Contents

- Introduction

- Irén Annus and Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

- Queer Eye on the Rise: Hegemonic Masculinity Confirmed

- Irén Annus

- Neo-Western to the Rescue: Breaking Bad and the Crisis of Hegemonic Masculinity

- Irén Annus

- Crossways of Film and American Studies

- Réka M. Cristian

- Gourmet Adventures: Film, Adaptation, and Cooking

- Réka M. Cristian

- Do People Dream of Digital Archives?

- Zoltán Dragon

- Remembering Henry James: Paris, Perspective and Panic in A Small Boy and Others

- Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

- The Business of Marriage: Clashing American and French Roles for Turn-of-the-century Married Women in Edith Wharton

- Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

- Mae West Turning Dirty Snow White through her Comic Performances

- Zsófia Anna Tóth

- Works Cited

- Merida and her Mother Bear: Feminist Cultural Pedagogy á la Disney/Pixar

- Zsófia Anna Tóth

- The Power of Hemispheric Sympathy: Sentimental Aspects of Thomas Jefferson’s Conception of Inter-American Relations

- Zoltán Vajda

- Contributors

Szeged Series in American Studies #1

REVISITING THE PAST

AMERICAN CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT

Edited by

Irén Annus and Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

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.

Revisiting the Past: American Culture in Contemporary Context 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.

(cc)2021 Szeged, AMERICANA eBooks

Series editors: Réka M. Cristian & Zoltán Dragon

(cc)Irén Annus and Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

ISBN: 978-615-5423-77-2 (.mobi); 978-615-5423-76-5 (.epub);

978-615-5423-75-8 (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

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

SZTE 100

CONTENTS

Introduction

Irén Annus and Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

Queer Eye on the Rise: Hegemonic Masculinity Confirmed

Irén Annus

Neo-Western to the Rescue: Breaking Bad and the Crisis of Hegemonic Masculinity

Irén Annus

Crossways of Film and American Studies

Réka M. Cristian

Gourmet Adventures: Film, Adaptation, and Cooking

Réka M. Cristian

Do People Dream of Digital Archives?

Zoltán Dragon

Remembering Henry James: Paris, Perspective and Panic in A Small Boy and Others

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

The Business of Marriage: Clashing American and French Roles for Turn-of-the-century Married Women in Edith Wharton

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

Mae West Turning Dirty Snow White through her Comic Performances

Zsófia Anna Tóth

Works Cited

Merida and her Mother Bear: Feminist Cultural Pedagogy á la Disney/Pixar

Zsófia Anna Tóth

The Power of Hemispheric Sympathy: Sentimental Aspects of Thomas Jefferson’s Conception of Inter-American Relations

Zoltán Vajda

Contributors

INTRODUCTION

Irén Annus and Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

The year 2021 is a landmark for the Department of American Studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary: it marks the centenary of the university in its current location. However, the institution traces its origins all the way back to 1581, when the Academia was founded in the town of Cluj/Kolozsvár with two schools. Three hundred and forty years later, it was moved to Szeged in the aftermath of the Great War, as Cluj/Kolozsvár was part of the Hungarian territories annexed to Romania after the Treaty of Trianon. Since then, the university has been centered in the city after which it is currently named, having survived the winds of history and a subsequent series of re-organizations and name changes. The current volume is published to celebrate one hundred years of uninterrupted operation in Szeged, during which the university and the city have become deeply intertwined, each shaping the other in intricate and multifaceted ways.

The year 2021 also marks 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.

It is in this spirit that this collection is published as the first volume in a new series the Department has decided to launch: the Szeged Series in American Studies (SZESAS). As part of the open access Americana eBooks division with Réka M. Cristian and Zoltán Dragon as general editors, this series will publish an annual collection of studies as a platform to present articles by academics within the university researching various fields of American culture and society. The first volume – a retrospective glimpse into the past – includes previous studies already published by Department faculty which have been revisited and recontextualized for the present day.

In the publication, we wish 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. More specifically, the collection indicates three key areas of interest. Firstly, there is an obvious focus on visual culture and mediality in American Studies. Secondly, you will find a palpably theoretically minded link to contemporary phenomena, ranging from popular culture to highly canonized literary texts – the balance apparently toppled by the popular side – mostly related to how the memory and reception of cultural products work. Thirdly, there is a pronounced sensitivity to issues of historiography.

The two studies in this collection by Irén Annus investigate the American socio-cultural contexts and relevance of two different types of television genres: domestic advice reality TV programs through an analysis of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–2007) and increasingly popular neo-Western elements of recent primetime series through the example of Breaking Bad (2008–2013). Both productions, widely popular as well as highly acclaimed and honored with professional awards, have been thoroughly investigated from various perspectives, focusing on a number of novel aspects of these landmark programs. The current studies in particular focus on the post-9/11 period: the potential crisis in hegemonic and traditional masculinities and the resultant shift of gender roles and positions in American culture, which both of these programs address. The current success of the remake Queer Eye and the continued influence of the neo-Western on more recent TV series indicate the continued impact of and interest in these genres.

Réka M. Cristian reissues two papers that showcase the interaction of theory and practice in the field of American film studies. Cristian’s first paper is based on the premise that American Studies and film studies have developed simultaneously, and that US film production provides a reasonable chunk of US cultural production. The paper draws on Gene Wise’s 1979 concept “paradigm dramas,” meaning “actual patterns of thinking in action” (Wise 1979, 175) and proceeds to enlist how different “paradigm dramas” of American Studies are related to Film Studies. The paper shows that the academic field American Studies was actually quite slow in explicating its basic connection to film studies. The second paper discusses cooking as a metaphor for adaptation in Nora Ephron’s film Julie and Julia, based on works by Julia Child and Julie Powell – at the same time, it performs a contemporary paradigm drama of American Studies in which (film) adaptation provides space for cultural and intertextual dialogue.

Zoltán Dragon’s meditation on the figure of the archive investigates the role the Digital turn plays in the production of contemporary cultural knowledge. Do new digital forms of storing data leave the cultural content they contain intact or not, in other words does the techné influence the episteme? The archive has always been the symbol of a culture’s memory, and the question that comes with digitizing data in the archive is whether changing the means of storing data also changes what is being remembered in the archive. The paper claims that digitized ways of storing data result in a new kind of memory and knowledge, one that is difficult to erase and one that poses ethical concerns.

The two papers by Ágnes Zsófia Kovács discuss turn-of-the-century performances of gender in the works of Henry James and Edith Wharton. The elderly Henry James was immersed in writing his autobiographies, revisiting the past by writing. These volumes are usually read as stories of the evolution of the artist figure, while the paper reinterprets the final scene of Notes of a Son and Brother as the narrator’s experience of homosexual panic as defined by Kosofsky Sedgwick. Kovács’s second paper looks into the intersection of US and French gender roles in Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. Its heroine, Undine Spragg, pushes for social uplift through four marriages and her changing performances as a married woman provide space for breaching the rules of American and French gendered behavior alike.

Anna Zsófia Tóth discusses two phenomena of American cinema, both of which are fresh in content and novel in approach, thus their re-publication hopefully generates further discussions regarding the role of humor in the art of Mae West and her age as well as the potential pedagogical impact of animated films made for children. Her first study investigates Mae West’s works in the context of comic performativity. Tóth argues that West’s art was framed by the widely held belief of the age that humor is associated with masculinity and male performance. West, however, was able to subvert this cultural expectation by overemphasizing her femininity, among others, thus she was able not only to create a successful artistic space for herself, but also to reach a lasting impact in contemporary entertainment industry, breaking down barriers that excluded women from the art of humor. Her other study focuses on the exceptional features of the animated film Brave (2012) and dissects the various ways in which the figure of the adult (mother) bear challenges practices of traditional fairy tales or fables, as she is constructed as an empowered agent in the story who, through humanimal transformations, is ultimately able to challenge traditional understandings of femininity and masculinity as well. As a result, the film stands as a powerful example of “feminist cultural pedagogy.”

Zoltán Vajda’s piece is an outstanding instance of meticulous interdisciplinary research rooted within the academic field of history and thus provides an edifying methodological model to follow. It explores a subject that can be located at the intersection of several fields of scholarship concerning itself with an important aspect of early nineteenth-century dominant US culture, the definition of national identity in its relation to political sympathy shared by foreign nations. Through that interest it connects with transnational studies scholarship has shown considerable interest in Jefferson’s application of the political variety of sympathy, as well as in his attitude to the American colonies of Spain becoming independent at the start of the nineteenth century. This essay makes an attempt at connecting these two strains of scholarly research, thus rendering the piece in Interamerican Studies.

QUEER EYE ON THE RISE: HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY CONFIRMED

Irén Annus

Emmy Award-winning US tv series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003-2007) has been recognized for making history by introducing a new formula to reality makeover programs and by including only openly gay guys on the cast. This study investigates the series from the perspective of gender roles and hierarchies, making use of Connell’s theorization on hegemony and masculinities. The paper argues that the show, despite its innovation in the formula and casting, continues to operate with traditional, essentialist categories and capitalize on mainstream heteronormativity along with gender stereotypes and hierarchies. These are disrupted only temporarily for the duration of the makeover, by the end of which hegemonic masculinity is affirmed, with the Fab Five being elevated to the top of the symbolic gender order as the ultimate makeover experts, looking down on us all from their elegant loft apartment as they are clinking champaign glasses in celebration of their success.[1]

Keywords: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, hegemonic masculinity, gender order, makeover show

0. Proem

American makeover reality tv series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy ran successfully on Bravo for five seasons between 2003 and 2007. Ten years later, in January 2017, Netflix decided to revive the series by the short title Queer Eye, alias with a new cast as the Fab 5. The popularity of the first season of the remake and the three Emmy Awards it had collected convinced Netflix to renew the show for five more seasons – thus, it is still in the making.

When appeared, the series was a cutting-edge program all around. The executive producers of the original Queer Eye, Collins and Williams revealed that “the word ‘queer’ was considered way too risqué for a TV show title in the early 2000s. In fact, in the state of New York – of all places! – it was illegal to even use ‘queer’ in the name of a business” (Collins et al. 2018, 9). This may come as a surprise since, as we know from Cristian’s research, queer cinema has long been “part of the oppositional approaches to dominant cinema” (Cristian and Dragon 2008, 99, see also Toth 2015) and “the first studies on queer identities in American films” already appeared as early as the 1970s (2014). Despite the socially disturbed status of the word, the producers insisted on using it in order to reshape its connotation and make it their own.

Fifteen years later, when the show was revived, the word queer manifests empowerment that signifies the important ways in which the LGBTQ community has advanced in US society. The producers explain the urgency to re-launch the program, however, by the fact that the American nation had become deeply divided and therefore in need of a program, “a bridge to bring people together” (Collins et al. 2018, 10). And again, it seems, that the gay came to the rescue, this time of the nation as a whole. To bring out trust in people upon which this symbolic bridge can be constructed, the remake works with experts who are open and truthful as individuals and allow viewers to get a glimpse into their lives, experiences and thoughts. The program conveys the need for mutual respect and understanding along with embracing difference in order to move forward as a community, therefore the experts also represent a wide spectrum in terms of race, religion, family background, cultural roots, etc. “We represent more diversity than has ever been seen in an LGBTQ cast up until our show came out. And if we don’t have a certain point of diversity within our group, we try to find it within our heroes” (Borge 2019), such as gender or sexuality – noted French, one of the current Fab 5, in an interview.

The present show also hopes to bring about certain developments specific to the queer community, advancing on the path that the original series stared. The producers, who also happen to be part of the LGBTQ community, through the first series wished to achieve recognition for their community and enhance tolerance, while the aim of the current series is “to accomplish acceptance in every form” (Borge 2019).

But even before the reboot, the show continued to surface in the academia. Westerfelhaus’ (2013) systematic survey of the plurality of perspectives through which the original program has been approached within Communication and Media Studies demonstrates the highly contested nature of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. His rigorous exploration reflects the complexity of the issues the program touched upon, eliciting a series of concerns, from the uneven representation of gender, sexuality and race to the pertaining dominance of class positions and the shadow of consumer capitalism that also frame the show. The multiplicity of interpretations often collide which helps to keep the scholarly interest in the show alive. The paper below originally published in 2010, however, presents certain propositions that have been interpreted in a different light or not been regarded in the works included in this analysis, thus may still be of interest to readers who turn to the show with a new energy revitalized by the reboot of the program.

1. Introduction

Reality TV represents a new type of popular television program that has significantly re-shaped the Anglophone mediascape in recent years. Of the numerous sub-genres, lifestyle television has gained such recognition that a variety of cable channels have been launched with programming devoted to re-tailoring one’s body, wardrobe, home, garden, and eating and spending habits, among other things. As the wealth of literature on the topic indicates, the shows on offer are connected to a broad array of contemporary cultural issues, from identity through consumerism to discourses of power.

This study investigates issues of representation in relation to gender in one of these series, the Emmy Award-winning US series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (from here on Queer Eye), through a close reading of a selection of episodes from the first two seasons, which were broadcast in 2010 on Hungary’s deko channel. The paper proposes that (1) this polysemic program is structured around the textual logic of biological essentialism as a result of which (2) the gay experts on the show capitalize on traditional stereotypical traits of femininity assigned to women and gays in contemporary western societies, (3) which they are able to subvert by introducing homonormative discourses as the dominant normative discourse of the show, in the course of which, (4) by establishing a synthetic friendship with the straight subject, (5) they are eventually able to make him over, or as they say, “make him better,” within their perceived heteronormative logic. Ultimately, however, they challenge neither dominant discourses of heteronormativity nor the essentialist cultural logic that lies beneath. Instead, they rely on these as they engage in re-negotiating gay masculinity and re-positioning it within the gender hierarchy, as an outcome of which they contribute to the affirmation of hegemonic masculinity.

As makeover and lifestyle programs are concerned with changing one’s habits, they operate by influencing the perception and representation of the self – ultimately one’s self-identity. Underlying assumptions that guide the investigation are late modern or postmodern understandings of identity. Self-identity, as Stuart Hall defines it, is “a construction, a process never completed” (1996, 4), constituted at the intersection of “points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us” (1996, 6). Anthony Giddens (1991) argues that identities are also discursively constructed, in the process of which, he warns, we must be aware of the practice of self-tailoring that is an outcome of reflexive monitoring of action on the part of the agent. He concludes that self-identity “is not something that is just given […] but something that has to be routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual” (1991, 52). Reflexivity is a fundamental practice through which the self is able to connect to the social environment. In fact, Richard Jenkins maintains that identity is “the field upon which the individual and the collective meet and meld” (1996, 17), and he therefore claims that identities are constituted at the intersection of internal and external definitions of the self. As individuals occupy a plurality of changing positions, contemporary identity constructions are fragmented and constantly in flux and, therefore, essentialist and homogeneous categorizations of identity are no longer viable (see also Annus 2011, 2-4).

Contemporary scholars such as Mike Featherstone propose that lifestyle choices nowadays reflect “individuality, self-expression and a stylistic consciousness” (1991, 83) that are also expressed through consumerism. As a result, makeover shows are also elaborately connected to consumer culture and, in subtle ways, to advertising. Featherstone (1991) sees a potentially democratizing power in consumerism in post-modernity that allows for considering lifestyle choices as contributing to a shift to post-class, post-gender and even post-racial (Kovács 2019, 2) societies. I maintain, however, that categories reflective of certain social constructions and identities, including class, race/ethnicity, gender, age, etc., still prevail. In fact, they also appear as constitutive forces on various makeover TV programs, all of which have strong normalizing, or as Tania Lewis claims, “regulating” tendencies (2007, 287). In the following, this study is concerned with one of these elements: the gender dimension of the program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

2. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

Queer Eye was among the most widely viewed lifestyle programs in the US during the first two seasons it was aired, between July 2003 and April 2005 (Kaye 2009, 103). While Jeremy Kaye dates the beginning of male conduct books “teaching eager young men how to be dandies” to the Renaissance (2009, 113), modern domestic advice books – offering suggestions not only on individual conduct but also on a wide range of issues tied to the home and family life – were shaped during the Victorian period. In the US, this era was marked by the development of modern industrial production and the attendant emergence of a new middle class that advocated a gendered division of labor and, consequently, the model of separate spheres. The home was regarded as the female realm: women were primarily viewed as mothers and wives, the guardian angels of their family (Woloch 1984, 114). Accordingly, they were also entrusted with the task of creating the proper home, which included interior design, proper home furnishing and decorating, along with the plan and maintenance of the ornamental garden (Stilgoe 1988, 22-48; Annus 2008). Guided by the general belief of the age in environmental determinism, the physical home was assigned a central place as it was thought to shape the moral character of its residents. Moreover, the home was also viewed as a distinct site for indoctrinating Christian values and behavior and for displaying proper manners, refined taste and culture; it was a harmonious milieu that distinguished the up-and-coming middle class from the rest of society (Leavitt 2002, 22-39; Major 1998, 21).

Women were educated on issues of domesticity and proper womanhood, such as how to dress fashionably, how to run a modern household, how to educate and take care of their children, and how to create a refined home and stylish garden. This was achieved through various advice and design books, such as Catherine Beecher’s “Domestic Economy, the housewife’s bible for the antebellum period” (Clinton 1984, 46), and women’s magazines, such as Ladies Magazine, which mushroomed during the era. The authors who contributed to these publications were also typically women, especially when regarding specifically female activities. Well-known domestic advisors included Sarah Hale, Catherine Beecher, Caroline Howard Gilman, and Catharine Sedgwick (Woloch 1984, 113-119). The realms of the home and the family, constituted as the women’s space, eventually served as areas within which modern female cultural capital could emerge.

The Victorian understanding of the home as a haven of morality and a place of beauty and tranquility has changed in various ways. One important set of alterations came about in the mid-twentieth century when the home appeared “as a model of health, efficiency, and ‘scientific’ motherhood” (Attwood 2005, 97) and was also transformed into a place for male leisure activities, due to which the DIY movement developed (Lewis 2008, 33). The home was a re-gendered place, a transformed site that displayed male presence and identity more prominently than before. Resulting from the consequent emergence of domestic masculinity, domestic advice programs in areas such as DIY, gardening and gourmet cooking came into being, typically employing male experts and targeting a male audience.

Makeover and lifestyle shows so popular nowadays have emerged out of these programs, in which the experts, argues Lewis (2008) – chefs, lifestyle gurus, home improvement and gardening authorities, etc. – often grounded their advice in common sense knowledge, therefore introducing what she calls “popular expertise” (2008, 2), which has replaced former understandings of the expert as a specialist, in possession of some specialized knowledge. The new experts were often men, but they did not defy overall female dominance in the area of domestic advice in terms of the experts or the audience, as illustrated by the brand name and empire of Martha Stewart, who “has captured the public’s imagination and achieved new heights in the proliferation of domestic advice” (Leavitt 2002, 197).

This has been challenged most recently by a number of makeover series launched in Anglophone cultures with gay men as lifestyle experts, including Colin McAllister and Justin Ryan in a number of interior design programs, such as the British Trading Up and the Canadian Home Heist, and fashion advisers Gok Wan in How to Look Good Naked and Mark Montano in Ten Years Younger and While You Were Out, to mention only a few. Of these, the most popular formula was introduced in Queer Eye, with five gay experts offering an overall transformation to a straight guy, representing “a full frontal capitalist assault on traditional hetero-masculine gender performance” (Clarkson 2005, 235), while also providing “the most positive representation of gay men in US television” (Hart 2004, 242). By bestowing a “new acceptance and appreciation for gay men”, argues Kylo-Patrick Hart (2004, 250), the program not only constructed a space within which gay and straight were constituted as equals, but gays were consistently depicted as superior to heterosexuals.

This makeover program was broadcast on Bravo TV in the US from mid-2003 to mid-2007, soon with spin-off series launched in Britain and Australia. The initial formula of the show guaranteed its instant success: a team of five experts, Carson Kressley, Ted Allen, Kyan Douglas, Thom Filicia and Jai Rodriguez, representing five major areas typically addressed in lifestyle programs – fashion, food/wine, grooming, interior design, and culture – enter the life of a messy straight guy to transform both him and his home completely by the end of the show.

Each episode follows the same format. In the opening, we see black and white images of the five experts – commonly referred to as the Fab 5 – engaged in their regular, everyday jobs until they receive a call. They immediately drop their work and, as if they were “secret style agents” (Papacharissi and Fernback 2008, 362), don their dark shades and dash off to complete their next assignment, which is the invasion of the home of yet another sloppy straight man. On their way there, as they head through New York City in a huge black SUV, they are briefed on their subject. They then introduce him to the viewers as well by quickly running through his profile at his house and head straight for the door to raid and investigate the home and its owner.

Through the underlying text of the opening, the subtle marginalization of the straight world begins: the home is represented as a crime scene and the straight man to be made over as a criminal, while his female relations – either the girlfriend, the wife, a sister or the mother – appear as the victims who ended up contacting the Fab 5, as if the police, desperately requesting their help to make their loved one over. Inherent in their plea is the public admission of their failure to act as effective agents capable of introducing any change in the appearance and lifestyle of the subject. This subtext therefore constitutes the gay guys as perceived to be almighty, powerful gurus, whose appearance on the premises will convince their man to change his ways. Therefore, the Fab 5 are placed in an ultimate power position within the show, representing gay expertise and influence as superior to the hetero world – both to male choices and to female influence. In this context, I would argue, their sexuality is essential to their role as experts in the program.

The rest of the show confirms this logic: women disappear from the program, symbolically relinquishing the power to domesticate the straight guy to the Fab 5 and will return only for the final reveal at the very end of the episode, once the Fab 5 have finished their job and left the premises. The straight guy is represented as obedient, always subjecting himself to the advice of these experts, who escort him to various shops and sites of his transformation, including a hairdresser’s, a manicurist’s and a massage salon. His body is being made over in parallel with his house: by the time they arrive home, it is cleaned up and re-furbished. After the reveal of the transformed home, the transformed body is divulged as the straight guy puts on a casual fashion show, presenting his new look: his fresh wardrobe and improved style. Then he receives even more grooming advice on how to shave, how to fix his hair, or what facial cream to apply, followed by a cooking class on how to prepare something quickly to impress the guests who will gather for the reveal that evening. He displays his new body and reality then, as he returns to his regular hetero life, friends and family, already a regulated, normalized guy. The makeover is guided by the underlying purpose of transforming the straight guy into a proper, youthful, fashionable, sexy, middle-class metropolitan male, in keeping with the desires of women – as conceived by the Fab 5.

The closing section of the show is a follow-up surveillance. After the Fab 5 have said their emotional good-byes to the straight guy, they return to their high-rise New York City loft, where they monitor how well he is observing their rules. The very last images capture how the newly styled guy celebrates his transformation: usually he throws a party and toasts the Fab 5, thanking them for their patient guidance and superb expertise. This is enacted as if a rite of passage, marking the end of his brief interface with the Fab 5 and the beginning of a new phase in his life as a proper straight guy.

3. The Queer Eye: Homonormativity in lifestyle expertise

Similarly to makeover shows in general, such as What not to Wear and House Invaders, this program capitalizes on “normative female cultural forms” (Firth et al. 2010, 477) that have also been listed among the stereotypical traits associated with male homosexuality. The series reverts to heteronormative logic by transforming this gay stigma into a virtue, based on which gay experts are constituted as naturally (Gorman-Murray 2006, 230) stylish, sensitive, cultured and artistic, born with exquisite taste in the culinary arts as well. These portrayals utilize essentialist logic to frame the male hierarchy that is created in the program, within which gay earns fame and straight is shamed. In order to achieve this, the show exploits the female cultural capital that has been accumulated within the area of domesticity, while by assigning primacy to the gay expertise, it is also able to constitute homonormativity as the dominant discourse of the series. Homonormativity is conceptualized as referring to a form of politics that, on the one hand, presents homosexuality as the norm, while, on the other, it “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them” (Papacharissi and Fernback 2008, 354).

The show capitalizes further on the essentialist mode of representation in terms of presumed sexuality and sexual dynamics. Some authors note that a striking feature of lifestyle programs is the “ungendering of the expertise” (Lewis 2008, 6), whereas others observe that the presenters’ sexuality is “suspended” (Frith et al. 2010, 480). Hannah Frith et al. (2010) elaborate on the relevance of this in relation to gay hosts in their analysis of the success of lifestyle expert Gok Wan in How to Look Good Naked, a makeover series that focuses on making women feel good about themselves. They find that Wan is accepted in the position of a facilitator in the show as it has effectively “reconstructed his gay male identity into a castrated, context-free configuration, which not only renders him harmless but also enables him to be grafted seamlessly as a supporter and adviser into the heterosexual world” (2010, 481). Women feel free to confide in him because he is represented as “sex-less”, and therefore harmless to their sexuality, and thus they can trust him with their body, even naked, a situation which would be “perhaps culturally unimaginable (at least for the present) if the host was a straight man or a lesbian” (Frith et al. 2010, 482).

Based on this, one may argue that Queer Eye, thus, should have employed “sex-less” lesbians as experts, but this is not a realistic suggestion as this show operates within a very strict cultural logic. Within this logic, the rather negative stereotypical image of lesbians – “often perceived as masculine, independent, aggressive and sexually deviant” (Brown and Groscup 2009, 160) – does not match the anticipated image of the new, sensitive, flamboyant and stylish lifestyle experts. Moreover, this logic prefers men and masculinity over women and femininity; indeed, David Collins and Michael Williams, the openly gay producers of the show – even if unconsciously – were probably more keen on advancing the socio-cultural position of gays than that of women. And, certainly, this possible undercurrent is captured by Kaye who summarizes the opinion of the show in the mainstream press as “a breakthrough for gay liberation” (2009, 104).

Therefore, I argue that the constitution of gay sexuality is an indispensable element of How to Look Good Naked as well as of Queer Eye. In fact, in its very title, by manipulating a set of sexual and cultural binary oppositions, Queer Eye assures the American audience that their straight guy, representing the heteronormalcy dominant outside of the show, is void of sexual temptation, illusion, and inappropriate conduct, a fear that would be much more difficult to achieve with female experts on the scene. In the program, this is achieved through the constitution of an uneven gay representation: on the one hand, the presenters conceal their gay sexuality and identity, while, on the other, they overemphasize the character traits based on which they claim to be in possession of the cultural capital that places them in the position of the expert, a powerful knowledgeable agent. In order to stress the latter, they at times include gay comments or inside jokes, but are careful never to exceed the perceived limits of heterosexual good taste.

It is at the intersection of these that the dominant framework of homonormativity is constructed, and it is within this that the experts operate on the show. Theirs is the dominant view and discourse: they strongly criticize the “Neanderthal” (Allen et al. 2004, 3) straight guys for not fitting into the heteronormative environment, and they create a homonormative context, within which the inventive changes and corrections can be best achieved. This is actually highlighted through the unstated but obvious fact that the women around these messy guys were unable to groom them within the heteronormative world, and, therefore, the superior gay expert and his homonormativity become the key to the overall transformation.

This is perhaps best depicted in the closing scene where the Fab 5 observe the actions of the transformed straight guy, first on his own, then returning to his friends and family, as if re-born in the midst of everyone’s joy and admiration. While they, as lifestyle gods, are watching these scenes through surveillance cameras “in panoptical manner” (Papacharissi and Fernback 2008, 360) from their smart loft in a Manhattan high-rise, they freely comment, evaluate, and pass judgment on the straight world, both male and female, and celebrate their achievements with a final triumphal clink of champagne glasses there.

4. The Straight Guy: Heteronormativity restored

Besides presenting themselves as the all-powerful lifestyle experts, the Fab 5 also gain access to the straight guy. They are able to win his trust and willingness to cooperate by establishing a synthetic friendship with him. This concept is a re-working of Firth et al.’s notion of synthetic sisterhood, which they use to characterize the relationship between gay presenter Gok Wan and the female makeover subjects in How to Look Good Naked (2010, 477). They employ this concept first introduced (by McRobbie and Garber) to describe the false, short-term friendship that is established between key figures in the show. Similarly, the brief but very intense friendship between the Fab 5 and the straight guy within the homonormative reality of the show establishes the human factor through which cooperation between them and ensuing straight transformation are made possible.

Their purpose – as the Fab 5 put it in the Introduction to their lifestyle advice book published in 2004 under the same title as the show – is to offer a new perspective to men: “A queer ‘eye’ doesn’t mean a queer look. It’s a point of view, a receptiveness to looking at what works and what doesn’t, instead of just accepting things as they are. It’s an openness to what’s stylish and fun” (Allen et al. 2004, 3). In the course of re-tailoring the straight messy guy, therefore, they teach him self-reflexivity (Lewis 2007), transform experiences in the boutique or the hairdresser’s from being emasculating to liberating, in the process of which they are also creating an educated consumer. The straight subject is trained to embrace proper – in this context, middle-class – style and taste and to engage in social and cultural etiquette and propriety.

This signifies an important turn in masculinity, as discussed by Jay Clarkson, who argues that contemporary masculinity is defined in terms of consumption since “the quest for physical consumption replaces the need for brute force” (2005, 239). More specifically, he proposes that Queer Eye in fact “re-idealizes masculinity as metro-sexual” (2005, 252), structuring the makeover of the straight guy “on a metro-sexual consumer culture” (Papacharissi and Fernback 2008, 352). The possibility of metro-sexual transformation already emerges with the Fab 5’s choice of the straight guy: he tends to be young, white, lower middle-class, and urban, most likely from New York or another East Coast city. And although he cannot, in every possible way, be transformed into what Mark Simpson first defined in 1994 as a metro-sexual man – “a single young man with a high disposable income, living or working in the city (because that’s where all the best shops are), [who] is perhaps the most promising consumer market of the decade” – the Fab 5 insist on making the straight guy aware that “‘unmanly’ passions [such as shopping or getting a manicure] are in fact manly” (Simpson1994). The straight guy is re-programmed as a good consumer and re-born as a fashionable, nicely groomed, sexy, gentle man, especially appealing to women as well as pleasing to everyone else around him.

The transformation of the male space reflects similar features: the new home is often characterized by adjectives such as masculine, urban, modern, chic, functional, organized, and orderly, but also warm, welcoming and comfortable. Moreover, it is often emphasized that the revived home is inviting for women as well; in fact, sometimes the makeover experience closes with a new cohabitation or marriage proposal by the straight guy. This indicates that the re-furbished homes reflect mainstream society’s heteronormative expectations as well: they are re-made to reflect “the conflation of family and home” (Gorman-Murray 2006, 231), reinforcing the cultural norm of patriarchal family model and “hetero-models of cohabitation” (Gorman-Murray 2006, 233), expressed in monogamous commitment and partnered cohabitation. The private space, thus, is devoid of elements of gay domesticity or any challenges to mainstream norms and expectations.

The lifestyle transformation, therefore, does not challenge the heteronormative reality of the straight guy. Some scholars, such as Zizi Papacharissi and Jan Fernback, consider the homonormativity in the show as a form of “veneer” (2008, 358), and indeed, underneath, the straight guy is not challenged in his heteronormativity – only in the way it is enacted. The Fab 5 drag their subject, stuck in his time capsule, into contemporary realities, modernizing and updating his behaviors and attitudes so that he can enjoy greater success within the heteronormative realities: he is trained to fit into the upscale, dynamic, fashionable cosmopolitan world.

5. The Queer and the Straight: Hegemonic masculinity affirmed

According to Lewis, “[a]n important trajectory … in the history of popular advice around the self and the home has been the ongoing dialogue and negotiation between the boundaries and norms of masculine and feminine culture and identity” (2008, 45-46). Besides straight men and women, some of the more recent lifestyle programs like Queer Eye also engage gays in this negotiation, adding a new dimension to the gendering of domesticity and attendant changes in gender hierarchy. Representing the gay world in the series in relation to the straight world in terms of the basic dichotomy of male and female offers an insight into these changes.

The nature of gay representation in the Anglophone media has received increased attention in recent years. Queer Eye seems to be characterized by what Paul Fejos observes of gay identities depicted on American TV, and finds that gay masculinity is presented as primarily “young, white, Caucasian, preferably with a well-muscled, smooth body, handsome face, good education, professional job, and high income” (Avila-Saavedra 2009, 8). One may regard perhaps the least central figure of the Fab 5, Jai Rodriguez, the expert on culture, as an exception to this because he is of Hispanic descent. However, since the US Census of 2000, Hispanics can officially be regarded as white – and Rodriguez can be easily classified as such because of his appearance and character. Fejos’ claim, therefore, applies to our show as well. Actually, it is supported further by the fact that representations of other gays, lesbians, or groups with other alternative sexual preference were missing completely in the parts under examination. This feature may be explained by underlying assumptions about gender relations of power. The uneven gender sensitivity reflected in the program is indicative of the extent to which the show seems to work within a subtext through which “queer sexism”, to use James Ward’s phrase (1999), may be detected insofar as Queer Eye is characterized by the central position of Fejos’ white gay guys – obviously one of privilege – and by a lack of consideration of other gender or sexual groups within society.

The Fab 5 can fully dominate the show because of their expertise in domesticity – something that they achieve through the mobilization of essentialist categories that assign presumed feminine traits to the gay man. This is in line with what Guillermo Avila-Saavedra observes about gay identities on American TV inasmuch as they reinforce “traditional constructions of femininity” (2009, 19). While these constructions were used to contribute to the negative gay stereotype in the past, the Fab 5 in Queer Eye manage to subvert it and re-constitute it as a virtue – one that was initially connected to women, as was the cultural capital that evolved out of it in the field of lifestyle and domestic advice. The series, therefore, does not exceed traditional essentialist logic; instead, it exploits and confirms it. The change the program propagates remains within that logic and signifies a manipulation of femininity to achieve a shift of cultural capital in order to advance gays at the expense of women. Queer Eye is a show that owes its success to its ability to marginalize women as effective agents in shaping and regulating deviant men, something that the Fab 5 can do in no time. They are like, to use Papacharissi and Fernback’s parallel, the fairy godmother who instantly transforms Cinderella with a magic wand (2008, 355). This can be performed only through a thorough appropriation of this – traditionally also female – role, thus we need to turn to a linguistic and cultural shift and define the Fab 5 as the fairy “godfathers” doing magic. This remains a valid claim even if the show “replicates the oppressive conflation of male homosexuality with femininity” insofar as the series represents a stereotypical gay “appropriation of feminine desire” (Gorman-Murray 2006, 230) in the transformation of the straight guy and his home.

Therefore, by inverting and appropriating domestic femininity, hence re-positioning gays over women within the gender hierarchy, the show moves in the direction of strengthening hegemonic masculinity. This is described by R. W. Connell and James Messerschmidt as various “configurations of practice that are accomplished in social action” (2005, 836). As these theorists acknowledge that multiple masculinities exist, they find that hegemonic masculinity “embodied the currently most honored way of being a man, it required all other men to position themselves in relation to it, and it ideologically legitimated the global subordination of women to men” (2005, 832). The show in fact seems to mark an important moment, a possible shift through which privileged gays move in the direction of integrating into the hegemony among men and their masculinities that Demetriou defines as “internal hegemony” (described in Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 853).

This shift, however, has certain implications that may appear somewhat problematic for women in terms of their socio-cultural positioning. It has been acknowledged that a “given pattern of hegemonic masculinity … [tends] to stabilize patriarchal power or reconstitute it in new conditions” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 853) – something that Queer Eye achieves through the various dynamisms discussed above. In fact, Lewis also concludes that in this program “the discourse of gay identity is not disruptive of heterosexual social order […it is used to] reinforce patriarchal notions of masculinity” (2008, 19). While this program does not challenge hegemonic masculinity, it positions gays such that they share in this with the straight guys. During the show itself, gays may occupy the top level in the gender hierarchy, but in the long run, “heterosexuality…is not replaced as the core of hegemonic masculinity (Clarkson 2005, 240). Similarly to other programs with a gay presence, status hierarchy reflects “heterosexuality’s normalcy” (Becker 2006, 7), but, as Clarkson argues, Queer Eye institutes one significant turn: the show reflects heterosexuals who are “not homophobic” (2005, 241).

Ultimately, the series re-introduces essentialist categories in constructing gay and straight masculinities, through which the deviant straight guy is restored to heteronormative life through the straightjacket context created by the Fab 5’s homonormative discourse and behavior. In the course of this, a dividing line is created between homo and hetero sapiens, who, although temporarily united through a synthetic friendship, resume their separate lives after the show. However, they remain connected through hegemonic masculinity more than ever before, modifying the gender hierarchy so that gays gain – while females fail.

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NEO-WESTERN TO THE RESCUE: BREAKING BAD AND THE CRISIS OF HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY

Irén Annus

“The Western becomes most popular in times of crisis,” as Stoddart (2016, 8) concludes, thus potentially explaining the revitalization of this quintessentially American genre in the crisis-filled era that started with 9/11. This period contributed repeatedly to a sense of crisis in hegemonic masculinity that surfaced forcefully within the American social terrain. This study investigates one of the landmark neo-Western series, Breaking Bad (2008–13), and the way it exposed the social, economic, and cultural dismay of the era. It focuses on the specific ways in which the resultant crisis in traditional masculinity is portrayed and the responses the series offers for a potential re-conceptualization, re-negotiation, and re-construction of the ideal American masculinity. The outcome of this, however, shows a rather unpromising, bleak picture for the next generation to tackle.[2]

Keywords: Breaking Bad, hegemonic masculinity, neo-Western

0. Proem

Seven years have passed since the publication of the study below on the cultural portrayal of the crisis in American hegemonic masculinity following 9/11. American society has continued to face further turmoil since then, having experienced the deepening of economic, social, political, and cultural divisions under the presidency of Donald Trump between 2017 and 2021. The prevalence of movements against racism (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName) and sexism (#MeToo) on American soil were only the tips of the iceberg. Trump’s paleoconservative policies and populism were perceived as encouraging extremist ideas and lending an impetus to the resurgence of numerous white supremacist, nationalist, ultra-conservative, alt-right hate groups, who, although voicing their dissatisfaction with Trump’s “soft” position on some of the issues they found pertinent, continued to support his presidency blindly – which culminated in the unprecedented insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Amidst this turbulent social landscape, idealized gender constructions have been continually called into question, both emphasized femininities and hegemonic masculinities (Connell 1987), as demonstrated by the wealth of recent studies on the various aspects of “the production of gendered selves, the cultural expectations regarding the performance of ‘proper’ gender identities which shape everyday interactions and the structure of institutional domains that form the backdrop for changes to gender identities and norms” (Budgeon 2014, 319), with some also subverting the inherently binary nature of these constructions. Kimmel, for one, relentlessly explores the flux of the plurality of American manhood and is captivated by the potential reconstructions of traditional masculinities through the perception of “aggrieved entitlements” (2017) and its subtle link to mushrooming violent hate groups (2018). Similar research signaling a debate in understandings of the crisis in femininity among tradwomen and alt-right extremist women, for example, has been steadily mapping uncharted social territories (for a discussion, see Annus 2019).

