self” (72) – e demonstrar a sua capacidade de leitor ávido, culto e criador,
apresentando um apêndice próprio no final do livro onde publica os seus

Álvaro Seiça Neves 243

poemas. No fundo, em mais um paradoxo danielewskiano, Truant é colocado
a servir-se da obra de Zampanò para se auto-promover. O texto dos Editores
usa a fonte de letra “Bookman”, explicitamente associada ao registo normativo
e à atribuição de autoridade e competência no universo editorial. Os Editores
(figura do leitor in opera, em terceiro grau) tentam emendar ou completar
alguma tradução que Truant não conseguiu apurar, ou revelar algum novo
dado sobre os leitores/críticos precedentes.
Danielewski, nesta tentativa de maximizar a verosimilhança do manus-
crito de Zampanò, cria também cambiantes relacionadas com a natureza
editorial do documento e a sua atestação, como por exemplo a ilusão de não se
compreender a letra do autor, ou a falta de texto (um borrão de tinta em cima);
ou então zonas truncadas, indicando que o autor teria eliminado aquelas
partes. Todos os artifícios são ensaiados de modo a simular perfeitamente o
efeito de rascunho, sendo que toda a obra se comporta como um simulacro
polifacetado. Entrando no jogo ficcional, o leitor deverá confiar5 na seriedade
racional e cega de Zampanò, deverá confiar na turbulência emocional de
Truant ou deverá confiar nos elípticos Editores? A verosimilhança pretendida,
num movimento de boomerang, que é também o movimento da onda sonora
do eco, devolve a resposta: em nenhuma figura autoral.

2. House of Leaves: nem gothic novel, nem hiperficção

O famigerado conceito de unheimlich (uncanny),6 que Freud desenvolveu
no seu ensaio “Das Unheimliche” (1919), é introduzido directamente na obra
para definir a mudança súbita na tipologia espacial da casa: “(…) the house
had changed […] the horror was atypical […] strange spatial violation […]
already been described [as] uncanny. In German the word for ‘uncanny’ is
‘unheimlich’ (…)” (24). O conceito é remetido para uma citação extraída da
obra de Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927), em que é apresentado como o não-
-familiar, o estranho dentro do familiar, o “not-being-at-home”. Segundo
Zampanò, que coloca, ironicamente, os conceitos de Heidegger em causa,
unheimliche, enquanto advérbio, é equivalente também a “dreadfully”,
“awfully”, “heaps of”, “alien, exposed, and unsettling”, sendo “(…) the perfect
description of the house on Ash Tree Lane” (28). Ou, como nos acrescenta, um
pouco mais à frente, “‘uncanny’ or ‘un-home-like’” (37). Este uncanny e o seu
insuportável “not knowing”, que correspondem ao enigma envolvido e ao
medo do desconhecido, tentam ser ultrapassados e compreendidos, através
de vários mecanismos, quer pela atitude positivista de Tom e Will – que
logo se apressam a equipar a casa de ferramentas, na busca racionalista de
uma causa ou fonte que possibilite a resolução e o desvendar de uma causa
–, quer pela atitude mais pragmática de Karen, numa lógica de criar sentido

244 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

sobre o irracional,7 ao construir uma estante no corredor que surgira, ou, já
numa atitude desesperada, ao orientar os objectos, dentro de casa, segundo a
filosofia Feng Shui.
O estranhamento (unheimlich) está presente na obra, primeiro pela
estrutura/forma, depois pelo conteúdo. O estranhamento é estratégia formal
da narrativa e leitmotiv. Por um lado, o carácter fragmentário e hipertextual
que alberga a ficção proporciona ao leitor uma sensação de estranhamento.
Por outro, as várias situações de estranhamento – e de intrusão do não-familiar
(unheimlich) no familiar – que se desenrolam, obrigam as personagens a
interagir com o bizarro e o irracional. Quer o corredor que surge subitamente,
após o regresso de viagem dos Navidsons a Ash Tree Lane, quer a porta que
misteriosamente surge na sala, abrindo uma passagem (hallway),8 são inseridos
na narrativa de modo operativo, ou seja, simbolizam esse estranhamento e
esse não-familiar dentro do espaço máximo da familiaridade, a casa.9
A casa é tratada como um organismo vivo, com os seus “physical
aspects” (83), e irá ser explorada por Will Navidson e por Holloway e os seus
ajudantes, entre outros. As explorações – incursões para mapear, organizar e
racionalizar o irracional e o desconhecido –, sobretudo a partir do momento
em que a equipa de Holloway entra em campo, tornam-se invasões constantes
à privacidade da casa, representação da família, do conforto, da segurança, do
lar. Este carácter de intrusão adensa ainda mais a ênfase colocada na família,
no não-familiar e na hallway. A hallway, que abre um labirinto subterrâneo,
assume-se como as vísceras da casa, o espaço do desconforto que ganha
uma dimensão física, emocional e psicológica destruidora do conceito de
família e estabilidade. A equipa de Holloway entraria como um paliativo,
como um agente potencial de cura, para sarar definitivamente uma brecha
irreparável que acabara de se abrir. Para além destes elementos do estranho, a
casa apresenta um leque híbrido de anomalias físicas: oferece «resistência de
representação», segundo as próprias palavras do narrador Zampanò, e uma
instabilidade permanente dos pontos cardeais. A experiência que Karen faz
com diversas bússolas demonstra que há uma corrente eléctrica estranhíssima,
provocando um campo magnético ainda mais bizarro, que não deixa a bússola
estabilizar no ponto cardeal Norte. Esta nova tentativa de racionalização vem
só adensar ainda mais o estranhamento daquele espaço.
House of Leaves contém muitos elementos da gothic novel, quer espaciais,
quer psicológicos. Danielewski apropriou-se de diversos lugares-comuns e
conceitos do gótico, prolongando-os ou transformando-os, através da paródia,
como forma de obter uma ambiência bizarra, assustadora, de horror, mas
também como forma de renovar esses mesmos lugares-comuns.
O leitor sentirá obviamente uma identificação com outras obras do
género gótico. Através do cenário escolhido – a casa, centro de todo o horror

Álvaro Seiça Neves 245

– encontrará a ressonância de todos os romances que se serviram do motivo
da casa assombrada como estratégia de causa-efeito. O tópos, Ash Tree
Lane, evoca o conto “The Ash-Tree” (1904), de M. R. James, e muitas das
cenas intertextualizam o conto “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), de
Edgar Allan Poe. A casa, num local bucólico, quase idílico, onde a família
iria recomeçar a vida e apagar o seu recente passado, transforma-se num
prolongamento e num reflexo psicológico das cisões dentro da própria família
e da psique de cada personagem.10 Este espaço assume uma componente
anatómica, como já referi, mas também uma componente hereditária – o
perigo é dado como transmissível, de ocupante em ocupante, sendo que
todos haviam sido traumatizados desde que a casa fora construída em 1720,
no campo, na Virgínia: “Navidson was not the first to live in the house and
encounter its peril” (21); “(…) product of psychological agonies, it would have
to be the collective product of every inhabitant’s agonies (…)” (21). A história
da casa irá coincidir e reflectir igualmente a história pessoal de Navidson,
cuja infância foi marcada pela ausência dos pais, o abandono e a falta de
estabilidade emocional, que o marcariam para o resto da sua vida.
Todos os ingredientes que forjam a gothic novel perpassam pela narrativa,
como a paranóia, a agonia, as mentes desequilibradas, as tensões familiares,
a nostalgia e o retorno do passado, a presença do sobrenatural, o trauma,
etc. Danielewski trabalha temas como a transgressão, a asfixia, a alienação, a
doença, a obsessão, a divisão psicológica, as fobias (a claustrofobia, a mania da
perseguição), e motivos como o doppelgänger e a casa assombrada. Ao explorar
estes temas associados ao espaço da casa, a trama da família como o seio
nuclear e, ao mesmo tempo, expoente máximo da tipologia onde as tensões
psicóticas se desencadeiam, pode propiciar uma leitura de aproximação entre
a sua obra e o romance Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), de William Gaddis.
O tema da loucura é enfatizado na narrativa de Truant, no historial da
própria personagem e no efeito posterior que esse historial irá ter, sendo
catalisado pela descoberta de uma mala de Zampanò cheia de velhos livros
e manuscritos, dentro da qual encontrar-se-ia o próprio livro The Navidson
Record, cuja história obsessivamente o irá perseguir: “negotiate the shadows”
(70). Na construção do passado de Truant, Danielewski injecta outro arquétipo
gótico, a família patologicamente disfuncional: um pai que falece e uma mãe
louca, presa num asilo psiquiátrico. Do conjunto de cartas escrito pela mãe de
Truant, Pelafina Lièvre – que é apresentado no apêndice, e que Danielewski
aumentou e deu forma autónoma em livro, The Whalestoe Letters (2000), que
em House of Leaves tomam ainda a designação de “The Three Attic Whalestoe
Institute Letters” –, sobressai a evidente figura de uma mãe louca e delirante,
embora cultíssima. Esta figura é urdida e simulada pela forma desconexa como
a escrita vai avançando, pela inconstância da abertura das cartas, dado que a

246 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

mãe se dirige e nomeia o filho de formas variadíssimas, e pelo conteúdo que
é transmitido, replicado pelas formas gráficas estrambóticas, que obviamente
atestam verosimilhança a uma mente psicótica.
No nome do asilo, “The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute”, está patente,
ironicamente, o cliché da figura da mulher louca presa no sótão, tropo que tem
um trajecto significativo dentro do género gótico – pense-se no conto “The
Yellow Wallpaper” (1891), de Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“the madwoman in
the attic”).11

House of Leaves não é uma gothic novel, assim como não é uma hiperficção,
apesar de «participar» em ambos os géneros.12 O facto de conter vários traços
da gothic novel não nos pode levar cegamente a etiquetá-la como uma gothic
novel. Danielewski pressentiu a necessidade de se defender desta eventual
classificação, assim como de qualquer outra classificação. Ao introduzir
directamente no enredo conceitos associados ao gótico, como Zampanò faz
com a erudição do conceito de unheimlich, ou a preparar o lastro da recepção
da obra, através das entrevistas ficcionais que Karen Green conduz, teve
apenas uma intenção: parodiar13 tudo e todos – todos os lugares-comuns,
todos os clichés, todos os rótulos e todas as referências pré-concebidas e
preconceituosas. Apesar da palavra ‘gothic’ registar nove entradas ao longo
da obra, é o próprio Zampanò que nos adverte:
Though many continue to devote substantial time and energy to the
antinomies of fact or fiction, representation or artifice, document or prank, as
of late the more interesting material dwells exclusively on the interpretation
of events within the film. This direction seems more promising, even if the
house itself, like Melville’s behemoth, remains resistant to summation.
Much like its subject, The Navidson Record itself is also uneasily contained
—whether by category or lection. If finally catalogued as a gothic tale,
contemporary urban folkmyth, or merely a ghost story, as some have called
it, the documentary will still, sooner or later, slip the limits of any one of
those genres. Too many important things in The Navidson Record jut out past
the borders. Where one might expect horror, the supernatural, or traditional
paroxysms of dread and fear, one discovers disturbing sadness, a sequence
on radioactive isotopes, or even laughter over a Simpsons episode. (3)

Este trecho, a propósito de The Navidson Record, pode muito bem aplicar-se
a House of Leaves. Não seria necessário obter esta corroboração – que funciona
como uma uma não-corroboração, visto estarmos em terreno ficcional –, para
ler a resistência da obra em ser classificada dentro de um género. Aliás, a
distanciação criada pela análise teórica que Zampanò elabora sobre o filme,
aproxima-nos da verosimilhança do suposto filme, para além de encurtar a
tentativa ficcional de recepção futura da obra, jogando assim a favor do autor,
já que gera uma maior ambiguidade entre facto real e facto ficcional.

Álvaro Seiça Neves 247

 Neste sentido, Danielewski é um virtuoso. Um dos aspectos do seu
estilo, empregue com argúcia no teor erudito do texto de Zampanò, é o seu
virtuosismo. Como um talentoso músico que nada tivesse a esconder e que
quisesse mostrar todas as técnicas que dominasse e a bagagem cultural que
possuísse, ou como um jogador de cartas que abrisse o jogo totalmente, não
abdicando de nenhum trunfo, Danielewski expõe um leque de artifícios
literários vasto – desde o pastiche, às enumerações incomensuráveis (como, por
exemplo, a lista de fotógrafos ou a lista de edifícios e estilos arquitectónicos
referentes ao labirinto subterrâneo da casa),14 à epistolografia, à poesia, ao teatro,
à transcrição fonética, às cartas em código, à literatura científica (matemática,
geologia, geografia, acústica, medicina, farmacologia) e erudita (cita Milton,
Heidegger, Dante, Ovídio, Rilke, Tolstoi, Virgílio, Shelley, Narayan, Kipling,
Cervantes, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Becker, Norberg-Schulz, London,
Borges, Plínio, Séneca, Baudelaire, etc.), aos diferentes modos de discurso,
etc. – sem receio de ser acusado, pela crítica, de autor de fogo-de-artifício ou
de indexador talentoso que gosta de ser afagado e elogiado. Como encena a
própria recepção da sua obra, através das referências bibliográficas ficcionais
e dos vários pontos de vista acerca de um determinado acontecimento – como
quando, no capítulo IX, sobre as várias entradas sobre o conceito de labirinto e
as suas variações helénicas, prepara o leitor mais incauto, desatento, ignorante
ou inculto, num comentário de rodapé, para a semelhança entre o fio de pesca
que a equipa de Holloway leva para explorar o labirinto e a história mitológica
do Fio de Ariadne –, e como se protege pela múltipla autoria criada na obra,
consegue habilmente sair de um registo e entrar noutro, encontrando sempre
uma rede que ampare a sua queda, mesmo se o seu trajecto de trapezista tiver
uma falha ou se o próprio trapezista resvalar na tentativa, mesmo tratando-se
de um Ícaro feroz.15
O conceito wagneriano de Gesamtkunstwerk aplica-se, num sentido
simbólico, a House of Leaves, pois o romance cuida quer dos detalhes mais
pequenos, a nível formal e estético, como das partes estruturais e conteúdos
mais densos: a obra de arte total. Por outro lado, emprega várias estratégias que
só são possíveis devido ao uso actual que o escritor faz do computador e dos
suportes digitais, como um usuário caseiro auto-produtivo,16 já que o escritor
não só escreve e transcreve a sua obra, como pode encenar aspectos gráficos17
da mesma: formatação de texto justificado com tabulações não habituais,
múltiplas notas de rodapé, texto invertido, texto em espelho, diferentes fontes
de letra, texto disposto obliquamente, caixas de texto, uso de símbolos e
de sinais de pontuação com tamanhos diferentes do corpo de texto, frases
compostas circularmente, etc. Não é necessário recuar tanto como o Barroco,
mas este fenómeno herda muito do Modernismo literário e dos movimentos
concretistas, sonoros e visuais dos anos 60, 70 e 80 do século XX. Há um

248 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

modo de pensar a disposição gráfica na página que não seria possível sem as
vanguardas da segunda metade do séc. XX, sem movimentos como o Art &
Language, no caso específico dos EUA, ou a poesia L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,
ou escritores como Vonnegut, Pynchon, DeLillo, etc.
As notas de rodapé, que se intensificam no capítulo IX, geram caminhos
de leitura hiperligados: uma nota termina noutra nota, dando origem a outra
nota, sucessivamente. Com este processo, Danielewski intensifica também a
experiência de leitura, de modo a implicar mais o leitor na narrativa, ou seja,
de modo a criar uma maior sensação de labirinto, levando a forma a exacerbar
o conteúdo. Todos os apartes e derivas não são colocados sem uma ligação
teórica ao texto-âncora, nem são descabidos: hiperbolizam e prendem o leitor
numa teia maior de verosimilhança. Este labirinto de paratextos e hipertextos
transforma-se em tema, para depois se transformar, de maneira mais espessa,
em novo hipertexto. O labirinto, a propósito do espaço abismal que se abre
debaixo da casa dos Navidson, torna-se, então, tema e estrutura do texto: o
hipertexto.
A nota 78, atribuída aos Editores, é relevantíssima. Por um lado,
evidencia, como todas as outras notas de rodapé, o carácter não-linear da obra,
mas neste caso de uma forma um pouco mais produtiva. Por outro lado, por
corresponder fielmente ao que estou a tentar demonstrar, quando afirmo que
House of Leaves não é uma hiperficção produtiva ou uma ficção hipertextual
eficaz, apesar de se estruturar como um hipertexto.
A nota 78 remete, como nos livros de aventuras e na ficção interactiva,
para a possibilidade de o leitor escolher o seu percurso na narrativa, seguindo
uma ramificação ou outra. Neste caso, se o leitor quer saber mais acerca de
Truant, “[to] profit from a better understanding of his past”, avança 512
páginas, até ao Appendix II-D e Appendix II-E, onde se encontram as “The
Three Attic Whalestoe Institute Letters”. Se o leitor não quer avançar, pode
continuar a leitura do texto-âncora. Claro que estamos perante uma ramificação
semi-produtiva, já que funciona apenas como retórica dissimulada, em que o
autor sabe que o leitor irá ficar preso como num anzol, pelo engodo, e seguirá
para o apêndice.
A questão é que House of Leaves não usa estas ramificações – links ou
hiperligações, se estivéssemos a tratar de um suporte digital18 – de uma forma
produtiva. Usualmente, a nota de rodapé que ramifica para outra nota de
rodapé é uma estratégia apenas para dar ao leitor mais pontos de vista sobre
um facto, para lhe conceder mais informações sobre as personagens ou a
história, para o envolver mais intensamente na urdidura, ou para aproximar
conteúdo e forma, como num simulacro, no sentido de adensar a trama do
espaço labiríntico da casa ou da própria narrativa.

Álvaro Seiça Neves 249

 Deste modo, o leitor enfrenta ramificações não-produtivas, do ponto
de vista activo, isto é, do ponto de vista de um leitor interactivo que possa
participar na escolha de percursos dentro do romance que impliquem uma
alteração à narrativa ou o bloqueamento de certas informações. Como estas
escolhas não conduzem a um desfecho diferente, a vários trajectos com vários
desenlaces, consoante os nós de onde ramificassem várias tramas que se
excluíssem por selecção activa do leitor, não se pode declarar que estejamos
perante uma obra aberta hiperficcional, ou seja, uma ficção hipertextual
produtiva.

3. A literatura como eco

O conceito de ‘eco’ ocupa todo o capítulo V da obra de Danielewski. O eco
(ou a sua ausência) é um dos primeiros indicadores físicos do estranhamento
e bizarria no espaço da casa: “The house responds with resounding silence”
(21).
Quer por curtas distâncias reflectirem uma onda sonora mais longa do
que seria esperado; quer pelas vozes produzirem ecos diferentes; quer pela
fragmentação e repetição do eco; quer pelo abismo criado pela escadaria
espiral, encontrada no labirinto subterrâneo, não produzir eco; em suma, o
facto de se colocarem em causa códigos sensoriais e cerebrais incrustados e
pré-estabelecidos, na relação espacial/sonora, aumentam o efeito de anorma-
lidade, no sentido de uma fuga às normas; aumentam o efeito a-centrado do
espaço e aumentam a produção de dúvidas e receios face ao desconhecido
e ao irracional: “We dropped a few flares down it [the Spiral Staircase] but
never heard them hit bottom” (85). A ausência de eco dentro de certas divisões
da casa prossegue com uma história análoga, mas verídica, da exploração
americana de uma gigantesca cratera no interior de uma montanha mexicana.
O que Danielewski consegue é legitimar uma história ficcional, dando-lhe
toda a verosimilhança de uma história real, através de uma história factual e
documentada do passado. No fundo, esta estratégia resulta, pela reversão de
figuras, pois camufla com muito engenho o movimento de encenação ficcional,
que deve ter sido realizado inversamente. Na verdade, Danielewski inspirou-
-se na história de três americanos, que em 1966 exploraram e documentaram
pela primeira vez uma gruta mexicana, Sótano de Las Golondrinas, para dar
maior verosimilhança à sua ficção – criar uma escada em espiral gigante, como
um abismo infinito – no enredo de House of Leaves. E este é apenas um exemplo,
dentro das centenas de cambiantes deste tipo de artifício, que tem a sua face
mais evidente na imensa listagem de livros ficcionais que são apresentados na
narrativa de Zampanò e nas suas notas de rodapé. A invenção de livros, de
metatextos, muito borgesiana, serve não só para dar maior lastro à narrativa

250 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

de Zampanò, como ajuda, também, numa primeira leitura ingénua da obra de
Danielewski, a preparar o seu «horizonte de expectativa» (Jauss 64) e a auto-
-legitimar a sua metaficção.
O eco assume-se como um conceito-chave em toda a obra, não só pelo
seu carácter físico, com as implicações que acabei de referir, mas também
pelo seu carácter mitológico e simbólico. Simbolicamente, o eco representa a
recorrência, a recursividade, a auto-reflexividade, a constatação, a verificação,
mas também o vazio e a nulidade, como ironicamente Borges irá explorar no
seu conto «Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote», na sua obra Ficciones (1944).
Se não pensarmos do ponto de vista da Escola de Konstanz – ou seja,
do ponto de vista de um estrito «horizonte de expectativa» e de uma estética
da recepção, que recairá sempre mais na crítica literária do que no leitor
crítico19 – mas, antes, na acção que a literatura deve friccionar nesse leitor
crítico, podemos admitir que a literatura só fará sentido quando produzir eco
em quem lê, seja um leitor-modelo ou um leitor especialmente interessado
em não ser de modo algum o alvo daquele texto! O texto produz um eco no
leitor, emite uma reacção. Mais do que nos confirmar um estado ou devolver
um som pré-definido, como o som produzido por uma moeda que se atirasse
num poço, a literatura deve simultaneamente antecipar esse som – tudo o
que é da ordem do comum e do habitual – e simular o momento em que
a moeda não produza som ao atingir o fundo, gerando essa instabilidade e
estranhamento, esse efeito desconcertante e de desassossego. A literatura,
enquanto eco com um efeito de alavanca no leitor, deve pressupor um campo
referencial dado pela sua história, e deve, em grau superior, activar um estado
de alerta, desfamiliarização e estranhamento (ostranenie), colocando as nossas
crenças e os nossos referentes em desequilíbrio e em permanente abalo e
questionamento.
Pela introdução de um elemento estranho, a literatura deve confrontar
as nossas convicções e abrir-nos novos sentidos para percepcionar a vida.
Não tendo a crença utópica que a literatura mais poderosa deva ter um papel
transformador total na consciência e no tecido de crenças e referentes de cada
leitor, a literatura, enquanto eco, refiro novamente, deve desarrumar algo em
cada leitor.

