Who Has the Real Problem with Sex?

By Robin Bates | Published: April 12, 2022
Peters and West as Othello and Iago

Wednesday

It’s a fairly reliable rule of thumb that those people most obsessed with sexual perversion are those most associated with it. Recently, members of the GOP, taking their cues from QAnon cultists, have been charging Democrats with being soft on pedophilia, if not being actual pedophiles. Yet many more prominent Republicans have been associated with pedophilia than Democrats, starting with the former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert and Florida Representative Mark Foley. We could also mention Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, who closed his eyes to trainer abuse when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State, and Donald Trump, who would wander through the backstage dressing rooms of the Miss Teenage beauty pageant and who spoke sympathetically about how his friend Jeffrey Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” And then there is Alabama judge and Senate candidate Roy Moore, with his long history of hitting on teenage girls.

Oh yes, and there’s also GOP firebrand Lauren Boebert, who is married to a man who, at 24, exposed himself to two young women in a bowling alley. (Lauren, who was 17 at the time, was present when this happened but that didn’t prevent her from later marrying him.) And let’s not pass over those Republican legislators in my home state of Tennessee, who came very close to passing a pathway to marriage without minimum age limits, relaxing guardrails that were in place to protect minors from predatory behavior and abuse. Only public outcry has gotten them to back off.

I thought about this as I was teaching Othello recently. Republican hypocrisy—or projection—alerted me to Iago’s own obsession with sex. On Monday I examined why Iago hates Othello to the degree that he does, chalking it up to “ressentiment” or resentment. But his sexual hang-ups may enter into the dynamics as well.

Consider Iago’s obsession with Othello’s sexuality. Early in the play, he rouses Desdemona’s father by saying that “an old black ram is topping your white ewe” and that “your daughter [is] covered with a Barbary horse.” If this isn’t stopped, Iago warns the father, “you’ll have your nephews [grandchildren] neigh to you; you’ll have coursers for cousins and gennets [donkeys] for germans [close relatives].”

Later, in a curious comment, Iago tells us that he hates Othello because he has slept with Iago’s wife Emilia. We have no evidence that this has in fact occurred. It sounds much more like a classic case of projection, with Iago so obsessed with Othello’s sexuality that he imagines it entering his own bedroom:

For that I do suspect the lusty Moor
Hath leap’d into my seat; the thought whereof
Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards…

There’s also the strange story Iago invents about Cassio’s dreaming. As evidence that Othello’s former lieutenant is cuckolding him, Iago gives the following account:

I lay with Cassio lately;
And, being troubled with a raging tooth,
I could not sleep.
There are a kind of men so loose of soul,
That in their sleeps will mutter their affairs:
One of this kind is Cassio:
In sleep I heard him say ‘Sweet Desdemona,
Let us be wary, let us hide our loves;’
And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand,
Cry ‘O sweet creature!’ and then kiss me hard,
As if he pluck’d up kisses by the roots
That grew upon my lips: then laid his leg
Over my thigh, and sigh’d, and kiss’d; and then
Cried ‘Cursed fate that gave thee to the Moor!’

What’s striking about this is not so much that Iago has invented it but that he indulges in such graphic details. It’s as though he’s fantasizing. The point of the story—that Cassio is in love with Desdemona—almost gets sidetracked by Iago’s description of what Cassio is doing to him physically.

If one adds to this Iago’s anti-women diatribes, along with his mistreatment of his wife Emilia, one begins to wonder if his hatred against Othello stems from a frustrated homoerotic attraction: perhaps he is in love with Othello and feels betrayed by the Moor’s marriage to Desdemona and his preference for Cassio. Maybe the “cursed fate” in Iago’s story of Cassio’s dream is not the Moor taking Desdemona from Cassio but of Desdemona taking the Moor from Iago. It’s like the way that Olivia takes Sebastian from Antonio in Twelfth Night.

To explain Iago’s extreme hatred of Othello, consider that hate often burns hottest when it starts off as love. In any event, while Iago complains about others being obsessed with sex, it appears that he is the real obsessive.

Which also appears to be the case with the GOP. Nor should we be surprised. It makes sense that the party that talks most about childhood innocence–that accuses Democrats of killing unborn babies, running global child trafficking rings, and giving overly lenient sentences to those who download child porn–is the party that has the bigger problem with actual pedophiles.