The cultural realm offers a formative terrain for the representation, problematization, and renegotiation of social concerns and inequalities, for expressions of lived experiences, concerns, fears, pains and other emotions (Annus 2008, 105-107). Melnick notes that amongst the “defining features of the post-9/11 cultural landscape” we find a translation of “the violence of the day as a simple assault on the proper functioning of American masculinity and femininity” (2009, 123). Faludi goes as far as to claim that the fall of the Twin Towers represented “the nation’s ‘emasculation’” (2007, 9), accounting for the ascendance of “a new John Wayne masculinity […] with resurrected virtues of the myth of the Western hero” (2007, 4). White (2019) surveys the views of various authoritative figures on the new Western thus appearing and demonstrates that the Western as a genre resonates with the state of American society and culture and provides fertile soil to explore the most essential concerns of the present, from the constitution of national identity through myth-making and dominant ideological underpinnings to gender constructions. In his introduction to a volume on the new Western, Stoddart (2016) emphasizes the critical stance inherent in the genre as well as the fluidity and dynamism with which it has been able to draw on elements from other genres, such as mobster movies, thereby creating an exciting and liminal hybrid art form as reflected in the subversive neo-Western movies of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers.

The neo-Western has come to dominate not only the big screen, but the various smaller screens as well. Johnson (2012) surveys a number of television series that demonstrate the inventive vein with which the genre was revitalized, from the more traditional visit to the tension-laden railroad business in the nineteenth-century West in Hell on Wheels (2011–16) through the horror-zombie-Western mix of The Walking Dead (2010–) to Firefly (2002–02), which is “Stagecoach (1939) in space” (127). Newer series, such as Ozark (2017–) and Yellowstone (2018–), radiate the creative energy still inherent in the genre, but also demonstrate the ongoing social issues that Americans need to work through. Central to these morality plays replete with their anti-heroes (Parunov 2017) continues to be the re-negotiation of hegemonic masculinity and femininity, the re-construction of the ideal family and community, and the shaping of the future generation, that is, the future of America as a nation. As Breaking Bad is “a game-changing television series” (Brown 2017, 78) that also tackles the very same issues as other neo-Westerns, the publication below of a previous study of these archetypal themes may still be of interest to readers.

1. Introduction

The beginning of the 21st century has been marked by a series of challenges to mainstream white masculinities in the US, in particular by the unexpected attack on 9/11 and then by the recession precipitated by the housing crash of 2008. Studies on previous historical periods have revealed the series of challenges and resultant changes that white masculinities in the US had undergone, thus supporting post-modern conceptualizations of social positions and identities as always being in a state of flux and intersecting in multiple ways. There seems to be a common understanding that the attack on the World Trade Center opened up yet another phase, one which is connected to the global presence of the US. Hamilton Carroll has found that the current “crisis of masculinity is a local (i.e. nationally specific) response to a global phenomenon, for while globalization accounts for some of the most profound transformations of modern American society, the national is still the level on which such transformations are most commonly felt, negotiated and understood. The erosion of masculinist privilege at both the global and the national levels produce a dialectics of crisis … often interpreted and understood at the micro-logical levels of home, family, and male psychology” (2011, 3).

Breaking Bad was one of the most popular and widely acclaimed television series in recent decades, aired between 2008 and 2013 on the AMC network. It addressed a wide range of contemporary issues, among them the crisis of American hegemonic masculinity, which it portrayed through the experiences of the main character, Walter White, and his microcosm: his family, relatives, so-called co-workers and business relations. This paper draws on Nick Trujillo’s model of representations of hegemonic masculinity in American popular culture (1991) to investigate the figure of Walter White and explore the specific ways in which he can be considered as an embodiment of the post-9/11 crisis in hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, the study also maps the logic this program offers along with specific strategies White employs in order to try to remedy this condition and re-configure hegemonic masculinity.

2. Hegemonic masculinity in crisis

Hegemonic masculinity as a concept was introduced by Connell (1987) to refer to a set of practices that made male dominance possible in contemporary societies. It described a normative type of masculinity which became hegemonic by having been accepted as the ideal for members of a particular society: “It embodied the currently most honored way of being a man, it required all other men to position themselves in relation to it, and it ideologically legitimated the global subordination of women to men” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 832). Trujillo has studied various representations of hegemonic masculinity in the contemporary American media and identified five common characteristic features: “(1) physical force and control, (2) occupational achievement, (3) familial patriarchy, (4) frontiersmanship, and (5) heterosexuality” (1991, 290). By physical force and control, he is referring to the physical strength associated with the muscular male body, a trope through which masculine power is constituted as normal and natural. Occupational achievement captures not only work opportunities and the division of labor along gender lines, but also the financial success and subsequent recognition that men tend to gain from their participation in the labor market. Patriarchy, referring to male dominance within the family, and by extension, within society, is a feature of hegemonic masculinity that is recognized to have softened towards the end of the 20th century, primarily as an outcome of second-wave feminism. However, Trujillo reminds us that the appearance of the “sensitive father” figure in fact did not challenge the structural hegemony enjoyed by men: what it has changed is that this new figure shares in the joys of childrearing more than its traditional counterpart (1991, 291). The symbol of the frontiersman captures the daring, strong, brave, self-reliant and fearless white young man who is most widely depicted in the archetypal image of the American cowboy, popularized through the genre of the Western. The last feature confirms that American society continues to be deeply heteronormative; therefore, it encourages monogamous relationships and the institution of marriage, along with the traditional nuclear family model – even if, I must note, only a minority of the American people live in this family structure by now. Heterosexuality also defines public behavior and encounters, modes of exchanges with other men – as well as women.

This model of hegemonic masculinity was challenged on 9/11. In fact, the attack challenged the entire American society and culture. Beck has argued that the US transformed from a risk society into a threat society after 9/11, whereby risks of ecological conflicts, global financial crises, and global terror kept American society under an uneasy feeling of constant threat (2002, 42). An essential feature of this shift is that “individual risk is being challenged by a world of systemic risk, which contradicts the logic of economic risk calculation” (2002, 44); this has thus created a new environment for the nation to manage. The US was unable to stop foreign terror on that September day, its men were unable to protect the country, the nation, and innocent people had to pay for this with their lives. This posed questions regarding hegemonic masculinity as well as increased the importance of the home, the homeland, concepts that also became instantly re-politicized (Leyda 2013). The heroic effort of the passengers aboard the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on its way to the White House was indeed the only exception in the series of attacks that day, out of which American masculine pride managed to surface.

Actually, former challenges and subsequent re-positionings of white masculinities started to emerge in the US after the 1960s, as a result of complex social, political and economic transformations. Robinson has emphasized that post-industrial American social realities were no longer in correspondence with traditional narratives of white hegemonic masculinity (2000, 2) as the various changes impacted not only the lower class, but also the majority of the middle class, which was the largest depository of this masculinity. She has claimed that these challenges, however, did not represent the subversion or end of white masculine privilege as it only had to be readjusted and reconfigured in ways through which it could ultimately reconstitute its former status. A number of other scholars (including Haraway 1991 and Wiegman 1999) have noted that key to white masculine privilege has been the fact that it has inhabited invisible, unmarked, transparent bodies that have been hidden in history, constituting the unproblematized norm, against which Otherness was constructed in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, etc. As the result of the Civil Rights Movements, this unmarked position, previously exempt from a series of social practices, such as surveillance and forms of control, started to be problematized. In their response, white men began to rely gradually on the logic of the emerging identity politics or “visibility politics,” as Phelan so aptly described it (2003, qtd. in Robinson 2000, 3).

This has become a unique undertaking still under investigation, but I would like to point out three important moments in this process, as I have found that these have shaped the strategies used post-9/11 in general and are represented in the series Breaking Bad in particular. One, white masculinity, having been challenged by a set of economic, social, political and ideological changes, could no longer be perceived in purely essentialist and universal terms; consequently, the process of its particularization began. This led to the plurality of white masculinities represented in current television programs as playboy masculinity, skirt-chasing masculinity, patriarchal masculinity and science nerd masculinity, to mention a few (Lotz 2014, 1-2). Two, white masculinity started to delineate locations from where transformations aimed at recouping white male privilege could be achieved (Carroll 2011, 7): it started to employ the logic of and to engage in the discourses and practices of marginalized groups, in the course of which, as Carroll observes, “white masculinity attempts to manage the stakes of its own fragmentation by co-opting the forms of representational meaning secured by women, gays and people of color” (2011, 6), processes that had started decades before (see Kovács 2006, 85-6). Three, a key constitutive element of the resultant “reactive strategies” (Robinson 2000, 6) or “affirmative reactions” (Carroll 2011) that aim at reconstructing masculine heteronormative privilege is the positioning of white masculinity as being “injured” (Wiegman 1999, 126-7), “victimized” (Robinson 2000, 5), “disenfranchised” (Robinson 2000, 57), etc. Lotz has found that this has been translated into expressions of a “personal politics of injury” (2014, 1) in current media representations of masculinity, while Leyda (2013) has noted that these representations exercise what “Steven Shaviro calls post-cinematic affect: part of the recessionary structure of feeling, the show ‘give[s] voice (or better, sounds and images) to a kind of ambient free-floating sensibility’ that is both symptomatic and productive of how it feels to live in the US during the financial crisis and its aftermath.”

This strategy was a legacy on which hegemonic masculinity could rely after the attack on 9/11, which was a direct assault on white American masculine power in particular. The myth of the US as a protected, safe place, the homeland that cannot be touched by foreign aggression, fell to pieces as Americans watched the Twin Towers collapse before their own eyes. The country seemed weak and vulnerable: with the fall of the landmark skyscrapers, surrounded by the myth of indestructibility, everything else that skyscrapers had represented in the US for the past century also vanished: as Santayana put it long ago, “the American Will inhibits the skyscraper [… it] is the sphere of the American man […] all aggressive enterprise” (1911).

Carroll has proposed that responses to the crisis after 9/11 have brought about the “acceleration of preexisting American cultural formations” (2011, 18). Adelman (2009), for example, has pointed out the power of the depiction of the armed forces after 9/11, arguing that the figure of the soldier has functioned as an archetypal image through which American men could hope to be “sold(i)ered” together, thus also re-establishing a bond between hegemonic masculinity and nationalism in the public discourse and imagination. Kusz (2008) has studied the increasing emphasis given to sports in popular culture in the period, with which they have served as a potential arena for the process of remasculinization. It seems to me that the initial reaction to the crisis in masculinity indeed mobilized traditional values, associated with physical strength, military spirit, bravery, endurance and perseverance: the firefighters and policemen on the scene that day and in the days to follow captured the image of the new hero in the context of both the metropolis and the nation. This return to physical masculine power is also in line with the emerging impact of sports, ultimately demonstrating that post-9/11 efforts at remasculinization relied heavily on dimensions of muscularization, one that the up-and-coming American middle class men had already experienced in the mid-19th century through Christian muscularity. Lotz (2014) has found that in most recent television programs – most of which also reflect upon the economic crisis triggered by the housing crash in 2008 – male figures are often represented as struggling to define forms of masculinity which are considered acceptable by society and has argued that these characters express a longing for patriarchal masculinity first and foremost – one which integrates the traditional masculine roles of being a proper husband, father and successful provider as well. This is a claim that would strongly apply to Breaking Bad as well.

3. Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad narrates the last two years in the life of Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston), an ordinary middle-aged high school chemistry teacher from Albuquerque, NM, who lives with his pregnant wife Skyler (Anna Gunn), a stay-at-home mom to their teenage son Walt Jr. (R. J. Mitte), who has cerebral palsy. The pilot episode opens with a puzzling series of images of the Southwestern desert, with a pair of pants inexplicably wafting through the air and then landing by the side of a dirt road only to be driven over by an old RV speeding away in a hurry, driven by a white man wearing a pair of underwear, shoes and a gas mask. As he stops the RV and gets out, he hears sirens approaching. He immediately puts on his shirt hanging on a hanger on the side mirror, records a brief good-bye message to his family on a small video camera, and steps out into the road, having taken a gun out of the back of his underwear, and gets into a position with legs spread apart, ready to shoot, like a cowboy in a Hollywood Western. At this point, the opening credits appear. What follows is a condensed summary of the events of the previous three weeks, setting the tone and providing the basic framework for the whole series.

It starts with a morning scene, White getting out of bed and surveying their home: baby care items, presents in boxes, and an award from 1985 on the wall surround him in their otherwise bare bedroom as he is doing his morning exercises. During breakfast we meet the whole family, learn that it is his 50th birthday and that they are short of money since they cannot afford a new water heater for the house. We see White in action as a teacher amongst uninterested and disrespectful students, to whom he is attempting to define chemistry as “change […] growth, decay, then transformation” (1.1). In the afternoon, he works for a local carwash, humiliated by his unappreciative students and the corrupt immigrant owner of the place. He ends up being late for his surprise party, during which his brother-in-law, Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), a DEA officer, shows off his gun, enjoying the attention of all the male guests and Walt Jr. as well. At one point, White unwillingly takes the gun in his hand and when he comments on how heavy it is, Hank’s response puts him in his place: “That’s why they hire men!” (1.1). A succession of emasculating experiences continue at night in the bedroom with his wife, but it is topped by his diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer the following day. Instead of collapsing and crying for help, he keeps it to himself and after a period of quiet lamentation in their deserted back yard he makes a decision to break bad for the remaining part of his life. He creates a master plan: he blackmails one of his former students, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), a drug dealer, to partner up in a meth business: White would produce the drug and Pinkman would distribute it. This decision empowers and liberates him at once, and places him on a path that takes him deep into the criminal world. The rest is the twisted, unexpected, often disturbing unfolding of his new business undertaking and his transformation from a resignful family man into a ruthless criminal under the pseudonym Heisenberg.

4. Pants flying in the sky: Mr. White and hegemonic masculinity in crisis

As noted above, a number of studies have discussed the general sense of the crisis of hegemonic masculinity in the US after 9/11, one that has only been deepened by the recession that has emerged in the years after the attack. Breaking Bad captures this crisis perhaps most vividly through the figure of the protagonist, Walter White. The flying pair of pants in the opening scene of the pilot episode symbolizes this crisis, as does White’s initial appearance in his underwear: it introduces an unusual situation in which no one is wearing the pants. The audience is doubly puzzled as he is wearing a gas mask, evocative of some dangerous military operation by association, introducing an abnormal, twisted situation, even if this all takes place in the desert outside of Albuquerque, NM, with Los Alamos National Laboratory only 95 miles away.

I argue that Walter White fails to meet any of the criteria for hegemonic masculinity presented by Trujillo except for one: heterosexuality. The nature of his sexuality is problematized in the pilot episode when Jesse asks him – as White is getting undressed as he prepares to cook meth – “What are you doing?”, and then later, as Jesse starts taping him with a focus on White’s brief-cut white underwear with the strap tied in a bow from his protective apron hanging over it, saying: “Yeah, work it, baby, work it!” (1.1), to which White responds by aggressively shutting off the camera. After this, his heterosexuality remains unchallenged. As for how masculine he is in his heterosexuality, this is also addressed in the same episode, in the bedroom scene after his birthday party, where he has passively allowed Skyler to take the lead in satisfying him. However, this is turned around at the very end of the episode; as we watch him after laundering the bills from his first meth payment, he now takes the lead in bed and expresses a behavior that is forceful and masculine – one that eventually will turn more aggressive and violent throughout the series.

In the pilot episode, White fails to embody masculine physical force and control. The audience can see his almost sterile, white, somewhat elderly body, with a spare tire, loose skin, and deepening wrinkles on his face. The news of cancer, afflicting his body already in a state of decay, takes away from him even the idea of a possible chance to increase his muscularity. Symptoms of the cancer and the effects of his treatment offer a realistic, almost graphic portrayal of his weakening body later in the show. In fact, most likely he has never been too muscular: as Hank notes in the toast he proposes on White’s birthday – following his comment on how only men are hired at his office – White has an enormous brain, which they would not hold against him as he has a good heart. Indeed, intellectual excellence is not among the features of hegemonic masculinity surveyed by Trujillo either. And the feminizing reference to White possessing a good heart nicely rounds out the discourse of his de-masculinizination.

His body is witness to a lifestyle which is primarily connected to interior spaces: his face is not tanned or touched by natural elements. He is not the image of the sporty outdoorsman, the contemporary embodiment of whom Trujillo describes as a frontiersman. Moreover, his character also lacks the temperament, courage and self-reliance associated with this figure. Sadly, he is only able to satisfy this cultural expectation related to hegemonic masculinity through his skin color. Shortcomings in his spirit of adventure and competition also appear through flashbacks: White has started out as a talented chemist but has chosen to throw away the chance to pursue a successful career as an academic, to gain wealth as an entrepreneur and to live a life of true happiness with the woman he adores. He made a series of decisions to give it all up; I argue, thus, that he is at least partly responsible for his current state: his unfulfilling job, financial hardships, and lack of respect and recognition. The worsening economic crisis only accentuates his low level of occupational and financial achievement, in which he has had a hand himself.

The last feature of hegemonic masculinity on Trujillo’s list is familial patriarchy. White is a failure in this regard: he and Skyler have decided that she should stay at home, take care of their handicapped son and focus on the baby on the way, hopefully even pursuing a career in writing short stories, but this is a weak façade that is ready to collapse any minute. Walter is unable to provide for his family financially, not even working at two jobs. Their house, symbolizing their family, needs mending: it seems outdated, dark, and uninviting. His car is also old and in sore need of repair. They find it difficult to pay their bills, attempting to save on food and all their other expenses. White is also a failure as a husband because he does not behave like a man with his wife: he expresses no passion towards her and often acts as if he were ashamed in front of her. He also fails to be a good father, to be the male role model for his son, to earn Walt Jr.’s respect and admiration. His seems to be a family on a path toward disintegration, held together primarily out of duty and routine, not true love and respect.

5. Pants fallen on the ground: Mr. White and attempts at re-masculinization

What strategies does the program employ to respond to this corrupted state of hegemonic masculinity? The underlying logic of the series initially follows the pattern of identity politics aimed at recapturing the damaged power position that comes with masculinity insofar as White is depicted in a general state of deprivation at the onset, disenfranchised and marginalized, both in physical and financial terms. At times, throughout the program his relationship with his wife – although initially framed as a proper traditional marriage with a stay-at-home wife – is portrayed as if traditional gender roles have been reversed, such as Skyler disapprovingly reminding him in the pilot episode not to use their credit card for small payments and/or without her approval. The news of cancer completes the image of White as being injured and victimized. White recognizes the gradual disintegration of both his masculinity and body and decides to translate it into a “personal politics of injury” which would lead up to his act of taking control, resulting in his self-liberation from the restrictions of his mundane, unsuccessful life. Faucette has argued that White represents a figure who, through “a need for freedom and control [tries] to reclaim masculine authority” (Faucette 2014, 75). He decides to become a self-made man: powerful, successful, respected and idolized all at once (on the archetype of the self-made man in the construction of American hegemonic masculinity see, for example, Kimmel 2012 and Tóth 2017).

His act of self-liberation marks his entrance into the criminal world as he puts his knowledge of chemistry to use: cooking pure meth. Lotz proposes that turning to “illegal situations” often represents the solution in “male-centered serials” which investigate men’s lives in an effort to define “how to be a man” (2014, 5). While White continually veils his true motivations by insisting that he is doing it for his family, to provide for them and to ensure their financial security for when he is no longer with them, the audience realizes with the unfolding of the story that this is not the case. White enters the masculine world of hardcore criminals – interestingly, thus, the program becomes a male-centered series in terms of the characters as well, since there are only two female figures consistently present throughout the show: White’s wife Skyler and his sister-in-law, Marie Schrader (Betsy Brandt). This male-centered realm of danger, competition and violence that White enters echoes Kimmel’s proposition about true masculinity being “a homosocial enactment […] fraught with danger, with the risk of failure, and with intense relentless competition” (1994, 120), which primarily takes place within the matrix of the male gaze. That is, the series creates a context within which true masculinity can be achieved through the ways in which one relates to and is perceived by other men.

When White makes his decision to enter into the meth business, he regards it as a necessary step to provide for his family, to recapture his patriarchal masculinity. Initially, he surprises his wife with his increased sense of masculinity and potential to satisfy her as a woman. This sense of masculine power, however, keeps on escalating until finally White ends up ordering her around, objectifying her and sexually assaulting her, thus driving her to despair, an abandoned effort to run away, an extramarital affair, deep depression, and a suicide attempt. White’s relationship with his son also undergoes a transformation: he is becoming more assertive, loud and expressive of his opinion, starts acting like a careless wealthy person, for example, buying Walt Jr. a car on the spur of the moment, until finally his son learns the truth about him and refuses to see him ever again – this being Walt Jr.’s painful act of self-liberation. The pretext of White’s actions being self-sacrificial for his family’s sake surfaces throughout the program, and it is not until the closing episode that he admits to Skyler: “I did it for me! […] I was really alive” (5.16).

I believe that it is first and foremost his knowledge of chemistry that draws him into the underworld: his ability to cook pure meth. This can be interpreted as the beginning of his occupational success, bringing him financial rewards as well, being yet another segment of hegemonic masculinity that he seems to be able to recapture. This is not a legitimate business, however; its first unexpected yield thus appears already in the pilot episode, with Krazy-8 and Emilio appearing by White and Pinkman’s mobile lab. White learns soon that the evolution of his business comes at a price: money, cruelty, human lives present no obstacle to him in this violent world of drugs, where public shootings and racialized gang wars set the stage for a successful business model – all concealed, invisible, under the veil of regular, respectable businesses, like a fast food restaurant and the car wash. Nothing is what it seems to be and should be. Ultimately, White’s business, which has reached a global scale, disappears, as do all the men and one single woman involved in the drug business, including White himself. The only person to survive is Pinkman.

In the course of his business, White takes on the name Heisenberg, symbolized by a black hat which he puts on to signify his alter ego. His wrinkled face, harsh eyes looking out from behind his glasses are yet again evocative of the Western tradition in American culture and of the figure of the cowboy, the frontiersman. This connection allows for the allusion of a cultural context for the series that takes us back to historical times, drawing on a particular American archetype of masculinity, placed in the wilderness of the Southwestern desert. This archetype embodies physical strength and control, adventurous spirit, the ability to overcome challenges, both natural and human. The gun is an inseparable object in the Western scenes, which is also constitutive of White’s power in the context of the human wilderness. His business power escalates with each episode, as does his sense of personal power and masculinity. With that, however, his aggression and merciless killer instincts also evolve, ultimately resulting in his complete disintegration before his family and partners. The masculinity he is able to constitute, however, is not hegemonic, nor is it lasting, as his fall is as fast as his rise has been: he ends up dying in the last episode alone on the floor of the lab run by the criminal gang he once hired to do his dirty work.

Most scholars seem to agree that White is not a hero; he is rather an anti-hero or a reluctant hero at best, who is “involuntarily placed in a situation where he must act” (Leyda 2013). He is an everyman, with no real possibility to re-capture hegemonic masculinity – he represents damaged goods, destined to failure, along with all the other men of his generation: they all die or disappear by the end of the series. The only two men to survive him are Jesse, his surrogate son and partner, whom White saves by freeing him from criminal slavery. In the closing episode we can see Jesse franticly driving away from his captivity, physically free, but with a body and soul filled with lasting scars. Walt Jr., White’s biological son, is the other figure, who is morally uncompromised, but is physically challenged. I think neither of them absolves or forgives Walt. But they ended up being invested with the task of re-configuring and re-constituting white masculinity. They are the ones who, based on White’s definition of chemistry – which is life itself for him – will experience transformation that follows the growth and decay he himself embodied.

6. Conclusion

The series confirms the message in the opening scene: no one catches the pants flying in the sky, they fall to the ground. Indeed, the program offers no immediate redemption for hegemonic masculinity. The adult men in the series are all depicted as morally compromised, weak and unworthy one way or another to be invested with the power captured by hegemonic masculinity. The program seems to leave it to members of the next generation to develop their own strategies and own masculine identities. The legacy passed on to them, however, overshadows any great potential as they are already suffering damage, both physically and psychologically, which they have inherited from previous generations of men and their failure to reaffirm traditional constructions of hegemonic masculinity. Thus, only the future can tell who will pick up the pants and wear them again

Works Cited

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CROSSWAYS OF FILM AND AMERICAN STUDIES

Réka M. Cristian

For a long time, American film has inhabited a marginal field in the context of American studies. Movies are present in American studies but American studies can also find its terrains of research within film studies. The two disciplines have a myriad of common subjects, methods, aims, and interests which need to be addressed. Despite an increasing number of publications on American film, only a handful of critics questioned the lack of engagement regarding movies within the field of American studies. In my essay, I argue that Hollywood and American film theory and criticism are essential milestones in imagining America in the field of American studies, with their important moments regarded as authentic paradigm dramas―as defined by Gene Wise―that open up multiple spaces of cultural encounters especially in the context of New American studies.[3]

Keywords: American studies, blind spot, American Quarterly, paradigm dramas, PCA, transnational

1. Film and American Studies: Blind spot?

Both American studies and film studies are fields encompassing multitudes of meanings with complex connections; albeit this association has, paradoxically, long been neglected by film theorists and American studies practitioners alike. Despite a massive outpouring of publications on American studies and on film, separately, there are still few texts and even less in-depth research about the relationship between the two fields. Besides, it would be inadequate to talk about contemporary American studies without considering the intricate implications of the American cinema, a ubiquitous cultural product that has long been the global export success of the United States.

Although film has long inhabited a marginal field in the context of American studies, contemporary approaches to New American studies can find prolific terrains of research in connection with film studies, which has started to find its way into the field of the Americanist discipline. The two fields have a myriad of common subjects, methods, aims, and interests which still need to be addressed through a collaborative enterprise. Even though there have been a burgeoning number of publications on the American cinema and film, it took decades after the establishment of American studies as discipline for a handful of critics to question the lack of engagement of movies within the field of American studies. Film, was not entirely accepted into the ‘club of high arts’ for a very long time and the dispute, though fading with time, continues even today with film’s status needing to be reconsidered (Cristian 2008,  18).

In 1975, Marie Claire Kolbenschlag drew the attention to the power of moving images when she remarked that film is a real “microcosm” reflecting the “imaginative articulation of U.S. experience and ambience” (2004) both on the domestic scene and on the international arena. Later, in 2002, Sam B. Girgus recapitulated Kolbenschlag’s ideas by claiming that film promulgates diverse “conceptions and representations of American identity” (12) in a global culture where American popular culture and moving images lie at the heart of America’s image. Obviously, Hollywood’s, New Hollywood’s, and the independent filmmaking’s imaginaries of America―perceptions and misperceptions alike―are, in today’s globalized world, as important as they were earlier, if not more.

Peter C. Rollins’s 1974 article on “Film and American Studies” published in American Quarterly―the official publication of the American Studies Association―was among the first focus studies regarding the connection between the two fields. Rollins saw the most visible points of convergence between cinema and American studies particularly in the realm of teaching. He remarked that while in higher education courses there was an “obvious student interest in film” (1974, 245), the elitist approach of that period prevailing in the ivied domain of American universities ignored the cinematic art considered, in the given context, “a mere diversion and at best a journalistic tool” (1974, 245). Based on his teaching experience, Rollins suggested the inclusion of film topics related to American history and American literature, accordingly, in the course offering of History and English departments. Twenty-four years later, in the comprehensive Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context’s thirteenth chapter entitled “Film, Television and American Studies: A 1998 Update,” he was still concerned about the inadequate presence of movies in the country’s higher education courses, but was more optimistic at this point: he added that academics finally began “to use film seriously” (247) with special regard to the medium in its cultural context. What is more, in this book Rollins concentrated mostly on the work of Americanists and urged them to provide “special insight and leadership” (1998, 247) in teaching and research in American studies through film, an approach today still ‘under construction.’

Following Rollins, Vivian C. Sobchack published in the American Quarterly journal, an intriguing study entitled “Beyond Visual Aids: American Film as American culture” (1980) in which she highlighted the prominent role of the cinema in American culture. For her, the medium “doesn’t just illustrate but has been and is American art, history, politics, culture, and institution from 1895 to the present,” adding that “without the inclusion of film, American Studies is not studying America” (1980, 300) at all. In a similar vein, Zsófia Anna Tóth claims (based on Rothman, Sumida and Kerber) that the study of American films and the field American studies are organically intertwined and mostly revolving around the concept of Americanization (Tóth 2009).

Similar to various popular culture artifacts, the American cinema was either missing from or only superficially present in the theoretical field of the American studies after the eighties. In 2006, two noteworthy articles warned once again about a significant lack of interest in the implication of movies within the Americanist discipline. One was Jonathan Auerbach’s “American Studies and Film: Blindness and Insight” which came out also in the American Quarterly. Auerbach observed that “[n]o systematic analysis of film” was yet performed “by academics,” (2006, 31) noting that the attitude of the discipline of American studies towards film remained virtually unchanged. He was appalled by the “puzzling lack of engagement with movies” (2006, 31) despite a self-evident pairing of film and the wider Americanist field. To exemplify his statement, Auerbach pointed out that while in the period between 1953 and 1973 there was only one article on film in the major academic Americanist forum, “[b]y the late 1970s and early 1980s, film had already shown up on the American studies radar, belatedly a full generation after the emergence of the American studies itself in the United States” (2006, 31-32). And indeed, Rollins’s and Sobchack’s articles are eloquent examples in this direction.

The other 2006 study in this regard was Lauren Rabinovitz’s “More than Meets the Eye: Movies in American Studies,” published in the American Studies journal. Rabinovitz was intrigued by the stagnant liminal presence of film and remarked that “original scholarship on cinema remains at the margins of American studies” with “only five essays that incorporate cinema as cultural artifact between 1996-2006 in the discipline’s main publication, the American Quarterly” (2006, 78). As a possible solution, she advocated the use of “social history of cinema that contextualizes films within cultural knowledge” (2006, 79) by pinpointing the need to see behind the textual implications of movies and the network of “processes and experiences” (2006, 83) enveloping the films themselves, a creative strategy that could bring together the above-mentioned fields.

Significantly, both Auerbach and Rabinovitz concentrate on visual metaphors: the first highlights the trope of “blindness,” connoting the invisibility and the absence of movies materialized as a paradigmatic blind spot within the Americanist field, while the second focuses on the trope of the “eye,” suggesting visibility and presence, and thus a clearly discernable opportunity in the making considering the inherent potentials of the visual medium in and through American studies.

2. Film and paradigm dramas in American Studies

When describing the development of American studies as a discipline in “Paradigm Dramas in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement,” published in American Quarterly in 1979, Gene Wise delineated a series of so-called “paradigm dramas” (171) he defined as “actual patterns of thinking in action” (175). These paradigm dramas were defined as “representative acts” of culture endowed with special, “trans-actional quality” (1979, 169) that offer “enormous potential for work” in American studies, especially “useful in bridging” gaps between the disciplines it employs (1979, 169). Wise used the creative thespian metaphor of the paradigm drama to map and describe a series of distinctive acts in the disciplinary matrix of the American studies in the seventies such as landmark publications, courses, conferences, programs, grants, academic events, and other important cultural processes that shaped the paths of the discipline.

Film, considered in this seminal essay as a popular culture artifact, was indirectly referred to because, as the author noted, the practitioners of the popular culture field “have broken away to form a separate movement” (1979, 189) from the larger discipline. According to Wise, American popular culture―cinema included―is a genuine “American Studies creation” (1979, 189) that dissociated itself from the larger “parasite” (1979, 188). From this perspective, the (re)placement of relevant paradigm dramas related to the world of movies among Wise’s classical paradigm dramas seems not only logical but also a legitimate step.

Although long-present, film is still a ‘fresh’ topic looking for methods of inquiries within the discipline of American studies with the link between the disciplines themselves still deficient despite the fact that movies alongside film theory and criticism are as significant representative acts as the literary works or historical documents that shaped the paths of traditional American studies. Movies have been a crucial component of the American life and culture that inspired innumerable writers, critics, journalists, and theorists alike. From the cornucopia of works about film and American culture I have chosen below a brief selection of representative acts bridging the American cinema with various areas of American studies; they are important works that opened new ways in the interpretation and reinterpretation of America through which they can be considered authentic paradigm dramas as the ones designated by Wise.

In 1915, when American studies was a discipline in the making and film was far from being accepted as a full art form, the poet and performance artist Vachel Lindsay prophesized in his pioneering work, The Art of Moving Pictures, the vast potential of cinema in shaping American culture and democracy in the United States. He anticipated the medium’s effect on the global level also when he said that “[t]he state that realizes this may lead the soul of America, day after to-morrow” (2004). Lindsay described film as a universal instrument of visual culture with tremendous impact and foresaw this form of art as a “new weapon of men” (2004), an idea later echoed in the intriguing work of the independent film producer and writer Frances Stonor Saunders entitled The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (2001), where she acknowledged―besides other art works―the role of movies, mostly of the Hollywood cinema, as a major cultural and ideological ‘weapon’ especially important during the World War II and the Cold War. Similar to Lindsay, Walter Benjamin prefigured in mid-1930s the potential of the cinematic medium when he stated that film as immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology and has not yet realized its “real possibilities” (Cristian and Dragon 2005; Benjamin 2007, 228)

In 1960, the avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist Maya Deren emphasized in “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality” the important role of the American mainstream but also experimental films when she claimed that cinema should “explore the new realms and dimensions accessible to it and so enrich our culture artistically as science has done in its own province” (70). Her interdisciplinary urge foresaw a novel approach regarding the connection between American films and its creator(s): the 1962 Americanization of auteur theory. This theory, formulated by film critic Andrew Sarris on the premises of the French la politiques des auteurs prompted the rise of academic film studies―hosted for a long time, as Robert Stam noted, mostly in literature departments (1960, 92)―and can be considered a significant paradigm drama, especially in the context of comparative, cross-cultural approaches emerging during the sixties in the field of American studies.

However, as Wise writes, in a commitment “to a distinctive American Studies venture” American studies scholars “retreated” (1999, 210) to their disciplinary heavens and despite an increasing interdisciplinary trend starting from the sixties, they left open the opportunity to include paradigm dramas of cinematic relevance into the official map of the field. Nevertheless, the Americanization of the auteur theory―among many other yet less mapped works pertaining to American film and cinema―are genuine paradigm dramas since they fit the criteria set by Wise for these paradigms, especially through their inherent potential for the “ritual rhetoric of newness” (1999, 210).

Although omnipresent in everyday life (as Rollins, Auerbach, and Rabinovitz have also shown), movies were visible to a lesser extent in the larger field of theoretical American studies until the late 1970s and early 1980s. A distinguished exception and one that can definitely be included among paradigm dramas with cinematic relevance is the “Film and American Studies” 1979 Special Issue of the American Quarterly (vol. 31, no. 5), which strange it may seem, appeared in the same year after the publication of Wise’s study (vol. 31, no. 3). Nonetheless, during the late 1980s and 1990s, there was a proliferation of new cultural hierarchies in the United States. The popular culture scholar George Lipsitz was one of its advocates: in his influential study entitled “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory and American Studies” (1990), he suggested that “a theoretically informed” American studies should begin by listening to all forms “found within the concrete contests of everyday life” (328), movies included. Later, Lipsitz labeled this emerging area the “other American studies” and pointed out that the novelty of this realm consisted in the employment of “organic grassroots theorizing about culture and power that has [since] informed cultural practice, social movement and academic work” (2002).

Similar to Lipsitz’s organic grassroots theorizing, John Belton’s cultural overview entitled American Cinema/American Culture (1994) emphasized that it was the movies―throughout various processes of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception―that responded critically and in a complex way to social, economic, and political issues of certain decades. He concentrated on film as a genuine collective experience, concluding that, particularly in this regard, movies were the primary cultural ‘nests’ of a homogenous, middle-class American culture.

The filmic paradigm dramas of American studies comprise a quite heterogeneous compilation of publications and theories, films and documentaries, institutions and events. In terms of earlier publications, besides Vachel Lindsay’s aforementioned The Art of the Moving Picture, Gilbert Seldes’s work on the early history of the American cinema entitled The Movies Come from America (1937) is also of pioneering importance. A crucial moment in the joined realm of film studies and American culture is marked by Andrew Sarris’s influential work on The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (1968). Here, Sarris canonized American directors and ranked a number of movies performing, as Stam noted, an “invaluable rescue operation for a number of neglected films and genres” that facilitated the entry of moving images into higher education by promoting the legitimization of cinema studies as a valid academic field (1968, 92). Additionally, Robert Sklar’s Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (1975) is another milestone publication on the relationship between film and American culture. This book was, according to William Grimes, one of the “first histories to place Hollywood films in a social and political context, finding them a key to understanding how modern American values and beliefs have been shaped” (2011) by the mainstream cinema.

