Contents

- Introduction

- The Global Appropriation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

- Thomas Jefferson on National Others in a Transatlantic Context

- Thomas Jefferson and the Visual Aspects of Sympathy in relation to Blacks

- The Carnivalesque (Re)Presentation of America in the Different Versions of Chicago

- At the Crossroads of American Cinema and American Studies

- Edith Wharton on French Manners in the Context of World War I

- A Literary Afterlife: The Figure of Henry James in Colm Tóibín’s The Master

- Inter-American Homes in Sandra Cisneros’ Works

- The Moving image and the Subject in the interface of technological augmentation and geography

- Contributors

Szeged Series in American Studies #2

CRITICAL EXPLORATIONS OF U.S. CULTURE, LITERATURE AND HISTORY

Edited by

Réka M. Cristian and Zoltán Dragon

AMERICANA eBooks # Szeged Series in American Studies is a new book series launched by AMERICANA eBooks based at the University of Szeged, Hungary for the production and dissemination of academic ork in the multidisciplinary field of American Studies.

Critical Explorations of U.S. Culture. Literature and History collects and connects publications by the staff of the Department of American Studies at the University of Szeged across a wide range of subjects: American popular cuture, visual culture, children’s literature, modernist literature, autobiography, performance studies, Interamerican Studies.

c 2022 Szeged, AMERICANA eBooks

Series editors: Réka M. Cristian & Zoltán Dragon

c Réka M. Cristian and Zoltán Dragon

ISBN: 978-615-5423-83-3 (.mobi); 978-615-5423-82-6 (.epub);

978-615-5423-81-9 (PoD)

AMERICANA eBooks is a division of AMERICANA – E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, published by the Department of American Studies,

University of Szeged, Hungary.

http://ebooks.americanaejournal.hu

C

This book is released under the Creative Commons 3.0 – Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) licene. For more information, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.hu

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Global Appropriation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Irén Annus

Thomas Jefferson on National Others in a

Transatlantic Context

Zoltán Vajda

Thomas Jefferson and the Visual Aspects of Sympathy

in Relation to Blacks

Zoltán Vajda

The Carnivalesque (Re)Presentation of America in the

Different Versions of Chicago

Zsófia Anna Tóth

At the Crossroads of American Cinema and

American Studies

Zsófia Anna Tóth

Edith Wharton on French Manners in the Context of

World War I

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

A Literary Afterlife: The Figure of Henry James in

Colm Tóibín’s The Master

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

Inter-American Homes in Sandra Cisneros’ Works

Réka M. Cristian

The Moving Image and the Subject in the Interface

of Technological Augmentation and Geography

Zoltán Dragon

Contributors

INTRODUCTION

Réka M. Cristian and Zoltán Dragon

The past year, 2021 marked 35 years of the successful completion of the initial year of the American Studies program at the university. Originally started as a minor within what was then the Department of English, it evolved into a full program, both on the BA and MA levels, with a growing number of students who have also earned their PhD in American literature and culture. By now with a separate Department of American Studies within the Institute of English and American Studies and a number of professors who were among the graduates of the program themselves, we are proud to continue a tradition that has developed in the spirit of inter- and multidisciplinarity, collegial cooperation and devotion to academic excellence and innovation.

To celebrate these decades, we decided to launch a new series in which the present collection is our second, following Revisiting the Past: American Culture in Contemporary Context, edited by Irén Annus and Ágnes Zsófia Kovács in 2021. The aim of this series is to document the work at the Department: not only its diversity, what you may call its multidisciplinarity, but its intersections or meeting points as well.

By employing Appadurai’s model of global cultural flows, Iren Annus in “The Global Appropriation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice” investigates the Mollywood adaptation of Austen’s most acclaimed novel as an example of trans-culturation. The chapter explores the specific srategies through which a contemporary American Latter-day reading of a novel by a globally meaningful brand name, such as Austen’s, has been integrated within transnational mediascapes, ethnoscapes and ideoscapes. Annus’ exploration contributes to a broad range of studies in which American cinema and American Studies intersect on transnational grounds (Cristian 2014), with perspectives on the appropriation and transformance of a British literary work and its subsequent employment to transmit American Mormon culture and values on the global scale – all unique addenda to the investigation.

The two essays on Thomas Jefferson by Zoltán Vajda offer different aspects on approaching the life and thoughts of the statesman. The first, “Thomas Jefferson on National Others,” explores his thoughts about gender and race relations within the larger context of nationhood. Thus it connects with persisting efforts of early American historians to adopt the methodology of New American Studies hoping to provide a complex approach to early American texts through the lens of race, class, and gender. In doing so it also ties in with the broader field of national identity studies addressing issues embedded in the intersection of these other identity markers.

The other essay, “Thomas Jefferson and the Visual Aspects of Sympathy in Relation to Blacks,” investigates the significance of a visual understanding of Jefferson’s vision of race relations in the early American republic. In doing so, it represents an effort to connect with the visual turn in cultural history as well as early American cultural studies addressing issues of power relations in an intercultural context.

Zsófia Anna Tóth’s first paper, “The Carnivalesque (Re)Presentation of America in the Different Versions of Chicago,” discusses how the various versions of (the story of) Chicago provide us with a carnivalesque (re)presentation of the United States. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical concepts of the carnival and the carnivalesque are briefly described, then, the different versions of Chicago (the 1924 newspaper articles, 1927 drama, 1927 silent film, 1942 film noir/screwball comedy, 1975 stage musical or musical vaudeville, 2002 film musical, yet with a focus on the two latest versions, the 1976 stage and the 2002 film musicals) are examined from this point of view and it is emphasized what a pointed look they give about American society and culture.

Tóth’s other essay in this volume, “At the Crossroads of American Cinema and American Studies,” examines the relationship between American studies and film studies. It overviews the international and transnational aspects of American studies and looks at the question of Americannes from a global point of view. By citing Stephen H. Sumida and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, it is stated that by the 21st century, the international arena of America Studies and how Americanness is defined and examined outside the United States are at the centre of attention. Then, the importance of American films as cultural mediators is pointed out and how American studies and American films are actually intertwined even if relatively few scholars address this fact – Jonathan Auerbach and Réka Crsitian also highlight this. All in all, American cinema is more broadly discussed within the realm of international as well as transnational American studies in our recent decades.

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács’s “Edith Wharton on French Manners in the Context of World War I” looks at Wharton’s model of French culture in French Ways and Their Meaning (1919) from the perspective of her work on social patterns of behavior. The paper argues that Wharton’s account of French culture in the book reflects her concern that WWI has ruined those social patterns she considers superior and that it also records her effort for a partial reconstruction of said patterns. I am going to argue for this reading in two steps. Firstly, I am going to describe the reception of Wharton’s general concern with social patterns of behavior from the perspective of gender and cultural studies. Secondly, I am to explicate her presuppositions about a general model of culture including male-female roles and relations she relies on when she differentiates French and US cultures in French Ways.

Kovács’s second essay, “A Literary Afterlife: The Figure of Henry James in Colm Tóibín’s The Master,” claims that there has been a Henry James revival of biofictions about the author’s life and appropriations of his novels in the past two decades. Colm Tóibín’s The Master is one of the most popular biofictions about James to date, which examines the popular gender aspect of James’s life and work by reenacting Leon Edel’s famous biography of James. The expectation would be that Tóibín’s novel will expose James’s implied homoerotic inclinations as central to our understanding of his output. Instead, this essay finds that Edel had been fully aware of and communicative about this aspect of James’ life, it did not need to be introduced by Tóibín. Instead, the main difference between the two accounts is the way James’s psychology is represented in Tóibín’s novel. In The Master, Edel’s psychobiography has been turned into a psychological novel by Tóibín that focuses on the ambiguities in James’s performances of gender identity.

In “Inter-American Homes in Sandra Cisneros’ Works” Réka M. Cristian focuses on the extensive and intricate issue of inter-American home(s) and maps its various extensions within and outside the literary realm of Sandra Cisneros’s narratives, the vignettes of The House on Mango Street (1984), the collection of short stories of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) and Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento (2002) by discussing several identity frames depicted by the more or less domestic(ized) metaphor of the house ― and its inhabitants. The argument shows that the concept of home as a double-faceted construct of identity goes well beyond Cisnero’s published texts; her rooms of identity transcend fictional and non-fictional borders exemplified by her personal webpage and by the transgenerational discourse of the museum installation set up in the memory of Elvira Cordero Cisneros, Sandra’s mother, at the Smithsonian National American History Museum, Latino Center.

As Zoltán Dragon argues in the closing paper to this volume, “The Moving Image and the Subject in the Interface of Technological Augmentation and Geography,” the moving image, and its specific subset of feature film, is changing by the day due to the introduction of advanced formats of interactive digital interfaces. While these technological changes might not affect the genre and the style of films directly (at least not noticeably on a larger scale), the way the spectator encounters and consumes the content begs serious questions. Especially adamant with the introduction of augmented reality interface features, the new kind of spectatorship forces us to reconceptualize the role of the subject in the spectacle and reconfigure the critical and theoretical framework in which new cases of watching moving images can be tackled. This essay looks at specific examples that push the boundaries of spectatorship and offer new concepts for critical reflection through the move from a screen-based media instance to a mobile and flexible interface-based spectating event.

THE GLOBAL APPROPRIATION OF JANE AUSTEN’S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Irén Annus

This study explores a 2003 Mollywood adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), a movie originally entitled Pride and Prejudice – A Latter-day Comedy, the first feature film by Latter-day director Andrew Black. Drawing on Joy Sperling’s proposition that in a globally connected world “cultural meaning is located … in transactions among (trans)cultures” (27), the paper investigates the ways in which this film can be interpreted as an example of trans-culturation. The analysis is carried out within Arjun Appadurai’s framework of global cultural flows and proposes that: (1) through the appropriation of Austen’s novel and its various adaptations, Black was able to connect to global mediascapes; (2) the director’s attempt to make a Latter-day – but then also a Christian – comedy located the film within global ideoscapes; and (3) his efforts to introduce a multi-ethnic context and to tailor this production to the fashionable chick flick genre lent the film important dimensions within ideologically positioned ethnoscapes.[1]

Keywords: Jane Austen, film adaptation, Pride and Prejudice, Mormon film industry

0. Proem

Ten years have passed since the publication of the article “Trans-culturing Jane Austen: The Mormon Adaptation of Pride and Prejudice” in Americana, but the tendencies the study describes have only intensified throughout the past decade: eighteen new movies and series have been inspired by Austen’s greatest novels (Jane Austen Movies), half of which have been re-makes of her masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice. The cross-pollination of genres signaled by movies such as the horror adaptation Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016), the modern adaptation as a vlogged reality show in Pride and Prejudice, Cut (2019), and the three-part detective mini-series Death Comes to Pemberley (2013) created trendy and exhilarating entertainment media content for the current mediascape that exposes the uninterrupted interest in exploring the possibilities offered by this novel. In addition, a historicizing material culture continues to have been successfully marketed with Austen as the brand name, covering Regency-style jewelry, accessories, card and board games, and dresses worn at historical dance clubs and balls, thus warming the heart of all Jane Austen lovers.

Issues of global and transnational cultural encounters, exchanges and appropriations have been a central concern for a number of disciplines in recent years, including area studies, which originally emerged with particular attention in studies of certain cultural manifestations that capture the realities of given communities (see, for example, research on aspects of global and transnational cultural production and American Studies at the University of Szeged: Cristian 2014, 2017, 2020; Kovács 2010, 122, and Tóth 2011). Austen’s presence both in her own right as an author as well as a “ghost” writer in a series of transhistorical, transcultural, intertextual and multimedial reinterpretations (Toth 2011, 308) makes her the most prevalent British author after Shakespeare whose major novels have been re-adapted and culturally tailored to local contexts on all continents. At the same time, Austen’s name as a cultural commodity has been exploited further by a mushrooming of Jane Austen tours and events, triggering a regular flow of tourists to visit England and to get “lost in Austen.”

As for ideoscapes, Austen prevails as a canonized author employed in ideologically informed culture wars. The most recent debate on her appropriation as a cultural icon in current politics was stirred up by an article published in 2017, the bicentennial of Austen’s death. In this, Wright argues that Austen and the society she portrays have been exploited as symbols of alt-right values in the US, particularly sexual purity, female inferiority, and white traditional culture, ultimately constructing a framework within which “the alt-right normalizes itself in the eyes of ordinary people.” At the same time, studies on Austen’s Enlightened feminism and social criticism continue to grow in number (Reiff). As Gross also observes, “Austen has been mobilized on behalf of an insistent cultural ignorance for the privileged, she also has provided an avenue to what O’Farrell calls a “disavowal” of that ignorance under the auspices of cultural literacy” (2).

As far as the religious ideoscape is concerned, the Latter-day Saints’ enduring fascination with Austen – explained by the correspondance they seem to recognize between social values and practices portrayed in her novels and those of their own – has given birth to an array of novels and movies. Jenni James, LDS author and mother of ten, for example, published her Jane Austen Diaries, a six-volume set modeled on Austen’s six novels, re-written for a high-school setting. Her four-volume Austen in Love series similarly adopts Austen’s works, but targets the adult audience. LDS writer Shannon Hale’s popular novel Austenland was yet another volume inspired by Pride and Prejudice, adapted for the screen by the same title.

The bicentennial also provided an apt opportunity to reflect on two-hundred years of the survival, impact, reception and legacy of Austen’s art. Two distinguished volumes in particular meticulously survey the period. Wells focuses on Austen’s reception in the United States as well as re-visits the history of the early publication of her works, her publishers, readers, collectors, biographers, etc. Looser, on the other hand, discusses “Jane Austen’s posthumous road to fame,” from “the Aunt Jane who emerged in the years just after her death; the nice old spinster aunt who happened to write a good yarn; the conservative Divine Jane of literary gentleman’s clubs, who gloried in exalting traditional gender roles and a traditional idea of England; the demure rebel icon of the suffragettes, who definitively demonstrated that women were capable of genius and who tore apart gender roles with her pen” (2017). Her natural inclusion in new scholarly fields, such as Humour Studies, invite us to appreciate Austen’s oeuvre in uncharted territories (Gross, see also Chan, Annus). As Gross has noted, we can use “Austen’s humour as a means through which to think about the world and politics, not to escape those” (1).

The continued explosion of literary and filmic adaptations along with material culture and various services demonstrate the invigorating and expansive appeal of Austen, “popping up in the speeches of alt-right misogynist provocateurs, and in the high teas of Pakistan’s upper echelon” (Gross 3). Her universal appeal has won her a dynamic global presence and a flourishing creativity from new cultural readings through transgression of ethnic and cultural boundaries and the cross-pollination of genres. In the movie industries, Mollywood has joined Hollywood and Bollywood on the global scene of trans-culturation, as the article to follow also demonstrates.

1. Trans-culturation and Global Cultural Flows

The notion of globalization seems inescapable in a description of the complexities of our contemporary realities. Sperling argues that in “a global economy in which language differences frequently inhibit communication, visual images appear to facilitate communication across language and cultural borders” (27). In fact, as Nicholas Mirzoeff proposes, visual culture has become the foremost postmodern space for cultural interaction and transaction; it thus offers the most dynamic global platform for the constitution, negotiation and contestation of the plurality of meanings and cultures, since for him, visual culture “is now the locus of cultural and historical change.”

Sperling develops Mirzoeff’s proposition further by arguing that the study of visual culture, therefore, should acknowledge that the visual has emerged as a site of trans-cultural space, where cultural transactions and subsequent transformations take place. American Visual Studies, she proposes, should consider the transformative power that images have on a global scale, as well as the fact that images function trans-culturally, within a multiplicity of cultures and interpretations. As a result, “there is no single metanarrative of Americanness, … but rather multiple intersecting fragments of refracting, unstable, and contingent identity(ies)” (32). In fact, as Mirzoeff also concludes, “it no longer makes sense to locate cultural activity solely within national or geographic boundaries, as in terms of Western culture;” rather, one should approach cultural productions through the global cultural economy.

This term was borrowed from Appadurai, who finds that the “central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization” (32). In order to overcome this tension, he suggests that “the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order” (ibid) that can be most successfully explored through “the relationship between five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes” (33). Of these areas, he singles out mediascapes, along with ideoscapes, as being prominently connected to the “landscape of images” (35) and rooted in narratives, through which segments of realities and identities can be represented. This approach to understanding the cultural realm as a global trans-cultural space with specific aspects or scapes within which to work offers an interpretative framework that makes it possible to conceptualize and explain the adaptation of an early nineteenth-century English novel to a contemporary American Latter-day film for a broader, Christian audience.

2. Appropriating Austen: Current Mediascapes

Appadurai defines mediascapes as referring “both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information … and to the images of the world created by these media” (35). He maintains that mediascapes produce complex sets of elaborate images and narratives, often overlapping and intricately interconnected and thus can be regarded as scapes within which dynamic trans-cultural transactions may take place.

The last century witnessed the unprecedented development of various forms of media, which has resulted not only in the advancement and expansion of technologies, leading up to the digital age, but also the specialization of production companies and facilities. Within the film industry, the initial emergence of Hollywood and the later development of other specific production industries, such as Mollywood, reflect this tendency of specialization or particularization.

As an umbrella term, Mollywood refers to relatively low-budget Latter-day films of various genres, created by Mormon directors and companies, addressed either to the Latter-day population and thus distributed within limited geographical areas with a high density of Mormons, or to a wider audience with the purpose of educating it on Mormonism. Mollywood productions share the feature of concentrating on issues specific to the Mormon faith, church and community: their beliefs, history, distinct practices, unique experiences, specific concerns, etc. All of these are quite particular as Mormonism is often considered to be a unique religion with specific American features, constituting a “peculiar people” (O’Dea 53) who, at times, have even been described as comprising a separate “ethnicity” (Hammond and Warner 59) or “a people” (Bloom 83).

It may come as a surprise, then, that Black decided to make a modernized version of an old English novel as his first Mollywood feature film: Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Within mediascapes, his choice may be explained by the wide success of the author and the novel. Austen’s name nowadays seems to guarantee immediate success: within the last two decades, she has emerged as one of the few iconic English-speaking authors to have dominated both the printed and the filmic worlds of the global mediascape. Her unprecedented cultural revival is marked not only by a renewed interest in the publication of her original novels as well as in their adaptations for television and film but also by the appearance of a series of modernized versions of her stories, both in literature – such as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason as well as Debrah White Smith’s adaptations published within her Austen series – and on screen – such as Amy Heckerling’s Clueless and Sharon Maguire’s adaptation of Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. More recent instances of visual re-writes of Austen’s ultimately most acclaimed novel are Bride and Prejudice and Pride and Prejudice – A Latter-day Comedy.

Black’s film tells a contemporary story of a 26-year old American woman named Elizabeth Bennet achieving success in her studies at the university and in her career as a writer, as well as finding true love and the prospect of a happy marriage to a wealthy Englishman, Mr. Darcy. As noted by Mary Chan, Jennifer Woolston and Juliette Wells (2008), the adaptations are always in a unique dialogue with the novel and other adaptations. In this film, in addition to the names and a series of other references to Austen and her novel, both in the storyline and in actual images (including a picture of Austen herself, for example), the film also integrates the actual text of the novel with lines quoted from it and printed in stylized letters on screen between various sections of the film. In this way, the original novel and printed medium structure the visual experience created by Black in his adaptation.

The film develops an elaborate series of underlying connections between the printed and the visual scapes through the figure of Elizabeth, who embodies not only Elizabeth Bennet, as made obvious numerous times throughout the story, but also Jane Austen herself. In the film, Elizabeth is a graduate student and an up-and-coming author working on her first book – referred to by many as a romance, a classification that she immediately rejects each time. She continually puts her work through substantial re-writes, but, in spite of this, she experiences difficulty finding a publisher. The novel on which she is working is set in 1813, as we can see from a quick glimpse at her computer screen, the year Pride and Prejudice was first published. This time frame is also confirmed by a short dream Elizabeth has of her novel as she falls asleep in the mountains: in it, the audience sees Elizabeth as the main character of her novel, dressed in Regency period costume, running through a dark forest on a rainy night and then rescued by a strong man who emerges from the mist on horseback, a figure who happens to be Darcy.

Another readily noticeable feature in the film is its intertextuality in terms of its apparent parallels with other Austen adaptations. The primary settings of the film are, for example, the home and the educational environment of the heroine, as is the case in Clueless. When Elizabeth and Jane feel depressed because of their experiences of failure, they launch into a destructive lifestyle, overeating unhealthy food, staring at the TV screen day and night, never straying from their untidy and malodorous room – in much the same way as Bridget Jones does. This ends with the regulation of the female body through various technologies of the self: turning to a healthy diet, doing exercise, cleaning the house, re-channeling energies to normalize their professional life – just as happens with Jones. And, ultimately, all of this leads to accomplishments in both their professional and love lives. In addition, the last scene of the film is evocative of the BBC series made from the novel in 1995, as the spectators approach the mansion in Lyme Park (Disley, Chesire, England), which was used as Pemberley in the series, and see it from the same angle from which Elizabeth Bennet saw it then. The building is integrated into Black’s storyline as a place where Elizabeth happily re-unites with Darcy, as she is enjoying a tour of the building – which also integrates into the film the fashionable Jane Austen tours – so popular among cultural tourists.

3. Austen and Mormonism: Ideoscapes Defined

Appadurai associates ideoscapes with images that reflect various cultures of politics, typically “oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it” (36). While he confines ideoscapes to “a loosely structured synopticon of politics” (ibid), I argue for the expansion of this scape by including religion. Although understandings of ideology and religion have been highly debated, as illustrated by John Gerring’s and Slavoj Žižek’s studies, religions may be regarded within ideoscapes based on the definition of ideology ‘in-itself’ offered by Žižek. He maintains that ideology should be conceptualized as “a doctrine, a composite of ideas, beliefs, concepts, and so on, destined to convince us of its ‘truth’, yet actually serving some unavowed particular power interest” (10). This definition is applicable to religions as well, and thus would allow for the inclusion not only of secular but also of sacred composite mental frameworks within the realm of ideoscapes. In fact, Louis Althusser also regards religious organizations and political formations as two kinds of ideological state apparatuses (110), indicating that religion and politics represent two types of ideologies.

The potential inclusion of religions within ideoscapes would allow for a quest for parallels between the ideologically positioned nature of Austen’s writing and of Black’s film. Actually, this may operate as the platform for previous investigations that have explored possible reasons behind recent appropriations of Austen. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, for example, find that the positive global response to Austen’s novels owes to her eloquent analysis of family life in the Regency era, which carries a meaningful message for today’s readers as well. Paradoxically, they conclude, it is the highly particular and locally specific analysis of early nineteenth-century rural English social life that “allows Austen … to go global.”

Wells (2008) investigates Austen’s presence within a more specific, ideologically positioned genre, charting her impact in the field of Christian literature in the US between 2004 and 2008. Her careful study of the appropriation of Austen both in novels, such as the Christian re-writings of Austen’s works by Debra White Smith, and in advice books on proper social conduct and personal behavior, such as Sarah Arthur’s Dating Mr. Darcy: A Smart Girl’s Guide to Sensible Romance, concludes that Austen’s writings lend themselves to such appropriations as (1) the “anticipated readers are English-speaking Christian women partial to love plots,” just as Austen’s readers were in her age, and (2) the figures in these re-makes, much like Austen’s figures, represent “engaging, trustworthy models for Christian behavior in today’s world.”

The idealized view of Austen’s women, however, has been disputed in recent scholarship. Zsófia Anna Tóth has surveyed these debates and suggested that Austen’s female characters often fail to comply with the social expectations that were held of pure women in the Regency period – which then later developed into the notion of proper womanhood during the Victorian era. Instead, Tóth notes, by employing unique humor, Austen challenges the contemporary dichotomy of pure versus fallen women by depicting female characters as “aggressive and/or lewd … often manipulative, competitive ‘husband hunters’ and ‘greedy schemers’, whose hearts are only concerned with their own monetary and sexual interests (Looser 169)” (185). One may well wonder if the brief cut in the film in which Elizabeth is giving an animated presentation on “lust/love,” as the words on the board behind her indicate, is related to similar concerns.

Still, the overall popularity of Austen among an American, Christian audience prevails, as signified by the numerous volumes published in recent years. This suggests that the particular time and space dimensions that represent a particular socio-cultural reality in Meryton in Regency England in fact corresponds to today’s Western, Christian culture, which tends to be quite traditional and often conservative; to convey an apparent and unified world view; and to expect and promote values and behavior patterns reflective of this. It advocates a patriarchal social order based on gender differences, which are substantiated through biblical interpretations and therefore implied as a set of final, indisputable, invincible positions. That it is thus part of a broader ideoscape, spanning spatially and temporally different and distant cultural regimes, is shown by similar conservative views of women’s role in mainstream US society that was nonetheless contemporaneous both to Austen and the birth of Mormonism, as also explicated by champions of American female domesticity in the early nineteenth century, such as Thomas Jefferson (Vajda 2008).

In fact, initially Black aimed to create a more particular appropriation of the novel: the film, as the original title suggests, was intended to be a specifically Mormon film. However, during the final editing, particular Mormon features were eliminated in order to attract a broader, Christian audience (Higson 166). Nevertheless, the film still offers a unique experience for an audience with a Latter-day Saints interest through a number of characters and situations that can be detected in the film.

The story mainly takes place in Utah, as we learn from Wickham, the homeland and hub of Mormonism, a religion that emerged in New York State in the 1820s and was officially established in 1830 – not very much after Austen wrote her novels in the 1810s. Although a religion that allows for change in church policy and practice through the institution of presidential revelations, Mormonism is still known for insisting on observing its traditional values and morals. This is conveyed throughout the film, from ways of dressing through ways of behaving to ways of speaking. Recurring Mormon expectations commonly held, character types and individual motifs widely observed, and certain practices shared all reflect the matrix of LDS realities throughout the film. At the same time, a delicate undercurrent of humor and self-criticism, such as in the characters of Mary and Mr. Collins, establish a context that may in fact not be appreciated by certain staunchly devout members of the faith.

4. Austen and the Social Realm: Mollywood Ethnoscapes

According to Appadurai, “[w]hat is most important about these mediascapes is that they provide (especially in their television, film and cassette forms) large and complex repertoires of images, narratives, and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world” (35). It seems to me that mediascapes may, in fact, contribute to the constitution of ethnoscapes, connecting and uniting people, establishing communal cohesion, making an imagined community – to use Benedict Anderson’s term – seem real, especially if it is indeed a global community, as is that of the Latter-day Saints. Mollywood films, moreover, may also act on the potential of homogenizing LDS believers by finding a way to them as part of global cultural flows.

In this sense, for Black, exploiting an already globally embedded cultural capital with the brand name of Jane Austen presented a winning formula. Moreover, in re-framing the story, argues Woolston, Black “grounds his film version in the quintessential chick lit framework of style, setting and character,” another winning formula today. This may not be so unexpected since, as Vivien Jones proposes, Austen may be regarded as a representative of chick lit during the Regency era insofar as her novels were structured around the theme of the experience of womanhood, the boundaries of which she tested through the heroines she created. Similarly, argues Caroline Smith, chick lit today also “seeks to challenge cultural expectations about women” (674).

Moreover, indicates Deborah Baker, the chick flick has also been able to create an artistic environment in which traditional boundaries, both in terms of genre and theme, have become fluid. Pamela Butler and Jigna Desai view this genre as one that produces “middle-class neo-liberal subjects” (2), thus overcoming former understandings of “femininity and gender [that] are often articulated through questions of race, nation, ethnicity, and socio-economic class” (4). Based on these, chick flick may be regarded as constitutive of possible global trans-cultural spaces, where former group boundaries, such as those of ethnicity or nation, may be challenged. Consequently, new ethnoscapes may be initiated, within which Black’s Elizabeth Bennet may emerge as “the new global woman … represented in localized context” (Troost and Greenfield).

In the world of moving pictures, as Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young assert, chick flicks provide the “prime postfeminist media texts” (3) that

raise questions about women’s place – their prescribed social and sexual roles …     [through] the cultural characteristics associated with the chick postfeminist aesthetic: a     return to femininity, the primacy of romantic attachments, girl power, a focus on female     pleasure and pleasures, and the value of consumer culture and girlie goods (4).

They discuss further hallmarks of the genre, including the retro, colorful setting and style, with young women as heroines – the protagonist maintaining a powerful friendship with her girlfriends and surrounded by similar young characters in the movie – who embody the desires of modern, energetic, smart women: the importance of pursuing a career, placing one’s successful professional performance in balance with a happy private life, and re-framing traditional gender roles, such as domesticity (as discussed in further detail by Smith), among other desires.

Mormon culture is depicted in this film as one that “offers space for such very different characters as Collins, Mary and Elizabeth to become the best and happiest versions of themselves” (Wells 2010, 176). This image, argues Wells, presented the possibility of mainstreaming Mormonism by depicting its Christian values, openness and ability to adjust to changing realities (165-169). Moreover, adds Wells, this film also may have operated as a means of popularizing the Mormon faith, as if proselytizing (164, 178).

