"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?"

In honor of Independence Day this year, 237 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I decided to reread Frederick Douglass’ speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” delivered on July 5, 1852.  It didn’t occur to me at the time that the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin would be announced before I got my blog post done.

My original thought was to write about the speech as an under-appreciated rhetorical achievement in the history of American letters, but the death of Trayvon Martin and the court case against George Zimmerman dramatizes the continuing relevance of Douglass’ core argument.  And that may be more important than the brilliance of Douglass’ rhetoric.

First, let me say that I harbor no ill will toward the jury in the Zimmerman case.  As I watched the trial unfold on TV these last few weeks, I kept thinking how glad I was that I was not on the jury.  Though I felt that Zimmerman should be held accountable for profiling and stalking Martin while carrying a concealed weapon, I was not persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the actual killing rose to the level of murder, or even manslaughter, given the Florida self-defense law. 

Correct verdict under the law or not, though, it does not seem to rise to the level of justice either.  It seems like yet another example of an African American citizen being denied full equality in a nation that just weeks before the verdict had celebrated its promise of individual rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” of equality under the law, and of “liberty and justice for all.” 

Douglass was invited to deliver his oration at Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, to celebrate our nation’s founding as a free and independent state, guaranteeing liberty and justice to its people.  It was a ceremonial occasion and, in some ways, Douglass meets expectations by praising the nation’s founders and the high ideals inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.  But Douglass takes the opportunity to turn the speech into a political one, focusing on the inconsistency of a slaveholding society espousing the values of equality and liberty and calling for the abolition of slavery.  After excoriating his audience for the hypocrisy of celebrating the 4^th of July while allowing the injustices and cruelties of slavery to exist, Douglass ends by holding out hope that our nation will someday uphold the values and ideals embedded in our founding documents.

A similar argument could be made today.  How do we celebrate our nation’s founding and its highest civic values on one day and on another day in the same month watch as lawyers in our “justice” system defend their client by justifying racial profiling and the killing of an unarmed black teenager on grounds of self-defense when that client had deliberately stalked that innocent teenager walking home in the rain?  Yes, we can hold out hope that Zimmerman will be held accountable in a wrongful death suit and that someday our nation and its citizens will truly live up to the ideals they espouse and celebrate, but that is cold comfort to those who mourn the loss of Trayvon Martin, who will never again  walk home.

Even though Frederick Douglass had been invited by the white civic leaders of Rochester, New York, to deliver this ceremonial speech, he knew full well that their deference to him was only for superficial show.  That is why in his opening words he presents himself as a modest, self-deprecating public speaker and why he goes on to position himself as an outsider, who, like all African Americans, slave or free, cannot enjoy the full benefits of “your” 4^th of July, “your” Declaration of Independence, or “your” heritage of equality and freedom.  And that is also why he presents himself as an educated, well-spoken, eloquent speaker whose performance belies his modesty and indirectly argues for his full equality with those privileged white civic leaders.  Douglass references the nation’s founding documents, the words of its forefathers, the Bible, as well as his own educated white contemporaries and in so doing establishes his literacy, his education, his credibility, and his humanity, despite having been born into slavery.

Repeating a common trope of African American rhetoric, he compares his people to the Biblical Hebrews who suffered under slavery in Egypt and were delivered to freedom in the Promised Land.  He lifts up the suffering of American slaves, drawing on powerful emotional imagery to dramatize their plight: 

“…I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep, and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder.  There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, the caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men.  My soul sickens at the sight.”

               Throughout, both directly and indirectly, he holds up the mirror of hypocrisy to those who would celebrate their national Independence Day:

 “            "The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie.”

How many “free” African Americans today join in our 4^th of July celebrations with conflicted hearts,

remembering the injustices of the past along with the promises of our founders, smarting from their

own experiences of prejudice and racism, and questioning, like Douglass, whether this 4^th of July

celebration includes them?

Although Douglass is speaking of American slavery, he himself was free, though under the Fugitive Slave Law he could be returned to his owner at any time should that owner be identified, and while he had escaped the slavery of the South, he lived with the racism of the North, the very racism of those who had the temerity to invite an escaped slave to deliver their 4^th of July oration, as if he were one of them.  Only the blind arrogance of misplaced self-righteousness could expect the victims of racism to praise their oppressors’ history and values.

Yet Douglass concludes with faith in the Constitution, and while that may undercut his verbal assault on American hypocrisy, it nonetheless saves him and us from despair.  His call to action would fail did he not leave his audience with hope of abolishing slavery and racism.