NOTES

1
A múltipla autoria, encenada nesta ficção, e a desmaterialização da figura autoral
reflectem um fluxo teórico das últimas décadas, desde a abordagem de Wayne
C. Booth (1961), que introduz as noções de “real author”, “implied author”
e “narrator”, passando pela proposta de Roland Barthes (1968), que declara
«la mort de l’auteur» e a consequente «naissance de le lecteur», até à visão de
Michel Foucault (1969) – que me parece a mais adequada na relação com a obra

Álvaro Seiça Neves 251

 de Danielewski –, onde é delineada a noção de «função autor», sendo o autor
o «instaurador de discursividade». Se pensarmos também no legado de Paul
Ricoeur e Hans Robert Jauss, julgo que temos o substrato ideal para analisar a
questão da autoria em House of Leaves. Num triângulo que inclua Autor, Texto e
Leitor em cada um dos seus vértices, o pendor cairá, sem dúvida, no vértice do
Leitor – a queda do Biografismo, a crescente desmaterialização do Autor e a fase
pós-pós-estruturalista em que vivemos fazem com que reflectir unicamente sobre
o Autor ou o Texto já não seja nem pertinente, nem estimulante.
2
“Paradox, after all, is two irreconcilable truths”, refere Zampanò (Danielewski 39).
3
Curiosamente, a mulher de Wallace, que foi quem o encontrou enforcado no pátio
da casa onde habitavam, tem o mesmo nome que a mulher da personagem Will
Navidson, criada por Danielewski: Karen Green.
4
A operatividade de Truant – mesmo quando desdenha das pretensões teóricas e
complexas de Zampanò, ou põe em foco o seu legado e o facto da sua escrita
supostamente séria também conter momentos mais digressivos (em que este
expõe a sua personalidade) – reforça a verosimilhança do registo e da narrativa
sobre “The Navidson Record”, já que ele próprio vai sentindo horror e sensações
inquietantes, até enlouquecer, à medida que vai percorrendo aquelas páginas:
“We all create stories to protect ourselves” (20).
5
Em relação a este confiar (to trust) por parte do leitor, será interessante confrontar
também a interpretação de Catherine Spooner (2006) em relação à personagem
Truant: “(…) he is apparently a pathological liar (his name ironically comprises
phonetic connotations of ‘true’ or ‘truth’ and its literal meaning of ‘shirking’ or
‘idle’ (…)” (42).
6
A propósito do conceito uncanny, veja-se as diferentes perspectivas, dentro da análise
teórica do gótico, de Allan Lloyd-Smith, Nicholas Royle, David Punter, entre
outros.
7
Sobre o irracional e os mecanismos encontrados pelos gregos, para ordenar o caos e
obter uma chave racional que pudesse ilustrar, aceitar ou suportar a ambiguidade
do irracional, leia-se The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) de E. R. Dodds.
8
Será curioso confrontar hallway com o explorador Holloway (hollo = hólos = «todo»;
«todo o caminho», «o explorador total»?), que é contratado para solucionar
e desmitificar aquele espaço de escuridão e medo. Holloway acabará por ser
engolido pelo espaço, pela criatura enigmática.
9
“(...) Navidson has settled on the belief that the persistent growl is probably just a
sound generated when the house alters its internal layout” (95).
10
Zampanò: “Some have suggested that the horrors Navidson encountered in that
house were merely manifestations of his own troubled psyche” (21).
11
Cf. American Gothic Fiction (2004), de Allan Lloyd-Smith, em que o autor descreve o
enredo de “The Yellow Wallpaper” e a figura de uma mulher que acaba de ser
mãe, sofrendo de depressão pós-natal, sendo encerrada no sótão de uma velha
casa, alugada durante o Verão, e obrigada a contemplar unicamente o papel de
parede amarelo (94-95).
12
Veja-se a digressão de Catherine Spooner: “A text may be Gothic and simultaneously
many other things” (26) –, servindo-se de Jacques Derrida, sobre o facto de muitas
obras poderem não pertencer a um género, mas participar nele.
13
A paródia é, sem dúvida, um dos modos em que Danielewski compõe com maior
elasticidade e perspicácia: no capítulo XV, a personagem Karen Green entrevista
vários autores, para aferir a recepção e as leituras do filme “The Navidson Record”.
Ao usar a paródia como método de resposta, Danielewski consegue criticar e

252 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 despir as tendências de romancistas góticos, como Anne Rice e Stephen King,
críticos como Camille Paglia e Harold Bloom, filósofos como Jacques Derrida,
cineastas como Stanley Kubrick, autores de ficção científica, etc.
14
Note-se que, pelo menos por duas vezes, entrando em campos que possivelmente
não são tão familiares, Danielewski não só troca os nomes de autores, como se
engana na sua grafia. Cf. a lista de fotógrafos e arquitectos (notas 75 e 147).
15
Esta metáfora não é despropositada: a personagem Will Navidson, até por consumir o
livro/casa House of Leaves dentro do labirinto, é um arquétipo de Ícaro e de Fausto,
pela busca ambiciosa de uma solução racional, pela busca do conhecimento total,
pela busca da libertação.
16
Alvin Toffler, em The Third Wave (1980), formula uma nova etapa do ser humano:
aquele que tem em casa, dadas as novas tecnologias de software e hardware, uma
linha de produção, pois, enquanto usuário, pode não só produzir os seus próprios
textos ou imagens em suporte digital, como ainda imprimi-los, digitalizá-los, etc.
O novo usuário não só tira as fotografias, por exemplo, como pode imprimi-las
imediatamente com o auxílio de uma impressora. Décadas antes, ter-se-ia que
deslocar a um sítio especializado para poder produzir os seus materiais. Com o
advento do hardware caseiro, qualquer pessoa pode em sua casa ter uma pequena
linha de produção. O usuário escritor também não escapará a esta vaga, servindo-
se de todos os meios e suportes disponíveis.
17
A visão, para além da audição, é o sentido principal investido em todo o romance,
não só pela inserção do campo cinematográfico como tema da obra e pela
plasticidade formal das páginas, mas também pela estratégia das câmaras (“hi
8 tapes”), que funcionam como entradas de um diário onde as personagens se
confessam e partilham os seus sentimentos mais íntimos, e pelo tratamento e
descrições visuais do espaço e das personagens. A estratégia cinematográfica
permite a inclusão do narrador nas cenas e leva o leitor, por arrasto, a ser incluído
em toda a rede da intriga e no suspense de toda a obra: “(…) we watch along with
everyone else (…)” (84).
18
Jessica Pressman (2006), de um modo concreto, e Katherine Hayles (2002), de um
modo mais simbólico, defendem que House of Leaves integra um sistema de
remediations da era digital, pois é um romance impresso que tenta remediar as
soluções digitais num contexto analógico. Pressman faz mesmo uma leitura da
cor azul da palavra «house», na versão “2-Color”, como sendo um exemplo de
uma tentativa de remediação (Bolter & Grusin 1999) da hiperligação digital.
19
Deve-se reforçar que muitos leitores críticos, mas produtores não-formais de crítica
textual, têm visões muito mais esclarecidas e perspicazes do que muita da Crítica
tida como especializada e competente.

OBRAS CITADAS

Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: The

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Barthes, Roland. «La Mort de l’Auteur». Le Bruissement de la Langue. Paris:
Seuil, 1984.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacres et Simulation. Paris: Galilée, 1985.

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Bolter, Jay D. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing.
Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1991.
_______ e Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1999.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1961.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1944.
Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Culler, Jonathan. The Literary in Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
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Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New York: Random House, 2000.
Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. California: University of California
Press, 1962.
Faulkner, William. The Wild Palms and The Old Man. New York: Random
House, 1939.
_______, “The Bear”. Big Woods: The Hunting Stories. New York: Random
House, 1955.
Foucault, Michel. «Qu’est-ce qu’un Auteur?». Bulletin de la Société Française de
Philosophie, 63ème anniversaire, n.º 3. Juillet-Septembre 1969: 73-104.
Gaddis, William. Carpenter’s Gothic. New York: Viking, 1985.
Gross, Louis Samuel. Redefining the American Gothic. Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1989.
Hayles, Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge: MIT Press (Mediawork
Pamphlet Series), 2002.
James, M.R. “The Ash-Tree”. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Charleston: Biblio
Bazaar, 2008.
Jauss, Hans Robert. A Literatura como Provocação. Trad. Teresa Cruz. Lisboa:
Vega, 2003.
Lloyd-Smith, Allan. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. New York:
Continuum, 2004.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. London:
Penguin, 2003.
Pressman, Jessica. “House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel”. Studies in
American Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 1. Spring 2006: 107-128.

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Ricoeur, Paul. Du Texte à l’Action. Essais d’Herméneutique. Paris: Seuil, 1998.
Sena, Jorge de. «William Faulkner e “Palmeiras Bravas”». Palmeiras Bravas; Rio
Velho. Lisboa: D. Quixote, 1993.
Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.
_______ e McEvoy, Emma, ed(s). The Routledge Companion to Gothic. London:
Routledge, 2007.
Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. New York: Bantam Books, 1980.
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown & Company,
1996.

Álvaro Seiça Neves 255

 A BRAVE NEW WORLD: USING THE WEB FOR AMERICAN STUDIES

Licínia Pereira*

For the academic community worldwide, the steady diffusion of the World
Wide Web in the last decades has opened exciting new doors to the study
of American political, economic, social and cultural contexts, promoted by
a quicker access to materials once belonging strictly to the somber rooms of
university libraries. The idea of connecting with almost no restrictions to a
wide range of documents, topics and forums of discussion was enough to
make us wonder about the unlimited possibilities of study, research and
collaboration at an academic level.
Initially, when it came to rating the information students extracted from
the Web, distrust prevailed. The dangers conveyed by a passive student
relationship with an over-stimulated media world and the limitations of what
researchers have defined as a digitally illiterate generation produced a cultural
gap between the academy and web technologies. But the development of
innovative digital projects has gradually laid the foundations for a decisive
era of scholarly debate based on the articulation of primary resources and
secondary critical materials, hyper-connected at the expense of instant
travels across the Web. This alone would make the progression of academic
investigation more dynamic and challenging for a mobile global scientific
community, despite the necessary critical caution towards a medium of
communication in which notions of authority and credibility are constantly
being called into question; in which, most frequently, fusion of fact and fiction
adds confusion to the study of many issues of our time.
In the section of primary texts or resources, we can easily distinguish
between sites providing access to archives of historical, literary or statistical
data, facsimiles of the works of prominent authors and images of historical
events, which, in some cases, have just recently emerged into the public
domain. In the section of secondary texts, the content is quite varied but not

257
always academically suitable. If most of the times students have reached
to the most popular internet search engine, Google, and its commercially-
based listings to obtain a general description of a certain subject or theme,
it has become easier to locate specialized databases aiming at a demanding
scientific audience. The Intute website project, organized by a group of
renowned British Universities, is a good example of the recent investment in
the formation of student-friendly digital repositories, which entitle students to
use unprecedented amounts of academic output while enlightening them on
how to make the best use of it. As Bella Adams and R. J. Ellis have suggested,
the Intute database, supplied with a very accomplished virtual tutorial for
American Studies students, “recognizes the importance of not only finding
relevant information but sharing it as well” (32).
What follows in this paper is a heterogeneous but representative selection
of useful web resources gathered and discussed by a group of postgraduate
students of the American Studies programs at the University of Coimbra,
whose specific interests and areas of research range from transnational studies,
feminism, poetry, and the visual arts to politics and literary history.
Critical projects like the one suggested in a classroom of American
Studies at Coimbra are indicative of the growing interest in producing an
international database dependent on the valuable input of scholars and
students of American Studies from around the world, who work locally and
nationally through different logics and perspectives.1
The internet has become, by all means, a place of display and exchange
of information useful to both teachers and students in search of relevant data
sources. It is therefore no surprise to identify at the top of our findings a
considerable number of online syllabi, a most effective means of communication
in the academic world, complemented by an updated showcase of pedagogical
materials in the area of American Studies.
Along with the traditional institutional sites of Associations specialized
in the area of American Studies (ASA; IASA; EAAS and APEAA), a group of
academic sites from American Universities have rapidly gained international
recognition: <http://americanstudies.georgetown.edu/>, an access tool to
the American Studies program from Georgetown College offering a useful link
to their pioneer educational platform Crossroads Project and <http://xroads.
virginia.edu/>, a state-of-the-art pedagogical and institutional platform,
hosted by the University of Virginia. Outside the US, similar projects attest
to the significant and challenging ties linking European scholars to the area of
American Studies, particularly on the subject of American ‘exceptionalism’ and
imperialism. The informative websites from the British Rothermere American
Institute (<http://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/>) and Dublin’s Clinton Institute for
American Studies (<http://www.ucdclinton.ie/>), which present coverage

258 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

of the varied academic activities of both centers with a special attention to
aspects of American history, literature, politics, law and international relations,
are positioned at the forefront of the transatlantic engagement.
Additionally, at <http://www.ehess.fr/cena/>, devised by the Centre
d’Études Nord-Américaines of L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales,
it is possible to find information on the latest investigation of the center
(research, seminars, publications and dissertations) as well as a calendar of
specific academic events, whereas Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in
Hungary (<http://americanaejournal.hu/>), an active forum supported by
the Department of American Studies of the University of Szeged, provides free
access to essays and book reviews written by scholars and doctoral students
engaged in the cultural study of the United States and the Americas.
On a more specific note, The American Studies Journal (<http://asjournal.
zusas.uni-halle.de/>), derived from a small American Newsletter published in
Germany since the 1960s and currently edited by the Center for United States
Studies at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, aims at teachers of
English and American Studies. The journal publishes research articles which
explore crucial aspects of American society, politics and cultural life from an
educational standpoint. Particularly focused on the challenging intersection
of regional, national and international asymmetries, the project developed at
the Federal University of Pernambuco (<http://www.nea.org.br/>) favors a
better understanding of the bilateral relations USA-Brazil while addressing
contemporary political issues through a comparative study of the conditions
and experiences of the Americas and the European continent.
Most often, academic sites have sprung from the need to present to
national and international scholarly communities the conclusions of an
ongoing investigation or the compilation of unrecorded data by established
research groups, profiting in some cases from students’ contribution. As a
result, interactive exhibitions on the Web have played a fundamental role
in activating a positive environment towards cultural and literary revision
within the academy. An interesting example of open revisionary practices is
found at <http://depts.washington.edu/keywords/forums/>, a discussion
forum “aimed at upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and professional
academic audience and their corresponding publics”, jointly sponsored by
the NYU Press and the Simpson Center for the Humanities of the University
of Washington as an extension of the successful guide Keywords for American
Cultural Studies (2007).2
As far as electronic historical collections are concerned, three main
groups of informative display can be highlighted: the website <http://
www.ourdocuments.gov/> presents a selection of one hundred essential
legal documents, including integral transcription of laws and declarations

Licínia Pereira 259

followed by photographic evidence, in order to better substantiate the roots of
the American political credo along with the constitutive economic and social
background of focal legal statements; a more eclectic but equally credible
compilation of texts and historical outlines is provided by the University of
Groningen at the link <http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/>, composed of historical
documents, essays, articles and biographies running from colonial times to
the present era; and the multi-awarded documentary series WGBH American
Experience, at <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/>, faithful
to the motto “some stories can’t just be told, they must be experienced”,
assembles documentaries previously aired on TV and invites audiences to
deepen their knowledge about US historical events by having a closer look
at each one of the episodes. Relying on an accurate but visually attractive
presentation, the PBS site organizes documentaries around major thematic
lines, adding to it a wide range of pedagogical materials such as chronologies,
maps, primary sources, photo galleries, interactive guides and multiple
bibliographic references to the area of social studies and American history.3
In a collective effort to document American fictional and non-fictional
production over decades, university-based digital collections have
experienced notable progress. At <http://library.mtsu.edu/digitalprojects/
womenshistory.php>, a wide array of photographs, letters, diaries, and other
personal artifacts bring complementary new insights into American women’s
history, further disclosing voices of activists, scientists or anonymous women
of different social and ethnic backgrounds from diverse locations and periods.
American fiction from the nineteenth century is exhaustively scrutinized at
<http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/wright2/>, an electronic collection
listed according to Lyle Wright’s bibliographical research and sponsored
by Indiana University Digital Library Program. Currently, Wright American
Fiction, 1851-1875 includes 2,887 volumes (1,763 unedited, 1,124 fully edited)
by 1,456 individual authors. Its flexible and varied search engine facilitates the
contact with abundant fictional material produced by a majority of unknown
authors, particularly women living in the second half of the nineteenth
century, and ultimately inspires a comparative reflection on the literary canon
and the cultural history of a decisive period of the US history.
Conversely, the study of American minorities and their cultural expression
has found a balanced representation in the World Wide Web. In the area of
African-American studies, the multi-dimensioned e-book Black Studies as Text,
at <http://www.eblackstudies.org/>, edited by Abdul Alkalimat with the
support of a network of activist intellectuals called Peoples College, covers
forty years of Black Studies as “a social movement, an academic profession
and a knowledge network”.4 At <http://naisa.org/> and <http://www.
nativeweb.org/>, scholars and students find excellent resource centers

260 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

on Native American or American Indian First Nations and Aboriginal and
Indigenous Studies respectively. Asserting more than just an academic
meeting point, these reference websites invest in an informed and activist
exposure of the voice, the place and the action of “dispossessed communities”
throughout American history.
American contemporary writing and culture has been equally successful
in maintaining a singular presence in the decentralized and labyrinthic Web
environment. The Penn Sound project (<http://www.writing.upenn.edu/
pennsound/>), assigned to the University of Pennsylvania, exhibits a fair
amount of contemporary poetry and subsequent critical material, revealing
an outstanding media library which includes readings and interviews with
selected authors, formatted in downloadable mp3 files. A similar organiza-
tional construction combined with a different philosophy and content describe
the large repository of avant-garde sound art, video and textual works at
UbuWeb (<http://www.ubu.com/>), founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth
Goldsmith. The fact that UbuWeb did not emerge from a rigid academic
environment has certainly influenced its experimental nature in dealing
with digital reprints of avant-garde art and its radical agenda focused on the
current functional and theoretical debates about contemporary culture.
Among several free-accessed digital journals on American contemporary
culture, the long-standing Weber at <http://www.weber.edu/weberjournal>,
a biannual journal “informing the culture and environment of the contemporary
West”, divides its attention into personal narrative, environmental literature,
poetry, essays on poetry, short fiction, art, conversations with eminent writers,
history of ideas, and film making.5 Although Weber’s regional setting sets it
apart from other journals (the journal is known for its successful collaboration
with the Sundance Film Festival), its new featured “Global Spotlight” series
speaks to an international academic community concerned with issues of
transnationalism and the postcolonial discourse of diaspora.
Those mostly interested in American poetry can count on general
informative websites, such as <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/>,
concentrated on the biography and poetry of national and international
authors with direct access to the archives of Poetry magazine, or explore
the growing number of carefully edited digital collections honouring the
life and works of canonical American poets. Of particular interest are the
diverse materials gathered since the 1990s dedicated to the works of two
of the United States’ most admired and popular poets, Walt Whitman and
Emily Dickinson, either in an isolated or dialogical critical mode. At the
website <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/>, we find an impressive
searchable database containing published works, manuscripts, aspects of
biography and correspondence, criticism, resources for teaching or academic

Licínia Pereira 261

research, pictures and audio recording by the influential “poet of democracy”.
On the other hand, The Dickinson Electronic Archives at <http://www.
emilydickinson.org/> compiles information on the life and works of Emily
Dickinson, according to four different categories: “writings by the Dickinson
family” (Emily Dickinson’s correspondence is included); “responses to
Dickinson’s writing”; “teaching with the archives” and “critical resources”.
In the third thematic area, connection to an exemplary joint project of the
Whitman and the Dickinson archives is made available. The Classroom Electric
project (<http://www.classroomelectric.org/>) unifies and magnifies both
poets’ long-life contribution to American Letters. Even though searching for
critical information on each individual poet is still possible, what renders the
Electric website such an effective critical tool is the opportunity to determine
and explore poetic interactions in the incandescent public arena (Civil
War; imperialism and colonialism; nation and identity; slavery; reform and
revolution) as well as in a more private and spiritual territory (death and
dying; sexuality and eroticism, writing and manuscripts).
The importance of this striving mode of interconnectivity in an academic
environment might only be comparable to the existence of online communities
as a whole and like other means of culture formation and sharing is determined
by the promises and failures of its symbolic and structural behavior. As Robert
V. Kozinets argues,
Culture exists, and always has, in a continuous state of flux whose
transformations have been driven by our inventions, which we
simultaneously shape and drive. If we accept that Homo sapiens and Homo
habilis are, by their nature, tool-makers and innovators, then perhaps it
makes no more sense for us to talk about cyberculture as distinct from other
forms of human culture as it does to talk about ‘alphabet culture’, ‘wheel
culture’, or ‘electricity culture’. (12)

Being part of networks of knowledge in the academic world means

recognizing that culture has assimilated the rules and mechanisms of the
digital era; it also means that changing our ways of reading and understanding
it critically empowers all of us.

NOTES

* The author is particularly indebted to the following students in the American Studies
PhD and MA programs at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Coimbra:
Catarina Pinto, Fernando Gonçalves, Isabel Elias, João Paulo Guimarães, Maria
Manuella Tavares, Marta Simões, Marta Soares and Sidcley Almeida, for their
valuable collaboration in researching for this article. The reflection on this
particular matter was inspired by a research project developed in the seminar
“Oficina de Escrita de Artigos Científicos”, led by Professors Isabel Caldeira and
Maria José Canelo.

262 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

1
Simultaneously, the World Wide Web can represent a new driving force for the
menaced field of humanities, offering creative and working solutions “for talented
people left wanting by feeble academic job markets” (Moulthrop 270).
2
Keywords for American Cultural Studies <http://depts.washington.edu/keywords/
forums/?page_id=18>.
3
Some of the themes introduced in the site include: Presidents; Civil Rights;
Native American History; Politics; War; Technology; Popular Culture, and the
American West. WGBH American Experience <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/
americanexperience/films/>.
4
Alkalimat <http://eblackstudies.org/text/intro.html>.
5
Weber <http://weberjournal.weber.edu/>.

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American Studies Electronic Crossroads Project. American Studies Association
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Discovering American Women’s History Online. James E. Walker Library, Middle
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americanstudies.georgetown.edu/>. Web. 24 July 2010.

Licínia Pereira 263

Home page. Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Anglo-Americanos, 2010.
<http://www.malhatlantica.pt/apeaa/>. Web. 17 July 2010.
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en Sciences Sociales, 2004-2010. <http://www.ehess.fr/cena/>. Web. 24
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Home page. Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College
Dublin, 2007-2008. <http://www.ucdclinton.ie/>. Web. 24 July 2010.
Home page. European Association for American Studies, 2005-2010. <http://
www.eaas.eu/>. Web. 8 July 2010.
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iasaweb.org/>. Web. 8 July 2010.
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<http://naisa.org/>. Web. 25 July 2010.
Home page. Núcleo de Estudos Americanos, Universidade Federal de
Pernambuco, 2001-2005. <http://www.nea.org.br/>. Web. 25 July 2010.
Home page. Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, 2009.
<http://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/>. Web. 24 July 2010.
Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Discussion Forums. NYU Press and the
Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington, 3 July
2009. <http://depts.washington.edu/keywords/forums/>. Web. 22
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Kohl, Martina, ed. The American Studies Journal, Center for United States
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Licínia Pereira 265

 THE RENAISSANCE PORTRAITS OF TWO KINGS AND ONE CARDINAL1

Maria de Jesus Crespo Candeias Velez Relvas

In his study on biography and portrait-painting, Richard Wendorf emphasises

the documentary dimension of both forms which, according to his opinion,
constitute “attempts to capture – on paper or on canvas – what is lost or
certain to fade” (9). Approximately along the same line, Paul Murray Kendall
states that “the biographer’s object is … to create a living picture” (129) and
Natalie Bober that “The biographer is a portrait painter … whose palette is
words” (78).
The portraits here considered are precisely the product of word palettes
handled by three authors who spanned the broad Renaissance period
comprising Elizabeth I’s reign: Thomas More’s Richard the Third, Francis Bacon’s
Henry the Seventh and George Cavendish’s Wolsey. The way these portraits
were “varnished, and framed” (Wilde 35) and the inherent importance of
their emblematic dimension – not accomplished through literal image, colour
or iconographical detail, as in the famous portraits of Elizabeth, but through
the art of writing – reveal important features for a richer understanding of the
time, especially of the relations of power at several levels. In an age when lyric
poetry and drama prevailed, this co-existent, less conspicuous form of narrative
offers innumerable possibilities of apprehending the also innumerable and
certainly complex faces that shaped the Renaissance in England.
At a time when the word biography had not yet been coined, the written
portraits were called Lives and contain such an abundance of puzzling
elements that one is led to wonder about the characters created by the authors
and the intentions they had to shape them in such a way.
Didacticism appears to have been intrinsic to biography since its
beginnings in ancient Greece and its role has been repeatedly underlined in
works on the genre. In The Advancement of Learning, Bacon states that when the
life-lived of an individual exhibits “actions both trifling and important, great

267
and small, public and private,” then the Life-written of that individual “if …
well and carefully written … certainly contain[s] a more lively and faithful
representation of things, and one which you may more safely and happily
take for example in another case” (Bacon, Advancement 305).
Together with didacticism, laudatio and vituperatio constitute other
striking elements of biography also detected right from its origins. Although
the former stands out as apparently more prevalent, both shape the texts in
one way or another and make them exempla, either to be imitated or to be
exorcised. In early modern times, More and Bacon wrote about two kings,
whereas Cavendish wrote about a cardinal who was a king’s minister, only
second in power to the monarch. These eminent characters played a direct
role in the historical process, detaching themselves from their anonymous
contemporaries and constituting potential, ideal material to be approached,
according to the tendency I have been focusing on. The texts, therefore, enclose
a dimension of strict biography in the sense that, in principle, they are based
on Richard Plantagenet, Henry Tudor and Thomas Wolsey but inevitably
involve a dimension of historiography, in the sense that they report – reliably
or not – many factual occurrences: battles, marriage negotiations, diplomatic
treaties.
The Renaissance concepts of history, literature, fiction and factual truth,
as well as the authors’ special involvement in their narratives are substantially
different from those ones written either before of after early modern times and
are in part responsible for the textual peculiarities. As a matter of fact, what
is told hardly corresponds to what is commonly known as biographical truth
(Anderson 2),2 that essential condition required by, for instance, the majority of
the authors who produced critical and theoretical essays on biography during
the 20th century. Virginia Woolf’s following words are particularly pertinent
to the Renaissance biographical writings and to the universes they display:
“it would seem that the life which is increasingly real to us is the fictitious
life” (234). Speculation, imagination, fiction, unconfirmed and spurious data,
personal opinions, all are clearly present in Tudor-Stuart Lives, and the writers
are perfectly aware of their use. Thomas More frequently employs expressions
such as “It is for trouth reported” (7), “as the fame runneth” (7), “as menne
constantly say” (16), “this haue I by credible informacion learned” (9), “Thus
say thei” (55), “men had it euer inwardely suspect” (82), “me thinketh it wer
hard but it should be true” (83); Bacon resorts to uncertain sources likewise:
“in the opinion of all men”, “in the opinion of wise men” (28), “men of great
understanding” (28), “secret rumours and whisperings” (30), “[they] were
said to be destroyed” (30), “if it had been true” (30); and Cavendish, although
he develops his text around the corollary “Trewthe it ys” (4), as if to justify a
narrative which is almost entirely the product of his point of view, sometimes

268 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

alludes to his own doubts and possible incapacity to reconstruct circumstances
or events: “it semyd me … that”, “I hard the oppynyon of Somme” (75), “I wyll
… declare it as truly as it chaunced accordyng to my symple remembraunce”
(149-150).
The paradigm of truth that began to be emphasised in early modern times,
within the new concept of history as art and discipline,3 was apparently never
defined, perhaps never practiced in its full extent. One may notice notorious
incongruities in different reports by several historiographers on the same
event, or, contrariwise, unanimous views by various writers who shared
sources that were unreliable, due to the fact that they were based on orality or
on spurious, badly preserved manuscripts.
One must also take into account the enormous pressure of the particular
historical context. The long conflict that had recently opposed Yorks and
Lancasters exerted its vigorous influence on the English Renaissance.
Its traces might have constituted a serious threat to the Tudors, not only
ideological – due to the York previous government and leadership – but also
effective – in the sense that both houses laid legitimate claims to the throne.
New antagonisms had meanwhile arisen as a result of religious struggles:
the permanent clashes between Catholicism and Protestantism, Anglicanism
and Puritanism, in an age characterised by tradition and change, certainly
influenced historians, historiographers and every artist in general. Moreover,
the pressure was a result of complicated relations, involving factions,
patronage and political power. On these uneven grounds, that Edward Bolton
named “places of danger” (104-106), the official historians had no choice but to
convey a certain kind of ‘truth’ because they were usually confronted with the
imposition of propaganda and submitted to censorship whenever they were
hired to tell the historic moments chosen by their patrons. For instance, Henry
VII employed the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil to rewrite the history of
England in a demolishing way for the York survivors. Thus started a long
tradition of chronicles – Grafton’s, Hall’s, Holinshed’s – oriented by the same
guideline: anti-York, pro-Tudor. Even those authors who stood in a more or
less independent position were faced with the urgent need to avoid falling
out of grace. Truth might surface, when it did not offend, disturb or threaten.
Centuries later and in totally different circumstances, Leo Strauss
approached essential aspects that may somehow be related to the Renaissance
context. He refers to “the effect of that compulsion, or persecution, on
thoughts as well as actions” (22). This seems to assume a particular meaning
along the Tudor dynasty, marked by Henry VII’s weak claim to the throne
and by the dynastic/religious problems, from beginning to end. In the midst
of the Elizabethan age, the complex issues of usurpation/deposition, power
legitimacy/power investiture gave rise to opposite attitudes regarding two

Maria de Jesus Crespo Candeias Velez Relvas 269

crucial, partly similar moments in the history of England: Henry VII’s victory
and Richard III’s consequent destruction – physical and ideological – were
amplified, giving consistency to the Tudor Myth; on the contrary, Henry IV’s
rise to power and Richard II’s consequent deposition were considered topics
to be avoided because of the parallels that would at once be drawn with the
situation featuring Essex and Elizabeth.
Nevertheless, also according to Strauss, the authors have always the
possibility of remaining independent in those “places of danger” should they
employ a subtle technique while producing their works:
Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith
to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is
presented exclusively between the lines. (25)

Strauss classifies the designation “writing between the lines” as metaphorical,

and the definition as literally impossible, although its roots stem from
Antiquity. What seems to be relevant is the practice of the technique by many
authors, avoiding situations of coercion, especially in the past:
… one may wonder whether some of the greatest writers of the past have
not adapted their literary technique to the requirements of persecution, by
presenting their views on all the then crucial questions exclusively between
the lines. (26)

We must always bear in mind that the characters and the universes of
biography are not fictional. Therefore, the pertinent aspects detected by
Strauss necessarily assume a wider dimension, once they may ultimately
be connected with the way the authors reported public, official decisions,
attitudes and behaviours.