At the same time, the film may have emerged as a means of connecting Latter-day Saints in various parts of the world. In fact, the film also maintains an unusual multi-ethnic character that to some extent matches the multi-ethnic character of this global religion. The LDS Church maintains probably one of the most extensive and effective missionary systems all over the world. The plurality of cultures within this group – otherwise characterized by ideological homogeneity – is reflected in the ethnic composition of the characters as well as the real actors, who are American, English and Argentine, with the Scottish director adding to this variety. The places integrated into the storyline which is mainly set in Provo, Utah, and Las Vegas, Nevada, include other parts of the US, England and South America. The multicultural character of the LDS milieu is emphasized further by ethnic cuisine that appears in various parts of the film. Such an ethnically diverse ethnoscape for Black’s movie production in the face of a homogenizing ideoscape nevertheless contrasts sharply with Austen’s world in particular and the transatlantic Anglo-Saxon world in general. Sentimental ties then seen as the foundations of national cohesion were not equally inherent to African American and Native American communities, for example, as captured in Jefferson’s thought (Vajda 2012).

5. Conclusion

This film, although reflecting the life of a particular cultural group in a particular location, could have reached a global audience, as have Austen’s novels, despite the localism it represents. The fact that this was a Mollywood film that could have delivered meaningful messages to a worldwide audience of LDS viewers would have supported the possibility of a wide viewership, in addition to the fact that in the end, the film was aimed at a broader, Christian audience. However, it was only shown in limited areas of Mormon America, and even there, has only achieved modest success (Wells 2010, 163). There must have been a number of reasons for this, from occasional weaknesses in the storyline and acting, through low budget and inexperienced staff, to a lack of aggressive marketing strategy and drive for financial success. And, although the film has ultimately failed to integrate into the global cultural economy, it is a fine example of global trans-culturation in terms of cultural production – reflecting the multi-faceted process presented by Appadurai.

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THOMAS JEFFERSON ON NATIONAL OTHERS IN A TRANSATLANTIC CONTEXT

Zoltán Vajda

This essay explores Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts about gender and race relations within the larger context of nationhood. Thus it connects with persisting efforts of early American historians to adopt the methodology of New American Studies hoping to provide a complex approach to early American texts through the lens of race, class, and gender. In doing so it also ties in with the broader field of national identity studies addressing issues embedded in the intersection of these other identity markers.[2]

Keywords: Thomas Jefferson; national others; race; gender, transatlantic

Introduction

It would be hard to deny Thomas Jefferson’s status as an important reference point in early American history or to question his significance in the making of American national identity. Apparently, he proved instrumental in formulating the principles that became the basis of the American nation-state. General interest in that role has been present in the literature but with the exception of Peter S. Onuf’s work, no systematic analysis of his conception of US national identity has been offered.

In his study, Onuf has explored the ways in which the “language of American nationhood” informed Jefferson’s understanding of political, ethnic or racial differences among various groups of human beings in the early republic. According to Onuf, Jefferson’s definition of the nation was fundamentally sentimental in the sense that it was structured by the notion of sentimental bonds of affection connecting members of the national community, while excluding those being outside the sphere of affection, including blacks, Native Americans or even white political adversaries such as the Federalists. This is what makes Onuf label Jefferson a “sentimental nationalist” (Onuf 14).

In this respect, one can argue, Jefferson’s nationalism was akin to the contemporary European model, born at the time of the French revolution, emphasizing kinship ties and sympathy among members of a nation, necessary for the formation and sustenance of a nation-state (Kedourie 52). In general, this emphasis on familial bonds of affection has, indeed, been an important component of the modern conception of the nation: national unity is supposedly based on the assumption that members of the nation are linked together as brothers and sisters “as one great family,” as it were (Smith 1991, 79; see also 76, 78, 162). Also, like in the case of Jefferson, such a conception of nationhood presumed a high degree of “cultural homogeneity” to the effect of creating conditions for the enduring co-existence of the members of the nation (Gellner 141).

Yet, bonds of affection can only be regarded as one aspect of national identity, and an understanding of Jefferson’s conception of nationhood based on them fails to do justice to other factors that also shaped his identifying those inside or outside of the American nation. The shifting boundaries of sentimental nationality, based on the changing scope of affection were not the sole markers in Jefferson’s system of American nationhood; there were other boundaries as well, shifting or stable, not necessarily depending on affection that determined the way in which certain communities could or could not be part of national identity as posited by him.

The problem of exclusion in Jefferson’s case, at the same time, is also related to the broader problem of equality, which formed an integral part of the modern concept of national identity. Nationalism, the movement aimed at constructing modern nations, involved the desire to abolish hierarchies and privileges associated with feudal power practices. It presupposed the nation as a kind of community whose members were equal in the political as well as in the legal senses of the word, enjoying equality in terms of rights and duties (Smith 1991, 1, 10, 68). As will be seen, Jefferson did not share this democratic conception of the nation if we regard the components of his understanding of American nationhood other than those related to familial affection. Various human groups enjoyed different degrees of share in his national community. As Zsófia Anna Tóth also points out in a different context, it definitely became a reality by the 20th century: people of different racial, ethnic or national origins got punishments of different severity or did not have the same chance to get acquitted for the same crimes (or not even committing the same crimes but they take the blame). So evidently, they were not viewed as equal members of the same nation (Tóth 2011).

The aim of this essay is to explore the scope of that nationhood, assessing the extent to which certain groups such as white middle-class women, Native Americans, and blacks could and/or could not be equal members of Jefferson’s American nation. In order to achieve that I first discuss considerations about national identity in general, then narrow the focus down on Jefferson’s general conception of American nationhood before turning to his particular visions of the place of women, Native Americans, and blacks in that community.

National Identity

In order to explore Jefferson’s conception of American nationhood as a multifaceted intellectual entity, it is indispensable to do so within the broader conceptual framework of national identity. Relating his ideas concerning the United States as a nation to more general considerations of the nation as a general concept facilitates a better understanding both of the different aspects of his vision as well as their significance from the perspective of national identity.

Approaches to the problem of nation and nationalism are without number.[3] Of the ones that examine it from a historical perspective, the most comprehensible belongs to Anthony D. Smith, who has attempted to combine two basic perspectives of the nation that he labels “Western” and “non-Western.” The former understands the nation as a political community with a clearly circumscribed territory that the members of the nation feel attached to. This conception also underlines the equality of those belonging to one national community in a legal and political sense as well as the political values that they share. Furthermore, according to this model, the ties between the individual and the national community are voluntary, a matter of choice (Smith 1991, 11).[4] By contrast, the non-Western conception of the nation assumes that its members belong to it through assertion of common birth and genealogy. This notion holds, then, that it is not so much a commonly held territory the boundaries of which hold the nation together but rather its presumed common ancestral roots. In this way, the nation appears as a family to its “members,” who “are brothers and sisters, or at least cousins, differentiated by family ties from outsiders,” maintains Smith (Smith 1991, 11-12; see also 76).

Smith’s distinction between these two conceptions of the nation, by and large, corresponds to the “civic-territorial” and “ethnocultural” dichotomy, which he identifies in the case of modern nations. While the former advocates the political attributes of the national community, the latter captures it through its cultural features (Smith 2000, 18, and Smith 1991, 13). Expanding on these two dimensions of nationhood, Smith proposes a definition that combines elements taken from both. Thus, he holds that national identity encompasses “an historic territory, or homeland,” “common myths and historical memories,” which relate to shared descent, “a common, mass public culture,” disseminated through education and the media, “common legal rights and duties for all members,” and finally, “a common economy with territorial mobility for members.” Smith emphasizes that this definition of the nation suggests an ideal type that has individual varieties containing its elements to varying degrees (Quotations in Smith 1991, 14; see also Smith 2000, 3, and Smith 1991, 43). As will be seen, Jefferson’s conception of American nationhood also contained elements taken from both dimensions and served as a basis of distinction among various human groupings in their relation to it.

Jefferson’s American National Identity

In the ethnocultural sense, Jefferson regarded all white Americans as sharing one common ethnic ancestry that he identified with the English and, ultimately, with the medieval Saxons. As he explains in his “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” the English and American people had common “Saxon ancestors,” who, parting company with the Germans, settled down in the “North of Europe.” Such an ethnic connection enables him to argue, on the basis of common descent with the English, that Americans had their own share of Englishmen’s rights derived from Anglo-Saxon times (Jefferson 1975, 4-5; quotations on 4). This ethnically homogeneous people involved men and women alike, and posited Americans as a nation in an ethnocultural sense.[5] Although distant in time, Edith Wharton’s sense of Americanness also posits a homogenous sense of American people linked to the Aglo-Saxon legacy.  (Kovács 2009)

Importantly, then, as Eric Kaufmann points out, in his use of the Saxon myth, Jefferson establishes a link between Americans and Anglo-Saxons both in an “ideological” and a “genealogical” sense (Kaufman 449). In other words, one should add, by way of his identifying political institutions shared by both groups, Jefferson regards the connection as one that expresses national identity both in the civic and the ethnocultural senses of nationhood. With independence, as scholarship has shown, the emphasis on Englishmen’s rights shifted to natural rights theory (see Appleby, and McDonald), yet, Jefferson never renounced this link with the Anglo-Saxonism-based English connection.

Jefferson was also a major proponent of the freeholding yeoman ideal, an important component of the early, ethnocultural dimension of American nationhood. According to this ideal, landed property assumed a vital role because of its capacity of allowing the producer to have independent subsistence. It also generated his preference for an agricultural “empire of liberty”[6] facilitating the employment of population surplus, delaying the shift to a commercial stage of social development that Jefferson associated with western Europe. Instead of developing manufactures, the European way of dealing with the surplus population (in addition to war), by making available a sufficient amount of land for an ever increasing American population, he hoped to preserve the basis of a republican order based on virtue. This is the reason that in his Notes of the State of Virginia (1785), he referred to American yeoman farmers as “the chosen people of God,” the antithesis of the “mobs of great cities” that is, wage laborers, lacking the independence necessary for virtuous citizenship (Jefferson 1975, 217).[7]

When promoting the agrarian way of life, Jefferson did so within an underlying framework of progress resting on a general theory of human social development originating from mid-eighteenth-century French and Scottish philosophy. According to this theory, human societies are bound to undergo four successive stages of development, each based on one particular form of food production: the first, hunter stage, followed by the pastoral, which, in turn, precedes the agricultural, and the whole process is completed by the commercial stage of development (Meek 35-66, 117; see also Nisbet 155-56).[8] The movement from one stage to the next was seen as a rise to a higher level of development and thus assumed legitimacy.

Jefferson understood the historical transformation of the United States as one fitting this pattern, with the westward “march of civilization” affecting American society, ultimately raising each segment from the state of “barbarism” to the level of the commercial centers of the East (TJ to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824, Jefferson 1975, 583).

Persistent and influential as it was, Jefferson’s vision of the USA as an agrarian republic underwent a significant change as a result of the War of 1812, which made him reconsider the problem of republican independence. The war had shown to him that in the lack of manufactures, the nation was dependent economically and politically on other nations. Isolating it from foreign supplies, the military confrontation compelled the USA to develop home industry. Hence, Jefferson realized, only a balanced economic policy was able to promote national self-sufficiency and ensure survival for the republic (See TJ to Benjamin Austin, January 9, 1816, Jefferson 1975, 549).[9] Jefferson, then, extended the requirement of economic independence of the agricultural producer to the national economy, making it a prerequisite to national independence.

These considerations of political economy were fundamental to other components of Jefferson’s conception of the American nation. One of these was a common political culture based on the values of “equality, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as he articulated in the Declaration of Independence and reaffirmed for the public in his First Inaugural Address (Jefferson 1975, 292-94). The political and legal equality of the members of Jefferson’s American nation created conditions necessary for republican self-government, a political system where Americans, unlike people living under European monarchical rule, could govern themselves. They did so within the framework of a federal system of government which also ensured the equality of states by assigning appropriate spheres of authority for them and the federal government respectively (TJ to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799, Jefferson 1975, 478) The territorial boundaries of this federal national political space, however, were not stable as Jefferson demonstrated through his acquisition of Louisiana Territory in 1803. In addition to the desire to enhance his “empire of liberty”, the purchase was to serve the preservation of republican political order by providing the population surplus with land for subsistence, thereby avoiding social tensions generated by overpopulation (McCoy 190-203).

As part of his effort to sustain such a republican political culture, Jefferson emphasized the role of education in raising devoted citizens for the republic. Its function was to hand over the tradition of natural rights together with the love of liberty to future generations of Americans. This was to be achieved by enhancing the knowledge of the young enabling them to govern themselves once having come of age. Moral education was of primary importance in his scheme, since it contributed to the development of the moral faculty of the individual necessary to make decisions furthering his/her own happiness as well as that of the nation (Wagoner 118, 121-22, 125).

For Jefferson, then, American national identity was, in part, determined by the position that the nation occupied in the process of social and economic development. With its love of liberty, derived from its ancient Saxon forefathers as well as its economic independence it exhibited major elements derived both from the civic-territorial and the ethnocultural dimensions of American national identity. Yet, awareness of these also directs attention to questions about the scope of American nationhood as understood by Jefferson, particularly concerning the degree of its inclusiveness. In this regard, as will be seen in the following, distinctions can be observed with regard to the degree of acknowledgement that different human groups received in relation to the American nation in Jefferson’s thought.

Native Americans

One group of people sharing a territory with white Americans but excluded from the nation both as far as its civic-territorial and ethnocultural dimensions are concerned were Native Americans. Descending from ancestors that Jefferson located in Asia (Jefferson 1975, 142), in his eyes, they were obviously different from whites, yet, through assimilation such a difference could be eliminated. In his vision, they were to cease to exist as a nation in the ethnocultural sense in order to become part of the American nation in the civic-territorial one. Jefferson did not regard Native Americans as a nation in the civic-political sense, so that aspect of nationhood gained no significance in his vision of their assimilation.

In a very real sense, Jefferson conceived of Native Americans as a unanimous race, radically different from whites in several ways, ranging from physical traits through mores and habits to social organization. Yet, he believed these not to be intrinsic to the race, but the product of external circumstances and thus susceptible to change. Hence the difference that his Indians exhibited vis-à-vis whites could be eliminated, and they could become part of the nation of the United States.

Jefferson argues that the weaker physical stature and other physiological features of Native American males are the result of insufficient nourishment and “physical exercise” but hence can also be improved (Jefferson 1975, 95, 97). More important are, for him, the distinctive marks of Native Americans’ society that distinguish them from that of whites and are derived from their place in civilization. Jefferson understands Indians to exist at a lower, “barbarian” stage of development characterized by such negative features as men subordinating their women, forcing them into manual labor (96). Their rudimentary level of social organization is also reflected in the fact, Jefferson argues, that these “savage Americans” lack a system of laws or government as well as an intricate social structure, instead having small, contiguous societies (134). In other words, they do not meet the requirement of a modern civic-territorial nation with a clearly circumscribed territory, state power or legal system.

This absence of the civic-territorial dimension of nationhood in the case of Native Americans, at the same time, facilitates their integration into the American nation for Jefferson, but only at a price of their undergoing a cultural transformation, basically affecting their status as a people at their current stage of social development. Jefferson, then, imagines them as a people capable of moving to the agricultural stage, once having settled and adopted a sedentary way of life. He believed that agricultural activity plus “household manufacture” were to serve their survival, also enabling them to improve their character.[10] As he declared in his Second Inaugural Address, it was the responsibility of the American government “to prepare them [i.e. Native Americans] in time for that state of society, which to bodily comforts adds the improvement of the mind and morals.” (Jefferson 1975, 318; see also TJ to Handsome Lake, November 3, 1802, Jefferson 1975, 307).

Jefferson hoped to achieve that shift among native Americans by “civilizing” them from governmental resources. He found it the responsibility and interest of the state to provide them with all the necessary means enabling them to make their shift to agriculture, at the same time, compelling them to cede or sell part of their lands to whites (Wallace 277-87).

Jefferson had faith in this desired transformation of Native Americans since he thought them “[e]ndowed with the faculties and the rights of men, breathing an ardent love of liberty and independence” (Jefferson 1975, 318). And as such, they were capable of republican self-government. Native Americans, then, to Jefferson’s mind, possessed all the traits that enabled them to become members of the American nation in a civic-political sense. Yet, Jefferson went further that that: by encouraging them to adopt white ways, he also encouraged cultural adaptation, which, for him, implied preparation for their integration into the American nation also in the ethnocultural sense. As he wrote Benjamin Hawkins, one of his Indian agents, “in truth, the ultimate point of rest & happiness for them [i.e. Native Americans] is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people” (TJ to Benjamin Hawkins, February 18, 1803, Jefferson 1903-4. 8:214).[11]

This transformation desired by Jefferson was rejected by a sizeable part of the Native American population that found the idea of private property, an important part of adopting white ways, as well as the reversal of sex roles problematic, to say the least (cf. Wallace 298-99).

Jefferson, then, expected his Indians to join the US nation and become suitable for that by cultural transformation, the endresult of which was their ethnic (and cultural) annihilation. Native American men were to set out by changing their way of subsistence from hunting to farming, raising themselves to an appropriate level of civilization, which included changing sex roles involving the treatment of their women as white men would treat their own. This was the key to their admission to the American nation in the ethnocultural way.

White Women and the American Nation

Another group of human beings inviting scholarly attention in Jefferson’s system of nationhood were white women, whom he identified as middle-class, thereby collapsing differences within the category of white womanhood in the USA. Although they belonged to the American nation in an ethnocultural sense, Jefferson refused entirely to regard them as part of it once we consider its civic-territorial dimension. Lacking the right to vote and other political as well as civil rights such as the right to property in marriage in Jefferson’s time, white women were excluded from the political community of adult white males, confined to the home, under the patriarchal supervision of their husbands or fathers.[12]

Jefferson rarely discussed American women as a distinct social group, and when he did so, he tended to locate their place within the nation in relation to women different in terms of race or nationality. Furthermore, he performed his comparison within a framework set by parameters rooted in a developmental conception of economics, politics, and education. One such group that he contrasts white women to Native American women, who, according to him, enjoy equal status to men treat them without attempting to oppress them. As seen above, this, Jefferson argues, is in sharp contrast with the position of Indian women, whom their spouses treat with a heavy hand, enforcing them to perform agricultural labor for the latter. Yet, as he points out, that is not the way that corresponds to a proper (i.e. western) level of civilization and social development: “[T]his is a barbarous perversion of the natural destination of the two sexes,” he claims, as “women are formed by nature for attention, not for hard labor” (“Memorandum …” March 3, 1788, Jefferson 1984, 652). By saying this, Jefferson clearly designates a place for women in the division of labor, defined by the one that he identifies with the US level of civilization.

Jefferson is prepared to identify the same, low level of civilization as far as the treatment of women is concerned outside Indian communities, more precisely, in Western Europe and also finds women maltreated in France and Germany: “they do all sorts of work,” that is, they perform tasks both inside and outside the home, which Jefferson finds characteristic of a lower level of social development (651). In contrast to such female laborers, women in America are happy within the confines of the home: “They have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other, and the art to cultivate it beyond all others” (TJ to Anne Willing Bingham, May 11, 1788, Jefferson 1984, 922-23). Furthermore, American women, Jefferson contends, have no ambition to cross the border between domesticity and politics—an aspiration that very much characterizes women in France (TJ to George Washington, December 4, 1788, Jefferson 1984, 932-33). His views are similar again to Edith Wharton’s twentieth century view about French women (see Kovács 2009 and Kovács 2010, 106).

In Jefferson’s thought, the lack of political role for women, their being attached to the domestic sphere, also has implications for their place in national culture through education. The primary goal of female education, he argues, is the instruction of would-be mothers enabling them to educate their sons and their daughters. More particularly, he expects girls to acquire skills and knowledge necessary for domestic amusements (“dancing,” “drawing,” “music”), and labor. As for the latter, Jefferson reasserts his belief in a proper division of labor between the sexes—girls are taught to become suitable for performing household chores: “The order and economy of a house are as honorable to the mistress as those of the farm to the master, and if either be neglected, ruin follows, and children destitute of the means of living” (TJ to Nathaniel Burwell, March 14, 1818, Jefferson 1984, 1412-13; quotation on 1413).

One aspect of Jefferson’s ideas about the education of citizens for the American nation was the raising of ideal leaders for the republic who are responsible for their community. Women, however, would not count as potential leaders in Jefferson’s system of education. Thus, although, in Jennings L. Wagoner’s view, Jeffersonian education was to prepare both boys and girls “for the pursuit of happiness in the broadest sense” (Wagoner 126-27; quotation on 125), because of the separation of their spheres of education it also conditioned them for different ways of pursuing happiness, as well as of different degrees of belonging to the nation.

By accepting the prevailing cultural norm of relegating Euro-American women to the domestic sphere, Jefferson endorsed their exclusion from politics, work and the cultural sphere of men as far as education and domestic pleasures were concerned. Raising sons for the republic as mothers was the only way for American women to simulate entrance into the sphere of politics.[13] In line with the norms of his age, while granting adult white males the franchise,[14] as for his position on the political status of women in America, Jefferson hoped they would never become the “Amazons” of France—even with French women’s limited, informal way of participating in politics and remain “Angels” of the hearth, ready “to soothe & calm the minds of their husbands returning ruffled from political debate” (TJ to Anne Willing Bingham, May 11, 1788, Jefferson 1984, 923).

Jefferson’s understanding of the links between economics, politics, education and the female sphere of domesticity reveals his refusal to consider white American women full and equal members of the nation either in the ethnocultural or civic-territorial sense. Peculiarly enough, it was through his regarding their status as being superior to that of their “savage” Native American and “agricultural” European counterparts that he legitimized their partial exclusion from the nation. While partaking of a common myth of descent, also sharing a territory with their male peers, Jefferson denied them access to civic culture and the political sphere in general as well as a common economic one: American white middle-class women had no chance of becoming yeoman farmers since it was against the thrust of civilization for them to fall back into the state of Indian women performing manual labor and to become both enfranchised citizens and producers outside the domestic sphere. They could be equal members of a nation in the enjoyment of affectionate ties and “attention,” but not with regard to other important components related to politics, education, or economics.

Blacks and American Nationhood

Scholars have taken notice of Jefferson’s troubled relationship with blacks in the United States and their status as slaves. His unequivocal assertion of the natural rights of humans and persistent denunciation of arbitrary rule created tensions when it came to his justification of black chattel slavery – tensions that he worked hard to resolve.[15] Nonetheless, ambiguities also emerge when one considers Jefferson’s attitude to blacks in relation to the problem of American nationhood.

Unlike whites in general or Native Americans once integrated into the American nation, black people in bondage occupied a place outside of the American nation in Jefferson’s vision. As Onuf has argued, Jefferson considered black people in the United States a separate nation and as such deemed their emancipation impossible without their removal or demolishing their status as a nation through their dispersal (Onuf 161, 186-87). Nonetheless, despite their existence as a nation in Jefferson’s eyes, like Native Americans, blacks obviously lacked civic-territorial features, only possessing ethnocultural ones. Although sharing territorial boundaries with whites, while in slavery, lacking equal rights with the former, they had no way of making it as members of the civic US nation. Furthermore, in his plans about their emancipation, Jefferson argued for their removal from American territory, preventing them from existing within the US boundaries of nationhood.

When considering the position of black people in the United States, most frequently, Jefferson discussed their situation within the context of black chattel slavery. Obviously, those held in bondage could not count as members of the American nation in any sense: deprived of all the rights that Jefferson found inalienable for white men, they lived under the despotic rule of their masters—as he himself was ready to admit (Jefferson 1975, 214).

As has been seen, Jefferson attributed the differences that he perceived between Native Americans and whites to external circumstances. Not so in the case of blacks, whom he considered intrinsically different from whites and inferior in several respects. While regarding black people as the equals of whites in terms of the moral sense and memory, Jefferson considered them inferior with respect to reason, imagination, and physical features (Jefferson 1975, 186-91). Jefferson identified these differences as serious obstacles to the peaceful co-existence of whites and blacks after emancipation. He, at the same time, also found the experience of slavery to be detrimental to race relations. Admitting that slavery as an institution of oppression contributed to the degraded conditions of black people in bondage, he saw its effect as one producing animosity in blacks toward whites because of all the suffering that they had been exposed to under slavery (see TJ to Edward Coles, August 25, 1814, Jefferson 1975, 544, and 214).

Jefferson held that these differences, coupled with the concomitant hostilities between the two races worked against their cohabitation after the emancipation of blacks but also against their intermarriage. As he argued, in order to avoid the emancipated black slave “staining the blood of his master … he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture” (Jefferson 1975, 193). To his mind, the “amalgamation” would result in the downgrading of whites by an inferior race of blacks (TJ to Edward Coles, August 25, 1814, Jefferson 1975, 546).

In Jefferson’s thought, then, ethnocultural differences of blacks prevented their integration into the white American nation. In addition to ethnic (that is racial) differences, historical memories, the experience of slavery divided rather than linked the black and white races. Furthermore, as seen above, while Native Americans as a nation were to undergo an ethnocultural transformation in order to join the nation of the USA, blacks did not face this requirement. Small wonder, then, that Jefferson, who was convinced that once emancipated, blacks would start a race war against their former masters, advocated their expatriation from the country (Jefferson 1975, 186; TJ to Edward Coles, August 25, 1814, Jefferson 1975, 545).

Conclusion

Jefferson’s conception of the American nation rested on both the ethnocultural and civic-territorial principles, which, therefore, provided the basis of a framework for a varied ideological strategy of integration and exclusion. In his vision, white women formed part of the ethnocultural American nation but only in a restricted sense, through blood ties, and were clearly excluded from the political-territorial one. Different from them, Jefferson regarded Native Americans as a people that were excluded from the American nation by nature but had the chance to become part of it both in the ethnocultural and civic-territorial senses. Yet, that was to take place only after their undergoing a transformation that was radically to affect their cultural traits, leading to their integration into the nation of white Americans first culturally, then ethnically. Finally, Jefferson also excluded blacks, either slave or free, from US national identity, giving no chance for them to become part of it in any sense: for them, political integration was impossible in Jefferson’s eyes, and so was an ethnic one. Although he found young generations of emancipated slaves capable of developing skills necessary for independent existence, that was not to happen within the civic-territorial nation constituted by adult white male Americans. Unlike in the case of Native Americans, he rejected the possibility of their integration into the American nation in an ethnocultural sense. His belief in the lasting impact of disaffection on black and white race relations as well as his fear of intermarriage between blacks and whites leading to the alleged racial degradation of the latter prevented his formulation of such a desire.

Anthony Smith has claimed that the USA as a civic-territorial nation is characterized by the co-existence of diverse ethnic groups (Smith 1991, 149-50). Jefferson’s vision, nonetheless, countered such a conception since it violated the civic-territorial dimension of the national principle, which allowed for the co-existence of human groups with different identity markers. Firstly, it was based on a desire to achieve ethnic homogeneity within the nation: white women and assimilated Native Americans fulfilled such a requirement but not blacks. Secondly, he expected Native Americans, once assimilated, to conform to the model of gendered division of white social roles, and hence they were to be expected by the unequal relationship that white adult males and females had in relation to the core of US national identity. He regarded members of these groups as temporarily, or permanently excluded from the American nation in certain ways. Even white women, the least unprivileged group in Jefferson’s vision, whom he believed part of his sentimental American nation on account of their enjoying the affectionate “attention” of their husbands, were denied the chance of becoming equal members of his national community in other respects.

Awareness of Jefferson’s conception of the American nation as having both a civic-territorial and an ethnocultural dimension, therefore, facilitates a better understanding of the ways that he distinguished among various human groups with regard to US national identity. Employing such a perspective also enables one to see that Jefferson found no group other than white adult males capable of meeting requirements for full membership of the American nation, also making distinctions regarding their chances of making it. In this way, he implied a division of the US population into two groups: white adult males, on the one hand, having an equal share of both dimensions of nationhood; and the national others that he relegated to a position which assured only limited (women) or no access (black) to nationhood regarding their civic and cultural domains or advocated their integration at the expense of ethnocultural annihilation (Native Americans).

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THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE VISUAL ASPECTS OF SYMPATHY IN RELATION TO BLACKS

Zoltán Vajda

This essay investigates the significance of a visual understanding of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of race relations in the early American republic. In doing so, it represents an effort to connect with the visual turn in cultural history as well as early American cultural studies addressing issues of power relations in an intercultural context.[16]

Keywords: Thomas Jefferson; visuality; sentimentalism; race

Research into Thomas Jefferson’s thought has uncovered the ways in which it was permeated with issues and concerns of contemporary moral philosophy, very much connected to the Scottish Enlightenment. Of primary importance of these links was the concept of the moral sense and its workings in relation to individuals in a social context. As well as empowering humans to make moral choices it was seen to relate them to one another within a particular cultural framework. An important component of the mechanism through which the moral sense functioned to establish links among individuals, providing a ground for organizing them into a coherent culture was sympathy. This central concept of sentimentalism denoted the power of the self to feel compassion, to share the feelings and emotions exhibited by the other. To a significant extent, sympathy related to the moral sense informed Jefferson’s thinking about individual, society and culture.