Of a complex significance in subtly conjoining American studies, gender, and cinema is Parker Tyler’s prolific oeuvre on American mainstream and underground, alternative American films including Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (1972), one of the first studies on queer identities in American films. Along this line of thought, Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet (published in 1981) outlined the first history of LGBT Hollywood that was adapted in 1996 into a documentary movie with the same title which was directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. This adaptation, alongside Gerald Peary’s comprehensive documentary of a hundred years of American film criticism entitled For the Love of Movies: The History of American Film Criticism (2009) are major paradigm dramas focusing on filmmaking, film criticism, gender, and cultural studies.

Peter Decherney’s Hollywood and the Cultural Elite: How the Movies Became American (2005) is another paradigm act which discusses the ways in which several cultural institutions, “museums, universities, and even government agencies embraced film and the film industry to maintain their hold on American art, education, and the idea of American identity itself” (2) by emphasizing cinema’s important affiliation with these institutions through which Hollywood “successfully wove” itself “into the fabric of American culture” (4). This books also make it clear that filmic discourse can also reveal the blind spots of cultural representation mirroring the gap between factual and fictional discourses that make historical consciousness evident. In other words, by making culture (or for that matter, the past) into a present (form of visual culture) shows the powerful transfomative potential of filmic discourse as well (Szélpál 2009, 468).

One of the prominent institutions incorporating filmic works was the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The museum’s film collection, founded as the Film Library in 1935 with the primary aim to “illustrate the historic and artistic development of motion pictures and to establish the medium as a major art form,” holds today over 22,000 films. According to Auerbach, the establishment of this film archive at MoMA marked “a crucial moment in the history of film studies in the US, legitimizing cinema as an art form worthy of close attention” (2006, 34). Another prominent institution hosting movies is the National Film Registry, established in 1988 as part of the Library of Congress’s Audio-Visual Conservation that includes a continuously expanding list of films “of enduring importance to American culture,” and other visual works that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

Outside the United States, the American film has been subject to a huge number of various cross-cultural studies, but a comprehensive introspection into the relationship between film and the field of American studies is still emerging. However, an important step in this regard is the 2010 special issue on “Film. European Film-makers Construct the United States” published by the online European Journal of American Studies, which comprises intriguing articles on the construction and deconstruction of America by European (Ex-Yugoslav, Spanish, British) and immigrant filmmakers, as well as by the German émigrés, mythmaking during the Cold War, and the transatlantic cultural hybridities in film, to name just a few.

3. A symbiotic affair

The connection between American studies and the larger world of movies is more than a random connection; it is, as the above-mentioned paradigm acts have shown, rather as a collaborative enterprise. Moreover, the two fields are into an enduring dialogic relation, complementing or supplementing each other, an interrelationship that can be described in many cases as a symbiotic association. Symbiosis, implying “living together in more or less intimate association or close union of two dissimilar organisms” (Merriam Webster Dictionary), appears in the case of the American cinema and American studies as “more or less intimate associations” generally in “close union” throughout the history of American studies as an institutionalized discipline vis-à-vis the history and development of the American film. Let me succinctly illustrate a few of these “intimate associations” in the following.

Although they developed in separate institutional contexts, the paradigm acts in American studies shared the same timing with the institutional development of movies. Moreover, in the case of the film world these watershed moments are, interestingly, in connection with the issue of censorship in movies.

The time span between the 1920s and 1930s, which was labeled as the pre-institutionalized period of American studies, including paradigm dramas such as Vernon Lois Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought (written between 1914 and 1927) as the shaping book of the discipline, the foundation of American Literature journal (1929), and the appearance of American history and civilization programs at Harvard, The University of Pennsylvania, and George Washington University (the 1930s), coincided with the Pre-Code era (or the censorship-free period) of the film industry that began with the establishment of the first modern American film studio in Inceville (between 1912 and 1922), which produced the first generation of American films without any censuring restrictions. As Kolbenschlag remarked, the “U.S. film came into existence at that crucial point in time when the frontier had recently vanished, when the reality had receded into the past but the afterimage remained more vivid in the rearview mirror of popular imagination” (2004). Early American films enjoyed an unrestricted artistic freedom and proliferated accordingly in the absence of censuring ‘frontiers;’ they became “rearview,” shaping films of American identity that reflected “the myth rather than the immediate reality” (2004) during the period when the emerging field of American studies began to map the elements of its usable past.

Even though they were essential tools in the national mythmaking processes, films were left out from the elitist, academic discourse—then mostly centering on literature and history (Kovács 2010, 25)—especially during the dawn of American studies as discipline because movies were then part of the mass or ‘low’ culture, a ‘less serious’ subject of academic inquiry. Nevertheless, the thirties ended with the founding of American studies as a distinct discipline parallel with the impressive development of the motion picture industry, of Hollywood as America’s most visible image-maker, which came under the strict supervision of the Production Code Administration (PCA), the censoring office of films (1930-1934) with its omnipotent Hays Office.

Between the late 1930s and early 1960s, the institutionalization of American studies took place under the aegis of the so-called consensual, exceptionalist attitude catalyzed by the ideological climate of the Cold War, which envisaged the consolidation of the discipline’s programs in the country (some involving massive corporate foundation grants), the founding of American Quarterly journal (1949), and of the American Studies Association (1951). In terms of film, this interval of time corresponded with the Golden Age of Hollywood and the classical Hollywood cinema with massive studio film productions and blockbusters, all working under the supervision of the powerful PCA. This was also the time when the consolidation of American studies as an institutionalized discipline took place; similarly, Hollywood became a significant national institution.

However, the challenging of PCA’s censuring office by what has become the commercial American art cinema―especially important in this regard were A Streetcar Named Desire (dir. Elia Kazan, 1951) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (dir. Mike Nichols, 1965)―led to the demise of movies censorship as such; the PCA had to be substituted with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) film-rating system at the end of the sixties (1968).

In tandem with the overturning of movie censorship events in the filmic context, the subversive sixties and, subsequently, the seventies brought significant changes in the field of American studies, too. The field faced a dissenting period culminating in the American Studies Radical Caucus that questioned earlier approaches by addressing complex issues involving multiculturalism and interdisciplinarity; the events related to this Caucus, among others, led to the appearance and development of comparative (1970s and 1980s) and international (1990s) approaches to American studies. The post-sixties changes in American studies took place concomitantly with the rise of Hollywood’s own decentering and diversification: the rise of New Hollywood (1960s through 1980s), the proliferation of independent film studios (1970s), the appearance of home videos (1980s)―all of which due to the absence of the former censoring PCA.

Currently, the ubiquitous presence of various and novel digital technologies that reshape the cinematic world on a global level mirrors an essential turn in current New American studies, a discipline under permanent construction.

4. The transnational approach

As Sobchack observed, the connection between American studies and film studies―which she sees as two “broad, fluid” fields―is “rather like standing before the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers” (1980, 280). Although independent of each other and quite complex in themselves, these areas are “mutually interdependent, each illuminating and providing context for the other” (1980, 281) because, as the Sobchack underlined, film studies is integral part of American studies as American studies is part of film studies (1980, 280). To accommodate this commonly shared “part” we need an appropriate interpretive space to host this symbiosis, which, in the current context of global discourses, can be best provided by the transnational mode (see for example Annus 2012).

Film is an inherently transnational medium that appeals to global audiences; therefore the use of transnational discourses to describe the relationship between film and New American studies seems a logical strategy to link the two fields as an effective way to test this dialogic syntax. Shelley Streeby noted that today, when “global flows of culture incite American studies scholars to theorize the popular in new, transnational ways” (2010, 432-452), film, too, seems to find its “staging ground” within the realm of New American studies, especially after the transnational turn. This turn was described by Shelley Fisher Fishkin in her 2004 presidential address to the American Studies Association in which she emphasized that “the United States is and has always been a transnational crossroads of cultures,” with the majority of apparently American narratives and “phenomena”―films included―as genuine “stories of transnational flow, as is the story of America itself” (2004, 43). Tóth expresses similar ideas in practice when she analyzes two films, Machete (2010) and Machete Kills (2013), in discussing the situation of Latinos and Latinas and states that these American films (among many other similar ones) present a transnational diaspora where the transnational identities are formed on borderlands (Tóth 2019, 93), making these visual narratives also transnational by many aspects.

The practitioners of both American studies and film have widely varying methodologies that have recently started to thrive on transnational grounds of inquiry and practice; each field has developed comparative, global approaches trying to conjoin other fields, including each other. However, their methodologies can be best brought to work, as Rollins recommended, through teaching practice.

Alongside a growing number of American colleges and universities, many institutions of higher education outside the United States have accommodated movies in their curricula and are using American films as complex cultural texts in their various courses on America. In Australia for example, as Joy McEntee remarks, students are “encouraged to consider how the politics and economics of production and reception have interacted with technology to drive aesthetic development and to engage with theoretical concepts and debates that have shaped Film, Literary and Cultural Studies discourses” (2007, 135) generally. For better results, she suggests a new “conceptualization of teaching” which would reflect “the methods and ways of knowing specific to the several disciplines that constitute ‘American Studies’” (2005, 149).

In similar courses worldwide, American studies has been successfully transgressing its disciplinary boundaries. It has also managed to open up an interdisciplinary space of exciting and multiple possibilities for film, which is, in Auerbach’s formulation, a particularly important “mode of cultural transmission” and “resource of understanding US culture” (2006, 31) in the global context.

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.  Available: http://americanaejournal.hu/ vol8no1/annus. Access: April 12, 2021.

Auerbach, Jonathan. 2006. “American Studies and Film, Blindness and Insight.” American Quarterly 58: 1, 31-50.

Benjamin, Walter. 2007. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Transl. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Book.

Belton, John. 2012 [1994]. American Cinema/American Culture. Fourth Edition. New York: McGraw Hill.

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.  Available: http://primus.arts.u-szeged.hu/american/americana/volIno1/crmdz.htm. Access: April 13, 2021.

Cristian, Réka M. 2008. ”Encounters of the First Kind: Once Upon a Time in Film.” In Cristian, Réka M. and Zoltán Dragon (eds). Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories. Szeged: JATEPress, 1-20.

Decherney, Peter. 2005. Hollywood and the Cultural Elite: How the Movies Became American. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deren, Maya. 1992. “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality” (1960). In Mast, Gerald, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds). Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Fourth Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 59-70.

European Journal of American Studies. 2010 Special Issue on “Film. European Film-makers Construct the United States.” Available: http://ejas.revues.org/ 8649. Access: April 10, 2021.

Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. 2005. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies. Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57: 1, 17-57.

Girgus, Sam B. 2002. American on Film: Modernism, Documentary, and a Changing America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Grimes, William. 2011. “Robert Sklar, Film Scholar, Is Dead at 74.” The New York Times July 6. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/ movies/robert-sklar-film-scholar-dies-at-74.html?_r=0. Access: April 9, 2021.

Kolbenschlag, Marie Claire. 2004 [1975]. “Film and the American Experience.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. Available: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC06folder/AmStudiesKolbsg.html. Access: April 5, 2021.

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

Lindsay, Vachel. 2004 [1915]. The Art of the Moving Picture (The Project Gutenberg eBook prepared by Jonathan Ingram). Available: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13029/13029-h/13029-h.htm. Access: April 11, 2021.

Lipsitz, George. 1999. “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies.” In Maddox, Lucy (ed). Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline.  Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 310-331.

Lipsitz, George. 2002. “Conversations with Scholars of American Popular Culture. Featured Guest: George Lipsitz.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture from the 1900 to Present 1: 1. Available: http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2002/lipsitz.htm. Access: April 9, 2021.

McEntee, Joy. 2007. “Teaching American Studies/Teaching Hollywood II. Inducing Double Vision, or Does the ‘Threshold Concept’ Account for How Students Learn About Hollywood Film?” Australasian Journal of American Studies 26: 2, 135-151.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Available: http://www.moma.org/ explore/collection/film. Access: April 5, 2021.

National Film Registry. Library of Congress’s Audio-Visual Conservation. Available: http://www.loc.gov/film/filmnfr.html. Access: April 9, 2021.

Rabinovitz, Lauren. 2006. “More than Meets the Eye: Movies in American Studies.” American Studies 47: 2, 71-85.

Rollins, Peter C. 1974. “Film and American Studies: Questions, Activities, Guides.” American Quarterly 26:  3, 245-265.

Rollins, Peter C. 1998. “Film, Television and American Studies: A 1998 Update.” In Rollins, Peter C. (ed). Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 246-269.

Sobchack, Vivian C. 1980. “Beyond Visual Aids: American Film as American Culture.” American Quarterly 32: 3, 280-300.

Stam, Robert. 2000. Film Theory: An Introduction. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.

Streeby, Shelley. 2010. “Popular, Mass, and High Culture.” In Rowe, John Carlos (ed). A Concise Companion to American Studies., Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 432-452.

Szélpál, Lívia Klára. 2009. ”My Twentieth Century Directed by Ildikó Enyedi as an Unconventional History of Europe.” In: Irantzu, Pastor, María, Castrillo et al. (eds). Actas del VIII Congreso “Cultura Europea.” Cizur Menor: Thomson Reuters Aranzadi, 465-477.

Tóth, Zsófia Anna. 2009. “American Cinema at the Crossroads of American Studies.” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary5: 2. Available:  http://americanaejournal.hu/vol5no2/tzsa. Access: April 20, 2021.

Tóth, Zsófia Anna. 2019. “Borderlands and Humorous Transgressions in Machete (2010) and Machete Kills (2013).” In Cristian, Réka M., Zoltán Dragon and András Lénárt (eds). Available: http://ebooks. americanaejournal.hu/books/transnational-americas/. Access: April 19, 2021.

Wise, Gene. 1999. “Paradigm Dramas in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement.” In Maddox, Lucy (ed). Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 166-210.

GOURMET ADVENTURES: FILM, ADAPTATION, AND COOKING

Réka M. Cristian

This study discusses the topics of adaptation and cooking in Nora Ephron’s foodie film Julie and Julia based on Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking that had a profound impact on several aspects of post-World War II American vernacular culture and Julie Powell’s novel Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen which was based on the author’s blog documenting a year of cooking all Child’s recipes. The article focuses on the issue of intertextual dialogism and refunctioning as primary means of adaptation and also on the issue of microhistorical event(s) and stardom involved in the making of Ephron’s film.[4]

Keywords: adaptation, refunctioning, cooking, recipe, blog, novel, film, Julia Child, Julie Powell, Julie and Julia, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, refunctioning, intertextual dialogism, microhistory, Meryl Streep

The forerunner of contemporary gourmet adventurers on the American screen was the Julia Child (1912-2004). Born in California, Child left for the East Coast of the States for her college studies, then worked in Washington D. C. and afterwards mostly in Europe. While she was living in France she became fascinated with art of French cuisine with its emphasis on using the finest ingredients, be it vegetables from the farmers’ street markets or cuts of meat from the best butcher. Eventually Child’s fascination culminated in her writing a French cookbook for Americans, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and also in introducing and leading a subsequent TV program, “The French Chef,” produced by WGBH, the educational channel in Boston between 1963 and 1973. Her book and her television showed a radically changed “American culinary landscape” (Turan 2009) in the advent of the second wave of feminist movements in the U.S. that had a profound impact on several aspects of post-World War II American vernacular culture. In her memoir, Child wrote that she “was enrolled at Smith College at birth, and eventually graduated from there in 1934, with a degree in history” and with a plan “to become a famous woman novelist” (Child and Prud’homme 2007, 84). Popular she became but not as a novelist. Her highly successful cookbooks and subsequent television show brought fame to Child and to other women as well. According to A. O. Scott, Child’s book “stands with a few other postwar touchstones”—including Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care (1946), the Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) and Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat (1957)—as “a publication that fundamentally altered the way a basic human activity was perceived and pursued” (2009), a cultural milestone that inspired many other cultural artifacts and especially various types of adaptations including the works of culinary blogger and novelist Julie Powell and foodie filmmaker Nora Ephron.

During the past decades there has been a proliferation of books, television programs, and films focusing on gourmet adventures creating a gastronomic mythology that invaded our homes in various ways. Cooking appears today as a popular element of domestic advice programs in many areas of popular culture (Annus 2011). Celebrity chef and restaurant critic Fanny Cradock’s BBC TV series on cookery, which began in 1955, initiated a revolution in gastronomy with the help with visual media. Today, there are many prominent culinary figures, including the ‘Naked Chef’ Jamie Oliver and his food revolution, the kitchen chemist Heston Marc Blumenthal with his molecular precision, and Martha Stewart’s “didactic gospel” and “kitchen engineering” (Magee 2007), the restaurateurs Anthony Bourdain and Raymond Blanc, along with Guy Fieri, Andrew Zimmern, Paul Hollywood, James Martin, Rick Stein and the minimalist ‘Iron Chef’ of fusion Masaharu Morimoto, the pugnacious Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen, the epicurean Nigella Lawson, the organic crusaders Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Alice Waters, among many others.

Child’s pioneering volume, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961 in the U.S. and co-authored by Julia Child, Simone Beck and Louise Bertholl, is an overall reflection of “France in the 1950s and the old traditions of French cooking,” thoroughly imbued with “a rather holy and Victorian feeling about the virtues of sweat and elbow” (Child and Beck 2010, 19). The second volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which came out in 1970, was written by Julia Child and Simone Beck. This became, similar to the first volume, an instant hit by catching up with the spirit of the seventies. While were working on the book project, Child and Beck beat together “a dirt path across the little field” between their two kitchens, as they “dropped in on each other several times a day to compare notes and taste whatever was on the other’s stove” (Child and Prud’homme 2007, 276-277). This type of social networking was based on a playful interactivity between the two author-cooks, Child and Simca [Simone], the last being “a veritable fountain of recipes and ideas, which she constantly changed or refined,” while Child’s “job was to be the authority on American habits and ingredients” and “to retest Simca’s recipes, to write the text, and (ugh) proofread” (Child and Prud’homme 2007, 277). Their collaboration was a genuine act of adaptation because Child not only selected but also adapted a great number of French recipes for the American audience overseas. This type of adaptation involved various processes of borrowing, especially the names of the dishes. In both volumes, Child used a mélange of French terms blending with a naturally playful attitude toward ingredients and cooking tools, similar to the improvisations and modulations of musical themes, making many edible combinations of otherwise unattainable French dishes accessible to a larger American public. Child remembered in My Life in France that

[O]ne of the things I loved about French cooking was the way that basic themes could be made in a seemingly infinite number of variations—scalloped potatoes, say, could be done with milk and cheese, with carrots and cream, with beef stock and cheese, with onions and tomatoes, and so on and on. I wanted to try them on all, and did. I learned how to do things professionally, like how to fix properly a piece of fish in thirteen ways, or how to use the specialized vocabulary of the kitchen—“petits dés” are vegetables “diced quite finely;” a douille is the thin nozzle of a pastry bag that lets you squeeze a cake decoration as the icing blurps out. (Child and Prud’homme 2007, 95)

As a result, Mastering the Art of French Cooking displays the basics of themes and variations in a pragmatic guide ranging from the crème au breurre à la meringue Italienne, gâteau aux noix le Saint-André, la Charlotte Africanine, le glorieux, or to the pain d’épices, a few among a large array of other delicacies that finally made their way into a vast number of American kitchens throughout the decades with the mediation of Child’s instructions.

At the beginning of the third millennium, Julie Powell, a Queens secretary, “risked her marriage and her sanity and her cats’ welfare to cook all 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking […], all in one year” (Powell 2009a, 297). To document this culinary adventure and forget daily frustrations she encountered by working at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation Call Center on August 25, 2002, Powell started a personal journal, a blog on the World Wide Web entitled “The Julie/Julia Project Nobody here but us servantless American cooks” (https://web.archive.org/web/20021217011704/http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/2002/08/25.html). Inspired by Child’s book and media personality, Powell planned to reinvent herself by ‘adapting’ Child’s recipes to her own tiny kitchen by cooking each day a recipe taken from Mastering the Art of French Cooking and then blogging the outcome and its context. Though far from being an expert cook, Powell managed to ‘master’ the 524 recipes learned from Child’s basic book and recorded in a candid manner each daunting act of culinary accomplishment in her “blog-turned-memoir” (Phipps 2009). Mastering the Art of French Cooking was a “childishly simple and dauntingly complex” book providing “incantatory and comforting” (Powell 2009, 15) feelings that made it into a guidebook to mundane little wonders that helped Powell escape from the stress of everyday urban life. After deciding to pursue her plan in an homage to Child, the blogger “cooked for friends, and for family,” and for many other people (including journalists) and, “somewhere in there it had gotten a little surreal” (Powell 2009a, 291) but also real enough for an intense dialogue about it on the internet.

‘Mastering’ for Powell meant primarily adapting and adjusting the French recipes collected and already ‘mastered’ by Child to suit the third millennium American cultural attitudes towards cooking and way of life while keeping in mind the aesthetics of pleasure and taste of the French, and that of Child as well. So, the dishes Powell cooked were already adapted recipes (by Child) of former, French dishes that have been, in turn, adaptations of previous regional, family or individual recipes that—as most recipes all over the world—varied in time, with geographical coordinates and various historical-economic and cultural factors. Similar in their purpose to the function of the urban spaces of New York City in E. E. Cummings’s works described by Zénó Vernyik, these collection of recipes seem to be “organized around a set of heterotopic locations functioning as portals in space and time” (Vernyik 2015, 133) with these coordinates shifting from France to the US, among various American cities, from Powell’s kitchen into the blog/internet and from the internet (feedbacks) to Powell’s home, as well as into the world of the Smithsonian Institute, TV shows and intradiegetic spaces of a film (as we will later see), all with the time range from the post-WWII period through the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Moreover, similar to Julia and Simca, Powell had also beaten a dirt path across the little virtual ‘field’ between her kitchen and many other American (and international) homes with her daily internet presence. Not long after her first culinary posts appeared online, the diary became a success prompting the blogger to transpose her experience of cooking-and-blogging into another medium, narrative fiction. Encouraged by an impressive number of messages and comments to her blogposts, Powell took a leave of absence from her social network, collected and grouped the posts, edited and compiled them into an adapted commentary of a fictionalized account, and returned to her live journal on the website to announce the publication of her own foodie book that bore the name of the two women involved in the process of culinary creation: Julie and Julia—the result of another adaptation process, this time one from blog to novel.  This is how Julie Powell describes the return to her blog after she finished the book based on the experience of cooking Julia Child’s recipes and blogging the experience of going through it:

Where the hell have I been? Well, I’ve been writing a book. And now it’s done! In t-minus 33 days, “Julie & Julia” (a slightly lame title, one editorial battle lost there) will hit the bookshelves. It will have my name on the cover, and my picture on the back leaf. I haven’t really begun to deal with this yet. […] And what I’ve decided I’m going to do is, I’m going to start up this blog, in case there are any Project readers left out there, just to – I don’t know. Touch base. I’m going to be visiting places, doing strange-o author type stuff. And it would be sort of cool if I got to see some of the old gang while I’m doing it. So here it is. Developments shortly to follow.... It’s nice to be back. (Powell 2005)

Powell’s fiction, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (published in 2005 with the paperback edition under the slightly different title of Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously), is a twenty-first century offshoot of the Child’s master-cookbook which served as Powell’s basic text. By using Child’s volumes both as base and “as a creative outlet,” Powell found her voice, her subject, her tone and—as Child with her first publication—her vocation as a writer (“Julie & Julia’s Julie Powell Sets the Record Straight”). Powell even confessed that she simply “wouldn’t have done it” without the key influence of Child (Powell 2009, 297), who was her outmost source of inspiration. In her August 10, 2009 blogpost the young gourmet acknowledges this influence. This is how Powell relates the relationship between Child and herself:

A lot of people have been asking whether it’s true that Julia Child wasn’t a big fan of Julie Powell, and whether she and I really didn’t meet. Both of those things are true—Julia, I think, from what I gather, was less irritated than simply uninterested. Which, when I first found out, was of course devastating. But the thing about Julia, to me, was that she was a real person—a great 6-foot-2 force of nature, with tremendous gifts, nearly limitless energy and generosity, firm opinions, and even a few flaws. That’s what I love about her—she inspired because she was a woman, not a saint. Not to say that her not loving my blog was a flaw. I just mean that the fact that she might not for whatever reason adore me as much as I adore her has absolutely no bearing on what is wonderful about her. Throughout her life, Julia nurtured and encouraged and gave great help to chefs and writers both. And she changed my life. No matter what she—or anyone else, for that matter—thought of the project. I know why I did what I did, and I am proud that I spent a year writing and cooking in tribute to one the most wonderful women I've ever not met. (Powell “A Couple of Things,” http://juliepowell.blogspot.com/2009/08/)

Oddly enough, Powell and Child never met. Child knew about Powell’s blog and also about Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen but, as Powell disclosed, Child was simply “uninterested” in her. In a candid description of facts concerning the imaginary relationship between Powell-the-adapter and the Child-the-adapted before Julie and Julia was published, Powell writes:

I didn’t know Julia Child. I never even met her. She did write a response to a letter I wrote her: “Thank you for your kind note,” it read. It was printed on a computer, on official Julia Child stationary. “I am happy to know that I have been such a positive influence on you.” I have no idea if she actually wrote it or not. The signature looks real, anyway. (Powell 2009, 302-303)

In 2009, foodie director Nora Ephron, intrigued by the entire process of Powell’s transmedial storytelling, decided to adapt to film a heterogeneous collection of materials. This included Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, combined with Julia Child’s memoir My Life in France she co-authored with her nephew, Alex Prud’homme. For the film version of Child’s food world, Ephron also ‘borrowed’ and inserted crucial moments from Dan Aykroyd’s famous 1978 skit from the Saturday Night Live Show (Season 4, 1978, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=eSxv6IGBgFQ) in which the actor parodied Child who was very amused by this humorous parody of herself. In the movie, Ephron also accommodated shots of a transposed “Julia Child’s Kitchen” at the Smithsonian Museum of American History (https://americanhistory.si.edu/ food/julia-childs-kitchen) in a movie which was to become a Golden Globe winner visual story of “two lost women who find a professional purpose through food” (Barnes 2009): Julie and Julia. Ephron’s work was thus a “postmodern adaptation” that employed, in the first place, various adapted materials—the cookbook and blog—combined through a special pastiche method that, according to Peter Brooker has “something to do with differences in media and modes of production and reception” informed by certain “habits of cultural value” which are exposed when several books, TV excerpts, internet, museum objects and film are brought together in order to “re-function” an original text (Brooker 2007, 108)—in this case the Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

For a postmodern refunctioning, Ephron, similar to many of her contemporaries, uses transposition, intersecting, borrowing and analogy in an intertextual dialogism involving various historical and fictive materials. In this sense, Child’s cookbook, Aykroyd’s skit, Child’s Smithsonian kitchen and Powell’s blog provide the microhistorical layer of the plot, while the basis for the narrative is Child’s memoir and Powell’s novel. Lívia Szélpál, writing on the issue of microhistory in Sommersby (dir. Jon Amiel, 1993), claims that a film that deals with given historical acts can function as a narrative embedded with a set of microhistorical events (2010, 174). And so does Julie and Julia: the film is palimpsest of accurate historical events that are microhistorical scenes (especially those in relation with Julia Child) fused with fictional elements (some in relation with Julie Powell) for a more effective cultural representation of the process of adaptation and cooking woven into the fabric of the filmic narrative. Zsófia Anna Tóth discusses similar processes taking place when Jane Austen’s work is adapted to the screen (and other media); all turn out to be transmedial, multimedial, transhistorical as well as transcultural adaptations (2011, 306-308).

As in a good recipe, Ephron’s film has not one dominating ingredient, but features a combination of elements that will make up the product, a movie about making food. Cooking, generally, is the result of passing down recipes from one generation to another, from a culture to another, from a person to another resulting in a considerable number of variations on one basic description or text; adaptation, especially the processes of recipe creation and recreation, resembles cooking in this procedural chain. Linda Hutcheon best defined the general characteristics of any adaptation process, which she saw as an “announced and extensive transposition” (Hutcheon 2006, 7). In this regard, Powell’s blog is an extensive transposition of Child’s two volumes, involving a shift of mediums—from book to blog and from blog to novel—and a reinterpretation of the original text in a given frame (blog text and narrative fiction), experiencing the end-product (Powell’s novel) as a palimpsest through the memory of other works (French recipes, Child’s cookbooks and memoir, Powell’s blog) that “resonate through repetition with variations” (Hutcheon 2006, 8). More ambitious than Child, Powell realizes the creative potential of Julia’s recipes and the publicity power of her blog, declaring with confidence: “I can write a book. I have thoughts” (Ephron 2009). So, she starts writing the foodie novel that will be one of the ingredients of Ephron’s film.

An eloquent example of the equation of cooking and adaptation is Julia Child’s scene from the 28th Episode of ‘The French Chef” entitled “The Potato Show” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6s6rVAkFrE), which might as well serve as an allegory for the adaptation strategy of Ephron’s Julie and Julia. In the show, Child attempts to turn over a potato mixture which, she claims, is a “daring thing to do” and continues by saying that “[w]hen you flip anything you, really, must have the courage of your convictions, particularly if it is sort of a loose mass like… oh, … this.” As any creative process, cooking and adaptation are “daring” things “to do,” especially if one’s ingredients are quite varied and “seem sort of loose mass” like Child’s potato mix or Ephron’s intricate materials. Despite obvious courage and conviction, Child accidentally drops the mixture on the table and, far from panicking, she picks it up and tosses it back into the pan continuing nonchalantly: “if that didn’t go well you can always pick it up and put it together and you’re alone in the kitchen—who’s going to see? But the only way to learn how to flip things is just to flip them.” In Ephron’s adaptation, Meryl Streep plays the role of Julia Child and this entire Potato Sow episode is engrafted in the film as perfect mimicry of the original show—a perfect allegory for a segment of the film adaptation.

In the texts adapted for Julie and Julia and in the film itself “each husband […] takes pleasure in supporting his mate’s commitment and ambition” (Barnes 2009). For example, Paul Child (Stanley Tucci) helps Julia choose the most pleasurable work she wants, “snaps pictures of his wife’s cooking for her book” (Barnes 2009), and helps her in various ways throughout the entire process of writing and publishing Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Similarly, in case of Julie Powell’s (Amy Adams) husband Eric (Chris Messina) enthusiastically encourages his wife’s “blogging idea” pushing her “to keep going after her obsession with it” starts “to wear on him” (Barnes 2009). As film critic Kenneth Turan accurately observed, “[T]his is the rare Hollywood film where it’s the men who are the support team, not the women” (Turan 2009). The result is a movie by women about women, in a filmic reevaluation of cooking as profession and not as women’s domestic realm.

Ephron re-functions her intra- and extradiegetic ingredients knowing that moviegoers are “going to see” what she managed to finally ‘cook’ into the celluloid world. As a result, Julie and Julia depicts two parallel lives, each with its own narrative in one film: the first “portrays Child’s self-discovery through cooking” through which she finds “a calling in a time and place when women weren’t generally thought to need callings,” based on a cookbook (Mastering the Art of French Cooking) and a memoir (My Life in France); the other focuses on Powell’s “accidental dissection of Internet-enabled twenty-first-century narcissism rendered in broad strokes and easy punchlines” (Phipps 2009), that adapts Julie’s blog posts and her blog-turned-novel. Ephron’s film is thus a smart re-functioning of its constitutive texts. The movie ‘quotes’ from Child’s cookbook, cites from Child’s and Prud’homme’s memoir (2007), and from Powell’s novel, but overall it is a movie about the dialogic relation of Mastering the Art of French Cooking with many other texts employed in the making of the story of Julia and Julie. The movie also acknowledges, besides Child’s work, the French cooks’ recipes and alludes to the onscreen character of Julia Child from various TV cooking programs by presenting Dan Aykroyd’s parody of Child’s television show and featuring the quasi-documentary shot of Child’s kitchen at the Smithsonian.

In the context of adaptation and its intertextual recycling, Julie and Julia is similar to the movie Adaptation (dir. Spike Jonze, 2002) based on Susan Orlean’s novel The Orchid Thief (1998). This film adapted a “non-fictional account that grew out” of the The New Yorker article, “Orchid Forever,” which was published on January 23, 1995, (https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/1995/01/23/orchid-fever). Its author, journalist Susan Orlean, adapted her article into a novel that was made into film. Jonze’s movie is about John Laroche, a self-proclaimed orchid-guru and poacher and features the adapted novel’s author, Orlean, who is acted by Meryl Streep. This film turns out to be a reflexive satire describing the creative struggles of real-life screenplay writer Charlie Kaufmann in adapting Orlean’s novel into a screenplay that ultimately leads to the movie Adaptation. The intradiegetic world is a dialogic rewriting of the novel, in which the spectator sees Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage) reading Orlean’s book, “through which the writing of The Orchid Thief becomes a spectacle, which takes the spectator back to the events that inspired the book, and even further, to the historical events that served as the basis for Charles Darwin in writing The Origin of Species” (Dragon 2008,  32).

Ephron’s visual narrative offers an analogous ‘recipe’ of adaptive strategies: Julie Powell ‘adapts’ Julia Child’s recipes, who had ‘adapted’ these recipes from Simone Beck, Louise Bertholl, and the Cordon Bleu cooks, who also ‘adapted’ these from other sources that had been previously ‘adapted’… Ephron’s work thus becomes a network of commentaries of one text over the other placed in a creative critical dialogue. Moreover, this film is not only about the birth of Child’s cookbook and its critical reception but also about Powell’s interpretation of Julia’s work. Julie re-reads and recontextualizes Mastering the Art of French Cooking (inherited from her mother, who, as many women of her generation, had a Child cookbook in her own kitchen). In doing so, she adapts Child’s dishes by cooking them all, one by one, and adding each event not only as performance but also as a separate post to “The Julie/Julia” blog project, that in turn, prompts a series of reader comments to which she responds with new posts, making this endeavor a genuinely interactive process. Consecutively, Ephron’s movie adapts the birth of this blog and its development by disclosing even the email of the real-life author (jpowell@yahoo.com) in a brief close-up of her online diary that functions as a microhistorical scene and shows the critical reception of Julie’s internet enterprise, its subsequent transformation into a novel, and the reception of Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, including a self-reflective sentence on Powell’s book at the end of the film, which says: “Her book has been made into a movie” (Ephron 2009). Furthermore, Ephron’s work features a remake of Julia Child’s television show, presents Powell’s commentary on Child’s Smithsonian kitchen and on Julia’s poster (featuring actress Meryl Streep as Child); it refers to Child’s less enthusiastic comments on Powell’s novel, and inserts, as a quote, Dan Ayckroyd’s “The French Chef” parody of Child’s cooking show in Saturday Night Live—all cooked up in a play of an intricate adaptive process.

Ephron’s adaptation of the Child-Powell encounter recalls the poetics of making Stephen Daldry’s movie, The Hours (2002), an adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel with the same title. In Daldry’s movie three women, Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) meet and reconsider their lives through the specter of Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway. For Clarissa, as opposed to Virginia and Laura, “creating and sharing fine food is an enjoyable and even artistic activity” (Bower 2004, 2), with The Hours becoming a film where food is “an important element but not the focus of the movie,” offering the audience “the opportunity to study the many ways that food and food-related activities create meaning” (Bower 2004, 2) within the intradiegetic world. This film is, as the above-discussed Adaptation, also about a re-functioning. And re-functioning is a kind of adaptation, while adaptation is a way to making films. Teresa de Lauretis claims that “cinema is directly implicated in the production and reproduction of meanings, values and ideology in both sociality and subjectivity” and, as such, it should be understood both as “signifying practice” and, like the process of adaptation, the “work of semiosis: a work that produces effects of meaning and perception, self-images and subject positions for all those involved, makers and viewers” (1984, 38). Or a re-functioning—for all those involved in it, makers and viewers alike. Semiosis as re-functioning, for example, does not play out fully in the film adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novel, Brooklyn (dir. John Crowley, 2015), where a Jamesian heroine is forced to choose a new American life: the adaptation of the morally ambiguous scenario could be contextualized by the involvement of Tóibín’s earlier James related piece, The Master, his essays (Kovács 2007 and 2016), even James’s work on his ambiguous relation to America – none of which actually happens in the adaptation.

In the case of adaptations as re-functioning Mrs. Dalloway is the source text and the process consists in “finding a pertinent transposition of Cunningham’s reading of Woolf’s own legacy” by confirming the evocation of a sisterhood “across narratives of independent choice, whether of life or death,” which continues into a new generation” (Brooker 2007, 118) and perhaps even beyond. Just as in Julie and Julia. With a happy coincidence of names, this movie re-functions its cookbook-source in Ephron’s own reading of Julia Child and Julie Powell, as well as Julie’s imagined Julia. These units of thought communicate through a dialogic relation, supporting, elaborating, extending, modifying and reinterpreting themselves and each other on the basis of a reference text, which is also based on previous themes and variations. Furthermore, an interesting point besides the exchange of written texts (cookbook, blog, article, novels) in the above-mentioned film adaptations is a special kind of dialogism involving a character who is present in all of them. The above-mentioned Adaptation and The Hours together with Julie and Julia, achieve an inter-filmic ‘conversation’ primarily through the character of Susan Orlean, Clarissa Vaughan, and Julia Child respectively, all played by the same actress, Meryl Streep. In this context, adaptation is thus ‘cooked’ besides Child, Powell and Ephron’s foodways, also by Streep’s own recipe of interfilmic stardom.

As Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan claim, in most contemporary adaptations “the pleasure is in locating and celebrating an excess of interpretation, rather than attempting to close off ‘unauthorized’ ones, or suggest a hierarchy of readings” (2007, 7). Ephron’s filmic narrative, the result of a free exchange of fiction, microhistorical non-fiction, documentary, technology and film (Cartmell and Whelehan 2007, 7), subscribes to this excess of interpretation by celebrating a genuine intertextual dialogism (as enounced by Robert Stam) that re-functions Julia Child’s and Julie Powell’s recipes for cookbooks, memoirs, blogs, and novels into a postmodern film adaptation à la Nora Ephron carte.

Works Cited

Annus, Irén. 2011. ”Hegemonic Masculinity Affirmed: Representations of Gender in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary  7: 2. Available: https://americanaejournal. hu/vol7no2/annus. Access: April 12, 2021.

Barnes, Brooks. 2009. “Full Stomachs, and Full Marriages, Too.” The New York Times July 31. Available:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/ movies/02barn.html?pagewanted=all. Access: April 10, 2021.

Bower, Ann L. 2004. “Watching Food: The Production of Food, Film, and Values.” In Anne L. Bower (ed).  Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film. New York: Routledge.

Brooker, Peter. 2007. “Postmodern Adaptation: Pastiche, Intertextuality and Re-functioning.” In Cartmell, Deborah and Imelda Whelehan (eds). The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 107-120.

Cartmell, Deborah and Imelda Whelehan. 2007. “Introduction.” In Cartmell, Deborah and Imelda Whelehan (eds). The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-12.

Child, Julia, Louise Bertholl and Simone Beck. 2009 [1961]. Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Vol. I. London: Penguin Books.

Child, Julia and Simone Beck. 2010 [1970]. Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Vol. II. London: Penguin Books.

Child, Julia and Alex Prud’homme. 2007. My Life in France. New York: Anchor Books.

Cunningham, Michael. 1998. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

de Lauretis, Teresa. 1984. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism. Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Daldry, Stephen, dir. 2002. The Hours. Paramount and Miramax.

Dragon, Zoltán. 2008. “Do You Speak Film? Film Language and Adaptation.” In Cristian, Réka M. and Zoltán Dragon (eds). Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories. Szeged: JATEPress, 21-33.

Ephron, Nora, dir. 2009. Julie & Julia. Columbia Pictures.

Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge.

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Jonze, Spike, dir. 2002. Adaptation. Columbia Pictures.

“Julie & Julia’s Julie Powell Sets the Record Straight.” 2009. Yumsugar: To Die For. (July 29). Available: http://www.yumsugar.com/Interview-Julie-Powell-Julie-Julia-3630257. Access: April 9, 2021.

Kovács, Ágnes Zsófia. 2007. “Recanonizing Henry James: Colm Tóibín’s The Master.” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 2: 2. Available: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol3no1/kazs. Access: April 3, 2021.

Kovács, Ágnes Zsófia. 2016. ”The Jamesian Secret: Representations of Irish Immigrant Experience in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn.” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 12: 2. Available: http://americanaejournal. hu/vol12no2james/kovacs  Access: April 3, 2021.

Magee, M. Richard. 2007. “Food Puritanism and Food Pornography: The Gourmet Semiotics of Martha and Nigella.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-Present)  6: 2. Available: http://www. americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2007/magee.htm. Access: April 9, 2021.

Orlean, Susan. 1995. “Orchid Forever” (January 23). The New Yorker. Available: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/01/23/ orchid-fever. Access: April 8, 2021.

Orlean, Susan.  1998. The Orchid Thief. New York: Random House.

Phipps, Keith. 2009. “Julie & Julia.” A. V. Club August 6. Available: http://www.avclub.com/articles/julie-julia,31381/. Access: April 10, 2021.

Powell, Julie. 2005. “Heloooo?” August 25. Available: http://juliepowell.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_archive.html. Access: April 8, 2021.

Powell, Julie. 2009a. Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.  Penguin: London.

Powell, Julie. 2009b. “A Couple of Things.” August, 10. Available: http://juliepowell.blogspot.com/2009/08/couple-of-things.html. Access: April 9, 2021.

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Szélpál, Lívia Klára. 2010. “Sommersby, avagy Martin Guerre visszatérése a történelem és a film kapcsolatának tükrében.” AETAS Történelemtudományi Folyóirat 25: 3, 172-184.

Tóth, Zsófia Anna. 2011. “Jane Austen Reloaded” In Földváry, Kinga, Zsolt Almási and Veronica Schandl (eds). HUSSE 10-LitCult, Proceedings of the HUSSE 10 Conference, Literature & Culture Volume. Debrecen: Hungarian Society for the Study of English, 302-310.

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Vernyik, Zénó. 2015. Cities of Saviors: Urban Spaces in E. E. Cummings’s Complete Poems, 1904-1962 and Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor. Szeged: Americana eBooks.

DO PEOPLE DREAM OF DIGITAL ARCHIVES?

Zoltán Dragon

Ever since the proliferation of textual documents seen as the most manageable and feasible means of the transmission of cultural heritage across generations, the archive, modelled on library came to signify not only the collection of human knowledge and culture, but also the intersection of different discourses. The shift to digital platforms is not simply a recontextualization of the issues inherited from earlier incarnations of archiving systems and their politics: with the digital agenda, the techné of our age has started to effectively shape the episteme of our cultural inheritance and identities on many levels. Today, it is the ontology of the archive that is at stake in the 21st century. To fully grasp the scope of reorganization of cultural memories today, on the one hand, the humanities need to critically assess the ways information technologies lend themselves to cultural analyses, and on the other, information technologies need to incorporate the critical view distilled from such relevant inquiries. Our versions of cultural heritages are no longer dependent merely on their critical dimensions, but rely heavily on the technologies that necessitated the digital shift both on a technological and on a cultural level.[5]

Keywords: Digital archive, cultural memory, techne, right to be forgotten, digital culture, internet

In Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, humanity is seen in a post-apocalyptic world, where most of the species are either completely extinct or endangered. Owning a simulacrum, an electronic replica of an animal means, on the one hand, social status; on the other, it is a reminder that one can still retain something of their humanity, through empathy, through remembering life before World War Terminus. Being (or staying) human in this context means a form of cultural memory, an illusory, volatile fantasy that holds the essence of human culture in a virtual vessel that has an electronic paraphernalia, a prosthesis, a technical gadget that seems to trigger that fantasy which, in turn, is able to hold together subjectivity. It is precisely this dialectic logic of social production (of status, of knowledge, of cultural memory) that forms the central questions concerning the more and more pressing issue of preserving and managing cultural heritage in the form of the archive.

Ever since the proliferation of textual documents seen as the most manageable and feasible means of the transmission of cultural heritage across generations (often in a potentially non-linear, non-chronological, even transgenerational manner), the library, or later, the extended archives came to signify not only the collection of human knowledge and culture, but also the intersection of different discourses. The shift to digital platforms and modes of production is not simply a reproduction or recontextualization of the issues inherited from earlier incarnations of archiving systems and their politics. With the new, digital agenda, the techne of our age has started to effectively shape the episteme of our cultural inheritance and identities on many levels. Questions of digital authorship and virtual property, of data ownership and cyberethics, of the role and rules of digital archiving technologies, and the preservation and enrichment of national cultural inheritance are more pressing issues than ever: it is the ontology of the archive that is at stake in the 21st century. There is a need to discuss the role and possibilities of the digital archive by combining data management logic (database and algorithms) and their integration in theories of culture (via the algorithmic turn as defined by William Uricchio (2011, 25)). To fully grasp the reorganization of cultural memories today, on the one hand, the humanities need to critically assess the ways information technologies lend themselves to cultural analyses, and on the other, information technologies need to incorporate the critical view distilled from such relevant inquiries. Our versions of cultural heritages are no longer dependent merely on their critical dimensions, but rely heavily on the technologies that necessitated the digital shift both on a technological and on a cultural level.

We have reached an era in which there is a steady, unstoppable shift from the relative material stability of the Gutenberg (i.e., textual) galaxy to the digital (i.e., hypertextual) realm in preserving cultural heritage. Yet we lack the general critical and theoretical, as well as corresponding technological toolset as to how the system of the archive should work, how it could move from its closed, fortified, privileged and ultimately institutionalized, paper and media-based structure to the new, open, virtual and augmented, crowd-sourced, open access digital space that eventually defies institutionalization and does away with questions of medium-specificity in the digital space. For this move involves not merely a transmission from materiality to the virtual, but also from the medial to the interface-driven hypermedial, too.

To find potential avenues to channel this transition, on the one hand, we need to revisit some of the most decisive conceptualizations of the internet and digital culture (born also as a transitory project but yet embedded in medial discourse with the help of Vannevar Bush and, later on, Ted Nelson). On the other hand, we need to refocus our study to establish a dialogue between computation and the philosophical, critical theory tradition. It is only this dialogue that can lead critical discourse on the question of the archive out of the impasse it has recently entered. For this to happen there is an urgent need to rethink the tenets and potentials of the archive as a cultural memory system that is unlike our usual institutions both on the level of politics and on mediality.

This endeavor puts us right in the middle of the archive debate: its ethical, ideological, and political dimension reaching into the terrain of the digital, algorithmic, and database world. To talk about the archive, one needs to enter one of the many relevant discourses that operate along massively different sets of rules. One may thus need to consult philosophy or ethics to ponder certain types of questions, or select fields of information technology to locate specific problems and issues in programming, the interface, or the algorithms that drive the archives. Unfortunately, whichever track one opts for, the other will be left alone, as the two (or potentially more) discursive lines do not intersect (not in a meaningful dialogic manner at least). In other words, the episteme and the techne do not inform each other in contemporary discourses on the questions posed by the digital archive, therefore none of the participating voices is able to tackle overarching problems and issues that our societies face today (and in the future) in terms of archiving and accessing cultural heritage. What I propose here is to erase the demarcation lines between humanities and information technology, philosophy and software, critical theories and algorithms in order to lay the foundations of a potentially flexible and fruitful dialogue that leads to a more comprehensive view at the archive.

The archive: The space of memory

When pondering the question of cultural heritage or memory organized in a meaningful and systematic manner, we also need to consider whether there is only one way to do it, or there are myriads of avenues opened up by digitized storing capacities. But to answer - or to approach something like a potential answer to - it, one needs to ask the pressing question: what is an archive? Especially: what is an archive in a media saturated age in which content loses its material base, its tenor, as an outcome of massive digitalization? Then comes another issue: what is an archive (or what are archives) for and how should we think about its future? What should it contain? Who is it for and who should control it?

Let us start from the beginning - in other words, let us try and archive this particular train of thought in relation to preserving cultural memories. Questions of memory, of intellectual heritage, and of archiving thought and knowledge probably go as far back in the history of humanity as the appearance of literacy which, according to László Ropolyi, can present the case for a kind of digital thinking before the invention of both electricity and the digital proper. He claims that writing is essentially a non-binary, non-electronic digital literacy that later, in the second half of the twentieth century, with the birth of and transition to the digital, turns more and more into a binary, electronic digital literacy (Ropolyi 2014, 12). Curiously, this claim finds parallel with how the issue of mnemotechnics first appeared in philosophical thought only being foreclosed thereafter until the second half of the twentieth century saw a heightened increase in the issue again. As Simon Critchley explains, “Western philosophy arguably begins with the distinction of techne and episteme, where Socrates distinguishes himself from the Sophists by showing how the pursuit of knowledge in critical dialogue is superior to and independent of sophistic rhetoric and mnemotechnics” (Critchley 2009, 173). The techne, as Critchley argues, comes to be repressed in philosophy and it resurfaces only following Heidegger - and this is where Jacques Derrida, in his insistence on the technicity of memory takes his lead from in his analysis of the Freudian inspired concept of the archive.

Derrida’s analysis of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas in The Archive Fever is transformative in many ways: on the one hand, it starts out from the subjective realm and enlarges on the issue of memory and the preservation of memory towards a collectively useful and feasible model. On the other, it uses a logic and terminology that is reminiscent of how contemporary new media theory (especially following the work of Lev Manovich) conceptualizes issues related to how digital composition and data retrieval (two of the major roles of the archive) works in a contemporary, interface-driven media landscape.

As is usual with a deconstructive reading, Derrida sets off by identifying the hidden traces in the etymology of the word archive: commencement and commandment, which brings him to claim that the archive is essentially based on a “nomological principle” where the two segments are coordinated (Derrida 1995, 9). It then involves a place, a special spatial setting, and a topology that governs this special intersection of law and privilege (10): an institution which harbors selected documents and saves them for posterity by exerting its own logic in the method of preservation. At this point, Derrida’s language seems to refer to the material, physically established archive, that houses real documents, but it might not be too difficult to dream of an electronic archive whose spatial setting designates a non-place - a virtual entity served by redundant clusters of hardware on the technical side that can, perhaps, go beyond the strict nomological principle and open its boundaries to some extent. This would mean the commencement of a new commandment which might be seen as the implementation of the algorithmic turn, i.e., the idea that contemporary representations of virtually any kind are prone to algorithmic manipulation as part of the new media scene of production and consumption (Uricchio 2011, 25). For instance, Zsófia Anna Tóth points out how even Jane Austen and her works turn into digitalized entities in our times through technological recycling, and by being reloaded and recoded, how Austen and her works become reinterpreted and rethought as digital creations in the new media age (Tóth 2011, 300-308). Also, new databases or digital archives may become democratic tools for interrogating cultural ‘dogmas,’ canonized or marginalized paradigms, which can easily result in renegotiating existing cultural paradigms (Cristian and Dragon 2005).

This train of thought gets its commencement from Derrida’s relegating archival storage to the outside, to the external substrate (Derrida 1995, 12), which commands him to differentiate between two versions of memory as a consequence: mnēmē or anamnēzis, and hypomnēma (14). It is this latter, the hypomnēma that is connected to the logic of the arkhé, which tells us that the very memory of the archive should be foreclosed, i.e., should be external to it. “The archive is hypomnesic” (14):

Because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory. (14)

Derrida here still thinks of the archive as an institution, a physical establishment, but some passages later, referring to his reading of Sigmund Freud’s psychic archive and problematizing the machinery of archiving logic he ponders the question: “Do these new archival machines change anything?” (15). His answer is very close to the common trait in the potential answers one could come up with in terms of digital technology today, as it is agreed that “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future” (17). Its ultimate consequence is that the archive “produces as much as it records the event” (17). What it means is that the techne puts its constraints on the episteme it wishes to conserve, which is further emphasized by Derrida in his insistence on including his computer and its role in the creation of his text within the very text he is writing (archiving in a way), claiming that the technical potentials and boundaries do have a well-documented effect in and on the document that eventually becomes an archive of his thoughts.

While it is certainly strange to have specific computer references in a philosophical reading of psychoanalytical thought, it is the act of reinscription of the technological into our discourse on cultural memory. The fact that this memory is redefined in terms of “a certain hypomnesic and prosthetic experience of the technical substrate” (22) is thus a very clear reference to the concept and working mechanism of the digital and dynamic model of the archive. This approach fits Derrida’s insistence on the role of the archive: rather than being “a thing of the past,” it “should call into question the coming of the future” (26). Because of the technicality, or the command of the techne, archival processes need to work for the future (for compatibility and for accessibility, among other aspects) instead of modelling themselves on old paradigms (when the episteme foreclosed issues of the techne even in this regard). Furthermore, the future is not merely an aim, a trajectory shaped by the techne, but the realm into which the working of the archive is deferred: the question of archiving and that of the archive per se “is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know in the times to come” (27).

While some assumptions, especially the deferment to the future, seem highly figurative in discursive terms, there is a very strong technical subtext to Derrida’s conceptualization here. Contemporary archiving is most concerned about the format of the digital documents that need to be preserved: there are competing formats supported by different software (and companies, of course) that promise maximal compatibility for future retrieval technologies, yet we do not know which of these will eventually prove to be consistent enough and widely supported (not only by archivists, archiving policies, but by the user community all around the world) to be “future proof.” If we widen the scope of the archive beyond written documents (which we obviously should), it is not even evident that we shall have to work with document types that are prevalent formats today: new medial representation forms, technical frames, modes of knowledge transfer, etc. could pop up any day and conquer communication methods – the archive should - at least conceptually and in basic technical terms - be ready for all kinds of changes to operate precisely like an archive as Derrida describes it.

I tried to stress the technical relevance of Derrida’s reading of the archive here, but this side may not be so apparent if we read some of the criticism on his discussion. Wolfgang Ernst, for instance, argues that what the philosophical tradition (meaning mainly the continental, French tradition, with Michel Foucault and Derrida taking lead) does to the issue of the archive is nothing but relegating it to the realm of empty metaphors, thus inflating the concept (Ernst 2008, 107). As opposed to what the “metaphorists” say, Ernst proposes an “elaboration of theoretical ideas in digital humanities in medium-specific ways” (Parikka in Ernst 2013, 2), i.e., advocates an approach that is informed by specific material, institutional, political, and medial tenets. It is from this position he criticizes Derrida and Foucault: the former “virtualizes” the concept of the archive, while the latter seems to forget about the complexity of media technology and infrastructure altogether (Ernst 2008, 113). Moreover, while acknowledging that today the archive is driven by a first and foremost “cybernetic” logic (111), he refuses to theorize or comment upon the shift of paradigm in terms of the analogue to digital transition, talking about the system of the archive defined as an apparatus that has both ideological and material dimensions (114).

The cybernetic logic of the archive is located in the material foundations of the institution, as it is based on the connection of memory and storage as hardware spaces. To follow this argument, one needs to stick to the strictly medial sense of the archive: the different documents and formats retain their characteristics in an analogue model of categorized, catalogued, “shelved” organization structure in which being archived means presence prolonged. While he does not dismiss the growing significance of the internet and its archival potentials, he nonetheless argues that the emphasis on this technology, which is a “transarchival” approach, “dissimulates the ongoing existence of material memory agencies, both hardware and institutions, which still govern the power of deciding what can be stored legally and technically” (Ernst 2013, 97).

Ernst’s approach, rooted in media technology, has not put the metaphoric rhetoric off the point, however: Derrida’s insistence on the hypomnemic nature of the archive is an unambiguous reference to the techne. What Ernst’s reading refuses, but Derrida’s thought embraces is precisely what George P. Landow noticed in the development of metaphorical rhetorics in literary theory and philosophy simultaneously with discourses on computation:

When designers of computer software examine the pages of Glas and Of Grammatology, they encounter a digitalized, hypertextual Derrida; and when literary theorists examine Literary Machines, they encounter a deconstructionist or poststructuralist Nelson. These shocks of recognition can occur because over the past several decades literary theory and computer hypertext, apparently unconnected areas of inquiry, have increasingly converged. Statements by theorists concerned with literature, like those by theorists concerned with computing, show a remarkable convergence. (Landow 2006, 1)

What Landow describes here is applicable for the internet as well, not only computer software; after all, the internet is run by software of many kinds. This approach resonates with the idea of transcoding, as defined by Lev Manovich: the most important principle out of those five that together characterize what a new media object is as opposed to an old, analogue media object (Manovich 2001, 45-46). Transcoding does not refer to the digitalization process of analogue formats and objects: it rather describes the dialogic interaction of what Manovich calls the “cultural layer” and the “computer layer” (46). This ongoing interaction between realms of cultural objects along with their interpretative framework and their computational metadata as used by the computer forms the basis for the shift from medial representation to the logic of the interface (277). The interface is no longer connected to any specific medium: it is a new, flexible, digital delivery format that is capable of organizing and managing previously separate media formats and the users’ interaction with them.

I think that with the current emphasis on the interface and on the practice of transcoding as cultural and digital exchange, we need to free the idea of the archive from its techno-determinist anchorage - the more so as the archive is not for the past but for the future, and it is still unclear what technological model is going to be the most proper and suitable solution to storage and retrieval in ten or fifty years. In other words, while today I claim that it is the techne that determines our episteme and the discourses surrounding the issue of the archive, it would clearly be a mistake to take the techne of our era for granted when thinking about new ways of archival epistemes of the future.

Erasure as formation of the archive: The right to be forgotten

To talk about the archive in a contemporary, digital cultural setting, we need to rethink it in a manner that reshapes the conceptual basis modelled on the traditional library/catalogue setting. If we accept the proposition that the Google is far from being the internet, but it might be technically (and culturally) seen as an operating, forming, dynamic archive, we should also assess the ethical-political dimension of its working mechanism. While probably the best-known archiving projects are proper archivist jobs at Google - the Google Books scanning project or the beautifully executed Google Art gallery -, perhaps the truly archivist dimension of the company is lesser discussed in these terms. For what Google is doing as a primary operation, i.e., its practice of indexing websites and different formats of content via its bots is a meticulous, never-ending archiving project per se. However, it should be clear that what Google sees of the entire internet is but one percent of what is thought to comprise its totality.

Yet, most of the legislative procedures concerning human rights, rights to privacy, and of course, copyrights cases lead to the deletion of certain metadata and indices from the vast collection that Google works on. This cumulated to the ruling of the European Court on 13 May, 2014, which coined the term “The Right to Be Forgotten” (C-131/12), arguing that “individuals have the right - under certain conditions - to ask search engines to remove links with personal information about them. This applies where information is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive for the purposes of the data processing” (“Factsheet on the ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ ruling”).

In 2010 a Spanish citizen lodged a complaint against a Spanish newspaper with the national Data Protection Agency and against Google Spain and Google Inc. The citizen complained that an auction notice of his repossessed home on Google’s search results infringed his privacy rights because the proceedings concerning him had been fully resolved for a number of years and hence the reference to these was entirely irrelevant. He requested, first, that the newspaper be required either to remove or alter the pages in question so that the personal data relating to him no longer appeared; and second, that Google Spain or Google Inc. be required to remove the personal data relating to him, so that it no longer appeared in the search results. (“Factsheet on the ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ ruling”)

Commenting on the decision, Viviane Reding welcomed the urge to tighten privacy and data protection legislation - a view that raises more questions than settling some. This case puts forward questions about the relation of data, or content, and archiving processes: the court decision makes us uncertain about the legitimacy of connecting archived data to the particular subject, the authorship of records and the rights and mandates it forges, and finally the archivist project, the process of archiving itself. Whose property is the archive - and what kind of an archive is in question at all?

Database + algorithm = archive

While it is clear that the EU decision concerns the World Wide Web, it is important to emphasize that it goes beyond that layer of the internet and directly questions the position of the archive - not merely from an information technological aspect, but in terms of cultural memory, history, and the subject. Those in favour of the decision hail the “right to be forgotten,” claiming the victory of individual sovereignty. However, what this case brings to the forefront is not a spontaneous gesture of forgetting, but a forceful attempt at repressing something embarrassing or simply outdated record concerning an individual. Is it not a replay of the infamous case of Paul de Man, whose personal archive spat out the forgotten traces of a young pro-Nazi commenter (see Ernst 2008, 150-154)? Seen in this light, would de Man be right to ask Google to “forget” his past to mask his youth? And once digital technology is involved: is there a possibility to implement the right to be forgotten the way EU legislation envisages it? In other words, can digital mnemic traces, algorithmic mnemotechnics deleted or altered in a way that the record in question leaves no trace?

The answer to that should be an absolute no. No in terms of the philosophical aspect, and no in terms of the technological side. The digital archive, in this context, is nothing else but an indexed database that serves as a pool of data from which algorithms carry pieces of information or records to the site of the human-computer interface (in the above case, to the search result page of a Google query). It means that the data (or collection of records), the search algorithms, and the interface that appears for the user are different levels of the archival constellation, where these technically separate levels can be programmed differently and behave according to different logics. This is the trick of the archive in the age of the internet: while an EU Court decision can make Google erase the hyperlinks pointing at the unwanted content, it obviously does not mean that the references should completely disappear from either the database or the algorithms at work. On the contrary: the hyperlinks do not show up on Google’s interface precisely because the algorithm is taught to foreclose it - in other words, there needs to be a record kept of the specific content or data, and the order to evade its listing.

This is the logic of the trace in Derridean thinking: “[t]he word ‘trace’ is a metaphor for the effect of the opposite concept, which is no longer present but has left its mark on the concept we are now considering” (Balkin 1998a). This is how deconstructive logic proceeds, as it untangles the repressed, forgotten, or erased concepts in another (usually opposite) one, and lays their codependence bare to investigate (Derrida 1976, 46-47). The lack (i.e., the apparent non-presence, the spectral quality) of the missing link the record presents in the database of the archive is thus more emphatically remembered than ever before: the algorithm needs to identify its trace in order to effectively put it under erasure (sous rature).

The enforcement of cases based on the right to be forgotten are examples of what in Derridean parlance should be thought of l’avenir: the shadowy, phantomatic, blurred figure or image of the Other intervenes in unexpected places and domains to unthinkable ends. Especially so if one is to assess the rationale behind the false pretense of “being forgotten”: while in legislative terms the well-founded request would mean that fellow netizens would not be able to locate data that the plaintiff would not want them to see, in practice it means that a shell is thought to protect the information or data posted on the net, and it is calculated to be enough to erase the very hypertextual trace of (in effect, the link to) the contested content to protect an individual’s right to privacy. However, this only means that the act of erasing, or in Derridean terms to put under erasure (sous rature) is a trace born, a mnemic signpost right at the center of what should be foreclosed from the system. As is clear in Derrida (and in the working mechanism of digital computing), the tricky thing with terms under erasure is that they do not simply disappear or get out of the system. Rather, they signify the position of “inadequate yet necessary” (Sarup 1999, 33) status.

One of the tenets of legal interpretation and argumentation for the right to be forgotten is apparently that Google is the one to create and to manage data that might be prone to be erased from the list of searches; even if the text of the Court decision is not overtly specific in this regard, as it designates search engines (in the plural) to be “controllers” of personal data (Suhajda 2014). While other search engines are clearly left alone to produce search results where links to the contested contents appear, it is also problematic to control data which is not in one’s possession: it should be evident from the working mechanism of Google that they do not control or manage content on the different websites where they appear - they only harvest metadata and map the content that is produced and served elsewhere. Hence the primary slippage of the legal claim in terms of technicalities: while some legal professionals (like Zoltán Ormós in Hungary, see: Suhajda 2014) proclaim that if something cannot be found with the help of a Google search, it certainly does not exist, reality seems to know otherwise. Firstly, it is only the accessible part of World Wide Web that the search engine can visit and map, which is a shockingly small portion of all the sites, documents and other objects present on the internet; secondly, just because one search engine does not map a site on the net, another one still can.

It is a fundamentally flawed idea that Google equals the Other in the Lacanian sense. It is rather Google’s Other, the construed, spectral dimension or image of the slippery and volatile totality of the internet that should be addressed - a legal impossibility of course, though the only true ethical option. It is the Other’s gaze that is responsible for the presence of objects on the internet: to turn the legal argumentation inside out one might claim that once something is put on the net (any corner of the net, not necessarily the widely used protocol of the World Wide Web), even Google might be able to “see” it - and there is no way that object (document, image or any content, for that matter) can be erased. It is evident that technically speaking if a content disappears, the links (the mnemonic, or rather hypomnemic traces) will remember it for us - and vice versa, if the links are removed, the object will turn into a digital memorabile of itself. In other words, it is not up to Google (or any other search engine) if a content is available or not on the internet.

But what is this vast digital network that can be thought of as the Other of Google? None other than the momentary sum of computers connected in decentralized network organized by nodal points that provide continuous information flow among the peers of the system. It escapes categorization or finality - it is changing by the milliseconds, deferring its completion endlessly, playing on the potentials of the practice of Derridean différance in a technological context. It is precisely in this shoreless pool that forms the rumbling underside of the dynamic, digital archive (or rather, potentially, archives, in the plural). Ever since the paradigm of Web 2.0, it should be clear that it is on this amoeba-like, ever-changing, ever-growing document space that means the future of the archives for the new generations. This virtual space that is governed and managed by digital interfaces is by no means a unified system but a dialogic space of different segments of culture connected and nurtured by hypermedial networks in real time (rather than retrograde as is characteristic of traditional, curated archives). This type of dynamism cannot be regulated: it is technically not possible - only some of its nodes and their corresponding interfaces might be muted or controlled.

The González vs Google case raises further questions, as well. To finish the legal case study, one has to look at the curiously vague and non-liberating, essentially self-contradictory subclauses of the ruling of the EU Court. While González asked the Court to make all media completely erase the data in question, the deletion part concerns only Google’s search algorithm: nor the original publisher of González’s story, La Vanguardia, the printed newspaper, neither its online edition was made to perform the erasing. The court’s claim was that the newspaper and its online version had all the right to publish the problematic content, so there is no legal way of forcing them to withdraw it - but Google has no right whatsoever to direct searches on González to that rightfully communicated content. In other words, the archivist of the data should deny the existence of the very data, while the publisher of the same data can continue to serve that information for anyone interested (searching for it in alternative search engines).

The moral of this legal intervention is perhaps that one may think of the archival database in terms of being the vessel of our episteme, or that Google is par excellence the interface for all the cultural products that enter the digital realm as a result of participatory culture. However, this approach neglects the technicity of the underlying network, as it is precisely this techne that, at the present, gives a framework for that episteme - and not vice versa. For that matter, any legal intervention in terms of data protection and the archive should take its start from this pretext. And, finally, apart from the ethical, political, economic, and legal dimensions of the above case, one may ponder the question what the right to be forgotten means in terms of an ever-growing archive.

Crowdsourcing the archive: Archive-on-demand

As opposed to the traditional concept of the archive, rooted in the paradigm of the physical library, new media technologies have brought about a new generation of systematic memory building possibilities. While Word Wide Web interfaces to immense object databases like Europeana.eu (trying to collect a vaguely defined European cultural heritage), or in Hungary, Manda (Hungarian Digital Archives, the proposed role of which is to make Hungarian cultural heritage freely accessible for everyone - a claim left unfulfilled), or university and scholarly repositories continue to build on the tradition of strict and meticulous categorization and shelving policies that they hope to transfer to the digital realm, these systems and policies essentially contradict the logic of memory in digital computing. The library paradigm is closed, ideologically constrained, centralized and hierarchically structured. The new media paradigm is open, without constraints (as it is dynamic), decentralized and - because of the hypertextual logic of linking - flat in structure.

If the library is the place and logic of the archive, it can also be regarded as the space of the canon. However, with the advent of digital archiving technologies, traditional libraries cannot keep the pace with the ongoing reformations of the various canons - be it literary or scientific. Curiously, it is a step beyond Google’s quasi-archivist efforts that might be seen as the future for the archive in general and in particular. In general, as the completely new model of collecting and preserving cultural knowledge takes its cue from that intersection of theory and digital computing Landow noticed earlier; in particular, as the digital, algorithmic logic behind the platform creates a futuristic, yet contemporary model deriving from a special mix of hypertextual logic and open access policies. The technology in question is, of course, the torrent, a type of P2P file sharing solution.

Thought to be the facilitator of copyright infringement and all the evil that there is on the internet, torrent is one of the most efficient sharing and storing technology. It utilizes the file sharing users’ connections and creates a loose, participatory subnetwork of digital objects that can be shared faster than any other technology at the present could do. It also is capable of acting like an archive proper: from its start up to 2012, Library.nu in fact served as the academic archive and library for a majority of Central-Eastern European scholars, when university libraries drastically cut their subscriptions to and acquirings of scholarly journals and monographs in the region. The lack or current academic literature in the libraries soon gave way to an abundance of the torrent server’s offering: it actually began to transform the academic canon for some disciplines. Although Library.nu was taken down in 2012, its legacy (and technology) was taken on by others, and by now various incarnations serve a million academic books, a million literary works, and almost ten million academic studies and articles (Bodó 2014).

The way Balázs Bodó, internet copyright researcher traces the development of not only the technology but the activists behind these new, pirate-type archives, it seems we get a new model for the digital dynamic archive: a crowdsourced archive, without (virtual or material) walls, working on demand, i.e., scanning and making those pieces of academic literature available for sharing which most users wish to read. Also, volunteers may contribute and enrich the database so that potentially all fields of academic research get the latest scholarly input. The system at first looks as if it were a somewhat structured anarchy or a mass of lazily categorized collection of traces of cultural objects, yet the technology behind is clearly one that is reminiscent of the dream of hypertext and docuverse put forth by Ted Nelson in the 1960s, or that of the Derridean rèseau system of nodes, traces, and différances. As Landow notes on Derrida’s vision of a quasi hypertextual network, it is described by the terms “link (liasons), web (toile), network (rèseau), and interwoven (s’y tissent)” (Landow 2006, 53; emphasis in the original): the terms get their most perfect technological realizations in terms of the torrent logic.

The formation of a new type of canon through the use and flourishing of the new archive-on-demand is imminent: most of the students in Hungary working with academic sources in English use the latest releases in their disciplines to the amazement of supervisors (especially those who still try to convince their librarians to acquire at least one of the myriads of important new releases for which the library has less and less financial backing). As students - members of the new, digital native generation - turn toward this new type of archive not only because of its price advantage (it is for free) but primarily because of its availability and ease of use, academic discourse starts to be shaped by the new and rumbling, developing, non-fixated canon of the dynamic digital archive.

Conclusion

The archive-on-demand, the most perfect rendition of dynamic digital archives ever envisioned by philosophers and new media theorists is on its way to become the new cultural software (Balkin, 1998b, 5) for our societies in preserving and, perhaps even more importantly, sharing cultural heritage. Based on principles in the intersection of Derridean philosophy, new media theory, and computer science, this new format of the cultural software comes with a new ideology, a new know-how, and an ultimately new model that defies almost all elements of traditional document archives and the model of the library. Whether it is Google-type of metadata harvesting or Library.nu’s (and its heirs’) logic of crowdsourcing and on demand serving, the new archive is no longer just a dream. It is here to shape our present to prepare us for the future - but first we need to unthink the archive to build the archive for the future and not for an unfortunate l’avenir.

This issue gets more pressing by the day with the appearance (and disappearance) of new forms of cultural production that defy the old systems of archival practice and require more flexible, dynamic registration in cultural memory - for it is not the content and its structural pattern that should be adjusted to the requirements of an archival framework in the digital era, but vice versa, the archive should be dynamic enough to be able to operate in the future without disruption. Today’s techne is in formation and is effectively shaping future document formats. Now it is the turn of our archival episteme to take the step toward the new digital paradigm and embrace its logic, as it is only in the intersection of these two dimensions that our archive for the future could be secured.

Works Cited

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Balkin, Jack M. 1998b. Cultural Software. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Bodó, Balázs. 2014. “Kalózok mentik meg az irodalmat.” Könyves blog, November 11. Available: http://konyves.blog.hu/2014/11/11/ kalozok_mentik_meg_az_irodalmat. Access: February 27, 2015.

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. Available: http://primus.arts.u-szeged.hu/ american/americana/volIno1/crmdz.htm. Access: May 14, 2021.

Critchley, Simon. 2009. Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought. London: Verso.

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Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. (Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Ernst, Wolfgang. 2008. Archívumok morajlása: Rend a rendetlenségből. [Das Rumoren der Archive. Ordnung und Unordnung] (Trans. Tamás Lénárt). Budapest: Kijárat Kiadó.

Ernst, Wolfgang. 2013. Digital Memory and the Archive. (Ed. by Jussi Parikka). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

“Factsheet on the ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Ruling” (C-131/12). 2014. European Commission. Available: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets/factsheet_data_protection_en.pdf. Access: February 27, 2015.

Landow, George P. 2006. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in the Era of Globalization. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Ropolyi, László. 2014. “Digitális írásbeliségek“. Korunk 25: 10, 8-14.

Sarup, Madan. 1993. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press

Suhajda, Zoltán. 2014. “Felejtésre kényszerül a Google.” Metropol, May 22. Available: http://www.metropol.hu/cikk/1187475-felejtesre-kenyszerul-a-google. Accessed: February 27, 2015.

Tóth, Zsófia Anna. 2011. “Jane Austen Reloaded.” In Földváry, Kinga, Zsolt Almási and Veronica Schandl (eds). HUSSE 10-LitCult, Proceedings of the HUSSE 10 Conference, Literature & Culture Volume. Debrecen: Hungarian Society for the Study of English, 302-310. Available: http://mek.oszk.hu/10100/10171/10171.pdf. Access: May 14, 2021.

Uricchio, William. 2011. “The Algorithmic Turn: Photosynth, Augmented Reality and the Changing Implications of the Image.” Visual Studies 26: 1.,  25-35.

REMEMBERING HENRY JAMES: PARIS, PERSPECTIVE AND PANIC IN A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

2016 marked the centenary of Henry James’s death, so the James industry was buzzing with publications of and about the Master’s work that culminated in a new edition of his autobiographies. James wrote two and a half volumes of autobiography in the four years before his death in 1916. The reception of the autobiographies normally views the volumes as texts which fit organically into James’s work, being part of James’s late nonfiction production that carries on the aesthetic logic of his late novels. However, critics differ on is what this aesthetic logic might be like. The differences of critical opinion are connected to distinguishable trails of critical traditions. There are at least four such trails: Freudian, Poststructuralist decentering, philosophically oriented, and gender studies based. The aim of this paper is to investigate the issue of homosexual panic at the intersection of two of these methods: by combining formal and gender studies concerns, I wish to review how the formal issue of Jamesian perspective is linked to the process of gendering and rejecting a homosexual subject position in A Small Boy. First, the idea of scenic representation is presented as the core element of a Jamesian artistic sensitivity. Second, I review processes of gender identifications that happen in given scenes of the life story. I argue that one central scene, that of the hallucinative dream in the Louvre at the end of the narrative, can be interpreted not as one about the artist’s renunciation of the world but as one about a typical nineteenth-century male homosexual panic, similar to homosexual panic in “The Beast in the Jungle.” [6]

Keywords: Henry James, Paris, autobiography, biography, scenic perspective, affect, homosexual panic, A Small Boy and Others, “The Beast in the Jungle”

Proema

2016 marked the centennial of Henry James’s death and it came with an outpouring of James-related publications reflecting on his work and his memory. Just to indicate some: Cambridge University Press are producing new editions of James’s texts, in 2016 James’s Complete Writings on Art and Drama was published, edited by Peter Collister. The parallel venture by the Library of America published James’s Autobiographies, edited by Philip Horne. Oxford University Press published Oliver Herford’s Henry James’s Style of Retrospect on James’s late nonfiction. Michael Anesko edited Travels with Henry James for the occasion. Simultaneously, a string of articles offered tribute to the Master and his memory including Louis Menand and Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, Colm Tóibín in The Guardian, Leo Robson in the New Statesman, a Podcast in the TLS, again just to mention a few. From the perspective of Jamesian autobiography and biography this means a new wave of interest in portraying the Master. At a moment in criticism when the methods of writing biography are seriously under debate, not to mention the lack of belief in facts, these articles provide overviews of James’s legacy in combination with insights into his critical reception.