The History of King Richard the Third (ca. 1514), The History of the Reign
of King Henry the Seventh (1622) and The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey
(1558) disclose the whole complexity of the age, as well as the peculiarities of
Renaissance biographical writings I have just pointed out.
Thomas More draws an acid, unlikely portrait of Richard III, based on
speculation and rumour, as the author himself recognises. The legendary
dimension of the protagonist, who is turned into a true monster by More5
and placed beyond recall in the domain of malignity, accurately emphasises
the narrative line – vituperation built upon a process of amplificatio. Richard’s
actions are dictated by his loathsome, morally distorted personality,
establishing perfect correspondences between the physical and the inner
traits – hunchbacked; withered arm; born with teeth and shoulder-length hair
after two year’s gestation in his mother’s womb; a murderer; a usurper; a vile
creature.

270 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 The way the Duke of Gloucester is introduced in his Life will determine the
long process of vilification. The first pages are totally dedicated to his brother,
Edward IV, who functions as his antithesis: “of visage louelye, of bodye
mightie, stronge, and cleane made” (4). Then, gradually, subtle references and
allusions are inserted, anticipating the protagonist’s negative characterisation
(4-7) and culminating in the report of his birth (7). When Gloucester finally
appears, the correspondence between his outer and inner traits is immediately
established, and the opposite image of Edward IV is fully depicted:
... little of stature, ill fetured of limmes, croke backed, his left shoulder much
higher then his right, hard fauoured of visage (...) malicious, wrathfull,
enuious ... close and secrete, a deepe dissimuler, lowlye of counteynaunce,
arrogant of heart, ... dispitious and cruell ... (7-8).

The insistence on Richard’s physical deformity seems to go beyond the intention

of merely describing him; consequently, the possibility of regeneration is
totally rejected along the Life. The literary speech is full of violence whenever
Richard is mentioned. Each one of his actions and decisions, first as Duke
of Gloucester and then as King Richard III, is always said to have a double
meaning, in a crescendo that leads to his complete destruction. Although the
capital crimes he is accused of are naturally condemnable (the murders of
Henry VI, Clarence and Edward IV’s sons), the emphasis on his wickedness
and the vilification of both his image and his character takes consistency on
another level. In fact, Richard III’s worst transgression is the way he is, or
better, the way More tells he is – a cruel, ambitious dissembler, continuously
guided by premeditation. The Life constitutes above all a dissection process of
his malignity and monstrosity. He was thus turned into an exemplum, not to be
followed, not to be imitated, according to a didactic and moralising principle.
The whole text seems to be deliberately out of focus so that what is
claimed to be the truth may be completely encapsulated. Factual reality, as
well as the actions, dialogues and conflicts involving the historical characters
are the product of the artist’s craft, not of the historiographer’s. Within such
frame, the negative portrait of the last Plantagenet king of England might
have led to a propaganda piece, focused, for example, on the Tudor salvation
of the kingdom. However, this is not what actually happens. The incomplete
narrative with its abrupt ending, together with the literal aversion to Richard
III, may indeed reveal a strong feeling of disappointment concerning an ideal
of government and an auspicious era that soon proved to be characterised
by new ways of tyranny, instability and corruption. The panegyric tendency
that, more or less explicitly, has been frequently associated to biographical
writings is here therefore completely subverted.
In Francis Bacon’s text laudatio does exist but it is achieved in inconsistent
ways, traced out by the exhaustive repetition of the conjunctions “yet” and

Maria de Jesus Crespo Candeias Velez Relvas 271

“but”, and originated by the permanent censure of the king. The author seems
constantly divided between two sorts of obligation – to praise and to be true
to a pseudo-factual reality – and approaches the problematic circumstances
intimately related to the Earl of Richmond’s rise to power with efficient
subtlety, always insisting on the precariousness of his legitimacy. According
to Bacon, the first Tudor king faced a serious dilemma when he sought to
achieve a solid position by claiming three indirect rights:
The first, the title of Lady Elizabeth with whom ... he was to marry. The
second, the ancient and long disputed title (both by plea and arms) of the
house of Lancaster ... The third, the title of the sword or conquest ... (29)

In the Life, the dilemma assumes the form of a debate built upon a complex
process of argumentatio that reveals (here and in many other passages, as it
happens in every Renaissance biographical text) the author’s own opinion
on the matter, while the recurrent problematic of usurpation/deposition is
significantly approached.
Another relevant aspect related to the monarch’s peculiarities of his
accession is the lack of a prince’s education. Bacon tells us that, in spite of
Henry VII’s achievements in terms of government, administration and
stability, there were threats of various origins that subsisted for a long time
during his long reign, due both to his lack of sagacity and preparation to rule
and to the stigma involving his accession:
The King was green in his estate; and contrary to his own opinion ... was not
without much hatred throughout the realm. (44)

Bacon seems to justify Henry VII’s hazards through these two factors, namely
implying that they were like a curse casting its shadow on the new dynasty.
Eventually, he succeeded in solidifying his and his descendants’ rights,
especially when he exposed the impostors Lambert Simnell and Perkin
Warbeck, as he succeeded in administrating the kingdom’s resources. But
the menaces never ceased and are permanently emphasised in the text by
the repetition of turbulence elements – “storms”, “winds”, “rains”, “weeds”
– whereas the repetition of verbs such as “look”, “see”, “foresee” and “watch”
put into evidence their opposites, in other words, the king’s lack of vision and
of prevision.
Henry VII’s Life is the report of his reign, namely of the state affairs
and the monarch’s policy. A sort of close up of the protagonist is made
only at the end, occupies but a few pages and contains the major elements
of a peculiar laudatory process where criticism is not absent. The result is
a composite image where the negative features invariably prevail. In fact,
Bacon’s attitude regarding the king is always ambivalent, sometimes even
caustic, based on various reiterations that constantly emphasise a disturbing

272 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

formulation – Henry Tudor’s ascension to power was only made legitimate
when he married a York, which corrosively presupposes the illegitimacy of
his own, alleged titles. Furthermore, and reinforcing that same formulation,
many of his decisions are considered dubious and the cause of disastrous
events, by means of constant references to Henry’s misjudgements, rapacity,
unjust treatment of his queen and, chiefly, to the lack of preparation and
experience for government. Therefore, while his life-lived may not be taken
as an exemplum, the Life told by Bacon may constitute a didactic sample, as far
as it reports a long learning process of someone in principle unfit to rule, and
as far as it is a new approach to the man and to the reign.
Contrariwise, the Life written by George Cavendish is clearly laudatory,
opposite not only to More’s but also to Bacon’s text. Furthermore, this portrait
is doubtless the most direct of the three and the one where the protagonist
has more visibility. The author’s major purpose is to restore the Cardinal’s
image and reputation that had been made insidious by other writers, within a
whole set of injustices mainly inflicted by Anne Boleyn. The laudatio explores
the cardinal’s dimension as a victim to the least detail but, simultaneously,
contains an elaborate euphemistic process that gradually depicts Henry VIII
as the master agent of his minister’s opprobrium.
The Life is developed upon many dichotomies and may be divided into
two parts that correspond to Wolsey’s rise and fall, the two moments in the
protagonist’s life-lived when he was in or out of favour with his monarch.
The first moment, permanently and significantly dominated by the colour
red, was characterised by Wolsey’s meteoric ascension to power and wealth.
According to the narrator’s point of view, these are natural traits of eminence
and constitute due rewards bestowed upon someone whose qualities
deserved to be recognised (13, 15, 17). Besides the title of Cardinal, Wolsey
would gradually be honoured with an impressive number of ecclesiastical
titles: Abbot of Saint Albans, Bishop of Bath and Wells, Bishop of Winchester,
Duresme, Tournai, Lincoln, Worcester and Hereford, and, above all,
Archbishop of York and Legatus de latere, i.e. the representative of the Pope
in England. As a consequence, he made sure he was always surrounded by
symbols of a personal imagery of power, especially the archbishopric cross
and the legacy cross, which would become metonymies of his prominence:
… erected his crosse in the Court and in euery other place […] Than hade he ij
great Crossis of Syluer where of oon of them was for his archebysshopriche/
And the other for his legacye/ borne alwayes byfore hyme whether so euer
he went or rode/ by ij of the most tallest and comlyest prestes that he cowld
gett wtin all this realme/ (15, 17)

Thomas Wolsey aimed at a public and constant display of his vast power
which, in practical terms, proved to be even greater than the king’s: as Lord

Maria de Jesus Crespo Candeias Velez Relvas 273

Chancellor, he effectively ruled England; as Cardinal, he was the highest
ecclesiastical dignitary of the reign; as Legatus de latere, he was invested with a
wide authority that simultaneously comprised the whole secular sphere.
The descriptive processes are frequent and detailed, in a perfect
consonance with the golden times in Wolsey’s life. The protagonist appears in
the text always surrounded by pomp, which will be expanded in the allusion
to rich clothes, fine jewels and expensive furniture:
… a great nomber of Riche stuffe of sylke … of all Colours/ as veluett/
Satten/ Damaske/ Caffa/ Taffata/ Grograyn/ Sarcenett/ (…) the richest
Sewtes of Coopes (…) a nomber of plate of all sortes/ as ware all most
Incredyble/ (…) And bokes conteynyng the valwe & wayte of euery parcell
… (98, 99)

The allusion to magnificence culminates in the detailed description of the

Cardinal-Chancellor’s House, an enormous estate that included several
mansions and palaces, with a horde of servants and attendants – “abought
the Somme of fyve hundred parsons accordyng to his chekker rolle” (21).
While reporting the ascendant motion of the Wheel of Fortune, the text is
full of colour, movement and detail that correspond to powerful metonymies
of the cardinal’s extreme ostentation, opulence and wealth. Concomitantly,
while reporting the opposite movement of fall, the author expands countless
variations of the character’s victimisation, as well as subtle, bitter considerations
on the precariousness of power, on the inexorability of destiny and on the
places of danger originated by factions, ambitions and despotism. The part of
the text devoted to this second moment in the Cardinal’s life is substantially
longer, describing his fall in every one of its sides: disfavour, rejection, total
destitution, opprobrium, exile, illness and death. The colour red and its
variations that had dominated the first part are symbolically substituted by
purple, also in several tonalities, while opulence, magnificence and wealth are
replaced by total austerity and frugality.
The ways Thomas More, Francis Bacon and George Cavendish approached
their subjects are particularly elaborate. Fiction is merged with historical truth
and the result is a totality of lives-lived and Lives-written where the authors’
own lives are simultaneously and explicitly visible. Biographical truth and
biographical fiction are thus convergent and confusable, because the texts
absorb elements from what was then believed to be the objective truth and
the creative imagination. The metaphorical processes give origin to complex
meanings, and one must try to read them “between the lines”. The authors
must have been exceptionally aware of the tensions that characterised their
time, due to the places they occupied and to the themes they chose to deal with.
The truth which is transmitted by More, Bacon and Cavendish corresponds
therefore to a very special kind of truth or, perhaps, to many kinds of truth. As

274 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

for propaganda, if it exists at all, it is certainly concealed under innumerable
subtleties. For all these reasons, the three texts seem to be above all didactic,
therefore useful, containing broad considerations on universal, timeless topics
that are usually conveyed through moralising warnings. All of them end up
by focusing on forms of tyranny and injustice and, in one way or another,
share a common concern, not exempted from disenchantment, because they
insinuate the improbability of successful alternative solutions. As Thomas
More powerfully put it in his Richard III,
… these matters bee Kynges games, as it were stage playes, and for the more
part plaied vpon scafoldes. In which pore men be but ye lokers on. And thei
yt wise be, wil medle no farther. (81)

NOTES

1
This paper was written in the Fall of 2002, as a result from research work developed
in the late 1990s. It was originally accepted for publication in issue 8 of Op. Cit.
After a six-year delay, the author has submitted it again for publication in the
present issue.
2
Judith Anderson considers the difference between ‘Life’ and ‘life’ – the first is written
and the second is lived.
3
See, for instance, Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry, Francis Bacon’s Essay “On
Truth” and Jean Bodin’s La Méthode de l’Histoire.
4
Richard III is turned into a monster by Shakespeare, as well. The play is based on the
same historiographical sources and on More’s biographical text itself.
5
Cavendish had been the Cardinal’s Gentleman Usher, therefore, a privileged
eyewitness to many events of the period.

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Judith. Biographical Truth. The Representation of Historical Persons in

Tudor-Stuart Writing. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1984.
Bacon, Francis (1605). The Advancement of Learning. Ed. James Spedding, et. al.
The Works of Francis Bacon. Vol. IV. London: Longman & Co., 1860.
_______, (1601). Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral. Ed. James Spedding, et. al.
The Works of Francis Bacon. Vol. VI. London: Longman & Co., 1861. 365-
518.
_______, (1622). The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh. Ed. James
Spedding, et al. The Works of Francis Bacon. Vol. VI. London: Longman &
Co., 1861.
Bober, Natalie S. “Writing Lives”. The Lion and the Unicorn 15.1 (June 1991):
78-88.

Maria de Jesus Crespo Candeias Velez Relvas 275

Bodin, Jean (1566). La Méthode de l’Histoire. Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1941.
Bolton, Edward (ca. 1618). Hypercritica: Or a Rule of Judgment for Writing or
Reading Our Hystorys. Ed. J. E. Spingarn. Critical Essays of the Seventeenth
Century. Vol. I. Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon P, 1908.
Cavendish, George (1558). The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey. Ed. Richard S.
Sylvester. London, New York and Toronto: Oxford UP, 1959.
More, Thomas (ca. 1514): The History of King Richard the Third. Ed. Richard S.
Sylvester. The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. Vol. 2. New Haven and
London: Yale UP, 1963.
Sidney, Sir Philip (1595). An Apology for Poetry. Ed. Geoffrey Shepherd.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984.
Strauss, Leo (1952). Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago and London:
The U of Chicago P, 1988.
Wendorf, Richard. The Elements of Life. Biography and Portrait-Painting in Stuart
and Georgian England. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991.
Wilde, Oscar (1890). The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. G. F. Maine. The Works of
Oscar Wilde. London and Glasgow: Collins, 1992.
Woolf, Virginia. “The New Biography”. Collected Essays. Vol. 4. London: The
Hogarth P, 1967.

276 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 BLURRING THE LINES BETWEEN THE NATIONS: SLIPPERY IDENTITIES IN
MARIA EDGEWORTH’S PATRONAGE (1814) AND ORMOND (1817)1

Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez

1. Introduction.
Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), one of the most popular and prolific women
writers in nineteenth-century Great Britain, had the merit to inaugurate the
regionalist novel and the Big House novel with Castle Rackrent (1800), a text
which inspired her great friend Sir Walter Scott, and later, Ivan Turgenev.
Edgeworth studies are currently centred on Ireland, on Edgeworth’s position
towards the Union or the Empire (see Perera, 1991; McCann, 1996 and
Hollingworth, 1997), and on Edgeworth’s enlightened views of education
and woman (see Kirkpatrick, 1996 and Harvey, 2006). Despite the traditional
categorisation of the Anglo-Irish writer’s corpus as Irish tales (Ennui [1809],
The Absentee [1812]), pedagogic essays (Practical Education [1801]), and
novels of manners (Belinda [1801], Helen [1834]), this paper presents a new
line of research related to postcolonial studies and to a project about the
representation of nationality in Edgeworth (Fernández, 2008). My study is
necessarily restricted, and it must be placed in the critical framework created
by many British women writers, such as Charlotte Smith (Desmond, 1792),
Elizabeth Hamilton (Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 1800), or Frances Burney
(The Wanderer, 1814). All of them questioned Frenchness against Britishness
at the turn of the nineteenth century and participated in an ideological debate
that has further consequences when we turn to the historical novel.
It is undeniable that the French Revolution affected trends and ideas all
over the Continent during the first half of the nineteenth century and that
the relationship between Edgeworth and France is not a new topic. On the
one hand, France represented a higher culture, and – for the Irish rebels
– Catholic France was even an ally against the English King. On the other
hand, France was a model to avoid. A patriotic attachment was articulated by

277
Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and, after
the famous recantations of support and sympathy for the Revolution made by
Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth in the late 1790s, anti-Jacobinism
and conservatism grew stronger in Great Britain. Edgeworth belonged to
the Protestant élite, and, during the Peace of Amiens, she had travelled to
Europe, where her family had good friends and contacts at court (Butler,
Maria Edgeworth 196; Connolly xxviii). In her tales and novels, the Anglo-
Irish writer makes extensive use of historical allusions and references to real
French people. One hundred per cent of her French characters are depicted
in black-and-white terms, such as Mme. de Coulanges, a bad mother in the
homonymous work, or Abbé Tracassier, an image of the French Revolution in
Mme. de Fleury (Tales of Fashionable Life, 1809) symbolising the typical ruthless
orator of revolutionary France. Examples of proper and improper feminine
behaviour appear respectively in the tales “The Good French Governess” and
“Mademoiselle Panache” (The Parent´s Assistant [1796] and Moral Tales), and
the main character in Mme. de Fleury, or Mrs. Mortimer in Patronage (1814)
show that France was also positively seen in Edgeworth’s fiction.
Clíona O’Gallchoir’s dissertation thesis analysed Edgeworth’s response
to Mme. de Staël and post-revolutionary France emphasising gender issues
and Edgeworth’s adherence to Enlightenment (1998). I support this scholar’s
views in the sense that Edgeworth does not attack France, which always
provides an intellectual stimulus. O’Gallchoir generalises and appreciates
that in Edgeworth there is
a sophisticated challenge to the post-revolutionary demonization of a
supposed feminization and corruption of French ancient regime culture, and
therefore a rejection of the negative stereotypes of Frenchness and French
womanhood in particular upon which the construction of a British national
identity relied (Maria Edgeworth and the Rise of National Theatre 22).

Years later, this critic notices that “many of Edgeworth’s texts envision an
Irish identity which is in permanent transit” (Maria Edworth: Women 175, my
italics). Though Edgeworth was a stout patriot, she was also a “whig” and
a Utilitarian who criticised social injustice and abuse using irony and satire
as weapons. Much of her merit precisely lies in her ability to depict wrong
attitudes through humour (Bilger). I would like to redefine O’Gallchoir’s
point of view and to take into account the role of France and its inhabitants in
the Anglo-Irish writer by referring to the postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha.
Together with Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Bhabha opened
a wide variety of theoretical issues central to postcolonialism, and, considering
the level of dispute regarding the political stance of Ormond and Patronage,
his is the perfect theory to read Edgeworth’s ambivalence. Bhabha explores
the possibility of reading colonialist discourses as endless ambivalent, split

278 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

and unstable, never able to install securely the colonial values they seem to
support, and far from benevolent and inclusive. The nation remains a site
of heterogeneity and difference, and culture is regarded as intermingled and
manifold. In colonialist representations, the colonised subject is always in
motion, sliding ambivalently between the polarities of similarity and difference.
For Bhabha, colonial discourse produces the colonised as a social reality which
is at once an “other” and yet entirely knowable and visible (70-1). Bhabha
considers the hybrids as the products of colonization and imperfect copies of
the original. Since a hybrid is just an imitation, I am not focussing specifically
on Frenchness, but on those characters desirous to frenchify themselves, or to
assimilate as much as possible to a culture associated with prestige and good
manners in the eighteenth century. Edgeworth plays with the potential for
subversion inherent in the hybrid revealing the limits of authority: “Mimicry
is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance
which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power intensifies
surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges
and disciplinary powers” (Bhabha, 86 also 115).
I propose an examination of two neglected non-feminocentric narratives,
Patronage and Ormond (1817), where the hybrids are not only objects of derision,
but also instruments to attack certain attitudes contrary to Edgeworth’s
ideology. As Bhabha points out, a hybrid does not reproduce the self, it comes
to be “the desire for a reformed, recognisable other, as a subject of difference that
is almost the same but not quite” (86). Such a desire is totally bound to fail in
Edgeworth who presents liminal figures: one a story set in England (Patronage
and the Clay brothers) and another one set in Ireland and France (Ormond
with Miss O’ Failey). Most of the times these hybrids are not attached to
any particular nation and just function as artefacts displaying their lack of
authenticity and moral integrity.

2. Patronage: Englishmen aping Frenchmen

Patronage is a long family romance recommending professional and
sentimental independence. Mixing politics and domesticity, it hinges on
two families, the Percys and the Falconers, representatives of two different
ways to progress in the world. While the Percys believe in effort and exhibit
exemplary attitudes, sound morality, good sense and independent spirit; the
Falconers are promoted through espionage, favours, intrigue, bribery and
forgery, and they do not achieve what they plan. Patronage is a complex pre-
Victorian satire without a single protagonist, it insists on prudence and self-
reliance and offers various psychological portraits of men and women.

Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez 279

 Towards the middle of the story, Alfred Percy sends to her sisters a list
of the people who are going to attend a performance at Falconer Court, which
provides the opportunity to introduce the Clays, both praised by The Quarterly
Review (1814: 315-6) and The Edinburgh Review (1814: 434). The Clays’ father
acquired some wealth thanks to commerce, and, according to Alfred, English
Clay is cold, proud, and obsessed by Englishness and his personal satisfaction.
He laughs at others and is unable to entertain those around. His brother is not
better and is marrying a foreigner while English Clay has a mistress and is
proud of remaining single (Edgeworth, Patronage 301-2). French Clay boasts of
his love affairs, he has seduced Lady Harriot H., an officer’s wife (Edgeworth,
Patronage 274), and deserves Alfred’s criticism:
[…] I am afraid I cannot speak of this man with impartiality, for I cannot
bear to see an Englishman apeing [sic] a Frenchman. — The imitation is
always so awkward, so ridiculous, so contemptible. French Clays talks of
tact, but without possessing any; he delights in what he calls persiflage, but
in his persiflage, instead of the wit and elegance of Parisian raillery, there
appears only the vulgar love and habit of derision. — He is continually
railing at our English want of savoir vivre, yet is himself an example of the
ill-breeding which he reprobates. His manners have neither the cordiality
of an Englishman, nor the polish of a foreigner. To improve us in l’esprit de
societé, he would introduce the whole system of French gallantry — the vice
without refinement. — I heard him acknowledge it to be ‘his principle’ to
intrigue with every married woman who would listen to him, provided she
has any of his four requisites, wit, fashion, beauty, or a good table. — He
says his late suit in Doctors’ Commons cost him nothing; for £10,000 are
nothing to him.
Public virtue, as well as private, he thinks it a fine air to disdain — and
patriotism and love of our country he calls prejudices, of which a
philosopher ought to divest himself. — Some charitable people say, that he
is not so unfeeling as he seems to be, and that above half his vices arise from
affectation, and from a mistaken ambition to be, what he thinks perfectly
French (Edgeworth, Patronage 301).