The founding documents of the United States were rooted in Enlightenment thought and this also involved a firm belief in human’s capability for morality (their innate sense for goodness) and their capacity for perfectibility and the conviction that moral regeneration is always possible. These beliefs are beneath the basic concepts of being American (Tóth 2011).

The literature discussing elements of Jefferson’s sentimentalism does that within the broader framework of his moral philosophy and typically in relation to his understanding of nationhood and race relations. These have discussed the ways, for instance, in which Jefferson’s moral philosophy connected with his republicanism and his racial science (Yarbrough 1998, 1997, 1991); his conception of nature (Miller); his understanding of races in the United States within a national conceptual framework (Onuf); civilization and cultural development (Helo and Onuf; Mennell); or the general influence of sentimental culture, including morality, on his thought (Wills; Burstein). These works, however, understand Jefferson’s conception of sympathy without paying attention to its visual dimension and its consequences for his thinking about issues of moral philosophy, whereas, I hope to show, the two are connected in several ways.

In this paper I set out to explore its visual dimension, a problem so far neglected in studies of his thought. I will argue that Jefferson’s understanding of sympathy exhibited visual features to a varying extent, depending on particular conditions. Also, I hope to show how visual perception becomes relevant in his sentimentalism, joining sympathy with morality. I will address these issues in connection with his more general conception of sympathy, the nation, and blacks against the background of contemporary models of sympathy and Jefferson’s own idea of the moral sense. Interestingly, the issue of visual perception so important for Jefferson was later also among the essential elements that shaped politics (Cristian and Dragon 2005) and democracy in the US at the beginning of the American century, when even the poet Vachel Lindsay prophesized on the vast potential of images and especially moving images in shaping American culture and democracy in the US (Cristian 2014).

As historian Daniel Wickberg has pointed out, in Western culture, two versions of sympathy had evolved by the time of the Enlightenment. The older one, “organic” and “corporeal,” assumed fellow feeling between human beings based on “physiological” affinity (Wickberg 140). According to this model, persons or objects are attracted to one another by some ubiquitous “magnetic force” present in the universe, “independent of the intentions or motives of persons” or consciousness and the mind (141). Such a force of affinity was also regarded as one working between the parts of the body assuming a connection between them that the same action was thought to produce the same reaction in different bodily parts as a result of their physiological affinity (141-42).

By contrast, the modern version of sympathy, linked to “dematerialized personhood,” came to denote compassion as a result of visual sensation: its generation took observer and observed instead of a relationship based on physiological affinity. This “spectatorial” version of sympathy presupposed the production of the same feeling in the observer as a result of its perception in the observed (140). The consequence was that “[m]oral judgment and social feeling” came to develop primarily on the basis of visual perception (139). This modern version of sympathy connected it with consciousness and the mind holding that compassion is generated in the observer as a result of a particular feeling perceived or imagined in the observed (142). Thus “mental projection” becomes the ground for “emotional identification of the spectator with” the “other” (144). All this, of course, assumes that self and other are no longer seen as participating in the same affinity but rather as observer and observed and the person as originator of sympathy, which was thus “felt by one person toward the other” (ibid).

This perceptual aspect of sympathy, at the same time, poses questions about how emotions are communicated between observer and observed. As scholars have pointed out, one aspect of this problem was the association of sensibility with sincerity. One was supposed to produce one’s “inner feelings” without pre-meditation or concern about public display and responses to that. Spontaneity was the way in which this could be achieved: feelings were to derive from the heart, the general organ of sentiments (Brewer 120, 117). Furthermore, the success of fellow feeling in this modern period was seen, to a great extent, as conditional upon identifying with the other’s emotion, which, in an obvious way, concerned the problem of “the communication of passions and sentiments” (Mullan 2). For major proponents of sensibility, the ties that connected humans in part depended on the successful communication of “harmoniously organized feelings” (7). For instance, sympathy is the principle in the case of Hume that facilitates the “movement” of “passion” and “feeling” (24-25). Therefore, sentimental culture accentuated the principle of sincerity, the communication of true private feelings in public (16-17). Sympathy either means the reproduction of the same sentiment as David Hume would postulate or, in the fashion proposed by Adam Smith, the “spectator” occupying the position of the other through imagination. This is why, for Smith, “sympathy is conditional on the spectator having the necessary information, and on ‘his’ subsequent reflections and efforts” (44), while for Hume sympathy is based on fellow feeling shared by self and others springing from natural disposition (45). As we shall see, the visual aspect of communicating sympathy was also a concern for Jefferson, and strongly related to the problem of the moral sense.

Sentimentalism also connected feeling with morality claiming that true virtue lay in the ability of the self to feel sympathy for the other (Brewer 114) – hence sensitivity being based on compassion and the impulse to be morally good. With Jefferson, this can happen through the moral sense, which is, in part, designed to establish fellow feeling among humans. It enables them to feel love for others. In his words, “…nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses…” (Jefferson to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814, in Jefferson 1337). By means of this feature, the moral sense is also connected to the individual’s happiness in so far as “benevolence,” doing good to others, results in pleasure and happiness (Yarbrough 1998, 20). Thus the moral sense of Jefferson’s individual also assumes the superiority of pleasures shared with others over the ones felt in solitude by the self (69).

Jefferson also underlines the ubiquitous presence of the moral sense: it is to be found in every human being. For him, the moral sense is, as historian Charles A. Miller puts it, “part of human nature” (92), and individual moral standards were to be measured against those of culture (Helo and Onuf 612): the individual moral sense was to be in harmony with that of the community. As Jean Yarbrough points out, for the individual to practice his or her moral sense he or she must “internalize …. the moral sentiments of the majority” by using “imagination” (1998, 42). The moral sense of the individual makes him or her abide by the norms of a culture determined by its majority (Miller 92). In addition, even though there can be cases when it seems imperfect, it can be ameliorated by external impulses, most typically by instruction. To quote Jefferson, again,

When it is wanting, we endeavor to supply the defect by education, by appeals to reason and calculation, by presenting to the being so unhappily conformed, other motives to do good and to eschew evil, such as the love, or the hatred, or rejection of those among whom he lives, and whose society is necessary to his happiness and even existence. (Jefferson to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814, in Jefferson 1338)

For Jefferson, then, personal development through faculties of the individual other than the moral senses can serve to make up for the deficiencies of the moral sense and the drive for feeling love and sympathy for others. Furthermore, as Yarbrough points out, with Jefferson, the development of the moral sense is a prerequisite to making sound moral judgments, hence its intimate connection with the individual’s maturation (Yarbrough 1998, 34, 44), and the moral capacity of the individual is something that needs constant practicing (54).

Another crucial point to highlight about Jefferson’s concept of the moral sense is that for Jefferson, unlike with some other contemporary philosophers, the moral sense is independent of reason since it is alone capable of instructing the individual about right moral conduct (Hellenbrand 51), and that he designates the heart in the general sentimental fashion as the center of the power to feel for others on an epistemological basis. As he explains in his letter to Maria Cosway from 1786, the heart functions to feel the joy and sorrow of others and unite with them through the feeling of compassion:

Deeply practised in the school of affliction, the human heart knows no joy which I have not lost, no sorrow of which I have not drank! [sic] Fortune can present no grief of unknown form to me! Who then can so softly bind up the wound of another as he who has felt the same wound himself?” (Jefferson to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786, Jefferson 870-71)

This passage also shows that with Jefferson, sympathy can only be generated on the basis of previously known feeling. The moral sense (located in the heart) functions as a reservoir of emotions necessary to identify (with) the feelings of others. The heart knows how to respond to certain feelings because of its experience, and its previous knowledge of these.

Furthermore, this knowledge serves as a basis of benevolent acts and can be enhanced as a result of external stimuli. In Jefferson’s words, “When any signal act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with it’s [sic] beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and graceful acts also” (Jefferson to Robert Skipwith, August 3, 1771, in Jefferson 741). Such impulses coming from the outside, so characteristic of sentimental physiology, also become important when Jefferson talks about sympathy in action as will be seen in the following.

Issues related to the perceptual features of sympathy within an epistemological and moral context can be best explored in Jefferson’s aforementioned letter to Maria Cosway, where in the form of a dialogue the “heart” engages in a debate with the “head” over the nature of sympathy and pertaining benevolent action. Toward the end of the text, explicating the mechanism of sympathy, Jefferson presents three examples in an effort to contrast the moral functioning of the head and the heart: the first concerns a soldier, the second a woman, while the third the nation – all in need, soliciting sympathy and charity. In these situations, the head and the heart respond to each in a contrasting manner (Jefferson to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786, in Jefferson 874-75).

The story of the soldier is offered to suggest sympathy as denied at the urge of the head. “The poor wearied souldier”;[sic] asks for a lift on a “cart” (874) ridden by the head and the heart, but for fear of more similar requests from other soldiers on the road they reject him, which the heart later regrets. Nonetheless, the heart knows better next time, when they meet a “poor woman,” and gives her “charity” (875). The woman, as it turns out later, uses the money to pay for her “child”’s schooling, not on liquor as previously suggested by the head. In the third example, sympathy also wins when it comes to the nation since the War of Independence, the heart argues retrospectively, was won by the “enthusiasm” and “sacrifice” of Americans with no concern for “wealth and numbers” (ibid).

The conclusion that the heart draws from these examples is that sympathy is indiscriminate regarding the personal interest of the self or the social standing of the sympathized other, be it a soldier, a woman or the nation. “Wealth, titles, office, are no recommendations to my friendship,” the heart says; instead, it also maintains, what matters to it are “great good qualities” as a precondition for sympathy and charity (ibid), that is, sympathy in action. Furthermore, the heart also claims to have the power of divining who possesses such “qualities,” and it is only such a person that deserves its “friendship” and sympathy. As the heart asserts: “I receive no one into my esteem till I know they are worthy of it” (ibid). This statement is made in connection with the woman, whom the head originally claimed to be a “drunkard” (ibid).

Jefferson’s argument about the moral sense and sympathy as presented through these examples by the heart offers intriguing claims concerning the role of visual perception in the mechanism of compassion. In the cases of the soldier and the woman, it is by sight, i.e.: visual perception that sympathy is established in the observer. Yet this spectatorial sympathy is immediately connected with the epistemological prerequisite for awareness of the observed person’s being worthy of the sympathy generated in the heart, that he or she is indeed in possession of those “great good qualities.” This, in turn, can happen only through the sentimental principle of sincerity or transparency by which the observed can communicate his or her “good qualities” toward the “observing” heart. In these two cases, then, spectatorial sympathy is fused with perceptual morality and epistemology: seeing becomes believing and the basis of moral judgment at the same time, hence providing a mechanism for sympathy.

As for sympathy at the national level, the situation seems more complicated. As scholarship has shown, Jefferson held that patriotism, or amor patriae, as he referred to it, the love of one’s country, was a sentiment being the end result of the moral development of the individual through education. The process beginning with attachment to natural parents developed through affection for mentors to culminate in love for one’s country, also indicating the individual’s sentimental movement from one to the other (Hellenbrand 84-85). In the case of the nation or “country,” as the heart puts it, the schema applied to the soldier and the woman is complicated by the fact that, in this case, no primacy of visual perception is articulated. Instead, here epistemology is based upon “Providence,” which, the heart says, suggested how Americans should behave: its “precept is to do always what is right” (Jefferson to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786, in Jefferson 875). Such an understanding of the Revolution by the heart, then, links the Patriot cause, righteousness and epistemology in a sentimental unity, in which visual perception plays no significant part. How can that be possible?

It is possible to have moral epistemology without visuality in the case of the nation because, for Jefferson, it is already a community based on affection and sympathy. As historian Peter Coviello argues, in his own draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson solves the dilemma of defining Americans as a nation which, in fact, does not exist at the time of the War of Independence by seeing it as one based on “affective unity” (443; original emphasis). That is, with Jefferson, the “country” that is nonexistent as a political entity, is still already there as a sentimental community whose members are connected into coherence by bonds of sentimental affection. Hence no visual stimuli are required to trigger affection or sympathy for moral scrutiny among them since communal ties ensure its presence.

What the argument of the heart adds to this is the definition of the Patriot cause and hence the nation as one resting on morality thus being worthy of the appreciation and sympathy of the individuals willing to make a sacrifice for its liberty. This is the way in which one could attest to one’s ability to feel compassion and thereby become part of a community of such individuals all possessing “great good feelings” and hence being worthy of affection and moral support.

Finally, visuality gains special significance for Jefferson in his discussion of blacks and their expression of emotions also highlighting his treatment of the esthetic and moral. In exploring the role of nature in Jefferson’s thought Charles Miller argues that the relationship between the esthetic and the ethical is hard to grasp (103). Through exploring the visual aspect of sympathy in connection with blacks, however, one can have a better view not only of how the moral and the epistemological, but also how the moral and the esthetic are related in his conception of sympathy.

Discussing Jefferson’s conception of the moral sense in relation to slavery and slaveholding in Virginia, Ari Helo and Peter Onuf point out how, relying on Scottish moral philosopher Henry Home’s (Lord Kames) thought, Jefferson adopted a progressive view of morality tied to civilization, the specific level of moral development of diverse cultures, people or ethnic groups (including whites and blacks in Virginia). They have shown how the culturally specific conception of the moral sense on the part of Jefferson results in his setting an absolute standard of all-embracing sympathy by which to measure various cultures occupying different levels of civilization in terms of moral development (600). This level, at the same time, determines the nature of the “institutions” that a people can exist under as well as the solutions that they can legitimately seek to their problems (600, 604). The institution of slavery, for instance, yoked blacks in the South to a level of civilization and moral development that remained well below that of whites, according to Jefferson. They were not in the power to improve their moral conduct through education (609-10). In addition, their dependent position in bondage prevented them from becoming morally responsible persons and remained like children (611); their civilization, amelioration of the moral sense “would take generations” (614).

As a concomitant feature of their lower level of the moral sense, for Jefferson, blacks differ from whites in their capacity for sensibility. In the first place, their inferiority in imagination is to the detriment of feeling sympathy for those racially different from them, as I have explained elsewhere (Vajda 2009). Yet, more importantly for my present purpose, this difference also manifests itself in the problem of communicating sentiments between whites and blacks. “Are not the fine mixtures of red and white,” Jefferson asks in his Notes on the State of Virginia, “the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the one, i. e. among whites, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?” (Jefferson 264-65). According to Jefferson, then, the facial color white can serve as an appropriate medium for showing emotions, since it can express emotions while the complexion black can show no such variety in terms of change in color.

Thus, for him, on account of their color, black people are incapable of communicating their emotions by sight to the observer. One consequence of this would be their exclusion from the sentimental community of whites. The inscrutability of black emotions or in his words, that “veil” which covers the inner self from the public prevents a black person from arousing the sympathy of spectators, who therefore cannot become sympathetic observers of their emotions. In this way, the aesthetic becomes fused with the moral in such an interracial spectatorial act of scrutiny.

We understand from other parts of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia that while he regarded blacks as inferior to whites with respect to rationality, and imaginative power, as far as the moral sense is concerned, he asserted its presence in the black person (Jefferson 266). At the same time, for various reasons he found the co-existence of the two races impossible. This pessimism was obviously augmented by his denial of blacks’ ability to arouse sympathy in the observer because of the color of their skin. The lack of the power of blacks to communicate emotions to white observers weakens Jefferson’s claim about blacks’ moral sense: even though they possess it, they cannot make proper use of it in their interaction with whites also impairing the possibility of moral judgment by white spectators.

In conclusion, we have seen how, in Jefferson’s conception of sympathy, the visual element gained varying emphasis concerning individual and race. It was not only part of a spectatorial model in connection with white individuals, but also a prerequisite to morality which became a condition for sympathetic compassion as the examples presented by the heart suggest. With blacks, visuality also gains significance for Jefferson, but only as an impossibility and hence as an indicator of the lack of the chance for them to appeal to a sympathetic observer. However, no such problem emerges for Jefferson in connection with the white patriots of the Revolution: in their case visuality becomes immaterial since being already part of a sentimental community of people also morally good, no visual mechanism is required for them to observe the morally right nation that they are themselves already part of.

Works Cited

Brewer, John. 2000. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Burstein, Andrew. 1995. The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia.

Coviello, Peter. 2002. “Agonizing Affection: Affect and Nation in Early America.” Early American Literature, 37.3, 439-468.

Cristian, Réka M. and Zoltán Dragon. 2005. "American Studies in the Age of Visual/Electronic Reproduction". Americana e-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. 1.1. Web: http://primus.arts.u-szeged.hu/american/americana/volIno1/crmdz.htm

Cristian, Réka M. 2014. "American Studies and Film: From Blind Spot to Symbiosis". Americana e-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. 10.1. Web: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol10no1/cristian

Hellenbrand, Harold. 1990. The Unfinished Revolution: Education and Politics in the Thought of Thomas Jefferson. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses.

Helo, Ari and Peter Onuf. 2003. “Jefferson, Morality, and the Problem of Slavery.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 60.3, 583-614.

Jefferson, Thomas. 1984. Writings. Merrill D. Peterson ed. New York: The Library of America.

Mennell, Stephen. 2007. The American Civilizing Process. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Miller, Charles A. 1988. Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Mullan, John. 1990; 1988. Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

Onuf, Peter S. 2000. Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia.

Tóth, Zsófia Anna. Merry Murderers: The Farcical (Re)Figuration of the Femme Fatale in Maurine Dallas Watkins’ Chicago (1927) and its Various Adaptations. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. 112-113.

Vajda, Zoltán. 2009. “Limited Expectations: Thomas Jefferson on the Moral Sentiments of Blacks and Race Relations.” In Zoltán Vajda ed. Kultúrán innen és túl – Írások Rozsnyai Bálint tiszteletére/Within and Without Culture: Essays in Honor of Bálint Rozsnyai. Szeged: JATEPress, 277-286.

Wickberg, Daniel. 2007. “The Sympathetic Self in American Culture, 1750-1920.” In Wilfred M. McClay ed. Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past. Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 129-161.

Wills, Garry. 1979; 1978. Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. New York: Vintage Books.

Yarbrough, Jean M. 1998. American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People. Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas.

——. 1997. “The Moral Sense, Character Formation, and Virtue.” In Gary L. McDowell and Sharon L. Noble eds. Reason and Republicanism: Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy of Liberty. Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 271-303.

——. 1991. “Race and the Moral Foundation of the American Republic: Another Look at the Declaration and the Notes on Virginia.” Journal of Politics, 53.1, 90-105.

THE CARNIVALESQUE (RE)PRESENTATION OF AMERICA IN THE DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF CHICAGO

Zsófia Anna Tóth

This paper discusses how the various versions of (the story of) Chicago provide us with a carnivalesque (re)presentation of the United States. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical concepts of the carnival and the carnivalesque are briefly described, then, the different versions of Chicago (the 1924 newspaper articles, 1927 drama, 1927 silent film, 1942 film noir/screwball comedy, 1975 stage musical or musical vaudeville, 2002 film musical, yet with a focus on the two latest versions, the 1976 stage and the 2002 film musicals) are examined from this point of view and it is emphasized what a pointed look they give about American society and culture. It is argued that the story of Chicago creates a comic-grotesque image of the USA, which is most explicitly realized through the actions and performances of its carnivalesque femmes fatales and through their specific imagery as well as performativity. The social criticism in Chicago has been apparent since its emergence in a dramatic form in 1927 (and even before that, with the real life murder cases and the trials). Its latest 2002 version retains this socio-critical edge of the original, and can indeed be read as presenting a modern(-day) Carnival. All in all, the image of carnivalesque America is to facilitate criticism and debate while also reinstating order and preserve existing norms and values.[17]

Keywords: Chicago, Mikhail Bakhtin, carnivalesque, America (United States of America), American identity

In this paper I will examine how and why Chicago, in its various versions, from the real murder cases (as they were recounted in the newspaper articles) in the early twentieth century to the last film musical in 2002, produces and presents a carnivalesque image of the United States. When using the term carnivalesque I refer to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival, carnivalization and carnivalesque that he introduced to describe and interpret a socio-cultural mechanism and custom that is subversive, disruptive while also regenerative and constructive. The carnival time was/is a very unique period of revelry and merrymaking which functioned/s as a safety valve that allows for venting all the tension that the customary world order generates. It involves the duality of the death-life cycle and as a result it is most characteristically a comic-grotesque phenomenon. (Bakhtin 1-58) I will argue that in its various versions (1924 newspaper articles, 1927 drama, 1927 silent film, 1942 film noir/screwball comedy, 1975 stage musical or musical vaudeville, 2002 film musical), the story of Chicago creates a comic-grotesque image of the USA, which is most explicitly realized through the actions and performances of its carnivalesque femmes fatales and through their specific imagery. I call the femmes fatales of Chicago carnivalesque femmes fatales because they embody everything that Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival involves. In the 1976 version, while thanking the(ir) audience for their support and applause, the two leading female characters (the comic-grotesque-carnivalesque while deadly and criminal women murderers of the story) concretely allude to their connection to the ideals, concepts and images of America stating that “we are the living examples of what a wonderful country this is. (They hug and pose.) […] So we’d just like to say thank you and God Bless you” (Ebb, Fosse 91).

Maurine Dallas Watkins, the author of the 1924 series of articles and the 1927 drama when writing her original articles covering the real-life murder cases on which Chicago is based, already set the tone and mode of communication with her witty and humorous coverage of the events (i.e.: the murders, their media coverage and the ensuing trials), for example, by making comments such as giving the following title to one of her articles: “State Launches Trial of Belva For Law Killing” (Watkins 1997, 151), which is a word play since the name of the deceased man was Law while what she is doing is actually the “killing of the law,” as well. In her 1927 play, Watkins reworked the original stories along with her reflections on them and elaborated on her view that all that happened resembled a carnival world, although she did not employ this specific term, she expressed this in discursive, narrative and descriptive modes. Thus, the spirit of the marketplace (Bakhtin 9) as well as its carnivalesque cavalcade (un unbridled and uncontrollable tumult of nonsense and merrymaking) got evoked and the succeeding (re)interpretations and versions of the story adhered to this approach. Since all the versions could not be analyzed in detail within the scope of this paper, I will concentrate on the two latest versions, the 1976 stage and the 2002 film musicals, the most closely related among all of the versions. I will discuss Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival and the carnivalesque in the chapter entitled “The Carnival and Carnivalesque Spaces,” then, I will examine how this gets manifested within the leading female figures of Chicago (1976, 2002) and how the carnival world is presented within the story in the chapter on “The Carnival World of the Story and the Characters.” Then, I will continue with the discussion of a specific figure and phenomenon of the carnival, the scapegoat, and present through this figure how and why the American ideals and values get ridiculed within the story of Chicago, and eventually how a carnivalesque image of the US is created, in the last chapter: “Scapegoating and Non-Americans,” which is followed by a conclusion.

Chicago, in all of its versions (1924 series of newspaper articles, 1927 drama, 1927 silent film, 1942 film noir/screwball comedy, 1975 stage musical or musical vaudeville, 2002 film musical), presents the United States through the subversive power of humor and carnivalesque cavalcade with the help of these specific comic-grotesque femmes fatales and the way they hold a distorting mirror up to America. The social criticism in Chicago has been apparent since its emergence in a dramatic form in 1927 (and even before that, with the real life murder cases and the trials). Its latest 2002 version retains this socio-critical edge of the original, and can indeed be read as presenting a modern(-day) Carnival. Hence, the self-ironic upside-down world of Chicago serves a unique function in the formation and (re)interpretation of the image of the United States of America.

While Maurine Dallas Watkins obviously criticizes her country, its judicial system and the functioning of the media highlighting the negative aspects, the corruption and manipulation involved therein. She does this via humor and creates a carnival world when retelling the story in order to interpret how and why everything terrible that happened during these cases and the trials were possible. Since rationalism and logic do not explain the horrors of the story, Watkins’ rendering can only be a subversive, out of the ordinary, upside-down and turnabout mode of communication and interpretation of the events and the figures of the story. Her criticism targets both community and social order that facilitate all the senseless, unjust and unrealistic happenings. Watkins suggests that America is a world of carnival where anybody can pursue their happiness and anybody can succeed even if these are people who would be out of bounds in a conventional world order. Although, it is also true that, according to Bakhtin’s theory, carnivals facilitate criticism and debate while reinstating order and preserve existing norms and values at the same time (Bakhtin 5, 13-17, 22, 34). Additionally, Chicago is an excellent example that proves that Bakhtin’s theory is still valid in our time and is applicable to current events, not only to ancient or medieval ones since people behave and social-political systems function almost the same way as they did during the Middle Ages.

1. The Carnival and Carnivalesque Spaces

To see more clearly what the carnivalesque femmes fatales of Chicago stand for and how they project a carnivalesque image of America, Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival and carnivalesque is paramount to be discussed. Before citing the particulars of his ideas a summing up of his theory follows as a theoretical introduction:

In Rabelais and His World (trans., 1984), Bakhtin proposed his widely cited concept of the carnivalesque in certain literary works. This literary mode parallels the flouting of authority and inversion of social hierarchies that, in many cultures, are permitted in a season of carnival. It does so by introducing a mingling of voices from diverse social levels that are free to mock and subvert authority, to flout social norms by ribaldry, and to exhibit various ways of profaning what is ordinarily regarded as sacrosanct. Bakhtin traces the occurrence of the carnivalesque in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance writers (especially in Rabelais); he also asserts that the mode recurs later, especially in the play of irreverent, parodic, and subversive voices in the novels of Dostoevsky, which are both dialogic and carnivalesque.  (Abrams 63)

J. A. Cuddon adds that the carnivalesque is a typical characteristic element “of burlesque, parody and personal satire” and also states that the carnivalesque through its subversive mechanisms serves a liberating function while “it disrupts authority and introduces alternatives” (111). In the various versions of Chicago both of these interpretations apply. Chicago tells the story of a spectacular, modern and urban carnival while displaying most of the features of the carnivals of ancient times and the Middle Ages: since the story, the characters as well as the mode of communication are all irreverent, parodic and subversive. In addition, the play flouts social norms, profanes what is sacrosanct and subverts authority, order and the legal system. Chicago presents us with a world turned upside-down and inside-out; all the rules, laws, norms and the customary order are disrupted similarly to a carnival time.

The world of Chicago is also related to the cabaret and as Elisabeth Bronfen claims, “[i]n the cabaret” all distinctions and boundaries “become uncannily blurred” (“Seductive Departures” 2007, 131). In an earlier version of the same article, Bronfen concretely connects these spheres by saying that all this blurring of boundaries occur “[i]n the carnivalesque space of the cabaret” (“Seductive Departures” 2003, 21). Anna Kérchy also suggests that these spaces or spheres are interconnected when she says about Angela Carter’s novels that “the toyshop, the fairground, the circus, the masquerade or the theatre, can be regarded as spectacular, open spaces of a grotesque, carnivalesque topography […]” (48). Billy Flynn also links the circus tradition to the carnival and the cabaret in the two latest versions: “[i]t’s all a circus, Kid. A three-ring circus. These trials – the whole world – all show business. But kid, you are working with a star, the biggest!” (Ebb, Fosse 75; see also Marshall 1h 15 min). Although what is implied here is not entirely that “[a]ll the world’s a stage, [a]nd all the men and wom(a)en merely players […]” (Shakespeare 638) – but rather that the world is a circus and not even a simple but a three-ring one. Thus what is taking place in Chicago is, in fact, the production and realization of panem et circenses. Although, within the musicals (1976, 2002) the circus is mentioned concretely the circus, the carnival, the cabaret and the vaudeville can be considered a continuum as it is suggested above. All of the versions of Chicago can generally be categorized into genres that could be termed as “low or mass entertainment” (such as burlesque, screwball comedy, musical vaudeville and their sister genres). Chicago means to highlight that the American legal system and judicial process can be interpreted as public or mass entertainment, also suggesting thereby (that American culture involves this and as a result also projects) a carnivalesque image of America.

2. The Carnival World of the Story and the Characters

Bakhtin traces the origins of carnival-like festivities back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance primarily (but later also to antiquity (6) and claims that they were closely connected to “folk humor” and “people’s laughter” (4). In Chicago, although we have an urban setting, the carnival is still the people’s entertainment, the laughter is people’s laughter. The story basically and primarily targets, as an implied audience as well as its theme, the lower classes: the women of Chicago – including Roxie (the protagonist) – who, coming from the working class and/or lower middle class, provide entertainment “for the people.” Although, it is also a carnivalesque feature of Chicago that people of different classes meet and interact on a familiar basis and they get mixed up (Bakhtin 10).

