They Really Are Coming for Your Body

By Robin Bates | Published: May 15, 2022
Still from Handmaid’s Tale

Monday

Although I’m 70 years old, I’m always learning, and one thing I’ve grasped in a new way over the past six years is that appeasement doesn’t stop bullies. My natural inclination when I encounter disagreement is to make concessions in hopes that the other side will engage in good faith negotiating, but Trump and Putin have made me realize how naïve this is. As authoritarians see it, any concession is a sign of weakness and an invitation to push even more.

This is true as well of anti-abortion crusaders—which is why scaling back or overturning Roe v Wade, as Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus points out, will be

just the start. For those who believe that abortion is the taking of a human life, allowing it to remain legal in wide swaths of the country is intolerable.

As Marcus sees it, anti-abortionists will start with banning abortion in red states and then in all states. After that, rightwing forces will go after birth control and same sex marriage and who knows what else.

Last week Margaret Atwood wrote in  an Atlantic article about composing The Handmaid’s Tale. “I stopped writing it several times,” she reports,

because I considered it too far-fetched. Silly me. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?

Atwood notes that she took some of her inspiration from “17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence,” which is ironic given that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito cited a 17th century judge, one Sir Matthew Hale, in his draft opinion overturning Roe. (Hale voiced suspicion of women who charge rape, contended marital rape was an impossibility [since men own their wives, they can’t rape themselves], and sentenced two “witches” to death.) In her article Atwood observes that there are differing religious views on abortion and that, in settling on one, the United States would be imposing a religious rule on the entire country, in violation of the “freedom of religion” clause in the First Amendment:

When does a fertilized human egg become a full human being or person? “Our” traditions—let’s say those of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the early Christians—have vacillated on this subject. At “conception”? At “heartbeat”? At “quickening?” The hard line of today’s anti-abortion activists is at “conception,” which is now supposed to be the moment at which a cluster of cells becomes “ensouled.” But any such judgment depends on a religious belief—namely, the belief in souls. Not everyone shares such a belief. But all, it appears, now risk being subjected to laws formulated by those who do. That which is a sin within a certain set of religious beliefs is to be made a crime for all.

If America were being true to its Constitution, Atwood says—which is what the self-proclaimed “originalists” on the Supreme Court claim they are–it “ought to be simple”:

If you believe in “ensoulment” at conception, you should not get an abortion, because to do so is a sin within your religion. If you do not so believe, you should not—under the Constitution—be bound by the religious beliefs of others. But should the Alito opinion become the newly settled law, the United States looks to be well on the way to establishing a state religion. Massachusetts had an official religion in the 17th century. In adherence to it, the Puritans hanged Quakers.

Once jurisdictions start policing such matters, Atwood points out, they will unleash chaos. For instance,

it will be very difficult to disprove a false accusation of abortion. The mere fact of a miscarriage, or a claim by a disgruntled former partner, will easily brand you a murderer. Revenge and spite charges will proliferate, as did arraignments for witchcraft 500 years ago.

The Canadian author concludes that if America really wants to “be governed by the laws of the 17th century,” then it “should should take a close look at that century.”

“Is that when you want to live?” she asks.

After reading Atwood’s article, I revisited Handmaid’s Tale, which I’ve taught twice, to see what insights she gives on how a society becomes a Gilead. In flashbacks scattered throughout the novel, handmaid Offred recounts how the current theocratic state came about. A one point, she notes,

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. There were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

If one is living in a blue state, the possibility of banned abortion seems far removed. If one is living in a red state, the possibility of a ban on contraception seems far removed. And yet Mitch McConnell has said that, if the Republicans were to regain power, they could well pass a federal ban, and there are Republican legislators (including my home state senator Marsha Blackburn) who want the Supreme Court to revisit privacy laws allowing birth control. There are also legislators talking about forbidding women to travel out of state to get abortions and tracking the health records and internet searches of those who are pregnant. Yet we find ways to shrug off these concerns. As Offred observes,

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.

Later in the novel, the United States experiences a military coup following an unspecified national catastrophe. In spite of this, the army reassures the public:

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.

Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.

I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?

Even after the new leaders suspend the Constitution, there’s a muted response:

They said [the suspension] would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your hand on.

Looking back, the naïve June reports that her more worldly-wise friend Moira was more alert to the danger:

You wait, she said. They’ve been building up to this. It’s you and me gainst the wall, baby.