In David McWhirter’s Henry James in Context Sheila Teahan seems surprised to find herself writing about James autobiographies and biographies in 2010. Her (our) poststructuralist schooling would defy a belief in facts, and indeed she highlights that James himself finished A Small Boy and Others with the word “gap” (Teahan 2010, 62) as part of the modernist novelist’s concern with the impossibility of autobiography (Maunsell 2018, 3). Then she criticizes early biographers who relied heavily on the autobiographies and “assumed them to be history” (Teahan 2010, 63) and also those who took it 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 example for Teahan, 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). 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 other narratives may possibly lie buried among the notes in the archives.

In 2016, the Library of America published James’s Autobiographies in Philip 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 reminiscences (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). Similarly, Leo Robson used the new edition to reconsider James’s relation to the “real,” a central concept of his artistic vision. This concept appears much more problematic for James’s modernist mind than many would suppose (Robson 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 in the 1990s provided a framework of reading that transformed James from the distant master into a contemporary spirit (Tóibín 2016).

The essay below is an attempt to use the notion of homosexual panic by Sedgwick for the analysis of a key scene in James’s A Small Boy and Others, a formative dream about the Louvre and Paris as part of the narrator’s search for self-definition.

Introduction

Henry James wrote two and a half volumes of autobiography in the four years before his death in 1916. [7] This was the time when he could complete no new novels any more, when he had finished his American travelogue The American Scene and had composed the Prefaces to the New York edition of his work. All was completed and not selling well, and the lack of popular interest threw James into bulges of depression. As a way to resist the ebb of creativity, critical opinion says, the autobiographies of 1913-1616 tell the story or emergence of the artist as a young man. In particular, the first volume, A Small Boy and Others represents how the perspective of the budding artist came into being in the 1850s.

The reception of the autobiographies normally views the volumes as texts which fit organically into James’s work, being part of James’s late nonfiction production that carries on the aesthetic logic of his late novels. What critics differ on is what this aesthetic logic might be like. The differences of critical opinion are connected to distinguishable trails of critical traditions: to my mind, there are at least four such trails.

First, the most populous route is the Freudian psychoanalytic direction set by Leon Edel with various later variations. Edel’s name is tied to James studies, his lifelong work as a critic and biographer of James defined and monopolized James studies for decades. Edel’s popular psycho-biographies of James tell the story of the author who renounced life for art, the life of the personal relations for the life of the mind. In this overarching interpretation art stands for a Jamesian method of composition that is closely linked to James’s experiments in writing drama and producing dramatic performances in and around 1895 (Edel 1978 and Kovács 2007). For Edel the biographer James’s own autobiographies illustrate the emergence of the Jamesian interest in consciousness and also represent his own life in ways his novels represent his characters: through omissions and silences. Carol Holly expands on Edel’s biographical method when she investigates how family scheme structures relations among members of the extended James family (Buchholtz 2014, 90). Until the 1990s, the autobiographies did not interest literary scholars unless as part of the Jamesian major phase and as an area where the application of techniques can be demonstrated. From this angle, James the author is usually presented as a Jamesian hero “who utilizes newly gained insight into some ethically meaningful action” (Hoffa 1979, 289).

The second route is constituted by poststructuralist reinterpretations of unifying readings of Jamesian procedures through focusing on the ambiguities of rhetorical and hermeneutic processes in James. Paul John Eakin problematizes the alleged referential function of autobiography and goes on to show how this is manifest in James’s account of the emergence of his creative faculty (Eakin 1988, 680). Collin Meissner shows how what he calls the Jamesian negative hermeneutics is present in the Autobiographies. For Meissner, negative hermeneutics in James “comes down to an under-standing of his conception of experience as a fundamentally negative process through which one’s subjectivity is constantly being breached and reconstructed anew” (Meissner 1999, 187), and he claims there is a parallel between James’s fictional consciousness and his autobiographical one (Meissner 1999, 199).

Miroslawa Buchholtz investigates the terms of an auto/biographical p/act between James and his readers in the three texts. She refabricates Lejeune’s idea of the autobiographical contract for the case of James with the guidance of Paul de Man. Lejeune argues that autobiographies are referential texts. What constitutes and justifies autobiography is an autobiographical pact between author and reader that the information provided by the autobiography is to be verified by the reader. De Man draws on this position to explain that autobiography demonstrates the impossibility of creating a totalizing self-image through “all textual systems made up of topological substitutions,” therefore autobiography and biography are difficult to distinguish. To the idea of the contract he adds that autobiography is not only referential but is also contractual, grounded in speech act. Buchholtz maintains that biography and autobiography are no longer regarded as genres that can be defined but as a discourse of identity and representation, hence the first slash, auto/biography, in her central term (Buchholtz 2014, 21). She also accepts that what constitutes and justifies auto/biography is an autobiographical pact between author and reader about the reader’s role to verify the autographical value of a text. The reader, she says however, may not be aware of the writer’s auto/biographical act inscribed in the writing, so she calls the pact the ‘p/act’ with a slash, so that critical readers keep in mind the performative element of the process of writing (16). From this perspective, James’s auto/biographical texts become identity narratives in which the margin between Henry’s and William’s identities become blurred and the exegete is to map.

In a similar vein, Tamara Follini integrates a formally oriented reading of James with a poststructuralist interest in the workings of the past when she reads James’s late texts dealing with the past (including the autobiographies). She claims that James’s two roles around which many of his self-definitions cluster, the historian and the dramatist are rarely oppositional (Follini 2000, 110). She reads “James’s conception of history as an entity compiled of multiple viewpoints, and of an individual’s personal history as incorporating versions of experience, each of which attempts to express the meanings latent in any given occurrence (Follini 2000, 121). In the autobiographies she analyzes a series of self-defining scenes in which various combinations of elements (solitude, enclosure, sickness, far, aggression) construct and reconstruct personal history (Cristian 2006). These, similarly to other auto/biographies or self-writings of the time, tend to reflect traditional patriarchal world order and convey heteronormative male-centric perspectives that make use of the past to communicate in the present (Annus 2005, 16-17). One can add. however, that the fissures within such a state of mind are visible in the attitude of such heteronormative male thinkers of the early-nineteenth century as Thomas Jefferson, who argued for the need to break with the past among generations of Americans, including most conspicuously, Native Americans – in the spirit of modernization (Vajda 2019).

Thirdly, there is a philosophically oriented way to approach the autobiographies that emphasizes the Pragmatist background to James’s venture. Richard Poirier’s articles on James remind readers of the link to William’s thinking that escapes the attention of Tanner when he focuses on “style” in Jamesian nonfiction (Poirier 1995) and also eludes Edel when he misreads James’s tropes and reduces biographical study to family calendar (Poirier 1963, 599) instead of paying attention to “historical and essentially ideological matters” (Poirier 1963, 598). Poirier maintains that in his memoirs James performs a posthumous bow to his brother William about being in essential philosophical agreement with him. Henry’s sensous education is to be compared to William’s idea of ‘troping,’ “the ‘turning’ of words from already established meanings so that they include additional and more flexible ones” (Poirier 2002). Free characters in James are able to perform this while fixed ones are not, their dramatic conflict structures the plots. The fictitious hero of the autobiographies learns this method that despite the technical term precludes premeditated procedures (ibid.). Ross Posnock takes up this line of thought when he compares the affinities between the two brothers’ thinking. He investigates their thinking as versions of what he names the ‘politics of nonidentity,’ i. e. the disruption of the compulsion to fix identity, to reveal their ambiguous relationship to modernity (Posnock 1991, 16 and 170).

Fourthly, the gender studies reassessment of technologies of gender at work in James’s literary production debate the easy identifications implied in readings by Edel and co. In her overview on Jamesian auto/biographies, Miroslawa Buchholtz contends that there are two distinctly different ways to treat James’s homoeroticism in life writing about James. Biographers like Kaplan and Novick “focus on suppressed homosexual desire as the source of constant anxiety” (Buchholtz 2014, 63) as a way to take issue with Edel’s representation of a possible Jamesian homoeroticism. In contrast, literary scholars like Eric Haralson, Wendy Graham, and Leland Person view the issue “in the larger context of social pressure,” (ibid.) discuss contemporary historical contexts of the representation of gender and sexuality in James, and survey the normative script of masculinity that James defied by remaining a bachelor artist.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the issue of homosexual panic at the intersection of two methods outlined above. Similarly to Follini’s combination of formal and poststructuralist concerns in the autobiographies, I wish to review how the formal issue of Jamesian perspective is linked to the process of gendering and rejecting a homosexual subject position in A Small Boy. On the one hand, by Jamesian perspective I mean the specific process of the “scenic perspective” that is described in the text as the result of the (aesthetically) sensous education process the James brothers undergo in their early years. The theme of the scenic perspective is introduced as the heart of the young James’s artistic education. The educational process is directed to the emergence and extension of a sensibility that is basically visual. The idea of scenic representation is presented here as the core element of a Jamesian artistic sensitivity. The scenic perspective also functions as a method of representation in the text because the story of the young artist evolves through a string of mental pictures elaborated on. More specifically, there is a list of self-defining scenes all critical accounts enumerate: two illnesses and a hallucinative dream. On the other hand, by gendering I mean the processes of gender identifications that happen in given scenes of the life story. I argue that one central scene, that of the hallucinative dream in the Louvre at the end of the narrative, can be interpreted not as one about the artist’s renunciation of the world but as one about a typical 19th century male homosexual panic. If one reads Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s analysis of homosexual panic in “The Beast in the Jungle” along with A Small Boy, the parallels become marked.

In order to substantiate this reading, the first part of the paper surveys the idea of artistic education put forward in the text. The second part describes the theme of scenic perspective represented in the account, while the third analyzes the actual use of the scenic perspective in the hallucination scene that, I argue, is represented as a case of nineteenth century male homosexual panic.

1. James’s  sensous education

James‘s three autobiographies narrate the story of a Jamesian sensibility which functions as the source of Jamesian creativity. The Small Boy and Others recounts the story of how the James brothers, William and Henry were educated until Henry’s twelfth year.

Educational institutions play an insignificant role in the brothers’ education of sensibility. Planned instruction, as James puts it, confronts them rarely. As the James family spent long stretches of time in Europe that interrupted the flow of their New York residence, about a score of educational institutions and even some remarkable pedagogues are mentioned in the volume. These commentaries refer to the characters of the teachers and the atmosphere of the schools, not to what was taught in them, because what was taught in the institutions had no effect on the brothers. Instead, museums, theaters, and family gatherings are pointed out as the locations where “important things” were indeed learnt.

It is the emergence of a general sensibility that is shown to be important, a sensibility that is also named variously as ‘style’ and ‘taste’ later on. At the outset, the education is only of sensibility in general: a quickened sensibility (James 2001, 149)[8] that comes from walking, dawdling and watching, from activities seemingly useless for the outsider.

A spectacular site of the education of this sensibility is the Museum of the Louvre. Here the vast collection of pictures makes the young spectators aware of a mysterious connection among pictures, that pictures have a bewildering and overwhelming effect on the spectator. “We were not yet aware of style, though on the way to become so, but were aware of mystery, which indeed was one of its forms” (180), James comments. He adds: “in those beginnings I felt myself most happily cross the bridge over to style constituted by the wondrous Gallerie d’Apollon “ (180) “a tunnel trough which …. I inhaled little by little, … a general sense of glory. The glory meant ever so many things at once, not only beauty and art and supreme design, but history and fame and power, the world in fine raised to the richest and noblest expression … the galerie became for years what I can only term a splendid scene of things” (181). The Louvre is visited regularly, its effect “educative, formative, fertilizing, in a degree which no other ‘intellectual experience’ our youth was to know could pretend, as a comprehensive, conductive thing, to rival” (182). Summing up the issue of their education, the James brothers agree that “[W]e never picked up an education” but a social and historical sensibility instead (183). Henry James labels the kind of knowledge they did acquire as a derivative kind of intensity (198), not the one characteristic of the time of speaking, to which he refers to as an immediate kind of intensity.

2. The scenic perspective of space

The education of the Jamesian sensibility takes on a visual form. One may even call the emergence of this sensibility the emergence of a visual sensibility. The narrator offers mental pictures of persons and situations represented and he is commenting on these pictures in the storytelling. One example of this mental picture phenomenon is the case of the daguerreotype of Henry James and his father Henry James, Sr. (which usually appears on the cover of A Small Boy when it comes as a separate volume). Henry Jr. remembers going to the salon of the photographer with his father, also the jacket he wore, the room, the photographer. He adds that his jacket was also commented on by a visitor, Thackeray, in his father’s library. Thackeray was clearly startled by the number and size of young Henry’s buttons and remarked that in England he would be called Buttons. The bewildered Henry was to remember this comment as something impudent done on his part without him noticing, an impression that what he thinks is normal can be strange for someone coming from a different country.

The problem of how pictures represent something underlies the series of mental pictures offered and analyzed in the text. This problem comes up in an early encounter with paintings on Italy early on in the text. In his own home, James is inspecting paintings in the salon with friends of the house. A painting by Thomas Cole (the American Turner) depicts Florence, in which not an object represented stands out (James does not remember the title). Then, in another room the family has another Italian landscape, this one by M. Lefèvre that is represented in frank, rich colors: a so called view in Tuscany, a rural scene with ruins and peasants. A friend of the house criticizes the Lefèvre asking: “’Are you sure it is Tuscany?” (141) James’s father adds: “Oh in Tuscany, you know, the colors are much softer – there would be a certain haze in the atmosphere’” (141), to which James the child himself adds: “’Why of course I’d say the softness and haze of our Florence there, isn’t Florence in Tuscany?” (141). After that incident the whole family is facing a dilemma: if Florence was like they all conveniently remembered, then Lefèvre could not be; yet if Lefèvre had Florence right, then their “old convenience,” their idea of Florence could not be. (141) This causes a problem to ponder on and to be checked later in Italy – with the added problem of what Lefèvre had painted if it was to turn out that the family (and Cole) had Tuscany right. In other words, James’s education through pictures projects the problem of visual re-presentation to him on a practical level, before the critical concepts for the problem actually appear.

As another source of the practical initiation to the problem of representation, James relies on his experience of the dramatic form. The key concept of the scenic perspective comes from James’s education in the theater. We learn that he goes to the theater very often, and chapters of the book are dedicated to his experience of Broadway and of the French theater in his early years. We learn that he even begins to write dramas with the aid of quarto sheets of ruled paper. “Luckily, each fourth page of the folded sheet he used was left blank. … When the drama itself had covered three pages the last one over which I most laboured, served for the illustration of what I had verbally presented. Every scene had thus its explanatory picture, and as each act, would have had its climax” (136). Scenes were more important than the stories themselves. “Scenes being the root of the matter, … especially when they flowered at every pretext into the very optic and perspective of the stage, where boards diverged correctly, from a central point of vision… straight down to the footlights” (136).

James the narrator goes on to link this perspective to his later work at once: “whereas my cultivation of the picture was maintained, my practice of the play, my addiction to scenes, presently quite dropped. I was capable of learning the express ideas in scenes, and was not capable…. of making pictures. The picture appealed to me all my days, I was only slow to recognize the sort that would appeal to me most” (137) – he comments. As a child, he begins to see and render situations in writing according to dramatic conventions, applying even the centralizing perspective of the stage when setting up his situations, a way of vision I will refer to as the ‘scenic perspective’.

3. Paris, the Louvre, and gendering the hallucination scene

The method of the scenic perspective we have seen is not only described but is also applied in A Small Boy and Others. All critical accounts of the book list a string of self-forming scenes that allegedly represent the steps in James’s artistic education: Broadway in NYC, his malaria in London, his typhus in Boulogne, his visits to the Louvre. In the third section of the essay, I focus on one of these formative scenes, that of the hallucination in the Louvre in order to analyze the use of the scenic perspective in it.

The hallucination in the Louvre is usually presented as a key scene in the emergence of James’s visual sensibility (see below). When commenting on the ‘Taste’ he learnt in the Salon, James tells the story of a subsequent nightmare that took place in the Salon. In the dream, a dim sinister figure attacks James who is alone in the Salon. James manages to resist the attack by keeping the double door firmly shut with pushing the weight of his own body against it. The ferocity of the resistance threatens the dim figure who in turn flees along the corridor.

Carol Holly’s article on the reception of the Jamesian autobiographies highlights the fact that contemporary critics did not comment of the dream, only post-Freudian critics began to see it as centrally important, a scene that defines James’s essential psychology as the artist renouncing the world (Holly 1985, 575). Even today, critics consider it as the artist’s willful self-assertion, a victory over the figures harrassing the imagination, the self-assertion of the budding artist (Perosa 2002, 18-9). In 2008 Hugh Stevens suggested the scene also had a strong erotic element, and the identification with the male ghost makes the hallucination belong to the genre of the queer horror story practiced at the time (Stevens 2008). In the footsteps of Stevens, I suggest that if we reconsider the dream scene in the context of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s analysis of a similar hallucination in a late story, “The Beast in the Jungle,” then the nightmare at the Louvre can be read not as the projection of artistic principles but a scenic representation of male homosexual panic.

Sedgwick’s reading sums up James’s short story ”The Beast in the Jungle” from the perspective of nineteenth-century male homosexual panic. In the story Marcher, an American expatriate bachelor, upon a visit to his old country, finds his old lady friend May Bartram still waiting for him. They chat, socialize, and May confesses her love, but Marcher falters, remains uncertain, and does not take her as a wife. When May soon dies, at her grave, Marcher reflects that his life had been empty and will now always be. Simultaneously, he is watching another male figure grieving at another new grave, and as he notices the other man’s agitation, he hallucinates that a beast jumps on him, and in shock, he throws himself on the grave in escape. The open ended story is usually read as the story of the artist who has renounced heterosexual love, or human relationships in general, for the sake of his art.

Instead of the usual reading, Sedgwick analyses James’s short story as part of a post-Romantic tradition of male homosexual panic. She starts out with the idea that in the nineteenth century especially, forms of male socializing required certain intense male bonds that were not readily distinguishable from the most reprobated bonds, the homosexual ones. And because of this anxiety about the status of certain required male bonds, male homosexual panic became the normal condition of male heterosexual entitlement. Sedgwick uses James short story to pinpoint the role of male homosexual panic in it. She explains that in the nineteenth century the odd character of the bachelor moves toward a recuperation, a domestication, it becomes partly feminized (Sedgwick 1990 and 1985, 92-4).

In “The Beast in the Jungle” Marcher is one such feminized bachelor character. He defies May’s love not because of his secret artistic impulses but because of his secret homosexual affinities. Marcher lives as one in the closet, and his secret is that he imagines he has a homosexual secret. He needs May’s company to look like the norm, to playact the heterosexual. The hallucination at the end of the story is related to this, Marcher’s perception of another man reenacts the classic trajectory of male entitlement. It goes through the phases of mute assault, direct confrontation, passion shown, being aroused, and envy. Marcher identifies with the unknown man’s loss, this is his only reaction to the female challenge. In the final hallucination of the beast he denies his identification with the unknown male figure. He acts out the nineteenth-century male homosexual panic while he in fact conceals, turns his back on, his homosexual possibilities.

Returning to the Louvre hallucination in The Small Boy and Others, I think the parallels between the two hallucinations are marked. First of all, the solitary male characters are similar. The absence of verbal communication is also common. There is a similar sequence of events, the trajectory of male entitlement following each other in set order: i. the unknown male figure stages a mute assault, ii. he directly confronts James, iii. he shows signs of passion, iv. James is aroused, v. James fights back and becomes similarly passionate, then vi. the ghost flees, vii. James wakes, open end. So the trajectory of male entitlement known from Sedgwick’s analysis is repeated here, again directed at another male. The scene is practically about James’ perception of and identification with the numb man. All these parallels indicate that the hallucination scene in Louvre functions not so much as a preservation of artistic autonomy and solitude but rather as an acting out of homosexual panic.

Conclusion

The first volume of James’s autobiography A Small Boy and Others is traditionally considered to represent the story of the young artist’s development. I have retraced the theme of the ‘scenic perspective’ in the volume as the key element of this formal perspective. At the same time, I have shown that the scenic perspective is also used as a compositional method in the text. Moreover, as a complement Leon Edel’s psychobiographical approach to Jamesian autobiographies, I found that the final hallucination scene of the volume in the Louvre functions as the scenic representation of sexual identification rather than the scenic representation of artistic identification.

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

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

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THE BUSINESS OF MARRIAGE: CLASHING AMERICAN AND FRENCH ROLES FOR TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY MARRIED WOMEN IN EDITH WHARTON

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

In Wharton criticism, there is a tendency to look at Wharton the critic of culture rather than Wharton the feminist author because of her ambiguous representation of women’s issues. The paper locates this ambiguity as part of Wharton’s general preference for dualities. There is a double strategy at work in Wharton’s texts that not only criticizes but also accepts the overwhelming social and cultural changes late nineteenth century American modernization has triggered, and for the representation of women this means a critical attitude to modern feminine gender roles. In particular, the paper investigates Wharton’s ambiguous representation of cultural change in the life of a married woman in The Custom of the Country (1913). Undine Spragg is a ruthless opportunist, who consumes four husbands for social uplift. Wharton’s representation of Undine is highly critical: Undine stands for the Modern American nouveau riche whose abundance of energy and money threatens the nineteenth-century genteel New York City cultural elite with extinction. However, Undine also learns about New York City social life, European customs, and Parisian manners in the course of her marriages. The paper analyzes Undine’s changing social positions as a married woman and investigates what it is that Undine actually learns in the course of her marriages by comparing the extent of her adaptation to norms of behavior in Wharton’s chapter on “The New Frenchwoman” in her French Ways and their Meaning (1919). The paper claims that Undine becomes a professional businesswoman and her position is represented ambiguously in the novel because it is shown both from the perspective of American and French ideas of married womanhood.[9]

Keywords: marriage, manners, cultural change, The Custom of the Country (1913), French Ways and their Meaning (1919), the new Frenchwoman

0. Proema

In the conclusion of her French Ways and Their Meaning, Edith Wharton differentiates between two kinds of Hell, a Latin and an Anglo-Saxon version. To be more precise, 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 positions the adulterous lovers take in their respective Hells reflect the values Latin and Anglo-Saxon 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 most 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 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. This scenario is challenging as it also characterizes Wharton’s perspective and method. Focusing on the theme of interpersonal and social relationships, she jumps to generalizations about morals and nations as a whole, and even makes comparisons between cultures with an educational intent.

Wharton draws special attention to the roles of Latin and Anglo-Saxon women in the adulterous scenarios and in married life. In Latin cultures, it would seem, adultery is tolerated as long as the women remain close knit business partners of their husbands and reliable members of their community as wives. In contrast, an Anglo-Saxon context expects them to be more virtuous than social and place the value individual faithfulness above any other value. It is natural to ask the question which cultural context dominates the married life of a repatriate American woman like Ellen Olenska in NYC in The Age of Innocence, or conversely, how an American woman manages to function as wife in a Latin country, like Undine Spragg of Wharton’s The Custom of the Country in Paris.

Wharton’s direct engagement with issues of the marriage market has been pursued by critics for long. Most recently, Pamela Knights explained the intricacies of the institution of marriage in the US before the turn of the century (Knights 2012, 230-4) and Linda Wagner-Martin surveyed the conscious decision on Wharton’s side not to represent herself as a sentimental woman novelist when she wrote about marriage and marriageable female characters (Wagner-Martin 2012, 243). Emily Orlando succinctly connects “the seeing eye” Wharton attributes to be the result of French cultural tradition in French Ways to Ellen Olenska’s creative relation to art and marriage (Orlando 2007, 171 and 224). Yet, it is Virginia Ricard who 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).

In general, Wharton’s relation to France is not necessarily linked to her concern with women’s roles. 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 not gendered ones (Blazek, 2012, 280). Similarly, Laura Rattray’s positions French Ways as part of a war related cultural debate rather than an exposé on gender related concerns 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, as a contrast, she also points out Wharton’s enhanced identification with America in the text (Rattray 2020, 107). In the same vein, discussions of the frightening destruction of French cultural continuity the Great War represents for Wharton prefer to focus on Wharton’s architectural language of loss undifferentiated by gender (see Carney 2016, 198 and Kovács 2017, 559).

Drawing upon both the interest in marriage and comparative cultural studies, the essay below maps out the story of Undine Spragg’s ambiguous marital behavior in The Custom of the Country in relation to clashing national expectations of gender performance at the intersection of national, gender and class issues.

1. Introduction

In Wharton criticism, there is a tendency to look at Wharton the critic of culture rather than Wharton the feminist author. In 1988, Amy Kaplan discussed Wharton’s problems with traditional gender roles for upper class American women in terms of professionalization. In 1995, Nancy Bentley showed Wharton’s interest in American and European ways as an ethnographically oriented project that both criticizes and accepts the changing of manners. In 2004, Jeannie Kassanoff pointed out Wharton’s conservatism in her cultural politics. Bentley, Kaplan, and Kassanoff all approach Wharton’s fiction as social practice that produces a discourse of culture (Bentley 1995a, 3; Kaplan 1988, 7; Kassanoff 2004, 4). Moreover, they all find a double strategy at work in Wharton’s texts. Amy Kaplan locates a double strategy in Wharton’s early short stories about women artists that represent her attempt “to write herself out of the private domestic sphere and to inscribe a public identity in the marketplace” (Kaplan 1988, 67), neither being active against a male tradition of writing nor being a representative of a separate sphere of women’s writing. Instead, she wrote realistically as part of her struggle to define the nature of professional female authorship by relying on traditional male genres and rhetoric. This vision of the link between domestic space and public space -- which also appeared in other art forms in contemporary American culture, such as painting (Annus 2010, 128-130)  --  represents the core of Kaplan’s current analyses of the dynamic of imperial expansion both in domestic and foreign policies of the US in the 19th century (Kaplan 1993, 11 and 2005, 25), with a focus on how deeply the rhetoric of domesticity permeated debates about national expansion (Kaplan 2002, 115).

Bentley asserts that Wharton’s fiction performs an ambiguous strategy of representation, as her texts both “critique and preserve the authority of the late 19th century elite class, a double strategy that finally serves to accommodate the very social changes the class appeared to oppose” (Bentley 1995b, 49 and Bentley 2003, 151), in other words they do not only criticize but also accept the overwhelming social and cultural changes late 19th century American modernization has triggered. More recently, Kassanoff identifies Wharton’s conservative theory of race and also attests to her texts’ hybrid force that fails to authenticate Wharton’s conservative notion of American (racial) identity (Kassanoff 2004, 7). So the ambiguous representation of historical change Bentley explicated seems relevant not only to modernization but to racial and gender representations as well.

In The Custom of the Country issues of gender performance, cultural change, and national culture intersect and are represented ambiguously. Undine Spragg from Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) is a ruthless opportunist: she goes through four husbands in quick succession who help her reach her social and economic aims. On the one hand, Wharton’s representation of Undine is highly critical: Undine stands for the Modern American nouveau riche whose abundance of energy and money threatens the nineteenth-century genteel New York City cultural elite with extinction. On the other hand, Undine does learn a lot about New York City social life, European customs, and Parisian manners. In this paper I wish to investigate what it is that Undine actually learns in the course of her marriages, and whether her new knowledge modifies the initial nouveau riche cultural position assigned to her in the text.

I frame the problem of Undine’s professionalization as a problem at the intersection of gender, class, and sexuality that is articulated in a dual rhetoric of criticism and acceptance following Nancy Bentley’s example. I suggest that we look at Undine’ position in the context of Wharton’s ethnographically oriented writing on French and American women. I claim that Wharton’s criticism of American women in her French Ways and their Meaning (1919) fits Undine’s position to perfection. However, looking at Undine as a middle class uncultivated social upstart disregards the alterations she undergoes and the skills she does acquire through the story. To me, during her social ascent she becomes a businesswoman, and one should account for the skills of her profession as part of the story of her ascent.

To substantiate the idea above, the paper is divided into three parts. The first section delineates Undine’s various positions as a wife in A Custom as that of a socially ascending American married woman. In the second section, I go on to Wharton’s view of the differences between French and American ways of marriage on the basis of her French Ways. Eventually, I reassess Undine’s class, gender, and sexual positions in terms of her professionalization, pointing out her new qualities as a those of businesswoman that can be seen from both the French and the American perspectives. I argue that Wharton’s double rhetoric of criticism and praise of change can be identified in her representation of Undine’s professionalization: a businesswoman whose trade is marriage.

2. The critique of Undine Spragg

Undine Spragg’s four marriages and her notions about manners, entertainment, motherhood,  sexuality, and, last but not least, money, represent an attitude to American marriage that is thoroughly criticized in the book. I wish to show the link between this criticism and Wharton’s ideas of the New Frenchwoman in her French Ways, so first let us lay out conflicting female role models in the novel.

Changing American customs

Early on in the novel one character, Charles Bowen points out the main problem behind Undine’s behavior. The omniscient observer character of the novel discusses the custom of the country, the US, regarding the relationship between an American man and his wife. Bowen the quasi scientist ethnographer claims that ’Homo sapiens Americanus’ does not take enough interest in his wife. He has his real life, the real business of life he considers serious. Also, he has his life of the home, but his domestic context remains unaware of his hard work at the office. The wife knows nothing about her husband’s public business life, because although the husband slaves away at the office, sacrifices himself at work, — he has nothing to communicate about this to his wife. Bowen thinks this attitude reflects the man’s indifference to his wife. For the man, the primacy of business has brought his inability of knowing how to spend his money, therefore it is the wife who spends the money without a single idea of its origins. Yet, the man makes only material sacrifice for the women, no ideal or romantic ones. He is too preoccupied to share his real life, and instead he tosses money, motors, clothes to his woman to make up for the absence of the real. This, for Bowen, is humbug, a big bribe paid for women for keeping out of man’s way. It is the custom of the country not to bore the women with business matters, but this custom practically boils down to American men’s indifference to wives and eventually results in the wives’ sham pretentious notion of life.

For Bowen, this division of gender roles has come to being recently with the emergence of men of business in the social scene. Before, the emotional center of a man’s life was ‘love’. Today, the emotional center of man’s life is ‘business’ (chapter XV). Because of this shift, there is a breach between the hemisphere of men and women, with their different emotional centers, business and love, respectively.

Undine’s case

Ironically, in the case of Undine Spragg and her marriage to the effete Washington Square gentile, Ralph Marvel, it is the woman who has switched to a new understanding of public and domestic spheres, while her husband, Ralph is still burdened by the old notion of love. This setup has disastrous results when Ralph has to go to business. He cannot adopt business and money-making as the emotional center of his life, while his wife expects him to excel in this new sphere and provide for her domestic existence plentifully. His allusions to love in the old sense carry no meaning for her, while his inability to make money makes her impatient for her chance of life in terms of money, motors, and clothes. The same clash of roles is valid for the relation of Clare van Degen and Peter van Degen. Here it is the wife who has the old notion of love as the emotional center for the lives of the partners, while Peter has already switched to a businessman’s attitude to his most precious asset, his wife. Peter, then, floods his wife with money, motors, and clothes and does not care to know why she still seems discontent.

Undine’s divorce from Ralph is the inevitable result of this incommensurable distribution of roles. However, her next divorce from her French aristocrat of a husband, Raymond de Chelles, is also connected to their different ideas about roles in matrimony. Undine breaks the laws of French social life by getting married to de Chelles in the first place. As an American divorcée, she would be welcome to be the ’friend’ of the man provided she keeps up appearances. But she is determined to play the game according to her own rules and coaxes the Frenchman into marrying her. Then she is appalled to learn the roles she has to perform as the wife of a French nobleman. Her main grudge is her husband’s relation to money. He is happy to invest and spend money on his estate, but he is more than unwilling to pay Undine’s bills. Also, they have an hôtel in Paris, but they only live in its back quarter for two months of the year. The main apartment is let, and anyway, ten months of the year are spent in an ancient castle in Burgundy, without proper social life, and also without proper piping, electricity, and heating. Also, there is an expectation for family loyalty, which primarily means an active participation in social activities connected to family relations. Moreover, it does not help that Undine is unable to join conversations on literature, arts, politics that are going on in the French salons associated with her new family. From her perspective, she is prevented from the pursuit of other, for her more enjoyable, social activities during the short two months in Paris: dining out in restaurants, motoring about, wearing splendid clothes in the company of her compatriots.

The different ideas of social propriety the spouses cling to result in a swift estrangement between husband and wife, culminating in the argument about the family tapestries. The de Chelles family possesses ancient tapestries from the age of Louis XIV hung in the draughty halls of the castle in Burgundy. Raymond would be happy to miss one Paris season to save some money, but Undine rejects this proposition wholeheartedly. Instead, she invites a salesperson to estimate the value of the tapestries. When Raymond learns of this, he tries to explain the symbolic importance of the tapestries, the family tradition they stand for, but Undine does not understand. This incompatibility of opinion also represents the breach between the two. He goes off on errands to his ’friend,’ leaving Undine without the chance to conceive the heir expected of her. She meditates on her unhappiness and the chances of divorce.

Undine is content to join her last husband (who was also her first husband to divorce), Moffatt, the successful American businessman who finally shares her social code. She does not seem to understand where the money comes from but is an expert in spending it on social entertainment. They have a house in NYC on Fifth Avenue, a mansion in Paris, and they travel around a lot, in the company of their compatriots. The husband remains indifferent to his wife’s sphere and her way of spending money — the way Bowen had described the relation. At the same time, Moffatt is involved in spending money on art objects he has an unsuspected but excellent taste for. His aesthetic sense is not paralleled by that of his wife, but this has no effect on their matrimonial bliss.

3. Marriage and the new Frenchwoman in French Ways and Their Meaning

This story of changing and incompatible gender roles is a familiar theme from Wharton’s novels and short stories. However, in her study of French customs, French Ways and Their Meaning, she lays out the exact difference between current American gender roles and French ones, also indicating her preferences.

In French Ways, Wharton distinguishes 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 physical lifelong loyalty. In this system, love which never has accepted and never will accept such bonds (as Wharton claims), immediately becomes a pariah and sinner when experienced outside marriage. Conversely, in the Latin world, a marriage is founded for the family and not for the husband and wife. Marriage secures husband and wife as associates in the foundation of a home and the creation of a family. It is a kind of superior business association based on 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 for the average American. She names this role model the “new Frenchwoman” (not to be mixed up with the notion of the “New Woman” from the first part of the twentieth-century, see Tóth 2005, 257).  Such an attitude to the French and American conceptions of marriage expressing the superiority of the former over the latter was in sharp contrast to the one represented by Thomas Jefferson, who promoted the American way of intramarital relations, finding it ideal both in terms of men’s affection for women and productivity in family business are concerned (Vajda 2012).

For Wharton the French businesslike association of man and woman, interestingly, is a sign of more superior interpersonal relations between them than the relation between married man and woman in the Anglo-Saxon world. 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 the man, she is not only socially free to take part in the intellectual life of the salons. Rather, in many cases she rules French life through the important relations she can establish with men in her circle. Wharton calls these relations “frank social relations” (Wharton 1919, 112) and contrasts them to the relations an American woman has both to 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 the home. In America, the result of the clear division of roles between domestic and public spheres is an odd Anglo-Saxon view that a love of beauty and an interest in ideas imply effeminacy.

4. The critique of Undine Spragg

In The Custom of the Country, Undine Spragg seems to represent upper class American women, who are criticized in French Ways. Undine romped around freely with young men as a girl, and as a married woman she is expected to learn stricter rules of associating with men. She does not understand the business sphere of her husbands’ life, and lives her own pretentious one centered on flimsy social activity and a display of money. Also, she remains ignorant of French expectations of behavior as well, she has not been able to interiorize the value attached to family loyalty, tradition, culture, and economy that are the chief characteristics of the French system of values. Elaine Showalter points out that Undine in fact lives a freer life than a French woman, and learns not only a new social language characteristic of her new set but also a skill to bargain and negotiate, the art of the deal (Showalter 1995, 91). These new skills are acquired as part of her story of adaptation. I wish to link this idea to Wharton’s criticism of Undine’s ways so far.

Apart from her beauty, it is Undine’s flexibility to learn and adopt to her surroundings that singles her out for social success.[10] Her first appearance shows her as a flexible, doubling and twitching person (Wharton 1989, 7)[11] who likes to dress up and play lady for her mirror (16) and also for an audience like the one at the Opera (37). Her only problem is that once she has acquired a certain behavior, she always realizes there is something even better beyond that: “it was her fate to find out just too late about the something beyond,” (34) and accepted values are reversed again and again (164, like for Mae West in Tóth 2015). What are the ways of behavior she learns? Out in Apex she wants something else already: she goes for holidays to lakes, to the East, to the sea to see social life unattainable to her. The family’s departure for NYC in search of a husband is part of this scheme. After her marriage to Ralph, she is quick to adopt to the Marvel’s codes but sees she has chosen the wrong set, as she joined “the exclusive and the dowdy of the past instead of the showy and the promiscuous,” who possess the future (111). Then she learns the possibilities open for a divorcée in America and in France. She goes on to join an aristocratic French social system but its actual code of behavior does not fit her, so she quits again, this time for the glittering promiscuous fast world of the rich American businessman.