Another important aspect of the criticism that depicts America as carnivalesque is that such a criticism can be expressed since American society makes room for it and the American culture is open for such an argument, such a discourse can be articulated as the US allows for it. Since a significant aspect of the carnival is that it is consecrated by tradition and the state exactly to produce a safety valve effect and allow for criticism. This criticism, however, is possible only in this un-official, out-of-the ordinary time and place, which by not being serious, ordinary and “real,” lets things be said that cannot be said otherwise and lets events and actions occur that otherwise could not have happened or would not have been tolerated if they had happened. As Bakhtin suggests, the protocol as well as the rituals of the original carnivals were deeply rooted in laughter and they were “consecrated by tradition” (5). The carnivals meant a double life, a double world for people, which were actually legitimized by the existing system (Bakhtin 5-6).

They offered a completely different, nonofficial, extraeclesiastical and extrapolitical aspect of the world, of man, and of human relations; they built a second world and a second life outside officialdom, a world in which all medieval people participated more or less, in which they lived during a given time of the year. (Bakhtin 6)

The carnival time being a unique, special, suspended period, allowed for everything working with a specific and out-of-the-ordinary logic. It also has to be emphasized that people actively and willingly participated in this unique event. This is exactly what can also be experienced in Chicago. Within the story, whatever happens is the result of a unique carnivalesque situation, and this greatly facilitates the fact that the female murderers, the violent women can get away with what they have done. In Chicago, similarly to the ancient and medieval carnivals, the people actively participate in the events and willingly live the aforementioned double life, which allows for the acquittal and success of the femmes fatales of the story. Since

[a]s opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed. (Bakhtin 10)

The merry relativity of truths and authorities was/is a typical aspect of the carnival. The world of the carnival did not convey or support an absolute truth or authority and nothing was immortalized or complete. The inverse logic of the carnival was highly characteristic (Bakhtin 10-11). It was “the peculiar logic of the ‘inside out’ (à l’envers), of the ‘turnabout,’ of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanantions, comic crownings and uncrownings” (Bakhtin 11). The world of Chicago is also inside out without the truth(s), authority(ies), values or justice of the “official world” by acquitting obviously guilty female murderers and turning them into celebrities (e.g.: Roxie and Velma) while executing innocent people (e.g.: Hunyak). Its peculiar inverse logic and the gay relativity of truths and authorities also postulate the world and the story of Chicago as that/those of a carnival where parodies, travesties, humiliations and profanations abound ending in the crowning of a fool in the figure of Roxie (the protagonist and anti-heroine of all versions): an ethically-morally-intellectually-challenged adulteress-murderess. This image of the world and social order turned upside down as a critique of America contrasts sharply with the value system that one can find in a less critical rendering of the country at an earlier stage of its history (Vajda 2008).

This is precisely manifested in the following example from the two latest versions (the scene is almost identical): in the closing scenes of the 1976 and the 2002 versions a performance of mass entertainment occurs, in which the carnivalesque femmes fatales articulate their identification with America. This scene resembles a meta-performance of the whole story as the Master of Ceremonies announces:

Ladies and gentlemen, the Vickers Theatre, Chicago’s first home of family entertainment, is proud to announce a first. The first time, anywhere, there has been an act of this nature. Not only one little lady, but two! You’ve read about them in the papers and now here they are – a double header! Chicago’s own killer dillers – those two scintillating sinners – Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly. (Ebb, Fosse 89)

Then, Roxie and Velma shout to the audience in a moment of carnivalesque self-identification with America, or at least, as products of a carnivalesque America:

VELMA. (To the audience): Thank you. Roxie and I would just like to take this opportunity to thank you. Not only for the way you treated us tonight, but for before this – for your faith and belief in our innocence. / ROXIE. It was your letters, telegrams, and words of encouragement that helped see us through our terrible ordeal. Believe us, we could not have done it without you. (As ORCHESTRA plays the Battle Hymn of the Republic.) VELMA. You know, a lot of people have lost faith in America. ROXIE. And for what America stands for. VELMA. But we are the living examples of what a wonderful country this is. (They hug and pose.) ROXIE. So we’d just like to say thank you and God Bless you. VELMA and ROXIE. God Bless you. Thank you and God Bless you. … God be with you. God walks with you always. God bless you. God bless you. (Ebb, Fosse 91)

The 1976 version closes with these ironic and self-reflexive words (probably due to the shocking and expressive message these final lines were omitted from the 2002 version, which is otherwise closely based on the 1976 one). The 2002 film closes with Velma and Roxie similarly thanking the people’s active participation in this carnival that immensely contributed to their freedom and success: “VELMA. Me and Roxie, we just would like to say thank you. / ROXIE. Thank you. Believe us, we could not have done it without you” (Marshall 1 h 40 min). These lines are very expressive and shocking because these immoral, criminal, dishonest, manipulative and murderous women are postulated as good people and are celebrated as innocent ones. In addition, they even state that they stand for America, and they “are the living examples of what a wonderful country this is” (Ebb, Fosse 91). They declare that although many people have lost faith in this country (probably due to disillusionment), the American values and ideals, THEY (Roxie and Velma as “good” examples) are here to prove the opposite. Supposedly, they are the ones that prove with their life examples that everything is fine and all right in this country. Experiencing the “double aspect of the world” (this dual logic of the carnival) while mixing the serious cults and myths with the comic and abusive ones as both being “equally ‘official’” was only possible as a result of the mechanism of the carnival (Bakhtin 6). The specificity of the carnival allowed for the parodying and ridiculing of the “serious world” in a legitimate way and thus granting these femme fatale figures freedom, success and even celebrity status. The female ideal represented by the figures of Roxie and Velma contests a tradition formulated in early American white female ideal and contrasted to women of other races and nationalities (Vajda 2008).

Another aspect of the carnival imagery prevalent in Chicago is carnivalesque laughter. The carnival laughter is extremely complex since it is not an individual’s isolated reaction to a single event but it belongs to all the people. This laughter is also universal as it is directed at all of the participants while the people themselves produce it; the entire world is projected and seen through this special, carnivalesque lens. Yet, most of all, it is an ambivalent laughter because “it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding” (Bakhtin 11-12). The people of Chicago are actively and willingly involved in the carnival happenings; they simultaneously laugh at and participate in the events. Within this story, the world is also presented and viewed through the specific, “distorted” lens. The laughter inside/outside/around Chicago is also ambivalent since in spite of the merriment and the triumph of the female murderers it this unique laughter still mocks and derides all that happens. Here lies the greatness of the image of carnivalesque America: it invites and involves everybody and while the laughter is merry it also derides and mocks hence producing an ambivalent laughter that can, or concretely does, reveal and communicate criticism.

3. Scapegoating and Non-Americans

In Chicago, laughter’s function to provide criticism is vital and while laughter causes derision due to its degrading and materializing function by emphasizing the down-to-earth, the material and bodily aspects, and also because “[l]aughter degrades and materializes” (Bakhtin 20-24), the death-life cyclical connection (closely-related to the duality of laughter that degrades and elevates at the same time) (Bakhtin 25) is also of high significance since the new life for Roxie and Velma actually rises out of the grave of Hunyak. Hunyak’s sacrifice plays a crucial role in that the female murderers of Chicago can gain a new life. The acquittal of Roxie and Velma is only partly the result of the comic aspect (and their (comic) masquerade) since another central factor in this process is Hunyak, the sacrificial lamb whose death as a scapegoat produces their new life and “purifies” them. The idea of the comic-grotesque, tragicomic scapegoat is also supported by what John Parkin suggests, based on Henri Bergson, that the scapegoat is actually a comic figure (3). Wylie Sypher also adds that comedy is essentially a victory over death and a mode of regeneration: “[c]omedy is essentially a Carrying Away of Death, a triumph over mortality by some absurd faith in rebirth, restoration, and salvation” in spite of the fact that the original rites of the carnival were drenched with sacrificial human blood, yet, the carnival served to unite “the incompatibilities of death and life” (220). In addition, Sypher claims that comedy uses the scapegoat to do away with the evil: “[i]n its boisterous moods comedy annihilates the power of evil in the person of the scapegoat” (245). Nonetheless, the popular corrective laughter (as defined by Bakhtin) is what is generally applied to the amendment of vices and pretense (Bakhtin 22) in Chicago with more or less (much rather less) success. Within this story, the “regenerating and laughing death” (ibid) is in full force.

Scapegoating is of central importance in the acquittal of the guilty women in Chicago. In order to let the femmes fatales walk free somebody has to put on and take away the blame and this is the scapegoat, i.e.: Hunyak. In the various versions there is a difference to what extent she does this, but in the latest ones she even gets executed (as the only one and as the only innocent one). In this story, the “non-ideal” or rather the non-American is the one who becomes the scapegoat; a person, who does not manifest the prescribed American identity. She stands for the poor, the minority, the immigrant. In the original drama there are two women who are the unlucky ones: “hunyak” (Moonshine Maggie) and an eyetalian woman (named Lucia) – eyetalian is a US slang term meaning Italian (Dalzell 347) – she is obviously an immigrant who is non-American and who is financially challenged. Thus, just to be able to prove that the judicial system functions well they are those who are sacrificed on the altar of the American Dream, they do not get help in being acquitted (Watkins 1927). The innocence of the executed person is doubly important because it heightens the injustice of the system. The cultural construction of the non-American obviously had a long tradition in the mainstream culture with an important phase being the demarcation line established by the discourse of sentimentality (Vajda 2012; Vajda 2009; Vajda 2013).

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a fear of immigrants originating from the late nineteenth century. Americans were afraid as they presumed that because of the numerous immigrants there would be miscegenation and the nation would “degenerate” (Richardson 242). This scare generated by the eugenic enthusiasm was carried to such an extent that in 1882 the Congress acted to restrict immigration. Despite this, the number of immigrants was rising and most people arrived from Eastern and Southern Europe (“Austria-Hungary,” Italy, Poland etc.) and they were considered to be inferior to the northern Europeans (Richardson 246). The so-called “new immigration” from Southern and Eastern Europe reached the United States after the Civil War, which meant about 27 million people (Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Czech, Slovaks, Russians, Jews) and they constituted a great threat to the American Creed with their strange new ways of dressing, behavior, languages, religions etc. (Schlesinger 10). Later, during the twenties, there were again several “immigration restriction laws” introduced which were based on “national origin” (Annus 134), for example, the Immigration Act of 1924 which was destined to freeze the ethnic composition of the United States and to put a stop to the influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (Schlesinger 13-14). So, in the original drama of 1927, the Eyetalian woman named Lucia and Moonshine Maggie called “hunyak” symbolize this fear openly. Maggie cannot speak English properly and she is asking for Uncle Sam all the time, who will help her evidently signifying she is not American. She might be Hungarian on the basis of her name (yet she is much rather German due to the other allusions in the text). These women are molded into one, the figure of Hunyak, in the 1976 and the 2002 versions. In both of these versions, she speaks only Hungarian and she is the only one who is executed in spite of being innocent.

In the 1927 film version, Hunyak is not mentioned but the other female characters are also rather insignificant; except for Katie (who is not to be found in any of the other versions). In the 1942 adaptation, there is not a word about Hunyak either, similarly to the other minor female characters. This version strictly concentrates on Roxie. In the 1976 version, Hunyak returns and in The Cell Block Tango scene she talks about her case in Hungarian. The same happens in the 2002 adaptation. In the different versions of Chicago, only the innocent one is executed. Her Hungarian nationality is probably meant to signal that she is an immigrant and cannot explain her actions, thus cannot defend herself due to her lingual incapability (as one of her major shortcomings). “[…] It is also obvious that AARON is impatient with his client’s stubbornness and her inability to speak ‘American’” (Ebb, Fosse 72). When she gets executed all this happens in a true carnivalesque manner: with the crowd cheering and applauding in awe – as if they were participating in a medieval public execution similarly to how Frazer describes the sacrifice of the scapegoat within the festivities of the carnival (768).

As Frazer claims, the public “expulsion of devils is commonly preceded or followed by a period of general license, during which the ordinary restraints of society are thrown aside, and all offences, short of the gravest, are allowed to pass unpunished” (754). This is clearly a carnival that is described, and later on, Frazer openly discusses the connection between the ritual of the scapegoat and the carnival world. In ancient Greece and Rome, after having several versions of the scapegoat rituals (similar to the carnival) the darker forms of the ritual also appeared which included the death of the scapegoat. The public purification of the people hence involved that a “scapegoat” or a “vicarious sacrifice” would give his/her life for the others and bear all their sins. (Frazer 756-758) The Roman Saturnalias (predated carnivals as Bakhtin also implied) gave way to all kinds of license and merriment without constraints (10).

Scapegoating has its roots in the ancient custom and tradition of transferring the accumulated misfortunes and sins of a given community to a dying god or to some other being. This other being is supposed to bear away all the sufferings and guilt in order to leave the people innocent and happy. The transference of evil can occur to a person, an animal (goat, lamb, camel etc.) or an inanimate object (tree, bush etc. – although it is an interesting presumption that plants are inanimate), who or which will suffer all the pains and sorrows through this shift of burden instead of a given person or people (Frazer 706-709, 715). People usually resort to these methods to rid themselves of all the evils and to make a new start (Frazer 722). This is what happens in Chicago since Roxie (and Velma) can have a new start in life after the sacrifice of Hunyak. This new start is central as some of the basic ideals which constitute the American identity and are considered to be American values and ideals are youthfulness, beginnings, new beginnings, restart, renewal (Campbell, Kean 20-43; Kroes 28-32), freedom and everybody’s right to the pursuit of happiness – as we can find it in The Declaration of Independence (1776): “[w]e hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with CERTAIN [inherent and] inalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; […]” (Peterson 235).

Irén Annus claimed that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were both fundamental in the shaping of the future of American society and that everything that these documents granted to the American people were rooted in the notions of Enlightenment and all this was and still is “essential to their American identity” and sense of Americanness (Annus 104-108). A few of the concepts still prevalent concerning American identity springing from the conceptual framework of Enlightenment are “[d]eism and rationalism […] individual freedom of thought, speech and worship;” the belief that men are benevolent and there is human perfectability, progress and “social improvement” (Annus 105). What is also paramount in the realization of “the American Dream” apart from the ideals of “material success” and “social progress” is the ideal and the belief in “moral regeneration” (Annus 106). The secular foundation of this stress on morality can be found in the tradition started by thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson with his preoccupation with the role of the moral sense in interpersonal relations (Vajda 2021; Vajda 2020). Besides all of the notions mentioned above, moral regeneration is of central importance in Chicago as this latest idea, the possibility of moral regeneration, is one factor that greatly contributes to Roxie’s acquittal, this is one of the most significant points in the carnivalesque performance of her defense as Billy Flynn also states in the 2002 version: people cannot resist a reformed sinner (Marshall 40 min). Eventually, this is Roxie who is really granted the Lockean concept (adopted by Jefferson) of man’s “unalienable natural rights” of “equality, rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (Annus 106). The strong Christian tradition as it is described by Annus when discussing the Puritan heritage (102-104), the centrality of “civil religion” and the Judeo-Christian tradition (109-20) is also exploited in the various versions of Chicago since Roxie is posited as the daughter of God who is expecting a child, and in whose life religion is of great importance, this being another crucial factor in her acquittal that is the result of a carnivalesque performance. Actually, these anti-heroines are glorified and celebrated as the quintessential realizations of the ideal of the American identity and values. According to the rules of the star system of the times, there was a “fetishistic dichotomy of the woman” concerning the available categories either being a domestic angel or the fallen woman (Cristian 2008, 78), and evidently the ideal women were granted their American Dream, so even if Roxie was the exact opposite of the ideal woman, she was presented as one while becoming a star, so she was also associated with the ideals of the United States. Zoltán Dragon also asserts that stars were typically associated with the “dream factories” of cultural production and the star system was intertwined with the emblems of “the American Dream of success” (2008, 17). In fact, she managed to realize everything, to manifest her American ideal destiny by fulfilling the American Dream as it is described above. Roxie Hart while awaiting the death penalty for her deeds and crimes is acquitted and she is endowed with her unalienable rights: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Instead of imprisonment, punishment and death, she gets Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness just like everybody else in the story except for the scapegoat: Hunyak.

Frazer suggests that the ancient Saturnalia and the modern Carnival of Italy do not merely bear strong resemblance to each other but these might be termed as identical by all means, what is more, the public execution of a burlesque-grotesque figure in the midst of “feigned grief or genuine delight of the populace” is to be found in both (Frazer 768) – as it is also to be found in Chicago, a modern(-day) Saturnalia, a modern(-day) Carnival. The sacrifice of Hunyak can also be interpreted as a site for discussion and debate over cultural norms since feminine death (can) serve(s) as such a site as Elisabeth Bronfen suggests. In addition, the death of a beautiful woman (can) emerge(s) as a mode of assurance of cultural norms and values. As Bronfen argues, “the death of a beautiful woman emerges as the requirement for a preservation of existing cultural norms and values or their regenerative modification.” (Bronfen 1992, 181) Thus, Hunyak’s sacrifice as a beautiful (and innocent) woman is a requirement for the preservation of order and the prevailing cultural norms and values while also being an integrated part of the carnival.

Hence, as I have suggested, the image, the concept and function of carnivalesque America is to facilitate criticism and debate while also reinstating order and preserve existing norms and values. Through discussing Bakhtin’s theory, basic American concepts, ideals and relevant historical data as well as presenting how all these ideas can be found in Chicago on the level of the story as well as concerning the characters my aim was to prove that Chicago (1924 series of newspaper articles, 1927 drama, 1927 silent film, 1942 film noir/screwball comedy, 1975 stage musical or musical vaudeville, 2002 film musical) is a modern-day carnival that reflects on America as a carnival world. What is more, the carnivalesque femmes fatales of the story (in the two latest versions) even identify themselves with the US thus symbolically projecting a carnivalesque image of America.

Works Cited

Abrams, M. H. 1999. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, Thomson Learning Inc.

Annus, Irén. 2005. Social Realities in the Making. The Structuration of Society and the Constitution of American Identity. Papers in English & American Studies XI. Monograph Series 3. Szeged: JATEPress.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press.

Bronfen, Elisabeth. 2007. “Seductive Departures of Marlene Dietrich: Exile and Stardom in The Blue Angel.” In Gerd Gemünden and Mary. R. Desjardins (eds.) Dietrich Icon. Durham: Duke UP, 119-140.

——. 2003. “Seductive Departures of Marlene Dietrich: Exile and Stardom in The Blue Angel.” New German Critique 89, Spring-Summer, 9-31.

——. 1992. Over Her Dead Body. Death, femininity and the aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester UP.

Campbell, Neil and Alasdair Kean. 1997. American Cultural Studies. An Introduction to American Culture. London and New York: Routledge.

Cristian, Réka M. and Zoltán Dragon. 2008. Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories. Szeged: JATEPress.

Cuddon, J. A. 1999. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin.

Dalzell, Tom ed. 2009. The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English. New York: Routledge.

Ebb, Fred and Bob Fosse. 1976. Chicago. A musical vaudeville. New York: Samuel French INC.

Frazer, Sir James George. 1963. The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion. London: Macmillan.

Kérchy, Anna. 2005. “Wings and Masks. Grotesque Body, Laughing Language and Carnivalesque Texture in Angela Carter’s Nights At the Circus.” In Erzsébet Barát (ed.) Spaces in Transition. Papers in English & American Studies XII. Szeged: JATEPress, 47-60.

Kroes, Rob. 1996. If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall. Europeans and American Mass Culture. Chicago: U of Illinois P.

Marshall, Rob, dir. 2002. Chicago. Written by Bill Condon. Miramax Films.

Parkin, John. 1997. Humour Theorists of the Twentieth Century. Lewiston: Mellen P.

Peterson, Merrill D. ed. 1977. The Portable Thomas Jefferson. New York: Penguin Books.

Richardson, Angelique. 2004. “The birth of national hygiene and efficiency.” In Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham (eds.) New Woman Hybridieties. Femininity, feminism and international consumer culture, 1880-1930. London & New York: Routledge, 240-262.

Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. 1991. The Disuniting of America. Reflections on a Multicultural Society. n. p.: Whittle Direct Books.

Shakespeare, William. 1991. As You Like It. In Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds.) William Shakespeare. The Complete Works. Compact Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 627-652.

Sypher, Wylie. 1956. “The Meanings of Comedy.” In Wylie Sypher (ed.) Anchor Books edition. Comedy. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 193-255.

Urson, Frank, dir. 1927. Chicago. Written by Lenore J. Coffee. DeMille Pictures Corporation.

Vajda, Zoltán. 2021. “Friendship Never Ends: Spaces of Sympathy in Thomas Jefferson's Dialogues of the Head and the Heart.” In Ágnes Zsófia Kovács (ed.) Sentiment, History, and Intermediality: Essays in English and American Studies. Szeged: JATEPress, 27-34.

—. 2020. “Having It Both Ways? Sympathy and Self-Love in Thomas Jefferson’s Moral Philosophy.” In Mónika Fodor (ed.) FOCUS: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies. XII, 83-92.

—. 2013. “Complicated Sympathies: John C. Calhoun’s Sentimental Union and the South.” The South Carolina Historical Magazine. 114, No. 3., 210-230.

—. 2012. “Selfish Barbarians – Affectionate Americans: Thomas Jefferson, Indian Women, and the Power of Civilization.” In Zoltán Vajda (ed.) Költők, kémek, detektívek, pirítós és fordítások – Írások Novák György tiszteletére/Poets, spies, detectives, pieces of toast, and translations: Essays in honor of György Novák. Szeged: JATEPress, 261-264.

—. 2009. “Limited Expectations: Thomas Jefferson on the Moral Sentiments of Blacks and Race Relations.” In Zoltán Vajda (ed.) Kultúrán innen és túl – Írások Rozsnyai Bálint tiszteletére/Within and Without Culture: Essays in Honor of Bálint Rozsnyai. Szeged: JATEPress, 277-286.

—. 2008. “‘Amazons,’ ‘Angels,’ Blacks, and Savages: National Others in Thomas Jefferson’s Thought.” Americana E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. 4:1. Available: https://americanaejournal.hu/vol4no1/vajda

Watkins, Maurine. 1997. “Watkins’s Chicago Tribune Articles.” In Thomas H. Pauly (ed.) Chicago, With the Chicago Tribune Articles That Inspired It by Maurine Watkins. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 115-157.

—. 1927. Chicago. New York: Alfred A Knopf.

Wellman, William A., dir. 1942. Roxie Hart. Written by Nunnally Johnson. Twentieth Century Fox.

AT THE CROSSROADS OF AMERICAN CINEMA AND AMERICAN STUDIES

Zsófia Anna Tóth

This paper examines the relationship between American studies and film studies. It overviews the international and transnational aspects of American studies and looks at the question of Americannes from a global point of view. By citing Stephen H. Sumida and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, it is stated that by the 21st century, the international arena of America Studies and how Americanness is defined and examined outside the United States are at the centre of attention. Then, the importance of American films as cultural mediators is pointed out and how American studies and American films are actually intertwined even if relatively few scholars address this fact – Jonathan Auerbach and Réka Crsitian also highlight this. All in all, American cinema is more broadly discussed within the realm of international as well as transnational American studies in our recent decades.[18]

Keywords: American studies, transnational, international, film studies, American cinema

“What is American about American film study?” asks William Rothman in the title of the 29th Chapter of The “I” of the Camera, Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics. He claims that America’s film experience is unique especially for those outside the United States because the impact of the film is always connected to the specter of Americanization which, within the country, it is commonly seen as American (Rothman 1). I would like to start my discussion with some reflections on the recent national and international situation of American studies and later proceed onto the issue of American cinema, and its American features or Americanness as well as its connectedness to Americanization beyond the borders of the United States.

In 2002, Stephen H. Sumida started his presidential address to the American Studies Association (ASA) by asking his colleagues about the international dimensions of American studies (333). He considered essential to have information about the international aspect of American studies and aimed to discuss it in detail since previously this aspect of the discipline had not been regarded as important or relevant to focus on within the larger field of study. Instead of concentrating on the discussion of Americanness and American studies from a national point of view, Sumida targeted the question with an outlook on its more universal impact on the international arena. After citing the opinion of several scholars of American studies outside of the United States, Sumida states that these “international colleagues” (334), show uncertainties about “what the name of the field means any more, when it seems that in the United States we concern ourselves mainly with a ‘discussion of identity politics variously represented as universalism, multiculturalism, nationalism, postnationalism, American studies, New American studies, globalism, localism.’” (334-5). He goes on quoting “a leader of a national association for American studies outside the United States” (335) who says that given national association had more direct concerns about the “economy, security, politics […] the identity question” (Sumida 335) concerning Americanness. A combination of these concerns is necessary also in the construction of American studies course syllabi. He furthers the ideas expressed by Linda Kerber, who asks whether “the term ‘American studies’ is becoming once again an invitation for political scientists, economists, as well as scholars of other social sciences and of literature, history, cultural studies, religion, and the arts to participate” (qtd. in Sumida 337). Kerber questions whether there has been a change concerning American studies again since the 1990s when Cultural Studies dominated the field. She claims that “the term ‘now would encompass some of the more capacious international studies that come under the heading of the ‘internationalization of American studies’” (ibid.). Sumida assumes that this change eventually took place and the study of American studies outside the US does include all various fields listed by Kerber above (ibid.). American studies also involves film studies, more specifically the study of American Cinema in and outside the United States, which obviously belongs to the field mentioned by Kerber as “the arts.”

In the presidential address given to the American studies Association in 2004, Shelley Fisher Fishkin followed Sumida’s train of thought when she emphasized the international aspect of American studies. In her paper entitled “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American studies,” she declares that

[T]he goal of American studies scholarship in not exporting and championing an arrogant, pro-American nationalism but understanding the multiple meanings of America and American culture in all their complexity. Today American studies scholars increasingly recognize that that understanding requires looking beyond the nation’s borders, and understanding how the nation is seen from vantage points beyond its borders. (Fishkin 20)

In the 21st century, American studies scholars and the leaders of ASA in the US started to lay more and more emphasis on the international arena of America Studies and on the ways in which Americanness is defined and examined outside the United States. The combination of various views is considered more and more important together with the integration of non-US based American studies into the work of ASA. The current view is that the study of America and the definition(s) of Americaness should be made in a transnational-international arena, and not only within United States’ national borders. Fishkin adds that

[I]t is up to us, as scholars of American studies, to provide the nuance, complexity, and historical context to correct reductive visions of America. Whenever people with power act on visions of America that rests on oversimplification, myth, and a blind faith that America is always right – or, for that matter, always wrong – that is a call to us as American studies scholars to do our work. (20)

Fishkin also states that the field of American studies itself went through a dramatic transformation during the last four decades when the previous “exceptionalist visions” were replaced by the voices of women and minorities, which were (re)discovered and recovered by scholars (20). Fishkin elaborates on Amy Kaplan’s observations by saying that the world in the 1990s was still perceived in terms of “us” and “them,” of “domestic” and “foreign,” of “national” and “international” (Fishkin 21). However, she observes that this world-view has changed and given the vast complexity of American studies, the field has to be examined in further detail, as America has always been in the process of blurring the boundaries between inside and outside as well as between national and international. In her own words:

[T]he complexity of our field of study as we understand it today, however, requires that we pay as much attention to the ways in which ideas, people, culture, and capital have circulated and continue to circulate physically, and virtually, throughout the world, both in ways we might expect, and unpredictably; it requires that we view America, as David Palumbo-Liu put it, as a place ‘always in process itself.’ It requires that we see the inside and outside, domestic and foreign, national and international, as interpenetrating. (Fishkin 21)

Fishkin writes that not everybody should do transnational work because there is still a lot to do within American studies that is non-transnational, yet, “the transnational becomes more central to American studies” (22). Fishkin considers that, this way, it will be recognized that the United States and American culture have long been transnational crossroads of cultures: “[I]n the twenty-first century, American studies is increasingly doing justice to the transnational crossroads that we are and, indeed, that we always have been.” (Fishkin 43)

However, before this international and transnational turn in American studies there have already been American studies scholars outside the United States addressing issues that are recognized and integrated into the international and transnational concept of American studies by ASA today. Following Gertrude Stein’s definition of the 20th century as the American Century, Rob Kroes observed in 1991 that Europeans – as well as other nations across the globe – stand at the “receiving end of American Cultural Imperialism” (Kroes 3) because Americanness has been spread all over the world through political, economic and cultural imperialism.

One of the most general ways of spreading Americanness is through films but also through various channels of mass production and distribution like television, sound recordings, the press, photography, etc. (Kroes 10). Kroes claims that while people watch the American films outside the United States they internalize the messages about American identity, about its values and concepts, and within their culture(s), American culture becomes re-contextualized and re-semanticized outside its own cultural frame (3-4). It seems that the cultural crossroads have long been part of American studies, especially outside the United States, before the new direction singled out by Sumida at the ASA inside the United States. Films have a central role in the distribution of American values, diverse cultural phenomena and identity patterns; and via its mechanisms new symbolic messages of images can be rearranged and rendered (8).

