Leave No Trace

The motto of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) is “Leave no trace.”  A permit is required to camp and canoe there and guidelines are provided for minimizing the human impact on this wilderness area in northern Minnesota close to the Canadian border.  Outdoor enthusiasts, as well as environmentalists, are fiercely protective of this natural preserve, “the largest remaining area of uncut forest in the eastern portion of the United States” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Waters_Canoe_Area_Wilderness).

Most recently “Renewed proposals for copper and nickel mining in northern Minnesota has…been a source of tension. Mines would be situated south and west of the BWCAW upstream of the wilderness and within its watershed, leading to concerns among conservation groups that surface runoff could cause damage to the area. In December 2016 the federal government proposed banning mining for 20 years while the subject was studied. The new administration cancelled the study in September 2018, clearing the way for mining leases in the national forest.^”   

Mindy Mejia’s recent novel, Leave No Trace, does not directly address the land use disputes of the BWCA, but it does make an understated plea for the preservation of wilderness areas.  The wilderness theme has a long history in American literature, dating back to William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation: “What could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men?” These early colonial narratives morphed into the nineteenth century frontier novels by James Fenimore Cooper and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, who borrowed from earlier American “captivity narratives” (https://yourbrainonbooks.blogspot.com/2010/02/narrative-of-captivity-and-restoration.html). 

Not only does Mejia’s novel harken back to the wilderness theme, with its contrast between nature and civilization, but also to the captivity narrative, in which European settlers recount their experiences being captured by Indians. In Leave No Trace, however, civilization is the enemy, nature is the source of restoration, and the systems of law enforcement and mental health treatment are the captors, who prevent the narrator, Maya Stark, Assistant Speech Therapist at the Congdon mental health facility in Duluth, MN (those in the know will find the name of this facility hilarious), and her patient, Lucas, from tracking down Lucas’ father, Josiah, who has disappeared deep in the BWCA. 

Which brings us to the theme of disappearance, not by captivity, but by choice.  Josiah and Lucas Blackthorn had escaped into the BWCA wilderness ten years earlier, after Josiah had been arrested for obstruction of justice in Ely, MN, a gateway to the BWCA. Mejia underscores this theme by drawing parallels among the fictional Josiah and historical instances of voluntary disappearance, such as that of Agafia Lykov ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agafia_Lykova) and Ho Van Thanh (https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/09/210477419/father-and-son-coaxed-from-jungle-40-years-after-vietnam-war).  In addition, Maya’s father, operator of a salvage tugboat on Lake Superior, has received a grant to search for the lost “ghost ship,” the SS Bannockburn, a Canadian freighter, that (involuntarily) disappeared on Lake Superior in 1902 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Bannockburn).  In another parallel, one of the orderlies at Congdon refers to Lucas as “Tarzan.”

Other forms of “disappearance” occur in the novel.  Lucas’ mother had disappeared from his life when she died suddenly of an aneurysm; Maya’s mother had abandoned her and her father when Maya was a child.  These parallels, as well as a budding romantic attraction, bond Lucas and Maya, as together they scheme to escape the mental facility to go in search of Josiah.

 

Having lived in the BWCA with his father for ten years, Lucas, now nineteen-years-old, had suddenly reappeared, caught breaking and entering into a camping outfitter store in Ely. Violent and uncommunicative he is committed to Congdon. Though he is violent toward her at first, Lucas eventually connects with Maya and she with him.  Maya learns that Josiah is sick; Lucas had left to get help but is arrested and confined at Congdon before he could get back to his father.  Finding Josiah and getting him help is Lucas’ mission; with Maya’s help he is able to succeed, though, in the end, Josiah finds another way to disappear.

Maya’s journey into Lucas’ past takes her on a journey into her own past.  It turns out they share, not only the loss of their mothers, a history of law-breaking, and of mental health treatment, but also a history that neither of them knows about. 

The tangle of coincidences in their pasts is barely believable, but despite an unlikely plot, the themes of disappearance, of being lost and found (or in the case of the Bannockburn, not found), of captivity and restoration, of recovery and redemption resonate powerfully. 

And the BWCA wilderness is not the only one in the novel where people can disappear; there is the wilderness of personal history, of social alienation, of mental instability, in which one can get lost, but from which one can also find truth, human connection, and mental health. 

Maya’s mother had been a geologist, and the rocks of the BWCA become part of the setting and the story. Agates, a type of volcanic rock, become a dominant symbol in the novel.  Maya’s mother had taught her: “The Earth took violence and decay and made agates…Agates can only form when something in you is destroyed, when the hollows of grief or depression can never find the light, and the sediment that accumulates inside them is dense. Their power changes you.”

However “hideous and desolate,” however “full of wild beasts and wild men,” however violent, however capable of destruction, the wilderness has the power to create beauty, strength, and preservation.  As Henry David Thoreau wrote, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World…From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.” And such is the underlying message of Leave No Trace.  There is healing value in exploring both the wilderness without and the wilderness within.

And such is the value of preserving the wildness of the BWCA and other wilderness areas.

In the end Maya and Lucas seem to make peace with civilization and find some semblance of balance between it and the wilderness.  The fate of our planet may depend on the ability of all of us to find such balance.

   

Quaker Cafe

Summer seems to be a good time for reading B novels. I mentioned Off Course as an example of "Loser Lit" in the previous post (English Lit Newly Lit). Quaker Cafe by Brenda Bevan Remmes is a less painful read, at least in terms of content. Off Course is stylistically superior, but Quaker Cafe is definitely more fun to read.

For one thing, there are lots of hilariously entertaining scenes involving family and social dynamics in a small Southern town, which was founded by Quakers, but is now dominated by mainstream Christian denominations, both black and white.  The white population is largely conservative; the few liberals in town stick together and represent both Quakers and Methodists.  The differences make for good humor, but the core of the story is very serious, involving family secrets, racial injustice, and a community with deep divisions.