Additional thoughts: I should make it clear that pedophilia isn’t confined to Republicans. There are undoubtedly pedophiles amongst Democrats and Independents as well. But Democrats are better at policing their ranks. There is also a link between fascism, with its insistence on purity and control, and pedophilia.

As regards Iago’s possible homosexual tendencies, it should be clear to regular readers of this blog that I’m not saying that homosexuals are more likely to be evil than heterosexuals. (We don’t make Macbeth stand in for the latter.) Evil can be found across the gender preference spectrum. It is true, however, the sexual repression can breed monsters. On a historic note, men sleeping with men in Shakespeare’s time was not the big deal it became in later times. Some of the world’s greatest love sonnets (Shakespeare’s) were written by one man to another.

 

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Dancing in the Face of Darkness

By Robin Bates | Published: April 11, 2022
Degas, The Star (1878)

Tuesday

Because the news is so dark these days, here’s a Jane Kenyon poem that may pick you up. Gazing at the evening sun as the world prepares to sink into night, the poet flashes back to a childhood memory. At this moment between light and dark, she remembers an ecstatic moment when, wearing a yellow dress, she made a perfect circle as she whirled around in “the ochre light of an early June evening.”

And even though she was a child, she sensed that she would need to hold on to this memory in order “to live and to go on living” when sorrows beset her. Kenyon certainly faced such sorrows, wrestling with depression and then dying of leukemia at 47. Yet the poem declares that, in that ecstatic moment, she grasped that sorrow would never “consume my heart.” She grasped this truth even as it was happening:

Evening Sun
Jane Kenyon

Why does this light force me back
to my childhood? I wore a yellow
summer dress and the skirt
made a perfect circle.
Turning and turning
until it flared to the limit
was irresistible….The grass and trees,
my outstretched arms and the skirt
whirled in the ochre light
of an early June evening.
And I knew then
that I would have to live,
and go on living: what sorrow it was;
and still what sorrow ignites
but does not consume
my heart

The poem, written in 1983, reminds me of a Lucille Clifton poem written a decade later. In Clifton’s case, an elusive sun once more plays a supporting role, helping her recover from the trauma of sexual child abuse at the hands of her father. Only after he died, she writes, did she remember how one can catch a glimpse of the sun even in darkness. “Only then,” she writes,

did i remember how she [the moon]
catches the sun and keeps most of him
for the evening that surely will come;
and it comes.
only then did i know that to live
in the world all that i needed was
some small light and know that indeed
i would rise again and rise again to dance.

Although the evening invariably comes, the heart doesn’t have to surrender to it.

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Iago Resentment Is Destroying America

By Robin Bates | Published: April 10, 2022
Solomon Alexander Hart, Othello and Iago (1857)

Monday

I have written frequently about what I regard as America’s (and the world’s) Grendel problem. This is the resentment that eats away at people, causing them to act violently against their fellows or, at least, to countenance socially disruptive behavior. While Grendel is my go-to literary archetype for resentment, I also see Milton’s Satan as a worthy candidate and now, after having taught Othello for a second time, would like to add Iago to the mix.

That’s because my students, especially Bo Sain, have been helping me see the extent to which Iago is driven by such resentment. But first, we need a handy definition of the resentment I have in mind—or “ressentiment,” as German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson have called it.

According to Oxford Reference, “ressentiment” is a “vengeful, petty-minded state of being that does not so much want what others have (although that is partly it) as want others to not have what they have.” Nietzsche applied the concept to the powerless—notably to early Christians—but I prefer Jameson’s reworking of the concept. As Jameson noted, you can have power and still feel resentment towards the powerless. In the words of Oxford Reference, Jameson saw the ruling bourgeois elite as filled with ressentiment, which they use “to simultaneously justify their privileges and rationalize the denial of those same privileges to the poorer classes.” I would add that ressentiment often rears its ugly head when the poorer classes make forward strides.

Ressentiment is as good an explanation as I can think of for Iago’s unhinged hatred for Othello. We learn in the very first interchange of this hatred—”Thou told’st me thou didst hold him in thy hate,” Roderigo says to Shakespeare’s consummate villain—and later on Iago says directly, “I do hate him as I do hell-pains.”