The United States gained leading status among the film-producing nations by 1916 and maintained its position even today (Gronemeyer 50). Andrea Gronemeyer claims that Europeans primarily intended to use cinema for political purposes but for Americans films were first and foremost consumer products (51). Since films are indeed consumer products, the allegorical repertoire of the American Dream seems appropriate to be linked with the issue of films through the possibility of their commerce and commercial exploitation (Kroes 8; Gronemeyer 51).

As Rob Kroes writes, “America’s national symbols and myths have been translated into an international iconographic language, a visual lingua franca. They have been turned into free-floating signifiers, internationally understood, free for everyone to use” (8) in this international and transnational commerce of Americanness through the tools of visual culture. Kroes also adds that “[m]odern media of mass reproduction, like film, photography, the press, radio, television, sound recordings, have filled the semiotic space of people everywhere with messages made in America” (10). American films, as technological-artistic conveyors of American culture carried obvious American values into the everyday realities of people outside the United States by sometimes altering and modifying their own vision of diverse cultural concepts. However, the people outside the United States do not only receive these ideological messages but change and modify these by contextualizing them within their own interpretational realm. In a reverse manner, they reconceptualize and reconstruct a mediated American culture and its products, a process that results sometimes in having a reverse effect on American culture and the United States, an effect gradually recognized and internalized by international-transnational American studies today. Let me quote Kroes, who makes it

clear that European commercials made for European products may draw on semiotic repertoires initially developed in and transmitted from America. Yet, in a creolizing freedom not unlike America’s modularizing cast of mind, Europeans in their turn now freely re-arrange and recombine the bits and pieces of American culture. (13)

He concludes here – as an authentic voice understanding American culture and American visual culture from the outside – that before any new direction in American studies within the United States took an international turn, many people already used visual lingua francas transmitted from the United States.

For indeed, as European examples, from the political and the economic market place, serve to illustrate, the logic of a choice of freedom knows no bounds, once set free from controlling American standards of taste and decency. As a lingua franca’s wont, it moves in a realm of free creolization, where the controlling authority of a mother culture no longer holds. Americanization then should be the story of an American cultural language traveling and of other people acquiring that language. What they actually say in it, is a different story altogether. (Kroes 16)

Now, I would like to return to Rothman’s question on the American features of the American cinema (Rothman 359). Despite the international turns in the field of American studies in the third millennium, he still sees the question from a national perspective but fortunately leaves a door open for alternatives and changes, while trying to approach the problem or the question from various points of view. Rothman offers an answer by paraphrasing Stanley Cavell, who states that the Americanness of American cinema is closely linked to the American tradition of philosophical thought.

[T]he American-ness of American cinema cannot be separated from the ways American movie genres have taken up and revised, made their own, the American tradition of philosophy founded by Emerson and Thoreau, an American way of thinking that it has also been an American tradition to repress (qtd. in Rothman 359).

Rothman goes on by saying that it was only in the late 1960s and early 1970s “when the case for the academic study of film was originally made to American university administrations and faculties, film study predominantly envisioned itself as a new field of criticism” (364). The works to be studied were the products of the “classical” period of American cinema but it turned out that other achievements of cinema should also be included into the research and study of films. Hence, issues of class, gender, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity gained more and more attention, and also those related to multicultural approaches. It seemed “appropriate to ask in a more intense way critical, philosophical and historical questions about the notion of multi-culturalism in relation to the tradition areas of research in film … studies” (Rothman 365).

Rothman observed, in 2004 (sic!), that “the field of film study in America has never definitively won its struggle to secure its intellectual identity” (366). So, it seems that the study of American films in the Academy was subject to slow change. Rothman also adds that American cinema Studies adopted an alien “Theory,” seen as an entity that encompassed a mass of different non-American academic writings, which emphasized the repressive ideology of classical cinema (368) in contrast with the ideas of Thoreau and Emerson, strongly advocated by him. But, when film study in America could finally claim a voice of its own and could ensure its capacity to think for itself, “by bowing down to Theory, film study in America betrayed its capacity to think for itself and submitted to the suppression of its own voice” – says Rothman citing Cavell (qtd. in Rothman 368). Rothman further laments over the loss of American uniqueness of American Film studies and maybe even the films themselves due to Theory by stating that:

[I]t was in quest of denying the necessity of thinking about itself, and the necessity of thinking for itself, I take it, that American film study embraced the still-dominant myth about its own origin – the myth that envisions the field as born, or born again, through its transfiguring faith in Theory. […] This myth is the disavowal of America’s own experience, a denial that the American experience was and is formative for film study in America. (369)

Paradoxically, Rothman, even in the 21st century, is against any transnational and international connections and intermingling of ideas, concepts, approaches and trends within films and film studies. He considers a tragic aspect the fact that European ideological trends and thoughts enter the academic thinking concerning American films, which, for him, infiltrated and ‘polluted’ American Film studies. Rothman starts his book by saying that “America’s experience of film is virtually unique in that in almost every other country, the impact of film cannot be separated from the process or at least the specter of Americanization. In America, film in no sense represents something external; it is simply American” (1). In his argument, while acknowledging the impact of non-American intellectual trends, ideologies, and people contributing to American cinema in various ways, Rothman is concentrating on defining and finding the true, specific and unique features seen as the Americanness of American cinema and film studies. He somehow fails to recognize that cinema has always been transnational by definition.

Mel van Elteren joins Kroes, Fishkin and Sumida and opposes Rothman in discussing the international and transnational study and discussion of Americanness by stating that spreading of American values through various means is not a hegemonic, unilateral process but a negotiation between cultures, with the receiving nations or cultures assimilating, transforming and modifying what they get from American cultural products. There is a certain transculturation going on. Americanness is, accordingly, the reception of a cultural language and a set of symbols that anyone can use, play with or ironically employ through their interpretations of this cultural repertoire. The receiving cultures usually decide and choose what they want from American culture (van Elteren 345-47). Van Elteren warns us that the reception of American products goes on especially on the level of the individual because of the sociopsychological dimensions of any cultural product:

[s]ociopsychological dimensions cannot be simply deduced or derived from discourses as reconstructed through analyses of the contents of manufactured artifacts such as magazines, films and television programs, books, and other ‘texts’ or cultural outputs. The wider tendency in cultural studies (or American studies of a similar kind) to ‘read off’ psychology from cultural products instead of locating psychological feelings and thoughts with individuals, entails discourse determinism. (352)

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács, after Pratt, additionally highlights the role of transculturation and describes it as the process of how “subordinated or marginal groups select or invent from materials transmitted to them by dominant or metropolitan cultures” (Kovács 2010, 84). Van Elteren also claims that “Americanization is usually not solely a cultural, but a more comprehensive, multivariegated process” (355).

In 2006, Jonathan Auerbach started his discussion of the relationship between American studies and Film studies by saying that somehow only a handful people dealt with this relationship in particular and with the question of what the attitude of the discipline is towards film. Réka Cristian is also of this opinion when discussing the symbiotic relationship of American studies and film studies highlighting that originally this connection was mostly looked at (if at all) as a blind spot, and it was not really addressed as a central concern; however, she insists that it is a very intrictae relationship and its study helps both fields of research in major ways (2014). Auerbach states that American studies does not seem to include films among its objects of study (Auerbach 31). He suggests that “[T]he most obvious reason for the lack is that US intellectuals throughout the twentieth century ignored and/or dismissed virtually all forms of popular culture, giving such cultural forms ‘no respect’” (33). Auerbach claims that although there was a strict separation of highbrow elitist and lowbrow popular culture right from the beginning of the twentieth century, only several scholars and US intellectuals inside and outside the university took the study of films seriously (33). Yet, it is a central aspect of the cinema that has gained real artistic status and power, as Zoltán Dragon argues, that the viewer goes through an identificatory process, hence starts to get immersed in the world on screen (Cristian and Dragon 2008, 42), thus, the examination of American studies in connection with the mechanisms of (American) films is inevitable as it is an illusory Americanization that occurs through this identification within the viewing experience. Moreover, as Réka M. Cristian writes, the American films, especially those produced by Hollywood, hold “a considerable cultural influence over American and global audiences” (Cristian and Dragon 2008 17). Irén Annus also shares this view that American films, and visual culture at large, belong to “a global trans-cultural space” (2012). Auerbach, then, concludes that

[A]mid the current calls for change in the academy, the return of the public intellectual or a reinvigorated interdisciplinarity, this early lost intersection between film and American studies merits close consideration, suggesting how those of us concerned with the futures of American studies would do well to carefully attend to its pasts. (47)

Auerbach is right in his assumption about the relationship of American studies and film studies, however, we must not forget that films have always been part of the cultural heritage of the United States and the discussion over these have long fueled the intellectual debates in and outside the arena of American studies. However, in addition, Zoltán Vajda also adds that the travel of European theoretical and methodological considerations into scholarly fields attached to American visual cultures, at the same time, should not be seen as a surprising or new phenomenon. Intellectual history has shown how European influences can be explored in a productive way when it comes to the exploration of race or gender issues within an American context, from the visual perspective (Vajda 2012). Yet one thing seems certain: in the 21st century, American cinema is more broadly discussed within the realm of international as well as transnational American studies.

Works Cited

Annus, Irén. 2012 “Trans-Culturing Jane Austen: The Mollywood Adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.” AMERICANA, E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. 8: 1. Web: https://americanaejournal.hu/vol8no1/annus.

Auerbach, Jonathan. 2006. “American Studies and Film, Blindness and Insight.” American Quarterly 58.1, 31-50.

Cristian, Réka M. 2014. “American Studies and Film: From Blind Spot to Symbiosis.” AMERICANA, E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. 10: 1. Web: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol10no1/cristian.

Cristian, Réka M. and Zoltán Dragon. 2008. Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories. Szeged: JATEPress.

Fisher Fishkin, Shelley. 2005. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association.” American Quarterly. 57.1, 17-57.

Gronemeyer, Andrea. 1999. Film. A Concise History. London: Laurence King Publishing.

Kovács, Ágnes Zsófia. 2010. Literature in Context: Reading American Novels. Szeged: JATE Press.

Kroes, Rob. 1999. “American Empire and Cultural Imperialism. A View From the Receiving End.” Conference Papers on the Web. The American Impact on Western Europe: Americanization and Westernization in Transatlantic Perspective. Conference at the German Historical Institute. Washington, D.C., March 25-27, 1999. Web: www.ghi-dc.org/conpotweb/westernpapers/kroes.pdf

Rothman, William. 2004. The “I” of the Camera, Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Sumida, Stephen H. 2003. “Where in the World Is American Studies? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association.” American Quarterly. 55.3, 333-52.

Vajda, Zoltán. 2012. “On the Visual Dimension of Sympathy in Thomas Jefferson’s Moral Philosophy.” AMERICANA, E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. Volume VIII, Number 1, Spring. Web: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol8no1/vajda

Van Elteren, Mel. 2006. “Rethinking Americanization Abroad: Toward a Critical Alternative to Prevailing Paradigms.” The Journal of American Culture. 29.3, 345-67.

EDITH WHARTON ON FRENCH MANNERS IN THE CONTEXT OF WORLD WAR I

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

This essay looks at Wharton’s model of French culture in French Ways and Their Meaning (1919) from the perspective of her work on social patterns of behavior. The paper argues that Wharton’s account of French culture in the book reflects her concern that WWI has ruined those social patterns she considers superior and that it also records her effort for a partial reconstruction of said patterns. I am going to argue for this reading in two steps. Firstly, I am going to describe the reception of Wharton’s general concern with social patterns of behavior from the perspective of gender and cultural studies. Secondly, I am to explicate her presuppositions about a general model of culture including male-female roles and relations she relies on when she differentiates French and US cultures in French Ways[19]

Keywords: Edith Wharton, ethnography, writing culture, World War I, French Ways and Their Meaning (1919)

Proem

Published in 1919, French Ways and their Meaning belongs to the heterogeneous group of Wharton’s wartime texts. Wharton published extensively during the war, but only part of her output was strictly “literary,” as her engagement in war relief work from 1914 on reduced her literary output considerably. She published a collection of short stories titled Xingu in 1915, but it contained texts from before the war mostly, as Wharton only added “Coming Home” as a new one to it. In 1918 she published a war story The Marne, and in 1920 The Age of Innocence about the 1870s of her childhood. Instead of fiction, she published war journalism and collected these articles under the title Fighting France (1915), then she edited The Book of the Homeless (1916) for charity purposes. Her essays on French culture that originated in her speeches she delivered for American soldiers about France after the US joined the war in 1917. Wharton’s last travel book In Morocco (1920) reported about her 1917 trip to the then French protectorate and was published after the war along with The Age of Innocence.

Several key studies have been published on Wharton and her work focusing on its ethical, scientific, artistic, feminine aspects as part of the interdisciplinary contextualizing approach since the late 1990s. Studies relevant from the perspective of the criticism of culture in French Ways include the analysis of Wharton’s philanthropic and literary work during the Great War by Alan Price (1996) and Julie Olin-Ammentorp (2004). In relation to scientific thinking about human culture, Paul Ohler discussed the role of evolutionary theory in her fictional work and her critique of social Darwinism (Ohler 2006). In relation to theories of art, Sarah Bird Wright surveyed Wharton as a cultured amateur in her travel writing (Wright 1997). In addition, Emily Orlando has revealed the role contemporary visual culture played in the way she portrayed her heroines (Orlando 2007). Extending the scope of texts for analysis, Laura Rattray has examined her not only as a novelist but as a playwright, a poet and a travel author as well (Rattray 2020). Related to these new approaches, different sections of her texts have been analyzed, beside her war related work also her short stories and her work from the thirties, as well as archival material (Ohler 2019).

In criticism, the most immediate direction comments to French Ways come from is the gendered discussion of the new Frenchwoman. Virginia Ricard argues that France provided Wharton with a standard from which to criticize the US and to compare French women to women in the US, clearly preferring French ways also in marriage (Ricard 2019, 86). However, Wharton’s relation to France is not necessarily linked to her concern with marriage and gender. William Blazek tells about Wharton’s relation to France by prioritizing the topic of cultural continuity; and French Ways as a historical account of national characteristics (Blazek, 2012, 280). Laura Rattray’s positions French Ways as part of a war related cultural debate when she considers it as Wharton’s defense of her decision to live in France (Joslin and Price 1993, 10, 12 qted. in Rattray 2020, 107) and when she, as a contrast, also points out Wharton’s enhanced identification with America in the text (Rattray 2020, 107). Discussions of the frightening destruction of French cultural continuity the Great War represents for Wharton prefer the focus on Wharton’s architectural language of loss (see Carney 2016, 198 and Kovács 2017, 559). This essay focuses on Wharton’s ethnographic work on French culture as a model for a US audience in 1919, at the end of the Great War, when cultural alliances between the US and France have shifted and needed to be rearticulated.

Introduction

I propose to look at Wharton’s model of French culture in French Ways and Their Meaning (1919) from the perspective of her work on social patterns of behavior. My hypothesis is that her account of French culture reflects her concern that WWI has ruined those social patterns she considers superior and that it also represents her effort for reconstructing some of these patterns. I am going to argue for this reading in two steps. Firstly, I am going to describe the reception of Wharton’s general concern with social patterns of behavior from the perspective of gender and cultural studies. Secondly, I am to explicate her presuppositions about a general model of culture including male-female roles and relations she relies on when she differentiates French and US cultures in French Ways. This model also highlights Wharton’s preferred arrangement of social relations.

I. Recanonizing Wharton

During the 1980s Edith Wharton’s oeuvre was recanonized. The work was performed by scholars who foregrounded the female subversive potential in her fiction. As Millicent Bell puts it: “[T]hough she was no conscious feminist, it was felt that she had expressed her own struggles in fiction that showed her clear understanding of what it had meant to her to be a woman.” (Bell 1995b, 13) As a result, a multitude of books and articles have been published on the subject: biographies, monographs, comparative studies. The interest promoted biographical studies showing her life in terms of feminist psychopathology, as well as monographs investigating the commodification in the formation of the female artist’s character (Bell 1995b, 13-14). In 1984, for instance, Amy Kaplan in The Social Construction of American Realism articulated the commodification of the figure of the female artist in terms of the division between the private and the public sphere. She claimed that Wharton’s writing is situated at a complex intersection of class and gender. Wharton attempted to construct a separate personality in the mind of the public and to write herself out of the private domestic sphere, inscribing a public identity in the marketplace, unlike contemporary lady novelists of the domestic sphere like H. B. Stowe (Kaplan 1988, 70 and Wright 1997, 5). Wharton’s achievement in constructing a public identity for herself as a female author was considered to be a significant alteration of the public roles designated for female novelists of her time.

As Bell goes on, today scholars are more interested in Wharton as the writer of culture than in Wharton as the woman writer (Bell 1995b, 15 and Ammons 1995) on race as well (Kassanoff 2004 and Annus 2019). Yet, it seems that the body of travel writings that clearly fit into the ‘writing of culture’ slot and interest indicated by Bell (Pratt 1993) can be included in the description of the construction of Wharton’s public identity as author, as well. By writing American travel books, Wharton took upon herself a position formerly filled by American men of letters, a position forbidden for lady novelists. It was exactly through the modification of the public roles of the female novelist that she was able to write travel books. However, there was one specific problem with her newly forged public identity. Interestingly, Wharton, the woman of letters, seems arch conservative in questions of gender and class. In other words, she writes nonfiction not to subvert but rather to preserve the existing cultural and social status quo. So much so that Frederick Wegener, the editor of a Wharton’s uncollected critical writing states that her criticism does little to “locate a genuinely feminine sensibility in Wharton’s work” (Wegener 1996, 44). Also, Michael Nowlin argues along similar lines: “Wharton boldly set out to claim cultural authority on grounds long exclusively occupied by men … in the public arena …[but] showed no eagerness to challenge the bifurcation of culture along gendered (as well as class) lines” (Nowlin 1998, 446). It seems the female subversive potential in Wharton cannot be readily reconciled with her public identity – and what is the use of a new kind of female author who only copies male examples?

On the basis of this opposition critics are tempted to ask whether Wharton was modern or conservative, feminist or not (Haytock 2008). Yet asking such questions cut us off from the achievements of Wharton’s work. Looking at the work from the perspective of ‘writing culture,’ it is more useful to look at her output in terms of what it does. In this sense, we can look at Wharton’s work as a method of channeling social conflicts of her time (Bentley 1995, 50). For instance, one can look at how Wharton represents women’s changing social roles in changing contexts or the fashioning of the female position. So in French Ways, the task is not so much to point out the incompatibility of the feminist sensibility and the public identity either. Rather, the task is to explicate how the text represents the sphere of culture and how it articulates the shock of WWI for the US, and how this relates to the social roles of women according to Wharton.

II. French Culture in French Ways

Wharton’s work is a collection of articles permeated with the intent of warming the feelings of the American reading public and American soldiers towards their war ally, France (Green 2002, 431). At first glance, the book’s seven chapters simply consist of a series of positive conservative traits the French, as a people, are supposed to possess (Olin-Ammentorp 2004, 86). As a result, an idealized image of the French – in general – appears from the introduction. At the same time, a model of culture as such can be constructed on the basis of Wharton’s scattered remarks. If one looks at what Wharton considers real culture, real education and real life (her terms), one can understand the basis of her criticism of the US and the objectives of her text better (Schriber 1987, 264-5).

Practically, the idealized image of the French confutes the negative stereotype Americans tend to have about the French. Each positive feature Wharton enlists has its negative counterpart it aims at turning over. It is revealing to see how the idealized image reforms a former, sinister stereotype. For instance, the new positive trait of continuity stands against the old American belief that the French are old fashioned or traditional. Another long standing grudge is erased when Wharton argues that knowing how to live a real life describes what otherwise is known as the French being sensual and immoral. Another example could be about the French being cautious with money; this can be mistakenly called being frugal with money. In other words, instead of saying ‘No, the French are not immoral, sensual, frugal, traditional, etc., as we tend to believe they are’, Wharton’s rhetoric focuses on the positive cultural framework these individually unpopular features fit into.

Yet the main purpose of the new list of features lies in catalyzing the self-reflection of Americans. Wharton points out a new frame of reference for Americans to think about the French as artistically minded and well-educated. Simultaneously, she points out the mistakes of the American perspective that misreads the French as a people. Although the French can be regarded to be sensuous, immoral, frugal, impolite, conservative, bad businessmen (to name a few traits), this becomes possible only if one loses sight of cultural continuity in which all these individual features fit into. In turn, the framework Americans tend not to see behind French ways remains an example for the rest of Europe and America alike.

The central reason why peoples misunderstand each other can be found in how they think about the relation of the individual to the community. In France, the community regulates the individual, overwrites individual rules. In contrast, in America a belief in individual rights ensures that individual aims and incentives are regarded more important than communal regulations. Wharton comments that Americans should reconsider their former stereotypes about the French and reflect on their own beliefs and values instead. “Before calling a certain trait a weakness, and our own opposite trait a superiority, we must be sure, as critics say, that we ‘know the context’; we must be sure that what appears a defect in the character of another race will not prove to be a strength when better understood.” (Wharton 1919, 18), says Wharton.

However, against her own advice, Wharton does not remain a neutral observer of the two sets of cultural values. It is her contention that average Americans stand at a lower level of social organization and knowledge than the average French (Green 2002, 436). She holds up the French example to follow because she maintains a belief in the existence of real culture, real knowledge, real life yet to be obtained by the average American. After the turmoil of WWI, Americans should take the opportunity to understand the French and to learn from them. She puts in her introduction a somewhat biased form: the labels American and Latin are convenient, simply a loose way of drawing a line between the peoples, “who drink spirits and those who drink wine, between those whose social polity dates from the Forum, and those who still feel and legislate in terms of the medieval forest” (Wharton 1919, viii). She places the two cultures at opposite ends of the scale as far as social organization is concerned. In the book, Wharton’s primary objective is to give a warning: to show the medieval social conditions she thinks Americans live by and also to pinpoint the way out of this situation.

Wharton’s comments on the French in particular provide a chance for reconstructing her model of culture in general and this system explains her lowly view of US social patterns.

Her model can be introduced through her three terms: real civilization, real education, and real life. Firstly, Wharton claims that real civilization is a way of life: it forms speech, manners, taste, ideals, judgment, all at the same time. So real civilization is a process, it is a long-term education that extends to the whole of life. Instead of the word “culture” she often uses the term “education,” partly because she maintains that in the US the term culture is looked upon with contempt, but also because the two concepts overshadow each other in her vocabulary. Secondly, for her, real education takes time and effort, as knowledge and manners cannot be obtained in college during a two-year or three-year course, as is often supposed in the US. Finally, real life comes into being as the result of good education and an ability to see events and human actions as parts of a historical continuity (e. g. the French). So Wharton’s concept of culture covers historical patterns of social habit, or, to put it differently, it maps the historicity of man’s social self (see Christian 2006 and 2011).

The cultural contrast between the US and France, or Anglo-Saxon and Latin spheres can be described in terms of two basically different patterns of social habit. Interestingly, Wharton suggests that we take their two different concepts of love as a primary example of the different patterns of social convention. To understand the different concepts of love one must first understand the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon conceptions of marriage. In the Anglo-Saxon world, marriage is supposed to be determined solely by reciprocal inclination, and to bind the parties not only to a social but also to a lifelong physical loyalty. In this system of love, that one who has never accepted and never will accept such bonds (as Wharton claims), immediately becomes a pariah and sinner. Conversely, in the Latin world, marriage is founded for the family and not for the husband and wife. Marriage secures them as associates in the foundation of a home and the production of a family. It is a kind of superior business association based on the community of class, of political and religious opinion, and an exchange of advantages. Love is not expected in the association neither as an emotion nor in the form of physical loyalty. In other words, Wharton defies the old stereotype of the immoral and sensuous Frenchman and woman by placing the phenomenon of illicit sex into a social context quite incomprehensible or invisible for the average American.

For Wharton the French businesslike association of man and woman is, interestingly, a sign of superior interpersonal relations. For her, the relation of the French man and wife prove more valuable than the relation between married man and woman in the Anglo-Saxon world. The reason is that in France the idea of equality extends to the relation of man and woman, she claims. Here the married woman becomes a full social partner of men; she is also socially free to take part in the intellectual life of the salons. In many cases she rules French life through the important relations she can establish with the men in her circle. Wharton calls these relations “frank social relations” (112) and contrasts them to the relations an American woman has with both her husband and to men in general. In the US, a girl is free to romp around in society until she becomes married; then she is cut off from men’s society in all but the most formal ways. An American woman is listened to by women, because women are restricted to the domestic sphere where they are engaged by questions of art and ideas. In America, the clear division of roles between domestic and public spheres relies on an odd Anglo-Saxon view that a love of beauty and an interest in ideas imply effeminacy.

III. Wharton’s View of the New Frenchwoman

Wharton’s primary example of French ways of culture can be found in her account of the new Frenchwoman. Wharton claims the role of the Frenchwoman is so telling about French ways she devotes a whole chapter to discussing it. Her position, when taken out of context, is often recalled as groundbreaking and modern, yet read as part of her story to educate Americans through the French example, it appears quite traditional indeed (Nowlin 2004, 90), as Elizabeth Ammons puts it, in the volume “the American Dream of personal liberty does not apply to women” (Ammons 1980, 127). So Wharton thinks very unlike Mae West, who rose to national prominence not long after Wharton, spoke about the American Dream for women also, and realized the Horatio Alger myth (Tóth 142-3). Let us take a look at the chapter and feminine roles in detail now in order to specify the values the Frenchwoman exemplifies for Wharton.

Wharton claims that the new Frenchwoman is really not new but America has never taken the trouble to look at her and understand her (99). On the surface, the difference between American and French women is that the Frenchwoman dresses better, knows more about cooking, is more feminine, more excitable, more emotional, more immoral (100). Still, the basis of the difference lies in the fact that the Frenchwoman is a real grown up person while the American remains unrestricted by traditional discipline. American women have little part of real living because they lack the old and rich social experience needed for it. The reason for this lack can be found in the fact that American women are mostly each other’s audience; in other words, they live their social life in an isolated realm of women (102), whereas the Frenchwoman acts as the business partner of her husband and a peer of other men in social intercourse. This social sense of being grown up is not diminished by the fact that the French wife has less legal independence than the American.

In this social sense of growing up, invisible for money-focused Americans, the Frenchwoman actually rules French life: “she rules it under a triple crown, as a business woman, as a mother, and above all, as an artist” (111). Wharton links this social sense to the Frenchwoman’s sense of beauty in particular and importance of life as art for the French in general (112). The behavior of the Frenchwoman represents exactly that sense of social maturity and knowing how to live (savoire vivre) beyond concerns with money the French as a whole seem to possess. Interestingly, it is the married woman whose social position permits the full exercise of her social powers, as girls are most severely isolated from socializing. Americans, as we have seen, are familiar with the reverse of this scenario, since in the US girls are allowed to ‘romp’ with male associates while married women are not. This is the reason why American married women cannot perform as social centers outside their households.

Wharton values the social roles filled in by French women by clinging to one presupposition. She takes for granted that the ‘knowing how to live,’ the aesthetic sense of beauty, as she often recalls, is more valuable than the money-oriented materialist vision Americans as a whole represent. It is interesting to note that Wharton’s take on French and American women contrasted sharply with that of Thomas Jefferson a century before, who had a decisive role in intellectually relegating white middle-class American women to the domestic sphere (Vajda 2008). Wharton’s idealizing French gender relations seems to have contested a tradition launched by people like Jefferson, who had argued for the exceptional status of white American women in view of domestic interpersonal relationships in comparison with Native American women living under the subjugation of supposedly unloving husbands (Vajda 2012).

Conclusion

So how are French ways presented in Wharton’s account? According to the new stereotype, the French are learned, and live according to historically formed social patterns of behavior, and devote much attention to maintaining this heritage through education. In Wharton’s view, Americans are supposed to improve as a people by following the French example of learning, and in their relation to the past, to education, to man-woman relations and towards marriage. Wharton’s representation of French ways is apparently biased. She takes Latin and Anglo-Saxon people as unities; she pretends to talk about and for the whole social spectrum of the US although she talks about the leisure class only. She argues for an unbiased comparative study of other cultures when she does have a clear preference for French ways and a clear dislike of American ways. The French middle and upper classes represent a top of the range model of culture for her.