Atwood’s plot may have appeared far-fetched in 1985 but not now, given that we barely escaped our own coup on January 6, 2021. And unlike the coup in the novel where Muslim terrorists provide the rationale, Trump supporters have been openly taking credit for ours. We learn from Trump flunky Peter Navarro that the coup plan had a name–“The Green Bay Sweep”—and from Trump lawyer John Eastman’s e-mails about attempts to convince Pennsylvania politicians to come up with “cover” (fraudulent voting accusations) so that GOP fake electors could vote for Trump. There were also plans, pending anticipated disturbances following an election overthrow, to declare martial law. Several in the GOP were very open about it.

One would think that all this would be hot enough to get us to leap out of the bathtub. And yet, once again, many Americans are pushing the danger aside, telling themselves that “everything is under control.”

So now there’s talk in some states, if Roe v Wade is overturned, about not allowing pregnant women to cross state lines to get abortions. In the novel, meanwhile, June and her husband and daughter attempt to flee to Canada. June sees her husband shot and her daughter kidnapped, and she herself is turned into a breeding machine.

Could Christian fascists triumph here? If Roe v Wade is overturned, they’ll have the wind in their sails.

Reader response: When I first responded to Alito’s draft ruling, I received the following response from reader Matthew Currie, which smartly lays out what may be coming:

One of the things I find most scary about this already scary future is that many on the anti-choice side have announced that their next target will be the Griswold Vs. Connecticut decision, with an aim toward outlawing the protection of birth control, ostensibly on the ground that the IUD creates an abortion. And of course, with the privacy issue may go gay marriage, and racial equality. Of course the people going against Griswold assure us they don’t want to ban all birth control, and don’t want to do this or that, but they are making it possible.

A woman gets an IUD at a time when she is not pregnant. It is a procedure performed on the single individual who, up until now, has been considered to own her own reproductive apparatus. In fact a person could get an an IUD and die a virgin. What it does is to make the uterus unreceptive to a zygote. If the IUD is banned, it will, not sort of, not virtually, but literally, mean that a woman is not allowed to control a part of her own body. The idea that an IUD is an abortion requires that a fertilized egg not only has the rights of a human being to live, but the right to find a home, and that this right is retroactive – that a person must provide that possibility before the “person” exists.

The banning of any form of birth control is, I think, an abomination, but singling out the IUD adds a fearsome dimension, because it truly declares that at any time, any place, any age, and any circumstance, a woman’s uterus is government property. We can, of course, assume that the ignorant idiots in charge of this will not realize or take advantage of the existential change this entails, but our faith in human nature and moderation is rarely met. If you can tell a woman what procedures she may perform on her uterus, why can’t you tell her what else she must do with it, when she must, with whom she must or must not?

You could argue, I think, that banning the IUD, if not any birth control, is a subset of eugenics.

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Reporting on My Lenten Observance

By Robin Bates | Published: May 14, 2022
Una saves Redcrosse from suicide in the Cave of Despair

Spiritual Sunday

I realize that I have not reported on my Lenten reading project, which was to read as much as I could of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. As it turned out, I only got through Book I and those parts of Books II and III that are in the Norton Anthology. Nevertheless, it proved to be a rich experience, especially when I realized how much C.S Lewis owes to the poem for his Narnia books. More on that in a future post.

Since I was reading the poem for Lenten observance, one thing that stood out was how the Redcrosse Knight—a St. George figure—does penance. I’ve been arguing in some of my Lenten posts that Lent is not a time to beat yourself up for how bad you’ve been but a time to get closer to God. At one point I shared a Madeleine L’Engle poem that opens, “It is my Lent to break my Lent, /To eat when I would fast.” In other words, she’s not going to observe Lent by mortifying her body, which she sees as counterproductive. Rather, she will observe it by attempting to follow Christ’s Sermon on the Mount instructions.

The vision of Lent she’s pushing against, however, is the one that Redcrosse observes, with hot sauce added. In the poem, he has just been rescued from Despaire, where he almost commits suicide. As you read his cleansing ritual, don’t be daunted by the language—while it mimics Chaucer’s middle English, it’s actually closer to modern English, prettied up in the Spenserian style. Una, incidentally, is Redcrosse’s lady fair, who suffers as she witnesses his self-flagellation but nevertheless regards it as necessary:

Book I, XXVI
In ashes and sackcloth he did array
His daintie corse, proud humors to abate,
And dieted with fasting every day,
The swelling of his wounds to mitigate,
And made him pray both earely and eke late:
And ever as superfluous flesh did rot
Amendment readie still at hand did wayt,
To pluck it out with pincers firie whot
That soone in him was left no one corrupted jot.

XXVII
And bitter Penance with an yron whip,
Was wont him once to disple every day:
And sharpe Remorse his hart did pricke and nip,
That drops of blood thence like a well did play:
And sad Repentance used to embay
His bodie in salt water smarting sore,
The filthy blots of sinne to wash away.
So in short space they did to health restore
The man that would not live, but earst lay at deathes dore.