Liz Hoole is from St. Paul, MN, but married a Quaker and has lived for decades in her husband's North Carolina hometown.  Husband Chase runs the family pharmacy, and Liz works for the Red Cross, where she discovers some medical information about a friend, which she must keep confidential.

Without revealing too much, let's just say Liz gets tangled up in her friend, Maggie’s, medical situation, which has implications, not only for Maggie, but also for Liz’s family and the whole community. As history that has been covered up for years gradually unravels, Liz struggles to help Maggie, support her own family, and maintain her professional confidentiality.

The truth opens up old wounds of racial injustice, threatens the fabric of relationships, and calls for confession and penance.  At this point we see a process of restorative justice work its way through families, churches, and community, a process based in Quaker and African American church traditions, as well as shared human experience.

What makes it a B novel? Well, there is nothing really noteworthy about the style, the plot, or the characters, not that there's anything terribly bad about them either. The dialogue sounded a bit artificial to me in places, though occasionally, having grown up in the South, I thought I heard a Southern style and cadence that sounded very authentic. A structural masterstroke is telling the story from the point of view of a quasi-outsider. Though Liz has lived in the South for many years, she's not a native and is more removed from the town's history than the other characters. As such, she invites the non-Southerner into the narrative and provides a more distanced, balanced perspective. So, a good novel, not a great one, but a good one.

Even a B novel, though, can verge on greatness. Read at face value, it doesn't rise to that level, but if one takes a slight imaginative leap and reads it allegorically, it takes on measurably more significance. 

What if we read it as, not merely the redemptive narrative of one individual and one community, but as a kind of call for restorative justice in the whole South? Of course, the racial injustice in the history of the South is no secret, but we have only to reflect on the recent defense of the Confederate flag as a symbol of "heritage" and "regional pride" to consider the depth of Southern denial about its own history.  Could the individual story of injustice and redemption in Quaker Cafe represent a call for regional assumption of historical responsibility, confession, and atonement?  Does the model of restorative justice represented in the novel offer the vision for a path by which the stark divisions of the American South might be healed?

Perhaps that is a stretch, but surely no more so than acknowledging the human universality of the redemptive story and the shared human yearning for healing and wholeness.

We should also acknowledge that at the end of Quaker Cafe, not all are redeemed; the dead are still dead, and they died without learning the truth.  Not all justice can be restored, but the novel holds out hope for the human capacity of accepting responsibility, making amends, and achieving some measure of peace.

A Lesson Before Dying

As I reread this 1993 novel by Ernest J. Gaines, I kept thinking, “Who is teaching who what lesson?”

 Jefferson, a young, black man in a Louisiana Cajun community in the late 1940’s, is falsely convicted of participating in a pre-meditated crime resulting in murder and is sentenced to death.  The defense had argued he was too stupid and sub-human to carry out such a crime.  “Why I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this,” was the last statement in the defense attorney’s closing argument.

Jefferson’s grandmother knows there is no justice to be found for him in the white-dominated, racist criminal justice system; she just wants him to die with dignity. 

She and her friend turn to the friend’s nephew, Grant, the educated local school teacher, asking him to visit Jefferson in jail and restore his sense of self-worth after his humiliating victimization and his equally humiliating defense in that public courtroom.  Grant is reluctant to agree.  He will have to humble himself before the white officials of the town to get permission to visit Jefferson, and he has no idea what he can say or do to build Jefferson’s self-esteem on death row.

Grant bows to the pressure of the older women, however, and takes up the task.  He finds Jefferson in a depressed state; not only is he facing an early death, he cannot get that image of himself as a “hog” out of his head.  Grant has no lesson plan and despairs of getting through to Jefferson, but at the urging of his aunt and her friend, the grandmother, he continues to visit and try to talk to him. 

Grant, himself, we might say today, has a bad attitude.  He is sometimes disrespectful and even contemptuous of his elders, including the local minister.  He wishes he could escape the small town and its traditional environment, hates his teaching job, and resists almost every effort to participate as a full member of his community.  It doesn’t help that he has rejected the Christian religion that his family and neighbors live by.  He refuses to lie to Jefferson about salvation and life after death, though he does dutifully preside over the school Christmas program.

Grant’s inner conflict is represented by the fact that his secular schoolroom is housed in the church.  And the theme of religion vs. secularism runs through the entire novel.  How will a secular atheist fulfill the wishes of his Christian aunt and her Christian friend, as well as their minister, to rebuild Jefferson’s self-image as a child of God, worthy of salvation and immortal life in heaven?  And is it Grant who will teach Jefferson the lesson of self-worth or is it the community that will teach Grant the lesson of social obligation and self-redemption?

In the end it is both.

 Instead of using religion to persuade Jefferson that he is better than a “hog,” Grant uses history, the whole history of slavery and racial oppression under white supremacy.  Jefferson can use his execution and the manner in which he faces it to transcend that history and demonstrate to whites and blacks alike the full humanity, worth, and equality of the black man.  In effect Grant builds Jefferson’s self-esteem by reminding him of his duty to his race, his family, his community, and by persuading him that he has the capacity, not only to be a hero to his people, but also to prove their human dignity to their white oppressors.

By rising to the challenge of his community, especially of the women in his community, and by learning to empathize with them, as well as with Jefferson, Grant learns the value of social relationships.  When he teaches Jefferson that in the historical context of racial oppression his life and death have significance and meaning, Grant shows that he has learned the lesson of social obligation, that he is a member of a community as well as an individual in his own right.  And when he refuses to take credit for Jefferson’s “transformation,” when he admits the minister and Jefferson are braver men than he is, Grant shows that he has learned the lesson of humility.

Not only does the novel raise a protest against racial injustice and the death penalty, it raises questions about the meaning of education, religion, power, and individualism.