French Clay’s efforts are concentrated on passing for a Frenchman to the point
of being ridiculous, hypocritical and uncultivated. At Falconer Court, the fop
disdains a performance because it is based on a translation of Voltaire: “‘La
beauté est toujours dans son pays, and tears unfortunately need no translation,
—but when we come to words, you will allow me, Ma’am, that the language
of fine feeling is absolutely untranslatable, untransfusible’” (Edgeworth, 1986:
369). Edgeworth emphasises that French Clay would be rejected by the French
themselves, and, more importantly, that a lesson is to be drawn: “The most
common-place and disagreeable characters often promoted this purpose, and
thus afforded means of amusement, and materials for reflections” (Edgeworth,
Patronage 372)

280 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Solely guided by self-interest, French Clay admits that public feelings,
which he lacks, are a prejudice and that “‘no prejudice ever was or can be
useful to mankind’” (Edgeworth, Patronage 373). He later explains what kind
of wars he opposes:
[…] he was not speaking of wars, of foreign conquests, but of defensive
wars, where foolish people, from an absurd love of their own country, that
is, of certain barren mountains, of a few acres of snow, or of collections of
old houses and churches, called capital cities, will expose themselves to
fire, flame, and famine, and will stand to be cut to pieces inch-metal, rather
than to submit to a conqueror, who might, ten to one, be a more civilized
or cleverer sort of a person than their own rulers, and under whom they
might enjoy all the luxuries of life — changing only the name of their
country for some other equally well-sounding name; and perhaps adopting
a few new lands, instead of what they might have been in the habit from
their childhood of worshipping, as a wittenagemotte [sic], or a diet, or a
constitution (Edgeworth, Patronage 375).

This statement is answered by the half German Count Altenberg, who states
that French Clay is reducing civilization to the state of brutes and that he
should value the fact of inhabiting a land of freedom, which makes French
Clay enounce his surprising motto:
[…] it might be awkward to live in a conquered country; but if a man has
talents to make himself agreeable to the powers that be, and money in his
purse, that can never touch him, chacun pour soi — et honi soit qui mal y pense
(Edgeworth, Patronage 376).

The comment does not depart from what Napoleonic advocates supported,
as Count Altenberg observes. As if that were not enough, French Clay admits
that he is totally indifferent to homeland:
“I have two hundred thousand pounds, well counted; as to the rest it is quite
indifferent to me, whether England be called England or France. — For,”
concluded he, walking off to the committee of dress, “after all I have heard,
I recur to my first question, what is country — or, as people term it, their
native land?” (Edgeworth, Patronage 376).

Edgeworth believes in enlightened cosmopolitism at the same time that she

is aware of the potential limitations of the emergent ideology of national
character. Here French Clay’s attitude must be condemned bearing in mind
the Anglo-Irish writer’s admiration for French culture which O’Gallchoir
perceives in her earlier work Letters for Literary Ladies (1798) (Maria Edgeworth:
Women 115). Taking into account his inability to commit himself to a nation,
this pseudo Frenchman cannot be more laughed at. Nevertheless, it will be in
Ormond where Edgeworth leaves aside nationalistic feelings and best exposes
the intersection between hybridity and gender.

Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez 281

 3. Ormond and the Frenchified vulgar Irish woman
The mixture of British and French features is also found in Miss O’Faley or
Mademoiselle O’Faley in Ormond. This is a story about the education of a
generous orphan brought up by the courtier Sir Ulick O’Shane, who loves
Harry Ormond more than his own son Marcus. Two ways of life are again
contrasted: King Corny is introduced as a symbol of Catholicism and Gaelic
civilization whereas Sir Ulick embodies the worldly Protestant politician.
The Black Islands, where King Corny lives, offer a mythical atmosphere, a
pre-industrial society encompassing the feudal virtues of loyalty, continuity
and attachment to the land. Ormond appears as a sentimental flawed hero
aspiring to be first a Tom Jones and later a Sir Charles Grandison, two of the
many subtexts structuring Ormond. There is a love story between the hero
and Dora, King Corny’s daughter, and, after some adventures and a stay in
Paris meeting relevant political and intellectual figures of the time, Ormond
acquires the polish and experience to return to Ireland and marry Florence
Annaly.
Together with Miss Black, Miss O’Failey is one of the best points in Ormond
(Murray 278; Butler, Novels lviii, vol. 1), but she has been almost neglected by
critics so far. For Marilyn Butler, O’Faley represents the descendants of the
“Wild Geese”: “one of those high-born followers of King James who sought
military service with the Catholic monarchs of Europe” (Novels Intr. vol 5:
xxii; cf. McCormack 137). The daughter of an officer of the Irish Brigade
and a French Lady, O’Failey was brought up in France and dresses like a
Frenchwoman. Ormond’s aunt seems to be fifteen, she uses rouge and does
not stop moving her eyes. The pseudo French lady profits from Ireland in the
sense that her wealth comes from the money left by a relation of hers, who
was a merchant (Edgeworth, Ormond 100).
In general, the inhabitants of the Black Islands like O’Failey due to her
sociability:
[…] she was so gay, so sociable, so communicative; and she certainly, above
all, knew so much of the world. She was continually receiving letters, and
news, and patterns from Dublin, and the Black Rock, and Paris; each of which
places, and all standing nearly upon the same level, made a great figure in
her conversation, and in the imagination of the half or quarter gentry, with
whom she consorted in this remote place (Edgeworth, Ormond 102).

Others, such as King Corny, have a quite different opinion:

Here is my sister-in-law, Mademoiselle O’Failey, coming to reside with me
here, and has conquered her antipathy to solitude, and the Black Islands, and
all from natural love and affection for my daughter Dora, for which I have a
respect for her, notwithstanding all her eternal jabbering about politesse, and
all her manifold absurdities, and infinite female vanities, of which she has a
double proportion, being half French (Edgeworth, Ormond 99).

282 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 King Corny has no intention to marry O’Failey and has no eye on her
money: “‘I am a great hunter, but not legacy hunter; and that is a kind of
hunting I despise, and I wish every hunter of that kind may be thrown out, or
thrown off, and may never be in at the death!’” (Edgeworth, Ormond 99). He
also criticises her stubbornness and fashionable innovations in Corny Castle,
which comes to be Castle Topsy-Turvey:
His ready wit had excuses, reasons or remedies for all mademoiselle’s
objections. Every alteration she proposed, he promised to get executed, and
he promised impossibilities with the best faith imaginable.
“As the Frenchman answered to the Queen of France,” said Corny, “if it is
possible, it shall be done, and if it is impossible it must be done” (Edgeworth,
Ormond 101).

O’Failey is othered in the narrative, she represents a way of life very different
from the Irish one. Her love of etiquette provides the readers with some
hilarious scenes, such as when she is angry because a little boy has brought
a smeared letter: “When will this entire nation leave off chewing tobacco,
I wonder? This is what you style clean, too, in this country?” (Edgeworth,
Ormond 112).
Critics have accurately insisted on the centrality of French in Ormond.
For O’Gallchoir, and despite the portray of French Clay, commanding French
makes the protagonist a gentleman as long as he embraces the language of
politeness (Maria Edgeworth: Women 143). On the other hand, Hollingworth
points out that Ormond frequently obscures its Irish political commentary and
plays strange tricks with its historical setting (184). This scholar explains that
the transition from English to French affects the narrative point of view and
the representation of thought: “the narrative hovers between the formal and
the informal mode, between English and French, between the written and the
oral code, in a way which reflects Ormond’s and Ireland’s crisis —the crisis of
allegiance” (205). As a result, Ormond becomes a “richly political apologue”
(Hollingworth, 206). From Bhabha’s perspective, by speaking English, the
colonised O’Failey, like Black Connal, has not succumbed to the power of
the colonisers, but she challenges the representations which attempt to fix
and define her. Subjectivity is discursively produced, it can be remade and
remodelled, and, regarding language in Ormond, Butler points out: “The
difference between her two idioms underlines the difference in the state of
culture in France and Ireland, but it also suggests that when grafted on to Irish
characters French civilization does not necessarily take root” (387), and this
is what happens to O’Failey. Though this woman is a connoisseuse of social
manners and speaks perfect French, she makes many linguistics mistakes in
English. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot conceal her Irish stock:

Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez 283

 In her gestures, tones, and language, there was a striking mixture, or rapid
succession of French and Irish. When she spoke French, which she spoke
well, and with a true Parisian accent, her voice, gestures, air, and ideas were
all French, and she looked and moved a well-born, well-bred woman. The
moment she attempted to speak English, which she spoke with an inveterate
brogue, her ideas, manner, air, voice and gestures were Irish; she looked and
moved a vulgar Irishwoman (Edgeworth, Ormond 97).

Unable to find the right word, O’Failey needs Ormond’s help. The same
happens when she wants to translate an expression, and Dora corrects her:
“‘Hoisted him out! Well, aunt, you do sometimes speak the oddest English’”
(Edgeworth, Ormond 152). For Hollingworth, “her [O’Failey’s] ungrounded
idiolect, her uncertain registers, the lack of integrity in her vocabulary and
idiom, all express the deeper political concerns of the narrative” (208), and
her inaccurate vernacular has a moral dimension indicating her unsuitability
as a companion (209). Taking into account cultural duplicity, she is similar to
Black Connal:
In English he spoke with a native Irish accent, which seemed to have been
preserved from childhood; but though the brogue was strong, yet there were
no vulgar expressions; he spoke good English, but generally with somewhat
of French idiom. Whether this was from habit or affectation it was not easy
to decide. It seemed as if the person who was speaking thought in French,
and translated it into English as he went on (Edgeworth, Ormond 154).

A Frenchified character, who becomes Dora’s husband, Black Connal or M.

de Connal has the same problems with vocabulary and shows his ridicule
command of French when he resorts to Ormond to apply the right word:
“What you want chiefly in conversation, in everything, is a certain degree of
— of — you have no English word — lightness.”
“Légèreté, perhaps you mean,” said Ormond.
“Precisely. I forgot you understood French so well. Légèreté, untranslatable!
You seize my idea” (Edgeworth, Ormond 170).

Miss O’Faley is attracted by everything that is related to France and specially

by Parisian life. From her point of view, Dora should marry an Irishman and
then they should fix their residence in the French capital. Ormond’s aunt
introduces a cultural contrast regarding female education related to Seamus
Deane’s idea that femininity is poised between two extremes in Edgeworth:
The social virtues Edgeworth promotes are similar to those recommended
by Hannah More for the ideal English woman in her Strictures on the Modern
System of Female Education (1799). Her Enlightenment values are specifically
“Protestant” […] The role of her ideal female is to “civilize” an unruly or
lovable male by letting him see the twin ganders of fashionable society on
the one hand and derelict provincialism on the other […] The Frenchified
frippery of high society and the rapscallion anarchy of Hibernian society are
the extremes between which this ideal and English sobriety must steer (31).

284 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

O’Failey is associated with moral corruption. She cannot understand women’s
attitude to men, which again provokes comic situations:
“Bon Dieu,” cried mademoiselle, who was now within exclamation
distance. “What a course we have had after you, gentlemen! Ladies looking
for gentlemen! C’est inoui! What is it all? for I am dying with curiosity”
(Edgeworth, Ormond 145).

The narrator delineates her personality when she plans to avoid White
Connal’s marriage to Dora,
To the French spirit of intrigue and gallantry she [Miss O’Failey] joined with
Irish acuteness, and Irish varieties of odd resource, with the art of laying
suspicion asleep by the appearance of an imprudent, blundering good-
nature; add to all this a degree of confidence, that could not have been
acquired by any means but one. Thus accomplished, “rarely did she manage
matters” (Edgeworth, Ormond 105).

On one occasion, Ormond’s aunt unsuccessfully tries to impose her will and
to persuade Dora to marry Monsieur de Connal, which provokes the girl’s
reply:
“No matter what he is,” said Dora, “I shall not go down to see him; so you
had better go by yourself, aunt.”
“Not one step! Oh that would be the height of impolitesse and disobedience.
You could not do that, my dear Dore; consider, he is not a man that nobody
know, like your old butor of a White Connal. Not signify how bad you treat
him, like the dog. But here is a man of a certain quality, who knows the best
people in Paris; who can talk and tell everywhere. Consider, when he is a
friend of my friend La Comtesse d’Auvergne. Oh! in conscience, my dear
Dore, I shall not suffer these airs with a man who is somebody and —“
“If he was the king of France,” cried Dora, “if he was Alexander the Great
himself, I would not be forced to see the man, and marry him against my
will” (Edgeworth, Ormond 151).

To press the heroine, O’Failey gives her a seductive account of courtship à la

française, which is rejected by Dora:
“The young ladies in Paris passing for nothing, scarcely ever appearing in
society till they are married, the gentlemen have no intercourse with them,
and it would be considered as a breach of respect due to a young lady or
her mother to address much conversation to her. And you know, my dear
Dore, their marriages are all make up by the father, the mother, the friends;
the young people themselves never speak, never know nothing at all about
each one another, till the contract is sign. In fact, the young lady is the little
round that you call cipher, but has no value in societé at all, till the figure of
the husband come to give it the value.”
“I have no notion of being a cipher,” said Dora. “I am not a French young
lady, Monsieur de Connal.”
“Ah, but my dear Dore, consider what is de French wife? Ah, then come her
great glory; then she reign over all hearts, and is in full liberté to dress, to go,

Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez 285

 to come, to do what she like, with her own carriage, her own box at de play,
de opera, and — You listen well, and I shall draw all that out for you, from
M. de Connal” (Edgeworth, Ormond 155-6)

Once King Corny’s daughter has married, O’Failey’s manoeuvres lead her
to invite Ormond to enter Dora’s apartments in Paris, and the young man
hears “a quick step, which he knew was Dora’s running to bolt the door of the
inner room” (Edgeworth, Ormond 339). Dora’s improper chaperone laughs at
Ormond’s “English préjugés”, and the narrator criticises her:
Mademoiselle had not at this moment the slightest malice, or bad intention
in anything she was saying; she simply spoke in all the innocence of a
Frenchwoman, if that term be intelligible. If she had any secret motive, it
was merely the vanity of showing that she was quite Parisienne; and there
again she was mistaken, for having lived half her life out of Paris, she had
forgotten, if she ever had it, the tone of good society, and upon her return
had overdone the matter, exaggerated the French matters, to prove to her
niece, that she knew les usages, les convenances, les nuances, en fin la mode de
Paris! A more dangerous guide in Paris for a young married woman, in every
respect, could scarcely be found (Edgeworth, Ormond 339-40).

4. Conclusion
Cultural hybridization is not regarded in positive terms in Edgeworth since
imitating a certain culture is not a synonym of improvement. More than having
culturally marked features, hybrids are totally devoid of national feelings
and of morality according to Edgeworth’s deep-rooted values of industry,
honesty, common sense and social responsibility. The Anglo-Irish writer is
interested in general human attitudes, and she condemns vices as much as
they affect the community. She already insisted on this in her An Essay on
Irish Bulls (1802): blunders and stupidity, which are commonly assigned to the
Irish, can be found in other cultures and among all classes as well.
Instead of introducing some intellectual or moral enrichment, hybri-
disation produces ridiculous individuals who discredit themselves. Since
France symbolised a cultural reference, both French Clay and O’ Failey
represent two instances of intellectual colonisation. The former is a caricature
of affectation, opportunism and lack of patriotism, which the Edgeworths
despised, and Miss O’ Failey stands for a contaminating influence and the
possibility of sexual corruption menacing the English women. Textually
displaced, hybrids inhabit the margins of the narrative and never acquire the
status of main characters. Behind the comic façade, and, like in other tales and
novels, the social picture presented through hybrids in Patronage and Ormond
aims at making the reader reflect on nationality and on woman as serious issues.

286 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

NOTES

1
The expression is taken from Seamus Deane (30).

WORKS CITED

Bilger, Audrey. Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria

Edgeworth and Jane Austen. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge,
1994.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1972.
_______, General Ed. The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth. 13 Vols.
London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999-2003.
Colvin, Christina, ed. Maria Edgeworth in France and Switzerland: Selections form
the Edgeworth Family Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
Connolly, Claire. Introduction to Ormond. London: Penguin Books, 1999: xi-
xxxvi.
Deane, Seamus. Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing
since 1790. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Edgeworth, Maria. Patronage. Introduction by Eva Figes. London and New
York: Pandora, 1986 [1814]
_______, Ormond. Ed. Jeffares, Norman A. Shannon, Ireland: Irish University
Press, 1972 [1817].
Fernández Rodríguez, Carmen María. “Leaving Utopia Behind: Maria
Edgeworth’s Views of America.” Irish Studies 4 (2009): 9-20.
Harvey, Alison. “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obeah’: Race, Feminity
and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.”
New Essays on Maria Edgeworth. Ed. Julie Nash. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006:
1-29.
Hollingworth, Brian. Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History, Politics.
Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997.
Kirkpatrick, Kathryn J. “‘Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon this Subject’: West
Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction
5.4 (July 1993): 331-48.
McCann, Andrew. “Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: the
Colonial Context of Non-Identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Novel
30.1 (Fall 1996): 56-77.

Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez 287

McCormack, W. J. M. Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo Irish Literary History
from 1789 to 1939. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
Murray, Patrick. “The Irish Novels of Maria Edgeworth.” Studies LIX (August,
1970): 267-78.
O’Gallchoir, Clíona. Maria Edgeworth and the Rise of National Literature. Doctoral
Dissertation. Cambridge University, 1998. Ann Arbour: UMI, 1998.
_______, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenmenent and Nation. Dublin:
University College Dublin Press, 2005.
Perera, Suvendrini. Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to
Dickens. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.
Smith, Sydney. Review of Patronage. The Edinburg Review 23 (1814): 416-34.
Ward, John. Review of Patronage. The Quarterly Review 10 (1814): 301-22.

288 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 SELF AND NATION IN HENRY ADAMS’S WORKS1

Edgardo Medeiros da Silva

The writings of Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918), a keen observer of

nineteenth century postbellum America, help us define the contours of American
consciousness and in that way what it means to be an American as well. On the
pages of his well-known autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1918),
of his essays and reviews (written primarily in the late 1860s and 1870s), of his
two political biographies, The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879) and John Randolph
(1882), or even of his monumental history, History of the United States during
the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1881-1889), we can
find a perceptive examination of what Adams believed constituted the major
challenges faced by his America – America understood here as both a physical
and emotional space, a locus of belonging and self-realization, which perhaps
only partly coincides with the United States as a political unit per se – over
the course of its (short) history. Moreover, in these works self and nation are
often intertwined, in a symbiosis which makes it difficult to detect where the
fault lines between the two concepts actually lie. With a strong sense of past,
Adams’s self-consciousness never strayed away from the part played by New
England (and indirectly by his ancestors) in the definition of an American
nationality, even when he criticized the shortcomings of his fellow citizens.
Convinced that a process of moral and political degradation had been at
work inside America since the Revolution, he permanently contrasts in his
writings Northern states and Southern ones, New England(ers) and the rest
of the country, the public men of the early republic with those of his own
age, so as to lament how far present generations had fallen away from past
ones. My aim in this paper is to discuss where and how, whenever possible,
the concepts of self and nation either overlap and/or diverge in light of the
fact that frequently in Adams’s works they cannot be separated from family
and/or personal history.

289
 Throughout his life-time Adams remained attached to his own idea of
America, clearly inherited from a family legacy of political participation on
state and national levels, never becoming “a citizen of somewhere else”, like
his contemporary Henry James, for instance, and never abandoning America
psychologically. Adams never gave up on America as his emotional space,
despite the feelings of disappointment that characterize so many of his
post-Civil War writings. In that sense, America was always the home of his
(political) imagination, a mythical and privileged space where self-realization
can be effected on both a historical and human level, just like for so many other
American authors (Cid 308). As has been observed by the critic John Carlos
Rowe, both James and Adams are key figures in the emergence of a modern
consciousness because their works are characterized by the discontinuities
that emerged from the technological, scientific and economic changes of the
latter part of the nineteenth century (9-10). The nation Adams describes in The
Education, his third person autobiography, is one characterised by chaos and
anarchy, with multiple forces at work, “adrift from its moorings, skeptical of
its past, uncertain of its future”, as Henry Steele puts it in a book of essays
entitled Critical Essays on Henry Adams (59). In The Education, we have in
fact Adams’s most clear statement on how he saw the world of politics, first
through the eyes of a young man thrown into the midst of Civil War politics at
the London Legation, then as an adult already detached from the day to day
mayhem of turn-of-the-century progressive politics.
As a fourth generation member of one of the oldest political clans in
America, with a “patrician” heritage that he believed entitled him to a
say on the future of his country, Adams showed a keen interest, passion,
almost, in America’s past throughout his lifetime, especially in the origins
of American nationality. Lewis Perry, in his book Boats against the Current,
has put forward his own definition of “historical consciousness”, which,
in my view, appropriately describes the way Adams saw America’s past.
Perry defines historical consciousness as “the stance from which Americans
‘observed’ the past, the strength of their cathexis with previous generations,
the choices they made about which periods of the past mattered or did not
matter, the connections they drew between truth and the histories of human
communities, and the tactics they used to learn about the past, to change it,
or to escape it” (49). The concept is thus related to one’s sense of the past,
the way we look at it and the manner in which we are affected by it. Above
all, historical consciousness, informs the kinds of choices we make in our
lives about our present and our future. In the case of Adams, he fashioned a
“historical persona” in his autobiography through his use of the third person,
whereby he created a distance between the literary Adams, the narrator and
protagonist of The Education, and the historical Adams, the individual who

290 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

lived between 1838 and 1918 and witnessed many of the events he describes.
Adams suffered from that habit of speaking of America as a “them” place
and not as a “we” place which was so characteristic of New Englanders. New
England elites developed over time a cultural separatism based on questions
of taste that was reflected in their attitudes towards the rest of the country, as
has been suggested by Robert Dawidoff in his book The Genteel Tradition and
the Sacred Rage – High Culture vs. Democracy in Adams, James, & Santayana (46).
Dawidoff argues that Adams, James and Santayana embody what he terms
“the antinomies of culture and democracy”, by which he means that these
authors had to live within a political democracy to which they subscribed and
a cultural setting associated with the tastes of masses from which they felt
estranged (IX). The genteel culture of New England is one we can undoubtedly
associate with Adams, though he remained committed to American values and
ideas even when he seemed to be criticizing everything and everyone around
him.2 Adams liked to observe events from a distance, without engaging in
them, and in that sense, as has been argued, belongs to that group of “masters
of distanciation”, together with Emerson, Thoreau and James, all of whom
built an intellectual distance between themselves and the others (Hansen 9).
True, Adams often posed as an outsider, a bystander who did not participate
directly in affairs, even though he was always ready to offer his criticism. This
attitude has been regarded by some scholars as bordering on “aloofness”, as
it denotes a “distance from socially relevant issues” (Hansen 142). It is an
attitude that certainly corresponds to a later phase in Adams’s life, but does
not reflect his active involvement in American politics in the aftermath of
the Civil War. His writings of the period between 1865 and 1876 show that
he was particularly concerned with civil service reform, the tariff, the gold
standard, as well as with how to reconstruct the South. Moreover, there were
two instances in which he broke away from Lincoln’s Republican Party and
tried to set up a faction within it so as to recover the political ideals of the
Founding Fathers.

PART ONE – New England Puritanism

New England developed a moralistic culture that never really lost its hold
on its inhabitants, Adams included. In his Education, he labels himself as a
“Boston moralist”, confirming the idea he was strongly imbued with a Puritan-
Protestant ethos: respect for the law, order, stability, and good morals. He
suffered from “Bostonitis”, a disease that affected those brought up within
“the strictures of Puritan thought,” as he puts it, having been raised with
the idea that the world was “filled with evil forces” and that consequently
it needed to be reformed. It was a duty, as he writes, that “implied not only

Edgardo Medeiros da Silva 291

resistance to evil, but hatred of it” (Adams, The Education 726). Like many New
Englanders of his generation, he saw himself involved in a struggle against
a hostile universe, a situation that made him (and his friend John Hay), as he
admits, “unfashionable by some law of Anglo-Saxon custom – some innate
atrophy of mind” (Adams, The Education 980). As has been argued, those who
kept close to the Puritan-Protestant ethic believed that the world was always
on the verge of expiring and in constant need of renewal (Morgan 7).
Adams’s Puritan upbringing meant that it was not easy for him to feel a
part of modern America. Dislocation and estrangement are two sentiments
that accompanied him all of his life. Arguably, his autobiography can be read
as a long jeremiad on the failure of an education and of an individual life (even
if we discount his tendency for self-deprecation), but it may also be read as the
lament of a nineteenth century Puritan living in an age which bore no relation
to him. Puritan thought had been kept alive among New Englanders long
after they stopped calling themselves Puritans. This set of ideas separated
this section of the Union from the rest of the country: “The Puritan thought his
thought higher and his moral standards better than those of his successors.
So they were. He could not be convinced that moral standards had nothing
to do with it, and that utilitarian morality was good enough for him, as it was
for the graceless” (Adams, The Education 743). It is important to mention that
although Adams denotes everything that we associate with being a Puritan,
in a strictly religious sense he was not so. Adams lacks that most important
quality that would warrant such a designation in full, that is to say, religious
faith. His attachment to Puritanism is purely philosophical, in line with what
he writes in the chapter “Silence” of The Education, where he laments “his
aching consciousness of religious void” (1042).3
Adams was proud of the intellectual tradition of New England. On the
pages of his History, his most important intellectual contribution to understand
the nation’s past, he does not miss an opportunity to praise its intelligentsia,
convinced of the intellectual superiority of those states as opposed to other states
in the Union.4 As a citizen of the republic, he disliked the robust Americanism
displayed by his fellow countrymen, who for the most part seemed to denote,
in his view, an absence of education, culture and knowledge. This attitude of
moral and intellectual superiority evidenced by cultured Northerners vis-à-
vis the rest of the Union, but particularly towards the people from the South
and West, became more evident as the nation grew in size and wealth. New
England elites, with their schools, churches, moral crusades, felt culturally and
intellectually superior. This contrasts with the anti-intellectualism that seems
to have pervaded other states of the Union from very early on in the nation’s
history. Richard Hofstadter, in his comprehensive study of the subject, Anti-
Intellectualism in American Life (1962), defines it as “a resentment and suspicion

292 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it, and
a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life” (7). At the root
of Americans anti-intellectualism, in Hofstadter’s view, lies early nineteenth
century evangelism, and what he terms as primitivism, that is, the pioneer
culture of those masses of individuals who first began to push America’s
frontiers westwards. As he observes, too, the supporters of the Jacksonian
movement undermined the importance of intellectual life in America because
they tended not to trust knowledge or expertise, wishing to “uproot the
entrenched classes”, the cultured and educated elites of the eastern seaboard
(155-6).
Adams frequently defends his Puritan ancestry in his works. He shows a
tendency for praising the special qualities of New Englanders, knowing full
well that they were out of place in modern America. In a letter to Henry James
à-propos the publication of William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903),
where he commends James for his style (his “specialty of style”), Adams
draws a portrait of the typical New England intellectual (his “type bourgeois-
bostonien”), explaining the kinds of things they all shared and believed in,
including their predicament at the start of the twentieth century:
The painful truth is that all of my New England generation, counting the
half century, 1820-1870, were in actual fact only one mind and nature; the
individual was a facet of Boston. We knew each other to the last nervous
centre, and feared each other’s knowledge. We looked through each other
like microscopes. There was absolutely nothing in us that we did not
understand merely by looking in the eye. There was hardly a difference even
in depth, for Harvard College and Unitarianism kept us all shallow. We
knew nothing – no! but really nothing! of the world. One cannot exaggerate
the profundity of ignorance of Story in becoming a sculptor, or Sumner in
becoming a statesman, or Emerson in becoming a philosopher. Story and
Sumner, Emerson and Alcott, Lowell and Longfellow, Hillard, Winthrop,
Motley, Prescott, and all the rest, were the same mind, – and so, poor worm!
– was I (Adams, Selected Letters 440-1).