XXVIII
In which his torment often was so great,
That like a Lyon he would cry and rore,
And rend his flesh, and his owne synewes eat.
His owne deare Una hearing evermore
His ruefull shriekes and gronings, often tore
Her guiltlesse garments, and her golden heare,
For pitty of his paine and anguish sore;
Yet all with patience wisely she did beare;
For well she wist his crime could else be never cleare.
If that’s what it takes to become clear, sign me up for a different religion.

I don’t know a lot about either Faerie Queene or the Christianity of the time, but if fear of hell played a big role in it, then I can see why one might go overboard to make sure one didn’t go there. To end this post on a more cheerful note—one more in keeping with the Easter season—here’s one describing where Redcrosse hopes he ends up. Since in today’s lectionary readings we finish up the Book of Revelations, it’s more than appropriate. First, the lesson:

In the spirit the angel carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day– and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. 

And now for the vision of heaven that a holy hermit shows Redcrosse after he has completed his penance. Like Jacob, Redcrosse sees angels ascending and descending the stairway to heaven

Faire knight (quoth he) Hierusalem that is,
The new Hierusalem, that God has built
For those to dwell in, that are chosen his,
His chosen people purg’d from sinfull guil

With pretious blood, which cruelly was spilt
On cursed tree, of that unspotted lam,
That for the sinnes of al the world was kilt:
Now are they Saints all in that Citie sam,
More dear unto their God then younglings to their dam.

Emily Dickinson has written, Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –/ I keep it, staying at Home .” Yes, and some observe Lent by plying their flesh with whips while others with reading books. No ruefull shriekes and gronings for me, thank you very much. We can debate which way gets us closer to God.

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If You Find Joy, Give in to It

By Robin Bates | Published: May 12, 2022
Fragonard, The Swing

Friday

A Mary Oliver poem has been making the rounds on twitter and it’s easy to see why. The poet’s image in “Don’t Hesitate” of  “whole towns destroyed” brings to mind Russia’s wanton shelling of Ukrainian civilians, leaving us to wonder if any joy is possible. To which fear Oliver defiantly replies, “Still, life has some possibility left.”

On Tuesday I shared an Oliver poem that ended on an unexpectedly dark note so I bookend the week with a poem that ends on a light one. Oliver’s poems tend to veer between depression and ecstasy, but when she speaks of joy, she gives herself into it fully. In “Humpbacks,” for instance, she writes,

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body…

And in “The Plum Trees”:

Such richness flowing
through the branches of summer and into

the body, carried inward on the five
rivers! Disorder and astonishment

rattle your thoughts and your heart
cries for rest but don’t

succumb, there’s nothing
so sensible as sensual inundation.

 But back to “Don’t Hesitate,” our poem for today. While she must acknowledge that “we are not wise, and not very often kind” and that “much can never be redeemed,” she nevertheless counters with the possibility of love and light. So whenever you “unexpectedly feel joy,” don’t hold back, hoarding it the way that one perhaps hoards crumbs, hoping in this way to make the dinner last longer. Instead, dive into the feast, fully and without holding back.

Don’t Hesitate
By Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

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Russia Has Always Hated Ukrainian Lit

By Robin Bates | Published: May 11, 2022
Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet

Thursday

I never would have anticipated that a host of literary issues would arise from a horrific conflict, but so it has been with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia has one of the world’s great literary traditions—it rivals that of Great Britain’s—but it comes with a cost.

The cost is the suppression of other languages. Guilty of language chauvinism, Russia apparently has been ruthless in imposing its language on others. Some of the chauvinists, as a recent article in Literary Hub reveals, have been great authors.

“We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then all would have been lost,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in his 1959 study, Gogol. He continued: “When I want a good nightmare, I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume….” What he calls the “Little Russian dialect” is none other than the Ukrainian language, which is about as close to Russian as Spanish is to Italian.

Author Askold Melnyczuk observes that Nabokov wasn’t alone but has been joined by countless Russian writers and intellectuals. This has me rethinking my recent interpretation of Joseph Brodsky’s poem “On Ukrainian Independence,” where the speaker describes the Ukrainian poet Shevchenko as a “bullshitter” when put up against the immortal Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. I argued for a distinction between the speaker and Brodsky, imagining that Brodsky was channeling the voice of a Russian chauvinist rather than expressing his own thoughts. While this might still be the case, I’m now wondering whether Brodsky himself doesn’t agree.