In the conclusion of her French Ways and Their Meaning, Wharton differentiates between two kinds of Hell, a Latin and an Anglo-Saxon version. She distinguishes between two different concepts of Hell: one version is symbolized by Paolo and Francesca’s story, the other by The Scarlet Letter narrative. Wharton argues that the position the adulterous lovers take in their respective Hells reflects the values their respective cultures attribute to morals in general. In the Latin version the lovers are placed in the temperate zone of Hell because their sin against the third person is not considered a serious one. In this framework, real sinners are traitors of business, state, religion, and friendship instead. Conversely, in the Anglo-Saxon version the lovers are punished most severely because their sin against the third person is considered more serious, whereas in this framework business or state affiliations matter less. The basis of the difference lies in how the two cultures think about the relationship between individual and community. Wharton claims that the Latin model places values and rules of the community higher than individual ones, while the Anglo-Saxon version reflects a belief that individual values and rights are worth more than those of the community. Wharton claims that Americans could use the French concept more than they think. To me this scenario is challenging as it also characterizes Wharton’s perspective and method. Focusing on the theme of man-woman relationship, she jumps to generalizations about morals and nations as a whole, and even makes comparisons between cultures, all with educational intent.

I have looked into how Wharton’s French Ways represents changing social patterns of behavior after the turmoil of WWI. Although the text is primarily concerned with social losses, it also celebrates traditional cultural values. At the same time, it gives a warning for America to revert back to old standards, as exemplified by the French. Also, the text proves to be ambivalent, because when it brings female patterns of behavior into focus, it represents a social self in a network of culture (education) that forms a clear contrast with the biting educational intent of the volume. One can even find the tone of the text prescriptive and didactic because of the expressed Francophile bias. Therefore, Wharton’s model of culture in French Ways proves to be more challenging than the actual lesson on manners the book was intended to teach.

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Vajda, Zoltán. 2012. “Selfish Barbarians – Affectionate Americans: Thomas Jefferson, Indian Women, and the Power of Civilization.” In Zoltán Vajda, ed. Költők, kémek, detektívek, pirítós és fordítások – Írások Novák György tiszteletére/Poets, spies, detectives, pieces of toast, and translations: Essays in honor of György Novák. Szeged: JATE Press. 261-64.

——. 2008. “’Amazons,’ ’Angels,’ Blacks, and Savages: National Others in Thomas Jefferson’s Thought.” Americana e-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. 4: 1. Available: https://americanaejournal.hu/vol4no1/vajda

Wegener, Frederick, ed. 1996. Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wharton, Edith. 1919. French Ways and Their Meaning. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

——. (1977) “The Fulness of Life” Available: http://www.classicreader.com/book/1977/1/ Access: Feb. 5, 2009

Wright, Sarah Bird. 1997. Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing: The Making of a Connoisseur. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

A LITERARY AFTERLIFE: THE FIGURE OF HENRY JAMES IN COLM TÓIBÍN’S THE MASTER

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

There has been a Henry James revival of biofictions about the author’s life and appropriations of his novels in the past two decades. Colm Tóibín’s The Master is one of the most popular biofictions about James to date, which examines the popular gender aspect of James’s life and work by reenacting Leon Edel’s famous biography of James. The expectation would be that Tóibín’s novel will expose James’s implied homoerotic inclinations as central to our understanding of his output. Instead, this essay finds that Edel had been fully aware of and communicative about this aspect of James’ life, it did not need to be introduced by Tóibín. Instead, the main difference between the two accounts is the way James’s psychology is represented in Tóibín’s novel. In The Master, Edel’s psychobiography has been turned into a psychological novel by Tóibín that focuses on the ambiguities in James’s performances of gender identity.[20]

Keywords: Henry James, Colm Tóibín’s The Master, Leon Edel, biography, biofiction, gender

Proema

What can be the reason for the popularity of Henry James in contemporary fiction? Colm Tóibín’s widely admired The Master and David Lodge’s Author! Author!, both published in 2004, represent the tip of the iceberg only. Bethany Layne’s Henry James in Contemporary Fiction explores the phenomenon by asking what conditions enabled the emergence of this form of engagement with James the author and his work. Layne argues that the contemporary popular interest in James was generated by theoretical concerns with the nature of textuality and the subject, interests that intersect with issues of gender and sexuality in James studies. On the one hand, the questioning of biography as empirically founded coincides with recanonizations of James the formalist Master. On the other hand, the notion of the authorial subject as a discursive entity resonates to James’s practice of narration through one character’s consciousness.

In biofictions about Henry James a postmodern interest in textuality comes along with the sacrifice of the notion of the author as a biologically rooted, stable, reconstructible entity. Biofictions relate to each other self-consciously, and the author’s name becomes a figure in them (Layne 2020, 5). In the case of James, the gaps in his life and an outpouring of biographies paved the way for biofictions that create the plural figure of “James” the author and that suggest origins for his fictions.

Not surprisingly, the confluence of James criticism and biofiction has highlighted the theme of biography in James reception. In McWhirter’s Henry James in Context Sheila Teahan criticizes early biographers who relied heavily on the autobiographies and “assumed them to be history” (Teahan 2010, 63) and also those who took the continuity between life and fiction for granted (ibid.). She summarizes the story of James’s implied sexuality in the biographies to showcase the ever changeable forms biography can take. – As if providing an explicit further case study of Teahan’s line of thought, Michael Anesko’s Monopolising the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship tells the story of how Leon Edel’s monopoly of writing about James’s life resulted in the censoring of its homoerotic subtext (Anesko 2012 and Buchholtz 2014, 33-4). Based on thorough archival research, Anesko shows how the politics of scholarship forcefully formulated a mythical narrative about James’s life. At the same time, it makes one wonder what further narratives may possibly lie buried in the archives.

For the James centennial in 2016, the Library of America published James’s Autobiographies in Horne’s edition which provided many readers an occasion for remembering Henry James. The edition contained not only the three (two and a half) volumes of James’s autobiographies but also eight other related reminiscenses (Horne (ed.) 2016). Adam Gopnik reflected on the new edition by focusing on James’ image of James the boy and through this on James’s evocation of the imaginative mind in his novels (Gopnik 2016). Conversely, Colm Tóibín’s reaction to the edition is an overview of the adventures of James’ biography through references to Anesko’s account of the scandal in the James archive. Tóibín credits Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick whose work on gender performativity in the 1990s provided a framework of reading that transformed James from the distant master into a contemporary spirit (Tóibín 2016).

The examination of Tóibín’s The Master in 2022 needs to acknowledge the role of Tóibín’s novel within the critical work of academic Jamesians: not only did it provide a delicious way to engage with James’s style through pastiche but, perhaps just as importantly, it directed critical attention to the politics of memory studies in the James archive. Tóibín relied on Kosofsky Sedgwick in writing his biofiction, while James criticism in turn refocused on discursive intersections of gender, biography, memory, and identity politics. The essay below maps out representational strategies in The Master and Edel’s biography in order to situate them in the discourse of biographical criticism on James.

Introduction

The James industry seems to be in full swing at the moment. It is not so much that innumerable dissertations are being written and books published on James – this has been normal critical practice since the 1940s. Rather, and perhaps more importantly, his figure and work are adapted to film versions and to new novels, so he is practically becoming part of the contemporary cultural output through the allusions. Speaking about the films, one must mention Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996) that was followed by Iain Softley‘s The Wings of the Dove (1997), Agnieszka Holland’s Washington Square (1997) and James Ivory’s The Golden Bowl (2000). More recently, James can often be sighted as a theme or character in British fiction, too. Emma Tennant’s Felony (2003) is a rewriting of James’s The Aspern Papers that allows for the perspectives of the female characters and the author beside the narrator. Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) rewrites Leon Edel’s famous biography of James focusing on James’s consciousness and was shortlisted among the final six for the Booker Prize, 2004. David Lodge published his latest novel titled Author, Author (2004) as a tribute to the Jamesian achievement. Last but not least, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004) presents a satire of 80s Tory government in Britain, while it features “the tone of a laconic latter day Henry James” (Hickling 2004) coming from his narrator-aesthete. Also, it won the Booker Prize in 2004.

What might be the reasons for the frequent references to James and his work? As for the film adaptations, David Lodge claims the constant need for screenplays in the film industry is well satisfied by Jamesian narratives. James tends to write stories that are confined to a limited space and to a minimal number of characters. Also, his usual reliance on a strict dramatic structure in his texts lends itself well to scenes in the films (Logde 2002, 201). Yet, one has to admit a possible problem, too: James’s lifetime ambition, the representation of human consciousness, is difficult to actualize on film and becomes a pitfall of adaptations. As for the novels, James’s experiments with perspective and his focus on the process of personal experience that paved the way for Modernist prose present a challenge for rewriting his texts in the manner he foreshadowed.

Apart from the reasons based on formal features, one can also find a contextual explanation for the James renaissance. Referring to Sacvan Bercovitch, Heinz Ickstadt describes the direction of New American Studies since the 1980s as a shift of focus on issues of race, class and gender in the direction of research (Ickstadt 2002, 549). In practical terms this means the outpouring of articles and books on hybrid identities, power struggles, queer and lesbian performances of gender in the case of specific texts or authors. For James, the focus on issues of gender has provided a new source of critical activity. In a similar vein perhaps, in contemporary adaptations of Jamesian texts or figures, one can spot the interest in questions of gender identity. Campion’s film presents The Portrait with a feminist bias, Tennant complements the male perspective of The Aspern Papers with the female one. Tóibín and Hollinghurst focus on gender performances of gay men in their adaptations of Jamesian themes and tones.[21]

As a case in point, I propose to investigate Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) in the context of current critical focus on gender in James’s reception. For me, Colm Tóibín’s novel reenacts Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James. Tóibín’s title is borrowed from the fifth volume of Edel’s biography which describes James’s life between 1901-16, “the evolution of the legendary master.” Yet Tóibín’s new volume relates the events of 1895-1901 instead, using the same title and it also offers glimpses from James’s life before and after 1895. Shifting the reference of the title from James’s major phase to his experimental phase indicates a shift of focus: instead of the master of the late novels, the new hero of the new book is the Master in the making. In the experimental years the Master is born because of personal and professional anxieties that trigger his new way of writing. For Tóibín, James’s unresolved sexual identity constitutes the core of these anxieties. While Edel’s psychologizing narration only hints at James’s ambiguous performance of gender, Tóibín explicates this performance. I wish to find out to what extent the gendered focus alters Edel’s biographical account in Tóibín’s novel.[22]

In my paper I am going to explore, firstly, the current situation in James studies in terms of representations of gender, thereby explicating expectations towards a new biographical volume. Secondly, I am going to display some comparable scenes from the two books with a focus on performances of gender (using Edel one volume version of his biography as handy reference), and thirdly, consider the extent to which issues of gender actually inform the novelty of Tóibín’s work.

I. James’s Recanonization Today

Problems of gender identity and performance in James have been discussed widely only recently; as, I suppose, they have been in all areas of the humanities influenced by the cultural turn. So today we have a new, powerful image of Henry James influenced by gendered readings of his texts. So in James’ letters we glimpse the image of the young man with tropes of homoerotic panic lurking among the lines. In the biographies, we find the image of the consciously feminized bachelor artist who has taken a conscious decision not to be a productive member of society in any material sense of the word. In his Notebooks, we get acquainted with the image of the ageing homoerotic man.

The issues discussed in recent important studies on James often relate to the problem of gender. As a case in point, James’s relation to women in general was studied by Alfred Habegger in his James and the Woman Business to show the falsity of the account of James’ relation to his cousin, Minny Temple, which is revealed to be mostly James’ own creation (Habegger 1989, 231). Also, in her The Epistemology of the Closet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has discussed post-Romantic male homosexual panic in James’ texts, letters (Sedgwick 1990, 208) and Prefaces (Sedgwick 1995, 233). Even the acclaimed Americanist, John Carlos Rowe published his latest book on James titled The Other Henry James about homosexual implications in noncanonized short stories (Rowe 1998, 3). Perhaps as a companion piece to Rowe’s book, Donatella Izzo analyzed technologies of gender in stories about women in 2001 (Izzo 2001, 2 and Annus 2005, 16-17). The most recent example is Eric Haralson’s Henry James and Queer Modernity which traces the emergence of modern male homosexuality including James’s sexual politics.

To make sense of the gender upsurge, Richard Henke goes as far as to say that gender has a lot to do with the rehabilitation of James’ reputation in the 1980s and 90s. I have to quote him extensively on this:

As the well-known story goes, a group of devoted critics in the late 1930s and early 40s transformed an eccentric and increasingly unread author into one of the most important writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. James may have earned his place in the revised canons of British and especially American literature because of shifting literary priorities that resulted in a new understanding and respect for modernism that his experimental late narratives seemed to prefigure. What has not been so often noted about the rise of James’s literary fortunes is how pivotally issues of gender played in his redemption. (Henke 1995, 227)

In other words, Henke claims that a discussion of issues of gender was central to the critical rehabilitation of our James today, after his formal reception whereby New Critics assigned him his canonized position as a pre-Modernist author, a canonic figure of American national literature. To put it bluntly, his homoerotic interest is no longer a shame but an attraction for us.

Tóibín’s book reflects an awareness of the pivotal gender orientation in James’s reception. So it seems a matter of course that he centers his biographical work around the question of James’s gender identity. Also, Tóibín as a literary biographer has a reputation for writing about gay Irish authors, so James seems to be a natural choice for him. One’s expectation is definitely that the fuller exploration of the gender aspect is the most likely reason why Tóibín chose to reenact Edel’s story about James the Master.

II. The Performance of Gender in Edel and Tóibín

When we indeed look into the two books, however, the expectation turns out to be a gross oversimplification. Although it is true that Tóibín modifies the way scenes from James’s life are presented and organized, and the narratorial commentary is also different, it is mainly the representation of James’s consciousness that is modified. Let me explain my position further first in general terms (on genre) and then through examples (of scenes).

Genres

Generally speaking, Edel and Tóibín relate two versions of James’s psychic development. Edel’s classic is also a well-known example of psychobiography. A psychobiography designates “an account of the life of an author that focuses on the subject’s psychological development, relying for evidence both on external sources and on the author’s own writing.” (Abrams 1993, 266) It stresses the role of the unconscious and disguised motives in forming the author’s personality, and is usually written in accordance with a version of the Freudian theory of the stages of psychosexual development. In this vein, Edel’s hero is James the devoted artist who has sacrificed his personal relations and his emotions on the altar of art. For Edel, James’s textual production is primarily the expression of James’s personal anxieties, a safety valve, as it were. In this respect, Edel’s biography is essentially a monograph of James’s work because the life is related to show how it inspired the texts. Edel’s work also has an impressive scholarly polish to it. The text is studded with quotations from James’s correspondence, from his articles and novels, from newspapers of the time. The tone Edel uses, whilst the language is slightly embroidered and Jamesian, its mainly informal tone reporting events in James’s life and work. In the focus we find the ‘Work’ by James, paraphrases of the plots and the connection of these to James’s repressed emotions. As is due from a biography, the events are related in a chronological order. The only aspect that may make us wonder about the obvious objectivity of Edel’s narration is the recurrence of his personal voice. Repeatedly, Edel finds it necessary to explain James’s behavior. He poses as a modest, understanding friend of James who is telling us the insider’s view. James is usually addressed familiarly as ‘Henry,’ and any time there is an instance in James’s personal relations that would make the implied reader wonder as to the novelist’s egoism in his personal affairs, we get the comment that all this happens because James has sacrificed life for art.

Colm Tóibín’s version of James’s life is definitely not a psychobiography but rather a fictionalized biography.[23] Although Tóibín relates James’s position in his family, the relations of the siblings, his emotional responses and memories, none of this serves the purpose of a background to the work. As an important difference from Edel’s book, in Tóibín Jamesian art is not elevated as a result of a sacrifice. Rather, the book focuses on James’s relations to others with only brief references to the artistic aspect. The hero in this version is not the author but James the experiencing person. Tóibín’s version has little of the scholarly polish characteristic of Edel. The titles of the chapters do not come from texts or events but are modest dates. We have no quotations from letters because the wordings from the correspondence are woven into the text as descriptions or dialogues. However, the most striking difference from Edel’s account lies in the absence of narratorial evaluations. Nowhere in Tóibín can you find a definite commentary from the narrator as you have accustomed to it in Edel. Although he calls the novelist Henry, this third person singular narrator is not a friend of James. Instead, he provides detailed accounts of James’s consciousness. In other words, in Tóibín’s novel the Jamesian center of consciousness is the character called Henry James. In this sense, Tóibín’s text is more of a psychological novel featuring James the person than a psychobiography starring the artist.

Gender in scenes

Let us concentrate on some of the scenes of consciousness featuring Henry James. I have selected three scenes some version of which exists in Edel and are relevant from the perspective of gender identity, too. The first one is about how the young James shares a room and a bed with Olivier Wendel Holmes, Jr. in 1865. The second concerns James’s reaction to and possible role in the suicide of Constance Fenimore Woolson, a fellow novelist, in 1894. Last but not least, his intimate friendship with a young sculptor, Hendrik Andersen, in 1910s is elaborated on. Brief references to Edel’s version will indicate the contrasts Tóibín’s prose creates.

The case of Olivier Wendell Holmes, Jr. takes place in 1865 right after the end of the Civil War. Holmes had been a soldier while James maintained his civilian life in Boston. The two young men visit James’s cousins, Minny Temple and her sisters, at their summer residence, and Minny can only arrange for a room with one bed for the two men. Edel quotes James’s letter in which he makes fun of the situation, and then goes on to relate the conversations with Minny. The letter is mentioned to illustrate the wit and tone James uses with Minny, while the significance of the holiday proves to be intellectual and social.

Tóibín, in contrast, magnifies the story of the night. We get to know little about the actual events of the summer with Minny although it is indeed mentioned that James feels he has been writing about this summer ever since. In Tóibín’s presentation, the focal event happens in the room with one bed. There is a proper dramatic structure to present the story: the issue of Holmes, Jr. is introduced with the anecdote. The young James’s interest is roused by a male nude being drawn at William James’s art school. The same allure appears in the description of the night with Holmes, Jr. as Holmes undresses for the night. The main part of the scene is constituted of a sex scene without sex. Holmes invariably directs the situation: he moves close to Henry who is the yielding but passive partner to Holmes. All the movements are presented from Henry’s perspective, how he silently agrees to being nude, how he turns away not to initiate anything but to be able to respond.

They lay side by side without speaking. Henry could feel the bone of his pelvis hitting against Holmes. He wondered if he could suggest moving to the bottom of the bed but somehow, he understood, Holmes had taken control and silently withheld permission for him to make any suggestions. He could hear his own breathing and sense his own heart beating as he closed his eyes and turned his back on Holmes. (Tóibín 2004, 98)

The closing of the situation is a report on Henry’s somewhat disappointed observation that Holmes does not refer to the events of the night the morning after. The turning point in the story is that it serves as a counterpoint for James’s evening with the old Holmes in Britain some thirty years later. Holmes has come to visit James in order to tell his conviction that James did not help her cousin Minny recuperate from her illness when they were young. Holmes thinks James should have invited Minny to spend the winter with him in Rome, and this would have saved the girl’s life. James denies the accusation point blank and bitterly resents Holmes for bringing it up. So in Tóibín’s version, the joke from Edel is turned into an alluring and disturbing scene of desire that is eventually reversed as Holmes’s antagonism towards James is proved in 1890s.

Constance Fenimore Woolson was the only possible woman who could have aspired to be a wife in James’s life. She did not achieve this aim, and committed suicide. The dilemma for James and his friends was to determine how much this unrealized connection influenced Fenimore in committing her act. In Edel’s version, this story one of the major examples of the Jamesian identity theme “life sacrificed for art.” Although James is drawn to Fenimore as a person and is willing to spend a lot of time with her in private, he is afraid that a relationship would jeopardize his artistic independence. Also, he is abhorred by thinking that their friendship gets publicized. So after years of intimate friendship, James practically stops seeing Fenimore, although he is aware that she suffers from depression when they are separated for long. The last incident between them happens when James promises to visit Fenimore in Venice, to stay there for a while to keep her company, but when he learns that Fenimore has told others about his promise, he reverses his plan. He does not write to Fenimore but to one of the acquaintances involved that he is not coming to Venice. A couple of months later Fenimore jumps out of her window and dies. Edel recounts the events as a dilemma that James resolved when he decided to withdraw from the attachment in the first place. It was a renunciation, a sacrifice only logical for James whose life was patterned according to the principle life for art. James feels remorse and given the chance destroys those parts of Fenimore’s correspondence that would reveal their involvement. Apart from his emotional shock, he feels utterly frustrated by the six weeks the selection and destruction of Fenimore’s papers has taken from his work.

In Tóibín’s representation, James’s remorse is much more intense. James is shown struggling with Fenimore’s letters and papers. He is also shown burying her clothes in the Canal like a romantic lover. The letter expressing his annoyance at the loss of time caused by arranging Fenimore’s papers is not mentioned at all. Instead, the actual reasons for James’s remorse are stressed emphatically. James’s experience of the time with Fenimore is triggered by Lily Norton’s visit. She has come to see James in England to tell him she thinks he had a major role in Constance’s depression (and suicide) that winter. (Tóibín 2004, 219) James can hardly back out of the conversation, and the remainder of the chapter relates his experience of Constance’s death. In other words, in The Master there is no narratorial explanation of the events but a careful projection of events, accusations, and reactions that reveal the full ambiguity of James’s behavior to Woolson. He dreads the possible role of a husband and although he enjoys Fenimore’s company, it should in no way be linked to his solitary life and work. As a male performer, he is inactive. He is also indirectly responsible for Constance’s suicide. He suffers from this knowledge, but is unwilling to face the accusation: in conversation he rejects it right away.

The most rewarding scene from the perspective of James’s performance of gender in both volumes is the account of James’s relation to Hendrik Andersen, the Norwegian-American sculptor in Rome in 1899. Edel reports their meeting step by step. James behaves like an older mentor figure to the young sculptor, as if they were characters from James’s early novel Roderick Hudson. Then, Edel tells about their correspondence which is striking in that James uses several descriptions of bodily gestures he would perform if Andersen were near – patting, drawing close, holding long, gestures a lover would write about. This impression is strengthened by the general tone of the letters that expresses a cry for the absent one. Characteristically, Edel is prompted to add a speculative paragraph to the account, where he poses the question if this relation was really “love.” By the term “love” here he means a realized homosexual relationship. He says we cannot tell if it was, as Victorian bedrooms had their doors shut. Nevertheless, Edel deems it important to point out that James “had hithertho tended to look at the world as through plate glass.” (Edel 1985, 498) That is, without us knowing if the relation was consummated or not, it would not fit into the Jamesian pattern of renunciations witnessed so far.

Of course, Tóibín takes full advantage of this story. The implied reader’s knowledge about the depth of the involvement is not more specific, but the way James and Andersen behave carries the full understanding of the potential relationship. James and Andersen gaze at each other well before being introduced. James takes his brand new acquaintance to Constance’s grave and the two hug each other because of the emotional strain on the part of James. James watches Andersen bath very much like his father had watched a swimmer woman in Boulogne, with repressed desire (Tóibín 2004, 86). James can assess Andersen’s foolish artistic aspirations but remains supportive of him. Also, he writes the letters of longing we know of from Edel, too. So in this affair, James would perform the role of the elderly seducer, if there was a seduction. Both Edel and Tóibín are fully aware of the nature of the attraction between the two men, the difference comes from the way they represent it: Edel as part of the Jamesian sacrifice scheme, while Tóibín as another ambiguously desiring and withholding performance.

III. Tóibín and Recanonization

Having looked at specific scenes of the two texts, it is apparent that the two accounts cannot be sharply contrasted on the basis of their understanding of Jamesian gender identity, because both Edel and Tóibín are aware of the homoerotic tinge in James’s attractions. The difference lies in the way they represent this impulse. Edel explains the scenes by fitting them into the story of Jamesian sacrifice, his renunciation of life for art. This theme does not leave space for actual adventures, and the repressed is put to good use as it surfaces in the form of artistic activity. The issue of the possible homosexual inclination is positively resolved as far as Edel is concerned.

Tóibín, in contrast, exposes the ambiguities of Jamesian human “sacrifices” to the full. In Tóibín there is no dichotomy of renunciation contra good use. As a result of his personal renunciations, James is shown to be possibly responsible for not helping his friends in need. His reluctance to invite Minny to Rome when his life opens up is similar to his unwillingness to take a flat in Venice when Fenimore intimates his plan to move there for others. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Lily Norton appear to articulate these accusations to him. In terms of roles acted out, James declines to act like a woman or a man; instead, he prefers the position of the patron, that of the (elderly) inactive gentleman. So the issue of the homosexual tendency is definitely not resolved in Tóibín’s account, as it represents a lack of human contact and responsibility. While Edel appraises James’s renunciations because of its artistic yield, Tóibín is critical of the very same because of the irresponsible behavior it results in. So Tóibín portrays James’s ambiguous performance of gender roles as a betrayal of human ties under the pretext of creating art. This interpretation renders James’s figure part of an intellectual tradition that, constructing human bonds as a result of affective interaction, deemed the white European’s others incapable of developing such ties. James, by implication and ironically, becomes the opposite of the dominant cultural ideal and thus on a par with Native American males and African Americans of the early nineteenth century as imagined by Thomas Jefferson, for instance, who thought “uncivilized” peoples existing outside the world of affective human relations (Vajda 2009; Vajda 2012).

From the perspective of the recent James revival, the expectation of Tóibín’s work was that it would focus on the popular gender aspect of James’s life and work. His reenactment of Edel’s biography would expose James’s implied homoerotic inclinations as central to our understanding of his output. Instead I found that Edel had been fully aware of and communicative about the gender aspect, it did not need to be introduced. The main difference between the two versions is the way James’s psychology is represented. Edel’s psychobiography has been turned into a psychological novel focusing on the ambiguities in James’s performances of gender identity.

My suspicion is that Tóibín’s novel may soon be integrated further into contemporary popular culture through additional textual remakes of James’s life. Also, this may happen through intermedial exchange, if/when the book gets turned into a film, possibly into one similar to the film adaptation of Richard Ellman’s biography of Oscar Wilde.

Works Cited

Abrams, W. H. ed. 1993 (1941). A Glossary of Literary Terms. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace.

Anesko, Michael. 2012. Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship. Stanford: Stanford UP.

Annus, Irén. 2005. “Subversion through the Quilt? Mormon Auto/bio-histories from the Domestic.” In Barát, Erzsébet (ed.). Spaces in Transition. Szeged: JATE Press, 11-26.

Buchholtz, Miroslawa. 2014. Henry James and the Art of Auto/biography. London: Peter Lang.

Edel, Leon. 1985. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper and Row.

Gopnik, Adam. ”Little Henry, Happy at Last.” New Yorker January 10, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/18/little-henry-happy-at-last Access: July 7, 2021.

Habegger, Alfred. 1989. Henry James and the “Woman Business.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haralson, Eric. 2003. Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Henke, Richard. 1995. “The Man of Action: Henry James and the Performance of Gender.” The Henry James Review 16, 227-241.

Hickling, Alfred. 2004. “Between the lines.” The Guardian Saturday, April 10, 2004. Available: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1189089,00.html Access:

Hollinghurst, Alan. 2004. The Line of Beauty. London: Picador, 2004.

Horne, Philip, ed. 2016. Henry James: Autobiographies. New York: Library of America.

Ickstadt, Heinz. 2002. “American Studies in an Age of Globalization.” American Quarterly 54:4. 543-62.

Izzo, Donatella. 2001. Portraying the Lady: technologies of gender in the short stories by Henry James. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Jefferson, Ann. 1987. Modern Literary Theory. A Comparative Introduction. London: B. T. Batsford.

Layne, Bethany. 2020. Henry James in Contemporary Fiction: The Real Thing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lodge, David. 2006. The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel. London: Penguin.

—— 2004. Author! Author! London: Secker and Warburg, 2004.

—— 2002. Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

McWhirter, David. 2010. Henry James in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rowe, John Carlos. 1998. The Other Henry James. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. “Beast in the Closet”. In Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 182-212.

——. 1995. “Shame and Performativity: Henry James’s New York Edition Prefaces” In  McWhirter, David (ed.) Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 206-315.

Teahan, Sheila. 2010. “Autobiographies and Biographies.” In McWhirter, David (ed.)  Henry James in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 58-67.

Tennant, Emma. 2003. Felony. London: Vintage.

Tóibín, Colm. 2004. The Master. London: Picador.

——. 2016. “How Henry James’s family tried to keep him in the closet.” The Guardian. Feb. 20, 2016. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/20/colm-toibin-how-henry-james-family-tried-to-keep-him-in-the-closet  Access: May 6, 2022.

Vajda, Zoltán. 2012. “Selfish Barbarians – Affectionate Americans: Thomas Jefferson, Indian Women, and the Power of Civilization.” In Vajda, Zoltán (ed.) Költők, kémek, detektívek, pirítós és fordítások – Írások Novák György tiszteletére/Poets, spies, detectives, pieces of toast, and translations: Essays in honor of György Novák. Szeged: JATEPress. 261-64.