The minister tells Grant that his secular, formal education cannot help him help Jefferson; Grant proves him wrong but also comes to appreciate the value of education through human experience.  Similarly, while Grant does not undergo any sort of religious conversion, he comes to understand its meaningfulness in people’s lives. Likewise, he learns the difference between social power and psychological power, as the man who was reduced to a “hog” in public and sentenced to death emerges as the strongest and bravest in the room at his own execution.  And finally Grant learns to temper his sense of individual righteousness with a sense of community values.

The story is narrated almost entirely from first person point of view by Grant.  However, near the end we get Jefferson’s point of view in his journal and then the POV seems to pan out to an omniscient overview of the community.  This technique reinforces Grant’s (and Jefferson’s) shift from egocentrism to sociocentrism.

In a larger sense, the novel uses Christian allegory and the universal patterns of the hero’s quest and the scapegoat myth to lift the novel out of its historical context to a transcendent level of meaning.

If you think it a stretch that Jefferson serves as a Christ figure, consider that, when his execution is set for two weeks after Good Friday, Grant notes, “And on Friday too. Always on Friday. Same time as He died, between twelve and three.”  In addition, Jefferson is innocent of the crime he is accused of, and, like Christ, he dies with dignity and is lifted up by his community after his death as one who left a legacy as “the bravest man in the room,” braver than any of the white people who participated in, presided over, and witnessed his execution.

The Christian story, of course, and Jefferson’s are both examples of the universal hero’s quest and scapegoat myths.  Jefferson’s quest is to refute that public image of himself as a “hog,” and with Grant as his guide, he fulfills that quest, showing that he is a better man than his accusers and demonstrating the full humanity, not only of himself, but of his race.

Like Christ, Jefferson is also a scapegoat.  As Christ dies for human sin, so Jefferson dies as a scapegoat for the guilt and fear of his white oppressors.  By accusing and executing him, the dominant white class reassures themselves of their own supremacy.

Grant also, however reluctantly, fits the hero myth pattern.  He is called to a quest which he resists but ultimately fulfills—to “save” Jefferson from his shame and from an ignominious death.   In the process, he learns that, as much as he might like to live his life for himself alone, he is part of a community, a race, and a human family, calling for certain sacrifices and challenging him to leave a legacy that is larger than himself.  To that extent the novel serves as a coming of age story, not only for Grant, but for Jefferson as well.

And so both Grant and Jefferson redeem each other, contributing to each other’s maturation and growth into better people who leave something behind more significant than either would have done alone.  

Finally, as one who has no faith in God or an afterlife, Grant learns and teaches Jefferson that it’s not that you die, it’s how you die, and how you live, that matters.

The Great Gatsby

I have not seen the latest film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, but the commercial hype led me to reread what at one time in my life I might have said was my favorite novel of all time.

There is something about the writing style, the wedding-cake richness and artifice that greatly impressed me as a college student.  This time, the language, while I could still admire it, struck me as more pretentious than I had ever thought before, and that, of course, reflects on the narrator, Nick Carraway, who struck me as more snobbish, more deceptive (perhaps self-deceptive) and evasive than I had remembered.  He presents himself as a product of the Midwest, which is more “decent” and less corrupt than the East Coast and East Egg.  Yet Nick is in the thick of enabling two adulterous affairs and covering up the truth of a traffic accident that resulted in someone’s death. 

Nevertheless, as with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, there is incredible power in language that can take the ugliest, most sordid of human experiences and transform it into artistic beauty.  But that is what art and imagination can do, and that is largely what the novel is about, for Gatsby has that same power of imagination to take someone as shallow, hollow, and, as Nick says, “careless” as Daisy and transform her into a romantic ideal.  Nick also projects his romantic idealism, not only onto himself, but also onto Gatsby’s character and onto the whole tragic tale.

If one can look past the misogyny and anti-Semitism of the novel, one can perhaps appreciate how Nick allegorizes its events into a cultural narrative of the American experience and ultimately into a universal statement of the human dilemma, in which we find ourselves forever caught in the web of contradictions between our imaginative vision and the ashes of our own corruption (except that Nick seems to present himself as an innocent bystander rather than a full participant). 

Gatsby’s story parallels the quintessential American success story and I could not help but think of some of his literary forbears—Rip Van Winkle who transforms himself from a hen-pecked husband into the town raconteur after disappearing for twenty years; Ichabod Crane, the fortune hunter, who is attacked by the headless horseman (see previous blog posts Feb. 6, 2013); and, of course Benjamin Franklin, whose project to achieve human perfection pre-figures Gatsby’s self-improvement notes on the book cover of his boyhood copy of Hopalong Cassidy (see previous blog post March 12, 2010).  Like Rip, Gatsby transforms himself from the poor son of “unsuccessful farm people” into a product of his own imagination.  Like Ichabod he courts a woman more for the dream of “money” that she represents than for her own character.  And like Benjamin Franklin he projects the image of a self-made man, who has pulled himself up by his own bootstraps.

In the classic American success story it is hard work and moral virtue that takes one from rags to riches.  In Gatsby’s case it is imagination, opportunism, and criminal activity which bring him to the lavish mansion across the bay from the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.  The American Dream of material prosperity, in this version, rests on a rotten foundation of moral corruption.

West Egg and East Egg on Long Island Sound represent not only the Midwest and East Coast, but also the New World and the Old World, new (cheap) money and old aristocracy.  Just as the original European settlers glorified and romanticized their plunder of North America, so Gatsby justifies his criminal career in terms of his romantic ideal, personified somehow by the wholly inadequate Daisy. 

In the end we realize that, like all of us, as Gatsby pursues his dream he ultimately hurtles toward his own death.  And the novel suggests that his story is somehow emblematic of the American experience, full of romantic idealism that founders on corruption and destruction.  Between the quintessential city of New York, where their money is made, and the homes of the wealthy on Long Island Sound lie the ash heaps of vulgarity, duplicity, betrayal, violence, and crime.  Overlooking it all are the sightless eyeglasses of T. J. Eckleberg, an abandoned advertisement that seems to represent either the godlessness or the god-forsakenness (or both) of the whole American experiment.