The explanation Iago gives is that Othello has promoted Cassio over him:

I know my price, I am worth no worse a place:
But he; as loving his own pride and purposes,
Evades them, with a bombast circumstance
Horribly stuff’d with epithets of war;
And, in conclusion,
Nonsuits my mediators; for, ‘Certes,’ says he,
‘I have already chose my officer.’
And what was he?
Forsooth, a great arithmetician,
One Michael Cassio…

Yet this explanation does not fully account for Iago’s subsequent scorched-earth campaign of destruction. After all, people get passed up for promotion all the time without setting off fireworks. Other explanations also fall short, such as Iago’s sexual feelings of inadequacy: Iago sees Othello as a “black ram” and imagines (with no proof given) that he has slept with Iago’s wife. But again, why would this cause Iago to go all in to destroy the moor?

Some have argued that Iago loves Othello (there are hints in the play of homosexual desiring) and that he feels betrayed and abandoned when Othello marries Desdemona. This is more plausible to me in that a sense of betrayal, of love turned to hate, is the kind of thing that could account for the intensity of Iago’s emotions. But for my money, the play doesn’t give us enough evidence to support such a claim.

Ressentiment, on the other hand, makes a lot of sense. As my student Bo and I discussed, Iago can’t forgive Othello because Othello makes him feel small. As a Venetian citizen, he believes he is entitled to feel big, yet this foreigner of color enters the scene, promotes someone over him, seems to have a potency that Iago lacks, marries brilliantly (outshining Iago’s marriage), and in general acts as though he deserves it all. At the same time, we see signs of Iago’s insecurity in the fact that he has married a doormat of a wife—my student Merrit Newton wrote on this—and this insecurity is compounded by Othello’s belief in his own superior qualities. He’s a proud man who believes he belongs where he is. As a result, Iago is willing to take immense gambles—gambles which prove self-destructive as he is headed for the torture chamber by the end of the play—to bring about Othello’s fall.

We saw such ressentiment at work in the eight years that Barack Obama was president, with gun sales rocketing and rightwing hate groups proliferating. The haters were gratified by Donald Trump’s birth certificate nonsense, which was a way of knocking Obama—with his position, his talented wife, and his classy behavior—off his high horse. It surfaced again in the unhinged attacks on Joe Biden’s immensely qualified Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court. It didn’t matter that both Obama or Jackson are immensely skilled—in fact, their merits just make the haters feel smaller. Trump, by contrast, won the haters’ immense gratitude by seeming to vindicate their feelings–so much so that they were willing to storm the Capitol on his behalf. Many have ruined themselves in the process, but feeling small is so painful—the ressentiment runs so deep against those whom they blame for (as they see it) casting their lives into shadow—that they will risk their businesses, their comfortable lives, and their own futures to give it vent.

Grendel is still my favorite archetype for ressentiment. But Milton’s Satan and Shakespeare’s Iago are tied for second.

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Join in the Joyful Symphony

By Robin Bates | Published: April 9, 2022
Anonymous Cameroonian artist

Spiritual Sunday

Today being Palm Sunday, I share two Palm Sunday poems that I’ve written about before, one by contemporary poet Lucille Clifton, one by 17th century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan. Since both poets love nature, it stands to reason that they would both emphasize the vegetation imagery.

Here’s today’s reading:

When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, saying, “Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.'” So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” They said, “The Lord needs it.” Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying,

“Blessed is the king
who comes in the name of the Lord!

Peace in heaven,
and glory in the highest heaven!”

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” (Luke 19:27-40)

Clifton retells the story using traditional African American imagery. I love how she refers to Jesus as “the brother”:

palm sunday

so here come i
home again
and the people glad
giving thanks
glorying in the brother
laying turnips
for the mule to walk on
waving beets
and collards in the air

For his part, Vaughan calls upon palm trees to lend him their shades and freshness, just as Jesus’s followers turned to palms to express their joy upon his entry into Jerusalem.

It is clear that the poet is really addressing himself as he addresses the “trees, flowers & herbs; birds, beasts & stones” that have been groaning since man’s fall. After all, it is only humans that groan. Seeing himself as a “humble flower,” he says that today is the day for such flowers to leave their fields and secret groves to come and join in the joyful celebration.