PART TWO – New England Politics, Politicians, and Nationality

For Adams, the people of Massachusetts included some of the finest examples
of political participation in the country. The time of the American Revolution
had been one of the most memorable pages in the history of New England,
a period which Adams’s ancestors, Samuel Adams and John Adams, in
particular, had helped to shape. In the critical moments that preceded the
Revolution, the people of Massachusetts had stood out in their opposition to
English despotism and corruption. Adams describes in his essay “Palfrey’s
History of New England,” written as editor of the North American Review, the
heroic citizens of Massachusetts who resisted English abuse in laudatory

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terms: “These village Hampdens who came up to Boston year after year
and voted solidly to disobey the royal orders, were the offspring of town
meetings and the Puritan church-system. They have left no record of their
own personality. They can only be dealt with in mass as a tendency, a force,
which belonged to the soil and the atmosphere (209). In those trying times,
no colony had contributed more to the history of constitutional governments
than Massachusetts, as it attempted to establish “precedents of which no one
else in the whole world then understood the value” (Adams, Palfrey’s History
of New England 208).
As assistant professor of history at Harvard, one of Adams’s first major
academic works was his essay “Anglo-Saxon Courts of Law”, included in
the volume Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law (1876).5 This essay represents Adams’s
attempt to prove that the origins of England’s (and later New England’s)
democratic institutions go back to the Anglo-Saxons’ “hundred,” or district
law court. His thesis, now discredited, was that the hundred, the only
political subdivision of the Anglo-Saxons, was both a court and an assembly.
Adams considered this to be a great historical discovery, the fact that “the
entire Germanic family […] placed the administration of law, as it placed
the political administration, in the hands of popular assemblies composed
of the free, able-bodied members of the commonwealth” (Adams, Essays in
Anglo-Saxon Law 1). Adams argues that because power lay in the hundred
and not with the king, it had a democratic basis. “This greatest principle”, as
he characterizes it, allows him to establish a connection between Germanic
(or Teutonic) institutions and English institutions, giving them “roundness
and political continuity” (Adams, Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law 1). Based on
this continuity, Adams can establish unquestionably a link between English
institutions and American ones. As has been noted by David Levin in his
book History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley and Parkman (1967),
the American republic represented for some historians “the latest link in the
genetic chain of Teutonic liberty – in its millennial form, the last link but one,
the bearer of liberty to the world” (qtd. in Ross 917). Adams belongs to this
group of historians, lamenting in this essay the fact that this continuity in
the nature of democratic institutions has been endangered on account of the
changes brought about by the Civil War, which had disturbed the balance of
power that had existed among the three branches of government since the
founding of the nation.
Following his resignation from both Harvard College and the North
American Review, of which he was editor for almost a decade, over a disagreement
with the publishers of the magazine because of its editorial content, Adams
decided to settle in Washington in 1877.6 In that same year, he completed
the editing of a volume of historical materials entitled Documents Relating to

294 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

New England Federalism, 1800-1815 (1877), a compilation of documents on the
constitutional development of his native state, Massachusetts. The documents
Adams compiled were essentially letters written by prominent New England
politicians, a series of public statements which had appeared in the press at the
time, concerning a well-known episode in the history of the country. The so-
called Hartford Convention was the first major political dispute to endanger
the continuity of the Union and it almost led to the creation of a Northern
Confederacy. As the War of 1812 raged on, twenty-six New England federalists
met to show their opposition to the continuation of the war and threatened to
abandon the Union should the federal government decide to press on with it.
These extreme federalists demanded resistance to the national government on
the part of their citizens, even nullification of federal laws, since the war was
imposing heavy penalties on the trade carried out by the New England states.
Adams’s grandfather, John Quincy Adams, as a moderate federalist, had
opposed the formation of the confederacy amidst bitter opposition in his own
native state. Although historians today disagree as to whether the intention
had actually been to secede from the Union, from Adams’s viewpoint this
had been an event in which the Adams’s family commitment to the federal
idea had come out on top. It was his way of asserting his, and his family’s,
unrelenting commitment to the Union.7
Adams’s two-volume work The Life of Albert Gallatin and The Writings of
Albert Gallatin (1879), a biography of Thomas Jefferson’s renowned Secretary
of the Treasury, was Adams’s next academic work. Gallatin corresponded to
Adams’s ideal statesman. He had supported the new Constitution (he had been
involved in the debates that led to its approval in his state, Pennsylvania) and
was a moderate among Jefferson’s supporters, meaning that he had adopted
a mid-way position between the states’ rights advocates and the federalists.
In his political life, Gallatin seems to have always tried to be above party and
was also a strong opponent of slavery. These were all reasons that appealed to
Adams and explain his interest in writing this biography, where he reveals his
ideological stance in very clear terms, one which will not change much over
the course of his life: strongly pro-federal government, in favor of internal
improvements, an effective army and navy, and a powerful executive and
judiciary. Gallatin’s ideological stance matches that of Adams.
There is ample evidence in Adams’s works to suggest that he thought
examples from past history could be used to help overcome current difficulties,
either in political or economic terms. The country had ceased to produce
politicians of the caliber of Gallatin, who understood the importance of
sound finances – no debt, low expenditure, and frugality in spending. In this
biography, Adams laments the disappearance from public life of men such as
Gallatin, moderate, above party, and disinterested, engaging (as elsewhere)

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in the rhetoric of a jeremiad, “that most American of all rhetorical modes”,
in the words of J. G. A. Pocock (513). Adams is regarded as one of the last
great masters of the form (4), since one of the most important themes of his
History is precisely this idea that the ideals of the Puritan founders have been
betrayed by successive generations of American as they pursued their private
interest to the detriment of the public good.
The biography John Randolph (1882) covers the life of yet another well-
known politician from the early history of the nation. Adams wrote it to show
how the Virginia school of politics functioned. John Randolph was a member
of one of Virginia’s oldest and most powerful families, aristocratic in its
origins, but “mad as the maddest,” as Adams writes (Randolph 3). Randolph’s
family represented everything Southern society stood for, a world dominated
by privilege, patronage, favor, and propped up by tobacco plantations and
slave labor. It was the very antithesis of New England society. Two of the
things that Adams most heavily criticizes in Randolph are his temper and his
pride, seen as the result of his undisciplined upbringing. Virginian education,
unlike New England’s Puritan tradition in this respect, did not include
discipline.8 Appetites, emotions, passions, lack of self-control, were the sort
of personality traits associated with Southerners which New Englanders
like Adams disapproved of. They implied lack of rationality and excess of
emotion in behavior and attitudes, a display of excessive emotionalism
rather than rationalism: “To the cold-blooded New Englander who did not
love extravagance or eccentricity, and had no fancy for plantation manners,
Randolph was an obnoxious being” (Adams, Randolph 255). Adams’s biases
against Southern politics and politicians are evident throughout John
Randolph’s biography. His conception of government is not compatible with
the oligarchic view of it that existed in the South, and which was based on
privilege and the “peculiar institution.” For Adams, aristocratic principles
and democratic governments were two irreconcilable things, an idea that is
apparent when he writes that Randolph was completely wrong, “in the entire
delusion which possessed his mind, that a Virginian aristocracy could maintain
itself in alliance with a democratic polity” (Randolph 26). In independent and
democratic America there was to be no room for these outmoded forms of
behavior, and so Randolph, as a representative of this world, is the object
of Adams’s truculent criticism. On a more personal level, there had always
existed antipathy between the Adamses and the Randolphs, but especially on
the part of John Randolph, who “never missed a chance to have his fling at
both the Adamses, father and son” (Adams, Randolph 26); a case of inherited
politics, unquestionably.
Adams deplores the peculiarities of Southerners because their ways
hinder the emergence of a truly American identity. Adams believed Southern

296 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

society had never recovered from the heavy blow the Revolutionary War had
dealt it, as it continued to depend on England for “its tastes, fashions, theories,
and above all its aristocratic status in politics and in law” (Adams, Randolph
4-5). If Gallatin’s biography had been written to reveal the importance of
strong personality, principles and vision in a politician, the biography of John
Randolph was written to show exactly the opposite, that is, the extent to which
bad principles, bad schooling, bad personality, and above all excessive pride,
could give rise to misguided individuals who were capable of endangering
the Union itself. Taken together, the two biographies complement each other,
as they express two conceptions of what politics and politicians should be all
about: whereas Gallatin had been above party and sectional politics, Randolph
was inflexible in his anti-federalism. As a staunch defender of states’ rights
and strict construction, Randolph was a representative of those individuals
who placed the government of the republics in a more prominent position
(the other individuals had been Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Joseph
H. Nicholson, Nathaniel Macon, and William B. Giles, all of whom figure
prominently in Adams’s works as opponents of the centralization of power in
Washington). He also laments that sectional politics should take precedence
over national issues, a strategy that the states’ rights school strongly pursued,
and which jeopardized the unity of the country.
The emergence of a feeling of nationality and/or national character is
the central theme of Adams’s History, his most important contribution to the
field. For him, the way people think determines the kind of political system
they opt for, which is the reason why he was so keen on finding a formula
that would “explain what share the popular imagination bore in the system
pursued by government” (Adams, Administrations of Thomas Jefferson 120). As
a study of national character the History provides us with the names of the
main players in the nation’s early history, held up as models to the country’s
citizenry. Among its political leaders, Adams includes the names of George
Washington, William Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John
Adams, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Alexander Dallas, John Calhoun,
John Quincy Adams, among its judges, we find the names of John Marshall,
Samuel Chase, Roger B. Taney, its diplomats, William Pinckney, Albert
Gallatin, its inventors, Eli Whitney, Oliver Adams, Robert Fulton, its men
of letters, Timothy Dwight, John Trumbull, Joel Barlow, Noah Webster and
Joseph Dennie. Adams argues that one of the defining traits of Americans is
idealism and that the men mentioned above, as women are completely absent
from his History, had certainly been idealists and visionaries in their own
right. Adams laments in his History, though, that from very early on material
progress, stemming from the quick addition of new territories, had begun
to undermine those republican values which had bound the founding of the

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new nation. He bemoans the individualistic attitude of settlers because that
reflected, according to him, a disregard for the common good. As citizens
in such a large democratic republic as the United States began to give more
importance to their own private interests, Adams felt that they had abandoned
a prior concern with public life. In a way, thus, Adams’s History may be
understood as representing the loss of republican values to liberal ones, an
indication that from very early on in the nation’s history commerce started to
win over virtue.
The words Adams uses to describe in his autobiography what may lie
in store for future generations of Americans are telling, as they reflect an
estrangement on his part from government and his fellow citizens that is
somewhat paradoxical, given his life-long inquest into what made America
unique:
The child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world which would
not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine it, and an education that
would fit it. He found himself in a land where no one had ever penetrated
before; where order was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificial
compulsion imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the
universe revolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved itself back
into anarchy at last. (Adams, The Education 1138)

PART THREE – Democracy, Aristocracy, and States’ Rights

In the New England states, the biases against democracy were particularly
strong. These feelings became more evident during the election of 1800, that
most critical moment in American politics when the federalists handed over
power (peacefully) to the Jeffersonian democrats. New Englanders had not
forgotten the excesses of the French Revolution, about which they had read
in Fisher Ames and other conservative writers. In his articles in the Boston
press, Ames had associated the French Revolution with the worst possible
human instincts, and so New Englanders grew used to blaming “democracy”,
which they equated with mob rule, or the rule of the populace, for all forms of
social upheaval: “It is a vile, illiberal school, this French Academy of the sans-
coulottes; there is nothing in it that is fit for a gentleman to learn” (Adams,
Administrations of Thomas Jefferson 58-9). Adams writes in his History that in the
minds of conservative New Englanders the French Revolution and its excesses
were used not as “an argument or a proof, but only [as] an illustration, of the
workings of divine law; and what had happened in France must sooner or
later happen in America if the ignorant and vicious were to govern the wise
and the good” (Administrations of Thomas Jefferson 59).
In Dennie’s Portfolio, America’s foremost literary magazine at the time,
Jefferson’s supporters were often depicted as Jacobins, such was the distrust in

298 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

those states towards more radical forms of political activity. That Adams does
not identify with the ultra-conservative positions of these New Englanders
is clear when he qualifies the articles in the Federalist press denouncing
the dangers of democracy in the wake of Jefferson’s election in 1800 as
“extravagant” and “treasonable” (Adams, Administrations of Thomas Jefferson
60). Adams asserts that these ultra-conservatives were wrong: no political
crisis would ever occur in New England, because they had failed to take into
account “the old spirit of Puritan obstinacy” in those states (Administrations of
Thomas Jefferson 61). That spirit would prevent despotic government from ever
coming into being either in New England or in the national government. His
comments on Fisher Ames’s writings also attest to his disagreement with these
extreme views of democracy: “Ames’s best political writing was saturated
with the despair of the tomb to which his wasting body was condemned”
(Adams, Administrations of Thomas Jefferson 62).9
For Adams, democracy and aristocracy, that is to say the rule of the many
versus the rule of the few, were antithetical concepts, and frequently a source
of political conflict. When discussing the state of New York in his History,
for instance, he observes that society in that state “in spite of its aristocratic
mixture, was democratic by instinct”; Pennsylvania, on the other hand, was
“the only true democratic community in the eastern States.” Adams adds that
unlike New England, Pennsylvania did not have a hierarchy; unlike New
York it did not have great families, such as the Livingstons, the Schuylers, the
Clintons, the Jays, the Burrs; and unlike Virginia and South Carolina, there were
no oligarchies of planters in that state. Adams reveals a clear admiration for
Pennsylvania because its society seemed to be politically more balanced: “Too
thoroughly democratic to fear democracy, and too much nationalized to dread
nationality, Pennsylvania became the ideal American State, easy, tolerant, and
contented” (Adams, Administrations of Thomas Jefferson 80). This equilibrium
meant that the forces of federalism were to a large extent neutralized by those
of the states’ rights school in accordance with constitutional precept. Adams’s
admiration for Pennsylvania extends to one of its most illustrious citizens, none
other than the above-mentioned Albert Gallatin, secretary of the treasury to
Jefferson. Adams was convinced that the anti-Federalist forces in the country
were “denationalizing forces”, meaning that they jeopardized the unity of the
states by stimulating sectionalism among Americans. As a strong supporter of
centralized federal authority, Adams favored strong national bodies as a way
of maintaining cohesion among the different states of the Union.
As a firm believer in the federal idea, Adams asserts in the concluding
chapter of his History that a united nationality, such as that which emerged
after 1815, represented a triumph of human progress. Up until that time,
it had not been clear whether America would succeed in creating a single,

Edgardo Medeiros da Silva 299

united country out of the divisions that existed among the states which
comprised the Union. However, the possibility of keeping together a large
territory of diverse interests would entail, in Adams’s words, “prospects of
peace and ease, contentment and philanthropy, such as the world had not
seen”; (Adams, Administrations of James Madison 1331). The end of the War of
1812 made Americans realize what a major step for world history it would be
to form a united nation which could function without rivalry, wars, or violent
competition, it would indeed represent “the difference between Europe and
America”; (Adams, Administrations of James Madison 1331). Britain’s defeat
meant that the New England states had indeed lost influence within the
Union, but it also made the South and the West more American in character.
A great admirer of the Constitution, there is one aspect in it which Adams
considered to be a major structural fault. It concerns the question of states’
rights I have alluded to above – the defence of the prerogatives of the states
from the encroachments of the national government. Supporters of the states’
rights school had always held that any right which had not been granted to the
federal government in the Constitution remained with the states. Therefore,
the consent of the states as parties to the Constitution was required either
to add or remove rights to the national government. As a strong opponent
of “particularisms” (sectionalism), Adams acknowledges in his essay “Von
Holst’s History of the United States” that “it may be gathered that there were
fundamental defects in the instrument” (263). For him, politics had to be above
sectional interests in all cases.
The American Enlightenment produced a generation of political leaders
of exceptional ability – Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton,
Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, to name just a few. They were men of
eighteenth century minds, statesmen who were also philosophers, and whose
personal characteristics Adams thoroughly admired (the distinction between
“politicians” and “statesmen” is one Adams never fails to underscore in his
writings). As the politicians of his own time were no match for these men
in terms of intellect, education, knowledge, the assessment Adams makes of
American politicians in his writings is an extremely negative one. More often
than not, they lack the intelligence, education, and morals to be respected
as public servants. In an essay written in 1861, but not published until 1910,
entitled “The Great Secession Winter of 1860-61”, the twenty-three-year-
old Adams clarifies for us some of the ominous differences in outlook that
existed among the politicians from the various sections of the Union, and the
difficulties involved in bridging them:
Between the quiet New Englanders with their staid and Puritanical ideas
of duty and right, of law and religion, and the rough representatives of the
Northwest, who swore by everything in the Heavens above and the Earth

300 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 beneath that they would turn the rebel states into a wilderness, the difference
of manner and idea was great enough. But the southerners were beyond all
imagination demented […]. The more moderate, or more astute, […] were
all agog with the idea of dissolution and a reconstruction of the Union with
the anti-slavery element left out. But those from the cotton States abandoned
at once all thought of uniting themselves with the cold and repulsive North,
and turned their minds […] to the contemplation of fancies which were
oriental in their magnificence (3-4).

It was Adams’s belief that in the years leading up to the Civil War, politicians,
Northern and Southern ones alike had failed to rise to the occasion and thus
prevent the conflict between the two major sections of the Union. We are
told by him that a committee had been formed to discuss how a compromise
could be attained, but which Southern politicians approached “in order either
to control it or to break it up, and in order to bring matters to a head they
pressed on it measures which they knew could not be adopted” (Adams, The
Great Secession Winter 13). Due to the inability of Southern politicians to come
together for the good of the nation, and to compromise on the extension of
slavery to the new territories, the slave power was able to take control of the
political process, and in particular of the agenda of the Democratic Party. In
a passage from the series of articles Adams wrote covering political affairs
in the late 1860s and early 1870s, modeled on Lord Robert Cecil’s articles in
the London Quarterly, he contrasts two types of politicians: one representing
the politician that has gained power through the influence of caucuses and
party promotion”, and which is to be avoided on the grounds of “narrow
political morality”; the other, to be admired and respected, has gained power
“by birth and by training [and is] a representative of the best New England
school, holding his moral rules on the sole authority of his own conscience,
indifferent to opposition whether in or out of his party, obstinate to excess,
and keenly alive to the weaknesses in which he did no share” (Adams, “Civil
Service Reform” 110).
Adams thought public duty was something Southerners lacked to the
extent that their sense of responsibility was limited to those things that were
of immediate concern either to them or to their party, that is to say, the
Democratic Party. The tendency of Southerners to place on a higher plane
their interests – especially slavery and their plantation economy – rather than
those of the community, which Adams describes in the above-mentioned
biography of John Randolph, in particular his early political career, was
part of their mentality: “These old Republicans of the South, Giles, Macon,
Nicholson, Randolph and their friends, always asserted their right to judge
party measures by their private standard, and to vote as they pleased, nor
was their right a mere theory, for they exercised it freely, and sometimes
fatally to their party interests” (Randolph 53).10 In contrast, and consistent with

Edgardo Medeiros da Silva 301

sound principles of Republicanism, Northern politicians were in politics for
the good of the community and of the Union, not as a means to defend some
individual or sectional interest.
Influenced by his sojourn among some of New England’s most prominent
families, where the question of public service was undoubtedly a matter of
discussion, Tocqueville gives us his account of what shape civic duty took
among New Englanders, namely the public duties of the selectmen in the
townships of that part of the Union. He records the nature of this civic duty as
follows: “He [the New Englander] takes part in every occurrence in the place;
he practices the art of government in the small sphere within his reach; he
accustoms himself to those forms without which liberty can only advance by
revolutions; he imbibes their spirit; he acquires a taste for order, comprehends
the balance of powers, and collects clear practical notions on the nature of his
duties and the extent of his rights” (Tocqueville 37). Tocqueville asserts in
the first pages of his Democracy in America that Puritanism was not simply a
religious doctrine. It was a political doctrine which “corresponded in many
points with the most democratic and republican theories” (17). Referring
to the way the government of the townships was first organized by them,
Tocqueville also remarks that generally-speaking Americans showed a
tendency to distrust men of superior knowledge (the expression he uses is
“distinguished talents”), and so tended to keep them away from positions
of authority. However, according to him, the situation was different in New
England. There common people respected “intellectual and moral superiority”,
and thus in that part of the country “democracy makes a more judicious choice
than it does elsewhere” (Tocqueville 84). We can gather from his words that
in New England, “where education and liberty are the daughters of morality
and religion”, democracy takes on a more positive look. Tocqueville shares
Adams’s bias against the South when he remarks that Southern society “dates
but from yesterday and presents only an agglomeration of adventurers and
speculators” (84).

CONCLUSION

The fact is that the dichotomy we can detect in Adams’s writings between
North and South, New England and the rest of the country coincides with that
which he himself evidences as both a New Englander and as an American. He,
too, found it difficult to bridge those fault lines from which the greatest tragedy
in American history had arisen. Invariably defining himself as an American
by stressing precisely what is best about New England, his “Americanness”
cannot be separated from his “New Englandness”, one informing the other

302 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

and vice-versa. As I hope to have shown, self and nation overlap in Adams
when they refer to those values and principles that shaped the beginnings of
American nationality and with which he could identify, whether these had to
do with Puritan thought, federalism or democracy, diverging when they bear
no relation either to him or to the legacy of his famous ancestors, a case indeed
where individual and collective identity more often than not are indeed one
and the same.

NOTES

1
An abridged version of this paper was first presented at the 31st Annual APEEA
conference, “Geographies of the Self”, held at Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 15-
17 April 2010.
2
We are reminded here of the senator who called Adams a begonia, whom he mentions
in The Education, no doubt for his association with New England’s genteel culture,
a term first used by George Santayana in his 1911 essay “The Genteel Tradition
in American Philosophy”.
3
James P. Young characterizes Adams as being a representative of what he terms the
“New England conscience”. Cf. Young 4.
4
This explains why he writes as follows in the above-mentioned letter: “So you have
written not Story’s life, but your own and mine – pure autobiography – the more
keen for what is beneath, implied, intelligible only to me, and half a dozen people
still living […]. You strip us, gently, like a surgeon, and I feel your knife in my
ribs.” Ernest Samuels, ed., Henry Adams – Selected Letters 441. Letter to Henry
James, dated Paris, 18 November 1903.
5
This volume, edited by Adams, includes essays by his doctoral candidates, Henry
Cabot Lodge, Ernest Young and James Lawrence.
6
The incident that led to his resignation is interesting in itself. It concerned an article
Adams had written entitled “The Independents in the Canvass,” in which he
had urged the members of the Republican Party – the readership of the Review
– to break away from the party and support an independent candidate in the
presidential election of 1876. The owners, objecting to the unorthodoxy of
Adams’s proposition, dismissed him.
7
The general view today is that the Hartford Convention was made up of individuals
who basically wanted to protest against the war, put forward constitutional
changes, and thus prevent radical acts on the part of the extreme federalists.
Consequently, today we have two different versions of the story: Adams’s
version, where the role of John Quincy Adams is pivotal, in that he prevented
New England’s secession from the Union; and another, in which his importance
is diminished because the event itself was unimportant.
8
Adams contrasts, for example, the education of a boy in Virginia to the one he, as a
New Englander, had received: “Every Virginian lad, especially on such a remote
plantation as Bizarre, lived a boy’s paradise of indulgence: he fished and shot; he
rode like a young monkey, and his memory was crammed with the genealogy
of every well-bred horse in the State; […] he knew all about the prices of wheat,
tobacco, and slaves; he picked up much that was bad and brutal in contact with
inferiors; […]. All these accomplishments and many others of a like character

Edgardo Medeiros da Silva 303

 were familiar to most young Virginians whose parents did not send them early
to Europe or to the North, and, with the rest, a habit of drinking as freely as
they talked, and of talking as freely as the utmost licence of the English language
would allow.” (Adams, Randolph 6-7).
9
According to Adams, the members of the so-called Essex Junto embodied these views,
its most important members being George Cabot, Theophilus Parsons, Timothy
Pickering, and Fisher Ames.
10
A word of caution here: the “old Republicans” Adams is alluding to are the pro-
states’ rights supporters.

