WandaVision and Grendel’s Mother

By Robin Bates | Published: March 11, 2021
Olsen as Wanda, the Scarlet Witch

Friday

A great review of WandaVision by the Washington Post’s Sonny Bunch has me making an unexpected comparison: Wanda as Grendel’s Mother. Hang on while I explain.

Disney’s nine-episode series, which concluded this past week, features a superhero who is so traumatized by the death of her robot husband that she creates a fantasy world in which he is still alive. To do so, she takes over an entire town, turning it into a replica of those idyllic sit-com towns from my childhood, like Leave It to Beaver’s Mayfield. All the town’s inhabitants are drafted, against their will, into Wanda’s grieving fantasy.

The show’s most interesting theme, Bunch believes, is that wallowing in grief can turn people into monsters.

This is not to deny that Wanda has many reasons to grieve. In the episode where she revisits various tragic episodes from her life, we understand why she has retreated into a fantasy world. Unfortunately, other people pay for her grief:

But in “WandaVision,” Wanda is processing this trauma by taking an entire town hostage, trapping the people there in a variety of TV sitcoms as she tries to work through her grief by using magic to resurrect Vision and give them twin sons.

It’s a genuinely monstrous act, and for a moment, the show acknowledges that. Freed from Wanda’s curse by fellow witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn), one of the townspeople begs Wanda to let her see her 8-year-old daughter again: The little girl has been locked in her home for the entirety of the so-called Scarlet Witch’s reign, a grotesque act of child separation. Another confesses he’s exhausted: She doesn’t let them sleep in natural cycles, a violation of the Geneva Conventions. When they are allowed to sleep, they suffer her worst nightmares. “Please let us go,” one character begs. And, failing that?

“If you won’t let us go, just let us die,” Sharon (Debra Jo Rupp) croaks after Wanda has literally choked them into silence.

Rather than explore this further, however, the show leaves us with the line, “What is grief, if not love persevering?”, which Bunch believes sidesteps the horror: 

And yet, the show feels the need to recast Wanda’s ultimate decision to give up her imaginary family, as well as her hold over the town, as an act of heroic altruism. “They’ll never know what you sacrificed for them,” says Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), a secret agent turned friend of Wanda, in the final episode.

Rambeau’s line is a moral atrocity, an effort to recast Wanda as the hero of the show, the savior of all these little people. But it’s not what she did for the people of Westview that matters. It’s what she did to them. And what she did to them is horrifying, a form of mind-rape and torture that extended for weeks, maybe months.

I’ve written a number of times about how Grendel’s Mother is one of literature’s great depictions of destructive grief. Any Anglo-Saxon warrior, unhinged by the loss of a comrade, could become a Grendel’s Mother, lashing out indiscriminately. The poet genders the anger female, I think, because warrior society could think of no anger more powerful than that of a mother who has lost her child.

We see Grendel’s Mothers all around us today. Whenever someone lashes out in grief and anger, they have become a Grendel’s Mother. Often innocent parties are killed, like Aeschere in Beowulf and Saddam Hussein following 9-11. In my book How Beowulf Can Save America (2012), I surmise that the radical right’s destructive behavior is connected with the death of their cherished dream that America can once again become Mayfield. (Of course, for people of color that image was never reality.)

Lashing out is only one of the responses to grief that we encounter in Beowulf. Another is dragon depression, where characters retreat into mental caves. At one point we see Wanda retreat into such a solitude, and in Beowulf we see a series of kings do so as well (Hrothgar for a few moments, Heremod, Hrethel, the Last Veteran). The original anger is still there, it just blows cold rather than hot. (It can blow hot is prodded, however, just as hot anger can become cold fury, as it does when Grendel’s Mother retreats into her cold underwater cave.) Neither lashing out nor withdrawing is a healthy way to grieve.

Beowulf defeats hot rage with a giant sword that he finds deep within himself. Wanda does as well, her sword being the realization that grief is “love persevering.” That part the series gets right, even if it glides too quickly over the collateral damage.

I note that Wanda has a couple of Wiglafs, Beowulf’s companion in the dragon battle, in Vision and Monica Rambeau. Both of them help her defeat her dragon self–which is to say, loving support can prevail when we are losing it.

In the end, Wanda lets go and ventures out, just as Beowulf emerges from the undersea cave. Once they have done so, both can once again begin to engage productively with the living world.

Further thought: My one disagreement with Bunch’s analysis is that he thinks that the show gets the acting direct of SWORD wrong:

The only character who has the correct response to Wanda is the acting director of SWORD (Sentient Weapon Observation Response Division), Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg), who calls in a drone strike on the monstrously wicked and dangerously powerful Wanda. Yet he is cast as a villain despite being the only person who recognizes the dangers presented by this overpowered war criminal.

Putting aside how we should deal with war criminals, the way to deal with dangerous grieving is not through force. Beowulf learns this when he tries using first his arm strength (will power) and then Unferth’s sword (conventional force) against Grendel’s Mother. Only something from the spirit works with such people. Monica Rambeau realizes this when she says she wants to understand Wanda, not take her out. Because such understanding occurs, Wanda overcomes her inner darkness.

For comparison’s sake, Wanda can be compared with another superhero that goes Grendel’s Mother after losing a loved one. In Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, lesbian witch Willow Rosenberg goes ballistic after a man rapes and kills her partner. Her anger is so large that, after skinning him alive, she threatens to take down the whole universe. She recovers only after another member of the group soothes her with tender childhood reminiscences, which remind her of her best self. The essay I wrote on the episode was one of this blog’s first posts.