Ukraine certainly doesn’t regard Shevchenko as a bullshitter. Melnyczuk observes,

Ukraine is the only country I know of that was dreamed into existence by a poet. Born a serf in 1814, Taras Shevchenko was freed from slavery by the efforts of fellow artists. The painter-poet then took on himself the mission of telling the story of the indigenous people of Ukraine in their native tongue. For this the Russian empire punished him with decades of exile and imprisonment—this despite the fact that he wrote his prose in Russian. His Ukrainian-language poetry, however, had the effect of solidifying and fortifying the indigenous people’s sense of themselves. Ever since, poets have held a singular importance for the culture.

Actually, as I noted on Monday, Slovenia might be another such country. But set that aside. Melnyczuk says that, although Ukraine isn’t the only neighboring republic that has had Russian pushed down its throat, it has long been a particular target. First, two years after the abolition of serfdom in 1863, there was a ban on Ukrainian publications. Then, in 1876, Tsar Alexander

outlawed all publications in Ukrainian, including books imported from abroad. The policy also rendered illegal theater productions and performances of songs in Ukrainian. Russia feared that the indigenous peasant population might began to demand human rights and undermine Russia’s imperial claims. 

Things then got particularly nasty in the 1930’s under Stalin in what Melnyczuk calls Ukraine’s “aborted Renaissance”:

In 1930 some 260 writers actively participated in the country’s literary life. By 1938 only 36 remained on the scene. Surveying the fates of the missing speaks volumes about the leitmotif of that decade: Of the 224 MIAs, 17 were shot; 8 committed suicide; 175 were arrested or interred; 16 disappeared without a trace. Only 7 died of natural causes. Belorussian culture was similarly decimated and thwarted by Stalin.

“The crime for which writers and intellectuals in former Soviet republics were punished,” Melnyczuk writes, “was that they dared aspire to autonomy and cultural independence.”

Russia is, of course, not the only country that has imposed its culture on others. France, England and others did so as well. Frantz Fanon, the legendary author of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), notes how the soft power of culture complements the hard power of state violence. Looking at how Europe colonized Africa, Fanon notes,

Every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture, which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior, to recognize the unreality of his “nation.”

As a result, imported culture overwhelms native culture, which becomes “more and more shriveled up, inert, and empty.”

What Fanon says about national culture in general applies to literature. As African children are brought up reading, say, the French tragedies of Corneille and Racine, little is left of indigenous culture other than “a set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress, and a few broken-down institutions.” In these “remnants of culture,” Fanon says, “there is no real creativity and no overflowing life.” For instance, old folktales that grandparents tell their children, while they may survive, cannot address the issues of the day.

Fanon then goes on, however, to talk about a “literature of combat” in which a new sense of nation arises. Combative literature “calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation,” Fanon says. As such, it “molds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours,” thereby opening up “new and boundless horizons.” Such literature Fanon characterizes as “the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space.”

Such literature includes folk art, and Fanon notes that in Africa, the authorities, from 1955 on, began to systematically arrest storytellers. After all, the stories they told conflicted with the official colonialist narrative.

On Chris Hayes’s podcast Why Is This Happening?, Yale historian Tim Snyder, an expert on Russia and Ukraine as well as the author of the influential On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, recently spoke of Russia’s long history of cultural genocide. Russia, Snyder said, doesn’t acknowledge the existence either of the Ukrainian language or of Ukraine itself. To support his contention, he discussed a statement that appeared on Russia’s official state news agency site on April 3rd, just a few days after the discovery of the mass murders by Russian soldiers in Bucha.” Melnyczuk quotes Snyder in her article:

The Russian handbook is one of the most openly genocidal documents I have ever seen. It calls for the liquidation of the Ukrainian state, and for abolition of any organization that has any association with Ukraine. Such people, “the majority of the population,” …more than twenty million people, are to be killed or sent to work in “labor camps” to expurgate their guilt for not loving Russia. Survivors are to be subject to “re-education.” Children will be raised to be Russian. The name “Ukraine” will disappear.

But Ukraine can’t disappear if it has a vital literature, and Melnyczuk notes that “dozens of presses are rushing out translations of work by Ukrainian writers, whether they’re written in Ukrainian, Russian, Belarussian or Crimean Tatar.”

It’s ironic that the same language that has given us Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, and Akhmatova should also be used to silence indigenous authors. And indeed, there has always been this push and pull in liberation movements: should Chinua Achebe write in Igbo or Salman Rushdie in Urdu, thereby limiting their readership—or should they write in the colonizers’ language, which expands their scope? By writing in English, Achebe was able to speak to much of Africa and Rushdie to all of India, but they gave up something in the process.

In his interview with Hayes, however, Snyder made an important point. Ukrainians have no difficulty moving between languages, which means that multiple literatures are available to them. Their multicultural nation is far more vibrant than monocultural Russia.