Similarly, may the realization of our own contemporary failures in overcoming color prejudice and racism leave us not in despair but with renewed conviction that our anti-racist words and actions are not in vain and that the dream of people like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King for full equality and justice for all may someday be achieved in our country.  (See also previous blog post on Frederick Douglass *Narrative of an American Slave,* December 2009.)

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 Maypole of Merry Mount"

I started thinking about this blog post on May Day, but life (to be specific, knee replacement surgery) intervened.  Now I’m finally getting it posted just under the May wire.

The tradition of the maypole isn’t always associated strictly with the month of May, however.  In some countries it is erected during mid-summer celebrations.  And this short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne (published 1836) is based on such an occasion in the early American colony of Mount Wollaston, a.k.a. Merry Mount, which was adjacent to the better known Plymouth colony in the 1620s.

The rivalry between the two colonies, one Puritan and one Anglican, and the historical incident in which John Endicott cut down the maypole at Merry Mount are documented by historians from both colonies.  William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation describes the Merry Mount colonists and their ringleader Thomas Morton as “licentious,” “dissolute,” and “profane.”   Their maypole is an “idol,” around which the merrymakers engage in drunken dancing, “inviting the Indian women for their consorts…frisking together like so many fairies, or furies…”  Thomas Morton, in his New English Canaan, mocks the “precise Seperatists” of Plymouth, who “make a great show of Religion but no humanity,” and their leader Captain Miles Standish as “Captain Shrimp.”

In the preface to his story Hawthorne notes that the historical facts “have wrought themselves, almost spontaneously, into a sort of allegory.”  “Jollity and gloom,” says the narrator of the story, “were contending for an empire.”

In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne offers two world views for comparison, using one to critique the other, finding fault with both, and suggesting that each could learn from the other. (See blog post Oct. 24, 2012). In “The Maypole of Merry Mount” Hawthorne uses the nominally Anglican but actually more secular/commercial colony of Merry Mount to invoke pre-Christian paganism, referencing not only the maypole itself and the American Indians, but also the “Golden Age,” “fairies and nymphs,” “ancient fable,” and “Comus,” the Greek God of immoderate pleasure, excess, revelry, and disorder.  Similar to The Scarlet Letter, 17^th century Puritanism is contrasted with excessive hedonism and untempered pleasure seeking.

In this story the Puritans emerge victorious as they cut down the maypole, punish the wrongdoers, and invite the newly married “Lord and Lady of the May” into their more sober community.  Yet the narrator, while acknowledging the historical triumph of Plymouth over Merry Mount, does not spare the Puritans.  They are “dismal wretches”—“grim,” “stern,” “darksome,” hard-hearted, and punitive.  The whipping post is their maypole.  If the merrymakers of Merry Mount indulge in excessive pleasure seeking, the Puritans seem almost to take sadistic pleasure in an excess of pain and punishment.

More than an historical allegory, the story represents a process of maturation from a child-like view of the world as playground to the inevitable encounter with evil and suffering that accompanies a “coming of age.”  Yet, the story seems to question whether the Puritan view of the world as a crucible of suffering, a “vale of tears,” is really superior. 

The newly married couple who join the Puritan community offer some hope of a healthier outlook.  Even before the Puritans arrive to cast their shadow over the mirth and merriment of Merry Mount, the young couple has a “presentiment” of future “care and sorrow and troubled joy,” thus chastening the youthful exuberance and carefree quality of their wedding celebration.  Later, their devotion to each other and their willingness to suffer, each for the other, in the face of Puritan judgment and punishment, softens the “iron man,” Endicott, who lifts a wreath of roses from the ruined maypole and throws it over their heads, thereby holding open the possibility that flowers and sunshine may mix and mingle with Puritan gloom.

As Hawthorne says elsewhere, “Life is made up of marble and mud.”  Neither youthful hedonism nor age-worn cynicism captures its complexity.  Wisdom, truth, and healthy human community lie somewhere between the two extremes.

Hit by a Farm

I almost hesitate to blog about this 2006 memoir by Catherine Friend (http://www.catherinefriend.com/HTMLBookPages/hitbyafarm.htm)  because too often in popular media, especially of the political variety, I see the words “bestiality” and “homosexuality” appear in close proximity to each other.

There is no bestiality in this book, but there is a lot of beast sex, of the sort that occurs among farm animals.  And the farm is owned by a lesbian couple.