Incidentally, the unexpected inclusion of “stones” in his list refers to the rebuke of the pharisees that concludes today’s passage. When they complain about the multitude celebrating Jesus as “the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”, Jesus replies, “I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” As Vaughan sees it, he is called upon to cry out in joy with the rest of creation.

Still struggling to be joyous, however, he then he tells the plants/himself to take inspiration from the children who cried “Hosannah” as they strewed the palms. I have no doubt that Wordsworth had this stanza in mind when he wrote about the shepherd boy in Intimations of Immortality, and the comparison is clarifying. Just as Vaughan is fighting against gloom, a depressed Wordsworth feels himself rebuked by the happy shouts of the boy:

                              Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts,
thou happy Shepherd-boy.

Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call
                    Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
     My heart is at your festival,
          My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
               Oh evil day! if  I were sullen
               While Earth herself is adorning,
                    This sweet May-morning,
               And the Children are culling
                    On every side,
               In a thousand valleys far and wide,
               Fresh flowers…

An image of joy is not enough to entirely lift Vaughan out of his dark thoughts, however. He also needs an image of sacrifice. His attention therefore turns from the children to the ass that bore Jesus, and he wishes that he were that derided beast of burden. He resolves to be as meek as the ass, as the children, and as the palm fronds over which Jesus rides. Then it will not matter whether he bears the sorrows of Job.

In the lovely final line, he combines an image of life with an image of purity. All that matters, he says, is that he secure “but one green branch and a white robe.” 

Palm Sunday
By Henry Vaughan

Come, drop your branches, strew the way
                              Plants of the day!
Whom sufferings make most green and gay.
The king of grief, the man of sorrow
Weeping still, like the wet morrow,
Your shades and freshness comes to borrow.

Put on, put on your best array;
Let the joy’d road make holiday,
And flowers that into fields do stray,
Or secret groves, keep the highway.

Trees, flowers & herbs; birds, beasts & stones,
That since man fell, expect with groans
To see the lamb, which all at once,
Lift up your heads and leave your moans!
                              For here comes he
                              Whose death will be
Man’s life, and your full liberty.

Hark! how the children shrill and high
                              “Hosanna” cry,
Their joys provoke the distant sky,
Where thrones and Seraphim reply,
And their own Angels shine and sing
                             In a bright ring:
                              Such young, sweet mirth
                              Makes heaven and earth
Join in a joyful symphony,

The harmless, young and happy ass,
     Seen long before this came to pass,
Is in these joys a high partaker
     Ordained, and made to bear his Maker.

Dear feast of palms, of flowers and dew!
     Whose fruitful dawn sheds hopes and lights;
Thy bright solemnities did show,
     The third glad day through two sad nights.

I’ll get me up before the sun,
     I’ll cut me boughs off many a tree,
And all alone full early run
     To gather flowers to welcome thee.

Then like the palm, though wrong, I’ll bear,
     I will be still a child, still meek
As the poor ass, which the proud jeer,
     And only my dear Jesus seek.

If I lose all, and must endure.
     The proverb’d griefs of holy Job,
I care not, so I may secure
     But one green branch and a white robe.

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Kiss the Earth with Your Feet

By Robin Bates | Published: April 7, 2022
F. Lloyd, Woman Walking in the Woods with Two Children

Friday

Apparently today, April 8, is both Buddha’s birthday and something called “National All Is Ours Day.” While I haven’t heard of it before, the latter holiday sounds very much in accord with Buddha’s teachings in that it calls for us to (1) pay special attention to our natural surroundings, (2) appreciate all that we have been given and (3) share our bounty with others.

Essentially summing up both occasions is this poem by Buddhist monk and poet Thich Nhat Hahn, who died this past January. Walk and touch peace:

Walk and touch peace every moment.
Walk and touch happiness every moment.
Each step brings a fresh breeze.
Each step makes a flower bloom.
Kiss the Earth with your feet.
Bring the Earth your love and happiness.
The Earth will be safe
when we feel safe in ourselves.

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“Othello’s” Toxic Relationships

By Robin Bates | Published: April 6, 2022
Fisburne, Branagh as Othello, Iago

Thursday

Yesterday I reported on my Sewanee students writing about Twelfth Night so today I turn to those writing about Othello, the other option. Here again most of them focused on relationship issues. But whereas with Twelfth Night their focus was on how relationships can be saved, with Othello they mostly wrote about why relationships fall apart. That’s not a bad way to contrast comedy with tragedy.