Which means that Gogol writing in Ukrainian might not have the nightmare that Nabokov feared.

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PBS’s Sanditon: Austen + Jane Eyre

By Robin Bates | Published: May 10, 2022

Wednesday

Two years ago, not realizing that the PBS Sanditon series was going to experience a second season, I expressed my dissatisfaction. When Charlotte doesn’t marry either of the two very attractive prospects available to her (for her part, Austen never gives us more than one attractive bachelor per heroine), I speculated, “Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to capture the disappointment we feel over Austen’s own unfinished ending.”

It’s not that I was demanding a traditional marriage plot. I would have been more than happy with a bildungsroman (growth story). To elaborate, feminist Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in an influential book, sees the marriage plot warring with the bildungsroman in much of 19th-century women’s fiction, with the marriage plot invariably winning out. Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre may flirt with the bildungsroman, she observes, but in the end the marriage plot wins the day, with the protagonist dwindling from hero to heroine. Jane Eyre may undergo remarkable growth in the course of Charlotte Bronte’s novel but, on the last page, she is triumphantly proclaiming, “Reader, I married him.” Elizabeth, meanwhile, must curb her satiric tongue—what we love best about her—once she is engaged to Darcy. A pretty good joke at his expense*, one that could prod him to grow, never sees the light of day.

My problem with season #1’s conclusion was that Charlotte appeared to be heading back to an obscure life in the country, where she would be unable to exercise her powers in any way that we could see.

But now that there has been a season #2, and with a season #3 on the way, I’m more forgiving. We are getting the marriage plot after all, with all the perils that go with it. And who knows—Charlotte may end up as a hero rather than a wife in the end. Or perhaps she will be an equal partner with a husband. After all, that architect from season #1 is still around while Charlotte has good design ideas and admirable drive. I could imagine them as joint partners, something like Dorothea Brooke and Ladislaw in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

I noted in my previous post that, since Jane Austen didn’t complete Sanditon, the filmmakers aren’t bound to a specific ending. In the first season, as I observed in my post, they mostly rearrange previous Austen characters and plots. Part of the fun for Janeites like myself is recognizing when they do so. In fact, I called them out as I watched the series with my wife and mother, and they—perhaps because they are Janeites themselves or perhaps because they were being nice—didn’t complain.

For instance, I noted that Charlotte starts out as a Catherine Morland type (from Northanger Abbey), and that her relationship with Sydney Parker has an Elizabeth-Darcy vibe. The filmmakers have also drawn a lot from Mansfield Park, with Edward and Esther Denham at one point resembling the Crawfords. Lady Denham, meanwhile, echoes various tyrannical widows, like Mrs. Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility and Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. Like Mrs. Ferrars, Lady Denham has control of her estate and can disinherit if she chooses (and in fact does so).  

Season 2 continues with some of this rearranging. Charlotte’s sister is invited to Sanditon like Fanny Price’s sister to the Bertram household, although the two have more in common with Elinor and Marianne from Sense and Sensibility. Sense and Sensibility may also have inspired some of the backstory of Mr. Colbourne, the estate owner who (spoiler alert) does not, in the end, propose to Charlotte: just as Colonel Brandon’s first love runs away from his brother, whom she is pressured to marry, so Colbourne’s first wife runs into the arms of the unscrupulous Captain Lennox, before returning to her husband to give birth and die. (It doesn’t, however, appear that her tomboy daughter will suffer the fate of Colonel Brandon’s ward, who is seduced and ruined by Willoughby.)

Captain Lennox, meanwhile, has some of Wickham’s debt issues in Pride and Prejudice, although in the end he is far more malicious, resembling Mr. Eliot in Persuasion. Mr. Eliot, like Lennox, has eyes for the heroine (whose desires point in another direction), and, like Mr. Eliot, he ruins (or attempts to ruin) other people. Meanwhile, the West Indian colony of Antigua, which appears in Mansfield Park, continues to play a role: Georgia, mixed-race heiress and ward of Sydney Parker, is still with us. Sydney, meanwhile, takes a trip to Antigua (like Sir Thomas Bertram), where he dies of yellow fever.

But for all that, the series is also moving in a very Victorian direction. This Sanditon, for instance, has a far more positive view of the governess profession than Jane Austen ever did. It’s more Bronte-esque than Austen-esque. Here’s how Jane Fairfax in Emma, perhaps speaking for Austen, tells Mrs. Elton how she sees the profession:

When I am quite determined as to the time, I am not at all afraid of being long unemployed. There are places in town, offices, where inquiry would soon produce something—Offices for the sale—not quite of human flesh—but of human intellect.”