WORKS CITED

Adams, Henry. Documents Relating to New-England Federalism, 1800-1815. New

York: Burt Franklin, 1969 [1877].
_______, “The Great Secession Winter.” The Great Secession Winter of 1860-61
and Other Essays. George Hochfield, ed. New York: Sagamore Press Inc.,
1958. 1-31.
_______, “Von Holst’s History of the United States.” The Great Secession Winter
of 1860-61 and Other Essays. George Hochfield, ed. New York: Sagamore
Press Inc., 1958. 253-87.
_______, History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas
Jefferson and James Madison. Earl N. Harbert, ed. New York: The Library of
America, 1986 [1884-1889].
_______, John Randolph. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1882.
_______, The Life of Albert Gallatin. New York: Peter Smith, 1943 [1879].
_______, “Palfrey’s History of New England.” Sketches for the North American
Review by Henry Adams. Edward Chalfant, ed. Hamden, Conn.: Archon
Books, 1986. 202-11.
Adams, Henry, ed. Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law. Boston: Little, Brown, and
Company, 1905 [1876].
Cid, Teresa. “Regresso, Trauma e Imaginação.” Viagens pela Palavra – Miscelânea
de Homenagem a Maria Laura Bettencourt Pires. Mário Avelar, coord. Lisboa:
Univ. Aberta, 2005. 307-14.
Commager, Henry Steele. The American Mind: An Interpretation of American
Thought and Character Since the 1880s. New Haven and London: Yale
Univ. Press, 1950.
_______, “Henry Adams.” Critical Essays on Henry Adams. Earl N. Harbert, ed.
Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1981. 50-62.
Dawidoff, Robert. The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage – High Culture vs.

304 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 Democracy in Adams, James, & Santayana. Chapel Hill and London: The
Univ. of Carolina Press, 1992.
Hansen, Olaf. Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect – American Allegory
in Emerson, Thoreau, Adams, and James. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1990.
Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage
Books, 1962.
Morgan, Edmund S. “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution.” The
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. 24, no. 1 (January 1967): 3-43.
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment – Florentine Political Thought and
the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Univ.
Press, 2003.
Ross, Dorothy. “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America.”
The American Historical Review, vol. 89, issue 4 (October, 1984): 909-28.
Rowe, John Carlos. Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern
Consciousness. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986.
Samuels, Ernest, ed. Henry Adams – Selected Letters. Cambridge, Mass.: The
Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1992.
Santayana, George. “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy.” Gordon
Hutner, ed. American Literature, American Culture. New York and Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1999. 201-12.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Henry Reeve, trad. Ware,
Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1998 [1835].
Young, James P. Henry Adams – The Historian as Political Theorist. Lawrence,
Kansas: Kansas Univ. Press, 2001.

Edgardo Medeiros da Silva 305

 O CORPO HUMANO COMO ÍCONE VIVO NA RETÓRICA PURITANA
DE WINTHROP E NA ESTÉTICA BARROCA DE CARAVAGGIO

Luísa Maria Vilhena Ribeiro de Sousa

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon

a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we
shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have
undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present
help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word
through the world.
John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630)

No painter ever painted his own mind so forcibly as

[...] Caravaggio. [...] Darkness gave him light; into his
melancholy cell light stole only with a pale reluctant
ray, or broke on it, as flashes on a stormy night. The
most vulgar forms he recommended by ideal light and
shade [...].
Henry Fuseli, Lecture II (1801)

Com o presente trabalho, pretendemos analisar comparativamente o

sermão “A Model of Christian Charity”, do líder puritano John Winthrop, e
as obras Conversão de São Paulo e A Crucificação de São Pedro, do pintor italiano
Michelangelo Caravaggio, considerando-os ilustrativos do modo como a
retórica puritana e a estética barroca (re)constroem similarmente o corpo
humano como ícone vivo.
Segundo Weber, os Puritanos consideravam-se a “aristocracia que, com o
seu character indetebilis, estava separada por um fosso do resto da humanidade
eternamente condenado” (104). Em 1630, John Winthrop, líder do êxodo
puritano para New England, sublinha em “A Model of Christian Charity” o
sentido utópico de unidade e de eleição dos que cumprirão o seu manifest
destiny na “Terra Prometida”.

307
 Neste sermão, a imagem do corpo humano revela-se fundamental na
anunciação do elo entre Deus e o Seu “povo eleito”. Esta dimensão da retórica
puritana de Winthrop representa a comunidade da Massachusetts Bay Company
como um corpo físico religioso vivo, detentor de uma natureza espiritual, para
além do seu carácter secular corporativo. A sua Igreja pode crescer e regenerar-
-se, por ser orgânica, transcendente, perpetuada por actos de caridade,
movidos pela graça divina. Em Literature in America, Conn assevera que o
momento da conversão, o mais profundo e sagrado na vida de um “santo”,
se afigura como um foco de introspecção e análise constante. A reputação
puritana de rigor moral resulta assim da sua profunda apreensão com a
salvação (Conn 16). Através da conversão, a integridade perdida por Adão
no Paraíso é concedida por Cristo aos Seus “eleitos”, como escreve Winthrop:
Adam in his first estate was a perfect model of mankind in all their
generations, and in him this love was perfected in regard of the habit. But
Adam rent himself from his creator […]; whence it comes that every man
is born with this principle in him, to love and seek himself only, and thus
a man continueth till Christ comes and takes possession of the soul and
infuseth another principle, love to God and our brother […]. Now when this
quality is thus formed in the souls of men, it works like the spirit upon the
dry bones. […] “bone came to bone.” (221)

Em “‘Christian Charitie’ as Colonial Discourse”, Dawson evidencia que

a ordem social puritana hierarquicamente rígida, promovida neste sermão, é
legitimada pela mensagem de S. Paulo: “God’s equipping individuals with
different capacities and calling them to the offices in which they are to serve
the church’s well being” (16). Deste modo, a caridade harmoniza a diversidade
criada por Deus. O estatuto social moralmente superior dos “eleitos” implica
deveres, actos de auto-sacrifício, que são imitações de amor divino.
Das palavras de Winthrop depreendemos que o corpo como organismo
social age para o bem de todos os membros, que beneficiam ciclicamente dos
frutos do seu trabalho: “[…] among the members of the same body, love and
affection are reciprocal […]. The mouth is […] to […] mince the food […] for
[…] the other parts of the body, […] the other parts send back […] for […] the
mouth. […] So is it in all the labor of love among Christians” (222). Tal como
a saúde do corpo de um indivíduo é preservada pela integração dos seus
poderes físicos e mentais, o bem comum do corpo social só é resguardado pelos
esforços altruístas dos seus diferentes membros, distantes, mas mutuamente
dependentes (Dawson 17). Neste sentido, Winthrop propõe a transformação
do desejo corporal em espiritual: “he gives us a glimpse of his hope that man
can truly be remade from a creature of onanistic self-delight into an image of
a generous God” (Delbanco 74).
Winthrop reitera as afirmações de S. Paulo, aludindo à reciprocidade
no seio da Igreja. Como os tendões ou outros ligamentos do corpo humano,

308 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

também a caridade responde às necessidades de uma sociedade santa:
[…] Christ and His church make one body. […] All the parts of this body
being thus united are made so contiguous in a special relation as they must
needs partake of each other’s strength and infirmity; joy and sorrow […].
1 Corinthians: 12.26: “If one member suffers, all suffer with it, if one be in
honor, all rejoice with it.” (Winthrop 220)

Dawson elucida que a figura da integridade social de Winthrop – “We

must be knit together in this work as one man […] always having before our
eyes our community as members of the same body” (224-25) – advém não só
da ciência política e da jurisprudência, mas também do legado eclesiástico
de S. Paulo, relativamente à figura do Corpo da Igreja: a sua analogia entre o
corpo humano e o corpo político ensina que os que se unificam pelo laço da
caridade constituem uma sociedade verdadeiramente integral, transcendendo
o espaço e o tempo (8).
Como se depreende das palavras de Winthrop, a estrutura organiza-
cional, que alia os corpos político e económico, assemelha-se à concepção
eclesiástica puritana: “It is by […] consent, […] to seek out a place of cohabitation
[…] under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical. […] We
are entered into covenant with Him” (223-24). De acordo com Michaelsen,
em “John Winthrop’s ‘Modell’ Covenant and the Company Way”, o termo
covenant, para além do significado bíblico e político, adquire uma conotação
económica, devido à sua utilização frequente na prática comercial (85-95). A
palavra corporation não surge no sermão, mas o vocábulo company revela um
conteúdo similar na declaração de Winthrop: “We are a company professing
ourselves fellow members of Christ” (223).
Desta forma, as três instituições da Colónia – a igreja reunida, a unidade
política e a corporação comercial da Massachusetts Bay Company – são fundidas
nas figurações do corpo humano tão recorrentes neste sermão. Como
testemunha Winthrop:
There is no body but consists of parts and that which knits these parts together
gives the body its perfection, because it makes each part so contiguous to
others as thereby they mutually participate with each other, both in strength
and infirmity, in pleasure and pain. [...] The several parts of this body,
considered apart before they were united, were as disproportionate and
as much disordering as so many contrary qualities or elements, but when
Christ comes and by His spirit and love knits all these parts to Himself and
each other, it is become the most perfect and best proportioned body in the
world (220).

Subjacente a esta imagem do corpo humano (re)construído e promo-

vido enquanto ícone vivo podemos descortinar determinadas concepções
relacionadas com a interpretação puritana das formas materiais. A retórica
e a iconoclastia puritanas compreendem o conceito de figura como uma

Luísa Maria Vilhena Ribeiro de Sousa 309

forma material dinâmica, ou um modo de interpretar a figura humana como
forma corporal viva ou imagem artística. Apesar de os iconoclastas puritanos
rejeitarem todas as imagens, crêem profundamente no poder dos ícones. A sua
iconoclastia concebe os seres humanos como formas materiais, manifestando
uma verdadeira obsessão na correcta utilização destas categorias que em
tudo se assemelham. Assim, os iconoclastas puritanos são ídolos verdadeiros,
“imagens vivas”, que se contrapõe aos ídolos da arte sacra, no seu significado
religioso enquanto formas materiais. Na doutrina calvinista, os sacramentos
protestantes são a arte icónica viva:
What Calvin favors are “images” that are “living iconic” […]. The Protestant
icon is the actual performance of religious rites such as the Lord’s Supper:
what one sees as the participants enact the sacramental events and other
church rituals. […] His choice of iconicas (meaning “exact image”) emphasizes
the artistic realism that informs his concept of an image (Kibbey 45-6).

A oposição protestante à transubstanciação centra-se na materialidade

imutável do pão sacramental, enquanto objecto comum da vida quotidiana.
A teoria calvinista do objecto sacramental define potencialmente a sociedade
puritana como corpo místico. Os corpos humanos são reduzidos ao estatuto
de objectos materiais porque a teoria sacramental interpreta a conversão dos
seres humanos de acordo com o paradigma da conversão do pão. Na Eucaristia,
a substituição de “corpo” por “pão” é uma metonímia que (re)classifica o
visível ao localizar a invisível, mas verdadeira presença de Cristo no mundo
material. Enfatizando os seres humanos, as palavras e os objectos como
figuras sagradas, Calvino realça as suas formas materiais dinâmicas no modo
como estas “exibem” e concretizam a presença espiritual (Kibbey 52-55). Os
Puritanos, verdadeiros ícones vivos de Deus, são formas físicas visíveis1, os
“visible saints” que tencionam realizar no “Novo Mundo” a “Nova Jerusalém”.
A despeito da ética puritana do seu autor, o sermão “A Model of
Christian Charity” denuncia manifestamente a fruição de determinados
traços do Barroco, como sejam: as emoções ao rubro, as impressões sensoriais,
a representação corporal esplêndida e dinâmica, o contraste intenso entre luz
e sombra, a elevação do corpo humano no espaço físico e a expressão formal
de will-to-space ou will-to-infinity. De facto, se Winthrop, enquanto Puritano,
pode ser percepcionado como um potencial iconoclasta, a sua construção de
“imagens icónicas vivas” remete-nos concomitantemente para a cosmovisão
barroca, descrita em Four Stages of Renaissance Style – Transformations in Art
and Literature 1400 – 1700 nos seguintes termos:
[…] baroque piety and art are able to consolidate and fulfill experience at
the level of the flesh, and they do so ardently, triumphantly, unthinkingly.
[…] Yet baroque piety and art alike modified, or corrupted, the doctrine of
transubstantiation; the flesh did not become spiritual – the spiritual became
fleshly. […] the transcendent was to be secularized by accepting the material

310 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 image, the physical sensation, as sufficient. Then both religion and art can
really terminate in the senses, and thought does really become a physical
experience. (Sypher 187-89).

Neste âmbito, focalizamos a atenção em duas obras de Caravaggio,

“um dos mais imediatos precursores do Barroco” (Jirmounsky 124), cuja
representação do corpo humano como ícone vivo seculariza o transcendente,
assumindo contornos semelhantes aos do sermão de Winthrop, mormente o
conteúdo formal e ético absoluto e a vitalidade dramática e severa.
Caravaggio inaugura uma estética arrebatadora. A sua arte revolucionária
é dramática e violenta, coerente com a época de contrastes do Barroco.
Caravaggio escandalizou os seus contemporâneos não só pela vida turbulenta
que levou, mas também pela sua escolha de temas pouco representados e
simplicidade aparente das suas invenções iconográficas de efeito directo e
exortativo (Châtelet and Groslier 407-8).
Na obra Conversão de São Paulo (confrontar anexo I), a concepção de
Caravaggio da conversão milagrosa reflecte o seu espírito revolucionário.
Num plano destacado, surge um enorme cavalo malhado que abrange mais
de três quartos do espaço. Inclinado para o fundo num ângulo ténue, o animal
ocupa o espaço pictórico de canto a canto com o seu volume. A sua energia
plástica é acentuada por esta condensação nesse espaço estreito. Dedicando-
-se a uma natureza visível e tangível, Caravaggio representa um cavalo que
corresponde à sua própria observação da vida comum e não a uma “idea
fantastica”. Os seus olhos melancólicos e a sua cabeça inclinada correspondem
perfeitamente à expressão sombria do criado. Homem e cavalo parecem
preocupados em relação a algo que não conseguem compreender, por isso,
movem-se lenta e cautelosamente, participando modestamente na acção. O
criado segura o freio com as duas mãos, não para impedir que o cavalo fuja,
mas porque este, perturbado por algum motivo, ergue a sua pata direita.
Friedlaender salienta, em Caravaggio Studies, que não estamos perante um
triunfo, uma pose nobre, elegante e impaciente: o cavalo ergue a pata por
uma razão diferente – evitar atingir o corpo prostrado do seu dono, numa
reacção instintiva, própria de um cavalo vulgar. A acção psicológica interior
é vivida pelo homem e pelo cavalo, estando ambos intimamente relacionados
com o milagre (Friedlaender 8-9). O cavalo é o principal receptor de luz, que
o atinge drasticamente. A luz aguda e o plano de fundo muito escuro não
confirmam que a acção se desenrola à noite. Caravaggio não nos indica a fonte
natural dessa luz inefável, proveniente das esferas celestes. As suas figuras
distinguem-se pelo ritmo dos gestos, pelo relevo quase físico das formas
materiais. (Jirmounsky 124).
Rejeitando a perspectiva católica tradicional, Caravaggio opta por
apresentar o corpo de Paulo, sob um ponto de vista subjectivo e pouco

Luísa Maria Vilhena Ribeiro de Sousa 311

ortodoxo, reduzindo-o de forma quase ortogonal. A condensação abrupta do
corpo evoca uma reacção de choque e de espanto. O jovem soldado romano
cai do cavalo, aterrorizado pelo fenómeno da luz e do som sobrenaturais
que o cercam. Colocando o centro da acção no solo, Caravaggio expõe a
insignificância do Homem perante Deus. Paulo é representado com uma
indumentária de soldado romano comum (espada pequena e capacete
romanos) e não como alguém de estatuto social superior. Como Bardi realça,
em Maneiristas e Barrocos, Caravaggio procura concentrar toda a nossa atenção
na figura incontestavelmente santa, mas de uma santidade conquistada a
partir do carácter humano (43-5). O modo de comunicar a experiência da visão
de Paulo também se demarca da tradição iconográfica. Os olhos deste “Santo
visível” estão firme e convulsivamente cerrados, exprimindo a intensidade da
sua resposta à mensagem de Cristo. Caravaggio acentua o processo interior
da conversão e não o contacto directo entre Paulo e Cristo. Friedlaender
confirma que, na sua forma de interpretar o milagroso, Caravaggio é directo
e realista: os braços erguidos e os dedos tensos e afastados de Paulo, que
parecem abraçar a visão de Cristo, são o único gesto exterior que indica o que
Paulo sentiu, viu e respondeu à voz poderosa que penetrou na sua mente e
corpo. Esta é a figuração de um drama psicológico: a conversão de Saulo em
Paulo, a transformação de um soldado obstinado e odiento num discípulo de
Cristo (Friedlaender 23).
Caravaggio representa Paulo, plenamente subjugado, no momento
em que aceita o “contrato” divino numa imagem análoga à descrição da
conversão dos Puritanos apresentada por Winthrop no seu sermão, na qual
apenas a conversão firmada pelo rigor ascético e por um processo permanente
de introspecção permite a salvação dos “eleitos” por Deus. A composição do
corpo de Paulo, enquanto “ícone vivo”, ilustra ainda a forma como os tendões
e outros ligamentos evocam o valor da reciprocidade no seio da Igreja.
Na obra A Crucificação de São Pedro (confrontar anexo II), Caravaggio
constrói diagonais vincadas que, de acordo com Bardi, se entrecruzam com
o intuito de exprimir o conflito entre a brutalidade e a pureza (45). Nesse
dinamismo constante e implícito, os três homens têm de labutar com seriedade
e concentração. Cada movimento é necessário para obter o resultado final: a
elevação da cruz de São Pedro. Friedlaender explica que os três homens agem,
fatalmente, como forças da natureza: são tão directos e intensos e estão tão
próximos do espectador que este sente-se convidado a assistir e a participar
em todos os passos da sua tarefa tenebrosa (31).
O tema é abordado por Caravaggio de um ponto de vista anímico. O
corpo visível do Santo não é representado de forma convencional, ou seja,
numa posição indecorosa, invertida, que não permite aproximação, nem
resposta. Nesta obra, São Pedro segue o movimento inclinado da cruz; os seus

312 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

pés e os seus joelhos flectidos estão mais elevados do que a sua cabeça, mas
o seu desvio do plano horizontal não é acentuado, distorcido, perturbante.
São Pedro permanece activamente consciente e capaz, até um certo ponto,
de se mover e de comunicar connosco. Os traços expressivos e dignos do seu
rosto procuram o olhar do espectador. Num último esforço da sua vontade
interior, o Santo inclina o peito o mais possível, erguendo os seus ombros
para podermos ver o seu corpo, iluminado de forma sublime por Caravaggio.
Esta construção invulgar do corpo de São Pedro como ícone vivo permite uma
aproximação directa ao centro da acção por parte do espectador, descrita do
seguinte modo por Friedlaender: “[…] Saint Peter looks out of the picture as
if he might speak to the people, as king, by his personal appeal, for their close
attention to the glorious example of his indestructible faith” (32).
O apelo deste Santo, enquanto exemplo de convicção fervorosa, é
comparável à retórica persuasiva de Winthrop, líder de um movimento
religioso, político e económico, que se auto-classifica como “eleito por Deus”.
Os homens que crucificam São Pedro parecem suportar penosamente todo
o peso dos pecados do mundo, o que contrasta violentamente com o seu
acto de caridade, acto esse compreendido no sermão de Winthrop como um
dever, uma imitação do amor sagrado. O seu corpo martirizado, mas sereno,
constitui-se como um organismo social que age para o bem de todos os que
usufruem do seu sacrifício altruísta, a tal ponto que, aparentemente, a acção
secular trágica se torna mais comovente do que a acção transcendente épica.
Afinal, a sua imagem não é a de um homem santo, mas sim a de um homem
na sua condição mais humana, tal como a figura de Cristo, dos apóstolos e dos
santos apresentada no sermão de Winthrop:
The definition which the scripture gives us of love is this: “Love is the bond
of perfection.” […] For patterns we have that first our Savior who out of
His good will in obedience to His father, becoming a part of this body, and
being knit with it in the bond of love, found such a native sensibleness of
our infirmities and sorrows as He willingly yielded Himself to death to ease
the infirmities of the rest of His body, and so healed their sorrows. From the
like sympathy of parts did the apostles and many thousands of the saints lay
down their lives for Christ (220).

Nas suas obras, Caravaggio introduz um tratamento inovador da luz,

com um prisma que decompõe e constrói geometricamente os elementos,
iluminando viva e intensamente apenas algumas áreas, as mais significativas.
As restantes permanecem na sombra, num contraste violento, explosivo,
dando um relevo extraordinário aos corpos humanos representados com um
realismo extremo (Conti 41). O efeito da luz na sua arte “tenebrosa”, mas
apaixonada, dilui os matizes suaves das cores, ofuscando o modelado das suas
formas humanas, provenientes de um quotidiano vulgar (Jirmounsky 124).
Manifestando o seu carácter independente quanto à representação católica

Luísa Maria Vilhena Ribeiro de Sousa 313

tradicional, as suas figuras sacras vivem e actuam num plano humano, não
num estado hierático (Bardi 43-4).
De modo semelhante, Winthrop legitima as suas convicções, citando no
seu sermão determinados passos das Sagradas Escrituras que evidenciam
esse contraste entre luz e sombra enquanto representação do abismo entre o
sagrado e o profano:
[…] Isaiah: 58.6: “Is not this the fast I have chosen to loose the bonds of
wickedness, […] to bring the poor that wander into thy house, when thou
seest the naked to cover them. And then shall the light break forth as the
morning, […] and thy righteousness shall go before God, and the glory of
God shall embrace thee […]”. [Verse] 10: “If thou pour out thy soul to the
hungry, then shall thy light spring out in darkness […]” (219).

A ilusão espacial barroca mais audaz – a infinitude – é exibida nas

obras de Caravaggio pelo seguinte processo de construção: “The tactic of
closure, then expansion […], enhances our sense of release to ‘distance’, […]:
first, setting monumental limits, then immediately denying these limits by
melodramatically opening a vista beyond them, thus seeming to perform a
heroic feat of liberation” (Sypher 213-14). Com o propósito de delinear um
paralelismo credível entre o percurso dos Puritanos americanos e o dos Judeus
do Antigo Testamento, Winthrop também explora, no seu sermão, as imagens
da clausura, da libertação e da infinitude:
Likewise in their return out of the captivity, because the work was great
for the restoring of the church and the danger of enemies was common
to all, Nehemiah exhorts the Jews to liberality and readiness in remitting
their debts to their brethren, and disposing liberally of his own to such as
wanted […]. […] both in Scriptures and later stories of the churches that
such have been most bountiful to the poor saints, […] God hath left them
highly commended to posterity […] (218-19).