But, of course it is not just American culture; it is the universal story of our human potential for greatness alongside our capacity for evil. 

And so, the dark side of the “success story” is that of ill-gotten gains, and the “love story” is marred by greed, deception, and adultery.  And Nick’s “coming of age,” to the extent that it is that, is aborted by his failure to recognize the evil inside that he carries with him when he returns to the “decent” Midwest.

In Nick’s eyes Gatsby’s sordid life is redeemed by the power of romantic idealism, and perhaps the same can be said of the American dream and the whole human enterprise.  But the phrase “Great Gatsby” also rings hollow with irony, as the mythical host of lavish parties ends up dying alone in his swimming pool at the hands of a misguided revenge-seeker and buried with a bare handful in attendance at his funeral.

The Scarlet Letter

Margaret Fuller achieved notoriety, not only for her writing career and political advocacy (see previous post), but also for her private life.  While in Italy, in 1848, she bore a son to Giovanni Ossoli, whom she may or may not have married the following year.  The three of them died in a shipwreck just off the coast of New York on their voyage to the U.S.  This tragedy might well have been seen by her contemporaries, and even her family and friends, as God’s punishment for sexual sin.

For Nathaniel Hawthorne Fuller seemed to evoke powerful feelings.  He called her a “great humbug…defective and evil in nature” in his journal and may have had her in mind when he created the character of Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance and Hester in his 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter. 

Near the end of “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” Fuller invokes a kind of prophetess:  “And will she not soon appear?—the woman who shall vindicate their birthright for all women; who shall teach them what to claim, and how to use what they obtain?”  At the end of The Scarlet Letter, we are told that Hester had once imagined herself a “prophetess” of women’s future:  “Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a lifelong sorrow.”

Like Fuller, Hester bears a child out of wedlock.  If Fuller’s punishment came from God, however, Hester’s comes from the God-fearing humans of her Puritan community in Massachusetts Bay Colony.  In Hawthorne’s story Hester evolves from “scarlet woman” in the eyes of her community to well-respected, one might almost say revered, wise counselor of women.  Does Hawthorne hold out hope of redemption for the reputation of Margaret Fuller, or does he see her legacy forever tainted by the "scandal" of her private life?  If Hester does represent Margaret Fuller, then the answer, like a lot of those in Hawthorne’s work, would have to be ambiguous. 

The Scarlet Letter, however, is much more than a reflection on Margaret Fuller or on sexual morality or on women’s rights.  It actually constitutes a contrast, even a debate of sorts, between two world views—the Puritan, Biblical world view of the 17^th century setting of the novel and the Romantic, individualist, expressive world view of the early 19^th century—both of which are still very much with us in the 21^st century.

From the Puritan, Biblical perspective, the world is a drama, a cosmic conflict between God and Satan, good and evil, the saved and the damned, heaven and hell.  At the human level God’s “saints” (the saved) are responsible for representing God’s will, enforcing his laws as laid out in the Bible and punishing the sinners, for their own good of course, to elicit their confession, repentance, and salvation.

 Obedience to the Word of God, as interpreted by church leaders, is one’s ultimate responsibility.  Though lip service was given to the “priesthood of all believers” during the Protestant Reformation, those Puritans who sought to interpret the Bible for themselves (Anne Hutchinson) or who advocated for freedom of religion (Roger Williams) were banished. 

Socially one is expected to put one’s obligations to family, church, and community ahead of one’s own personal desires and wishes.  In this sense the Biblical world view upholds a communitarian, rather than an individualist, ethic, but the Puritan obligations were to the orthodox body of belief.  American Indians, Quakers, and any others who did not subscribe to the approved system of belief were considered outcasts, ripe for persecution.

The free individual is not to be trusted because “original sin” had left human nature essentially evil, able to be redeemed only by God’s grace, not by one’s own effort.  In such a world view social control is necessary to maintain order, and self-control, that is to say repression of one’s natural desires, is necessary for sainthood and salvation.

Conversely, from the Romantic, individualistic perspective the world is an organism.  God is a dynamic energy, power, and life force manifesting in nature, which is healthy, good, and trustworthy.  Nature is not just God’s creation; it is God’s body.  It is itself divine.  Human nature, then, participates in the beauty, goodness, and divinity of the natural world.

Ultimate authority is to be found within oneself.  Authenticity, integrity, and self-trust are the highest virtues.  The drama in this world view is not between God and Satan, but between the god-like individual guided by nature and the society which seeks to train, shape, and control the individual into conforming to a pre-determined standard of behavior and belief.

Social authority and power are to be resisted and natural feelings are to be expressed, not repressed.  Freedom of thought and expression are valued, as is the natural sympathy for others, which provides an organic, affective basis for social relations and community, as opposed to the artificial, legalistic basis of the Biblical world view.

The drama of The Scarlet Letter is played out between these two world views, a conflict which is left unresolved at the end, or, if there is any resolution in these terms, it is an affirmation that the truth lies in a middle ground somewhere between the two.

The Biblical world view is represented by the Puritan town that puts the mark of sin, the letter A, on Hester’s bosom and places her on the scaffold with her newborn child to be reviled by her townspeople.  The Romantic world view is represented by the forest, where Hester and Dimmesdale meet in secret, where Hester literally lets down her hair, and where little Pearl can wander freely, though under the watchful eye of her parents.

The three scaffold scenes mark three different aspects of the Biblical perspective: public punishment, private guilt, and public confession (but is it truly confession or merely another form of self-protection and hypocrisy?)  Some spectators claim to have seen a scarlet A on Dimmesdale’s bosom when he pulls back his shirt, heard him confess his long secret sin, and seen him acknowledge his long unrecognized family.  Others claim that he was merely speaking allegorically and that his bosom was as bare and white as the driven snow.  His words, indeed, are highly ambiguous and open to interpretation, making it possible for his fellow Puritans to hear what they want to hear and, for that matter, see what they want to see.  The whole Bible-based narrative of sin--repentance/confession--salvation is cast into doubt.