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Our Time in the Covid Sewers

By Robin Bates | Published: March 10, 2021
Jean Valjean (Harry Baur) in Paris sewers (Les Miserables, 1934)

Thursday

Tuesday, as I was awaiting my first Covid shot (!), I was listening to the scene in Les Misérables where Jean Valjean is groping his way through the sewers of Paris. The elation I felt upon receiving the shot bears some resemblance to what Jean Valjean experiences upon seeing the glimmer of the exit light after his nightmarish trek. In fact, the entire episode is a fitting image for the world’s Covid experience this past year.

Jean Valjean’s first descent into the sewer is as disorienting as the early days of the pandemic:

By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom which enveloped him penetrated his spirit. He walked in an enigma. This aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in a dizzy fashion. It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows. Jean Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route without seeing it. In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last. How was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he find it in time? would that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities, allow itself to be penetrated and pierced? should he there encounter some unexpected knot in the darkness? should he arrive at the inextricable and the impassable? would Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of hunger? should they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two skeletons in a nook of that night? He did not know. He put all these questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris form a precipice. Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.

When I was 11 and visiting Paris sites with my family, the boat trip we took through the sewers of Paris was a far cry from Jean Valjean’s experience. As he carries the unconscious Marius, he encounters a patrol that fires at him, a rat that bites him, and quicksand that very nearly swallows him up. This final ordeal almost proves too much, even though he manages to escape:

However, although he had not left his life in the fontis, he seemed to have left his strength behind him there. That supreme effort had exhausted him. His lassitude was now such that he was obliged to pause for breath every three or four steps, and lean against the wall. Once he was forced to seat himself on the banquette in order to alter Marius’ position, and he thought that he should have to remain there. But if his vigor was dead, his energy was not. He rose again.

At this point, however, he literally experiences a glimmer of hope. Think of it, perhaps, as the moment we learned that a successful Covid vaccine had been developed:

He walked on desperately, almost fast, proceeded thus for a hundred paces, almost without drawing breath, and suddenly came in contact with the wall. He had reached an elbow of the sewer, and, arriving at the turn with head bent down, he had struck the wall. He raised his eyes, and at the extremity of the vault, far, very far away in front of him, he perceived a light. This time it was not that terrible light; it was good, white light. It was daylight. Jean Valjean saw the outlet.

Despite his extreme fatigue and hunger, Jean Valjean is buoyed up:

A damned soul, who, in the midst of the furnace, should suddenly perceive the outlet of Gehenna, would experience what Jean Valjean felt. It would fly wildly with the stumps of its burned wings towards that radiant portal. Jean Valjean was no longer conscious of fatigue, he no longer felt Marius’ weight, he found his legs once more of steel, he ran rather than walked. 

He is not home free yet, however, as he discovers an impenetrable grating barring his accent. Some governors are also prematurely rejoicing, lifting mask mandates and dropping indoor gathering restrictions:

It certainly was the outlet, but he could not get out.

The arch was closed by a heavy grating, and the grating, which, to all appearance, rarely swung on its rusty hinges, was clamped to its stone jamb by a thick lock, which, red with rust, seemed like an enormous brick. The keyhole could be seen, and the robust latch, deeply sunk in the iron staple. The door was plainly double-locked. It was one of those prison locks which old Paris was so fond of lavishing.

On the other side of the grating is (in our case) prospects of neighborhood July 4th barbecues, visits to grandchildren, and normal Thanksgivings. Jean Valjean imagines escaping both the military patrols that are hunting down revolutionaries and Inspector Javert, who has been dogging his steps for years. Ahead is a return to his beloved adopted daughter Cosette:

Beyond the grating was the open air, the river, the daylight, the shore, very narrow but sufficient for escape. The distant quays, Paris, that gulf in which one so easily hides oneself, the broad horizon, liberty. On the right, downstream, the bridge of Jéna was discernible, on the left, upstream, the bridge of the Invalides; the place would have been a propitious one in which to await the night and to escape. It was one of the most solitary points in Paris…

Fortunately, in an unexpected twist, he escapes the sewers, and life returns to normal, with a heartfelt reunion and a wedding. Our own Paris awaits us, but we must stay patient and disciplined for a few more months.

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Does Lit Makes Us Better People?

By Robin Bates | Published: March 9, 2021
Francis John Wyburd, Portrait of a Woman Reading

Wednesday

I’m in the final stages of my book Does Literature Make Us Better People? Surveying a 2500-Year Debate and today share the introduction. I kick the book off with a Bertolt Brecht epigraph—“Every art contributes to the greatest art of all, the art of living”—and go from there. I’m still in the revision stage and am open to all reader suggestions.

Introduction

For at least as far back as Plato, people have been debating whether or not literature is good for us.  Plato, worried that Hesiod and Homer would incite immoral behavior in young people, banned poets from his ideal republic while his younger colleague Aristotle countered that tragedy would help audiences psychologically manage dangerous emotions. Both philosophers agreed on one thing, however: literature is a powerful force that profoundly affects the people it touches.

Throughout the ages, the terms of the debate have varied but the same paired questions keep coming up:

–Does literature in fact change individuals’ lives?
–If so, does it change them for the better or can it also change them for the worse?

–Is there a difference between the effects of great literature and lightweight literature?
–If so, is great literature good for us and lightweight literature bad?

–Can literature change not only individuals but history itself?
–If so, is great literature necessarily progressive or can it have a conservative or even reactionary impact?

Or course, these questions lead to many others. For instance, how do we characterize literature in the first place? Then, once we have a working definition, how do we determine whether a work is great or lightweight and whether its effects are good or bad? For that matter, is it the literature itself that changes behavior or might readers have changed as they did without literature?