Their decision to write about relationship issues isn’t surprising. They are still at the age where, according to psychologist Eric Erickson, they are wrestling with issues of identity. Fighting against socially imposed identities in order to discover one’s actual identity is to be expected. In fact, this is why I chose “identity” as the course’s theme. Still, I’ve been impressed at the variety of ways they have been exploring that theme.

Merrit, for instance, wrote about the Iago-Emilia marriage, seeing it as both toxic and all too familiar. Emilia is essentially a doormat wife, handing all her power over to her husband without question. Why else would she steal the fatal handkerchief from her best friend under orders from her husband without asking why? At one point, in a discussion with Desdemona, she says she would sacrifice her honor for her husband if it meant making him the ruler of the world. It’s a hypothetical debate they’re having but reveals that she values submission over honor.

Merrit noted that, by choosing such a wife, Iago reveals his own masculine insecurities, which help explain his evil deeds. Because he is not as self-confident as he seems, he marries a submissive wife to feel masculine. (In conference, Merrit and I discussed how his constant insults of women, while supposedly delivered in jest, may reveal this underlying insecurity.) In fact, Merrit noted that the one time we see Iago lose his composure is when his wife, realizing how her husband has destroyed Desdemona, stands up to him, revealing his perfidy. At that point he stabs her in front of witnesses, an uncharacteristic move given how secretive he normally is. His extreme reaction may reveal just how threatening to his manhood he finds her rebellion. She, meanwhile, reveals that she has some integrity after all, even though it costs her her life. She will not, in the last instance, whore herself for her husband.

Another student, Brooke, tackled the Othello-Desdemona marriage and concluded that, even had Iago not intervened, it was probably doomed from the start. The marriage involves the exchange of two fantasies that reality cannot sustain, Brooke argued. On the one hand, Desdemona fantasizes about the warrior life, which contrasts with her own sedentary existence. Othello is her opportunity to escape from her controlling father into what she sees as an exotic alternative. Othello, for his part, is in love with the fact that Desdemona loves him, even though he is a dark outsider. If society can accept their marriage, then he really has overcome the racism of Venetian society.

This means, however, that it’s not difficult to have doubts about her, even without Iago’s insinuations. If he has insecurities about his outsider status, then fears that Desdemona might second guess her choice of him are not far behind. Iago has but to play on these insecurities for the marriage to turn tragic.

I found myself resisting Brooke’s conclusions, wanting to believe in the Desdemona-Othello marriage. I feared her arguments led to the conclusion that interracial marriages in general are doomed from the start. (To be sure, Brooke did not argue this.) I must admit, however, that her essay shook my easy faith in the love match. At the very least, Brooke convincingly showed that, if a relationship has nothing more to it than shallow fantasies, then social obstacles will probably ensure its long-term failure.

For verification of this dynamic, Brooke referenced a popular reality television show. As she put it in her opening paragraph,

While critics slander [The Bachelor] as trash TV, its exploration of relationships, perpetual melodrama, and devastating dose of heartbreak are strikingly similar to Shakespeare’s poetic masterpiece, The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice. From years of Bachelor Nation fandom and watch parties, I can confidently conclude that the most important ingredients for a recipe of happily ever after are communication, vulnerability, transparency, empathy, trust, and respect. While Othello and Desdemona’s romance is seemingly blissful and uncontentious at the beginning of the play, the couple shortly thereafter disregard the cookbook of love. With dissimilar backgrounds, fantastical perceptions of one another, and divided duties, Othello and Desdemona are unfit for each other; their marriage is unrealistic and destined for failure, even without Iago’s intervention.

My Pakistani student Hamza certainly saw dissimilar backgrounds as a problem, especially the society’s racism. Hamza noted that, in Venetian society as depicted by Shakespeare, Black men are stereotyped as sexual animals, which is why Iago thinks that Othello must have slept with his wife (which he and I find unlikely). Because of the stereotype, Iago feels he is superior to Othello, which makes Othello’s command over him—not to mention Othello’s power to elevate other men over Iago—particularly galling. (Hamza didn’t mention white supremacist rage over Obama’s election but I found myself making the connection.) No wonder Iago wants to take down Othello, along with the woman who has (in his eyes) desecrated herself by marrying him.