The forest scene dramatizes the triumph of the Romantic perspective, when Hester and Dimmesdale are reunited, along with their daughter, renew their vows of love, and plan their escape from Puritan oppression to a place where they can live and love openly as a family.  It is there that Hester unburdens Dimmesdale’s guilt-ridden conscience, assuring him of that their love is blessed and that his good works far outnumber his sins, and it is there that Hester removes the scarlet letter and tosses it away.  However, it is also there that little Pearl returns the scarlet letter to her mother, insisting that she wear it, and that the narrator questions the absolute innocence of nature: “Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild, heathen Naure of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth—with the bliss of these two spirits.”

And the novel denies the two lovers their happy, Romantic ending, for Dimmesdale, unable to overcome his guilt, chooses to make his dramatic, final statement, however ambiguous, on the scaffold with Hester and Pearl before drawing his last breath.

From the Puritan, Biblical perspective Hester is a fallen woman, though capable of redemption.  Her story is a cautionary tale.  To the Romantic, she is a natural woman, whose free expression is thwarted by an oppressive and repressive society.  Her story is the age-old scapegoat narrative in which she unjustly bears the punishment for others’ secret sins.

Similarly, from the former view Pearl is an “imp,” tainted not only by original sin, but by that of her earthly parents, while from the latter she is an innocent child of nature, unjustly treated as an outcast.  The Puritans see Dimmesdale as either a sinful, but just, saint (assuming he confessed at the end) or as a spotless spiritual leader taking others’ sins on his own head (assuming he spoke allegorically), whereas the Romantics see him as a repressed, tormented soul, unable to break free from the bonds of his misguided religion.  Chillingworth, to the Puritans would be a just punisher, whereas to the Romantics he is a villain.

Neither world view is allowed to triumph in the novel.  The Biblical view is cruel, intolerant, and hypocritical, while the Romantic view is self-indulgent, permissive, and naïve in its unqualified trust in the goodness of human nature.  Both are self-righteous.  Wisdom is to be found in the middle ground of humility, self-discipline, forgiveness, and sympathy.  Communitarianism must respect individual rights and freedoms; individualism must temper itself and value the well-being of others, social cohesion, and the common good.  Tradition must bend to women’s rights, and women’s demands must be mediated by social reality.  Margaret Fuller deserves redemption but cannot escape the judgment of her peers.

The Awakening

It makes sense to read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) as a feminist novel of female emancipation, both sexual and spiritual, especially given its biographical and social context.  Yet it also fits into the 19^th century tradition of the novel of adultery and its predecessor, the seduction narrative, in which the female transgressor must, of course, be punished in the end, whether it be by abandonment, disgrace, death, or all of the above.

The novel of adultery could, perhaps, be traced back to the “courtly love” tradition of the European Middle Ages, but Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1870s) established the 19^th century tradition.  The Awakening, however, is the only one that was effectively removed from public circulation because of its negative reviews as an immoral book, perhaps because it is more open in its depiction of a female character who enjoys sex or perhaps because it was written by a woman or both.

 Hawthorne’s novel begins after the fact and focuses on Hester Prynne’s transformation from “sinner” to “saint,” but like Flaubert’s and Tolstoy’s heroines, Edna Pontellier in The Awakening commits suicide in the end.

 It might have been possible to read Chopin’s novel as a cautionary tale, relating the sad fate of a sinful woman, but no one did, again perhaps because Edna’s sensuality is too openly represented.  Though the price of pleasure is suicide, she indeed seems to experience pleasure in her forbidden affair and admits to herself that she would, no doubt, seek out more such affairs once the current one ends.

 It didn’t seem to matter to reviewers at the time that a primary motive for the suicide is concern for her children.  Edna seems to foresee how her transgressions would harm her children.  Neither Chopin nor the reviewers lived in a time when the harmful effects of a parent’s suicide on the children were well understood.

 Since the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 70s Chopin’s novel has been received as a feminist classic, portraying a heroine who defies the restrictive Victorian conventions of the 19^th century and pursues her own emancipation, not only from an unhappy marriage, but from an oppressive society.

 Perhaps the conflicting attitudes toward the book rest on the same textual characteristic, namely that Edna is largely presented sympathetically and the reader is invited to identify with her.  The strict sexual moralists of the 19^th century were, no doubt, more shocked by the sympathetic portrayal of an adulteress than they were mollified by her suicide at the end.  Feminists of the 20^th century, however, did identify with Edna’s oppression and her quest for emancipation.  For them, her suicide merely underscors the injustice of a society in which a liberated woman cannot survive.

 From a more universal perspective, the novel could also be viewed in conflicting ways: either as a cautionary tale of crime and punishment or as a tragic quest for freedom and fulfillment.  The key seems to be whether readers identify with Edna as a sympathetic heroine or whether they view her as a selfish narcissist, who is a dangerous threat to marriage, motherhood, and social stability.

 Who is the enemy: the repressive society or the rebellious individual seeking liberation?

 One is tempted to dismiss the conflict as an anachronism in the 21^st century.  Surely most readers today would be most likely to view Edna as a victim of sexist oppression who struggles heroically against social injustice.  But consider the debate that can still get quite heated over stay-at-home moms vs. working moms who put their children in day care.  While contemporary readers may be more willing to forgive Edna’s adultery, they may not be so willing to forgive her neglect of her children.

 The conflict between motherhood and women’s emancipation may be as universal as any story of crime and punishment or tragic quest.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn III

Race? Gender? Sexuality? I’ve even read studies of Huck Finn on social class, arguing that the novel critiques the high and the low, but not the middle. These historicist and cultural studies focus on what divides us. There’s nothing wrong with them, but do they tell the whole story? Is there a dimension of Huck Finn that brings us together? Does the novel have a universal significance that transcends social categories?