Undine changes from an invader in the making to an invader at its most active. At the outset, when she has not learnt the language of her new class yet, Ralph wants to teach her something about an inner life that does not exist in the glittering world of surfaces. Yet Undine is made out for adapting to her actual context in minute detail and has no eye for the interior. She notices new tones and is quick to pick them up to attain her own end: entertainment. For instance, at her first dinner with the Marvels, she is silent and takes in “the world of half-lights half-tones, eliminations and abbreviations, gradations of tone” (ch III) but it is all alien to her – later when she has to evade her husband’s queries as to her use of time, she applies these methods for not giving straight answers. It is always her who hits the nail on the head when a problematic situation is to be solved. She picks up ways of thinking from her male friends. Her male friends like Peter van Degen and Elmer Moffatt tell her about business dealings and even give her advice she can make good use of. Peter gives her money with the intent to make her his mistress eventually, to buy her body, as it were – a deal she is careful to keep with the code of the honest married woman, only desiring a new marriage, not an extramarital affair (not as a mujer mala, see Cristian 2017, 173 but rather the way Julia Childs adopts French recipes to American ingredients as in Cristian 2018). She is effective in her dealings with tradesmen. She pleads for money from the right people, she drains the Marvels from their last dollar blackmailing them by threatening to take her son away from them. She wins Peter van Degen’s offer for marriage as the result of a tricky business negotiation where she pulls threads and plays with emotional pressure consciously as if winning a bargain (168). She follows a similar method when she makes de Chelles ask to marry her: she explains the stakes and creates a business negotiation where she wins the deal. So she makes use of the social knowledge she acquired in the exclusive Washington Square context to realize her 5th Avenue aims.

She seems to be a counterpart of Elmer Moffatt, the successful American businessman. Yet, Undine lacks several characteristics that make Elmer different from the rest. Elmer is detached, ironic, sees through his partners’ motivations. He has an irreverent sense of humor and no respect for sham social life. Ralph likens him to a director of a play and even to a novelist, who sees the psychology of his business partner as a novelist sees his characters and makes them act and speak with a view of the larger design of -the novelistic plot (132, 150-1). Apart from his intelligence, Moffatt also possesses an involuntary aesthetic sense triggered by art objects. Undine learns Elmer’s methods but she does not possess his intelligence and aesthetic sense. Undine has no social charm to accompany her actions.

5. Conclusion

What does Undine’s professionalization mean from the perspective of the Whartonian conflict between Invaders and Aborigines? Is Moffatt’s kind of doing business and making money acceptable, while Undine’s way of social bargaining without charm is not? From the perspective of the usual Whartonian double rhetoric of criticizing and negotiating the shock of the American modernization, Undine’s representation in The Custom of the Country fits in perfectly. Her social manner is criticized both from an elite New York City perspective and a traditional European perspective, but even from that of the new American hero, the successful businessman. It seems that the new American businesswoman needs to learn even more from her male counterparts. In turn, the manners of new American businessmen represented by Moffatt can be synchronized with the requirements of the old elite (Ralph) and European tradition (Raymond).

Another way to think about Undine’s social uplift is in terms of architectural metaphors Wharton is so fond of. Undine’s social ascent can be characterized by the spaces she occupies. Her years in New York spent waiting for a husband and presenting an attractive surface is contextualized by the Sentorian Hotel. Her next stage, the marriage to Ralph, can be characterized through her relations to the ancient Marvell house at Washington Square, her friends’ houses on 5th Avenue, and to her own house way off West. Her aim to become free is worded in her Paris hotel room. Her French phase and difficulties are expressed by her understanding of the Paris mansion and the Dordogne castle. Eventually, the new Paris mansion and the New York City house on 5th Avenue represent her social ideals most perfectly. Yet, she cannot sit still and stick to any of these symbolic spaces, as being on the move and staying at a hotel (in the American sense) is her most natural environment that reflects her superficial interest in interiors.

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MAE WEST TURNING DIRTY SNOW WHITE THROUGH HER COMIC PERFORMANCES

Zsófia Anna Tóth

The paper discusses Mae West’s works and artistic output from the point of view of comic performativity. It is argued that West overexaggerated her femininity to cover up her masculine characteristics which resulted mainly from the cultural assumption that the production of humor is a male privilege, but she generally displayed many masculine features, not just through her comic talent. Consequently, as a successful comic entertainer, it was often questioned whether she was a woman, that is why, she overdid her femininity probably in order to question its naturalness by this artificial performativity to raise awareness about women and their roles and functions in society. West managed to achieve such independence and to exert such a power in American cinema, theatre and culture at large that was unique in its time, so she broke boundaries in the field of humor for women.[12]

Keywords: Mae West, American cinema and theatre, humor, comic, performativity

The title of the paper is a reference to one of Mae West’s witty remarks: “I used to be Snow White but I drifted” (West qtd. in Barreca 1996, 595). Obviously, West never shied away from getting dirty – in every sense of the word – and while she immensely enjoyed it, even capitalized on it, at the same time, she never regretted anything. Drifting into the ‘dirty’ world of humor did not really distrub West and losing the quientesseial place on the pedestal of demure femininity symbolized by the purity of Snow White never was an actual loss to her. Even more, she used the power of humor to enhance the effect of everything she did or said and she used humor as well to get away with many troubles. One of West’s famous trademark sentences, which emphasizes her unique style in expressing the way she never regretted anything she said or did is the following: “It isn’t what I do, but how I do it. It isn’t what I say, but how I say it, and how I look when I do it and say it” (West qtd. in Austerlitz 2010, 77-78). West was, and still is, one of the greatest comedians and humorists of all time, and everything she achieved professionally was greatly indebted to her fantastic sense of humor. According to many of her critics, she could not sing or dance or act well; moreover, she was not even especially beautiful or photogenic, yet, she was able to make her audiences believe she was the best in doing all these things. Her overwhelmingly amazing personality and star persona as well as her entertaining skills and humor made those who heard or saw her believe anything she wanted them to believe. She was a prime entertainer and a great humorist ― and this is where her greatness lies.

This is the root of another contradictory aspect of West’s art involving her star persona: while she is generally considered to be a very feminine woman, a sex goddess with an ample appetite for men, she is also considered to be a ‘bad woman’ and a prostitute although her intellectual abilities combined with her heightened sense of humor makes her seem ‘masculinized’ and this questions her other feminine allures and thus her sex appeal also. In general, all humor critics agree that the production and use of humor is a male privilege and if a woman ventures into this field, she loses her femininity and by all means, her (possible) status as a woman proper. What is interesting in connection with West is that she somehow is not remembered as a masculine figure in spite of being one of the greatest American female humorists and comedians. Although, she falls far from being a true ‘lady’ in any of her roles, acts, performances, etc. and she almost always targets the problem of ‘ladyhood.’ In this paper, my aim is to discuss what Mae West, as a humorist and a comedian, achieved in American cinema and culture as a woman and how all this affected her gender construction because, in spite of all appearances, she was not a sexy, feminine woman but a strong, phallic presence, who had, in many aspects androgynous features.

In the range of topics she covered in her writing and her performances there is again a surprise: her stories were usually simplistic, focusing on how Mae West as a woman of questionable morals and great sexual allure performs actually herself (that is, the cultural icon), with the background story being always about finding love. However, as a writer, as an auteur, as an actress, performer and public persona, she challenged the questions and boundaries of gender, race and class; through her wit and comic acts she transgressed those boundaries while, in fact, she hardly ever did or said anything with which she would have committed those transgressions, while she always appeared to do so. The reason behind this might be also what Zoltán Dragon discusses, based on Andrew Sarris and John Belton, in connection with the screwball comedies of the era – which genre was not what West wrote for herself to perform but she also belonged to this “low and cheap” comedic realm and her works shared elements of screwball comedies nevertheless – that due to the hardening of the Production Code these comedies turned into such sex comedies that had to leave out the sex and consequently a never-ending string of sexual allusions as well as “references to explicit sexual play” were included in them (2008, 54-55). So, the trick is that you have the impression that you see a lot of sex/uality on screen while you see none eventually apart from some smouldering glances, a few hip swings and maybe an innocent kiss where they hardly even touch each other’s mouth for a second.

Nevertheless, West indulged in talking about delicate issues (sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular, interracial sexual relations, prostitution, criminals, the underworld, drug use etc.) and that is why she often had problems with censors, but in spite of the controversial themes of her works, she never went beyond a certain point of decency. This is especially true about her films although she was much more daring in her plays and in her performances on stage or in her novels where West treated issues challenging people’s notions about personal freedom and equality. This is just like the actions as well as the courage to defy conventions as well as to try to change them that many other maverick women of her age throughout the globe, in intra- and extradiegetic worlds alike did/had, e.g. Karola Szilvássy, whose extraordinary life Réka Cristian discusses in detail (2019) or Toni Morrison’s Bride in God Help the Child (as a literary example) whose early professional business acumen shocked her white American female counterparts as masculine (Kovács 2019). However, whatever West did within her artistic and comic endeavors, when she targeted a controversial topic she usually consciously made an effort to ameliorate the situation of those involved, especially women but also homosexuals or people of color etc. She always tried to be realistic and lifelike emphasizing the importance of these concepts. She always conveyed liberal and egalitarian ideas either as a privileged person in a power position – this was usually the case in her films – or as an underprivileged person – much rather true about her plays and novels. In the latter ones, she usually created characters that struggle and suffer as underprivileged people, while in her films she usually rises from such a position quite at the beginning helping those who are not as lucky as she is. Throughout her life West promoted social and cultural equality of disadvantaged groups and minorities by using humor, especially gendered humor within cultural interactions, helping the social and cultural recognition and acceptance of issues related to class, race and gender, especially advocating the problems of feminism and homosexuality.

My first focus will be on how she tried to ameliorate the situation of women through her transgressive acts and performances that challenged the set ideals of womanhood and femininity of the times by using the trope of the witty, humorous prostitute. For instance, in her play Sex, which was one of her greatest successes and scandals at the same time, the protagonist is precisely a prostitute and, as Lillian Schlissel claims: “the success of Sex was astonishing. In writing of a hooker and a happy ending, Mae West challenged Broadway rules” (1997, 6). West always worked with and around the figure of the fallen woman, the prostitute, the woman of the street presenting the ways in which a woman was considered one of these people or why and how she became one of them. West always treated these controversial issues with humor and her comic acts greatly helped her get away with serious transgressions. It is significant to note that while she was primarily a performer, she also wrote stories, creating both her own persona and her fictional characters, as well, and this made a difference in how she succeeded on page, on stage and on the silver screen. As an author, she managed to convey her transgressive ideas tailored to her fictional characters that she then played. She wrote her own roles and performed them as she wanted to. She was as much an author-writer (behind the scenes) as a performer-actress in the forefront. In this context, Schlissel said that West “was a writer as much as a performer, and the likelihood is that if she had not written her own material, there would have been no stellar career” (1997, 1).

In her works and performances, she was seemingly on the side of men; thus she could not escape being considered in many instances as a mindless, man-pleasing, dumb blonde but here it was definitely not the case. Once West said that “[i]t was a good time to play dumb and I did. There were going to be more surprises than a blowtorch” (West 1970, 37). Betsy Prioleau is also of the opinion that one of the great myths concerning seductresses, alluring as well as sexually-successful women is their visible “stupidity,” as they were/are usually considered “airheads,” women who “play dumb, and keep their mouths shut,” while, in reality these great seductresses have always been far from what they depicted; “[i]n fact most seductresses talked brilliantly and knew what they were talking about” (2003, 6). Prioleau adds another mistaken notion to the list of stereotypes regarding seductresses, fallen women leading to the “mindless sex bomb fallacy;” she says that they were seen as “servile man pleasers” (2003, 6), while in fact, “were mistresses of misrule, carnival queens who cast off repressive shackles” (2003, 17). Prioleau also points out that seductresses are usually dismissed by feminists, while in fact, these women are “the liberated woman incarnate” and the “futuristic models of female entitlement: independent operators, pleasure claimers, terroristas of traditional femininity, and big, classy divas” (2003, 1-2). This description unquestionably applies to West. With the help of humor and comic performances, West was an independent operator.

As a comic, so-called fallen woman, she challenged and subverted most notions of ideal femininity, and at the end of her stories, she/the female protagonist seemingly always gives in to the traditional ideas of womanhood as a saved, converted strayed sheep but she always makes it clear with a final shot of a cunning smile or a witty remark that this is not the case. Schlissel mentions several critics, who suggest that West’s trademarks, her “smart-mouthed quips” and her “flamboyant sexuality” were only a disguise (1997, 2). Schissel also adds that although West always played the “tough girl,” her sexual adventures and allusions were questionable in strict heterosexual terms by emphasizing the role of comedy in all this: “unlike other ‘fallen women’ of the day, the sexuality she displayed was closer to comedy than to passion” (1997, 2). Yet, I do not agree with her (and the unnamed critics’) suggestion that “[n]o real woman could be so brazen, so self-contained, or so funny” (1997, 2). A woman can be all of these and West was; however, her sexual identity was often questioned throughout her career. For example, George Davis wrote about West in Vanity Fair in 1934 by saying that

I can pay you no greater tribute, dear lady, than to say that [my love for you] has healed the wound in my heart caused by the death of the one and only Bert Savoy. I love you, Miss West, because YOU are the greatest female impersonator of all time. (qtd. in Hamilton 1996, 136)

Marybeth Hamilton, in another work, even calls her “the queen of the bitches” (1995, 136) which―while obviously relevant to her eternal sexual enactment in performance of the gold-hearted prostitute―it also has allusions to her queer identity and West’s strong relationship with and support of homosexual people and their rights in her contemporary American society.

West, contrary to the general belief, was a champion of egalitarian ideas and a defender of women’s rights. She stated that “I freely chose the kind of life I led because I was convinced that a woman has as much right as a man to live the way she does if she does no actual harm to society” (West 1970, 91). Far from being an outright feminist activist, she still contributed immensely to the amelioration of women’s situation in her time. Through her creative output either as a writer or as a performer, West challenged and unhallowed social conventions and remained an emotionally, psychologically, socially as well as financially independent, strong, influential, free and empowering person. West clearly points out these things by saying: “I like movies about strong women. I was the first liberated woman, y’ know. No guy was gonna get the best of me, that’s what I wrote all my scripts about” (qtd. in Barreca 1996, 595). Moreover, in her autobiography, West expressed similar ideas:

[t]hey [men] soon discovered I would not conform to the old-fashioned limits they had set on a woman’s freedom of action. Or the myth of a woman’s need of male wisdom and protection. […] once they knew they could not change my philosophy or dominate me, none of them left me; my problem was actually how to get rid of them. (West 1970, 56)

As an artist, she questioned and re-created traditional ideas of womanhood and gender stereotypes mainly through her comic discourse; in fact, it was exactly this mode that enabled her to achieve her goals while also facilitating the public acceptance of her unconventional acts/actions. The use of humor was seen as traditionally only men’s privilege and being a comedienne generally was not considered to be a high artistic achievement in the case of women, yet, West managed to remain an accomplished artist and a successful performer mostly because of her wit and social critique she produced concerning various fields.

An interesting feature of comedy is that “[i]t is revolutionary and conservative” at the same time (Sypher 1956, 242) as it questions and subverts morals, ideals, values, principles, and rules while, at the same time, also (re)inscribes all of them. Comic art provides catharsis through laughter thus freeing us from our problems, and at its best, while mastering disillusionment it also manages to leave our ideals intact: “[a]t its most triumphant moments comic art frees us from peril without destroying our ideals and without mustering the heavy artillery of the puritan” (Sypher 1956, 245). Elisabeth Bronfen states in relation to “parodic strategy” that while it facilitates “a rereading against the grain, [it] may be complicitous with the values it inscribes even as it subverts them, the subversion does remain” (1992, 406). Hence, parodic strategies always involve a “double encoding” to create the simultaneous processes of contestation and complicity within the dominant culture (Bronfen 1992, 406). Bronfen, additionally, argues that in spite of the complicity and the (re)inscription of the values that are subverted within comedy the subversion itself will remain as a ‘signpost’ (1992, 406). She also points out that (post-)modern women writers often deal with the common heritage of “cultural image repertoire” in order “to repeat, invert, and re-invent” those images through the duplicitous processes of “miming and disclosing, […] complying and resisting” (Bronfen 1992, 407). Therefore, such women writers, artists and performers carry conventions to their limits, or even to excess with the help of comedy, and they often even “transform them into the macabre or the grotesque” (Bronfen 1992, 407). However, the tautology reveals that the excess and the hyperbolic overturning of a trope still makes the clichés true, and thus, unbearable through their obviousness, irrevocability and unavoidability (Bronfen 1992, 407). This all is again true about West’s comic performances, roles and use of humor since these challenge and subvert traditional notions of femininity, yet, she still (re)inscribes the feminine ideals, although her exaggerated mode of doing this evidently enhances the signpost of subversion.

Additionally, Haskell highlights a significant aspect of the woman humorist and that is if a woman becomes the practitioner of the art of humor she will culturally desexualize and de-feminize herself by becoming more masculine thus losing her (possible) status as a proper and ideal woman: “[a] woman can display humor in the diluted forms of sarcasm or ‘personality,’ but if she indulges in either the athletics of the clown or the epigrams of the wit, she risks losing the all-important status of ‘lady’” (1975, 61-62). It is also added that “[w]hile a male comedian can have sex appeal […] a female comedian […] automatically disqualifies herself as an object of desire,” and while the comic man “often becomes a romantic figure in his quixotic destiny,” a comic woman “is regarded more as a desecration to her sex than a holy fool” (Haskell 1975, 62).

However, Mae West – as a filmic and cultural icon, actress, stage performer, writer, author, and most of all, humorist – is still a unique combination of wit (humor), intellect and sexuality. West was a perfect example for the powerful phallic woman whose humor was applauded while being considered, at the same time, “the queen of the bitches” (Hamilton 1995, 136). She always appeared to be an ambiguous figure, who managed to masterfully balance on the rope of (the appearance of) virtue, and at least on screen, she never fell down into the depths of sin (visually); in addition, her sexual promiscuity was not clearly proven either, although, always alluded to and talked about. Probably because this was part of her performed persona: it was an aspect of her stardom. Her life was a great performance and a masquerade of the fallen woman, while she always remained a “true” woman in the sense of being, in fact, the opposite of that fallen woman. As it has been discussed by several scholars, the true woman was the American term for the angel in the house and the ideal woman or true woman (as an abstract concept) was defined against the fallen woman, the femme fatale or the vamp (Daniel 1987, 7-8; Welter 1992, 48-71). That is why it is interesting that while West always acted/played out the “bad” woman, she actually was the opposite, and in her stories, nothing actually ever happens that would prove her “badness,” she is always good, correct, fair and honest (maybe with a little curve or bend here and there but never crossing to the other side). Haskell also suggests that “[a] wholesome, daytime version of vampirism with both humor and honor, Mae West turned male lechery on its ear” (1975, 116), while proving that “‘male’ aggressiveness and ‘female’ romanticism and monogamy – can coexist” too (1975, 117).

Joan Mellen writes that although West’s image in the media was that of the “sex queen and manipulator of weak, drooling men”, in Hollywood she actually projected “a uniquely free image of woman,” who was “seeking mastery over her life” (1973, 229-230). What is even more interesting concerning West’s star persona and performance(s) is that she was not embarrassed by being considered “the prostitute or the burlesque queen” (Mellen 1973, 230) while being financially independent. In addition, her unashamed, frank and humorous treatment of economic and gender these issues posed a challenge to the society of her time in the manner of the comic Vice. Here is again a unique masculine aspect of hers acting as a comic Vice in her stories, a character traditionally performed by men exclusively. But West can be seen a Vice figure herself without doubt. As Mellen writes “[o]ften her license, bawdy humor, sexual explicitness and bravado are invested with a challenge to those who disapprove” (1973, 230). What is more, she even “turns the tables” and becomes the “superior” person in her relationships with men and she is the one who takes command, who is in charge while she “never surrenders freedom or control” (Mellen 1973, 230). Her comic sexuality and campy vamp performance becomes a source of power, independence, agency and autonomy: “[…] West also transforms sexual allure on the part of women into an item of pride, power and autonomy” (Mellen 1973, 230). West’s excessive sexuality is only a performance and a comic play with her enhanced sexual moves and gestures – she is actually mocking the rituals of mating – and her appearance of an easy woman is only a mask since she ironically plays the bad woman to cover her kindness.

She treats her adventures with bountiful humor and her exaggerated ‘sexy’ walk is at once a sexist ploy and a mockery of the sexual signals assumed to bind men to women. She is also ironic when men assume that her sexuality is an invitation to easy usage (Mellen 1973, 239).

West’s walk is really quite specific, but probably it is also a comic trademark as it is very typical of famous humorists and comic artists to have a special, usually, rather odd, kind of walk. With this ‘silly walk,’ she also makes fun of women’s learnt and expected modes of behavior.

Again, it is only part of her performance where she appears to be a ‘Black Widow’ (or a potential praying mantis), who might devour the male after mating. In I’m No Angel (1933) in the scene when her character first meets her love she is wearing a black dress that has a silvery, rhinestone pattern of a big sparkling cobweb with a glittering spider brooch climbing up her body (Ruggles 1933, 49-53 mins), while the male victim (played by Cary Grant) abandons himself willingly to her offering his body to be consumed. Earlier, she even sings “I have the face of a saint […] but look at my eyes, I’m the Devil in disguise” (Ruggles 1933, 6 min) and suggestively dances leaving the stage and asking ravished men “[a]m I making myself clear, boys?” then adds hardly audibly: “[s]uckers” (Ruggles 1933, 7 min). All this also connects West to the figure of the comic Vice. Mellen also concludes that “West was the auteur of films redolent with wit in which the punchline always went to the woman” (1973, 243).

Before continuing the examination of West’s masculine position as a humorist, I would like to discuss briefly some examples from her works concerning the transgressive issues she treats. In Sex, as it has already been referred to, the heroine is a prostitute (presented and discussed in its raw forms), who has a heart of gold – as all of her prostitute/fallen woman characters do –combined with a leveled head. In this plot line, there is also drug abuse where Margy, the heroine, saves Clara from an overdose. In The Drag, the topic is homosexuality, presented with life-like homosexual men. This project was a daring adventure on West’s part during that time in America. In The Pleasure Man, there is an unscrupulous and charming man destroying girls and women, who is then murdered in the end – with his actions and seductions presented in detail. There is also a smart utterance concerning female solidarity said ironically by a female impersonator, a “sister in distress” (1997, 185). What is also an additional feature of all of West’s stories is that she is absolutely authentic in her language use: she is life-like with her slang and colloquial words and phrases with which she presents a particular group or class of marginalized people. In Diamond Lil, the heroine is again an ex-prostitute, who is also a saloon singer. In this story, there is also a young girl considering prostitution as a way out of her misery (there is also white slavery within the story) along the workings of the criminal underworld; in The Constant Sinner, the workings of the underworld (criminals, gangs, bootlegging, drug dealing and drug use to prostitution) predominate with the heroine being a prostitute, whom West calls “a femme amoureuse” (1995, 5). According to West, this type of woman is to be found not only “among women of the streets, but in every stratum of society” (1995, 5). Babe, the heroine, is of the opinion that “if a man can have as many women as he wants, there is no reason why a woman should not do the same things,” and it is written about her that she “was non-moral” who “enjoyed selling herself and her personality” (1995, 5-6).

In the film I’m No Angel, Tara is a circus performer who becomes a lion tamer and then rises into high society. Her ascent is a little bumpy with the issue of class discussed here in detail together with the question of race. West and her heroines always behave/s in an egalitarian way. There is also a court case where the heroine defends herself making fun of the whole court procedure. Here, one of her most famous witticisms are uttered after her won trial: “Why did you admit knowing so many men in your life? / Well, it is not the men in your life that counts but the life in your men” (Ruggles 1933, 1 h 20 min). She Done Him Wrong (1933) is the filmic version of Diamond Lil. At the end of this film, marriage is parodied in the part in which the police captain says jokingly to the heroine, Lady Lou: “I got you. You are my prisoner and I am gonna be your jailer for a long, long time,” while he is pulling a ring on her finger (Sherman 1933, 1 h 3 min). West’s heroines do not really want to get married and even when they do, it is obvious that they are still uncertain about marital bonds. For example, in Goin’ to Town (1935), the female protagonist is again a prostitute taking part in the following conversation: “What excuses you to run around single? I was born that way” (Hall 1935, 2-3 mins). Despite this, the character agrees to marry a man (although they decided it with dice and she lost the game), who dies before the wedding day and so she is considered to be his widow (since they signed a contract) inheriting all of his money by the first 12 minutes into the film, becoming rich and a successful business woman. Here again, the class and the social hierarchy are central issues, but also the issue of race is highlighted through a Native American employee, who is treated in an equal way with the whites.

As I have already mentioned before, there is a hint of the devil in West’s performances, her stories and characters connecting her to the figure of the comic Vice. There is a longstanding tradition behind the relation between Vice and the comic stance in the allegorical manifestation of Sin and Evil; the Vice figure of morality plays was supposed to be performed “in a fashion both sinister and comic” while he (because this character was always a he) was occasionally even considered “as a precursor both of the cynical, ironic villain and of some of the comic figures in Elizabethan drama […]” in literary discourse (Abrams 1999, 166). Mikhail Bakhtin is also of the opinion that there is a close tie between the comic and the devil since in several medieval literary forms a jolly devil figure was frequently present, whose function was to represent “the unofficial point of view” (1968, 41). Moreover, Jean Paul also adds that “the greatest humorist of all would be the devil” (qtd. in Bakhtin 1968, 42). In this regard, Wylie Sypher argues that the fool, the jester and the devil are all closely related, and the “tempter” figure often “disguises himself as clown or devil” (1956, 236). Irén Annus also opines that in Christian communities or societies with strict Christian regulations laughter and humor were traditionally shunned and refused as things that origniated from the Devil: “humor has traditionally been regarded as possessing an unusual potential for questioning, challenging, and even possibly subverting religious beliefs, practices and world views” (Annus 2016, 110). Emily Auerbach also suggests, based on Mark Twain, that laughter (and humor are) is related to Satan, who actually considers it (them) the greatest and most “powerful weapon” that humanity has (2004, 270, 304).

According to Ágnes Matuska, the Vice – despite its roots in the morality plays and its function as the allegory of Sin – was a clownish, jocular, zany and ludicrous character, who served as an interlocutor and mediator between the performers and the audience during the Tudor period, and whose task was to make people get involved into the events of the carnival or the story/performance of a drama/play by being intelligent, artful, shrewd and witty (2007). West, in spite of being a woman writer as well as performer, acted in the same way while also being very sexual and erotic. Tempe E. Allison also calls attention to the issue of seduction since the ‘duty’ of the Vice as “the emissary or agent of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Devil” was “to seduce mankind” (1937, 104). West undoubtedly does that in all her works. However, it is also to be noted that the Vice of sixteenth century English Drama was “a unique and problematic character,” who was not exclusively evil; this character was “a tempter, a mischievous, humorous villain” and “a real crux” (Matuska 2005, 1). What is more, as Robert Withington suggests, “[u]ndoubtedly the type persists in life, not only through the Middle Ages, but to more modern days […]” (1936, 124), which is again relevant in connection with Mae West. By asserting time continuity, Matuska alleges that “[n]o matter whether we take the perspective of 16th century audiences or 20th century critics, a basic problem with the Vice has always been the sense of comedy that makes him, although evil, appealing” (2005, 2).

Mae West is always appealing and attractive in all her acts and performances and her audiences were easily seduced by all her doings. The power of West greatly lies in her duality and complexity as a comic, fallen, devious and, at the same time, appealing person, performer and creator. Matuska emphasizes that the comic and the evil in the figure of the Vice should not be separated because this duality is exactly that endows it/him with a unique power: “[i]nstead of separating the comic and destructive elements in the Vice, we should rather see them inseparable: a unique merger that is intrinsic to the character, and that gives him the unfathomable energy and power he possesses” (2005, 19). Another significant aspect of West and her protagonists she performs is that, similarly to the character of the Vice, “has no prejudice, no attachment to anything” (Matuska 2005, 4). West is almost always nonchalant, and although she can be closely connected with several people, even intimately, especially with men, she is never attached to anyone. Although, she is caring and sympathetic, she never gives herself entirely in any of her relationships. As the complexity of the Vice character gets even more complicated, “he pretends not to care for them [the other characters],” and is “indifferent” to “their various wishes;” yet, he eventually “does not betray” them – as Matuska argues in connection with Merry Report (2005, 5). West, as I have already mentioned, is the same since she seems disinterested and indifferent, but eventually, she always helps those in trouble and never lets down those in need. However, after helping them she moves on immediately. It is typical of West and of Vice characters in general that they treat everybody in “the same mockingly disrespectful manner” (Matuska 2005, 6). Although, West and her protagonists can behave properly, they can become disrespectful and even rude within seconds towards anybody if they are not treated adequately. Without delving deeper into the discussion of the character of the Vice, I would like to conclude this part by stating that there are clear parallels between Mae West and the Vice. West, despite bein an attractive and excessively feminine woman, is also masculine in her endeavors as a Vice figure.

West’s masculinity, which is covered up by her excessive feminine allure and masquerade, is also due to her cultural stance and presence as a comedian and a humorist. As Regina Barreca argues, women traditionally, were expected not to produce humor, and not even to enjoy it while they were expected to recognize and acknowledge it with a smile only. Barreca alleges that a proper girl or woman was expected not to laugh (out loud), only to smile or perhaps giggle at most and this all in the service of acknowledging the humorous man’s intellect. She writes that

We always knew that we had to smile at his stories, giggle at his jokes. Nobody said we should giggle at his jokes only if we found them funny; we had to giggle at his jokes even when we thought they were dull, insulting, or dumb. [emphases mine] (Barreca 1992, 5)

As Barreca suggests, laughing and humor function the same way as the sexual dilemma since a girl or a woman is expected to be receptive of (and even be grateful for) almost any man’s humor; she is supposed to signal her cognizance as well as acceptance by smiling. Yet, she is not allowed to laugh because, then, she is too active, dangerous, uncontrolled, available and “cheap;” not to mention the possible connotations of producing humor … (Barreca 1992, 7). Humor produced by a woman artist generally conveys her criticism towards the system and its ideologies that entrap her into her gender role. For example, relevant to Mae West is also what Jillian Heydt-Stevenson states about Jane Austen’s use of humor. She writes that Austen’s witty and bawdy humor is “tendentious,” which is “(Freud’s term for humor’s aggressive purposiveness),” in a way that it provides an outlet for her hostility toward ideologies that dominate women (2000, 337). Barreca also opines that women’s use of humor is a mode of protest against the injustices of society: “[w]omen’s humor emerges as a tool for survival in the social and professional jungles, and as a weapon against the absurdities of injustice” (1996, 2). In Eileen Gillooly’s view, humor can be both aggressive and defensive in the case of both genders, although, those in the “culturally feminine position” are always more vulnerable as it “comprises, for both genders, a complex set of defensive and aggressive strategies, [however] its defensive function is peculiarly acute for those occupying a culturally feminine position” (1999, 22). She also adds that in spite of being mostly defensive, aggression is not excluded even from this type or strategy of humor (Gillooly 1999, 23).

In my opinion, West is again much more masculine in this respect because her use of humor is never defensive. John Parkin, while reflecting on Hélène Cixous’ views concerning humor, highlights the subversive force of women’s humor when he says that “the importance of laughter’s subversive force has led some women to turn the male prejudice on its head” (1997, 230). He also claims that feminist theorists have pointed out that the main theorists of humor were usually men who concentrated on men’s humor and excluded “the female voice in all its rich abundance and its potential for subversion” (Parkin 1997, 230). In terms of comic women in films, Molly Haskell ascertains that during the 1920s and 1930s (West’s filmic period) there were two basic types of comic females: “good girls” (pretty but not so beautiful as the romantic heroine) and “gargoyles” (physically disadvantaged or even appalling figures) (1975, 62). West was the romantic heroine/good girl and also the excessive gargoyle; her humor was applauded, while she was considered attractive as a woman; she was able to exceed all categories, and conquer all.

However, Barreca’s claims where she states that “all the best female humorists” are troublemakers with their “devastating wit” (1996, 3), precisely applies to West. Yet, I think that this is true about humorists in general, not just about women. Yet, Barreca emphasizes the sexual aspect of women’s understanding and use of humor again by stating that “[t]he girl couldn’t laugh, because Good Girls just didn’t ‘get it’ […] [b]ad girls bounced” (1992, 3). She also reveals a quite striking association between humor, laughter and sexuality by stating

[f]aking a laugh is like faking an orgasm: we’ve been taught to believe it’s preferable to pretend pleasure than to say ‘That one didn’t do it for me.’ And we have certainly been taught not to say the most dangerous of lines: ‘That one didn’t do it for me, but let me suggest something that might.’ (Barreca 1996, 9)

Additionally, what is relevant to West is that “a Bad Girl […] not only gets it but […] gives it and, maybe worst of all, isn’t going to take it from anybody” (Barreca 1992, 8). And eventually, Barreca declares that, in fact, all women can be funny and humorous despite the cultural myths “[l]ike the myth that women have no sense of humor, the idea that we can’t be sweet and wicked at the same time just isn’t true. Good Girls can and do laugh with their mouths open” (1992, 8).

Obviously, the closed mouth and the subsequent silence is one of the greatest virtues of a woman ― another significant aspect of our patriarchal culture. Bram Dijkstra elaborates on the idea that for an ideal woman as a “paragon of virtue and self-negation” silence was of utmost importance, and if she could not keep her mouth shut that “was enough to send Lohengrin packing in disgust” (1988, 21). Sarah Ellis’ famously quoted words (which are also reflected in Vicinus’ title) also highlight the importance of silence if somebody aspires to the title of a proper lady, since a woman’s “highest duty is so often to suffer, and be still” (1843, 73). Even if a woman could not entirely embrace it, at least, she had to project “the house-wifely calm of Penelope” while being “lamblike and silent” (Vicinus 1973, 133).

The open or closed female mouth is again of central importance within our culture since it has further connotations regarding female sexuality and reproduction. The sole reason behind all cultural restrictions on the opening of the female mouth leads to the ‘regulation’ of female genitals. An ideal woman can control her mouth (against laughing) and her genitals (against promiscuity): does not eat (or hardly anything), does not speak (stays silent), and most of all, does not produce humor; all this in service of securing her expected purity. Mae West was obviously not concerned about closing her mouth or any other body part of hers. In her stories, she speaks her mind, talks excessively, eats abundantly and drinks publicly. As Kathleen Rowe argues

[t]hat the unruly woman eats too much and speaks too much is no coincidence; both involve failure to control the mouth. Nor are such connotations of excess innocent when they are attached to the female mouth. They suggest that the voracious and shrewish female mouth, the mouth that both consumes (food) and produces (speech) to excess, is a more generalized version of that other, more ambivalently conceived female orifice, the vagina. Together, they imply an intrinsic relation among female fatness, female garrulousness, and female sexuality. (1995, 37)

West’s eating habits coincide with her comic habits. Humor has been mostly related to the masculine, and humor theorists in general agree on the following sentences: “[T]HE CREATION and enjoyment of humor have traditionally been considered masculine privileges […]” (Barreca 1996, 1); humor is “[h]istorically considered a masculine enterprise” (Gillooly 1999, 15); “both Hazlitt and Simpson […] gender humor as masculine” (Gillooly 1999, 39); “[t]he comic spirit […] of silent comedy […] is basically masculine in gender and often antifeminine in intention” (Haskell 1975, 61). Even Rod A. Martin, who discusses humor from the point of view of psychology, states that “[t]here has also long been a sexist aspect to the concept, which was viewed as an essentially masculine characteristic. Until quite recently, it was commonly assumed by many writers that women generally lacked a sense of humor (Wickberg, 1998)” (2007, 25). Moreover, Joanne R. Gilbert declares that “many scholars maintain that historically, comedy has been defined and dominated by men and is, therefore, a ‘male’ or ‘masculine’ genre (Auslander 1993; Barreca 1988; Horowitz 1997)” (2004, 41). Similar to Haskell’s earlier statement about female humorists’ losing their femininity and lady status, Barreca claims that “[i]t’s a risk for women to use humor (even good humor) because their ‘femininity’ might be (read: inevitably be) called into question” (1996, 2). Additionally, Barreca argues that humor requires “intelligence, courage, insight, and a sense of irreverence” (1996, 3) – all traditionally and culturally conceived as masculine qualities. Eileen Gillooly adds a striking, although, very precise observation that can also be well applied to Mae West: “[e]ven Becky Sharp, perhaps the most famous comic heroine of the nineteenth century, is, despite her sex, a decidedly masculine humorist” (1999, 18).