“Oh! my dear, human flesh! You quite shock me; if you mean a fling at the slave-trade…”

“I did not mean, I was not thinking of the slave-trade,” replied Jane; “governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies. But I only mean to say that there are advertising offices, and that by applying to them I should have no doubt of very soon meeting with something that would do.”

Sanditon’s Charlotte, on the other hand, sees the job as a possible future and means of independence. As I recall, on her way to Mr. Colbourne’s estate she first encounters his dog before meeting him on horseback, which is how Jane Eyre first meets Rochester. Edward Denham, meanwhile, has turned into a Wilkie Collins-style villain (I’m thinking of The Woman in White) as he secretly feeds her opium to convince her and the world that she needs to be locked up in a madhouse. There’s also something Dickensian about the woman he impregnates, who ends up running away from her child.

By the end of season #2, it sounds as though Charlotte, now twice crossed in love, is considering marrying a neighboring farmer. This of course cannot stand as the filmmakers are unlikely to go in a Thomas Hardy direction. There’s far more energy to be found in resort towns, like Sanditon and Bath.

I have no problems with the televised Sanditon. Austen herself was moving from a classical 18th century sensibility to a more Romantic one in her late fiction, with Anne Elliot—in her last completed novel—marrying a risk-taking captain rather than a landed squire. Sanditon, meanwhile, was venturing into the very un-Austen territory of real estate. Who knows where the author would have ended up?

*Elizabeth’s joke: Austen tells us that

Elizabeth longed to observe that Mr. Bingley had been a most delightful friend; so easily guided that his worth was invaluable; but she checked herself. She remembered that he had yet to learn to be laughed at, and it was rather too early to begin.

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Add the Climate to a Week of Disasters

By Robin Bates | Published: May 9, 2022
Peter von Cornelius, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1845)

Tuesday

I seem to be writing about one catastrophe after another these days. Last Tuesday it was Mariupol, followed by the likely repeal of Roe v Wade, which was followed by another post on Russian atrocities, before the week ended with news that America had just registered one million Covid deaths. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are certainly making their rounds, and to make sure they don’t miss anything, I turn today’s post over to climate change, as seen by Mary Oliver.

The four horsemen, as I’m sure you know, are War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. So I’ve covered War, Death and Pestilence, and I could note that Famine is riding hard in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and could come to other parts of the world with the interruption of the Ukrainian wheat harvest. In their collaborative novel Good Omens, fantasists Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett feature the four horsemen, only they have replaced Pestilence with Pollution on the grounds that that latter poses more of a threat, especially with advances in modern medicine. While the grave threat that carbon emissions are posing to the future of the planet makes the swap understandable, it’s worth noting that the novel was written before the Covid pandemic.

Oliver gets the tone just right in her poem “On Traveling to Beautiful Places.” As is customary with her, she looks out at nature and captures a sense of wonder.

Then she throws in a kicker.

On Traveling to Beautiful Places
By Mary Oliver

Every day I’m still looking for God
and I’m still finding him everywhere,
in the dust, in the flowerbeds.
Certainly in the oceans,
In the islands that lay in the distance
Continents of ice, countries of sand
Each with its own set of creatures
And God, by whatever name.
How perfect to be aboard a ship with
Maybe a hundred years still in my pocket.
But it’s late, for all of us,
And in truth the only ship there is
Is the ship we are all on
Burning the world as we go.

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A Reflection on National Literatures

By Robin Bates | Published: May 8, 2022
Ljubljana statue of Slovenian national poet France Preseren

Monday

I wrote recently about the significance of national literatures in the war between Russian and Ukraine (here and here). While many Russians regard the Ukrainian language with contempt—why read the “bullshit” of Ukrainian poet Shevchenko when you could be reading the Russian master poet Pushkin, the speaker in Joseph Brodsky’s “On Ukrainian Independence” says mockingly –a national poet like Shevchenko helps establish the credibility of the language and thereby the nation. That’s why the Ukrainian city of Karkhiv has a large statue of him in its central square, which is currently covered by sandbags to protect it against Russian missiles.

I saw how poetry can be entwined with nationalism at first hand when I spent two Fulbright years in Slovenia, once when it was one of Yugoslavia’s six republics (in 1987-88) and once when it was a newly independent country (in 1994-95). I remember being struck, when I visited the first time, by how many streets and buildings were named after Slovenian authors. Indeed, a statue of France Prešeren, Slovenia’s national poet, overlooks the downtown center of Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital.