With regard to audience subjectivity, what does it mean that different readers can respond to the same work in widely different ways and that, even if they respond similarly, they behave differently? Which readers should we study to determine impact? How do we measure change? Are generalizations about literary impact even possible?

There are also practical considerations. If the work is old, where do we find evidence of how audiences responded. For instance, can we determine if and how the behavior of Anglo-Saxon warriors was influenced by public recitations of Beowulf?

Questions of literary impact can get pretty murky, which is why many scholars have shied away from discussing them. In the period after World War II, the New Critics thought they had could skip readers altogether, dismissing their experiences as irrelevant. (They also dismissed as irrelevant authorial intentions and historical context.) W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley said that to judge a work based on its emotional affect was to commit “the affective fallacy.” They found it cleaner to look only at the text.

In so doing, they mimicked 1950s scientists, who employed a seemingly clean tool, the scientific method, to uncover the secrets of the natural world. If scientists’ thoughts and feelings were deemed irrelevant to the process, then couldn’t literary scholars be regarded as scientists of the text, coolly and dispassionately examining poems and novels to discover poetic laws? The New Critics thought so, as did a fair number of the structuralists and deconstructionists who followed them.

Regular readers, however, refuse to regard their literary encounters as irrelevant, and if so many over the centuries have insisted that literature has changed their lives, we should at least look into the matter. New Criticism may have temporarily put the issue on hold, but in the years that followed scholars took it up again. Marxists, feminists, post-colonialists, queer theorists, and other literary activists have made the case for literature’s impact, and so have various religious and so-called values-oriented conservatives. Reader Response Theory and Reception Theory have become respected approaches, studied along with other schools of thought in literary methods classes.

The special challenges haven’t gone away, however. Look at Plato’s claims that Homer corrupts young people, for instance. How does he know that young Athenians, after hearing talented orators recite Achilles’s lament to Odysseus about being dead, will turn cowards on the battlefield? Plato, after all, hasn’t conducted surveys, and even if he is relying on anecdotal evidence, that would have the drawbacks of all such evidence. Perhaps he is just raising a theoretical possibility—what philosophers call a thought experiment—that may or may not reflect actual human behavior.

Whether or not it does, Plato has had a lot of company in the centuries that have followed. Sir Philip Sidney battled a Plato-citing opponent who attacked poetry, Samuel Johnson worried that novels would corrupt the morals of young people, and today we see religious groups and others wishing to censor English teachers and school libraries.

Even empirical studies of literary impact may not settle the matter. Although various social scientists have indeed taken up that challenge, some going so far as to conduct brain scans of people reading novels, the results are still inconclusive. Sometimes the more one attempts to pin down literary impact, the more elusive it appears.

Perhaps the best we can do is examine the arguments that have been put forth over the ages and dig into the various claims. That is the approach I have taken here. By summarizing major thinkers on the subject and scrutinizing the assumptions that undergird their theories, I seek what Hippolyta in Midsummer Night’s Dream calls “a great constancy.” Hippolyta finds a connecting thread in the lovers’ accounts of the night’s events—a coherent picture emerges when they are all assembled together—even though Theseus compares them to poetic delusions. I have followed Hippolyta’s lead here, looking for patterns in what has been written on the subject.

As for what constitutes literature, the definition has shifted over the centuries. When it comes to reader impact, however, one aspect of literature has figured more prominently than all others: its ability to pull us into its imaginary worlds. Cervantesfamously dramatizes this power in Don Quixote, taking it to an extreme, but all great works and plenty of bad ones demonstrate it as well. Phenomenologist Georges Poulet dramatically captures the phenomenon as follows:

As soon as I replace my direct perception of reality by the words of a book, I deliver myself, bound hand and foot, to the omnipotence of fiction. I say farewell to what is, in order to feign belief in what is not. I surround myself with fictitious beings; I become the prey of language. There is no escaping this takeover. Language surrounds me with its unreality.

Indeed, we can say that, without this power, literature would not have generated the controversies it has, leaving most to regard it as a harmless past-time. It’s because literature threatens to change human behavior that people take it seriously. To borrow a line delivered by a character in the film Grand Canyon when confronted by a gang member, “You don’t have the gun, we’re not having this conversation.”

If Plato hadn’t witnessed Homer reciters (rhetors) holding the same kind of sway over audiences as political demagogues did, he might have accepted them into his republic. If Aristotle hadn’t seen audiences emotionally wrenched by Oedipus Rex and Iphigenia in Aulis, he might not have placed tragedy at the center of his Poetics. If a London bishop, 18th century German parents, and an evangelical congregation in Lewiston, Maine hadn’t watched young people disappear into the novels of Henry Fielding, Goethe, and J.K. Rowling respectively, they wouldn’t have (1) accused Tom Jones of causing the 1750 London earthquakes, (2) blamed The Sorrows of Young Werther for adolescent suicides and (3) publicly burned copies of Harry Potter.

For that reason, I focus my attention on those literary genres that take over our minds, immersing us in their worlds and, at least for a moment, persuading us to accept an alternate reality—which is to say, fiction, drama, and poetry. Percy Shelley may have labeled certain philosophers, historians and scientists as poets but, for the purposes of this study, I do not. While we can lose ourselves in creative non-fiction, it may not be clear whether we are moved more by the language or what the language points to. When Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland is enthralled with Anne Radcliffe’s gothics, it’s a different conversation than if she were swept away by, say, Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essays.