Kristen Anderson Wagner also argues in a similar manner, when discussing early film history; she says that “[w]hile male comedians have been celebrated, analyzed, and fondly remembered through each passing generation, female comedians have largely been forgotten, by audiences and academics alike […]” (2013, 39). In her study, Anderson Wagner focuses on female comedians of the silent era as well as during the introduction of sound, for example, Mae West. She also asserts that there “is the longstanding and deep-rooted cultural bias against women performing comedy. The idea that femininity is incompatible with humor dates back to before the nineteenth century and lingers to the present day.” (2013, 40) I agree with her statement that these biases are still holding strong even today despite all advances in the direction of change. However, what is even more important is why those women who dare to venture into the realm of comedy and humor are still seen dangerous and are prone to constitute a threat: “[w]omen who engage in comic performances have the potential to subvert the social structures that keep them oppressed; by poking fun at those in power, especially men, women have the ability to expose their weaknesses and challenge their authority” (Anderson Wagner 2013, 40). This resonates with what Joanne R. Gilbert also argues, namely that women humorists subvert the status quo, are able to initiate transformation, and are dangerous exactly because they show resistance and are able to critique the dominant culture because of their marginalized and distanced position (2004, 3-5). Anderson Wagner also adds that

[t]hese women were doing more than just making people laugh; they were challenging conventional notions of femininity. Their presence and power both on and off screen meant a great deal of visibility as they broke boundaries and redefined what it meant to be a woman. (2013, 41)

A female humorist or comedian, as I have already pointed out, occupies a masculine position and challenging femininity, both hers as well as its abstract notions. That is why the presence of such women is so crucial for all women; “regardless of what type of comedy they performed, when comediennes appeared on stage or on screen they were visibly refuting the idea that femininity was incompatible with a sense of humor and proving that women could be aggressive, assertive, bawdy, and, most importantly, funny” (Anderson Wagner 2013, 42) just as Mae West did. Nevertheless, her excessive femininity is something to be remembered and also to be discussed briefly since it was such a striking aspect of her persona that it cannot be left unnoticed. My view is that she did all this on purpose and exactly to cover up her masculinity. Similarly to all phallic women who challenge hegemonic masculinity Mae West is also threatening with her non-femininity. Haskell addresses this issue by writing that West:

[i]n her size, her voice, her boisterous one-liners, and her swagger, there was something decidedly, if parodistically, masculine. But she was a woman, and she thus stretched the definition of her sex (1975, 116).

Joan Mellen argues likewise and states that West, with her exaggerated femininity, is much more a “transvestite” than a real woman, and she suggests that this is “a mockery of female sexuality by flaunting what are no more than ordinary female attributes” (1973, 243). Stella Bruzzi adds that “[t]he transvestite image” actually “is a fault line, a crack between sex and gender, a site of ambiguity and change” (1997, 157). West’s several campy drag performances as a result put “femininity into quotations marks” (Bruzzi 1997, 165). While examining the issue of “femininity as construction” in the figures of femmes fatales Bruzzi unites Riviere’s masquerade and Butler’s idea of performativity concerning “the dynamics of the body/social performance relationship” as well as Beauvoir’s famous sentence that “[o]ne is not born a woman, rather becomes one” (1997, 166). According to Butler, the corporeal performance provides a surface sign and that “incorporation” is only the effect of “corporeal signification” (Bruzzi 1997, 166), thus the corporeal performative enactments are only constructions:

[s]uch acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. (Butler qtd. in Bruzzi 1997, 166-167)

The “body/appearance dynamic” is manipulated by clothing, and the fluidity of identities is highlighted through their construction – hence their ontology is connected to this enactment – only “at the moment of performance” (Bruzzi 1997, 167). The importance of clothes in the performative enactment of the body is also emphasized here: “[c]lothes are always performative in that they function as signs or enactments on the body to give that body the illusion of integrity and substance” (Bruzzi 1997, 167). In this context, West’s excessive feminine performativity and masquerade all serve the creation of the illusion of a (desirable) woman to hide her masculinity.

Elaine Showalter, in accordance with Judith Butler, points out that the “womanly woman” is only a construction and a performance since “[f]emininity is a construct; growing up female means learning to play a role” (1993, xi-xii). The prescribed gender roles are all to be enacted since “[g]ender is an ‘act’ which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ itself carries the double-meaning of ‘dramatic’ and ‘non-referential’” (Butler 1997, 404). Joan Riviere also declares that womanliness is itself both masquerade and role-playing (1989, 38-39). And what is even more significant in relation to West is that “homosexual men exaggerate their heterosexuality as a ‘defence’” while “women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men” (Riviere 1989, 35). These women who dare to intellectually challenge the men (such as the femme fatale or the female comedian) directly or indirectly seeks the sexual attentions of those men in a more or less veiled manner (Riviere 1989, 36) in order to cover her intellect and ambition with her sexuality. Public display of womanhood, excessive femininity and sexual allure all are meant to avert the attention from intellectual proficiency and the possession of the phallus (Riviere 1989, 37). As Riviere claims, “[w]omanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it […]” (1989, 38). That is why, West probably carries her excessive feminine masquearade to such extremes that she is often conceived even a transvestite (Mellen 1973, 243). As Joan Mellen also remarks about West’s ‘covers’:

[w]hat has been cited as her narcissism was hardly a liberated response;

but West’s endless filing of her fingernails, bored by all, or examining herself in multiple mirrors, are also deceives she employs as foils for shrewd observations into a petty, ambitious and hypocritical society where women have always had to conceal their intelligence and remain on guard. When West masks her intellectuality, it is of course a measure of continued enslavement. (1973, 232)

West was committed to hard work, yet, she was never committed to any man. In She Done Him Wrong (1933) Captain Cummings asks from Lady Lou: “Haven’t you ever met a man that could make you happy? / Sure, lots of times” – replies West/Lady Lou with a cunning and knowing smile (Sherman 1933, 43 min). West, as well as her protagonists, would “neither acknowledge nor accede to the superior wisdom of any man” (Mellen 1973, 233). She was an independent woman, who had power over males; she was no trembling Hollywood ingénue but had boldness and self-possession; she rejected passivity and refused to wait for events to turn her direction (Mellen 1973, 235). Saul Austerlitz is also of the opinion that “West was a lone woman struggling to make her way in hostile territory, but was decidedly not a victim herself” (2010, 80).

Mick Lasalle emphasizes, similarly to Mellen, West’s “singular artistry” while claiming that she was mostly misunderstood and remembered incorrectly (2000, 152). It is noteworthy that Lasalle calls her “an amazing self-creation” whose presence, acts, moves and talk resemble and induce “an ongoing state of mild and vaguely uncomfortable arousal” (2000, 153). He also calls her “a great comedian” who was actually “a friend to men and women too” (Lasalle 2000, 153). Additionally, “[s]he wasn’t exactly sexy – that was just part of her act. But she was sexual, and she played it right down the middle: Everything was a joke, but not quite” (Lasalle 2000, 163). Saul Austerlitz is also of the opinion that although “Mae West drips sex [… she] is hardly an erotic figure. With her oversized parasol and peaked feathered cap, she is already comically exaggerated – less a sex object than an overripe parody of one” (2010, 80). Lasalle even goes so far as to state, again very aptly that “West was in fact a female female impersonator, playing an exaggeration of a woman” (2000, 154). Haskell also claimed that West was a unique merger of “brains”, “wit” and “sensuality” in such a way that was often considered incompatible in later periods of film history (1975, 95). She says that West was “self-created” both involving anima and animus in her uniqueness (Haskell 1975, 107) and notes that West owned such a unique complexity that her androgyny was almost perfect: “[i]ndeed, so complete was West’s androgyny that one hardly knows into which sex she belongs, and by any sexual-ideological standards of film criticism, she is an anomaly – too masculine to be a female impersonator, too gay in her tastes to be a woman” (Haskell 1975, 115). However, West was not a mere sexual object but “woman as sex object turned subject” and a “composite of sexual types” (Haskell 1975, 115).

One thing is certain, as Saul Austerlitz asserts, when in Night After Night (1932) West utters her iconic sentence as a reply to “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!”: “Goodness had nothing to do with it, Dearie” (Mayo 1932, 37 min), with “a lascivious smile stealing across her face, […] the movie – and the history of American comedy – would never be quite the same again” (2010, 75-76). As legend has it, George Raft said about this performance of West’s: “Mae West stole everything but the cameras,” and Austerlitz adds that “the audience wanted more, and so did Mae West” (2010, 76). It is again a significant aspect of West’s star persona and performances that she is so powerful that everyone else fades in comparison: “West is so much larger than life, so thoroughly demanding of our attention, that her supporting cast […] are wooden dummies, coached to walk and talk in the precise manner designed to best display the star” (Austerlitz 2010, 76). It is the same with her stories that are rather simplistic since “[t]he plot is helpful for West’s purposes, but is ultimately irrelevant; for all they matter, the sets and backdrops might as well be made of painted cardboard. They exist only to provide an excuse for West’s string of inverted aphorisms (Austerlitz 2010, 80), bon mots, witticisms and wisecracks as “she is a wisecracking philosopher, imparting her hard-fought wisdom with devilish panache (2010, 80). For example, about I’m No Angel (1933), which is one of West’s greatest successes, Austerlitz, actually rightly remarks: “[n]o one went to a Mae West comedy for its plot, as she well knew, and her script for I’m No Angel is little more than a thin filament linking unrelated wisecracks” as “West’s philosophy of life emerges, one carefully packaged and delivered bon mot at a time” (2010, 81).

Mae West was one of the greatest comedians in American culture. She was larger than life, a myth, who managed to be so controversial that both critics and audiences can hardly agree on what and who she was exactly. Everybody can only be certain that she was an iconic figure who made a difference.

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MERIDA AND HER MOTHER BEAR: FEMINIST CULTURAL PEDAGOGY Á LA DISNEY/PIXAR

Zsófia Anna Tóth

This paper examines how the figure of the bear appears and is represented in stories. While it is stated that representations of bears are typically males or negative cahracters in the (fairy) tales as well as the adult stories all around the world where bears are/were indigenous animals, Brave (2012) is an exceptional animated film since, here the bear is female, and even if being ambiguous (or rather starting out as a bad character from Merida’s point of view) for a while, eventually it becomes a positive character. Thus, the mother bear becomes an agent, who through the humanimal transformations, challenges traditional notions of femininity and masculinity as well as limits of humanity and hierarchies within human communities. This story about Merida and her mother bear provides an outstanding example of feminist cultural pedagogy.[13]

Keywords: Brave (2012), mother bear, bear, children’s fiction, feminist cultural pedagogy

In my paper, I intend to investigate the figure of the mother bear as an agent challenging ideals of (traditional) femininity, limits of humanity, and hierarchical organizations of family structures in the Disney/Pixar’s animation: Brave (2012). As theoreticians of the genre highlight, fairy tales, children’s fiction as well as animated films (literature and fairy tales: Tatar 1987, Hunt 2004, Garry and El-Shamy 2005, Zipes 2000 and 2006; animated films: Levorato 2003, Brode 2005, Booker  2010, Lury 2010, Pallant 2011, Whitley 2012, Cheu 2013; Zipes, Greenhill and Magnus-Johnston 2016) traditionally portray the bear as a character either male or negative or both: most typically a negative male character, therefore, the creation of a female bear fulfilling an empoweringly positive role in the plot qualifies as a subversive act of canon revision. It is an excellent example of what Réka M. Cristian and Zoltán Dragon called “the pleasurable negotiation of an enjoyable counter-cinema” (2008, 96). This extraordinary ursine adventure changes Queen Elinor, with the help of Merida and her special humanimal transformation that was triggered by her daughter, from a woman living – and also enforcing – a traditional and stereotypical womanly life into a liberated and independent woman defying traditional expectations about womanhood similarly to what Réka Cristian argued for in connection with las mujeres insumisas and how they became “extraordinary actors of their ordinary lives” in addition to how “true friendship and support” was the real instrument in that change, which is again true about Merida and Queen Elinor, since in this adventure, they become best friends and support each other unconditionally (2017, 169). Nevertheless, we also have the evil male bear embodied in the figure of Mordu as the great antagonist, whom nobody can defeat, not even communally, since we know that he, as a human prince, wanted ultimate power and the strength of ten men. In fight, it is evident that the men cannot defeat him, not even all together. There is only one person who can defeat him, even if with the help of a little cunning, a Mother Bear defending her child. Hence, Mordu could not have been defeated if Queen Elinor had not been turned into a bear because it was only her (in her posthuman or trans-species form) who could fight with him on an equal footing, and eventually restore equilibrium in the realm.

Although, Brave can really be termed a feminist fairy tale film, and most openly so among the Disney/Pixar animations, Disney, in fact, has always been an advocate of women’s causes, often even having characters with feminist leanings and opinions in the stories, even if it seems to be a suprising statement. I discussed this issue in detail in my paper entitled “Disney’s Violent Women. In Quest of a ‘Fully Real’ Violent Woman in American Cinema” (2017). Hence, I agree with Douglas Brode, who claims that “Disney’s attitude toward women emphasizes strength of character in pursuit of excellence and self-fulfilment” (2005, 168). Most evidently, this entirely applies to Merida and her Mother (Bear). Brode also adds – which is constantly proven by the numerous failing male figures (father figures, supposedly authoritative leading males and most often also kings) in the stories also including Merida’s father, who by the way, also resembles a bear and is called “the Bear King” – that Disney consistently tried to undermine male superiority in his stories and empowered his heroines (2005, 176-177). Amy M. Davis also argues that the “infectious” effect of the wicked women became rather prevalent and “the stories themselves, containing as they all do strong, independent, intelligent female characters, are potentially indicative of just how much feminist ideology had entered into mainstream American middle-class values” (2012, 175, emphases added). Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario similarly points out that “Team Disney Princesses” (who came after the death of Walt Disney) became sportswomen (2004, 46) while “[h]eroism, egalitarianism and autonomy” also became their characteristic features (2004, 47) and they started to think, speak and act in “progressively proactive” ways (2004, 57). This again applies to Merida word by word, and also to her mother after her transanimal/transhuman experience (actually even before that, she was just not willing to embrace it). Finally, Do Rozario’s closing remark still rings true “[t]he Disney kingdom may still seem a man’s world, but it is a man’s world dependent on a princess” (2004, 57).

At the beginning of Brave, the female protagonist’s unfeminine identity performances are contrasted with the mother’s exemplary feminine behavior (even though it is evident that she wears the trousers, still, she insists on the performance of ladyhood and ideal femininity – see also Annus 2010, 128-130 concerning the enforced ideals of proper femininity) – up until the unexpected turn of events when the mother-turned-bear becomes similar to her daughter and adopts her value system and way of thinking. Hence, it is not the daughter who takes after her mother but the reverse occurs through the post-human, transhuman and superhuman transformation, metamorphosis and shapeshifting of Mother Bear. Our male-identified, masculinized boy heroine, Merida, leads the way and through their shared trans-gender humananimal encounter and life experience, their mother-daughter relationship becomes rearticulated together with the general concepts of filial and familial bonds. The problematization of mother-daughter relationships, relatively infrequent in Disney/Pixar films, is not resolved by annihilating the adversary (in the fairy-tale manner of killing off the (bad) mother (either real or substitute)) but rather takes place through the post-human transcendence of cultured human embodiment. The same-sex intergenerational fight and conflict ends as the mother queen teaches and is taught a lesson about how the shedding of femininity might be more beneficial than tragic and how the resulting androgynous humanimal encounter might eventually point towards a feminist cultural pedagogy, in Angela Carter’s sense of the term.

Brave was the first Disney/Pixar product that openly represented a feminist cultural pedagogy. Up until Merida, who opened the way for Anna, Elsa, Judy Hopps, Moana and Raya, it was still true about Disney/Pixar heroines what Kim Snowden suggested that

[y]et these characters’ ambitions are invariably derailed when romantic dilemmas supersede them. While these films may have active, engaged, and smart heroines, they ultimately prioritize romantic, heterosexual love and standard norms of beauty as the most prized achievements their characters—and by implication their audiences—can hope for.” (2010, 160-161)

With Merida none of these things stand any more, since she is not a typical beauty and she does not want to be, additionally, she is striving to avoid marriage by all cost throughout the whole story even if it also takes turning her mother into a bear; and her mother actually also becomes cleansed of these above ideas after her ursine metamorphosis. It is well-known (and has been highly criticized) how Disney commodified and standardized the formula for fairy tale films which primarily involved “[…] the sequential plot that relies on a woman/girl being rescued by a worthy man; the inevitable resolution based on heterosexual marriage or betrothal; and the secondary characters, usually funny animals, who inform and elaborate this primary narrative and guarantee its outcome (Ibid., 95).” (Snowden 2010, 162) Brave was the first film that excluded the possibility of a rescuing male, the female protagonist is responsible for all the major actions, she also refuses marriage; and most of all, has a secondary character, who is not a cute, tiny, furry animal with whom you can sing but an imposing bear, what is more, the embodiment of an angry mother, who by the way, also becomes a helper figure and provides some comic relief, especially when still trying to hold on to feminine mannersisms highlighting its artificiality and performative aspects.

Thus, Brave is a story that rewrites fairy tale film tradition in the manner of Angela Carter (maybe, the creators actually read her works and incorporated some of her plot twists as well as character development, for example, riding away with Mother instead of a male lover in the end) also with the inclusion of the carnivalesque, the grotesque, the discussion of femaleness as juxtaposition, equation or contrast to animality, bestiality etc. But by all means, it is also true about Brave what Snowden claims: “Carter’s work similarly allows students to deconstruct the way the apparently neatly defined roles work in traditional tales but also opens up a discussion about the complexities of feminism and postfeminism and breaks down dichotomies and stereotypes concerning female sexuality, agency, and women’s happily-ever-afters.” (2010, 166, emphases added)

While analyzing another coming-of-age story just like Merida’s (except that, for Merida, this rite of passage is not about the pursuit but the refusal of marriage), Snowden mentions that “the werewolf invokes women who stray from the path and are comfortable in the forest, who are kin to the wolves, recognizing themselves in these animals’ otherness” (2010, 171). It is perfectly true about Merida and her Mother Bear. Merida is much more comfortable in the forest probably recognizing her kinship with it and its power that, in most cultures, is embodied in the figure of the bear: “[t]hey were the kings of the forest” (Bieder 2005, 51; Nagy 2006, 111). Right from the beginning, Merida is shown as very active, adept, happy and satisfied when she is riding/running/practising/wandering in the forest or climing a mountain etc. while being in the castle is similar to a prison (of feminine confinement) for her.  Hence, instead of a more typical wolf (or werewolf), in this story the female protagonist deepens her unity with the forest and the wilderness while wandering with a female bear. They are at home there as well as safe and definitely free, much rather than in “the civilization” of the castle. It is no wonder that the lesson of the story is spelled out with the help of a bear (or two). Merida, similarly to Little Red Riding Hood (wolf) and Rosaleen (werewolf), reaches “her transition from child to young woman” via “her journey through the forest” (Snowden 2010, 172), yet this time, we have a bear, and this beast does not stand for the girl’s sexual awakening and maturation in the traditional sense that she finds a male sexual partner, but through an older woman, her mother, and together they realize that there are other options available. With the help of each other, both women go through a journey of awakening (they look to each other for support, understanding and acknowledgement, not to men), and thus “reclaim[s] female subjectivity and agency by embracing the Other within the self” (Snowden 2010, 174), even if it entails concrete metamorphosis or the companionship of this posthuman other that is, actually, your flesh and blood.

According to “Karras, […] a successful feminist character […] embraces both the feminine and her female sexuality but does so outside of patriarchal understandings of these qualities” (Snowden 2010, 176). Additionally, Merida is not a traditional object of the male gaze either but a young woman “who not only looks back but is not punished—indeed, she is rewarded—for doing so,” (Snowden 2010, 176) she dares to look, and she looks in the eyes of anybody and anything, that being human, animal or supernatural, either male or female. It is also true about Merida concerning sexual interest in a man since she seizes up the man-candy warriror with unblinking wide eyes. Kim Snowden closes her article in a slightly depressing tone (although it was written two years before Brave): “[p]ostfeminist ideology wants my students to believe that they must choose between being a babe or a feminist bitch. Many young women embrace postfeminist ideology precisely because they see feminism as devaluing the feminine (and, to some degree, the masculine)” (2010, 176-177). Gladly, this is what Merida and her Mother do not suggest and provide us with a rich and combined performance of femininity, masculinity and androgyny. They do not devalue any of these and send a complex feminist message. Hence, their message serves the same means as, and their story works similarly to, that/those of Angela Carter: “Carter’s dialogue with feminist discourse draws attention to the fact that feminism cannot be seen as a polemic or from a unitary perspective (Day 1998, 149-50). Her work, then, is a perfect source for creating feminist cultural pedagogy: teaching students feminism’s heterogeneous forms.” (Snowden 2010, 169)

Sarah Wilde, in her article entitled “Repackaging the Disney Princess”, claims “that contemporary princesses, especially Brave surpass many traditional notions of gender. Evolving from a tale of a “heroine of life who has no story” (Tatar 1999, 293), to one of an empowered and autonomous heroine.” (2014, 132, emphases added) Merida is a loner (she is physically alone most of the time and she loves it, except when she is with her horse or her bear-turned-mother), she can rely on herself and her image/presence exudes empowerment and autonomy that are the exact result of not being femininely dependent. Wilde also emphasizes that Merida is not an object and it is not her feminine attractiveness that is the focus (that was the pattern for princesses before) but much more the “archetypal masculine traits of control, dominance and skill (Stewart et al. 2003)”, which render her more masculine and through these qualities she becomes a subject. (Wilde 2014, 140) Wilde goes on arguing that Merida breaks with traditional dichotomies and rules of gendered behavior, which also posits her exceptional while pointing towards a special unity of the feminine and the masculine in her (I also would add, this applies to her Mother Bear too):

Merida defies stereotypical gender codes, utilizing themes of conflict and adventure. […] Merida is proactive and confronts the challenges she must face, instead of waiting for her prince to save her (Stone 1975, 45). […] She also opposes stereotypical binary oppositions of gender representation and incorporates both masculine and feminine traits to enforce these ideals (Shiftman and Lemish 2010). (2014, 141-142, emphases added)

Merida is the hero and protagonist of the story without doubt wich rewrites previous fairy tale theories, while definitely not being characterized by a demure, docile and (Disney) Cinderella-like temperament or “traditional” princess beauty, although she has a unique and special beauty:

Applying Propp’s character theory (1968), a journey is based on a hero who endures gruelling tasks, yet the women are either damsels in distress or a prize to be won. Heroines are tested by their physicality, a beautiful face and perfect temperament (Stone 1975). The new Disney princesses have surpassed this notion, adopting the function of a hero and thus dispelling Propp’s role of a princess. (Wilde 2014, 141-142, emphases added)

Even though Wilde analyses Merida extensively – even if confusing the feminist and post-feminist terms – she does not say much about the mother and that she became a bear is not dicussed at all as if it was not of any significance. Although she mentions that Queen Elinor functions as a “false villain” since she just seems to be an opponent (to Merida’s happiness) first but actually becomes a helper figure and she is definitely not evil. (Wilde 2014, 142) Maybe that is why, she has to turn into a bear (a traditionally evil male figure in the stories, the villain) to really come to terms with herself and reconcile with her “real self,” because she is herself confused since she is constantly trying to enact a prefect feminine identity while actually being the man in the house. Wilde also adds that “women not only dominate the narrative, but also dominate the men within the narrative. Queen Elinor is in control of her family and the kingdom, forever dictating orders to her husband” (2014, 142, emphases added). To heighten the contrast between the men and the women in the story as well as to enforce “the Queen Bear” (in stead of bee) image, the men are presented as troublesome children (similarly to Snow White’s dwarves about 80 years ago): “Men are portrayed as dumb and emotionally unstable and this is signified when a male suitor throws a tantrum when he doesn’t win the competition and is rejected by Merida; this enforces the notion of feminist humour and power over the narrative (Shifman and Lemish 2010).” (Wilde 2014, 142, emphases added) The use of humor is powerful (that is why women were traditionally discredited as being able to produce humor (sometimes even understand it) while definitely being discouraged from practicing it), and that in this story, it is women’s humor that provides the perspective is not an insignificant aspect, additionally, we often even encounter feminist humor in the story, a rare feast up to that point in Disney/Pixar in general (even though there have been exceptions to the rule).

I also would like to discuss the question of mother-daughter relationships, an excessively popular theme of multicultural literatures (see Kovács 2006, 89-90). In Disney/Pixar stories one finds the typical lack of this topic as well as the absence of a living and functional mother  in general, because this throws light on why it is especially important that we have a Mother Bear in this story that is able and capable, and most of all, present and alive throughout the whole narrative. Although it seems that it is not only Disney/Pixar’s fault that we do not have positive and, at least, living mother figures in fairy tale films as Sarah Boxer claims: “[t]he dead-mother plot is a fixture of fiction, so deeply woven into our storytelling fabric that it seems impossible to unravel or explain,” (2014) which highlights why we have so many dead, missing or dysfunctional mothers. Amy M. Davis points out that the Disney mothers are usually either dead or unable to protect their children (she calls them “powerless”), however, she also adds that not only the mothers but the parents in general are also either “absent” or weak” – and it is actually in accordance with the “folk and fairy tale tradition” (2012, 102-103). Allison Craven is also of the opinion that Disney heroines typically have “bad or non-existent relationships with mother figures, but great loyalty and affection to father figures” (2002, 128). Lynda Haas, while trying to rehabilitate Disney mothers, cites Irigaray claiming that “the whole of our Western culture is based upon the murder of the mother” (1995, 195), which again shows a much deeper antagonism towards mothers within Western culture than the realm of Disney/Pixar. Haas also adds that “the typical mother is absent, generously good, powerfully evil, or a silent other,” but obviously not a complex human being with an identity of her own, and that “mothers are either sentimentalized or disdained; in either case, their identity and their work are simultaneously erased, naturalized, and devalued,” (1995, 196) which again supports the prevalent Western idea that mothers are non-entities, and their only function is to be a “zombie-like” incubator, then a nurturer who is sacrificed on the altar of the production of offspring and future generations, and who can be dispensed with as soon as the offspring are secured. Sarah Boxer cites Carolyn Dever arguing that the development of a child’s personality is triggered by the missing (of the) mother, because her non-presence makes the child mature, (2014) which again is in agreement with what Davis declares: that “the lack of a strong parent” is what makes, even “forces,” the protagonist (male or female) to mature and become an “independent adult” (102). Bruno Bettelheim is also cited by Sarah Boxer arguing that the death of the good mother and her frequent substitution with an evil stepmother in fairy tales actually help the child resolve his/her conflicts with his/her real mother, who is obviously not good and angelic all the time. (2014)

Brave with its masculinized heroine as well as masculinized mother is a unique exemplar of a female empowerment narrative. It was a groundbreaking move on the part of Disney/Pixar that they actually created a boy heroine who is masculine in many respects, and who is much rather a boy than a girl within her family as well as the first-born, hence, an heir/ess to the throne. She is a boy heroine with outstanding skills in horse-riding, archery and sword-fighting etc. while evidently she is in the status of a first-born boy within her family. Her depiction is also unconventional because her movements, acts, gestures and talk are not typically and traditionally feminine, for example she walks (with a wide stride and arms thrown apart) and acts as men and boys do in general. She is generally shown in active and often even dangerous physical situations (for example, climbing a cliff that no one dares to climb and drinking from the waterfall that, according to legend, only the (male) chosen ones can do etc.), and with phallic objects in her hands (she is shooting with bow and arrow while riding, even backwards, but she is very adept at swordfighting too). She is a great fighter no matter what the weapon is, even though her favourite is the bow and arrow (i.e. archery, which, it has to be admitted, is not a typically male endeavour) but she defeats men and bears with great skill. However, she is not only good in conventionally masculine activities in the physical sense but also intellectually as well as concerning leadership skills. When she has to distract the men from recognizing her mother-turned-bear as well as when she realizes what a diplomatic chaos she caused by winning her own hand, she makes a speech eloquently as well as persuasively while she manages to pacify everyone and unite the tribes while strengthening the kingdom. In her speech, she appeals to the affinity between the men (now fighting against each other) by emphasizing how they have always fought together, how they have always helped each other, defended each other, and why it is important that they can rely on each other, and that deep down, they are all friends and brothers. With these ideas, Merida evokes the role of affection even in politics – what Zoltán Vajda described in connection with Thomas Jefferson’s ideas concerning the hemispheric symapthies, and how collaboration and unity within the Americas can be achieved by highlighting the affinity and the brotherhood between the people living in the Americas against Europe (2015). Even if, here, we have a Scottish kingdom, but the logic of unity based on affinity works also because Jefferson based his concepts on (Scottish) Enlightenment thinking as a source for it (Vajda 2015).

However, what is even more intriguing is that, for the first time, the focus is on the mother-daughter relationship – a delicate and complicated issue rarely tackled by Disney/Pixar creators – and it is not presented as some idealized, saccharin/sugar-coated candy fluff, but as what it is: a bear fight. Interestingly, Lynda Haas deals with a Chinese-American analogy on the mother-daughter relationships and there the tiger is mentioned as an animal representative for the mother, while the relationship between the mother and the daughter is explained as the fight of tigers, from which there is no escape; the analogy of the fight of predators is presented as inevitable in the case of mothers and daughters (1995, 208-209). With a realist depiction of the psycho-dynamics of mother-daughter relationships, girl viewers – a key target group of Disney – can discover that this female coming of age story shows with its strong heroine and strong mother how they can fight their way through a tough, masculine world and how they can contest and start to reformulate the patriarchal world. Merida can defeat her male rivals (supposedly suitors) with ease and expertise in the memorable scene of the arching contest (where the young men compete for her hand) by ignoring markers of female/feminine beauty and behavior as well as acting as the first-born offspring of her family (that she is) competing for her own hand, i.e. her freedom and autonomy. In a symbolic act, she rips her confining bodice in order to pull the string of her bow properly and stands defiant with wildly flowing hair while she defends her own right to her own hand thus winning her freedom. This symbolic act/event unfolds in a way that, first, she is bound in a corset and a tight, feminine dress by her mother (her head covered, since she is not a girl, but a soon-to-be-married young woman), then, she first pulls a little, flaming red and untamed, curly lock of hair out of the head cover to destroy the “perfect” image, then, she competes for her own hand as the first-born in her family, while tearing her dress as well as accidentally wounding her face slightly causing a scar – one of the most important tokens of feminine beauty all over the world: “[w]ithin patriarchy and allegory, ‘beauty’ is the essential quality of femaleness” (Craven 2002, 138). With all these acts she destroys her femininity and she makes everybody forget about her femaleness likewise.

The fully-emancipated self of Merida, the woman warrior, is further strengthened in the climactic scene resembling an Oedipal conflict, as she (as the first-born “son” and “heir” of the family) stands confidently, bravely and fiercely (sword in hand) between her father (making him fall) and her Bear Mother shouting at him: “I will not let you kill my mother” (Andrews and Chapman 2012, 1 h 17 mins). Throughout the entire story, interestingly, there are several (mutual) rescuing scenes between the mother and the daughter, vice versa. As a culmination of these mutual rescues, Merida refuses to get married and rides away with her mother at the end of the story – again, as if the Disney artists got inspiration from Angela Carter. From this time on, a real feminist empowerment is granted to the Disney heroines, or rather female heroes, and not solely through masculine deeds of grandeur and violence but also overcoming the stereotypes according to which self-fulfillment is achieved through the pursuit of beauty and finding a male partner. This is also exemplified by Merida’s major joint masculine-feminine act towards the end through which she manages to save her mother and unite her family: she is riding her horse while mending (sewing) the tapestry (that symbolizes family unity and her feminine activities) she cut with her sword previously; then, she defends her mother with her sword against her father, and, finally, covers her mother with the mended tapestry while crying and hugging her. Thus, the end (just like the entire story) is a unique combination of the feminine and the masculine pointing towards androgyny.

Now, I would like to discuss (the figure of) the bear in more detail and focus on why it is exceptional and extraordinary that we have a female bear in Brave. As it has already been mentioned, bears in literature and film are almost always male and even within anthropological and ethnographic writings it is primarily referred to as male but there are a few exceptions, of course. When we think about the figure of the bear in children’s literature, animated films or in culture at large, the first figures are also generally male, just to name a few, such as the Teddy Bear, Smokey the Bear, Winnie the Pooh, Rupert the Bear, Baloo in The Jungle Book (1967), or when Disney decided to make an animated film about a bear it was Brother Bear (2003), even if, in Pocahontas (1995), the bear is female having also cubs (yet, it has about 2 minutes screen time). However, in other productions, meaning not Disney, the bear is primarily male and often angry and aggressive too, for example, Over the Hedge (2006) (DreamWorks). In Kung Fu Panda (2008) (DreamWorks), even though having a benign bear it is still a male one (and interestingly, as this story supposedly belongs to Chinese culture, we find a female tiger too). We also have Yogi Bear (Hanna-Barbera) from 1958 on, later he got a girlfriend: Cindy Bear. In The Hillbilly Bears (1965-67, Hanna-Barbera), we have a granny bear smoking a pipe and young girl bear too. Later, the Gummi Bears also arrived (Disney’s Adventures of the Gummi Bears, 1985-91) with Grammi Bear a grandma, and Sunni bear, who is a teenage bear girl. When thinking about bears in visual culture, the Care Bears cannot be omitted either, also having quite many female members of the community starting in 1981 (and the first movie came out in 1985). Goldilocks and the Three Bears, as an earlier still recurring story, has bear parents as well as a cub, thus, supposedly one of the parents is female. There are two other examples of female bears: one of them is a Blackfoot Plains Indian tribe tale entitled The Bear-Woman, in which an enraged woman turns herself into a bear and attacks her family when her husband kills her bear lover (Silver 2005, 99; Underberg 2005, 135); and the other one is Ted Hughes’ tale entitled How the Polar Bear Became (1963) about a female polar bear who always wins a beauty contest against the other animals, however, this story does not depict the bear in a positive light either since it is about vanity and white racial superiority that ends in self-imposed exile to save her purity, whiteness and beauty (Grenby 2008, 25-26). An interesting addition has to be made to this list, which is almost an exception to the rule being a positive female bear character. She is to be found in a Hungarian animated TV series entitled Kérem a következőt! (Next Please!, my translation (1974-1975, 1984, Pannónia Filmstúdió)), which is about a tiny, male, owl doctor called Dr. Bubó, whose nurse and assistant is a giant, female brown bear named Ursula. In spite of being enormous (often using her weight and body size to solve problems in the episodes) she is quite feminine, but most of all, she is a very capable, no-nonsense woman, who often even makes sarcastic comments, yet, throughout she is devoted to her tiny doc (being rather enamored) and her job. However, even one of the latest famous bears in products offered to children, also coming from Russia (where there are still quite many bears in real life too), is Masha and the Bear (2009-2013) featuring a naughty little girl named Masha and a daddy figure bear who is struggling with her (later he is also provided with a female love interest but she appears only sporadically, he is the important character). In Slavic nations and cultures, there is a taboo concerning calling the bear by its name and they have various taboo words to avoid the evocation of the creature (Garry and El-Shamy 2005, 116). Bieder also noted that there are euphemisms and taboo words for bears all over the world because they have or are under the control of supernatural powers and should not be offended (2005, 51).

According to Maria Tatar (1987), enchanted or bewitched husbands are quite frequent in the Grimm stories especially “ferocious beasts” like lions and bears, these often become the “consorts” of the “fairy-tale heroines” (1987, 176). In some cases, there were marriages between human females and male animals, for example a girl and a bear for a husband is mentioned by Tatar (1987, 156). In Snow White and Rose Red, the prince-husband is also a bear (Tatar 1987, 176). Tatar also adds that animal husbands and lovers can be of various species but most of the time they are “savage” beasts (1987, 176). Jack Zipes, in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, says the same since these men are “wild, roving beast[s] (wolf, bear, horse, raven, swan) in most of the animal bridegroom tales, and this condition represents his homelessness and undomesticity” (2006, 49). It has to be highlighted that in a lot of stories the male bear appears as a lover to a human female as if representing animalistic lust, unbridled passion and unconquerable sexuality. Bieder also mentions that “[h]umans have called on bears for warmth, food, medicine, power and protection. An aura of sexual attraction between humans and bears has long existed in legends […]” (2005, 74). Bruno Bettelheim, in A mese bűvölete és a bontakozó gyermeki lélek (The Uses of Enchantment), also adds that the animal bridegrooms or husbands are almost always dangerous, predatory animals that incite fear and disgust. This all serves as a mode to cope with the fears and dangers of sexuality, in his opinion. (1985, 269) Bettelheim also discusses the Norwegian tale entitled East of the Sun and West of the Moon, in which we also have a white bear as a husband, and also argues that these tales all help in resolving anxieties towards sexuality and accepting sexual desire as well as pleasure as not sinful, as something right and permissible. These tales all teach us how to develop a healthy sexuality and relationship with our partner, and not refuse the other and the act of sex as animalistic and repulsive. (1985, 307-308)

It also has to be added that, most of the time, when a woman turns into a bear in a story (for children or adults likewise) it is usually the result of her relationship with a male bear beforehand and it is supposed to be a punishment. Robert E. Bieder also claims that “[o]ne of the most universal tales – versions are found from North America to Siberia – is the legend of the woman who marries a bear” (2005, 56). Bieder also mentions the Ancient Greek legend of Callisto, who was turned into a bear as a punishment for becoming pregnant by Zeus (2005, 70). That is why, it is again of paramount importance that Queen Elinor turns into a bear not through the intervention of a man or a male bear but her human daughter. Thus, the focus is not on her being sexual or attractive as a female or on an intergender experience, but on same gender allegiances and how women relate to each other, how women can affect each other and help the other grow as an individual and an independent agent with subjectivity. Although it is evident that Merida being Queen Elinor’s daughter somewehere involved female sexuality on the way since without it it is hard to become a mother, but at the current moment of ursine transformations sexuality does not even appear and her relationship with any man is irrelevant. Additionally, the “magical object” that triggers the metamorphosis is a feminine symbol, or even a maternal one, since her daughter gives her a little circular cake wich has a red (supposedly jam) center resembling a breast with a nipple, while it is surrounded by round blueberries.