In setting up the culture’s racial stereotypes, Hamza quoted Desdemona’s father after learning that she has eloped. Brabantio’s conclusion is that Othello must have employed special African magic:

O thou foul thief, where hast thou stow’d my daughter?
Damn’d as thou art, thou hast enchanted her;
For I’ll refer me to all things of sense,
If she in chains of magic were not bound,
Whether a maid so tender, fair and happy,
So opposite to marriage that she shunned
The wealthy curled darlings of our nation,
Would ever have, to incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou, to fear, not to delight.
Judge me the world, if ’tis not gross in sense
That thou hast practised on her with foul charms,
Abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals
That weaken motion:

To further make his case, Hamza could have quoted the argument of sexualized racism that Iago uses to convince Roderigo that Desdemona will tire of Othello and he of her. In this vision, women are as driven by lust as men of color:

Iago: It cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her love to the Moor,…nor he his to her: it was a violent commencement, and thou shalt see an answerable sequestration: …These Moors are changeable in their wills:… the food that to him now is as luscious as locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. She must change for youth: when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice: she must have change…

To be sure, like those GOP legislators passing anti-LBGTQ laws left and right, the only people talking about sex in the play are the bigots, not Othello and Desdemona.

Another student, Charles, used Iago as an opportunity to figure out why people commit evil acts, always an important topic and one that seems especially relevant at the moment as Russian massacres of Ukrainian civilians come to light. While Charles is still sorting through various explanations, the notion of Iago’s insecurity –and perhaps a fear of being nothing—made its appearance several times in the essay. Perhaps someone who feels a vast emptiness rages against those who appear to have everything. Perhaps Iago believes he will find relief only if he renders those people as miserable as he himself is.

Bo, working with a similar idea, saw jealousy as the determining factor. Interestingly, some of the play’s most memorable passages about jealousy are uttered by Iago. He may be projecting in the following passage:

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on; that cuckold lives in bliss
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger;
But, O, what damned minutes tells he o’er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!

A final student, Zoe, was struck by the extent to which Iago abuses the trust that others have in him. A very trusting person herself, she set out to understand how it is that people are duped. Should Othello, Desdemona, and their friend Cassio have been able to see through Iago? If not, is she herself fated to be duped by the con artists of the world? We haven’t yet had a chance to discuss her essay, but I want to discuss with her if the victims of Iago’s deceptions are at all responsible for their victimization. What ingredients go into naive trust?

Given that America at present is swarming with liars, grifters, and con artists, it’s a question that urgently needs answers.

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Read “12th Night” for Relationship Advice

By Robin Bates | Published: April 5, 2022
Stubbs, Carter, Stephens as Viola, Olivia, Orsino in 12th Night

Wednesday

After a full day of revision conferences with my “Composition and Literature” students, I report today (with the students’ permission) on their ideas about Twelfth Night. Tomorrow I’ll share the ideas of those writing about Othello, the other essay option. As you will see, my students are hungry for authentic relationships and see in Shakespeare’s 1601 comedy guidelines for achieving them.

To give you a quick overview of the play, Viola is separated from her twin brother Sebastian in a storm, which each thinking the other is dead. After she disguises herself as a man (Cesario) so that she can work for Count Orsino, the count comes to appreciate her/him and appoints her/him as emissary in his wooing of the Lady Olivia. Olivia instead falls in love with Viola/Cesario, who in turn is in love with Orsino, making for an impossible situation. All ends well, however: after a series of comic misunderstandings, Orsino marries Viola while Olivia marries Sebastian, who looks just like his sister.

Three other characters show up in the student essays: Sebastian’s friend Antonio (who has a homosexual crush on Sebastian), Olivia’s uptight steward Malvolio, and Olivia’s jester Feste.

Sidney was fascinated by the Sebastian-Antonio relationship, which she then compared with the Olivia-Viola relationship. Both Sebastian and Olivia find themselves worshipped (Sebastian by Antonio, Olivia by Orsino) and experience their pedestal position as traps. After all, when someone worships you, he (or she) wants to possess you in their idealization of you.  As Sidney put it, neither Sebastian nor Lady Olivia feel “seen” by the people who profess to love them.