It is because of their hypnotic sway that poetry, drama, and fictional prose have figured prominently in theoretical debates. Time and again, one of these three has been selected to represent literature in general. Theorists have generally chosen whichever genre was most popular at the time so that, just as Plato singled out epic and Aristotle tragedy, Sir Philip Sidney focused on heroic poetry, Percy Shelley on lyric poetry, and Bertolt Brecht on drama. Since the 18th century, the novel in particular has held sway, although its primacy has been challenged in the past one hundred years by other narrative art forms, such as cinema, radio drama, television, comic books, video games, and various internet fantasies.

Always, however, audience immersion has been at the center of the discussion. Literature casts its spell, people applaud or panic, and theorists rush in to understand. In Part I of this book, I survey what the major theorists have had to say about literary impact. In Part II, I use Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as a test case for their theories, reflect upon what Jane Austen had to say about the impact of lightweight literature, and conclude by discussing various ways that you, dear reader, can assess how literature has changed you.

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Milton on Cancel Culture

By Robin Bates | Published: March 8, 2021

Tuesday

I’ve just stumbled across a website announcing that it will be launching an “occasional feature” where it applies classic works to contemporary issues, obviously a project close to my heart. Entitled Persuasion Classics, its inaugural essay looks at how Milton would regard current debates about cancel culture.

I shared some of my thoughts about cancelation in yesterday’s blog. Since the Persuasion essay only mentions instance of liberal cancelations, let me briefly balance the scales before turning to it. In my experience, liberals are far more concerned about canceling people who don’t agree with them than are conservatives, who have no qualms about quashing their opponents. “Political correctness” was initially a liberal self-critique that the right gleefully took up to bash liberals, never themselves.

There has been nothing comparable on the American left to the McCarthy purges of the 1950s, where people were actually imprisoned and countless careers ended (especially in the entertainment industry). African Americans who spoke their mind were literally canceled in the Jim Crow south, and the number of transgenders who are murdered every year in America is appalling. On January 6 we saw more than a few Trump supporters demanding various forms of cancelation for their opponents.

In short, there is almost always an element of bad faith when conservatives complain about cancelation. At the same time Fox News was complaining about a publisher’s decision to cease publication of six Dr. Seuss books, 50 Republican senators and Joe Manchin were rejecting a qualified candidate for the Office of Management and Budget head for her “mean tweets.”

That being acknowledged, liberals are indeed capable of wielding shame to silence people, including themselves. Shame is a kind of violence, employed to enforce community norms—which is good if those norms are healthy, bad when used for unjustifiable oppression. This is one reason why I find David Bromwich’s Persuasion Classics article very useful.

Bromwich begins by talking about Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), one of the most important defenses of free speech ever penned. As Bromwich explains, Milton’s attack on the official licensing of books was partly self-serving but not entirely so:

His political motives can be explained simply enough—the process of licensing might have outlawed the republican propaganda he defended and wrote a good deal of himself. Yet his reasons were not merely political. The proposed censorship would have amounted to state intervention in matters of individual judgment. A free person, said Milton, should be at liberty to judge the virtue or vice of unlicensed books. Officious standards that claim to weed out writings deleterious to the public mind are a form of coercion that places state authority over personal conscience.

If free people employ this liberty, Milton believed, the truth will eventually triumph. Bromwich quotes Aeropagitica’s most famous passage:

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

Bromwich observes that this may be a misplaced faith in the truth eventually triumphing—”How long is the long run implied by ‘eventually’?”—but it’s a noble ideal. Whether utopian or not, however, we can agree that for truth to emerge, a struggle is inevitable: bad ideas must war with good. Milton turns to Garden of Eden imagery to make his point:

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably….It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil….Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

Bromwich summarizes:

Milton is saying here that innocence is not the same as virtue. Innocence, indeed, is no longer an attainable or even a desirable good, once humanity has been cast out from paradise.

We learn to know and cherish the good by testing ourselves against selfish or wrong desires, against the temptations of willfulness and vainglory, spite and cruelty—in short, against evil. Areopagitica puts the encounter with harmful words at the very heart of conscience; our progress as moral beings comes through trial “by what is contrary” to the good. “And this”—so Milton concludes his uncompromising civil-libertarian thought—“is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.”

I love how Bromwich uses the passage from Paradise Lost where Satan whispers evil thoughts into Eve’s sleeping ear. The guardian angels discover Satan

Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve
Assaying by his devilish art to reach
The organs of her fancy, and with them forge
Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams,
Or if, inspiring venom, he might taint
Th’ animal spirits that from pure blood arise 
Like gentle breaths from Rivers pure, thence raise
At least distempered, discontented thoughts,
Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires
Blown up with high conceits engendering pride.

Disturbed, Eve informs Adam of the dream. Bromwich says that the Milton of Areopagitica appears to be speaking in Adam’s reply:

Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unapproved, and leave
No spot or blame behind.

Noting that these dreams are comparable to “politically incorrect” views, Bromwich says they enter when “the doors of conscious censorship are left open.” As a result, they operate as “a trial of virtue”:

In themselves, they no more taint the dreamer than the vicious words of a book against which a reader’s judgment may be tested.

He then points out that we have our own version of Satan whispering into our sleeping ears:   

Vagrant words (some of them possibly harmful), daydreams, half-formed hopes and fears are broadcast today with a swiftness and fecundity no poet in the age of books could have anticipated. Often, they seem to escape from their speaker with as little conscious thought as Eve put into her dream.

He then lambastes those “cultural institutions [that] have lately busied themselves finding new reasons for the suppression of words they consider harmful…” For Milton, he observes,

[L]iberty included the freedom to test oneself with such words. Evil acts alone were to be penalized. The essentially religious theory put forward by cultural censors today—namely, that dangerous thoughts or words taint the person they have once inhabited—takes us back to the inquisitorial attitude Milton aimed to abolish.