Keith Booker, in Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s films, analyses Brother Bear (2003) arguing, similarly to Nagy who basically studies cultures and peoples living within the territory of Russia, that the world of bears and humans as well as those of the natural and the supernatural run in parallel and sometimes overlap. Even though, this story focuses on Native Americans, even more specifically the Inuit culture, the rule here is also (similarly to Hanti, Ougur etc. cultures in Russian territories) that you cannot kill a bear because of hatred, anger or revenge but only as a last resort or mere necessity as self-defense or if food is scarce and killing a bear is for survival etc. This story also argues that you have to respect bears and it is of utmost importance to keep the natural balance. Here, the natural as well as the spiritual worlds get united and the supernatural elements transform Kenai into a bear as a form of punishment to teach him a lesson about how to be a decent human being.  His only aim is to become human again but his bear education turns out to be so effective that he remains a bear in the end as a choice and strives to restore and safeguard the natural balance he originally disrupted by killing a mother bear, that of Koda, whom he decides to raise alone. (Booker 2010, 71) An interesting parallel between cultures that occupy so distant territories as the United States and Russia is that, Nagy, in his researches, also found that the bear was referred to as “little brother” (2006, 136) or “big brother” (2014, 345) or “animal bro” (2014, 347), as taboo words are generally used, hence, even the name as Brother Bear is similar. In Brother Bear, Kenai is transformed into a bear to learn a lesson about how to be a good person/human. Queen Elinor’s transformation is similarly for educational purposes in the sense that she should rethink women’s roles and duties and readjust her values and ideals concerning femininity and to rewrite patriarchal rules, regulations and stories.

When analyzing Brother Bear, Prajna Parasher mostly criticizes racism and focuses on the harm and injustice done to Native American cultures (2013, 44-47), it is only said about the bear itself that “American Indians, who both knew bears and depended on them, treated the animal with honor and respect” (2013, 46). And eventually, Parasher closes with that “[t]he Indian is as safely dead as the werewolf and the bear” (2013, 47) suggesting that all of these figures, and the transformation of the Other (mostly racial others) into animals that are dangerous, can be done away with, and then, the White Man is assured that he managed to cope with his fears concerning the wild and the wilderness. (Parasher 2013, 47) Douglas Brode, in Multiculturalism and the Mouse, when analyzing (mostly earlier) bear characters or a man called “Strong Bear” in Disney, always discusses them as male; and their being a bear is only important as an interpretation for a racial other. In his interpretation, it is not the bear that is important but that it stands for a racial other and that different races just like different animal species should get along. (2005, 18, 44, 242) In the International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (2nd edition, Vol I) edited by Peter Hunt (2004), there are several bears mentioned – all of whom are male (even though the friendly kind such as the Paddington Bear, Rupert the Bear etc.), but considering the length and scope of the entire book, very tiny proportion is provided for these few bears. Sean Griffin, in Tinker Belles and Evil Queens, mentions only a no-name, angry, male bear who is finally defeated by Oswald, the rabbit hero in early Disney, and is humiliated by being skinned and he has to appear in bra and panties (2000, 8). The other bear mentioned here is Baloo, who is simply called a “beach bum bear” and nothing else follows concerning bears (Griffin 2000, 77).

Jack Zipes, in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, mentions the following bear examples: Beowulf’s name means “Bear” (2000, 66). In a story by Nancy Ekholm Burkert, one of twin brothers, who were separated at birth, is raised by a bear. (Zipes 2000, 78) Lisa Goldstein is mentioned to have written Brother Bear (1995) that was inspired by Goldilocks and a Native American legend entitled The Girl who Married a Bear (Zipes 2000, 213). Then, Basile’s tale entitled The She-Bear is mentioned (Zipes 2000, 255). Janosch wrote a tale about a little bear and a little tiger who were friends (Zipes 2000, 269). Zipes, in this overwhelming work of 600 pages, mentions bears only a few times and only once as possibly female. David Whitley, points out that, in Pocahontas, Smith does not even think that a bear can be a mother and immediately tries to shoot the animal, when Pocahontas does not let him, it turns out that it is, actually, a mother. However, Whitley finds it justly problematic that the human couple then starts to cuddle and play with the bear cub(s) ignoring the bear mother’s reaction or her true instincts that would immediately set her to kill those who come near her offspring. (2012, 87) Whitley also discusses Brother Bear and calls it an “eco-kitsch” that is insensitive towards the natural world. The animated film meets only the most superficial demands concerning drawing animals, and the animators were not interested in real animal behavior or movements. Additionally in his opinion, the protagonist is drawn and behaves like a “bemused human dressed up in a bear outfit after his transformation.” (Whitley 2012, 94-95) Later, he also discusses Baloo stating that he is just a generic bear and more or less being acceptable even though providing dubious guidance to Mowgli (Whitley 2012, 100). However, Chris Pallant, in Demystifying Disney, argues that Brother Bear was “the penultimate Neo-Disney feature” (2011, 115), and that it presented a bear’s point of view, “which challenges the assumptions about the bear’s place both within the animal kingdom and in relation to humankind” (Wells 2009b, 45, qtd. in Pallant 2011, 116). Additionally, it is suggested that this is a “story of a boy who became a man by becoming a bear” (Wells 2009b, 47, qtd.  in Pallant 2011, 116). Later, it is added that there is a “moral bilateralism” (characters having both “‘good’ and ‘bad’ qualities”, no strict binary between them) in such Neo-Disney works as Brother Bear too (Pallant 2011, 123). It is also added that in Monsters, Inc. (Pixar, 2001) Sulley had “the look and behavior of a bear” (Wells 2009b, 112, qtd. in Pallant 2011, 135-136). Alessandra Levorato, in Language and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition, discusses a Chinese tale (1979, Chiang Mi) entitled “Goldflower and the Bear”, which is actually the Little Red Riding Hood story except with a bear; in the end, the girl outwits and kills him (2003, 11). Here, the bear is not primarily evil but is depicted with various emotions and reactions (Levorato 2003, 22). Later, this very bear is, however, identified as wicked and evil explicitly (Levorato 2003, 44). Nevertheless, the girl is clever, resourceful and brave, she represents reason, and she can take care of herself, the Bear does not even have a chance against her (Levorato 2003, 98, 185).

In Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney (edited by Jack Zipes, Pauline Greenhill and Kendra Magnus-Johnston), Zipes discusses the figure of a teddy bear as male in a Czech animated film as well (Zipes 2016a, 15). Later, Rupert the Bear is also mentioned (again male), then the Norwegian fairy tale film entitled The Polar Bear King is discussed with a male bear again (Oxfeldt 2016, 115-116). Later, in the Journey to the Christmas Star, we find another male bear (Oxfeldt 2016, 117-118). There are some examples about bears but they all are male in general. There is only one exception, Brave discussed by Zipes. It is a brief analysis and has some great insights, but ironically not much is said about the fact that the bear is the mother, except that Queen Elinor turns into a “black bear” (Zipes 2016b, 282). In my opinion, it is a brown bear. According to Robert E. Bieder, the black bear is an American species and it originated from Asia, not Europe (2005, 11, 16, 35-36). The (European) brown bear “inhabited most of Europe, where it still resides in limited numbers” (Bieder 2005, 16). However, Zipes concretely analyzes Brave citing Brenda Chapman stating that she wanted to create a strong role model of substance in the figure of Merida, and not simply a pretty face that waits for romance (2016b, 281). Zipes declares that “Brave is indeed a feminist fairy tale film, and the fact that it was made by the Pixar Studio distinguishes it from the typical Disney animated films of this period […] with their “Barbie” princesses” (2016b, 281, emphasis added). He also adds that “Brave is a carnivalesque version of “King Thrushbeard”, which can be compared to The Taming of the Shrew” (Zipes 2016b, 281, emphasis added). An interesting piece of information is also provided about the female director and writer of the story that

[t]hough Chapman, the first female director of animated films at Pixar and screenplay writer, was ironically taken off the film she created because of creative disagreements, her basic “feminist” message comes through. It is not a didactic film by any means. At times comic, it is one of the few fairy tale films that has explored mother/daughter relationships with tenderness and compassion. (Zipes 2016b, 282, emphases added)

I also agree that it is really a story that presents the mother-daughter relationship in all its complexities with fights and disagreements but eventually as a loving, tender and compassionate bond that makes both participants grow and improve. And as it has already been mentioned the story’s use of women’s humor provides a new comic representation and approach likewise. In Zipes’ view, “Brave breaks with conventional fairy tale films to show […] complex familial and social relations.” (2016b, 282)

Other reasons why, in general, bears are not conceived of as females in stories are basically the masculine traits and (semi-)godlike abilities associated with this animal as defined and discussed by Robert E. Bieder and Zoltán Nagy (ethnographic, anthropological and interdisciplinary studies of American territories and Russian territories respectively): bears are supposed to possess “strength and spiritual power” (Bieder 2005, 40), physical as well as sacred power while also being able to provide “spiritual protection” (Bieder 2005, 49). The Tlingit of Alaska say that you always have to speak carefully about bears because they hear you even from far away having the ability understand human speech and take revenge if not being respectful (Bieder 2005, 38). North American Indians consider the brown bear and (close relative) the grizzly as “very powerful ‘people’” having shamanic abilities (Bieder 2005, 39). Bieder also uses such terms for the bears as “semi-sacred creatures who possess great powers” (2005, 75) or “[b]ears represented power; a raw force” (2005, 76). They also supposedly possess remarkable abilities such as shape shifting – they can change shape, they have the power of resurrection as well as a life-renewing ability (Bieder 2005, 65). Lakotas did not only believe in the bears’ capacity for reincarnation but also for curing, medical or healing powers: “bear doctors” (Bieder 2005, 67).

Zoltán Nagy, who was studying the figure of the bear from an anthropological and ethnographic point of view, claims that this animal is especially complex and always has a central place in the culture of the people with whom it has contact. The bear is always so definitive in that given culture that this very culture is almost entirely woven around it. Additionally, the bear is never simply looked at as a mere animal, but a creature that has complex profane as well as sacrilegious aspects and associations. The bear is always viewed as the king or czar of the forest and humans are only visitors in in the woods, which is accepted as his (!) realm. The bear is almost always and exclusively thought of as male. (Nagy 2006, 111) It has a very complex “genealogy” being partly an animal, partly a human and partly a god (Mandelstam-Balzer 190 qtd. in Nagy 2006, 107; Nagy 2014, 341). Nagy also adds that the great respect and reverence surrounding the bear are also partly attributed to its strong similarity to humans having similar skeletal structure as well as bodily features, what is more, a soul (2006, 133; 2014, 339). Bears are also believed to have “personalities” like humans (2006, 133; 2014, 339). Within Hanti culture and legends, there are several stories about human-bear transformations back and forth (2006, 133; 2014, 339). Nevertheless, the bear is still much rather viewed as more than a human: as superhuman, transhuman and/or supernatural (2014, 341), beyond the human; it is still more than a human physically as well as intellectually transcending human capabilities. The bear is still conceived of as omniscient knowing whenever it is talked of or even thought of. (2006, 135; 2014, 340) However, both bears and humans try to avoid encounters, direct contact and conflicts (2014, 344). They much rather have parallel worlds and their paths cross each other from time to time but they try to stay in their own realms not disturbing the other one (2014, 344). They both respect the other and look at each other as equals and if they meet they should never challenge the other or incite rivalry, they should always keep their “pact”, “agreement” and delicate balance intact (2014, 348-349).

Thus, Queen Elinor by turning into a bear gets associated with masculine traits and endeavours as well as power, she also supposedly acquires godlike abilities and a superhuman status. By becoming a bear she transcends the traditional realm of women even physically with the (unwitting) help of her daughter, Merida, and really turns into the “king” of the realm and the woods. Except, this time we have a Queen Bear, who reinterprets the role of a queen from various points of view. Hence this posthuman, trans-species as well as supernatural experience and encounter facilitates the rewriting of what it means to be a woman, and open up options for women beyond patriarchy.

Works Cited

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THE POWER OF HEMISPHERIC SYMPATHY: SENTIMENTAL ASPECTS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON’S CONCEPTION OF INTER-AMERICAN RELATIONS

Zoltán Vajda

Thomas Jefferson paid close attention to the independence movements of the colonies of Spain, wishing them well for their efforts to develop political systems based on the principle of self-government. At the same time, he was skeptical about the ability of the people of the sequels to develop viable republics, largely because of the ethnic, class and cultural diversity of the population. Nonetheless, this paper argues, he saw a commonality between their economic conditions and that of the United States that made him believe in the possibility of their cooperation in the Western Hemisphere vis-á-vis European powers on the basis of republican political economy. The abundance of free arable land in the New World made it a ground of hemispheric sympathy connecting his country and its southern neighbors.[14]

Keywords: Thomas Jefferson, sequels of Spain’s American colonies, republican political culture, hemispheric sympathy

Introduction

When in the summer of 1776 Britain’s thirteen North American colonies decided to declare their independence, they―at the same time―created a new nation that they felt ready to govern itself by principles gaining ground in the late-eighteenth-century western world. Fifty some years later, the South and Central American colonies of Spain began, one after the other, their struggle for independence, engaging in military conflicts with the mother country and one another hoping to establish independent states (Bethell 1985, 3:45-46; Bakewell 1997, 356-80; Anderle 2010, 62-65).

An active participant in the North American struggle for independence, Thomas Jefferson was convinced of the ultimate triumph of the sacrificial efforts made by the Patriots. As he would later reflect on the revolutionary events, their “enthusiasm and a few pulsasions of blood” proved decisive in overwhelming an otherwise powerful enemy (Jefferson to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786, in Peterson 1984, 875). At the same time, he felt more ambiguous about the revolutions taking place south of the border of the Union. Nonetheless, as far as relations of the United States with the newly independent countries of the South were concerned, he was positive about their friendly nature ultimately to be generated by hemispheric conditions.

In this article I will discuss Jefferson’s view of the new states of Spanish America, concentrating on the way that he envisaged their future as well as their relationship to the United States. In spite of his pessimism about their initial ability to develop self-governing republics as well as his understanding of their potential threat to the United States, his vision of the future of Spanish America, as I will argue, contained an emphatic sentimental element concerning the relationship between the United States and the former colonies of the Spanish Empire in the western hemisphere. More particularly, in Jefferson’s mind, this was a special space determined by a contemporary conception of sympathy that served as a common ground for such relations.

Jefferson’s idea of Spanish colonies

The sporadic scholarly treatment of Jefferson’s ideas of Spanish America remain confined to his general attitude toward the sequels without an attempt at exploring their deeper significance in relation to contemporary cultural ideals of sentimentalism (Steele2012, 96-98; Peterson 1975, 936-37).

This is all the more striking since the understanding of Jefferson as a sentimental thinker has been established by scholarship. Now we can see, for instance, how his notions about the need for independence were embedded in the sentimental tradition, or more particularly, were derived from Scottish Enlightenment thought (Coviello 2002; Coviello 2005, 160-69; Wills1978, 307-19). In a similar vein, now we have a better sense of his conception of nationhood rooted in sentimental philosophy as well as his ideas on race relations being informed by contemporary beliefs in affection (Onuf 2000a; Onuf 2000b; Saillant1993). These influences, as will be seen below, can also be detected in his discussion of US-Spanish American relations. Before seeing that, however, it is indispensable to assess his understanding of the major characteristics of the region and its people.[15]

Similarly to his fellow countrymen, Jefferson only had a limited amount of information available about lands lying south of the United States. As he would admit to German naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, Spanish America, just like the rest of the southern part of the western hemisphere, was inaccessible to the rest of the world (Jefferson to Humboldt, March 6, 1809, in Lipscomb and Bergh 1903-1904 12:263). Jefferson maintained that the physical distance that separated the United States from the South American colonies of the Spanish empire made it difficult for Americans to find information about the region (Jefferson to James Monroe, November 24, 1801, in Peterson 1984, 1098).

Nonetheless, Jefferson managed to gather some intelligence about the region in three ways. In the first place, he received first-hand accounts from visitors from Spanish America before the independence movements (Jefferson to John Jay, May 4, 1787, in Ford 1892-1899, 4:383-85; Jefferson to Valentine de Foronda, October 4, 1809, in Ford 1892-1899, 9:260). In the second, he had access to contemporary descriptions of scholarly significance such as the ones published by Alexander von Humboldt, who had conducted extended research into the area, and even visited him in Washington (Whitaker1960, 317, 320-21; Peterson 1970, 738; Schwartz 48-49). Finally, Jefferson also gained information about the possessions of Spain in the New World through historical works that he himself held in his library (Sowerby1952-1959, 4:251-93). This body of knowledge was complemented by his view of Spain, in turn informed by a system of ideas that was ultimately rooted in its treatment of the indigenous people of the American continent. According to this image that went down in history by the name “black legend” (“la leyenda negra”), the Spanish colonizers appear as merciless brutes driven by their greed for gold subjugating and abusing the native inhabitants of the land (Powell 1971; DeGuzmán 2005, 4-5).

This negative view of Spain as a colonizing power in the New World also included another element based on Jefferson’s more general notions about the retrograde system of religion and government that he associated with Spain: he was strongly opposed to Catholicism in general, with its alleged moral declension in general and the role of priesthood in generating tenets he held irrational in particular (Conkin 2002, 32, 34-35).

In addition to his views of the mother country, Jefferson’s image of Spain’s American colonies was also conditioned by his general ideas of government. In the first place, he found the “character of the people” primary in constructing any system of government. More precisely, he connected the moral and intellectual capacities of the people with self-government holding that only an enlightened citizenry was capable of governing itself freely with the utmost degree of liberty (Peterson 1975, 198, 336-37). He, for instance, was in support of the provision of the new Constitution of Spain making franchise conditional on literacy (Jefferson to Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816, in Ford 1904-1905, 11:523; Jefferson to Luis de Onís, April 28, 1814, in Washington 1869, 6:342). The other end of the scale would denote a people of dependence, incapable of self-government. To Jefferson this was best exemplified by the state of slavery, resulting in the lack of freedom coupled with the lack of consent and hence arbitrary wielding of power (Peterson 1975, 214).

For Jefferson, nevertheless, it was possible for a dependent people to undergo a development ultimately resulting in abandoning its colonial status ultimately acquiring the ability of self-government. In fact, this was a pattern that informed his idea of expanding the United States by admitting new states. They would originally have territorial status only before reaching the appropriate level of development in terms of population and political institutions. In this way they could become members of Jefferson’s “empire of liberty,” with equally developed states, capable of governing themselves, existing together, leaving their temporary colonial status behind (Onuf 1995, 68-70, 72; Saler 2002, 364-68; Boyd 1948, 538-54; Onuf 1983, 44-45).

It was the admission of Louisiana as a new state into the Union that, for the first time, represented to Jefferson the pattern of development for self-government and the integration of a people steeped in Spanish metropolitan rule. For him, the integration of the Spanish (and French) population of Louisiana posed a special challenge because of their long exposure to colonial rule and the lack of self-government. In this way, they proved profoundly different from the Anglo-European population of the Union and hence their existence under one government was deemed problematic. This, on the other hand, called for the lengthening of their colonial status after admission. Consequently, certain rights, for instance, were to be introduced only gradually or the governor was to be made independent from the will of the electorate (Kastor 2004, 87, 48).

All these considerations and experiences had an impact on Jefferson’s vision of the Spanish colonies in the New World striving for independence. His basic expectation was that the newly independent states would have difficulty establishing and maintaining republican governments because the colonial heritage having left an indelible imprint on the character of the peoples of the region.

He was convinced that, in the first place, the people of Spanish America, because of centuries of exposure to colonial rule, had the smallest degree of liberty and lived under the greatest amount of (despotic) power (Jefferson to John Jay, May 4, 1787, in Ford 1892-1899, 4:384). Hence, in the second place, he also held that “military despotism” was the most probable form of government for the new states, because their people had got accustomed to being governed by others with the utmost political power and minimal degree of liberty, characteristic of such systems (Jefferson to Humboldt, April 14, 1811, in Washington 1869, 5:580).

In addition to the effect of the form of government, however, Jefferson also identified another factor that contributed to the shaping of such peoples’ character. He understood that these people were not enlightened enough to govern themselves. Most of the population of Spanish America lacked education and, to make matters worse for him, they had been under the influence of the Catholic clergy keeping them in ignorance as well as in submission. (Jefferson to Dupont de Nemours, April 15, 1815, in Ford 1904-1905, 11:204; Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, April 14, 1811, in Washington 1869, 5:581). All this would result, Jefferson believed, in the freshly independent countries of Spanish America engaging in military conflicts among themselves, further promoting conditions for military governments (Jefferson to John Adams, May 17, 1818, Ford 1904-1905, 12:95; Jefferson to Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816, Ford 1904-1905, 11:524; Kovács 2013, 60 and 2010, 56).

Jefferson was so convinced that too much liberty for the peoples of Spanish America would result in political problems that he even suggested the “nominal supremacy,” the rule of the mother country be restored over them and removed only gradually. This solution, he held, would also have offered the immediate benefit of preventing military confrontation among the sequels (Jefferson to the Marquis de Lafayette, May 14, 1817, in Ford 1892-1899, 10:85).

Furthermore, considering the consequences of the political development of the sequels for their relations with the United States, Jefferson held that the “problem of neighborhood” that at the time characterized European power relations having nation states tending to start war on one another was also going to plague the new countries of the former Spanish American empire as well as their relationship with the United States (Lewis 1998, 1-9, 12-40). He believed that the sequels engaging in surreptitious military confrontations were, in fact, temporarily following the European way of placing foreign relations on the principle of the balance of powers and was only hopeful that they would not become strong enough to threaten the United States in a military sense (Vajda 2007, 285).

Finally, Jefferson understood that under similar conditions of productions, neighboring countries south of the United States, once independent, would pose a threat to its economic interests, able to find markets for their produce as rivals. He suggested to James Monroe in 1814 in connection with the economic power of Spanish American countries, writing that

[W]hen they are free, they will drive every article of our produce from every market, by underselling it, and change the condition of our existence, forcing us into other habits and pursuits, we shall, indeed, have in exchange some commerce with them, but in what I know not, for we shall have nothing to offer which they cannot raise cheaper … (Lewis 1998, 79, 218; Jefferson to Monroe, February 4, 1816, in Ford 1892-1899,10:19; see also Jefferson to Le Chevalier Onís, April 28, 1814, in Washington 1869, 6:342-43).

For all his negative views on the peoples of Spanish America, Jefferson was ultimately hopeful of building good relations with them. In the first place, in connection with their capacity for self-government, Jefferson believed in their ability to undergo change. He was positive that a new generation of Spanish Americans would be able to improve their capacities in a way to live up to the expectations of republican self-government through education (Jefferson to the Marquis de Lafayette, November 30, 1813, in Ford 1904-1905, 11:359; Jefferson to Dupont de Nemours, April 15, 1811, in Ford 1904-1905, 11:204) And in proportion to their becoming enlightened and educated, they would, on the other hand, have an increasing degree of liberty and self-government (Jefferson to John Adams, May 17, 1818, in Ford 1904-1905, 12:96)

Moreover, for all the difficulties that Jefferson associated with the independence movements of the former American colonies of Spain, he also envisioned an alliance between them and the United States based on a sentimental conception of space, mainly in contrast to Europe. In the first place, independent of the immediate context, Jefferson would often refer to the people of South America as “brethren,” expressing the idea of commonality between them and the United States (Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, June 13, 1817, in Ford 1904-1905, 12:68; Jefferson to Destutt de Tracy, December 26, 1820, in Ford 1904-1905, 12:184; Jefferson to the Marquis de Lafayette, May 14, 1817, in Ford, 1892-1899, 10:84). Furthermore, he tended to formulate a positive attitude to the people of Spanish America as part of a vision related to a more global geopolitical context: Jefferson believed that refusing to support their independence equaled having Spain as a “natural enemy” of the United States with Spanish colonies ultimately joining the mother country in a possible military conflict. Hence he argued for the United States’ support for their becoming independent for national security reasons, in the hope of weakening Spain’s influences in the western hemisphere. At the same time, out of more general considerations, he also believed that “[T]hey have a right to be free, and we a right to aid them, as a strong man has a right to assist a weak one assailed by a robber or murderer” (Jefferson to James Monroe, February 4, 1816, in Ford 1892-1899, 10:19). Furthermore, he also intimated to Monroe his anticipation of war with Spain, yet in such a case, he believed, the United States should opt for “joining the South Americans, and entering into treaties of alliance with them” (Ford 1892-1899, 10:19), “choosing to have them with us, rather than against us” (Ford 1892-1899, 10:20). Finally, in the spirit of cooperation, he would also support commercial cooperation between US economic forces and those of the sequels. In a letter to William Short, therefore, he also expressed his wish “to see the fleets of Brazil and the U.S. riding together as brethren of the same family, and pursuing the same object” (Jefferson to William Short, August 4, 1820, in Lipscomb and Bergh 1903-1904, 15:263).[16]

For Jefferson this alliance was, at the same time, ultimately made possible by the special conditions shared by the countries of the New World, distinguishing them from Europe. These conditions, in turn, expressed their power through the sentimental space of affection based on cultural-historical similarities which in the contemporary intellectual environment amounted to the recognition of a common space of affection among all nations of the continent.

Jefferson’s idea of sympathy

Research mentioned above has shown how values and ideas of sentimentalism influenced Thomas Jefferson in his moral philosophy, political thinking as well as race relations. In connection with Spanish America, he also applied these to international relations, mainly influenced by Adam Smith’s understanding of the spatial dimension of sympathy.

As the intellectual historian Fonna Forman-Barzilai has claimed, Smith’s theory of sympathy exhibited a complex understanding of proximity governing human relations. In general, it followed the common eighteenth-century model of affection and sympathy that, rooted in ancient prefigurations, associated it with the force of gravitation, arguing that its power was disproportionate with distance. In this way, proximity would entail greater gravitational attraction and consequently, a greater degree of sympathy (Forman-Barzilai 2010, 153; also, on the gravitational model in an early US context see Saillant). With Smith, in Forman-Barzilai’s reading, sympathy can develop between human beings as a result of “physical”, “affective” or “historical-cultural” proximity, with each “dimension” playing a different degree of role to play in the generation of sympathy (2010, 141). Each of them forms a segment of a “space” where sympathy becomes the result of either the physically “proximate,” the affectionately “connected” or the culturally or historically “familiar,” respectively (2010, 141). For Smith, it is the “historical-cultural” space of sympathy, with its principle of familiarity that assumes the greatest degree of power of all (2010, 161, 164, 165).

Sympathetic spaces: the US and the new countries of South America

Jefferson definitely identified a common ground for sympathetic space tied to the western hemisphere in which cooperation between the United States and the new countries of South America could take place. The affection that he perceived on that ground was to develop on the cultural-historical dimension formed by cultural identity. This cultural identity, on the other hand, was to demarcate the whole of the American continent from Europe.

Jefferson perceived a basic similarity between his own country and the sequels of Spain’s colonies in the New World. He made this clear in a remarkable letter to William Short in 1820:

The excess of population in Europe, and want of room, render war, in their [i.e. Europeans] opinion, necessary to keep down that excess of numbers. Here, room is abundant, population scanty, and peace the necessary means for producing men, to whom the redundant soil is offering the means of life and happiness. The principles of society there and here, then, are radically different, and I hope no American patriot will ever lose sight of the essential policy of interdicting in the seas and territories of both Americas, the ferocious and sanguinary contests of Europe. I wish to see this coalition begun. (Jefferson to William Short, August 4, 1820, in Lipscomb and Bergh 1903-1904, 15:263; emphasis added).

In the first place, Jefferson understood the western hemisphere as one basically different from Europe in that while the latter lacked in available free land, the former would have plenty of that to offer. Whereas, in the second place, in Europe population surplus was to be tackled by means of war, the same problem could be solved peacefully in the New World because of the arable land available for newborn citizens. In this way, he thought, population control could be more peacefully realized in the New World, and “happiness” provided for the people there through agriculture as a way of subsistence. This, at the same time, would distinguish it from Europe, plagued by military conflicts ultimately generated by the desire to tackle the problems emerging from the “excess of population.” Jefferson, then, established a common ground for identity between the two Americas unrecognized by earlier scholarship (cf. Steele 2012, 96).

In this assessment of “both Americas,” then, agriculture plays a crucial role, similarly to Jefferson’s general political economy. Regarding the cultivation of land as a major and, in fact, most desirable form of economic activity, Jefferson believed that, in the first place, it was bound to produce virtuous, since independent citizens. Hence yeoman farmers would constitute the backbone of a permanent republic. Although Jefferson later modified this viewpoint, agriculture remained important for him throughout his life (Peterson 1975, 217; Yarbrough1998, 78). In the second place, he was convinced that farming could be a key to the problem of population growth in the New World. The abundance of free arable land would provide surplus population with a secure means of subsistence. In this way, he hoped, America would be able to avoid the European paradigm of war as a means of population control and dealing with the surplus. He associated that with Thomas Malthus’s theory of population growth and limited resources on the European continent (Peterson 1975, 217; Jefferson to Jean Baptist Say, February 1, 1804, in Peterson 1975, 498).

In formulating these views, Jefferson drew upon the eighteenth century stadial theory of social development which held that human societies tend to undergo a gradual development of various stages based on a particular kind of subsistence, moving from hunting-gathering, through the nomadic, pastoral stage, then the sedentary agricultural one, culminating in the commercial one as the most highly developed one (Meek 1976, 68-126; McCoy 1980, 18-19). Together with some theorists of this line, Jefferson also believed in the gradational nature of this stadial pattern of social development in tandem with the moral degradation coupled with that. Although the most developed form, the commercial stage with the growth of manufacturing and urbanization tended to produce masses in the city with no independent means of subsistence thus being prone to corruption, Jefferson argued (Peterson 1975, 217). Hence the importance of the agricultural stage for him, with its relatively high status in the pattern of development, still having safeguards against the corruption of morals.

This was the broader intellectual grounding on which the cultural historical space of affection would encompass sequels together with the United States in Jefferson’s vision. At the same time, physical proximity also featured as a factor for him, since he held that those countries closer to his own would produce a greater pace of development in approximating the political institutions and degree of freedom of the United States. Thus he calculated with Mexico to be one of the first among the new countries to establish a republic fashioned by the United States (Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, December 6, 1813, in Ford 1904-1905, 11:351)

All this is not to belittle the more negative aspects of Jefferson’s views of the Spanish American neighbors―as shown above. Yet, Jefferson also developed a positive attitude toward the southern neighbors of the United States which was not without precedent. He, for instance, also conceived of the possibility of “good” neighborhood based on cultural homogeneity (See Jefferson to Breckinridge, August 12, 1803, in Peterson 1975, 496).

Furthermore, he was more prepared to see the new states of Spanish America become republics similar to the United States in the sympathetic space provided by the special conditions of the western hemisphere than countries of “military despotism” functioning by the European model of balance of power and population control. This is why, as he connected this problem with American national security, the isolated situation of the western hemisphere would further the possibility of keeping the United States and the former Spanish American colonies out of the European world of belligerent powers. As Jefferson explained to US President James Monroe in 1823, on the eve of the Monroe-doctrine, three years before his death,

Our first and fundamental maxim should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe. Our second, never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with cis-Atlantic affairs. America, North and South, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe, and peculiarly her own. She should therefore have a system of her own, separate and apart from that of Europe. While the last is laboring to become the domicile of despotism, our endeavor should surely be, to make our hemisphere that of freedom (Jefferson to James Monroe, October 24, 1823, in Lipscomb and Bergh 1903-1904, 15:477; see also Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, December 6, 1813, in Ford 1904-1905, 11:352; Jefferson to William Charles Cole Claiborne, October 29, 1808, in Ford 1904-1905, 11:55-56).

In his remarkable letter to William Short cited above, Jefferson also made clear his wish for an alliance among countries of the western hemisphere, emphasizing

… the advantages of a cordial fraternization among all the American nations, and the importance of their coalescing in an American system of policy, totally independent of and unconnected with that of Europe. The day is not distant, when we may formally require a meridian of partition through the ocean which separates the two hemispheres, on the hither side of which no European gun shall ever be heard, nor an American on the other; and when, during the rage of the eternal wars of Europe, the lion and the lamb, within our regions, shall lie down together in peace. (Jefferson to William Short, August 4, 1820, in Lipscomb and Bergh 1903-1904, 15:262-63).

Conclusion

Jefferson wished to see the people of the newly independent states of the Spanish American empire develop themselves in a moral and intellectual sense so that they would be able to govern themselves as free republics. At the same time, he was also aware of the dangers of foreign nation states that moved by the principle of neighborhood and balance of power would pose a threat to one another. Still, the difference that he perceived between the Europe of hostile powers and the New World of special geographical and geopolitical conditions also made him imagine a space of sympathy providing viable ground for inter-American relations.

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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 social position, cultural (visual) representation and identity construction of American minority groups throughout the last two centuries. She has lectured and published extensively both in Hungary and abroad on aspects of gender constructions, racial and ethnic groups as well as Mormonism in the US and Hungary.

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, with Zoltán Dragon, 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 and theories, 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 at the Department of American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary. Her research interests include late 19th-century proto-modern fiction, conversions of literary modernism and postmodernism, popular fiction genres, contemporary multicultural American fiction. Her current research into travel writing involves re-mapping travel texts by Edith Wharton. She has published two books, The Function of the Imagination in the Writings of Henry James (2006) and Literature in Context (2010), and she has co-edited Space, Gender and the Gaze (2017). She served as guest editor for AMERICANA – E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary in 2008 and 2016, with the issues “Multiculturalism in American Literature and Art” and “Henry James Appropriated;” and edited Jon Roberts’ A Life Less Damnable for Americana eBooks in 2013.

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 general research interests are film studies, cultural studies, gender studies, literary theory, humor theories as well as British and American literature and cinema. Her main research field is concerned with the representation of female aggression and violence in American literature, culture and specifically film. Her other main fields of interest include Jane Austen (her works, their adaptations as well as her legacy, her ‘afterlife’), 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 first book, which was based on her PhD dissertation, entitled Merry Murderers: The Farcical (Re)Figuration of the Femme Fatale in Maurine Dallas Watkins’ Chicago (1927) and its Various Adaptations, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (UK) in 2011. Her current research topics are humor theories, humor and gender, women’s humor, and especially the work(s) (and the 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 “Hegemonic Masculinity Affirmed: Representations of Gender in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 7(2011): 2. Available: https://americanaejournal.hu/ vol7no2/annus

[←2]

The original version of this study was published by the title “Pants up in the Air: Breaking Bad and American Hegemonic Masculinity Reconsidered.” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 11(2015): 1. Available: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol11no1/annus

[←3]

The original version of this study was published by the title “American Studies and Film. From Blind Spot to Symbiosis” in Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 10(2014): 1. Available: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol10no1/cristian

[←4]

The original version of this study was published by the title

“Film, Adaptation, and Cooking with the recipes of Julia Child, Julie Powell and Nora Ephron.” in Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 104(2018): 2. Available: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol14no2/cristian

[←5]

The original version of this study was published by the title “Digitized Spaces of Memories and Cultural Heritage: The Future of Archives.” Americana: E-Journal

of American Studies in Hungary 11(2015): 1. Available: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol11no1/dragon

[←6]

The original version of this study was published by the title “The Ragbag of Memory: Henry James’s Scenic Perspective in A Small Boy and Others.” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 11(2015): 1. Available: https://americanaejournal.hu/vo11no1/kazs

[←7]

James’s A Little Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years were published in one volume in 1956, edited and introduced by Frank W. Dupee, under the title Autobiography and is normally treated as one piece. The Dupee edition is still considered to be the most reliable one, published again recently by Princeton as a sign of renewed critical interest in Jamesian life writing (Dupee, 2014). Its new rivals include Horne (ed.) 2016 and Collister (ed.) 2011.

[←8]

Subsequent references to the text will be to this edition.

[←9]

The original version of this study was published by the title “The New American Woman: Edith Wharton’s Accounts of French and American Women in her The Custom of the Country.” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 7(2011): 1. Available: https://americanaejournal.hu/vol7no1/kazs

[←10]

Jia Tolentino writes that Undine Spragg would have millions of followers in the social media today (2019).

[←11]

Subsequent references to the novel will be to the 1989 edition.

[←12]

The original version of this study was published by the title “Mae West: The Dirty Snow White.” 10th Anniversary Edition, Inter-American Special Issue, Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 11(2015): 1. Available: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol11no1/tothzsa

[←13]

The original version of this study was published by the title “Merida and Mother Bear: A Lesson in Feminist Cultural Pedagogy.” Interspecies Dialogues in Postmillenial Filmic Fantasies, Special Issue, Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 13(2017): 2. Available: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol13no2/tzsa

[←14]

First published in Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 11(2015): 1. Available: https://americanaejournal.hu/vol11no1/vajda. Reprinted here with minor changes.

[←15]

What follows about Jefferson’s general views on the region as well as on its independence movements is largely based upon my research in this regard.

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In spite of Jefferson’s idealism concerning the relationship of the United States and its neighbors of mainly Hispanic origin, the current state of affairs appears to be even worse than what he anticipated as possible derailments of his ideas even if hoping that everything would turn out to the best. As two recent studies by Zsófia Anna Tóth attest on Latinos/Latinas, the hemispheric sympathies evaporated during these two hundred years. She argues that the creators/authors of the stories present the rather desperate situation of Latinos/Latinas within the United States as well as on both sides of the frontier (Mexican-US border) rather vividly - although in a humorous way. These articles argue that the terrible fights, struggles, identity constructions as well as impossible situation of Latinos/Latinas are presented through humor exactly to find a solution to and a way out of these possibly overwhelming, devastating, tragic and dangerous occurrences and how the fight is still going on to close the symbolic wound of the frontier (because the Mexican border is still es una herida abierta that lies at the heart of Latino/Latina existence (Tóth 2019; Tóth 2020).