Na sua estética, Caravaggio denuncia ainda um “motif” barroco profun-

damente emocional – “rapture”, uma sursum corda, uma elevação do espírito
ou do corpo humano (Sypher 234), quando fixa o ponto de vista, centraliza
o eixo e nos permite ascender a um plano mais elevado com confiança e
magnificência.
Ora, similarmente, a imagem bíblica da “cidade visível” (Delbanco 72),
recuperada por Winthrop no seu sermão: “For we must consider that we shall
be as a city upon a hill” (225), anuncia o sentido de coesão, ascensão e plenitude
dos “eleitos” que pretendem viver numa comunidade espiritual ascética
(Carroll and Nobel 54-5), como membros do mesmo corpo, manifestando
a sua fé, numa comunhão eterna com Cristo (Dawson 19). Os “não eleitos”
parecem confinados ao papel de meros espectadores que elevam os olhos para
o palco de um teatro barroco onde os “eleitos” são as figuras protagonistas:
“With unguarded frankness the baroque theater stimulates us to feel rather

314 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

than to think or discriminate; the energy of our response is so high that a
few portentous gestures by heroic figures impel us headlong toward an
overwhelming climax” (Sypher 233). Enquanto exemplo de fé e líder de um
corpo secular e religioso, Winthrop, finaliza o seu sermão, proclamando a
missão do “povo eleito de Deus” com as palavras bíblicas de Moisés na Terra
Prometida. Da sua concepção da colonização, na qual o corpo humano se
afigura como ícone vivo, emergem a ideologia da terra de eleição e a profecia
na glória americana. Estes elementos revelam-se como pilares fundamentais
no processo de construção de uma América única, utópica e mítica, cuja
promoção assenta nos simbolismos da retórica puritana (Bercovitch, The Rites
of Assent 5-35; “How the Puritans Won” 597-630).
Nas duas obras de Caravaggio, o milagre da conversão de São Paulo e o
milagre da fé de São Pedro não são contemplações remotas. Estas comunicam
directamente com o seu espectador que apreende e partilha as suas expe-
riências, nomeadamente o despertar da fé e o martírio pela fé (Friedlaender
27-8). Por sua vez, Winthrop apresenta uma retórica dramática, exortativa
e engenhosa, mas, insiste, simultaneamente, num “plain style” efectivo para
que o discurso complexo das Escrituras e da teologia puritana não permaneça
afastado da vida quotidiana dos “santos visíveis eleitos”.
Estes dois autores, aparentemente tão díspares, convergem afinal no
modo como exprimem, nas suas obras, a compleição física da figura humana
como forma corporal dinâmica, a imagem basilar do corpo na proclamação
do vínculo entre Deus e os Seus “eleitos”, a configuração de “ícones vivos
autênticos” em contraposição a “falsos ídolos” e a exacerbação do sentido
utópico de glória e felicidade dos “santos visíveis”.
Tanto Winthrop, como Caravaggio, ao (re)construírem o corpo humano
como ícone vivo, tencionam sobretudo reconciliar a Humanidade com o
seu Criador numa época conturbada e ardente no domínio religioso, mas
claramente demarcada por novos e prodigiosos desígnios. Em termos
históricos, uma ironia inquestionável subjaz à retórica puritana de Winthrop
e à estética barroca de Caravaggio:
[…] while confidence in theological systems was being shaken during the
seventeenth century, confidence in the images of faith increased until the
image seemed capable of sustaining the faith: or, at the very least, to be self-
sustaining. […] If one’s mind was unsettled, one could, at worst, trust the
senses. (Sypher 200)

NOTES

1
Para aprofundar a reflexão em torno da “prevailing rhetoric of vision”, consultar
Crasnow and Haffenden ( 35).

Luísa Maria Vilhena Ribeiro de Sousa 315

OBRAS CITADAS

BARDI, Pietro. Maneiristas e Barrocos. Brasil: Abril Cultural, 1984. 7-15, 42-7.
BERCOVITCH, Sacvan. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic
Construction of America. New York: Routledge, 1993. 5-42.
_______, “How the Puritans Won the American Revolution”. The Massachusetts
Review of the Rites of Assent. N.p.: n.p., 1976.
CARROLL, Peter and D. Noble. The Free and the Unfree: A New History of the
United States. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
CHÂTELET, Albert and B. Groslier. História da Arte. Trans. A. Sampaio. Vol.
2. 3 vols. N.p.: Larousse, 1985. 407-10.
CONN, Peter. Literature in America. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 1-17.
CONTI, Flavio. Como Reconhecer a Arte Barroca. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1978.
CRASNOW, E. and P. Haffenden. “New Founde Land”. Introduction to
American Studies. Eds. M. Bradbury and H. Temperley. 3rd ed. New York:
Longman, 1998.
DAWSON, Hugh. “‘Christian Charitie’ as Colonial Discourse”. Early American
Literature 33.2 (1998). ERIC. July 2003 <htttp://www.letras.up.pt>.
DELBANCO, Andrew. The Puritan Ordeal. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. 41-80.
FRIEDLAENDER, Walter. Caravaggio Studies. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974.
3-33, 117-35, 139-226.
JIRMOUNSKY, Myron. “Caravaggio”. Dicionário da Pintura Universal. Eds. M.
Chicó et al. Vol. 1. 2 vols. Lisboa: Estúdios Cor, 1962. 123-4.
KIBBEY, Ann. The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1986.
MICHAELSEN, Scot. “John Winthrop’s ‘Modell’ Covenant and the Company
Way”. Early American Literature 27.2 (1992). ERIC. July 2003 <http://
www.letras.up.pt>.
SYPHER, Wilie. Four Stages of Renaissance Style – Transformations in Art and
Literature 1400-1700. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1955. 180-251.
WEBER, Max. A Ética Protestante e o Espírito do Capitalismo. Trans. Ana F.
Bastos e Luís Leitão. 4th ed. Lisboa: Editorial Presença, Lda, 1996.
WINTHROP, John. “A Model of Christian Charity”. The Norton Anthology of
American Literature. Eds. N. Baym, et al. 5th ed. Vol. 1. 2 vols. New York:
W W Norton, 1998.

316 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 APÊNDICE

Anexo I – Caravaggio, Conversão de São Paulo. Roma, Sta. Maria del Popolo

317
Anexo II – Caravaggio, A Crucificação de São Pedro. Roma, Sta. Maria del
Popolo

318 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

RECEN S Õ E S / REV I E W S
Giacomo Chiozza.

ANTI-AMERICANISM AND THE AMERICAN WORLD ORDER.

Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press: 2009. Print.

Giacomo Chiozza’s 2004 PhD thesis entitled “Love and Hate: Anti-
Americanism and the American World Order” (Duke University) was revised
and published as Anti-Americanism and the World Order (Johns Hopkins
University Press), in 20091. In this book the author partakes with a non-
exclusively academic public of his views on popular anti-Americanism within
what he refers to as an “American world order”. The author’s main goals are
to “shed empirical light on the phenomenon of Anti-Americanism” and “to
fill a wide gap in our understanding of the US standing at the mass societal
level internationally” (3). Manifestly influenced by strategic political theories
in the field of foreign affairs (reference, praises and criticisms to “big names”
such as Robert Kagan, Josef Joffe Richard Crockatt, Joseph Nye, and the late
Samuel P. Huntington…), he tends to dice up into heavy statistics, choosing,
as he does in this opus, a very coherent and factual discourse to which scores
of statistical figures and models are added.
He relies mostly on an array of comprehensive statistical data (figures,
schemes and models), his “empirical” references for his propositions, obtained
by the close-reading of the 2004 Pew Global Attitudes Project2 entitled “A Year
after Iraq: Mistrust of America Even Higher, Muslim Anger Persists.” Further
readings, emanating from the same center, are inserted specifically the 2005,
2006 and 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Project; the 2002 Zogby International
Survey, and the 2002 Chicago Council on Foreign Relations /German Marshall
Fund (CCFR/GMF) survey. This array of data may eventually diffuse the
negativity ascribed to the foreign public opinion regarding the behavior of
the US, in the 21st century world arena.
From the very introduction, Giacamo Chiozza contends that on-
Americans and Americans alike are living within an “American world order”
and that popular anti-Americanism, in spite of all the alarming theories and

321
discourses, is but a persistent and “benign and shallow sentiment” worldwide.
According to him “the reason for this optimistic view, which counters the
current conventional wisdom about US popularity abroad, is that there is more
than one aspect of the United States that frames popular imagination” (4).
In doing so he cleverly sweeps aside the perilous, tedious (for the
common reader), and almost unfeasible task assigned to exegetes interested
in anti-Americanism: the excruciating process to question the meaning(s)
and the adequacy of the term “anti-Americanism” and to deliver a clear-cut
definition. Instead, he asserts that popular anti-Americanism is a “sentiment”
and “…. an ideational phenomenon, an attitude, and a political belief that can
be measured through the answers individuals give to survey items” (37).
Taken as a concept with no plural forms (indeed an arguable fact), anti-
Americanism is a thorny issue because one has to find out to which contours
of this concept the author is, in fact, relating. Is America a synonym for the US?
Or should the symbolic and mythical construction of “America” be embracing
other concepts present in an “imagined” “America— more appropriately
between quotation marks? Giacomo Chiozza uses mainly “the US” and when
he chooses the word America it is meant as a synonym for the former concept.
To be more accurate, only once, in Part IV, “Persistence”, does he consider
“The Image of America in Times of Crisis”: an America without quotation
marks. Yet, he is well-aware that the distinction is imperative, mainly to the
specialist, albeit not to the average educated or non-educated poll respondent,
who is happily “beguiled” (Joffe 2002, 173) by the “soft power” (Nye 1990,
2004) America exerts on him/her through movies, media, universities,
software, technology, internet, skyscrapers, English, jeans and other means.
These concerns about the spelling of “America” allow us to introduce
one of Giacomo Chiozza’s major themes: the adequacy and legitimacy of the
theory of “American exceptionalism”. Yet, a remark should be made here:
“American exceptionalism” is as multi-definable as anti-Americanism. Some
thinkers affirm that anti-Americanism would not stand without the idea of an
exceptional America (either with or without quotation marks). The fact is that
Giacomo Chiozza’s ‘American exceptionalism’ is directly linked to the notion
of power, empowerment and, eventually, it involves the concepts of empire,
imperialism, citizenship and community. To him, Joseph Nye’s 2004 theory of
soft power seems to be the explanation for the feeble degree of expression of
anti-Americanism revealed by the respondents of forty-two countries. Hence,
he wishes to prove that Nye’s theory can be tested by his analysis and that
soft power is at the basis of the superficiality and mild reaction of popular
anti-Americanism. According to him, despite the dissimilar respondents’
political and sociological backgrounds, they normally do not demonstrate any
feeling of hatred regarding the US, its cultural and commercial products and

322 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

society values. The enquired person might, on a certain occasion, experience
discomfort, even anger at some political actions performed by the US or/and
its administration. In Chiozza’s opinion this is an exceptional status quo in
today’s world arena. He adds:
A common element emerges from this investigation: the United States enters
into the ideational worlds of foreign publics as an ideal and an aspiration.
Such a perception mediates the popular image of the US international political
behavior and gives substance to the notion of American exceptionalism in
the court of world opinion (157).

Giacomo Chiozza’s penchant for the soft power theory equals his criticism of
Robert Kagan’s main views (Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the
New World Order, 2003) which run contrary to Joseph Nye’s since the former
depicts the U.S as an imperialist one-dimensional military-drawn country,
to which people react with strong manifestations of physical and vocal anti-
Americanism. Giacomo Chiozza is also strongly opposed to the famous and
controversial theory developed by Samuel P. Huntington, for whom culture
and religious identities will lead to further conflicts, disclosed in The Clash of
Civilizations and The Remaking of the World Order (1996).
Giacomo Chiozza never clearly explains the phrase “American world
order”, present in the book title. His analysis of popular anti-Americanism
seems to be rooted in this “American World Order”, and both lead to the
“American theory”, another phrase deprived of a precise definition. He
affirms that “The nature of the American world order, however, the subject of
much controversy” (32). The phrase is in italics so that the reader may infer
that this is a quote or an immediately identifiable concept. Does he imply
from G.H.W. Bush’s words that “the new international world order” equals
“American world order”, because the US has been so unilaterally powerful,
especially since November the 9th, 1989?
If this is his definition for “American world order”, then the inquisitive
reader might feel puzzled: the analysis focuses on the period between 2004
and 2007 and it clearly alludes to a post-9/11 world. Prior to 2007, many
authors, among whom Fareed Zakaria, mentioned in Chiozza’s bibliography,
have been challenging the idea of a sole hyperpuissance (the U.S). According to
Fareed Zakaria’s 2008 book The Post-American World the actual world order is a
post-American one. Paraq Khanna’s _ The Second World: How Emerging Powers
Are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-first Century (2009), Charles
Kupchan’s The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics
of the Twenty-first Century (2003) or David Mason’s The End of the American
Century (2009), convey a similar message.
The US is still undeniably an uncontested and unequaled military
behemoth. Yet, in the wake of events such as 9/11, Katrina, the most recent

Recensões / Reviews 323

effects of globalization, the most subprime crisis, and US domestic polemical
themes, the overall US hegemony, all over planet Earth is questionable or
somehow passé. The present world order is certainly not only an “American
one”: in the face of unfairly classified “emergent” countries (China, India
and Brazil) and the actual flatness of a globalization-based world (Thomas
Friedman), one must reconsider the validity and correctness of a phrase such
as “American World Order”. Of course, such a concept contains, justifies and
fuels the manifestations of anti-Americanism.
This brings us back to Giacomo Chiozza’s popular respondents. Which
is their world order’s definition? How do they cope with the fact of being
questioned on their attitudes toward the US? Are they familiar with and
sensitive to the notion of “American exceptionalism”? Why have they decided
to answer to the Pew’s questionnaire? Why did Giacomo Chiozza pick out the
Pew Global Attitude and the Zorby’s surveys? Are they the only ones fitted
for his purposes? And why? These questions are not taken into account in
Giacomo Chiozza’s analysis; he is obviously focused on the survey’s answers
and on his own hypothesis.
One might object to the countries selected for analysis, arguing that his own
assortment and clusters of countries obey to disputable criteria. Nonetheless,
one has to praise his methodology and dexterity in the interpretation of such
a presentation of massive disparate data.
In rounding-off his analysis, Giacomo Chiozza wonders if anti-
Americanism will persist in the 21st century and his opinion − “for some aspects
of America that are disliked, there are many more that are appreciated” (83)
− will prevail in spite of all the stereotyping, demonizing and the attribution
of evil intentions to the US,. As a matter of fact, there seems to be a pattern of
continuity in change.
His final words go to what one may call his omnipresent “American
exceptionalism theory”:
For friends and supporters of the United States, true believers, and true
admirers, the empirical findings presented in this book lend credence to the
belief that they have had all along: that the United States is a different kind
of nation benign and benevolent, that promotes a vision of a better world….
American prestige throughout the world is faith in the good intentions
as well as in the ultimate intelligence and ultimate strength of the whole
American people (201).

They make way for one last crucial pressing interrogation: does he include
himself among the friends and supporters of the US and their faith in the
exceptional features and mission of the US? Or does he simply act as an
objective scientist, obedient and respectful of the conclusions that indicate
that this ‘American exceptionalism theory’ is the only one that makes sense?

324 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

 There seems to be but a credible common world order as revealed by
statistics, polls, models, theories, clashes of theories, articles, essays, books,
reviews, in and out of the academic world: people are not yet through with
the US their opinions on the US and “their” America? The “exception” is but
the norm.

NOTES

1
He has been working as Assistant Professor, at the Department of Political Science,
Vanderbilt University, since 2008.
2
Pew Global Attitudes Project of 2004. “A Year after Iraq: Mistrust of America Even
Higher, Muslim Anger Persists”3. Technical report by the Pew Research Center for
the People and the Press. Available at people-press.org/reports/pdf/ 206pdf/.
For further details see Chiozza 222.

WORKS CITED

Chiozza, Giacomo. Anti-Americanism and the American World Order. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Print.
Friedman, Thomas. Hot, Crowded, and Flat. 2.0: Why We Need a Green Revolution
and How It Can Renew America. Great Britain: Allan Lane, 2008.Print.
_______, The World is Flat. A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.Print.
Huntington, Samuel. P. The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World
Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Print.
Kagan, Robert. Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World
Order. NY: Knopf, 2003. Print.
_______, Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World, from its Earliest Days to
the Dawn of the 20th Century. NY: Alfred A Knopf, 2006. Print.
Nye, Joseph. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public
Affairs, 2004.Print.

MANUELLA C. GLAZIOU TAVARES

Recensões / Reviews 325

RESUMOS DE DISSERTAÇÕES / DISSERTATIONS ABSTRACTS
1. DISSERTAÇÕES DE DOUTORAMENTO / DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS

EDGAR ALLAN POE EM TRANSLAÇÃO: ENTRE TEXTOS E SISTEMAS, VISANDO

AS RESCRITAS NA LÍRICA MODERNA EM PORTUGAL / EDGAR ALLAN POE
IN TRANSLATION: TEXTS, SYSTEMS, REWRITES IN PORTUGUESE MODERN
LYRICS
Margarida Vale de Gato
CEAUL / ULICES – University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, 2008

Considerando as rescritas como testemunhos duma complexa inter-

relação entre literatura, textualidade e historicidade, aplica-se o argumento da
tradução como manipulação a um acervo mais diversificado de dependência
textual, alargando-se também a dinâmica das relações inter-sistémicas a
correspondências transnacionais de história literária. Partindo de Edgar
Allan Poe e visando a lírica moderna em Portugal desde meados de 1860 até à
viragem para o século XX, destacam-se os sistemas de chegada e de partida, e
também o intermédio da literatura francesa.
Para que se possam apreciar as condições e incidência da manipulação, a
Parte I abrange a obra de Poe, considerando não só funções que terá cumprido
no sistema da emergente literatura dos E.U.A., mas também potenciais
sentidos que pareçam apontados pelo texto de partida. A Parte II estuda a
recepção francesa de Poe, exemplar no debate da manipulação da fama
literária entre sistemas competitivos. Seleccionando figuras e textos entre os
que mais provavelmente chegaram a Portugal, procurar-se-á dimensionar a
refracção textual de Poe com diferentes projectos colectivos ou (tres)leituras
singulares, questionando a narrativa hegemónica da agência de Baudelaire
sobre o “Poe europeu”.
A Parte III trata as rescritas na lírica moderna portuguesa, e o modo como
as suas condicionantes sistémicas, bem como a recriação autoral ou outras
formas de possessão, se intersectam com a história da primeira recepção de
Poe em Portugal. Abordando primeiro o contexto e as formas particulares
da introdução de Poe em Portugal (capítulo 1), compreender-se-ão dois
(sub-)sistemas diacrónicos sucessivos para efeitos de contraste. O capítulo 2
lida com Poe e “a poesia da nova era”, contemplando quer os imperativos da

329
“actualidade” quer uma emergente dramatização da subjectividade. O capítulo
3 aborda factores transicionais, concedendo margem para imponderabilidade
autoral em Gomes Leal. O capítulo 4 versa sobre o sistema a que se apõe
a designação lata de “encruzilhada finissecular” por melhor se adequar aos
dados obtidos da recepção de Poe, acolhido numa fusão de tendências, por
um lado testemunhas dum emergente esteticismo e, por outro, moralmente
reactivas à decadência nacional, mas de toda a forma forçando uma renovação
poética que propiciou a complexidade modernista.

ABSTRACT

Taking rewrites as sites of a complex interplay between literature, textuality

and historicity, this dissertation tests the argument of translation as manipu-
lation against a wider range of documents of textual dependency, extending
as well the dynamics of intersystemic relationships into transnational
correspondences in literary history. Starting with Edgar Allan Poe and aiming
at the Portuguese modern lyric from the mid 1860’s to the turn of the 20th
century, it focuses both on source and target systems, with French literature
as privileged mediating system.
In order to gauge the extent to which manipulation takes place, Part I deals
with Poe’s work, addressing not only those functions it may have fulfilled in
the emergent US literary system, but also potential meanings which may be
indicated by the source text. Part II studies Poe’s French reception, already a
familiar test case for the debate on the manipulation of literary fame between
competitive literary systems. Selecting texts and actors from among those most
likely to have reached Portugal, we shall analyse the textual refraction of Poe,
according to different collective projects or single (mis)readings, challenging
the hegemonic narrative of Baudelaire’s agency in “the European Poe”.
Part III involves rewrites within the field of the modern Portuguese lyric,
and the way its systemic constraints, as well as authorial recreation or other
forms of possession, intersected with Poe’s early reception history. Dealing
first with the general context and the particular forms in which Poe came into
Portugal (chapter 1), it encompasses two successive diachronic (sub)systems.
Chapter 2 handles Poe in “a poesia da nova era”, concerned with the “new”
and an emergent dramatization of subjectivity. Chapter 3 foregrounds
transitional modes as found in Gomes Leal, allowing also for the factor of
authorial indeterminacy. Chapter 4 concerns the system broadly called “the
crossroads of the fin-de-siècle”, a designation that best suits the data on Poe’s
literary fortune, who was then received through a blend of tendencies. These
were split between aesthetic claims and the moral imperative to react against
national decadence, but in any case followed the urge for poetic renovation
that would feed the complexity of modernism.

330 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

A MUNDIVIDÊNCIA HERÓICA E A INSTITUIÇÃO DA LITERATURA. POÉTICA
EPOLÍTICA DAS LETRAS INGLESAS NA ÉPOCA DE ADDISON E DE POPE /
THE HEROIC WORLDVIEW AND THE INSTITUTION OF LITERATURE: THE
POETICS AND POLITICS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF ADDISON
AND POPE
Jorge Bastos da Silva
Universidade do Porto, 2007

Este trabalho examina a imbricação da cultura literária com a política no

ciclo histórico-literário do Classicismo inglês, com destaque para o Período
Augustano. O conceito de política é tomado em sentido amplo, abarcando o
modo como a sociedade se organiza e se concebe, e bem assim os modos como
a acção e a reflexão políticas se articulam no campo partidário.
O estudo atende aos sentidos e aos valores pragmáticos assumidos pelo
discurso literário e pelo discurso sobre a literatura no contexto ideológico do
Augustanismo; e considera o pressuposto da utilidade ideológica da cultura
literária como argumento fundamental na consagração de uma esfera moderna
do literário com prerrogativas de relativa autonomia. É posto em evidência
o papel desempenhado pelo imaginário heróico como referente organizador
das práticas literárias em função da necessidade que tem a literatura de se
reivindicar de uma utilidade ideológica sobre a qual possa fundar-se um
discurso de autolegitimação social e institucional.
O cruzamento do imaginário heróico com a literatura é percepcionado
à luz do desejo de equiparação da modernidade à Antiguidade Clássica;
e especificamente da aproximação da Inglaterra moderna ao império de
Augusto, implicada no conceito de Período Augustano que emergiu no final
do século XVII. Essa aproximação não é meramente lisonjeira, antes constitui
uma exigência de elevação que a si mesma se impõe a elite social e cultural
inglesa, ou parte dela: elevação no plano da moral, da racionalidade, do bom
gosto, das maneiras, do fulgor da produção cultural.
Por conseguinte, uma vez delineado um panorama sociocultural e
estabelecida a natureza dos problemas a abordar, o estudo segue três linhas
principais de desenvolvimento, que aliás em muitos pontos se entrecruzam:
a) atenta nas representações da identidade nacional, focando o discurso
patriótico. Examina a presunção do excepcionalismo britânico
condensada na figura da rainha Ana e examina as relações da cultura
e do carácter nacionais com o estrangeiro (França e Itália, sobretudo)
pressupostas na época;
b) explora o tema do heroísmo, mormente enquanto objecto de
problematização ética reflectida nas representações literárias,

Resumos de Dissertações / Dissertations Abstracts 331

 examinando a transformação dos modelos heróicos no sentido da
sua interiorização e da sua socialização. Uma parte importante deste
argumento desenvolve-se sob a forma de comentário ao drama
de Addison Cato e ao respectivo prólogo, escrito por Pope, que
suscitam referência a autores (críticos e dramaturgos) do período da
Restauração como Davenant e Dryden;
c) debruça-se sobre a fundamentação teórica e filosófica da actividade
literária e sobre a definição de um campo específico do estético.
Concentrando-se nos contributos críticos de autores como Pope,
Addison, Shaftesbury, Dennis e Hutcheson, constata que os
modos como são concebidas as operações dos sentidos e da mente
quando postos em confronto com objectos dotados de valor estético
reconduzem caracteristicamente essas operações a categorias
ontológicas e psicológicas de cariz objectivo e invariável: Deus,
a natureza, a razão, o gosto, o senso comum. Deste modo, nota a
articulação da literatura com a verdade e com a consciência moral;
e a articulação do estético, genericamente, com um preenchimento
existencial que representa um ideal superior de humanidade.
O trabalho termina com uma síntese e uma reapreciação das matérias
abordadas, observando que a suposta objectividade dos critérios estéticos
releva de uma construção ideológica, não de uma relação com a verdade,
e que o estatuto do clássico é desestabilizado no próprio Classicismo pela
introdução de uma perspectiva historicista.

ABSTRACT

This study examines the connection between literature and politics in the
course of the literary-historical cycle of English Classicism, with special
emphasis on the Augustan Age. The concept of politics is taken to comprise
both the way society organizes and perceives itself, and the ways in which
political action and thought articulate on party level.
The study considers the meaning and the pragmatic value carried by
the discourse of and about literature. It also considers the assumption of the
ideological usefulness of literary culture as a fundamental argument for the
establishment of a relatively autonomous, modern sphere of literature. It
stresses the role played by the heroic imaginary as a referent instrumental
in organizing literary practice, regarding literature’s need to assert a kind
of ideological usefulness on which its claims for social and institutional
legitimacy can be based.
The intersection of the heroic imaginary with literature is perceived in
the light of the suggested equivalence of modernity to Classical Antiquity,

332 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

and specifically of the wish to compare modern England with the empire
of Augustus, a match that is implied in the concept of the ‘Augustan Age’
which emerged in the late seventeenth century. Such equation is not merely
flattering, as it entails demands for improvement imposed by the English
social and cultural elite, or by a part of it, on itself: an improvement in morals,
reason, fine taste, manners, and in the quality of cultural production.
After providing an overview of the social and cultural conditions and
establishing the character of the problems to be dealt with, this study therefore
proceeds along three main lines of development, which intersect at several
points:
a) it considers the representations of Englishness, focusing on
the discourse of patriotism. It examines the conceit of British
exceptionalism as it translates into the image of Queen Anne, and
the assumed relations of national culture and character with their
foreign counterparts (especially French and Italian);
b) it explores the topic of heroism as an object of debates in ethics
reflected in literary representations, examining the transformation
of heroic models towards their internalization and socialization.
A significant part of this argument is developed as a commentary
of Addison’s drama, Cato, and of its prologue, written by Pope,
which suggest references to Restoration authors (both critics and
playwrights) such as Davenant and Dryden;
c) it examines the theoretical and philosophical foundations of literary
activity and the definition of the specific field of the aesthetic. Focusing
on the critical contributions of Pope, Addison, Shaftesbury, Dennis
and Hutcheson, it shows that the way the operations of the senses
and of the mind in the presence of aesthetically-charged objects are
perceived typically refers to ontological and psychological categories
of an objective and invariable character: God, nature, reason, taste,
common sense. It thus identifies the connection of literature with
the spheres of truth and moral consciousness, as well as the general
connection between the aesthetic experience and an existential
fulfilment which represents a higher ideal of humanity.
The study closes with a synopsis and a reappraisal of the matters discussed,
noticing how the supposed objectivity of the aesthetic criteria rests on an
ideological construct, not on a connection with truth, and how the status of
the classic is destabilized within Classicism itself through the introduction of
a historical perspective.