So, let it be known from the outset that no comments associating homosexuality with bestiality, for that matter no homophobic, anti-gay comments or jokes, will be tolerated at all.  They will be immediately deleted.  Not that any of my regular readers would do that, but this is a public blog.

Another reason I hesitate to write about this book is that it recounts a life that I would personally never be attracted to.  Much as I like to garden, I would never want to live on a farm; raise, breed, feed, or clean up after farm animals; deal with their diseases; shear wool; build fences;  or do any of the other work involved in farm life.  Even the thought of a vineyard is a bit overwhelming. 

Just give me my small backyard garden and spare me the chaos, the smell, and the physical labor of serious farm life.   I enjoyed reading about it in Friend’s book, but, perhaps because she does not glamorize, sentimentalize or otherwise romanticize the farming life, I was strongly confirmed in my aversion to nature that much in the raw.  I should probably avoid working in a zoo or living in the wild as well.

Caveats aside, there is much to learn in this book about farm animals, their habits and diseases, their sounds and smells, their care and treatment.  The couple even gets a grant to compare different methods of weed control in their vineyard, which turns out to be highly educational in, perhaps, an unexpectedly negative way.   The information about what is involved in running a farm is weaved in among personal struggles; the drama of birth, life and death on the farm; and great good humor.

For the general reader, however, the most engaging part of the book may be the personal narrative, as Catherine learns to embrace her partner’s dream of owning a farm without sacrificing her own dream of being a writer.  The title says it all as Catherine, having no background or experience with farming, often seems blindsided by its full reality and more than once questions her decision to live this life.  Her own writing is frequently sacrificed to the daily, and seasonal, demands of farm work.  After fits, starts, and near failure, Catherine eventually learns, not only how to balance her own needs and desires with those of her partner, but also how to enthusiastically participate in the farm without being overwhelmed by it.

What is most interesting to me, professionally speaking, is the way Hit by a Farm transforms the memoir into a relationship narrative, which may be a distinctively modern twist on the traditional personal narrative.  We watch Catherine and Melissa struggle, not only with the farm, but also with their partnership and their distinctly different personalities.  A couple of times it looks like they might break up, but love and commitment ultimately triumph as they learn the lessons of reciprocity, equality, boundaries, and the delicate balance  between independence and an authentically shared relationship.

Just as Friend does not glamorize nature and life on a farm, she does not overly romanticize love and commitment.  The joys are celebrated, but the setbacks and challenges are unswervingly acknowledged.

As a lesbian in a relationship with a partner who is distinctly different from me, it was the relationship narrative that I found most personally appealing, for, like Catherine and Melissa, we’ve learned the same lessons they did, though not on a farm.

And each time I drive from St. Cloud, MN, where I live, to Rochester, where my daughter and her family live, I keep an eye out as I cross the Zumbro River to see if I can spot the Rising Moon Farm (http://www.risingmoonfarm.com/) up above the valley.

Rebecca

I recently watched the BBC Biopic on Daphne DuMarier, *Daphne* (2007), which dramatizes her bisexuality; her seemingly passionless marriage; her unrequited love for Ellen Doubleday, her publisher’s wife; and her affair with actress Gertrude Lawrence, as well as her writing career from the plagiarism trial over Rebecca to the writing of her short story “The Birds.” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963169/)

 

It had been a long time since I had read Rebecca (1938), so I watched the Hitchcock film to refresh my memory (1940).  According to Wikipedia, the film is fairly faithful to the novel with a couple of exceptions, namely changing the death of Rebecca from a murder by her husband to an accidental fall when he angrily confronts her and changing the character of Mrs. Danvers to make her younger, more mysterious, and more, well, lesbian. 

 

My own interpretation of the film version of Mrs. Danvers was that she was almost pathologically loyal to Rebecca and resentful of the second Mrs. de Winter, to the point of wanting to get rid of the second wife, almost like a child who hates her step-mother.   Mrs. Danvers is presented as unambiguously evil.  She always wears black and displays a malignant expression.  If you read her as lesbian, it could be because in those days the stereotypical lesbian was often a vampirish predator.