As a result, both keep their distance, with Sebastian attempting to leave Antonio and Lady Olivia rejecting the advances of Count Orsino. Viola, on the other hand, sees Olivia as a human being, not as an angel, and Olivia finds this exhilarating. As Sidney put it, “It’s a breath of fresh air to Olivia. Someone’s finally having genuine conversations with her, challenging her, and being honest with her.” Reminding me somewhat Aristotle in his discussion of friendship (in Nicomachean Ethics), Sidney concluded that true friendship—the kind of friendship she wants—consists of honoring the other in the fullness of his or her individuality.

Laney thought similarly except that, in her case, she compared Viola with Lady Olivia’s fool Feste. Both, she argued, rejuvenate a society that is hung up on static role playing. Lady Olivia feels that, to be a perfect lady, she must mourn her late brother for seven years before she accepts marriage proposals. Feste and Viola, by contrast, want people to live and love. Feste uses humor to loosen Olivia up, after which Viola presents her with an alternative way to live life: take risks and follow your heart. As a result of this encounter, Olivia abandons her former resolve and goes running after Viola, whom she thinks is a man.

For her part, Grace saw Viola pushing against a similar stasis as that described by Laney, only Grace saw gender stereotypes at work. In this world, men feel they have to be stereotypically male (hard and emotionless), women stereotypically female (angelic and ultra-sensitive). Orsino and Olivia both come to see these gendered roles as traps, with Orsino longing to access his female side and Olivia her male side. Both fall in love with Viola/Cesario because she seems able to balance male-female: she is sensitive (which Orsino appreciates because he can talk to her/him about feelings) and enterprising (she launches herself into the world rather than looking for a man to protect her). Grace noted that men and women, even today, find themselves trapped in stereotypical gender behavior, and she appreciated how Shakespeare shows us a way out.

Finally, there was Hayden’s essay on the necessity of comedy in the world. We get in trouble, Hayden contended, when we get hung up on life’s seriousness. When Olivia decides to mourn her brother’s death for seven years, thereby depriving the world of a potentially vibrant woman, she has the approval of Malvolio but not of Feste. Feste makes a joke that helps return her to the world of living relationships:

Feste: Good madonna, why mournest thou?
Olivia: Good fool, for my brother’s death.
Feste: I think his soul is in hell, madonna.
Olivia: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.
Feste: The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen.

When Olivia asks Malvolio for his opinion, he disapproves of what he regards as a frivolous approach to life:

I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal: I saw him put down the other day with an ordinary fool that has no more brain than a stone. Look you now, he’s out of his guard already; unless you laugh and minister occasion to him, he is gagged. I protest, I take these wise men, that crow so at these set kind of fools, no better than the fools’ zanies.

To which Olivia replies:

Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite. To be generous, guiltless and of free disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon-bullets: there is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do
nothing but rail…

Olivia is on her way to reconnecting with life and love. As Laney and Grace argue, she needs only Viola to complete the transition.

Malvolio, by contrast, Hayden sees as beyond saving. When, through a prank played upon him by Twelfth Night revelers, he ends up (temporarily) in a madhouse, Hayden notes that the fool—disguised as a pedant—once again “tells someone exactly what they need to hear”:

Feste explains how Malvolio is ignorant when he says, “there is no darkness but ignorance” (IV ii). Feste is saying something more important than what it seems. He alludes to how Malvolio lives in ignorance and darkness because he is so serious all the time….In order for Malvolio to get out of his prison,…he must be able to see the comedy within life. If he cannot, then he will live the rest of his life in a metaphorical prison of being too serious.

Great literature connects us with our best selves. In their essays, I saw Sidney, Laney, Grace and Hayden seeking to articulate and to get in touch with these selves.

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Putin Is Giving War a Bad Name

By Robin Bates | Published: April 4, 2022
Putin and generals

Tuesday

Bertolt Brecht is my go-to political poet for moments when the world spins out of control. Today’s poem applies to Russians who continue to support Vladimir Putin, especially those who should know better. Even with Putin’s propaganda, it takes a special kind of self-deception to ignore what is going on in Ukraine.

Similar self-deception is Brecht’s target in “War Has Been Given a Bad Name.” By 1945, when Brecht wrote the poem, reports of the concentration camps had gotten back to America. The exiled Brecht calls out those Germans who had enabled Hitler. The enablers, he writes, want to separate the war itself from “the extermination of certain peoples” and the “bloody manhunts.”