Can a female and/or white reader identify with Jim in his quest for freedom? Can a female and/ or black reader identify with the moral dilemma of Huck as he struggles with the conflict between law and friendship, between society’s view of right and wrong and the individual’s?

Can we all identify with the escape, the river journey, the risks taken and obstacles overcome, the conflict with enemies, the camaraderie with friends, the encounter with death, and the rebirth into new possibilities in life?

Regardless of race, gender, sexuality, and class, there is embedded in the narrative a universal hero quest myth that never fails to capture, not only the imagination, but, perhaps, our sense of the shape of our own lives as we escape our own constraints, navigate our own journeys, pursue our own quests, take our own risks, overcome our own obstacles, contend with enemies, bond with friends, struggle with our own mortality, and seek our own redemption, whether it be in the form of freedom, love and belonging, maturation, atonement, recovery, recognition, prosperity, achievement, or enlightenment.

Similarly, we all progress from youthful inexperience and naiveté, to encounters with negative experience and struggles with decision-making, to either cynicism or healthy maturity. We can debate how much progress Huck makes in the course of the novel and where he might be headed, but we can all relate to his moral and psychological journey.

There are those who contest the very notion of “grand narratives” in the form of universal patterns and themes. From this perspective, we are all so trapped in our own historical time, place, situation, and identity, that we are incapable of transcendence. It is the differences among us that are significant, not the similarities. Taken to an extreme such a viewpoint leaves us in social isolation, incapable of human transactions across difference, maybe even incapable of love and belonging.

When it comes to Huck Finn it seems that controversy is inescapable. Rather than taking hard and fast positions—the novel is racist or it’s not, sexist or not, homoerotic or not, classist or not, universal or not—I prefer to see the value in contrasting views. The novel is racist and it’s not, it is sexist and it’s not, it is homoerotic and it’s not, classist and it’s not, universal and it’s not.

Nature and society, pleasure and pain, good and evil, freedom and power, love and belonging, absence and presence—these constants of human experience, historicized in concrete action, imagery, character, and language, are what give Huck Finn, and all great literature its lasting value.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn II

Race is not the only controversy that has swirled around Huck Finn. When it was first published in 1884, it was primarily known as a “boy’s book” and was attacked and sometimes banned because of its perceived glorification of a “bad boy,” who smoked, and stole, and used bad grammar.

Contemporary feminist readers have seen in its “quest for freedom” and “coming of age” themes a reinforcement of the “masculine myth” (see Judith Fetterley , The Resisting Reader…, 1978, and others) in which the male hero seeks to free himself from the females in his life (mother, wife, potential wife, etc.) who would domesticate and “civilize” him. (This myth is still alive and well in our own day.) From this perspective, the hero’s “coming of age” is understood in terms of achieving independence from those social forces (often represented by women) that threaten to emasculate him.

With a couple of exceptions, Nancy Walker (“Reformers and Young Maidens…” 1985) finds the women characters in Huck Finn to be based on popular stereotypes of women as either moral reformers of men or as pure, innocent, “sweet” young damsels in need of either protection or rescue. One exception is Judith Loftus who is smart enough to see through Huck’s attempted disguise as a girl and who offers to help Huck rather than turn him in.

The scene with Judith Loftus is seen by another feminist critic, Myra Jehlen (“Reading Gender…” 1990), as evidence of the novel’s consciousness of gender as a socially constructed performance.

Queer theorists have noted that the masculine myth of freedom and independence involves, not only an escape from women’s attempts to form and reform men, but also as homosocial, if not homoerotic, experience of male bonding in a world free of women. (Fiedler, Love and Death... 1948) Christopher Looby (“’Innocent Homosexuality’…” 1995) sees the Judith Loftus disguise scene as just one in a whole series of transvestite scenes in which male characters dress as women, which constitute a motif of “gender masquerade” that provides “an alibi for potentially transgressive male-male encounters.”

So, (1) is Huck Finn a quintessential “boy’s book” representing the psyche and experience of “natural” boyhood when freed from social constraints? Research into the human genome does support the notion of natural gender differences, but research also reveals multiple exceptions and supports the role that social construction plays in gender expression and behavior. Whether you see Huck as an archetypal “boy” or a stereotypical “boy” may depend on whether you lean more toward nature or nurture in explaining gender. My question would be, how do you explain the appeal of the river raft adventure to generations of female readers, who seem just as drawn to the quest for freedom, independence, and autonomy as males?

(2) Is there an implicit misogyny in the masculine frontier myth of freedom and independence from women? The powerful role of nurture has historically steered women into more domestic social roles and has held them to a higher standard of “virtue,” whereas men have been more encouraged and expected to pursue independence outside the domestic sphere and outside strict moral codes. While there may be some genetic basis to this difference, there is no question in my mind that society has taken a general tendency and enforced it as a prescription for gender-based socially acceptable behavior.

There is also no question in my mind that, as a result, healthy gender relations are disrupted, and to the extent that men feel pressured or seduced by women into artificial roles, misogyny can certainly result. Obviously there are many other reasons for misogyny as well since patriarchy and male supremacy send very strong messages of female inferiority. So, yes, to the extent that women in Huck Finn represent all that restricts Huck’s freedom and autonomy, there is an undercurrent of misogyny.

(3) Does the novel reinforce and perpetuate popular 19th century stereotypes of women? Yes, Nancy Walker documents this aspect of the novel very well.

(4) Does the novel offer any alternative female images? Yes, Judith Loftus and Mary Jane Wilks do not fit the common female stock characters. They are active and assertive without being controlling of Huck, and they show more ability to take care of themselves without relying on a male rescuer.

(5) Do the multiple gender disguises, particularly the Judith Loftus scene, in which she instructs Huck in how to “act” like a girl, undermine essentialist readings and expose the social construction of gender. Possibly, but I doubt it is self-conscious and that anyone but a post-modernist reader would notice. The Loftus scene could be also be read as reinforcing an essentialist reading, since Huck has a tough time acting like anything but a “boy.”