On the other hand, by working for good in the presence of evil, we can ultimately achieve what the archangel Michael calls “a paradise within thee, happier far”:

Milton’s poem leads us to see that the ultimate transgression of Eve and Adam was a necessary trial for their passage from innocence to the possibility of goodness. Eve—when she finally considers eating the apple, and then does eat, and regrets doing so—becomes the first human being to have a thought. And Adam, hearing her relate the trespass, becomes the first human being to find words for grown-up love. He says he will depart with her from Eden and die with her: “How can I live without thee?”

In this framing, Bromwich has turned ideological purists into tyrannical angels who allow neither intellectual exploration nor love. He concludes with a warning:

In the 17th century, these people would have been petty magistrates. Today, it is hard to know what to call them. They have been described as the hall monitors of a school in perpetual session. They have been ironically called the Elect. If we keep in mind Milton’s story of the Fall and “that doom which Adam fell into,” perhaps we can see them more clearly. They are angels. They exist to assure that nobody whose words betray an evil thought will escape the deserved punishment. They patrol the gate to stop offenders from re-entering the paradise of the sinless and blameless.

Bromwich’s essay falls into the important genre of liberal corrective and, as with all such correctives, I suspect liberals will take it more seriously than conservatives. I can’t imagine Trumpists, who punish harshly the slightest deviation from Trump orthodoxy, even giving Bromwich’s essay a hearing (except as another club to bash liberals with).

The limitation of liberal correctives is that they assume ideas get subjected to truth claims, with truth the ultimate victor. In such a vision, we should educate young minds–and our own minds–so that thoughtful conclusions are arrived at. If one side rejects the process altogether, however, you have the situation described by the Editorial Board’s John Stoehr with regard to democratic politics, which he delivers as a mantra:

“You can’t get anything done when fascists are sitting at the table of democratic politics.” A democratic community can tolerate a vast array of opinions. However, it cannot, and should not, tolerate opinions in which democratic politics is the problem. If it does, then nothing needing to get done gets done—and everyone suffers.

So yes, by all means, stop dunking so gleefully on politically incorrect tweets. Give people space to evolve and respect those who differ from you. But if those who differ endorse your annihilation, don’t fool yourself into thinking you can have a rational discussion.

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How Whites Cancel Readers of Color

By Robin Bates | Published: March 7, 2021
Artist unknown, Black Woman Reading

Monday

I’ve hesitated weighing in on the Dr. Seuss controversy—or rather, manufactured controversy—because I consider it a Republican attempt to sidetrack the country into culture wars following their failure to address the pandemic and economic crisis. Since this is a literary blog, however, I should weigh in given that there are some legitimate issues involved.

First, however, let’s note that the political argument is in bad faith since conservatives, after gesturing towards the publisher’s withdrawal of six titles, immediately go to Green Eggs and Ham, which is not one of the titles being “canceled.” The withdrawn titles, incidentally, are so obscure that even I, a huge Dr. Seuss fan, have never heard of them (well, except for To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street). For those who haven’t been following the news, the other titles are If I Ran the Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super, McElligot’s Pool, The Cat’s Quizzer, and On Beyond Zebra! You can go here to see the caricatures of Asians, Africans, and Inuits that prompted the publisher to withdraw the books. I haven’t heard a single rightwing defense of any of them.

As for Dr. Seuss’s other books, Cat in the Hat, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Horton Hears a Who, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now, Hop on Pop, and Fox in Sox are not being withdrawn. Nor are The Lorax, about corporate devastation of the environment, and The Butter Battle Book, about an unfettered arms race—books which, I notice, never get mentioned by conservative commentators. And which party just, grinch-like, voted unanimously against pandemic aid after years of pushing wealth towards the top one percent?

What are we to make of the publisher’s decision? They’re doing what publishers have been doing for centuries, given that tastes change and what is inoffensive to one generation shocks another. I first became aware of this at 13 when I searched all over Paris for one of the first Tintin books. Tintin au Congo has such cringe-worthy depictions of Africans (often as children grateful for a white savior) that even in 1965 one couldn’t find it in print, and I had to scour used book stores to find a copy. Sometimes authors themselves will revise their works, as Mary Travers did with the depiction of an African tribesman in one of her Mary Poppins books. I suspect that, were he still alive, Seuss, a Roosevelt Democrat, would have changed the image of the China man with chopsticks (and wearing Japanese shoes) in Mulberry Street (1937).

Conservatives don’t talk about how such depictions can do harm. The same kind of reductionism in racist caricatures is also at work in the present rise of anti-Asian violence, which is partly due to Covid although it has always been with us. Distinctions are not made between Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotian, and other East Asian groups, and I dread the day when my biologically half-Korean grandson encounters such prejudice. For all the right wing’s talk about cancelation culture, they never acknowledge how they themselves cancel individual identities with their racial stereotyping. In fact, stereotyping is the ultimate form of cancelation.

This is the point made by one Michael Harriot, an African American, in an extended twitter thread that is so rich that I will quote it at length. Harriot says rightwing obsession over Dr. Seuss has taken him back to “the second-most devastating day of my life,” which was when “I found out the Hardy Boys were white.”

Harriot didn’t discover this earlier, he says, because his mother, who home schooled him until he was 12, built a “white people-free cocoon” around him and his sisters. She did so because she believed that Black children cannot “fully realize[ ] their humanity in the presence of whiteness.” When it comes to reading, the problem is that white readers have many characters to identify with while Black readers are stuck with a stereotype here or there. As Harriot puts it,

The few representations of Black people on TV and in books were WHITE PEOPLE’S versions of us. Not necessarily negative as much as they are stratified…Sassy or subservient. Poor or lucky. The criminal or the hero. Our existence is defined by how white people see us.