War Has Been Given a Bad Name

I am told that the best people have begun saying
How, from a oral point of view, the Second World War
Fell below the standard of the First. The Wehrmacht
Allegedly deplores the methods by which the SS effected
The extermination of certain peoples. The Ruhr industrialists
Are said to regret the bloody manhunts
Which filled their mines and factories with slave workers. The intellectuals
So I heard, condemn industry’s demand for slave workers
Likewise their unfair treatment. Even the bishops
Dissociate themselves from this way of waging war; in short the feeling
Prevails in every quarter that the Nazis did the Fatherland.
A lamentably bad turn, and that war
While in itself natural and necessary, has, thanks to the
unduly uninhibited and positively inhuman
Way in which it was conducted on this occasion, been
Discredited for some time to come.

I’m sure Russia’s oligarchs, who supported Putin in exchange for wealth, would just as soon that Russia was not committing atrocities in Ukraine. They might still own their yachts if that were the case. Perhaps the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who loves Putin’s gay bashing, would prefer that the war were not forcing him into ethical jiujitsu. (Two days ago, in a service for Russian soldiers, he announced, “We absolutely do not strive for war or to do anything that could harm others. But we have been raised throughout our history to love our fatherland. And we will be ready to protect it, as only Russians can defend their country.”) I’m sure announcers for Russian Television would prefer not to have to contend that the dead civilians in Bucha, Mariupol, and elsewhere are actually crisis actors. I’m sure that Russian diplomats would prefer not to have to defend the indefensible.

In other words, thanks to Putin’s Ukraine invasion, war, as Russians see it, has been given a bad name. How much better if Ukrainians had greeted Russian troops as liberators and cheered as they paraded down central Kyiv.

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Brecht: Don’t Become Numb to Suffering

By Robin Bates | Published: April 3, 2022
Bucha, Ukraine after the Russian occupation

Monday

Following the withdrawal of Russian troops from certain Ukrainian towns they had seized, we are getting a full measure of the evil that Vladimir Putin is visiting upon the country. According to the mayor of now liberated Bucha, some 270 civilians were found in two mass graves and another 40 were lying dead in the streets.

Not that we should be surprised. Washington Post columnist Max Boot, who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a child, observes that Russia has fought wars this way for some time. “They commit war crimes to terrorize the population into surrender,” he observes, pointing out that this is how Putin’s forces “fought in Chechnya and Syria — and before that, how Soviet forces fought in Afghanistan and in central Europe during World War II.” Putin cares neither about Ukrainian lives nor Russian lives.”

I’ve come to think of Vladimir Putin as Vlad the Impaler (a.k.a. Vlad Dracula), one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s vampire. The 15th century Vlad used horror, especially impaling people (including women and their babies) to cement his authority and terrorize his enemies. Like Stoker’s Dracula, Putin lives off the blood of others, a leech who takes kickbacks from Russian mineral extraction without using the windfall to grow the economy and create a lasting prosperity. Indeed, rampant corruption is one reason why Russia’s military has failed so badly.

We should pay attention to the horror we currently feel because there’s a danger that we will become inured to it. So warns Bertolt Brecht in his poem “When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain.”

Brecht, a German who had to flee Nazi Germany, witnessed how the world closed its eyes to Hitler’s evil-doing until it became too evident to ignore. Until Ukraine, the world similarly closed its eyes to Putin’s atrocities, so it could do so again. In his poem, Brecht notes the different ways we manage to ignore people who have witnessed horrors:

When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain

Like one who brings an important
letter to the counter after
office hours: the counter is already closed.
Like one who seeks to warn the
city of an impending flood,
but speaks another language. They do not understand him.
Like a beggar who knocks for the
fifth time at the door where he has four times been given
something: the fifth time he is hungry.
Like one whose blood flows from
a wound and who awaits
the doctor: his blood goes on flowing.

So do we come forward and report that evil has been done us.

The first time it was reported that our friends were being
butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred
were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered
and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of
silence spread.

When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out
“stop!”

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When
sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer
heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

May what is happening in Bucha, Mariupol, and other Ukrainian cities never become invisible. It will require all our powers of empathy to keep our focus on the Ukrainian people, however. Their suffering, already unendurable, looks as though it will continue for some time.

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