 

I don’t remember the novel well enough to speculate on whether this lesbian association could be found in the original text, but du Maurier may have seen her own same-sex attraction as evil, or at least, deviant.  In any case, her diaries reveal that she saw two sides to her own personality: the conventional wife and mother and the hidden male lover that energized her creativity. (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/935280.Myself_When_Young)

 

What if Rebecca were an expression of these two sides of her psyche?  Why is the narrator of the novel (the second Mrs. de Winter) unnamed?  Why is a crucial scene in the plot based on a costume that both Rebecca and the narrator wear?  Why does Rebecca herself have two sides to her personality: her public image as the beautiful, elegant wife of Maxim de Winter and her hidden side of sexual promiscuity, selfishness, cruelty, and deception?  Identity is clearly a prominent theme.

 

The unnamed second Mrs. de Winter is young, inexperienced, and naïve, compared to the sophisticated, worldly, and manipulative first wife, Rebecca.  The second wife could represent the conventional wife and mother identity that Daphne du Maurier presented in public, while Rebecca represents what du Maurier saw as her dark side of forbidden desire, sexual transgression, and duplicity.

 

So, why is the “good wife,” so to speak, unnamed?  Is that the author’s way of erasing her conventional self?  Is Rebecca’s death a way of symbolically killing off the dark side?  Does the novel express an identity conflict?  Does du Maurier unconsciously, if not consciously, reject both sides of her personality?

 

A Freudian or psychoanalytic critic would have no problem answering in the affirmative, and, I must say, I find that interpretation persuasive.

 

If Mrs. Danvers’ attachment to Rebecca, even after death, is read as lesbian, then her burning down of Manderly could perhaps represent the destructiveness that du Maurier saw, or feared, in her hidden desires.  Fire, of course, also represents the heat of passion.  Danvers’ own death in the conflagration may express du Maurier’s fear of her own self-destructive passion.  Is that why she retreated for the rest of her life into her conventional marriage after the death of Gertrude Lawrence?

 

On the other hand, her own words attribute her creativity to the “male lover” within.  Perhaps she was aware of the Freudian theory that repressed desire will manifest itself indirectly, often in creative work.  Perhaps it is safer to speculate, since speculation it is, that du Maurier was ambivalent about her same-sex desire, seeing it as potentially destructive if acted out and a source of energy if channeled into creative work.

 

I pose this interpretation tentatively and interrogatively because psychoanalytic criticism is often viewed skeptically as a form of practicing psychology without a license and pathologizing an author one has never met or interviewed.  Yet literature is a form of fantasy, and fantasy is often an expression of what has been sublimated, repressed, or denied.  I will leave it to my readers to conclude whether the parallels between du Maurier’s own autobiography and the novel are valid and significant.

 

Other ways of reading the novel include the gothic fear of irrationality and death and the age-old pattern of initiation, or coming-of-age, in which the “innocent” second wife comes to terms with the evil in the world, including, in her case, the knowledge that she loves, marries, and ultimately protects a murderer.  In either case, our narrator could be nameless the better to represent a universal human experience.  Neither of these readings is inconsistent with the other nor with the psychoanalytic interpretation.

Richard III as Tragedy

Shakespeare’s Richard III is categorized as a History Play (see previous post), but its official title is The Tragedy of King Richard III.  Given its deliberate distortion of historical fact and its well-established role in Tudor propaganda, perhaps it does make more sense to read the play as fictional tragedy than historical dramatization.  But how to turn a monstrous villain into a tragic hero?  This is where Shakespeare’s brilliance shows itself in this work.

Shakespeare’s tragedies grew out of the history plays, and it was not impossible for a tragic hero to have villainous qualities.  Consider Othello, who murders his wife, or Macbeth, who sinks deeper and deeper in blood as the play unfolds.  But the essence of tragedy involves a hero for whom the audience can feel some sympathy.  Othello is cruelly manipulated and urged on by Iago, as Macbeth is by Lady Macbeth.  The classical tragic hero is a larger than life character with great potential, whose tragic flaw leads to his (or her) downfall.  In the case of Othello, it’s jealousy and in the case of MacBeth, “vaulting ambition.” 

In some ways Richard III could be seen as a trial run for Macbeth, since ambition and lust for power are Richard’s downfalls, but no one eggs him on.  He is a larger than life character who simply chooses to get rid of anyone who stands in his way to the throne.  The classical tragic hero evokes “pity and fear,” pity for the hero and fear that, as human beings with our own flaws, we could fall as they do.  How to create sympathy for a purposeful villain like Richard?  How to make him a character that the audience can identify with?  And how to do so, and at the same time curry favor with your Tudor monarch by perpetuating the myth of Richard as a complete monster?