I write about Slovenia today because yesterday it, like much of Europe, celebrated Victory in Europe Day or VE Day. (Russia celebrates Victory Day today.) I got a close look at Slovenia’s regard for poetry when, in Slovenia’s 1995 VE celebration, I was one of six readers from five allied nations (along with a Slovenian teenager) chosen to read poems from their native lands. I enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame standing atop a 20-foot scaffold, where I read Walt Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain” to a national television audience. I recount the story here so will just note the significance of the organizers choosing to conclude the celebration with poetry. Earlier, Slovenians had been treated to a performance by the national orchestra; to Slovenia’s famed mountain climbers scaling the nearby skyscrapers; to planes flying overhead; to Slovenian concentration camp survivors parading around; and to Slovenia’s famous white Lipizzaner horses being trotted through. Poetry, however, got the last word.

Looking at one of France Prešeren’s sonnets, one gets a sense of why he—and Slovenian writers generally—are so important to Slovenia’s sense of nationhood. Writing at a time (1834) when Slovenia was very much part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Prešeren sees himself as a modern Orpheus. After all he, like the mythical Greek poet, lives in a mountainous country inhabited by “wild folk.” But if Slovenes are to go beyond regional infighting and see themselves as one people, they need a poet that will “speak with song of native strain” and “remind us of lost pride of race.”  If such a poet does so, then

Our people in one nation then combined
Would see that feuds no longer did increase.
His strains would bring the rule of joy and peace,
Where tempests roar and nature is unkind.

Here’s the entire sonnet, which appeared in Wreath of Sonnets and has been translated by Vivian de Sola Pinto:

Above them savage peaks the mountains raise,
Like those which once were charmed by the refrain
Of Orpheus, when his lyre stirred hill and plain,
And Haemus’ crags and the wild folk of Thrace.

Ah, would, to cure the dearth of these our days,
An Orpheus dowered with song of native strain
Were sent to us that all Slovenes might gain
Fresh fire to set their frozen hearts ablaze.

His words might kindle thoughts that would remind
Us of lost pride of race; discord would cease;
Our people in one nation then combined

Would see that feuds no longer did increase.
His strains would bring the rule of joy and peace,
Where tempests roar and nature is unkind.

I believe the Slovenian dialect in which Prešeren wrote became the official language, just as Pushkin’s Russian became official Russian and Dante’s Italian official Italian. Chaucer, meanwhile, showed the English what could be accomplished by writing in London English.

The United States felt its own need for a national literature early in the 19th century. How can you be regarded as a legitimate nation unless you produce your own authors? (Hence the importance of figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman to the young republic.) Nor must one be an emerging nation to use one’s authors for political purposes. Britain has sometimes wielded Shakespeare like a club, proof of its superiority, and France has done the same with Victor Hugo, Germany with Goethe, Italy with Dante, and Russia with Tolstoy.

I don’t approve of using literature in such a way since I think it detracts from what the authors are saying. When we idolize them (the worship of Shakespeare is called bardolatry) they become static and dead rather than dynamic and alive. It’s as though officialdom, by putting them on a pedestal, seeks us from getting too close. But at least we read them and, once we have done so, we can bridge that distance and develop our own intimate relations with them.

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Giving Birth, a Leap of Faith

By Robin Bates | Published: May 7, 2022
Waterhouse, The Annunciation

 Spiritual Sunday – Mother’s Day

Today being Mother’s Day, here’s a Thomas Merton poem about the moment that Mary learned she was to be a mother. At that moment, the poet tells us,

 Speech of an angel shines in the waters of her thought
like diamonds,
Rides like a sunburst on the hillsides of her heart.

And is brought home like harvests…

The joy at the prospect of birth, however, contrasts with the dark world that the child will enter. While Mary is focusing on life,  

The farmers and the planters
Fear to begin their sowing, and its lengthy labor,
Where, on the brown, bare furrows,
The winter wind still croons as dumb as pain.

If they were strictly logical, how many mothers, looking over the world’s brown landscape, would forgo having children? What youthful mother, W.B. Yeats asks in “Among School Children,”

Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

Fortunately for us, mothers focus on the possibilities of spring rather than on the uncertainties of winter. That leap of faith keeps us all going.

Aubade: The Annunciation
By Thomas Merton

When the dim light, at Lauds, comes strike her window,
Bellsong falls out of Heaven with a sound of glass.

Prayers fly in the mind like larks,
Thoughts hide in the height like hawks:
And while the country churches tell their blessings to the
distance,
Her slow words move
(Like summer winds the wheat) her innocent love:
Desires glitter in her mind
Like morning stars:

Until her name is suddenly spoken
Like a meteor falling.

She can no longer hear shrill day
Sing in the east,
Nor see the lovely woods begin to toss their manes.
The rivers have begun to sing.
The little clouds shine in the sky like girls:
She has no eyes to see their faces.