Vajda, Zoltán. 2009. “Limited Expectations: Thomas Jefferson on the Moral Sentiments of Blacks and Race Relations.” In Vajda, Zoltán (ed.) Kultúrán innen és túl – Írások Rozsnyai Bálint tiszteletére/Within and Without Culture: Essays in Honor of Bálint Rozsnyai. Szeged: JATEPress, 2009, 277-86.

INTER-AMERICAN HOMES IN SANDRA CISNEROS’ WORKS

Réka M. Cristian

The text focuses on the extensive and intricate issue of inter-American home(s) and maps its various extensions within and outside the literary realm of Sandra Cisneros’s narratives, the vignettes of The House on Mango Street (1984), the collection of short stories of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) and Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento (2002) by discussing several identity frames depicted by the more or less domestic(ized) metaphor of the house ― and its inhabitants. The argument shows that the concept of home as a double-faceted construct of identity goes well beyond Cisnero’s published texts; her rooms of identity transcend fictional and non-fictional borders exemplified by her personal webpage and by the transgenerational discourse of the museum installation set up in the memory of Elvira Cordero Cisneros, Sandra’s mother, at the Smithsonian National American History Museum, Latino Center.[24]

Keywords: borderlands, home, Sandra Cisneros, identity, mestizaje, transnational, inter-American, nepantilism, Chicanisma, performativity, autobriography

Today, in the context of the Americas, the shift to transnational approaches in the area of American studies seems to naturally direct the practitioners of the continental field of study towards a rather obvious area, the inter-American realm; therefore, as a synecdoche of the transnational path, the inter-American approach becomes more central to any study centering on the Americas. To borrow from Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s “Crossroads of Cultures,” one has to focus more to “figures who have been marginalized precisely because they have crossed so many borders that they are hard to categorize” (30) and to pay attention to the “legal borderlands both inside and outside the United States” (31) by welcoming  “investigations of the broad array of cultural crossroads shaping the work of border-crossing authors, artists, and cultural forms that straddle multiple regional and national traditions” and “studies that probe the cultural work of American literature outside the united States for insight into the non-U.S. cultures” (32). Right from the beginning of Fisher Fishkin’s article, the emphasis is on the versatile metaphor of home that is formulated and reformulated by the “proverbial immigrant who leaves somewhere called ‘home’ to make a new home in the United States” and who is subject to an “endless process of comings and goings that create familial, cultural, linguistic, and economic ties across national borders” (24). The experience of physical movement, of crossing borders and breaking away from the fixed spatial experience of the home, however, also opens up new avenues in the dynamic, complex private journey of becoming, of constructing one’s identity (Annus 2011).

The text below focuses on the intricate issue of borderlands as homeland (emphasis added), a major paradigm often employed in various works of Chicana writers, by mapping its various extensions within and outside the literary texts of contemporary writer Sandra Cisneros with the aim of exposing diverse identity constructions depicted by the versatility of the term of home(s), the “master metaphor” of identity (Kaup 363), in her multicultural (Kovács 2007, 36 and Kovács 2010, 32), transnational, inter-American world. As Sebastian Thies and Josef Raab observed, borderlands, with their inherent “rites of passage and tales of transgression, constitute a potent foundational myth of transnational or inter-American identities” (14), a myth that has been present through various modes in Chicana/o literature. As a recent cultural example of such transgression, the Machete films, for example, perform a similar role of a rite of passage. These visual narratives, like many other literary narratives on the issue of the border, present the life on borderlands with their idiosyncratic struggles, fights and negotiations of meanings and identities mostly with the help of humor as best rhetorical tool (Tóth 2013, 93-94).

In the following, I will consistently use the term “inter-American” tailored to the context of the Americas instead of the more general concept of the term “transnational.” While the latter has a more international, global connotation, the former has a peculiar, globalocal (relating to the whole world but with an impact and significance to a particular area) features pertaining to the Americas.

If there is a distinct place for the manifestation of globalocal, inter-American identities, then that is the border. By employing the dynamics involved in the concept, Gloria Anzaldúa defined borderlands as a vital site for those inhabiting and writing from this place because la frontera as such encompasses a peculiar geographical location and physical presence, a specific psychic landscape combined with a distinctive linguistic aspect that frequently uses difrasismo (the coupling of two elements to form a new word) and interlingualism (the space between languages consisting of a blend and juxtaposition, in this case, of Spanish  and English) in its literary forms. In Anzaldúa’s seminal book, an eloquent example of an uprooted difrasismo linked with the concept of home is homophobia, where ‘home’ as such becomes a twisted wor(l)d. Anzaldúa quotes a New England lesbian student, who misinterpreted the word ‘homophobia’ by associating it with the apt expression of the “[fe]ar of going home. And of not being taken. […] of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged” (20).

The idea of home, present in almost all Chicana/o body of writing involves in the North American context of borderlands a special kind of interlingualism also characteristic of a greater, Latina/o community. The Chicano poet and scholar, Alfred Arteaga―similar to many other writers and theorists―envisions the virtual birthplace and the fictive or real home of Chicana/o identity at the confluence of cultures, at borderlands, where this interlingualism contains “English, Spanish, calo (Chicano slang), and perhaps Nahuatl,” resulting in various textual and phonetic matters that “work out linguistically with thought what the border does culturally with the nation and what mestizaje does racially with the body” (10). Yet, this mestizaje is a blend of previous mixtures and thus a more sophisticated marker for the contemporary Chicana/o identity that defines itself through the la frontera reality:

[T]he “reality” of the border for Chicanos is similar to the “reality” of the Indian. Consider for a moment the identity “Chicano” and the homeland “Aztlan.” Chicano derives from Mexicano, which derives from Mexica, the name the Aztecs called themselves. “Chicano” recalls an older, original pronunciation. When Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztecs, the Spanish language still possessed the sound like the English “sh,” represented in Spanish by the letter “x,” so that the conquistador could approximate Meshica as Mexica. Eventually Spanish changed phonemically so that Meshico came to be pronounced Mehico (Mejico), and Don Quihote (Quijote), for another example, ceased to be Don Quishote (Quixote). The soft “ch” in Mexican Spanish approaches the “sh” of older Spanish and of Nahuatl, so that meshicano leads to mechicano and to chicano. In this manner, phonemically at least, Chicano signifies descent from the Aztecs. (Arteaga 9)

This veritable polyphony of various languages is similar to the murmurs and roars coming from the margins in the case of postcolonial subjects: voices that emerge from a common shared experience, colonization. (Cristian 2002, 38). As a result of this, the syncretic experience of Chicana writers is reflected in the mestiza consciousness manifested, as Anzaldúa defined it, through “a constant state of mental nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn between ways,” in a fluid “state of perpetual transition” always facing “the dilemma of the mixed breed” (78). The mestiza, living in a border position, practices a nomadic thinking described by Walter D. Mignolo as “border thinking;” she descends from immigrants but is not an immigrant herself; she is one of those who did not move but around whom the world moved by shifting borders (Mignolo 72). Sandra Cisneros, born in Chicago, is one of these mestizas, with her disparate home(s) residing in various Nepantla (“in between”) zones. Following the idea of the border, “the notion of borderland” as such can also “serve as a conceptual tool for defining transnational histories” from an inter-American perspective, corresponds “to a kind of communal usable past” (Szélpál 2009) for the peoples who inhabit a more flexible cultural space. The practice of communal usable past can lead to an alternative understanding of inter-American identity; such alternative strategy is also to emphasize similarity instead of difference for those who inhabit a given flexible cultural space in a specific historical context—for example, the American identity formation at the time of the making of independent states south of the United States (Vajda 2015; Vajda 2020).

In the following, I will map various Nepantla homelands present in Cisneros’ narratives, her primary textual homes and testimonies of border thinking and inter-American identity. These include The House on Mango Street (1984), Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) and Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento (2002). Cisneros’ work―apart from the previously mentioned three volumes, including also Hairs=Pelitos (1994), Bad Boys (1980), My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987), Loose Woman: Poems (1994), Have You Seen Marie? Fable for Grown-Ups (2012) and the book of non-fiction entitled A House of My Own: Stories form My Life (forthcoming this year)―thrives on the limits of both private and public realms, has a conscious subjectivity and fits perfectly to the idea of the political writer described by another Chicana writer, Cherríe Moraga, in her “Foreword” to the second edition of This Bridge Called My Back entitled “Refugees of a World on Fire,” where she claims that the “political writer […] is the ultimate optimist believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try to penetrate the privatism of our lives.” Cisneros’ narratives celebrate nepantilism and encourage readers to go beyond the borders of private and public, of natural and political realms, of gender and societal norms. As Inés Salazar writes, the narrator of Cisneros’s works “transgresses both against the norms for women that prevail within her community as well as against the myth of the American Dream, that cornerstone of bourgeois American individualism” (Salazar 393). Accordingly, the literary structures of Cisneros’ works, “multifaceted as her cultural identity” (Madsen 130), are assembled into particularly built, decentralized, fragmented, open narratives (Bollobás 2005, 714) that enhance multiple modes of transgression.

The textual site of one of these modes of transgression is The House on Mango Street. The protagonist of this 44-vignette book is Esperanza, who, in her impetus for a real house of her own, echoes Cisneros’ desires and aspirations and embarks on a “metaphysical journey, undertaken through her writing” (Salazar 394). In a recent interview with Nicole Thomson Akoukou, the author emphasizes this transgressive role by saying that “the questions that Esperanza was asking, I was asking” (Akoukou Thomson 2015). This sort of nepantilism goes all along the first vignette with the metaphor of the house in which the narrator lives, marking this identity caught at first between the family and society (“we”) and the young Chicana (“I”):

The house on Mango Street is ours. […] But even so, it’s not the house we’d thought we’d get […] They always told us that one day we would move into a house, a real house that would be ours for always we wouldn't have to move each year. […]

You live there? There. I had to look to where she pointed – the third floor, the paint peeling, wooden bars Papa nailed on the windows so we wouldn’t fall out.

You live there? The way she [the nun] said it made me feel like nothing.

There. I lived there. I nodded. I know I had to have a house. A real house. One I can point to. But this isn’t it. The house on Mango Street isn’t it. For the time being, Mama says. Temporary, says Papa. But I know those things go. (Cisneros 2004, 3-5)

Then in “Alice & I talking on Edna’s Steps,” the home of the narrator, a typical American building situated on Mango Street, a name bearing the cultural codes of Latinization, becomes the spot of negation, shame, and denial as if it was an almost illegal place of dwelling, resembling a no wo/man’s land between borders, an urban Nepantla situated at the fringes of both American and Mexican culture, still waiting to be identified and thus made “better.”

You live right here, 406 Mango, Alicia says and points to the house I am ashamed of.

No, this isn’t my house I say and shake my head as if shaking could undo the year I’ve lived here. I don’t’ belong: I don’t ever want to come from here. You have a home, Alicia, and one day you’ll go there, to a town you remember, but me I never had a house, not even a photograph … only one I dream of.

No, Alicia says. Like it or not you are Mango Street, and one day you’ll come back too.

Not me. Not until somebody makes it better.

Who’s going to make it? (106-107)

Although the real Chicana home appears as a promise of a “home in the heart” in “Elenita, Cards, Palm, Water (64), later on this fictive place of habitation is projected into the visible world of everyday objects in “Lineoleum Roses:” Sally’s “pillows and her plates” (101). Moreover, in “No Speak English,” the word “home,” repeated as a sacred chant, has a massive sentimental content with extended visibility, transcending into the visible world from the invisible domain of feelings and becomes “a house in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light” with Mamacita sighing “for her pink house, and then I think she cries” (77), still holding a considerable potential for emotions. As Maria Antónia Oliver-Rotger pointed out in Battleground and Crossroads. Social and Imaginary Space in Writings by Chicanas, the domestic arena paired with interiority, feelings and inwardness becomes a hybrid physical and mental space where Chicana identity is shaped by specific spatial configurations (82). Furthermore, the gendered spatial imagery of the borderlands in Cisneros’ work is in tandem with the metaphor of the home that reflects “complex realities that are often at variance with dominant representations of spatial relations” (83).

In The House on Mango Street, home is also the metaphor of hope [esperanza, coincides with the name of the protagonist] with the narrator voicing the wish that “your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away” to “stop in front of a house, a nice one with flowers and big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two steps to where a room is waiting for you” (Cisneros 2004, 82). The book of vignettes holds this room of desire representing the Nepantla of Chicana identity. With the intertwining connotation of the attic as a space of potential liberation from the time-worn cult of domesticity―discussed in depth by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in Madwoman in the Attic and later by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963)―and the role of this small room, ático, used for servants in Latin America and representing subordination, in the “Bums in the Attic” the narrator voices her determination to own not only an attic or a room of her own but an entire house belonging to her only, meanwhile not forgetting “who I am or where I came from” (Cisneros 2004, 87). When she describes this new residence, marker of her inter-American identity, as later specified in “House of My Own,” this goes beyond the limits of personal liberation, over the boundaries of class and race, past the barriers between the rich and the poor, and well beyond confined gender roles, Chicano patriarchy or Anglo American culture. This is “[N]ot a flat. Not an apartment in the back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s…” with everything in between negations becoming Nepantla. In this context, the vignettes of this volume are bricks building up a new home made of words imported from both worlds and cultures, both already hybrid. To use Salazar’s words, Cisneros’ “appropriation of aesthetic practice as an instrument to remake the self” results in a novel that “supports the viability of its individual agency” (395) and successfully traces the rims of her inter-American identity.

In the thirteen stories contained in Woman Hollering Creek, the metaphor of the house and home has wider connotations and is present as more or less abstract mundane pieces or people scattered in the chain of the volume’s stories such as orange Popsicles friends split so they could be sisters and Lucy, the narrator’s friend “who smells like corn” (Cisneros 1992, 5), Barbie’s MOD’ern cousin, Francie, in her new Prom Pinks outfit, whose left foot is melted a little in the short story entitled “Barbie-Q,” “runaway balloons” marking the age of the protagonist in “Eleven,” religious objects in  “Anguiano Religious Articles Rosaries Statues Medals Incense Candles Talismans Perfumes Oils Herbs” and “Little Miracles, Kept Promises;” all identity tags building the greater picture of the Chicana identity living in the textual Nepantla of Woman Hollering Creek. Furthermore, the inter-American identity is also laconically defined by a truncated word imported from the vernacular speech, “Merrican,” instead of the all-encompassing American: “We’re Mericans, we’re Merricans” (20). Being “Merrican” is another tag for the mixed fringe identity in which Mexican and American can both melt, as Barbie’s left foot.

Analogous to the borderlands, home in this collection of stories is also a place blunt contradictions: of longing, of crossing over the limits, of internalized dissent, of assertion but also of hopeless homecoming made impossible for the humiliated woman, who does not obey Chicano patriarchy anymore and runs away from her (husband’s) house to find a safe haven in a paradoxically similar place:

Sweet sweet homecoming … Wrinkle in the brain crumpling to a crease. … Sometimes she thinks of her father’s house. But how could she go back there? What a disgrace. What would the neighbors say? Coming home like that with one baby on her hip and the one in the oven” (50).

A particular identity facet of Cisnero’s women characters in Woman Hollering Creek, according to Deborah L. Madsen, is “divided between a celebration of the power of a demythologized feminine sexuality” combined with “a powerful awareness of misogyny and the control of women through the control of their sexuality” (117). Moreover, “the effort to negotiate a cross-cultural identity” is further “complicated by the need to challenge the deeply rooted patriarchal values of both Mexican and American cultures” (108), leading to a redefinition of the place called home. As Anna Marie Sandoval remarked, the concept of “homeplace” described in 1990 by bell hooks as a site of resistance has “gendered connotations that perpetuate the association of women with the domestic realm” (291) that is gazed upon and guarded as a border crossing by the (patriarchal) surveillance system. Therefore, in Cisneros’ work “the evocation of spaces of intimacy is tied to a sense of individual freedom that is inextricable” from the collective needs (292) of her own group but also that of a larger (inter-)nation. Home becomes, occasionally, an interchangeable concept with marriage or with voluntary single motherhood (for example, as the one described in “Eyes of Zapata”); coupled with the shift of home from the traditional to an unusual one (as in “Never Marry a Mexican” where there is “no home to go home to”) it can be best described by the term of migrant homelessness. Cleófilas, the protagonist of the title story, is one of these migrants caught in an idiosyncratic Nepantla: she crosses the border between Mexico and the United States with her husband, in hope of a better life she equates with those seen daily in telenovelas. However, after crossing the legal border, the life en le otro lado does not grant her salvation: she is still abused and lives in poverty. Hence, after several traumas, her homeplace is mentally relocated in a natural setting, a creek, bearing the mythical subtext of the La Gritona or La Llorona, a mythical feminine figure cursed to haunt water places, who weeps for her dead children and seeks to punish men for her suffering, by emphasizing the paradox behind its name: “La Gritona … Such a funny name for a creek so pretty and full of happily ever after” (47). The weeping woman, the name giver of the arroyo, inherited the complex, controversial identity traits of the Nahua Malintzin or La Malinche and that of the Our Lady of Guadalupe embodying the sexualized figure of the Aztec vendida woman, la puta, who keeps weeping for her lost children, merging with the sacred figure of a syncretic, mestiza Virgin Mary in the blended image of a Hollering Woman, a mestiza Stabat Mater exhibiting her threefold nature of lover, mother and saint and letting her voice out at the crossroads of cultures. Interestingly, similar to the characters of the Mexican Alberto Isaac’s film, Cisnero’s women figures can neither be confined into maternal stereotypes of the godly good mother (Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe) nor into that of the mujer mala (prostitute, La Malinche) because they simply do away with these stereotypes by transgressing not only the borders of their own domestic realms but also of the imposed roles on them (Cristian 2017, 174-175).

Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento is―according to its subtitle ―based on a true story. As Maria Alonso Alonso writes, it is the “autobiography of the author, with added fictionalisations” (16). As Esperanza in The House on Mango Street, Celaya (Lala) Reyes is also an outcast character that willingly-unwillingly deconstructs the concept of house and home through her multiple journeys across the Mexican-American border. Celaya’s perennial displacement, the yearly travels from her real and imaginary homelands, ranging from the Chicago family house through the rarely opened “storage rooms” of her Awful Grandmother’s [abuelita] home in colorful Ciudad de México to their new family home in San Antonio, Texas, put her in a constant play of (re)constructing her own identity. Celaya emphasizes that each year when she crosses borders “it’s the same – my mind forgets. But my body always remembers” (2013) and wonders about the location of her real home in trying to find her own place within this: “Home? Where’s that? North? South? Mexico? San Antonio? Chicago?” (2015). Her Mexicanness as well as her Americanness unveil an admixture of home and homelessness that lead her to ceaselessly remodel her subsequent Mexican and American identity into a new, inter-American one. As Alonso Alonso aptly put it, the house and the home as

[T]erritory and language are important issues which are present in most Chicana writing and in particular in Caramelo. These are usually ambivalent concepts ruled by exclusive binary codes. History has divided territories or moved borders from one place to another, which means that Chicanas/os are doomed to a constant search for a particular identity in order to reconcile their Mexican origin with their everyday life in an Anglo environment. Second- and third-generation Chicanas/os like Celaya find themselves in this situation and consequently struggle to find their own individuality (25).

The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek and Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento have opened a special literary window of transgression for various articulations of inter-American Chicanisma in Cisneros’ narratives. As Zsófia Anna Tóth writes, one of the specific ways of transgression in this regard is Cisnero’s use of humor as a narrative strategy and as specific mode of discourse in presenting Chicana identity (Tóth 2020, 609-610).

Apart from these texts and their narrative strategies, identity construction in Cisnero’s non-narrative world operates in pluralistic modes on manifold levels, including the extradiegetic shift of homes and homelands in various spaces where identity is negotiated by alternating across the boundaries of fiction and reality. Such extra-textual spaces of creative transaction include, besides her poetry, children’s book and picture book, the author’s official homepage (http://www.sandracisneros.com/index.php), a number of recent documents in the media concerning the disputes over her real-life home and Cisneros’ 2015 installation of her mother’s room at the Smithsonian National American History Museum, Latino Center (http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/altar-installation-sandra-cisneros).

The negotiation of identities across the borders of fiction and reality depends on the performativity of the subject involved. As Enikő Bollobás writes in They Aren’t Until I Call Them. Performing the Subject in American Literature, performativity “has the ability to signal the borderline, ambivalent and receding between the text and outside it” significantly contributing “to the understanding of the constructedness of the real and the reality of the constructed world and how we can know, if at all, where the boundaries are” (2010, 202). Performativity in the context of Cisneros’ extra-textual world, includes the side of performance, which is „a particular mode of performativity, characterized by a mimetic replaying of norms and the replaying of ruling ideologies when constructing the subject” intrinsically connected with the performative aspect, which „refers to another mode of performativity characterized by a resistance to ruling ideologies and the bringing about of new discursive entities in subject construction” (2010, 21).

Cisneros’ webpage bears one of her foremost blueprints of Chicana identity. An idiosyncratic assembly, both performance and performative, her homepage links Cisneros’ literary texts and off-texts that are combined to form the metaphoric unity of the home she has been constructing in her narratives and outside of them. Its architecture, made of eight major clusters as rooms in a house (entitled Home, Biography, News, Books, Events, Letter, Guestbook, Homenajes, Pilón), envisage the function of a real residence, a true homeplace open to anyone―regardless of borders of any kind. Its inter-American stance resembles Julie Taymor's cross-cultural world of moving images that created a homeplace and a perfect ground for mapping the unfolding identities of the Americas” through another Mexican mestiza artist, the figure of Frida Kahlo (Cristian 2006, 115). Cisnero’s webpage is transnational by function; however, by design and content is also Nepantla and inter-American. So was her Tejano-colored American heritage house in San Antonio, which had a story of its own, too. As Candace LaBalle noted, in 1995

Cisneros achieved what many consider to be the height of artistic success when she was awarded the MacArthur Genius Fellowship. Its $225,000 purse allowed Cisneros to finally realize her childhood dream—a house of her own. She bought a large Victorian home in a historic district of San Antonio that she painted a bright neon purple. The local historic board promptly challenged her color choice saying it was not a historically accurate color. Not one to sit idly by while decisions are made for her, Cisneros clad in purple held news conferences on her lawn. She passed out petitions on purple paper. She declared the color a part of her Mexican heritage and accused the board of bias against Hispanic culture. “We are a people sin papeles [without papers]!” she was quoted in Texas Monthly. “We don’t exist. This isn’t about my little purple house. It’s about the entire Tejano community.” (2002)

Two years later, the board withdrew its objections and Cisneros’s purple house retained its ethnic color. She could have, finally, her own purple house. In “My Purple House‒Color is a Language and a History,” Cisneros equated this process with a fictive happening by saying that it resembled a telenovela, one that was heavily mediatized: “One day I painted my house tejano colors; the next day, my house is in all the news” (1997). This house, as the records of mySA show, was sold not long ago, in January 2015 (Olivo 2015). According to the information on her webpage, Cisneros lives today “with many creatures, little and large, in central Mexico” publishing her work across the border in the U.S.; moreover, her new book, not surprisingly entitled, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life will be released in October 2015.

Through her textual and extra-textual performativity, Cisneros continuously reshapes the codified limits of her identity and continues to thrive, as her characters do, in an interstitial place of “borderlands between Mexico and the US as sites of imagined common culture” (Salazar 397).  And, while complying with a set of norms, Cisneros, also goes against the grain in building her versatile homeplace and her house, “one of the great powers of integration for the thoughts” (Bachelard 6) that “guides and encloses” her (and her characters’) earliest dreams (239). The conflation of the social and the imaginary at the borderlands of her literary and non-literary texts/works result in an additional, composite process of inter-American identity construction of the author of fiction and non-fiction and the real life person, who expands the boundaries of her home across the globe through the digital wording of her books and homepage and who, unlike her protagonists of her narratives, finally owned a house and even builds an inter-American, transgenerational identity through the museum installation made for and in memory of her mother, Sandra’s first ever home, Elvira Cordero Cisneros (1929-2007), in a canonized space of American culture. This is “My Mother’s Altar,” a room installation in the tradition of Dia de Muertos at the Smithsonian National American History Museum, Latino Center (open from October 31, 2014 through September 7, 2015).

Works Cited

Akoukou Thomson, Nicole. 2015. “Palabras. Sandra Cisneros, Author of the House on Mango Street Talks Libraries, Love, Photography, Spirituality, and Tattos.” Latin Post, Jan 22. Web: http://www.latinpost.com/articles/33042/20150122/sandra-cisneros-author-house-mango-street-talks-libraries-love-photography.htm, Access: April 9, 2022.

Alonso, Alonso María. “Textual Representations of Chicana Identity in Sandra Cisnero’s Caramelo or Puro Cuento.” Odisea, Nr. 12 (2011): 15-27.

Annus, Iren. 2011. “The Unheroine: The Figure of the Spinster in Doris Lessing’s ‘The Trinket Box’.” In She’s Leaving Home: Women’s Writing in English in a European Context. Edited by Séllei, Nóra and June Waudby, Frankfurt, London: Peter Lang, 53-62.

Arteaga, Alfred. 1997. Chicano Poetics. Heterotexts and Hybridities. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Anzaldúa, Gloria and Moraga, Cherríe, eds. 1983. This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table. Women of Color Press.

Bachelard, Gaston. [1958] 1994. The Politics of Space. Trans. John R. Stilgoe. Boston: Beacon Press.

Bollobás, Enikő. 2005. Az amerikai irodalom története. Budapest: Osiris.

-----. 2010. They Aren’t Until I Call Them. Performing the Subject in American Literature. Frankfurt am Main-berlin-Bruxelles-New York-Oxfords-Wien: Peter Lang.

Cisneros, Sandra. [1984] 2004. The House on Mango Street. London: Bloomsbury.

-----. [1991] 1992. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage Books.

-----. 1997. “My Purple House – Color is a Language and a History.” Hispanic Link, San Antonio, August 31, 1997. Web: http://www.genconnection.com/English/house.html, Access: April 11, 2022.

-----. [2002] 2013. Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento. New York: Vintage, E-Book.

-----. 2014. “A Room of Her Own. An Altar for My Mother, An Installation.” Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (October 31, 2014-September 7, 2015). Web: http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/altar-installation-sandra-cisneros/, Access: April 12, 2022.

-----. “Website of Sandra Cisneros.” Available http://www.sandracisneros.com Access: April 8, 2022.

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(translated by Servando Ortoll) Estudios sobre las Culturas Contemporaneas, Época II, Vol. VIII, Núm. 16, Universidad de Colima, México, diciembre, 37-53.

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THE MOVING IMAGE AND THE SUBJECT IN THE INTERFACE OF TECHNOLOGICAL AUGMENTATION AND GEOGRAPHY

Zoltán Dragon

The moving image, and its specific subset of feature film, is changing by the day due to the introduction of advanced formats of interactive digital interfaces. While these technological changes might not affect the genre and the style of films directly (at least not noticeably on a larger scale), the way the spectator encounters and consumes the content begs serious questions. Especially adamant with the introduction of augmented reality interface features, the new kind of spectatorship forces us to reconceptualize the role of the subject in the spectacle and reconfigure the critical and theoretical framework in which new cases of watching moving images can be tackled. This essay looks at specific examples that push the boundaries of spectatorship and offer new concepts for critical reflection through the move from a screen-based media instance to a mobile and flexible interface-based spectating event.[25]

Keywords: mobile and digital interface, movies, film theory, augmented reality, performative cartography

In William Gibson’s Spook Country, Hollis Henry, the protagonist of Gibson’s “Blue Ant” trilogy of novels, is invited to a spooky installation in the very first chapter: with a virtual reality headset device she can revisit the death of the actor, River Phoenix, on the spot (Gibson 2008, 9). The on-location virtual artefact is part of the trend once known as "locative art" – today it is not really an art form, and we simply use a more general, albeit extended term instead for similar installations: augmented reality.

Today we approach a state – more and more without the clumsy goggles and devices that accompany them – much like Hollis found herself in: not sure of what we see, how we see, and of the flimsy boundary between virtual and real, online and offline; and a bit like the body that is there and not there at the very same time, long degraded and yet intact, mapped and unmapped in an uncanny cartographic way.

Here I wish to address the specific problem the emplacement and the positioning of the subject presents in today’s increasingly augmented everyday realities. My particular interest lies in the technological aspect of the augmentation of space that results in what Nanna Verhoeff calls “performative cartography” that questions not only our modern understanding of – mostly urban – spaces, but also reveals a problematic aspect of subjectivity. If the space that the subject finds itself in is augmented, it is inevitable to pose the question what this augmentation brings for the subject. I will identify a common element, a digital-material glue that helps us understand how the subject is mapped onto the very cartography it pretends to master: the interface. While theorists have recently paid much attention to both the question of the subject and of space in the digital world separately, I would like to refocus the discussion on what connects the two and claim that it is the technological aspect of this connection that defines the augmentation of space and subject alike.