Shakespeare solved this problem by subtly psychologizing Richard as an unloved and unlovable man whose desperate desire for love twists him into a criminal.  His deformed body is merely an outward sign of a misshapen psyche, which becomes what it most hates.  And, tragically, Richard is fully conscious of his own depravity.

This theme is introduced in Richard’s opening speech: 

“But I…that am rudely stamped, and want love’s majesty/To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;/I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,/Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,/Deform’d, unfinish’d…/And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover/…I am determined to prove a villain…”

The idea of “dissembling nature” that has cheated him of a normal life continually recurs.  Margaret, widow of the lately dead King Henry VI, attacks Richard as a “slave of nature” and “son of hell.”  She goes on, “Thou slander of thy heavy mother’s womb!/And loathed issue of thy father’s loins!”  Richard’s own mother refers to her “accursed womb, the bed of death!” and refers to Richard as a “cockatrice” that she has “hatch’d to the world.”  Later she gives him her “most grievous curse.”  Richard is literally denied a mother’s love. 

And in the end, Richard struggles with his own self-loathing:  “Richard loves Richard…/O no! Alas, I rather hate myself…/I shall despair; there is no creature loves me,/And if I die no soul will pity me.”  Ironically, however, it is hard not to pity this man, alone in the end, facing the defeat he has brought on himself, having been deprived of a normal body, a mother’s love, and a healthy life.

Of all the murders Richard is accused of in the play, the worst is that of the two sons of his brother Edward IV, the young princes in line for the throne after Edward’s death.  The rumor was that Richard had had them smothered in their beds while they were supposedly housed in the Tower of London for their own protection. 

Shakespeare takes this image of innocent nature being suffocated and creates a powerful motif that applies to the smothering of Richard’s innocence, as well as to his victims. 

During the War of the Roses (according to Henry VI, Part 3) Richard’s own twelve-year-old brother, Rutland, had been murdered by a supporter of Margaret and Henry VI.  When Margaret confronts Richard with the murder of her husband and son, Richard reminds her of “the faultless blood of pretty Rutland.”  Later, children appear on stage, the son and daughter of Richard’s brother Clarence, grieving their father’s death, and then the two young sons of Edward IV, heirs to the throne before their murder.  A young Page is called on by Richard to name someone who would kill the young princes for money.  Thus are innocence and violence repeatedly linked.

At one point there is a reference to Richard growing so fast “That he could gnaw a crust at two hours old,” as if young Richard had outpaced his innocence and grown into maturity too soon. 

And when the murder of the young princes is described, the smothering of innocent nature is explicitly invoked:

“…thus…lay the gentle babes/…girdling one another/Within their alabaster innocent arms./Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,/…a book of prayers on their pillow lay…/…We smothered/The most replenished sweet work of Nature/That from the prime creation e’er she framed.”

Richard’s own childhood innocence, the text implies, had been stolen from him by his deformity from birth and the blood of family history, all of which culminates in a twisted psyche that substitutes the brutal pursuit of power for the love he has been denied and that ends as the victim of its own self-loathing.

Richard III is not only a tragedy of love and innocence, but also a tragedy of conscience.  When Richard’s innocence was smothered, his conscience was also suffocated. 

Early on Margaret curses Richard: “The worm of conscience shall begnaw thy soul!”  Later his mother and Elizabeth, mother of the young princes, seek to “smother” him with “the breath of bitter words.”  The ghost of Prince Edward, son of Henry VI, speaks to Richard using the same image of suffocation: “Let me sit heavy on thy soul…”  When the ghosts of all his victims appear, and speak, and disturb his sleep, Richard is temporarily stricken with the pangs of conscience:  “My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,/…And every tale condemns me for a villain.”  Yet, even while conscious of his own guilt, he resists:  “Conscience is but a word that cowards use.”

Shakespeare’s texts are saturated with the theme of love and death, and in Richard III, we see lust transformed into the desire to destroy.  Scenes of courtship alternate with scenes of murder, just as Richard’s longing for love is perverted by his sense of being unloved and unlovable.  He mocks the value of love because he feels he cannot have it.

Ultimately, Richard’s tragedy reaches beyond himself.  Frequent references in the play evoke dark depths of history, time, events, and human psychology beyond the control of even such a larger-than-life character as Richard.