Speech of an angel shines in the waters of her thought
like diamonds,
Rides like a sunburst on the hillsides of her heart.

And is brought home like harvests,
Hid in her house, and stored
Like the sweet summer’s riches in our peaceful barns.

But in the world of March outside her dwelling,
The farmers and the planters
Fear to begin their sowing, and its lengthy labor,
Where, on the brown, bare furrows,
The winter wind still croons as dumb as pain.

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Rhinos Ignore Covid Protocols

By Robin Bates | Published: May 5, 2022
Cover art for Ionesco’s Rhinoceros

Friday

The once unthinkable happened yesterday and we barely noticed. Indeed, you might not know what I have in mind were it not for my headline, but here it is in black and white: on May 5, 2022, the United States passed the mark of a million Covid deaths.

Struck by our seeming indifference, a Baruch College theatre history professor composed a twitter thread about Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros. It’s a good connection to make.

Ionesco wrote his play to capture the herd mentality that can take over a society so that, well, the unthinkable becomes normalized. The particular “unthinkable” he had in mind was rising fascism—also only too relevant in this day and age—but it applies to all situations involving mobthink. Caplan sums up the plot:

[O]ne by one, an entire town of people suddenly transform into rhinos. At first, people are horrified but as the contagion spreads, (almost) everyone comes to accept that turning into a rhinoceros is fine.

Caplan was led to her observations when, walking around New York City, she realized that virtually no one was wearing a mask, even though Covid continues live and well in the country. As she puts it,

Over the last few weeks, as mitigation measures drop, millions of Americans who were previously cautious about Covid (and millions more who never were) have decided that it’s time to move on and pretend that it’s 2019 again.

Bars and restaurants are packed with unmasked people, mask mandates hardly exist anywhere and are no longer tied to infection rates, the new CDC map makes it look like everything is under control, and we seem to have all collectively decided that Covid is “over.

And then she points to the reality:

The idea that we can live with Covid WITHOUT any mitigation measures and expect things to turn out ok (both for individuals and as a society) is a lie. We are watching an astounding mass delusion unfold in real time.

Caplan is particularly concerned about the possibility of contracting Covid repeatedly and reports that even 5% of the vaccinated are getting it. With Covid, meanwhile, comes the possibility of long Covid, which can have devastating effects. I can testify that one of my students this past semester has long Covid—she contracted it abroad very early in the pandemic—and although she bravely soldiers on, it has been making her life miserable.

Caplan notes that she feels like Berenger, who by play’s end is the only human left. Telling people she’s going to keep taking precautions, she says,

feels a little like Berenger’s monologue at the end of the play, where he declares his intent to remain human to a herd of rhinoceroses who no longer understand him. The contagion has already spread, and nobody is listening anymore.

“You’ll get used to it, you know,” Daisy (the love interest) tells Berenger. “It’s the wisest course to take,” his co-worker Dudard agrees. “Well, I can’t get used to it,” Berenger insists. “I wonder if one oughtn’t to give it a try?” Dudard replies. Then, he becomes a rhino.

Later, as more and more of their friends get infected, Daisy begins to change her mind about the value of staying human. “Those are the real people,” Daisy says, about the rhinos. “They look happy. They were right to do what they did.”

“We’re the ones who are doing right, Daisy, I assure you,” Berenger insists. “It’s the world that’s right – not you and me,” Daisy tells him. And then, she becomes a rhino too.

Caplan observes that she has accepted that, in all likelihood, she and her family will get Covid at some time or other. The goal, she says, “is to delay infection for as long as possible. The fewer times we catch Covid, the better.”

And she adds,

People who are trying not to get Covid aren’t “anxious” or “not moving on.” We’re looking at the facts and we’re reasonably concerned. Eliminating an opportunity for a 5% chance of developing serious heart, lung, or brain problems is worth a lot.

Which brings her back to Berenger:

Like Berenger in Rhinoceros, it feels very lonely to be caring about any of this right now. The world has moved on. But it’s the world that’s wrong, not those of us who see this for what it is.

Speaking for myself, I must admit to have gotten casual about wearing a mask. In some ways, I can get away with it since I live in a bubble. Both Sewanee the college and Sewanee the town required masking up until this past March; my students have all been vaccinated; and I myself have been twice vaxxed and twice boosted. All this has led me to become complacent.

Caplan’s Ionesco allusion, however, reminds me that I’ve got to be willing to look weird to others—i.e., put on a mask—when I enter venues that are less protected. My 96-year-old mother, even though fully vaccinated, would have real problems were she to contract a breakthrough case. And I myself am 70.

In other words, don’t let the rhinos of the world dictate your own health choices.

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