(6) Or, do those multiple scenes of gender disguise mask a homoerotic subtext? Given the frequency of these scenes, most of which occur in an all-male environment, and given what we know happens sexually in all male environments, I find this claim persuasive.

(7) Does the male bonding in the novel promote a homosocial, if not homoerotic, message? To the extent that male-male friendship is preferred over male-female relationships, yes; this does not seem to be an extravagant claim.

(8) Do all these questions over-analyze a text that is “just a story” told for entertainment purposes? If we answer “yes,” then are we trivializing the novel? Yes, Twain wrote that anyone “attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” But, is this (obviously exaggerated) statement to be taken a face value or is it tongue-in-cheek? It could just as well be read as an ironic statement and/or an attempt by Twain to deflect criticism, especially from readers who might be offended at the way white Southerners are depicted. If the novel is to be taken seriously, if it is worthy of being taught in schools and held up as an American classic, then it is worthy of being analyzed as a novel of serious significance, not dismissed as mere entertainment.

(9) Is Huck Finn a sexist novel? Heterosexist? So, yes, it is a sexist novel, though not without redeeming merit, even in the eyes of feminist readers. And, yes and no; it is both a heterosexist novel and one that can be read as homosocial and even homoerotic.

Controversy does not have to lead to polarization if one takes a "both...and" approach rather than an "either...or" approach and preserves what is of value in each contrasting position.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I

Recent controversy over The Help by Kathryn Stockett has reminded me of the continuing controversy over The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

It seems reasonable to me that a novel by a white author representing African American characters and experience would be subjected to critical scrutiny. It also seems reasonable to expect that a white writer will depict that experience through a white lens, just as black writers will portray white characters and experience through a black lens. Does that mean that whites should not write about blacks and vice versa? I hope not. Even if that means white novels will bear vestiges, at the very least, of racism and black novels will exhibit prejudice toward whites.

One problem of American publishing history, however, in a white dominated culture, is that black writers have had to get past white editors and publishers while white writers have rarely been screened by black publishing filters. As a result, historically, more racism in white novels has been published than has the critique of white supremacy in black novels. It should be no surprise that black readers will react more strongly to and scrutinize more closely the way their experience is depicted by white writers.

Instead of being hypersensitive and resentful, white readers and writers might want to pay attention. They could learn something.

For the most part, though, criticism of Huck Finn as a racist novel has been met with furious defensiveness. Mark Twain, after all, is an American literary hero and Huck Finn has been considered his “masterpiece” (interesting word choice). To label Twain and his novel as “racist” seems unpatriotic at best and downright sacrilegious at worst.

How could Huck Finn be racist? The escaped slave, Jim, is a sympathetic character and the white Southerners are mostly unsympathetic objects of ridicule and satire. But, is an anti-slavery message the same as an anti-racist message? Can an abolitionist still be a white supremacist? Slavery had been abolished some twenty years before the 1884 publication of Huck Finn, but racism continued to run rampant. Does the anti-slavery message absolve the novel of racism?

Defenders argue that Jim is not only sympathetic but humanized as a man equally deserving of freedom as the white runaway, Huck. Huck, himself, must struggle with and overcome his own conditioned racism in order, not only to help Jim escape, but also to bond with him as a companion and fellow seeker of freedom. Some even see Jim as a father figure to Huck, putting Jim in a psychologically superior position.

Detractors counter that (1) Jim is hardly represented as “equal” to Huck, (2) even if he were, then he, a grown man with a wife and children, is being equated with a child, thus reinforcing a common stereotype of blacks as “childlike,” and (3) while Jim may be allowed moments of genuine humanity, he is largely portrayed as a caricature based on popular minstrel show “Jim Crow” stereotypes. Critics also question Huck’s moral progress and human bond with Jim, given the way Huck joins with Tom Sawyer in tormenting Jim when he is held captive at the Phelps farm at the end of the novel.

Defenders counter that, after all, how much moral progress can you expect a fourteen-year-old boy to make in such a short time span? Just the fact that Huck does have those pangs of conscience over Jim’s treatment is anti-racist enough. And, while Twain may not have completely transcended his own white supremacist and racist environment, he went further in challenging that ideology than any other white writer of the 19th century. (I would submit that Herman Melville, writing before abolition, went further than Twain did, though his subtlety in Benito Cereno, for example, would have escaped many readers.)

I wonder if the defenders and detractors are both right. I wonder if Twain himself was torn between challenging the morality of his white readers and placating them in order to promote his own popularity and book sales. The result is a novel that promises much in terms of an anti-racist message but falls far short of full delivery.

Van Wyck Brooks, in his critical study The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1933), claims that, just as this iconic author had two names, Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain, so he had a conflicted psyche, one that aspired to be, on one hand, a serious artist using satire to critique his contemporary society, and on the other hand, a popular humorist, using folksiness to endear and promote himself to the reading public. Brooks traces this split throughout Twain’s career and argues that his increasing cynicism and misanthropy was the result of his own self-hatred for having “sold out” his highest and best artistic and moral promise. If Brooks is right, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is but one episode in the sad psychological story of our revered American author Mark Twain.

This commentary is not meant to reflect on The Help. That will have to wait for a future blog post.

Beloved III: The Mythic Message

From a mythic perspective, Sethe, the mother who murders her own child, is the Earth Mother or Great Goddess. She is Mother Nature, who takes the lives of those to whom she has given life. A nursing mother of one child while pregnant with another, Sethe is the ultimate fertility symbol. Having arranged to send her three children ahead to their free grandmother’s house, Sethe escapes slavery on her own, giving birth in a rowboat on the banks of the Ohio River, across which she and her new baby are later ferried, like dead people crossing the River Styx, except they are reborn to freedom among the living instead of being taken to the Underworld.

After 28 days, the length of a moon/menstrual cycle, the slaveholder arrives to take Sethe and her children back to captivity, and the blood flows freely when Sethe cuts her third-born “already crawling” baby with a handsaw before she can be stopped from killing all four of her children.