And

[Whites] don’t realize that the only time a Black child saw themselves in a Seuss book was in a racist illustration. They can’t comprehend because, even if there’s one bad characterization of whiteness, there are one hundred other characters in the book. Even when the villain in the TV show is white, so is the hero…And the hero’s sidekick…And the lawyer..And the cop…And judge…And the anchor on the news…And the weatherman…And the QB…And the commentator…And everyone except the ONE Black person

The point is: THEY GET TO CHOOSE!

To counter this, Harriot’s mother manufactured “a bizarro world where white people were the minority, they did not control the narrative and Black was the default.” Harriot lays out the lengths she went to and how much work it took:

When my sisters and I were really young, she would read bedtime stories. But she would change all the names. When she worked at night, she recorded cassettes of her reading for us to fall asleep to.

She even removed covers from books with white kids on the cover. We also couldn’t watch reruns of Sanford & Son, The Jeffersons or Good Times until we were older.

Harriot says that, while he knew that “white people were a thing,” he adds,

But if you had asked eight-year-old me, I would have told you that MOST people were Black.

And so, never having seen them, I assumed the Hardy Boys were 2 niggas from the suburbs of Detroit. Same with Encyclopedia Brown. Black was my default.

Looking back, he’s impressed with the results:

I honestly believe that the reason a lot of white people think I’m “the real racist” is because I never learned how to care what white people think. There is a subtle, subconscious deference to whiteness that MOST of us have.

My Trinidadian daughter-in-law would relate: she talks about not realizing that skin color was a thing when growing up because everyone looked like her. It became an issue only when she moved to the United States. While not as totalizing at Harriot’s mother, she and my son are very attuned to the books, television shows, and movies their children consume. They know, as Harriot’s mother knew, about white cancelation culture.

I can think of two black authors who push back as Harriot’s mother did, creating mostly Black worlds where their characters are not defined by whiteness. Whites sometimes put in an appearance in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, but for the most part they seem irrelevant. Toni Morrison too creates an all-Black world in Paradise, where characters have the freedom to develop their own identities, sometimes for good, sometime for ill. The point is, there is not an all-powerful white presence calling the shots.

So why are conservatives up in arms about cancel culture? Because they don’t like the unaccustomed pushback they are getting when they try to cancel others. Their cancel culture complaints reflect their longing for a society where whites are still calling the shots.

One of the “canceled” Dr. Seuss images
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God as a Stern but Loving Gardener

By Robin Bates | Published: March 5, 2021

Spiritual Sunday

Lent is the season for paring away the extraneous so that we can focus on what is essential, which makes George Herbert’s “Paradise” a good Lenten poem. To be sure, most of Herbert’s poems can be regarded as Lenten poems since the poet never ceases to grapple with his wayward thoughts and desires, asking God to help him get back on track. In “Paradise,” he regards God as a pruner whose ministrations, even when severe, will lead to a healthier plant.

The image is of fruit trees in a walled garden. What dazzles about the poem is the way Herbert successively prunes the end word of each triplet line, which holds out the promise of new growth. When God spares his harshest judgment, choosing instead to prune and pare, “ev’n fruitful trees more fruitful are.”

“Paradise” isn’t exactly an image poem, the way that “Easter Wings” and “The Altar” are, but it has a visual dimension. As you read it, keep in mind that the 17th century did not insist on correct spelling as much as we do today, which allows Herbert to get away with “ow” for “owe” and “frend” for “friend.”

Paradise

I Bless thee, Lord, because I GROW
Among thy trees, which in a ROW
To thee both fruit and order OW.

What open force, or hidden CHARM
Can blast my fruit, or bring me HARM,
While the enclosure is thine ARM?

Enclose me still for fear I START.
Be to me rather sharp and TART,
Then let me want thy hand & ART.

When thou dost greater judgments SPARE,
And with thy knife but prune and PARE,
Ev’n fruitful trees more fruitful ARE.

Such sharpness shows the sweetest FREND:
Such cuttings rather heal then REND:
And such beginnings touch their END.

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America Plagued by Ingratitude

By Robin Bates | Published: March 4, 2021

Friday

Red states have a long history of complaining about “blue state bailouts” while sucking up far more blue state money that blue states get from red, (Urban areas, the nation’s major income generators, generally vote Democratic.) Red state Congress members are also famous for denying disaster relief to blue states (think Ted Cruz on Hurricane Sandy in 2012) while insisting upon it for themselves, as we saw first with Hurricane Harvey and again last month the power outage. Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin made such points recently when wondering why the federal government should be bailing out Texas for its reckless Covid behavior.

While today’s post is about what Thackeray’s Vanity Fair teaches us about ingratitude, one of the funniest passages about people claiming to be self-sufficient while raking in federal money appears in Catch 22. I’ve included only a snipped here, but you read the extended passage in a post I wrote about Clive Bundy, who in 2014 launched a mini-insurrection when the federal government tried to bill him for grazing his cattle on federal land:

Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle, and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could.

But back to Thackeray, whose discussion of ingratitude has stayed with me ever since I read Vanity Fair in 1974. John Osborne, formerly a struggling merchant but now, with the help of stockbroker John Sedley, a wealthy man, turns on his former benefactor when the market tanks (caused by Napoleon’s escape from Elba) and Sedley goes bankrupt. Thackeray explains why Osborne, whose son is to marry Sedley’s daughter, is so bitter:

When one man has been under very remarkable obligations to another, with whom he subsequently quarrels, a common sense of decency, as it were, makes of the former a much severer enemy than a mere stranger would be. To account for your own hard-heartedness and ingratitude in such a case, you are bound to prove the other party’s crime. It is not that you are selfish, brutal, and angry at the failure of a speculation—no, no—it is that your partner has led you into it by the basest treachery and with the most sinister motives. From a mere sense of consistency, a persecutor is bound to show that the fallen man is a villain—otherwise he, the persecutor, is a wretch himself.