In general terms, augmented reality can be thought of as a digital layer on our reality comprised of geo-registered data retrieved and visualized through the screen of a mobile interface. As such, augmented reality, through contemporary mobile screen technology, not only takes place, but it also makes space (Verhoeff 2012, 134): the screen of the interface reconfigures the geographical space around us and creates a data-filled vision of it in front of us, thus making us capable of not only understanding our present situation (the deictic “You are here” type of positioning of traditional cartographic logic), but also of navigating this space. In other words, augmented reality fills the space with visualized data connected to geo-registered points, thus augmenting (but not completely overlaying or overtaking) our perception of reality.

Let me illustrate my point with a somewhat unique application that might even raise questions about the medium-specific definition of the cinema, as well as show the basic principles on which augmented reality operates. The concept of the Augmented Reality Cinema application takes geo-registered data of well-known film sequences and allows the user to activate the digital layer in their reality on-location, i.e., the “spectator” needs to be present in the very space the scene of the particular film is set. This way it is not the subject who enters the diegetic realm, but the diegesis enters the subject’s reality, inviting the subject to the location of the actual shots, outside the institution of the cinema (or rather, the user-subject navigates the filmic sequence to its location). I could have chosen other applications as well, of course, as this is an evolving technology, but I think the diegetic space of the filmic sequence can more spectacularly integrate with the representation of our reality than in the case of any other data-driven apps.

What is pivotal in augmented reality is a kind of upgraded cartography. Traditionally, cartography is concerned with making and reading maps, in two-dimensional meaning-making attempts, separating the observer and the observed (Verhoeff 2012, 139). Today, however, with the introduction of interactive, digital mapping tools featured by mobile and essentially networked media technologies, the function and the working mechanism of mapping have fundamentally changed. New mapping practices blur the boundary between observer and observed and put the user in the role of navigator with the use of Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), geo-browsers (like Google Earth), map-hacking, geo-tagging, and allowing the creation of mash-ups. According to Verhoeff, this not only leads to new representations of space, but also provides “tools to modify maps” and “to fill maps with different kinds of knowledge” (139).

It is thus a new way of putting oneself onto the map: it does not depend on the cartographer, but rather on how connected and networked one is, since contemporary digital cartography allows the user to manipulate and navigate the data layers comprising the ever-evolving map, thus allows for acts of creating and recreating space in a process of re-locating oneself. According to Verhoeff, this means that we have moved from representational cartography to what she coins as performative cartography. Performative cartography is “a procedural form of simultaneous making and reading space by exploring a hybrid space of atoms and bits, both the physical and the virtual, through interaction between on- and off-screen navigable space” (137). This practice brings together three domains central to the visual regime of navigation: screen, space, and mobility. Performative cartography emerges “during movement, as a particular form of interactive navigation: fixed maps do not dictate the itinerary, but rather maps and views evolve and emerge along the way” (145).

Verhoeff compares the process of performative cartography to bricolage, that is, a type of “creation by recombining ready-made bits and pieces” in the way Claude Lévi-Strauss or Gerard Gennette talk about it (146), but I think this is not the case here. Performative cartography and digital mash-ups are examples of what Lev Manovich calls deep remix, which is a truly hybrid media format (Manovich 2008). The difference between a bricolage or remix and the deep remix is that while in a remix the combined elements preserve their logic of representation (an image is an image even if it is transposed to text or music), in a deep remix the logic of representation is brought to a common platform: that of the programmable language of software.

Let me refer to a mash-up example to illustrate the hybridity of new media that is also at play in performative cartography. Canadian indie band Arcade Fire teamed up with Chris Milk to create an intriguing Google Experiment project called The Wilderness Downtown, which takes the band’s track, "We Used to Wait," and turns it into a hybrid mash-up of video footage, geo-imagery and Google’s map application, most notably its street-view option. The user navigates to the website the project is located at and enters the name of his or her hometown – the algorithm then searches for the coordinates and assembles a personalized show. In a curious act of digital flânerie, the user gets multiple points of view shots of video and street-view imagery stitched together, adjusted to the movement of the faceless protagonist of the clip, using several, dynamically changing browser windows as a multiplication of screens within the screen.

A nostalgic gesture indeed, the clip in fact utilizes the spatial memory of the user-subject, connecting the psychological factors with an algorithmic rendition of space. It dynamically, in a procedural manner, repositions the subject through the interface of the mash-up to recreate the once visited spatial coordinates that allow the subject not only the recollection of psychic, but also of bodily engagement within the given spatio-temporal setting. The subject’s spatial memory thus comes to be aligned (and overseen) by digital and performative cartography – in André Nusselder’s reading of Lacan, a fantasy screen navigated through the interface.

Another project for browser rendition by Milk, called RO.ME, illustrates the fact that one does not need real coordinates to create and maintain visual representations of space, or to navigate a diegetic space. The dream-like, travellesque, fantastic rollercoaster is in fact a momentarily rendering of a bunch of code written in WebGL inside the browser. The user can interact with the source code, change its properties to reposition itself or to redesign the spatial coordinates in which the short story unfolds. While the project obviously does not refer to any real-world cartographic element, it perfectly shows the way performative cartography is embedded in representations crafted on new media bases.

The concept of the Augmented Reality Cinema application is indicative in terms of how we tend to think about the cinema in particular, and about the moving image in general today. Cinema, a cultural interface, dominant in the twentieth century as Manovich asserts, is moving out of its institutionalized home, freeing itself of its brick-and-mortar roots with the theatrical institution we used to go to see the latest and greatest releases the motion picture industry produced. With the advance of digital technology in production and, a bit later, in distribution, cinema is no longer the well-definable medium theorists thought it to be. According to Manovich, if you look up the definition of the leading industry standard of motion graphics on Wikipedia, you will get a concise and more or less precise understanding of the background (Manovich 2008). However, it is no longer so easy to define what cinema is on strictly medial terms.

The above examples of new media make it essential to rethink and augment the notion of spectatorship. On the one hand, we need to investigate what happens when the kinetic presence of the spectator precedes that of the moving image, i.e., when the network of geolocated cinematic sequences structures the movement or path of the spectator in space. On the other hand, we also have to look at the phenomenon of what might be termed as digital flânerie: a kind of wandering or strolling reminiscent of a leisure walk in reality but generated through a technical apparatus by the augmentation of the spatial structure of the moving image with maps and data.

In post-structuralist film theory, the spectator subject is a kind of receptacle, sitting inert and immobile in the darkness of the auditorium. Its position recalls the imprint of Plato’s simile of the cave for the theorists of the apparatus (as seen in Jean-Louis Baudry’s work for instance). Similarly influential is the idea of the dream analogy (utilized by theorists from Christian Metz to Bruce Kawin), according to which the spectator encounters with the flickering images on the screen just as it would in a dream situation, where it would also be a passive recipient or witness to the sequences, like in the case of a film (Cristian and Dragon 2008, 37-38).

All of these theories of the filmic spectator enlarge upon the technology and characteristics of modern cinema. But what happens if we reach back to the original position the movie spectator inhabited: the mobile spectator? The spread of nickelodeons and movie palaces were indeed preceded by the invention of the technology, called the kinetoscope, invented under the auspices of Thomas Alva Edison by William K. L. Dickson, that was later taken over by more sophisticated projection technologies (Belton 2005, 6-8). The machinery, introduced in 1892, found its home under street arcades. The individual kinetoscopes, arranged in line, presented the viewer with short, repeated, looped sequences. These clips were sometimes connected and made up a story of some sorts that could be assembled by walking from machine to machine and peeping into the viewer on the top of the box. According to Manovich, this method is strikingly similar to the logic of representation advocated by the QuickTime video player released in the 1990s: reception is private as opposed to collective in both cases; the size of the screens is relatively small (as compared to the cinematic one); and both techniques feed on the structure and logic of the loop (Manovich 2001, 315).

I think the difference between the two modes of representation and reception can best be grasped in view of contemporary mobile interface technology: it not only returns the moving image to its originally urban home, but also puts a range of portable devices into the hands of the spectators which free them from standing still in the shade of the arcades. By this augmentation of reality, film and the moving image find a new place, as well.

The beginning of the 21st century brought about a significant shift in thinking about the experiencing of reality: blunt reality can no longer be seen solely as to be experienced through the usual sensorial perceptorial avenues. Perception today is defined by multi-layered, georegistered, dynamically updated and changing database: moving image is one data layer among the many. However, this spectacular augmentation of the space of reality has serious impact on the notion of the spectator subject, too.

Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift define subjectivity as “rooted in the spatial home of the body … united and orchestrated to a greater or lesser extent by narrative, and as registered through a whole series of senses” (Pile and Thrift 1996, 11). Locating the “spatial home of the body” and registering through senses recalls the Freudian definition of the ego, as “first and foremost a bodily ego,” that is “not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface” (Freud 1961, 27). Jacques Lacan takes his cue from the projective quality of the surface and suggests that the three-dimensional space in which the subject resides and functions is not a given, we are not born into space: it is the result of identification in the field of the Other that prepares the subject to comprehend and navigate space (Adams 2003, 148). Lacan’s idea is instructive here: from his famous mirror stage idea on, he emphasizes the presence of a screen, a projective surface on which various scenarios of identification can play out.

André Nusselder, in Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology, argues that the subject in the age of information technology lives on the screen (Nusselder 2009, 2), which echoes among many critical views, Nicholas Mirzoeff’s claim that “modern life takes place onscreen” (Mirzoeff 1999, 1), but he enlarges on this statement in a different way. For Nusselder, the computer screen is essentially a psychological space, the screen of fantasy, which distorts “the ideal relationship” of the user-subject and the sign (Nusselder 2009, 3). “Therefore,” he says, “the relation of user and sign is … cybernetic” (3).

While I agree with the claim that the introduction and use of digital computing devices distort the way the user-subject and the signs of representation engage, I think the subject does not “live on the screen.” As I will discuss it later, the cybernetic relation of user-subject and sign can work only if we stay close to the Lacanian graph of visual regime: the screen needs to be seen as a digital interface through which the relation of the user and the sign can play out. In other words, life does not take place on the screen but rather through it. It is an important distinction, as I do not think the subject has ultimately become completely virtual – though I will keep arguing for it being ultimately augmented.

To think about subjectivity in the age of Web 2.0, we need to consider that the subject is co-present in blunt reality as much as it can be online. It means that the digital aspect of subjectivity needs to be taken into consideration as well in defining the subject of the 21st century. What it entails is an intricate process of tracing one’s avatar – not only the visually composed set of images (let alone the blue Na’vis of James Cameron’s groundbreaking film) that we use as funny (or not so funny) identifications of ourselves on social networking sites or personal websites, but also the invisible digital footprints that we inevitably leave behind when browsing the World Wide Web.

This online subjectivity layer is in fact more than what we may think it is: we know what sites we have visited, what videos we have just watched on YouTube or whom we befriended on Facebook – but the internet knows a lot more about us. When you log into Amazon.com, the algorithm will instantly recommend you a wide range of items: how did it know that I am interested in science fiction? Well, it tracks my online route, but it uses not only the data I leave behind when I navigate away from its pages but collects the digital footprints I may take afterwards as well. It knows where I come from, it knows what I do there, and it knows exactly whither I leave. A lot of companies out there do nothing but trace my footsteps and compile a virtual map of my online travels. My online avatar thus is an ever-growing dataset composed of my navigation, my browsing habits, which then “pictures me” so that I can be identified when entering the site of commerce.

To see who follows your invisible digital footprints, one handy tool to refer to is the Collision plugin for Mozilla’s Firefox browser: it gives you an interactive infographic representation of those sites that you connect with without actually clicking on their hyperlinks by accident or on purpose. To illustrate how intricate this graph can turn, see my 5-minutes long browsing on regular sites: I start out to read my emails, check my friends on Twitter and Facebook, navigate to a couple of Hungarian news portals, watch a YouTube video, and the like – and see how more bubbles pop up adjacent to the particular sites: sites I have never ever visited, sites that follow me nonetheless. When talking about avatars or online representations of subjectivity, this is what should be meant: the intentioned plus the unintentional pieces of navigation that one performs when browsing. (Note that as I am talking, more and more companies announce their DNT strategies, such as Twitter or even Microsoft with the introduction of its new Internet Explorer browser: they allow the user to opt out or even to block 3rd party sites and services tracking their online browsing.)

In line with Nusselder’s discussion of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the digital age, one could assert that the unintentioned part of the dataset that builds my avatar is basically the digital unconscious that symptomatically returns in the most unexpected corners of the World Wide Web. He suggests that “information technologies … seem to design or create a second, parallel world” (an idea that corresponds to the main hypothesis of virtual domains like Second Life), and we can communicate, interact with this world in a way that user-data relation becomes transparent (Nusselder 2009, 8), an idea that could easily be linked to what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin calls “immediacy” (Bolter and Grusin 2000).

Recently, Beth Coleman investigated how our perception of reality is changing by the minute and how our online persona is getting more and more emphasis in how we see ourselves. In Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation, she elucidates the difference between offline and online dimensions that is usually at the core of discussion of contemporary digital identity, and contests the use of such a binary opposition. Instead, she points out how the two have really become one inseparable experience and goes on to offer the term “x-reality” (can be read either as “ex-“ or “cross-reality”) that is the quasi-virtual realm intertwining the two domains of experience.

While Coleman improves on the subject-object relationship in the digital age compared to many of the contemporary considerations of the topic by adding the programming, technological layer into the equation at some point (even attributing some kind of disruptive aspect to technological agency), I think that by putting the ultimate emphasis on the agency of the user-subject in interaction, the immediacy of the interface becomes a ghostly non-presence. Moreover, I also question the disruptive aspect of technology in augmented reality – especially in arguments that aim at connecting the on- and offline domains. I agree with both Nusselder and Coleman that transparency for the interface is pivotal, but I consider it problematic to locate agency on either the side of representation or that of the subject of representation.

As I have outlined above, it is through the interface that space is made: it is the performative cartography that uses geo-registered data, user interaction and interface technology that creates spatial representation. However, it is only through the programmable interface that the user can locate and constitute itself as subject who then is able to partake of the process of creating space. It is as if the Lacanian big Other got manifested in the mobile screen technology of the interface: the user-subject identifies itself through the device that helps it locate itself – a gesture that also makes space available to navigate in.

In his discussion of the position of the Lacanian Real in the cyberspace, Slavoj Žižek argues that "[w]hat defines the properly ‘human dimension’ is the presence of a screen, a frame, through which we communicate with the ‘suprasensible’ virtual universe to be found nowhere in reality" (Žižek 1997, 60). In this model he refers to the diagram Lacan uses to define the difference between the look and the gaze in The Four Fundamental Concept of Psycho-analysis, where the subject of representation is ultimately deprived of all of its imaginary agency. Interestingly, Lacan also denies this power of the gaze, i.e., the position of the big Other, thus challenging the thereto hierarchically organized relationship between the subject and object of representation (Lacan 1998, 67-78). The structure Lacan proposes and Žižek adapts to a cyberspace context is thus very similar to the situation I am describing.

The only difference that Žižek does not address is indicative, however. Both Lacan and Žižek presuppose the structuring role of representation as such: for instance, a painting designates the position of its spectator (think of perspectival organization) that leaves him or her with the feeling of mastery over the visual field. However, the smallest detail or point of disorientation (such as the strange blot in Hans Holbein’s infamous The Ambassadors) annihilates this impression and reveals the “other side” of representation, the gaze, the collision with which is the flimsy structural pane of the screen. The screen is then a mediating instance necessary to keep the balance of the look and the gaze, a pivotal part of the structure of representation, of the visual regime in which the subject comes to be, nonetheless, itself part of the scheme of representation.

In augmented reality situations, however, the screen of the interface (today in quite a material format) pre-presents rather than behaves as part of the representation. I am referring to the technological necessity Verhoeff calls attention to: in digital cartography space is continuously recreated by the user-subject through the interface. While, as we have seen in the example of comparing the practice of performative cartography to bricolage, Verhoeff does not emphasize the role of the interface as much as I think it should be done, it is clear that this pre-presentational turn could not operate without the fundamental presence of the interface, of the mobile screen.

Moreover, we need to acknowledge the agency of the interface as well – as taken over from either the agency of the visual regime of representation or from the subject. William Uricchio has recently announced the algorithmic turn in visual culture (Uricchio 2011) in his analysis of Microsoft’s Photosynth app. Photosynth basically takes user-generated, geo-registered imagery, finds the matches among the myriad of photos and stitches them together in such a way that it does not become a simple 3D panoramic representation of space, but rather a fluid, navigable one. One example is the collaboration with CNN’s broadcasting Barack Obama’s inauguration, when thousands of images were uploaded by professionals and amateurs alike, while Photosynth’s algorithm was busy at work to create a dynamic, navigable experience of the Washingtonian space.

While I think the algorithmic turn came a bit earlier (think of Animoto’s service, for instance, that matches color, editing and even music to the “feeling” of the photos you upload and thus creates a video montage), this turn clearly shows how the agency is now ultimately on the side of the interface and technology. It even forces its own digital, non-linear logic on us: in Photosynth there is no fixed point of view, set frame of representation, as it works with multiple authorities, fluid structuring of imagery based solely on data.

The interface, however, is not innocent, and while strives to be transparent, it is not so successful. In Lev Manovich’s definition, the interface “acts as a code that carries cultural messages in a variety of media” (Manovich 2001, 64). The interface is the mode of displaying, receiving, and transmitting information, an electronic surface that allows users interactive engagement with any form of content: the screen, the software and hardware used, and the special logic they entail. However, “far from being a transparent window into the data inside a computer,” Manovich argues, “the interface brings with it strong messages of its own” (65). It means that the logic with which an interface operates is already coded in the transmission of data.

As the technological insertion between the user-subject and space, the interface enables performative cartography. As Verhoeff explains,

The basic principle of screen-based navigation is that we see how we move, while how we move enables vision. This mutually constructive, discursive relationship between seeing and moving is a new principle in real-time, digital cartography. It is the movement that establishes the map; reading space requires navigation, rather than the other way around. Digital maps make use of the logic of tagging, plotting, stitching as forms of interaction. (Verhoeff 2012, 153)

Tagging is labeling objects and locations with metadata (this is what the organizers of the conference did with the map we were given: they augmented our reality, re-mapping a Szeged for us). Plotting is the practice of tagging objects in space and inserting tagged objects in the map (like live-streamed videos, or photographs you could see in Photosynth, plotting a whole inauguration ceremony in a special way). Finally, stitching is when these practices are integrated into a navigable whole (153).

Stitching is like a 4D model of filmic suture – not the standard suture procedure criticized so severely, but the short-circuited mode as discussed by Žižek who argues that when shot and counter-shot (the basic constituents of the suture operation on a formal level) appear within the same shot, subject and object of the look become co-present in the same virtual, impossible space, creating what he calls, the interface (Žižek 2001, 40). To refer back to the Augmented Reality Cinema app, I could say that what it presents us with is the suture operation translated into the interfaced, short-circuited mode of proto-filmic and post-production sequences in which scenario, curiously enough, the film sequence comes before, precedes, pre-presents the real space for the subject: stitches it into a new, augmented type of diegetic realm.

It is precisely this aspect, the tagging, plotting, and finally, the stitching of the user-subject within performative cartography that is missing from Verhoeff’s discussion: it is as if – contrary what she states about the interactive nature of such a process – the subject could distance itself from the scene it is navigating, exactly like the Cartesian subject of representational cartography. The point, however, is that by this process, the subject itself comes to be: tagged in space, plotted in the map, and stitched into its physical and augmented environment. It is the digital version of the Lacanian scenario of identification through the field of the Other as an establishing gesture of making space: here, however, the augmentative act of the interface takes the place of the field of the Other.

To refer to Manovich’s definition of the interface, and to augment Verhoeff’s performative cartography with its help, one can detect a crucial change in how our perception of our spatial setting is structured: in Lacanese, the visual field (including the spatial coordinates) is born out of the split between the gaze and the look, with the intrusion of the screen. However, in augmented reality, and especially regarding performative cartography, it is the screen that gives birth to both subject and space. This is, I would say, the techno-logic of digital representation in spatial terms.

The consequences of this cannot be overemphasized: the interface augments reality and the subject alike, thus taking the ideological power of representation with it, for it is no longer the map that acts as the locus of knowledge, of politics, of power, of instruction, i.e., it is no longer the representation that designates the place of object and subject, but the pre-presentational interface that – as Nusselder showed – distorts the relation between user and sign.

What all this amounts to finally, is the need to reconsider how we think about subjectivity in the age of digitally augmented reality. As our space comes to be augmented more and more by the day, inevitably, the subject – caught up in the flux of augmenting reality – cannot but be part of this interactive gesture, and augment itself by re-locating itself, renewing its self-recognition through the digital interface that instead of plotting our narratives in space, invite us to the procedure of continuous tagging and mapping. With the use of contemporary augmenting scenarios, therefore, the augmented subject is born through the interface.

Works Cited

Adams, Parveen. 2003. Art as Prosthesis: Cronenberg’s Crash. In Parveen Adams, ed. Art: Sublimation or Symptom. London, Karnac.

Belton, John. 2005. American Cinema / American Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Irén Annus is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary, where she also contributes to the work of the Gender Studies, Inter-America and Digital Culture and Theories research groups. Her interest in the fields of Cultural and Identity Studies has framed her research which has focused primarily on the cultural history and visual representation, social position and identity construction of American minoritized groups during the Victorian era and in recent decades.

E-mail: iannus@lit.u-szeged.hu

Réka M. Cristian is Associate Professor, Chair of the American Studies Department, University of Szeged, Co-Chair and founding member of the university’s Inter-American Research Center. She is author of Cultural Vistas and Sites of Identity: Literature, Film and American Studies (2011), co-author with Zoltán Dragon of Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories (2008), and editor-in-chief of AMERICANA E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, as well as its e-book division, AMERICANA eBooks.

E-mail: cristian@lit.u-szeged.hu

Zoltán Dragon is Senior Assistant Professor at the Department of American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary. His fields of research are digital culture, cultural theory, film theory, visual culture and photography. He is the author of The Spectral Body: Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó (2006), Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories (co-authored with Réka M. Cristian, 2008), Tennessee Williams Hollywoodba megy, avagy a dráma és film dialógusa (in Hungarian, 2011), and A Practical Guide to Writing a Successful Thesis in the Humanities (2012). He is founding editor of AMERICANA – E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary and the publishing label AMERICANA eBooks, and head of the Digital Culture & Theories Research Group at his home university.

Email: dragon@ieas-szeged.hu

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács is associate professor of the Department of American Studies at the University of Szeged. She teaches courses on nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, literary theory, and research methods. Her research interests include versions of modernist fiction in a transnational context, travel writing and travel as a theme by modernist authors, multicultural identity prose, and lately African American fiction.

E-mail: agnes.zsofia.kovacs@gmail.com

Zsófia Anna Tóth received her PhD in British and American Literature and Culture from the University of Szeged and is currently a senior assistant professor at the Department of American Studies, Institute of English and American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary. Her PhD research topic – and the resulting book: Merry Murderers: The Farcical (Re)Figuration of the Femme Fatale in Maurine Dallas Watkins’ Chicago (1927) and its Various Adaptations that was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (UK) in 2011 – was concerned with the representation of female aggression and violence in American literature, culture and especially cinema. Her research also includes Jane Austen’s works, their adaptations as well as her legacy, the New Woman (her representation and historical, cultural and academic reception), American women writers especially Sandra Cisneros as well as Disney and Pixar animations. Her current research focuses on theories of humor, the questions of humor and gender as well as women’s humor while she is currently working on a book about the work(s), humorous products/performances and the overall phenomenon of Mae West.

Email: tothzsofianna@gmail.com

Zoltán Vajda is Associate Professor of American Studies at the Institute of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Szeged, Hungary. His main areas of research and teaching are early American intellectual and cultural history, antebellum Southern history, Thomas Jefferson and his times, Cultural Studies and US popular culture. He serves on the editorial board of AMERICANA – E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, and Aetas, a historical journal.

Email: vajda@lit.u-szeged.hu

Megjegyzések

[←1]

The original version of this study was published by the title “Trans-culturing Jane Austen: The Mollywood Adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 8 (2012): 1. Web: https://americanaejournal.hu/vol8no1/annus

[←2]

An earlier version of this essay appeared as "'Amazons,' 'Angels,' Blacks, and Savages: National Others in Thomas Jefferson’s Thought" in Americana e-Journal of American Studies in Hungary IV.1 (Spring 2008)

[←3]

For a survey of these see Smith 2000.

[←4]

Scholars emphasizing the imagined, constructed nature of modern (western) nations can be linked to this perspective. See, for instance, Gellner, and Anderson. Theorizations on the constructed nature of American nationhood and national identity in particular were investigated by Annus 2005.

[←5]

On the place of Jefferson’s ideas within the broader context of the “Saxon myth” see Peterson 57-59. On the place of Jefferson’s ideas within the broader context of the “Saxon myth” see Peterson 57-59.

[←6]

The expression was introduced by Boyd.

[←7]

On the significance of landed property in relation to republican political theory and in the American cultural context see Pocock 1989, 96-101, and Pocock 1975, 532.

[←8]

For how much Jefferson’s views about agrarian development were rooted in the four-stage theory development of Scottish enlightenment explaining the shift from agriculture to the commercial stage see Drew McCoy 13-19.

[←9]

On Jefferson’s understanding of national economic independence in a broader intellectual context, see Onuf and Onuf 239-46.

[←10]

TJ to Benjamin Hawkins, February 18, 1803, Jefferson 1903-4, 10:362; see also TJ to Andrew Jackson, February 16, 1803, Jefferson 1903-4, 10:357 and TJ to William H. Harrison, February 27, 1803, Jefferson 1903-4, 10:369.

[←11]

According to Bernard Sheehan, Jefferson’s plan amounted to a desire for “biological amalgamation” of Native Americans and whites. See Sheehan 174.

[←12]

Kerber 137-84; Wiebe 266-67; On the ideological justification of this subordinated position see Welter.

[←13]

On this function of “Republican Motherhood” as an ideal see Kerber 229, 283-84.

[←14]

On this function of “Republican Motherhood” as an ideal see Kerber 229, 283-84.

[←15]

On such Jeffersonian dilemmas see for instance, Miller 2; Diggins, and Boulton.

[←16]

This essay appeared originally as "On the Visual Dimension of Sympathy in Thomas Jefferson’s Moral Philosophy" in Americana e-Journal of American Studies in Hungary VIII.1 (Spring 2012).

[←17]

The original version of this study was published by the title “The Carnivalesque Image of America in the Different Versions of Chicago” in Gabriella Varró and Zoltán Simon (ed). Special Issue: Proceedings of the 8th Biennial HAAS Conference, Images of America - Responses to a Changing Social, Cultural and Literary Landscape, Americana E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, 7: 2 (2011). Web: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol7no2/tzsa

[←18]

The original version of this study was published by the title “American Cinema at the Crossroads of American Studies” in Special Issue: Proceedings of the 2008 HAAS Conference, in Réka M. Cristian and Zoltán Dragon (eds.), AMERICANA, E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, 5: 2 (2009). Web: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol5no2/tzsa

[←19]

The original version of this study was published by the title “Edith Wharton’s Model of Culture in French Ways and Their Meaning.” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 5 (2009): 2. Available: https://americanaejournal.hu/ vol5no2/kazs

[←20]

The original version of this study was published by the title “Recanonizing Henry James: Colm Tóibín’s The Master.” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 3 (2007): 1. Available: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol3no1/kazs

[←21]

David Lodge analyzes possible reasons of the James revival and the construction of his own Author! Author! Lodge also highlights the role of gender studies and Queer Theory have played in the process. See his The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel. London; Penguin, 2006, 3-103., especially pp. 6-8.

[←22]

Diverse biographies of James are competing at the moment: one has to mention at least two more authors whose work would fit into the framework of this discussion (if stretched longer). Fred Kaplan’s Henry James, The Imagination of Genius: A Biography and Sheldon M. Novick’s Henry James: The Young Master can be placed along Edel’s and Tóibín’s work, respectively. Novick has written about the love life of James, more specifically about his emotional attachments to diverse men during his life. Fred Kaplan, posing for Edel the official James biographer, maintains that although James had a strong homosexual tendency, there is no proof whatsoever as to his actual involvement with any of the men Novick mentions.

[←23]

Lodge devotes a whole survey to this genre he considers a recent interest in fictional biographies of writers and calls it metafictional biography of writers. This is the group Bethany Layne has called “biofictions.” (Lodge, 2006, 10).

[←24]

The original version of this study was published as “Home(s) on Borderlands and Inter-American Identity in the Works of Sandra Cisneros.” In Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, Volume XI (2015): 1. Web: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol11no1/cristian

[←25]

The original version of this study was published by the title “Merida and Mother Bear: A Lesson in Feminist Cultural Pedagogy”, AMERICANA: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary Volume IX. Number 1., Spring 2013. Available https://americanaejournal.hu/vol9no1/dragon