Sethe’s quest to free herself and her children from slavery thus takes a twisted route, taking her back to captivity in prison for murder. Released after emancipation, she is restored to her family in her mother’s house followed by the ghost of that dead baby, Beloved, which is all Sethe could get carved on her gravestone (in return for ten minutes of sex with the engraver). Her two boys eventually flee the haunted house and her mother dies, leaving Sethe and her now grown born-in-a-boat baby, Denver, alone with the vengeful spirit of Beloved. Having finally achieved physical freedom, Sethe’s quest now becomes a psychological journey of healing and recovery.

Like Sethe, Denver has her own quest to fulfill. Like a mythic hero, she shows early signs of special powers and a special destiny. As an infant in jail with her mother, Sethe claims, “the rats bit everything in there but her.” Upon being asked by a schoolmate if her mother had been in jail for murder, and if she had been with her, Denver temporarily loses her hearing and develops an acute sense of sight. Living in fear of the Terrible Mother, Denver’s hearing is restored when Beloved is resurrected in fleshly form. Denver is the first to recognize who she is.

Having ingested her dead sister’s blood when she nursed at her mother’s bloody breast immediately after the murder, Denver forms a close bond with Beloved, a bond that represents her own psychological attachment to that moment in their personal history. She jealously seeks to protect Beloved from both Sethe and Paul D., Sethe’s lover.

When Sethe submits to Beloved’s power, however, and deteriorates into psychosis, it becomes Denver’s quest to save her mother and their household from the succubus that Beloved has become. She ventures out on her own for the first time, finds work to support herself and her mother, and seeks help from the community, which results in a kind of exorcism ritual conducted by the neighborhood women as Sethe re-enacts the murder but this time directs her rage at the white man instead of her child. This purging of the past that Beloved represents frees both Sethe and Denver from its power. Thus Denver, like a mythic hero, achieves her quest for liberation of both herself and her mother.

Beloved herself plays many mythic roles. She is a ghost, a spirit, familiar, devil, witch, seductress, temptress, femme fatale, succubus, enchantress, sacrificial lamb, both destroyer and redeemer. If Sethe is the Terrible Mother, Beloved is the vengeful child, the memory of the painful past and the legacy of slavery, which must be suffered and purged before the next rebirth and resurrection can occur.

In one scene, during those 28 days of glory when Sethe and all four of her children were together, the family enjoys a treat of wild blackberries “tasting so good and happy that to eat them was like being in church. Just one of the berries and you felt anointed.” If there is a governing deity in the novel, it is nature, which, as in pagan mythology, brings both death and life, pain and pleasure, destruction and triumph, suffering and joy, guilt and redemption, illness and recovery, apocalypse and creation, sacrifice and resurrection.

Just as “anything coming back to life hurts,” so the vitality of nature cannot be separated from loss and suffering, life cannot be separated from death, and good cannot be separated from evil.

The mythic message of Beloved transcends the separations of race, class, gender, and politics to unify us all.

Beloved I

This 1987 novel by Toni Morrison might be her most “beloved.” It also might be the richest, most complex, most difficult, and most rewarding of her works.

Often categorized as “magical realism," it can also be read as a historical novel, a fictional slave narrative, a socio-political study, a psychological novel, a gothic romance, a re-enactment of Biblical myth, or a mythologizing of African American experience in universal terms.

Historically the characters and their stories represent the African American experience of slavery and its aftermath. Like the traditional slave narrative, it recounts Sethe’s escape from captivity to freedom, but its main focus is her post-slavery quest for liberation from the psychological and social legacy of slavery and achievement of full selfhood, independence, self-worth, and dignity as a human being.

The novel’s roots in history include the actual story of an escaped slave mother who murdered her own child rather than have her recaptured, a story that Morrison researched in newspaper archives. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beloved_(novel). Its roots in slave narrative can be traced to Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in which Jacobs confesses that at one point she thought she would rather see her own children dead than to suffer the indignities and cruelties of slavery. The myth of the Terrible Mother can be found in pagan traditions of the Earth Mother or Great Goddess, a personification of Nature, who not only gives us life but also takes it. A monotheistic parallel can be found in the Old Testament Jehovah who not only saves and protects his “chosen people” but also punishes them, sometimes with death and destruction, a la the great flood.

Mythological and religious references abound in this story of the murdered child, Beloved, who returns to haunt and “possess” the mother who killed her until the “devil child” is finally exorcized and purged by suffering, perseverance, love, family, and community.

At one level the story represents Sethe’s guilt and atonement for the murder of her child (or, in other terms, her psychological illness and recovery), but the historical and mythic contexts lift it to another level, in which Beloved represents the burden of slavery carried, not only by the fictional Sethe and her family, but by all African Americans, a burden that must be lifted before full “salvation,” psychological health, and ethnic pride can be fully achieved.

This story of redemption likewise rises to the level of universal myths of birth and creation, fertility, quest, death and resurrection, sacrifice and salvation. At the same time it addresses a contemporary social and political debate over the extent to which individual behavior is the result of genetic, biological, psychological, social, economic and political circumstances and the extent to which it is the result of free will, choice, and personal responsibility. Though Sethe’s act of infanticide can be explained in terms of her brutalization in slavery and the psychological damage she has suffered as a result, the novel does not let her off the hook as an individual responsible for her own actions. We might be tempted to judge her “not guilty by reason of insanity,” but the novel holds her accountable and insists that she undergo a necessary penance before she can achieve both moral and psychological “at-onement.”

In the end, in a work that is filled with images of fertility, birth, and creation, Sethe experiences a kind of moral and psychological death followed by resurrection and rebirth.

Similarly, the novel suggests, African American culture and community, having suffered the destructive effects of slavery, will be reborn into health and vitality. For all the horror and tragedy that the novel depicts, it is a redemptive narrative that offers hope to all individuals and communities, of whatever ethnicity, who have been victimized, brutalized, and terrorized by history.