And further on:

Then Osborne had the intolerable sense of former benefits to goad and irritate him: these are always a cause of hostility aggravated. Finally, he had to break off the match between Sedley’s daughter and his son; and as it had gone very far indeed, and as the poor girl’s happiness and perhaps character were compromised, it was necessary to show the strongest reasons for the rupture, and for John Osborne to prove John Sedley to be a very bad character indeed.

In other words, it is because people feel a sense of obligation that they blacken the name of their benefactor. They deal with their guilt about their betrayal by going on the attack.

Osborne’s subsequent behavior resembles the way some Trumpist politicians demonize Democrats. I particularly appreciate Thackeray’s point that “you must tell and believe lies against the hated object…to be consistent”:

At the meetings of creditors, then, he comported himself with a savageness and scorn towards Sedley, which almost succeeded in breaking the heart of that ruined bankrupt man. On George’s intercourse with Amelia he put an instant veto—menacing the youth with maledictions if he broke his commands, and vilipending the poor innocent girl as the basest and most artful of vixens. One of the great conditions of anger and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.

When the great crash came—the announcement of ruin, and the departure from Russell Square, and the declaration that all was over between her and George—all over between her and love, her and happiness, her and faith in the world—a brutal letter from John Osborne told her in a few curt lines that her father’s conduct had been of such a nature that all engagements between the families were at an end.

Ungrateful though Osborne is, he’s an amateur compared to the emperor of ingratitude, Milton’s Satan. Satan first complains about “the debt immense of endless gratitude”—how can we ever thank God enough?—only to then concede that it’s actually not a burden. After all, feelings of gratitude are themselves gifts, with the grateful “at once indebted and discharged.” Satan’s awareness of this makes his behavior all the more criminal since he knows better:

The debt immense of endless gratitude,
So burdensome, still paying, still to owe;
Forgetful what from him I still received,
And understood not that a grateful mind 
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and discharged; what burden then?

Rather than resenting Sedley for the obligations he owes him, Osborne could simply express gratitude, which opens the heart and soothes the spirit. And rather than railing constantly at the blue states from which they receive disaster relief, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid payments, etc., etc., red states could be grateful that all will benefit from the efforts of those who work hard to enrich society.

Further thought: To apply ingratitude to Biden’s Covid relief bill, Washington Post’s Greg Sargent explains the politics of why the GOP may profit from their universal opposition to the measure, even though it is the most popular bill in years:

Indeed, I would add that after this is over, GOP lawmakers might be seen by their voters as having railed merely about phantom excesses in the bill that were invented for the base’s consumption. As Media Matters documents, right-wing media have wildly hyped such invented excesses.

And so, even as GOP voters pocket stimulus checks and get vaccines more quickly, the story in that information universe will become that GOP lawmakers rightly called out all these crazy socialist schemes brought to you by the Democrats who want to burn down your cities and cancel your children’s books.

Ryan Cooper calls this the “Republican grievance perpetual motion machine.” And as the Times reports, this might resonate with GOP voters more than the niggling matter of who supported sending that check.

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Elizabeth Warren, Like Eve, Persists

By Robin Bates | Published: March 3, 2021
Erastus Salisbury Field, detail from Garden of Eden

Thursday

Ah, the wonders of twitter. Thanks to one Arnie Perlstein, who declares himself a Jane Austen fan, I now see a similarity between Sen. Elizabeth Warren and John Milton’s Eve. It’s a comparison worth exploring.

Some explanation is required. On Tuesday, Sen. Warren declared that it was four years ago to the day that she had been silenced (Republicans today would say canceled) by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. During the Senate hearings of Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions for Trump’s attorney general, Warren read a Coretta Scott King observation, appearing in a 1980s letter, accusing Sessions of having “used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens.” A perturbed McConnell accused Warren of badmouthing a fellow senator, and, as Warren reports in her recent tweet, “every Republican in the chamber that night voted to shut me up.”

When later asked why, McConnell memorably explained,

Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.

From that point out, Warren wore “Nevertheless, she persisted” as a badge of honor. Tee-shirts appeared carrying the phrase, which in many ways sums her up perfectly.

For instance, she has persisted in pushing her long-proposed tax on upper incomes (2% on wealth between $50 million and $1 billion, 3% on wealth above $1 billion), which now that Democrats control the Senate will finally come up for a vote.

For that matter, she was absolutely right about Sessions, who backed tearing children away from the asylum-seeking parents and who weakened restrictions on police brutality and voter suppression. Only because he refused to become Trump’s personal attorney—he at least had enough integrity for that—was he fired and his career ended.