The opening lines suggest a tempest temporarily over, a stormy sea, and ocean depths.  Clarence’s dream takes place at sea, expresses his fear of drowning in “the tumbling billows of the main,” and calls up images of secrets in the deep.  As Hastings is taken to his own beheading, he bewails the “fatal bowels of the deep.”  Elsewhere, there are references to the “mighty sea” and the “swallowing gulf/Of dark forgetfulness and deep oblivion.”  Despite Richard’s dominance in the action of the play, there is that pervading sense that he too is caught in the roiling sea of life and in the ocean depths of his own unconscious urges.

Thus does Shakespeare turn this play, not only into Tudor propaganda that paints Richard III as a monster of history, but also into the transcendent tragedy of a character trapped in a catastrophe of his own making and in a universal human dilemma beyond his own making.

So what does Richard III tell us about the criminal mind?  It seems to suggest that destructive acts (both physical and verbal), assault, aggression, and abuse grow out of a deep-seated, unhealed wound.  Those who harm others have themselves been deeply hurt.*

*For the bulk of this commentary I am heavily indebted to my graduate school Shakespeare professor Dr. Gerald Chapman.  (Gerald Chapman, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Denver, scholar of Renaissance and 18th-century English studies, Department Chair for twelve years, has also taught at Northwestern, Harvard, and the University of Texas.)

Richard III as History

One need look no further than the Academy Award nominations of 2013 to note the controversy that often surrounds dramatizations of historical events and personages. I’ve seen Argo, Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty, even Lincoln questioned and debated as representations of history. 

In our postmodern world, we recognize that not even professional historians are completely neutral and objective in their accounts.  Why would we expect that of artists, playwrights, and film-makers?  Indeed, perhaps the value of historical dramatizations lies in their stimulation of interest and conversations about what we think we know about the past.

Similarly, real life events can spark interest in art.  I was fascinated by the recent unearthing of Richard III’s skeleton, which had lain undiscovered since 1485, not only by the archeological dig itself and the process of identifying the remains, but also by the efforts of the Richard III Society to rehabilitate his reputation after the damage done to it by previous historians and especially by William Shakespeare.  The news sent me back to the play, which I had studied in my graduate Shakespeare course, as well as to my undergraduate English history text and lecture notes.

I realized that, having both read the play and seen it in production, I had had my image of Richard shaped more by art and drama than by the historical record.  It was only when I reviewed my notes that I remembered my undergraduate history professor making the case that it was Henry VII, not Richard III, who had had the young princes murdered in the Tower.

Not only did I reread the play, but I reviewed the historical accounts.  Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, Vol. II, is particularly valuable since it compares the plot of Shakespeare’s play to what is known about the historical facts.  Shakespeare was clearly more interested in dramatic effect and the approval of the Tudor monarchy that ruled when he wrote the play than he was in historical truth.   Asimov makes a persuasive case that Richard probably did have the young princes murdered.  However, it’s clear from the historical record that it was Edward IV, not Richard, who had their brother, Clarence, murdered.  Asimov also argues that Richard’s ruthless acts to acquire and keep the kingship could be attributed as much to his desire to end the bloody civil wars that had been raging for decades as to his personal ambition.

In any case, while the newly discovered skeleton of Richard III confirms Shakespeare’s representation of him as a “hunchback” (he had curvature of the spine) there is no evidence that he had a withered arm or any other “deformities.”  Likewise, while the historical record shows Richard acting brutally, he was no more a “monster” than other contenders for the throne during the Wars of the Roses or other periods of British or other national histories.  There is also ample evidence that Henry VII, who succeeded Richard, and his Tudor descendants went to great lengths to create the legend of Richard as a brutal monster, both in his appearance and his deeds, who had grand ambition and little to no conscience.

Shakespeare contributed to this legend and added to Richard’s villainous image the traits of wit, irony, and “larger than life” character that marks most Shakespearean “heroes.”   What is fascinating is the way Shakespeare psychologizes the motivation of Richard’s character, such that the play becomes the study of a “criminal mind,” if you will, and of the steady decline deeper and deeper into corruption and blood, until his own treachery backfires and he himself becomes the victim of treason and violence.  (See next post.)

The examination of Richard’s skeleton showed that he had suffered wounds of humiliation after death, such as a thrust through the right buttock and missing feet.  Thus the Tudors and their followers demeaned his corpse as well as his reputation.

Whatever injustices art may inflict on history, at the very least it can engage and challenge us, not only in the drama but ultimately in the quest for truth.  We should never take any account, whether factual or fictional, at face value, but, rather, as the genesis of conversation, debate, and inquiry.  If art does not always represent the truth of history, it does energize us to seek that truth.