Resumos de Dissertações / Dissertations Abstracts 333

2. DISSERTAÇÕES DE MESTRADOS / MA DISSERTATIONS

JUVENTUDE, COSMOPOLITISMO E PACIFISMO: O OLHAR DE RANDOLPH

BOURNE / YOUTH, COSMOPOLITANISM AND PACIFISM: THE VISION OF
RANDOLPH BOURNE
Ana Maria da Luz Nunes Figueira
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2010

Esta dissertação teve como objectivo estudar a visão do crítico cultural

norte-americano Randolph Silliman Bourne sobre os seguintes temas: o papel
da juventude, através do pensamento crítico e de uma atitude não conformista,
como fermento de transformação e motor de aperfeiçoamento social; o seu
conceito de cosmopolitismo, radicado na cidadania dual e pluralismo cultural;
e a controversa posição dos intelectuais pragmatistas norte-americanos quanto
à entrada do país na Primeira Grande Guerra. Procurou-se também provar
a existência de uma relação coerente no entendimento de Randolph Bourne
sobre estas questões aparentemente não relacionadas, bem como avaliar a
importância do seu legado crítico e filosófico e o seu contributo para uma
melhor compreensão de problemas universais e actuais. Randolph Bourne, de
ascendência anglo-saxónica, nascido em 1886 em Bloomfield, Nova Jérsia, no
seio de uma família da classe média, foi uma figura influente da elite intelectual
do seu tempo, constituída pelos auto-denominados Young Intellectuals – que
o crítico designaria “beloved community” –, concentrada principalmente no
bairro nova-iorquino de Greenwich Village. Muito interessados nas questões
culturais contemporâneas, os Young Intellectuals entendiam ser sua missão
transformar o mundo através da reflexão crítica. A sua “innocent rebellion”
caracterizava-se por um forte antagonismo aos valores e convenções da
geração anterior e à hegemonia da tradição cultural vitoriana. O seu sentido de
independência e de responsabilidade social, o desejo publicamente conhecido
de intervir, de fazer a diferença nas arenas cultural, artística e política, bem
como o interesse em protagonizar uma nova definição de cultura, centrada na
produção cultural genuinamente americana, livre da tradicional e humilhante
subserviência em relação aos padrões culturais europeus, permeiam a eclética
e muito diversa produção literária de Randolph Bourne.

ABSTRACT

The main purpose of this dissertation was to analyse the vision of the
North-American cultural critic Randoph Silliman Bourne on the following
themes: the role of youth, through critical thinking and a non-conformist
attitude, as the leaven of transformation and motor of social improvement;

334 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

his concept of cosmopolitanism, based on dual citizenship and cultural
pluralism; and the controversial position of the pragmatic American
intellectuals towards the United States’ entry in the First World War. It was
also our aim to prove a coherent relationship linking Bourne’s vision of such
apparently unrelated issues, as well as to evaluate the importance of his
critical and philosophical legacy and its contribution to the understanding
of unresolved worldwide current-day problems. Randolph Bourne, born in
1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey, to a medium-class family of Anglo-Saxon
ascendancy, was an influential figure among the young North-American
intellectual elite of his time. Settled mainly in New York’s Greenwich Village,
the self-denominated Young Intellectuals – Bourne’s “beloved community” –,
deeply interested in contemporary cultural issues, perceived as their main
role to change the world through critical reflection. Their “innocent rebellion”
was characterized by a strong antagonism to the values and conventions of
the previous generation and the hegemony of the Victorian cultural tradition.
Their sense of independence and social responsibility, their public desire to
count, to make a difference in the cultural, artistic and social arenas, as well
as their interest in starring a new definition of culture, centred on genuine
American cultural production – freed from the traditional and humiliating
subservience to European cultural standards –, are voiced in Randolph
Bourne’s eclectic and wide-ranged literary corpus.

FORMA SINISTRA DE AMERICANISMO: O PURITANISMO NA ÉTICA E NA

RETÓRICA DO KU KLUX KLAN / SINISTER FORM OF AMERICANISM:
PURITANISM IN THE ETHIC AND RHETORIC OF THE KU KLUX KLAN
Luísa Maria Vilhena Ribeiro de Sousa
Universidade Aberta, 2006

Nas últimas décadas, os estudos sobre a proeminência sinistra dos grupos

de supremacia branca nos Estados Unidos da América, nomeadamente do Ku
Klux Klan, têm-se intensificado a nível internacional, embora concentrados
na sua trajectória política, social e económica, no perfil psicológico e social
dos seus membros ou nos seus motivos e intuitos pessoais. Neste contexto,
afigurou-se-nos necessária e pertinente a realização de uma investigação
sobre uma outra dimensão de análise – a apropriação da ética e da retórica
puritanas pelo Ku Klux Klan.
Com este trabalho, pretendemos essencialmente analisar o modo como
este grupo de supremacia branca recupera, reproduz e actualiza determinadas
concepções da colonização puritana a fim de justificar as suas actividades,
convicções, rituais e objectivos propagados por toda a América.

Resumos de Dissertações / Dissertations Abstracts 335

 Interessa-nos, assim, desvendar as formas mais ou menos subtis de
auto-legitimação do exercício de violência figurativa e literal por parte deste
grupo, que parecem protegê-lo em termos sociais, políticos, económicos e
histórico-culturais de uma extinção a que pretensamente estaria condenado.
Para tal, privilegiamos como dimensão de análise fundamental a
manifestação da herança puritana no discurso do Ku Klux Klan que perpassa
actualmente nos seus sites oficiais, na medida em que nos permite contribuir
de forma inovadora para desmascarar as diversas articulações entre os
modos de produção de discursos por parte do Klan e os principais pilares
em que assenta o Puritanismo americano. No prelúdio deste novo milénio, a
interpretação e a explicação dos contornos do movimento do Klan reclamam
um estudo aprofundado desse discurso ainda por explorar.
Concluímos que a impunidade constitucional relativamente à divulgação
da propaganda do Klan na Internet e a tolerância social face à sua promoção
da classe média, branca, anglo-saxónica e protestante e à discriminação
dos grupos minoritários revelam as fragilidades da sociedade americana,
claramente permeável a formas de terrorismo interno.

ABSTRACT

In the last decades, the studies about the sinister prominence of the white
supremacy groups in the United States of America, namely the Ku Klux
Klan, have been increasing internationally, despite being concentrated on
their political, economic and social trajectory, their members’ psychological
and social profile or their motives and personal aspirations. In this context, it
seemed to us necessary and pertinent to carry out research concerning another
dimension of analysis – the appropriation of the puritan ethic and rhetoric by
the Klan.
With this work, we intend to analyze essentially the way this white
supremacy group retrieves, reproduces and updates particular conceptions
of the puritan colonization in order to justify its activities, convictions, rituals
and aims propagated all over America.
Thus, we are interested in unveiling the (more or less) subtle ways of
self-legitimacy of the figurative and literal violence exercised by this group,
which seem to protect it, socially, politically, economically, historically and
culturally, from the extinction to which it would presumably be condemned.
We privilege as a fundamental dimension of analysis the manifestation
of the puritan legacy on the Klan discourse, which presently goes through
its official Internet sites, since it allows us to contribute, in an innovating
form, to unmask the diverse articulations between the means of production
of discourses by the Klan and the main pillars of American Puritanism. In

336 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

the prelude of this new millennium, the interpretation and explanation
of the outlines of the Klan’s movement claim a profound study of that still
unexplored discourse.
We conclude that the constitutional impunity concerning the divulgation
of the Klan’s propaganda on the Internet and the social tolerance towards
its promotion of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle-class and its
discrimination of the minority groups reveal the fragilities of the American
society, clearly permeable to internal forms of terrorism.

OS VAMPIROS DO NOVO MILÉNIO: EVOLUÇÕES E REPRESENTAÇÕES NA

LITERATURA E OUTRAS ARTES / VAMPIRES OF THE NEW MILLENIUM:
EVOLUTIONS AND REPRESENTATIONS IN LITERATURE AND OTHER ART
FORMS
Paula Cristina Damásio Lagarto
Universidade de Évora, 2008

A presente dissertação tem como objectivos principais mostrar como a

figura do vampiro tem evoluído, na literatura e outras artes, ao longo dos
tempos, chegando ao final do século XX e ao século XXI mais humanizado
que nunca. O vampiro evoluiu bastante e é, cada vez mais, a face do monstro
moderno, que parece humano, mas não é; que não suga só o nosso sangue,
mas também as nossas energias; que não é só a representação do Mal, mas
também se associa às forças do Bem, sendo o ponto de partida para uma
introspecção da natureza humana. Centrado na análise de um corpus literário
relacionado com o tema, constituído por obras escolhidas pela sua pertinência,
representatividade e sucesso alcançado, o nosso estudo percorre uma
evolução histórica até proceder à apresentação dos novos tipos de vampiros –
designadamente os vampiros emocionais, culminando na análise de diferentes
representações do vampiro no cinema, televisão, música e pintura.

ABSTRACT

This dissertation has one major goal: to show how the vampire has evolved,
both in literature and in the other arts, so that, in the end of the twentieth
century and in this new twentieth-first century, its humanization is completed.
More than ever, the vampire is the modern monster, which looks human, but
is not; which drains our blood, but also our life force and energies; which
not only represents Evil, but also fights for the Good, and whose example
allows us to better understand human nature. Our study is based on a literary

Resumos de Dissertações / Dissertations Abstracts 337

corpus connected with this subject; the works were chosen because of their
importance in the area and their success. It includes an historical overview
and presents new kinds of vampires – namely, the emotional vampires. Our
study ends with an analysis of different representations of the vampire in
film, television, music and painting.

CONSTRUÇÃO E DESCONSTRUÇÃO DE IDENTIDADES EM A CAVERNA DE JOSÉ

SARAMAGO E WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? DE EDWARD ALBEE /
CONSTRUCTION AND DECONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITIES IN JOSÉ SARAMAGO’S
THE CAVE AND EDWARD ALBEE’S WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
Sara Marisa Marques Vicente
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas – Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2009

Esta dissertação propõe uma abordagem comparatista do processo de

construção e desconstrução de identidades em A Caverna de José Saramago
(2000) e Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) de Edward Albee.
Os construtores Cipriano Algor, Martha e George produzem identidades
baseadas em ilusões, de modo a evitar o confronto com a verdade acerca das
suas próprias realidades.
Cipriano depara-se com a extinção do trabalho artesanal na sociedade
cada vez mais industrializada. A substituição inevitável destes trabalhos
pelos novos aparelhos tecnológicos e o aparecimento de materiais resistentes
funcionam como causas da inadaptação do oleiro na nova realidade
simbolizada pelo centro comercial.
Martha e George criam a ilusão de um filho que representa a perfeição
na relação do casal. No ambiente académico, o sucesso intelectual deve ser
acompanhado de um casamento irrepreensível.
Os espaços onde estas personagens constroem identidades, ilustram a
necessidade de encontrar novos códigos e linguagens para comunicar consigo
mesmos e compreender a verdade.
Tal como explica o filósofo alemão, Peter Sloterdijk, no segundo tomo da
sua trilogia Esferas (2004), estes espaços são “invernadouros”, onde Cipriano,
Martha e George encontram aquilo que necessitam para criar ilusões e ocultar
a verdade.
No respeitante aos “invernadouros”, a Alegoria da Caverna serve como
fonte fundamental para analisar o centro comercial e o enclausuramento dos
que aí vivem. No final, o oleiro sente-se como um prisioneiro na caverna de
Platão durante a estadia no novo apartamento.
Crátilo de Platão serve como suporte teórico relevante para explicar

338 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

o papel da atribuição de nomes às identidades no processo de construção.
Desse modo, os construtores associam as identidades com as realidades que
estas representam.
Em conclusão, estas identidades revelam a inevitabilidade do confronto
com a verdade e o processo de desconstrução torna-se não só previsível, mas
também necessário para o futuro das personagens nas suas novas realidades.

ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a comparative approach to the analysis of the process of

construction and deconstruction of identities in José Saramago’s The Cave
(2000) and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962).
The creators Cipriano, Martha and George produce identities based on
illusions, in order to prevent the confrontation with the truth about their
realities.
Cipriano tackles with the extinction of handiwork on a more and more
industrialised society. The inevitable substitution of these jobs by modern
technological supplies and the appearance of durable materials cause
Cipriano’s inadaptation to the new reality symbolised by the shopping
centre.
Martha and George create the illusion of a son who represents perfection
in their relationship. Within the academic environment, intellectual success
must be accompanied by an unblemished marriage.
The places where they create identities, illustrate the necessity to find
new codes and languages to communicate with themselves and understand
the truth.
As the German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, explains in the second book
of his Spheres (2004) trilogy, these are “places to hibernate” where they find
what they need to create illusions and hide from the truth.
As regards “places to hibernate”, the Allegory of the Cave is a core
intertextual source to analyse the shopping centre and the imprisonment of
its inhabitants. Eventually, the potter feels like one of the prisoners in Plato’s
cave during his stay at the new apartment.
Plato’s Cratylus is a relevant theoretical support to explain the role played
by the attribution of names to the identities in the process of construction.
By doing so, the creators associate the identities with the realities they
represent.
In conclusion, these identities reveal the inevitability of confronting with
the truth. The process of deconstruction is not only predictable, but also,
necessary to the future of these characters within their new realities.

Resumos de Dissertações / Dissertations Abstracts 339

NOTAS SOBRE OS AUTORES / NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
BÁRBARA ARIZTI is Senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of
Zaragoza (Spain). She wrote her doctoral thesis on the work of David Lodge.
Her current research interests are postcolonial literature and criticism, with
special emphasis on the representation of ethics and trauma in Australian
and Caribbean fiction. She has published widely in specialised journals
and collective volumes and is the author of the books Textuality as
Striptease: The Discourses of Intimacy in David Lodge’s Changing Places and
Small World (Peter Lang, 2002) and On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in
Contemporary Narrative in English (Co-editor, Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2007).

RUI VITORINO AZEVEDO is a Lecturer of English, Portuguese as a Foreign

Language, Linguistics, and Translation Studies at Universidade Lusófona
de Humanidades e Tecnologias (Lisbon, Portugal). He is currently working
on his Ph.D. at the University of Lisbon, where he is also a researcher at
ULICES – University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies. His current areas
of research include contemporary American literature, with a particular
emphasis on issues of immigration, ethnicity and identity in autobiography.
He has participated in international conferences and has recently
published “The Other in Me: The In-between Identities of Two Immigrant
Autobiographers” (2010) and “Recalling Memory in Buñuel’s and Darío’s
Autobiographies” (2010).

AMAIA IBARRARAN BIGALONDO is a lecturer at the University of the Basque

Country since 1999, where she teaches contemporary North American
Literature. She completed her Ph.D. thesis in 1998 on Chicano Literature.
Her research has always been focused on the study of Chicano Literature,
art and culture, and she has published several articles and co-edited books
in this field. Her current research deals with the literary production of
the new generation of Chicano writers as well as with the study of other
forms of popular artistic and cultural expression produced by the Chicano
community.

343
ANA CLARA BIRRENTO is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture
at the University of Évora (Portugal). She completed her Ph.D. in 2002 on
the fiction and the autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. Her current areas of
research include nineteenth-century literature and culture, particularly issues
of gender and self-representation. Her publications include essays (in Uniting
the two torn halves: high culture and popular culture (Linköping University
Electronic Press – http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/025/016/), chapters in books
(‘Reading Novels as Knowable Communities’ in About Raymond Williams,
Routledge, 2009) and the book The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant: the story
of a woman, a landscape of the self (CEL-UE, 2010).

MARIA SOFIA PIMENTEL BISCAIA is the coordinator of the bilingual project

Terminological Dictionary on Postcolonial Literary Theory. She holds a doctoral
degree in English Studies by the University of Aveiro (2005). She has
conducted interdisciplinary research in the fields of visual, gender and
postcolonial studies, including on South Asian, African, British and Luso-
-American authors. She has published extensively in domestic and interna-
tional journals and is the author of the book Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque:
Texts of Contemporary Excess (Peter Lang AG, 2011).

TERESA BOTELHO is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Faculty of

Social and Human Studies, New University of Lisbon, where she teaches
courses and seminars on American Culture and Art, American Drama and
American Media. Her main current research interests are the intersection of
theories of identity and performativity and creative expressions, mainly in
the areas of Asian American and African American literature and art. Her
publications include essays in a number of specialized journals and books,
the most recent of which was Positioning the New: Chinese American Literature
and the Changing Image of the American Literary Canon, 2010. She has organized
several international conferences and symposia, most recently the Symposium
Performing Identities and Utopias of Belonging in American and British Contexts
(December 2010).

CARMEN CAMUS CAMUS is a lecturer of English at the University of Cantabria

(Spain), where she teaches ESP at the Medical Faculty and ELT Methodology
at the Teacher Training Faculty. She has an MA (1994) and a PhD in Translation
Studies (2009). Her main research interests focus on the interaction between
ideology and translation, in particular, on the incidence of Franco’s censorship
in the translations into Spanish of American Westerns both in narrative and
film. Recent publications include: (2011) “Tracing the Voyage of Arthur
Penn’s Little Big Man into the Spanish Culture: Reception of the Film and

344 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

Censorship Constraints”, in Pekka Kujamäki et al. (eds.), Frank & Timme;
(2010) “Censorship in the Translations and Pseudotranslations of the West”,
in Daniel Gile et al. (eds.), Why Translation Studies Matters. John Benjamins;
and (2010) “Tracking down Little Big Man into the Spanish Culture: From
Catalogue to Corpus and Beyond”, in MikaEl Electronic Proceedings of The
Katu Symposium on Translation and Interpreting.

ALEXANDRA CHEIRA is a researcher at ULICES – University of Lisbon Centre

for English Studies. She completed her MA at the Faculty of Letters of the
University of Lisbon (2004) on the fiction of contemporary British writer
A.S. Byatt. She is now a Ph.D. candidate at the same Faculty. Her current
areas of research include contemporary women’s writing, women’s studies
and particularly issues of gender and wonder tales in the fiction of A.S.
Byatt. Her publications include essays in specialised journals and critical
volumes, such as “Things are (not) what they seem: in between dream and
nightmare images of female submission in A.S. Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia”
(Flora, Luísa Maria et al. (eds.), Studies in Identity, CEAUL/ ULICES, Edições
Colibri, 2009) and “ ‘I Can’t Let (Myself) Go’: piercing (through) motherly
landscapes of loss in A.S. Byatt’s ‘The July Ghost’ ” (inter-disciplinary.net,
2011).

TERESA COSTA is a lecturer of EFL at the Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and
Hotel Studies. She completed her M.A. in 2003 on William Carlos Williams
and the Visual Arts. Her current interests and research areas include heritage,
tourism and image/visual culture. Her latest publication was (2010) “Edward
Hopper: Glancing at Gaze with a Wink at Tourism”, in Burns, P., et al (eds.)
Tourism and Visual Culture. Theories and Concepts (Oxon: CABI).

LAURA ESTEBAN-SEGURA, Lecturer at the Department of English Philology of the

University of Murcia (Spain), received her BA and MA in English Philology
(2002, 2004), BA in Translation and Interpreting (2004), and MA in Specialized
Translation and Interpreting (2006) from the University of Málaga; her MLitt
in English Language and English Linguistics (2007) from the University of
Glasgow, and her Ph.D. in English Philology (2008) from the University of
Málaga. In it, she presented the edition and corresponding philological study
of the medieval medical manuscript Hunter 509 (ff. 1r-167v), held at Glasgow
University Library.
Her main research interests are: History of the English Language, Textual
Editing, Paleography/Codicology, Manuscript Studies and Translation.
The more specialised aspects of her research focus on the study of unedited
medical manuscripts in Middle English. She has published extensively

Notas sobre os Autores / Notes on Contributors 345

in journals and volumes of renowned prestige such as English Studies,
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, and Peter Lang,
among others.

PAULA ALEXANDRA GUIMARÃES is Assistant Professor at the Department of

English and North-American Studies of the University of Minho (Braga),
Portugal, where she lectures English Poetry and Language. Her areas of
teaching and research include the lyric produced during the Romantic and
Victorian periods, with emphasis on women’s writing and its connections
with the male canon. She has published scholarly articles and book chapters,
and presented several academic papers on Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Gaskell,
the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mathilde Blind, Byron, Tennyson,
Browning, and modern women poets such as Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith,
in both national and international conferences. She develops research on
the inter-artistic relations between poetry and music and has co-organised
an International Conference on “Music Discourse Power” in Portugal. She is
currently working on a major book project and website, Traditions, Revolutions
and Evolutions of Women’s Poetry in England: Reading / Writing the Other.

MARIA ANTÓNIA LIMA is Assistant Professor at the University of Évora

(Portugal). She completed her Ph.D in 2001 on the fiction of Charles Brockden
Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Her
current areas of research include gothic fiction and the relations between
literature and the arts. Her publications include essays in specialised journals
and critical volumes as well as books such as Impersonality and Tragic Emotion
in Modern Poetry (Universitária Editora, 2003) and Terror in American Literature
(Universitária Editora, 2008).

ELISABETE CRISTINA LOPES is an Assistant Lecturer at the Polytechnic Institute of

Setúbal. She completed her Masters Degree in English Studies in 2003 with
a dissertation entitled Women, Mothers and Monsters: The Feminine Shadow
behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Her current areas of research are related to
the Gothic genre, namely North American literature, Women’s Studies and
visual culture. At present she is taking a Ph.D. in Literature that dwells upon
the Female Gothic in the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and in the
photographic works of Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman.

JOÃO DE MANCELOS holds a BA in Portuguese and English Studies, an MA in

Anglo-American Studies, and a PhD in American Literature. He is a professor at
the Portuguese Catholic University, in Viseu, Portugal, where he has taught
American Literature and Literary Theory. Currently, he is working on his

346 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

postdoctoral project, in Literary Studies. He wrote several books of poetry
and short stories, two academic books (O Marulhar de Versos Antigos: A
Intertextualidade em Eugénio de Andrade, and Introdução à Escrita Criativa),
and published a large number of essays and reviews on Literature. His main
areas of interest and research include American Literature, Comparative
Literature and Creative Writing.

ANA CRISTINA MENDES is a researcher at ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre

for English Studies). Her interests span postcolonial cultural production and
its intersection with the cultural industries. Her publications include articles
in the journals Third Text and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She is
currently editing the volume of essays Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture and
co-editing Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics, both forthcoming
from Routledge.

MARTA MIQUEL-BALDELLOU is a member of the research groups Dedal-Lit

and IRIS (Institute of Research in Identity and Society) at the University of
Lleida, Catalonia, Spain. Her field of research focuses on Victorian literature,
nineteenth-century American literature, popular gothic fiction and gender
studies, especially authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Edward Bulwer-
Lytton. She was granted a research stay at the Victorian Studies Centre at
the University of Leicester, UK, in 2008 to pursue her PhD studies. She is
currently an assistant instructor teaching English as a foreign language and a
course on American literature at the University of Lleida.

ÁLVARO SEIÇA NEVES is currently completing his Master’s degree on

contemporary literary creations and North American electronic literature,
focusing on hyperfiction, at Universidade de Évora. He graduated in
Portuguese, English and North American Literature from the Faculty of Social
and Human Studies, New University of Lisbon. He also studied Architecture
and History of Art. His areas of research include e-literature and digital arts.
He has been publishing poetry and essays on different journals. In 2007, with
Gaëlle Silva Marques, he founded BYPASS, a hyperdisciplinary publication
on creation and theory. He is editor and curator of the BYPASS project, having
curated exhibitions and talks with Pavel Braila, Carlos Bunga, Ana Cardim,
Vasco Gato, Taylor Ho Bynum, André Sier, etc.

LICÍNIA PEREIRA is currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation in American

Studies at the University of Coimbra (Portugal). Her research focuses on the
webs of empire-building in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Fernando
Pessoa. She contributed to Novos Caminhos da História e da Cultura (Universidade

Notas sobre os Autores / Notes on Contributors 347

Nova de Lisboa, FCSH/CEAP, 2007) and academic journals such as Op.Cit.
and Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais.

MARIA DE JESUS CRESPO CANDEIAS VELEZ RELVAS is Assistant Professor (with

tenure) at Universidade Aberta, Department of Humanities (Portugal). She
completed her Ph.D. in 2002 on Renaissance English Literature, with a thesis
on biographical writings. Her current areas of research include Medieval and
Renaissance studies, Renaissance imagery and iconography, Victorianism, and
distance education. Her publications include essays in specialised journals,
mainly on English Renaissance and distance education.

CARMEN MARÍA FERNÁNDEZ RODRÍGUEZ is an English teacher in the Official

School of Languages in Ferrol (Spain). She completed her Ph.D. in 2007 on the
fiction of Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth. Her current areas of research
include gender and cultural studies, especially the reception of British women
writers’ oeuvre on the Continent. A regular contributor to The Burney Letter,
she has published reviews and articles in specialised journals, such as Atlantis,
Irish Studies, Sendebar, Babel and Pegasus: A Journal of Literary and Critical
Studies. Her most recent essay, “The Cervantine Influence in Frances Burney’s
Work,” is included in the anthology Reflections on World Literatures edited by
Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal (Jaipur: Yking Books, 2011).

EDGARDO MEDEIROS DA SILVA is Assistant Professor in English for the Social

Sciences at the School of Social and Political Sciences of the Technical
University of Lisbon (Portugal). He completed his Ph.D. in American
Studies in 2007, with a thesis entitled The Political Jeremiah of Henry Adams.
His current areas of research include American cultural history, American
political history and American historiography. His publications include
essays and articles in those areas, namely “The Hidden Meaning of Literary
Success: The Case of Henry Adams” (2008), “Manifest Destiny” in Henry
Adams’s History of the United States (2007), and “Historical Consciousness
and the Auto/biographical in The Education of Henry Adams,” (2005), among
others.

LUÍSA MARIA VILHENA RIBEIRO DE SOUSA has been an EFL teacher at Portuguese
state schools for fourteen years and a Teacher Trainer, certified by the
Portuguese Pedagogic and Scientific Council of In-Service Training, since
2008. She holds a degree in Modern Languages and Literatures – English
and German. She completed her Master’s degree in American Studies on
Puritanism in the ethic and rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan. Her current areas
of research include the Puritan Colonial Culture and Literature, Visual

348 Op. Cit. N.º 12 (2010)

Arts and Comparative Literature and Culture. Her publications include
papers in Conferences of the Portuguese Association of Anglo-American
Studies (APEAA), the Portuguese Association of Teachers of English (APPI),
and the Association of Pluridimensional Education and Cultural School
(AEPEC).

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