Now for the Eve comparison, which Perlstein tweeted in response to the “persisted” anniversary:

Sen. Warren, Re your 2017 persistence despite sexist/racist silencing, you have a great female forbear, who also refused to submit to male rule, but instead chose female knowledge & empowerment: “So spake the patriarch of mankind; BUT EVE PERSISTED…” — Paradise Lost, Bk 9

It must be acknowledged that Perlstein’s version of Eve is not Milton’s. The passage comes at the end of a prolonged marital dispute where Eve wants to go off by herself and is offended that Adam lacks confidence that she could hold her own against Satan. In other words, Adam sees female persisting as nagging and succumbs for the sake of domestic tranquility :

Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more;
Go in thy native innocence, rely
On what thou hast of virtue, summon all,
For God towards thee hath done his part, do thine.
So spake the Patriarch of Mankind…

Eve, having gotten her way, then reclaims the role of good, submissive wife, emphasizing that Adam is the one granting permission:

but Eve
Persisted, yet submiss, though last, repli’d.
With thy permission then, and thus forewarned…

Later, after the fall, she will throw this permission in Adam’s face, saying, essentially, that he should have been firmer with her. He, astonished, lashes back, although one senses that Milton agrees with Eve: he should have reminded Eve who wears the pants in the family. (Well, they’re naked but you get the point.) Here’s their interchange:

Eve: Being as I am, why didst not thou the head
Command me absolutely not to go,
Going into such danger as thou saidst?
Too facile then thou didst not much gainsay,
Nay, didst permit, approve, and fair dismiss.
Hadst thou bin firm and fixt in thy dissent,
Neither had I transgressed, nor thou with me.

Adam: It seems, in thy restraint: what could I more? 
I warned thee, I admonished thee, foretold
The danger, and the lurking enemy
That lay in wait; beyond this had bin force,
And force upon free will hath here no place.

Milton observes that no one’s going to win this argument:

Thus they in mutual accusation spent
The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning,
And of their vain contest appeared no end.

I’ve strayed from from Warren and McConnell so let me just say this. McConnell would like Warren to be submissive and deferential—we’ve just seen with the rejected Office of Management and Budget nominee Neera Tanden what happens when a woman tweets like a man—and Warren makes not even the slightest nod in that direction. Her persisting, in other words, is not like Eve’s in that she assumes that she has every right to go her own way. In fact, her refusal to play the subservience game is what irritated McConnell in the first place. When a male Democratic senator read the same Coretta Scott King letter later in the hearings, McConnell didn’t say a word.

So, in the end, Warren is no Eve and the contrasts are more illuminating than the comparisons. Eve imagines eating the apple will put her on the same playing field as Adam—“for inferior who is free?”—whereas Warren already assumes she’s on the same plane as men. No “he for God only, she for God in him” for her.

Milton was advanced for his age in that he at least gave Eve a voice and a fleshed-out character. It’s just regrettable that McConnell still has remnants of the author’s 17th century views.

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Hugo on Freedom-Loving Insurgents

By Robin Bates | Published: March 2, 2021
Horace Vernet, Barricade, Rue Sufflot (1848)

Wednesday

This past year I have watched with awe as protesters around the world have put their liberty and lives on the line for principles that Americans—at least until Donald Trump’s presidency—have taken for granted. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is helping me get a better sense of those Myanmar citizens—and Russian, Belorussian, and Hong Kong citizens—who are risking everything for freedom and liberty.

Hugo writes about an aborted 1832 Paris insurrection that ends with the deaths of most of the insurgents. Their leader, Enjolras, draws on the ideals of the French Revolution to deliver an inspiring speech on a Paris barricade. Hugo observes Enjolras’s vision has grown in the course of the insurrection:

[F]or some time past, he had been gradually emerging from the narrow form of dogma, and had allowed himself to incline to the broadening influence of progress, and he had come to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution, the transformation of the great French Republic, into the immense human republic…. Enjolras was standing erect on the staircase of paving-stones, one elbow resting on the stock of his gun. He was engaged in thought; he quivered, as at the passage of prophetic breaths….A sort of stifled fire darted from his eyes, which were filled with an inward look. All at once he threw back his head, his blond locks fell back like those of an angel on the somber quadriga [chariot] made of stars, they were like the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of a halo, and Enjolras cried:

“Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves? The streets of cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest, human conscience become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the school, for sole penalty and recompense fame, work for all, right for all, peace over all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers!

Enjolras declares that the meaning of the struggle is self-determination:

Citizens, whatever happens to-day, through our defeat as well as through our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create. As conflagrations light up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the whole human race. And what is the revolution that we shall cause? I have just told you, the Revolution of the True. From a political point of view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty.

Following a mini lecture on the social contract, Enjolras sets forth a Jeffersonian vision of the importance of education:

[L]egally speaking, [equality] is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity; politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously, it is all consciences possessed of the same right. Equality has an organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet, that is where the beginning must be made. The primary school imposed on all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From an identical school, an identical society will spring. Yes, instruction! light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns.

To our sorrow, we know his next prediction will not occur. The 20th century, rather than being happy, will be one of the bloodiest in history. Nevertheless, the ideal is one worth striving for. And to give Enjorlas credit, the European Union has accomplished some of what he envisions, ending the wars that have ravaged Europe since, well, the Pax Romana:

Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall no longer, as today, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events. One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy. The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet around the light.

The leader’s address concludes with assurances that the forthcoming sacrifice will not be in vain:

Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future. A revolution is a toll. Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up, consoled! We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the point of junction, of those who think and of those who suffer; this barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. Here misery meets the ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: ‘I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.’ From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are about to join and constitute our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.”

I myself have difficulty surrendering to Enjorlas’s idealism, but it does take me back to when I was 18 and protesting the Vietnam War. Once, along with 80 other students and faculty from Carleton College and St. Olaf, were arrested for blocking the doors of the Hennepit County Induction Center following the Kent State shootings. I remember an electric shock going through us when we learned that the federal government was prepared to gun down middle class white kids and feeling that drastic measures were called for.

Now, I was never capable of violence and, to participate in our sit-in, people had to promise not to resist the arresting authorities. We knew we wouldn’t be facing the kind of risks that Enjorlas and the Myanmar protesters must confront. Still, Hugo provides glimpses of the higher vision that can supersede even care for one’s life.

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