Into the Woods with Blake and Sondheim

By Robin Bates | Published: August 3, 2023

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Friday

My friend and colleague Jennifer Michael, English professor, former Rhodes scholar, and wonderful poet, has a great short essay on how William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods share a similar view of children. While adults may obsess about childhood innocence, Blake and Sondheim point out that they can fail to hear how hungry their kids are for experiences that will help them grow. In fact, both authors show how parents who claim to be protecting their children are often more interested in controlling and molding them.

While Jennifer’s article doesn’t take on the current MAGA obsession with banning books and dictating school curricula, one certainly sees this dynamic at work in politicians such as Ron DeSantis and organizations like Moms for Liberty.

Jennifer wrote her article after witnessing a high school production of Into the Woods. There she noticed that the wolf ushers little Red Riding Hood into the world of experience, his predation being

as much sexual as carnivorous. While we don’t see exactly what happens between them, we hear about it in Red’s account later: “He showed me things that I never had seen.” Experience brings wonder.

This in turn got her thinking of Blake, “who saw desire as part of innocence, not as a corruption of it.” Like Sondheim, , she says, Blake

uncovered the darker elements of children’s literature, exploring the interplay of innocence and experience, desire and repression. Both writers see the loss of innocence as not an end but a beginning—a fortunate fall.

Jennifer notes that Sondheim’s characters must journey into the woods “to achieve and examine their desires.” Because the woods are “suffused with mystery and danger,” they operate as a psychological symbol of the unconscious. (Other literary examples of this include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Scarlet Letter, and Deliverance.) Red, therefore, must venture into these woods if she is to grow up, just as Jack must climb his beanstalk. Jennifer cites Joseph Campbell in noting that, in the archetypal journey, “regardless of what material object is found, the real prize is knowledge.” Or as Jack puts it, “You know things now that you never knew before.”

Sondheim, Jennifer says, makes a distinction between “nice” and “good,” nice applying to Cinderella’s Prince Charming (“wanting a ball is not wanting a prince,” she discovers), “good” applying to Red’s wolf. The prince doesn’t do Cinderella any good when she marries him whereas Red is profoundly altered for the better when she emerges from the wolf’s belly.  

Let’s turn now to Blake, where the same distinction applies. To be sure, it’s a little confusing since the word “good” is often used as a synonym for “nice.” When parents want children to “be good,” they often mean well behaved:

Like Rousseau, Blake asserted that children’s impulses were naturally good, but the admonishment to “be good” often means to squelch those impulses in the name of conformity. (As Cinderella asks in the show’s opening number, “What’s the good of being good if everyone is blind?”)

For Blake, squelching is always bad. What looks like nice innocence can actually be a “polite superficiality” that poisons our feelings, as in “A Poison Tree”:

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

Jennifer points out that the poison plant is fed by the speaker’s “false smiles and crocodile tears.” The final effect is deadly:

And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears: 
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles. 

And it grew both day and night. 
Till it bore an apple bright. 
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine. 

And into my garden stole, 
When the night had veild the pole; 
In the morning glad I see; 
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

Throughout Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience one sees adults forcing niceness upon children without listening to their actual desires and needs. One thinks especially of how “grey-headed beadles” force-march orphans to church in “Holy Thursday” (in Innocence):

Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean 
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green 
Grey-headed beadles walkd before with wands as white as snow,
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow 

If your response to these lines is, “Isn’t that sweet?” you’ve missed Blake’s sarcasm. (It’s subtle but fueled by an immense rage.) One could also cite here Blake’s provocative proverb from “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” (Note: to get a sense of the stifling instruction ladled out to 19th century children, check out my recent post on Lewis Carroll and Hilaire Belloc, who satirized it.)

Far healthier are the parents in “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Little Girl Found,” which Jennifer says Blake moved from Songs of Innocence to Songs of Experience. In the poems Lyca

goes missing in the “desert wild.” Her parents find her among lions and tigers, not injured but (we assume) sexually awakened. Rather than respond with fear and outrage, however, they join her there:

To this day they dwell
In a lonely dell,
Nor fear the wolvish howl,
Nor the lions’ growl.

Jennifer also approves of the Nurse in “Nurse’s Song” (in Innocence), where the Nurse “accedes to the children’s desire to stay out until it is dark”:

Well well go & play till the light fades away
And then go home to bed
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh’d
And all the hills echoed[.]

[Side note: When Allen Ginsberg came to our college, he spent at least thirty minutes having us all sing the poem—especially the last line—to the accompaniment of a small harmonium. The effect was hypnotic and memorable.]

Jennifer observes that both Blake and Sondheim “recognize the power of stories, especially in the imaginations of children.” Narratives, she points out, “can be far more seductive and persuasive than instructions.” And she concludes,

Into the Woods follows Blake in encouraging its audience to question the tales we are told and the tales we tell, particularly their beginnings and endings. There is always something that happens before “once upon a time,” and something that follows “happily ever after.” In “The Tyger,” Blake’s speaker asks who can “frame [the] fearful symmetry” of human nature—one answer is the theater. The great genius of Into the Woods is that it allows us to be at once inside and outside that frame, to give ourselves, for a time, to the “forests of the night,” and return home braver and wiser.

All those who want to keep children from reading “dangerous books” are like Blake’s “grey-headed beadles.” As I say, they are not interested in growth but in control. If they have their way, Red, Jack, and all those others will never venture into the woods at all but will grow up dull and resentful, trapped in the confines of a narrow ideology.

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Smith vs. Trump, Macduff vs. Macbeth

By Robin Bates | Published: August 2, 2023
The final battle between Macduff and Macbeth

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Thursday

“Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power.” So reads the special counsel’s indictment of Donald J. Trump, released Tuesday afternoon at 5:15. Sensing that we need a Shakespeare play to do justice to such a momentous event in American history, I cast around for possibilities.

Richard II came first to mind since it is about a bad king who is forced to surrender his throne. But Richard, whatever his faults, is the legitimate monarch whereas Trump, by the laws of our land, is no longer president, whatever he may claim. He of course wishes to be a Richard-like monarch but that’s another matter. Also, he handles his defeat far worse than Richard, who gains a measure of nobility in his final days.

So I instead turned to the world’s greatest drama about an illicit power grab, which is of course the Scottish play. Rereading it, I was struck by how it begins with a failed coup, undertaken by the Thane of Cawdor. The resemblance ends there, however, because after Macbeth defeats him and is given his title, Cawdor does what every defeated presidential candidate in American history has done up to Donald Trump: he concedes graciously. It’s even more impressive in his case since concession is accompanied by execution. As Malcolm reports to his father Duncan,

                    I have spoke
With one that saw him die, who did report
That very frankly he confessed his treasons,
 Implored your Highness’ pardon, and set forth
 A deep repentance. Nothing in his life
 Became him like the leaving it…

Needless to say, we will never see Trump confessing his treasons.

There are other parallels with the play. First of all, there are the lies about a stolen election from the very man who is trying to steal the election. This resembles Macbeth blaming others for killing the man he himself has killed.

And then there’s Lady Macbeth sounding like Trump trying to persuade Pence into refusing to certify the votes. Trump apparently told the vice-president, “You are too honest” when Pence refused to go through with his plot, forcing the president to resort to Plan B (pressure Pence with a riotous mob). Lady Macbeth puts her own kind of pressure on her husband to galvanize him into action:

Yet do I fear thy nature;
 It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness
 To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great,
 Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it. 

And later:

Macbeth: If we should fail—
Lady Macbeth:  We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking place
 And we’ll not fail.

It’s not clear to me that Pence is filled with the milk of human kindness. Furthermore, Trump was asking him to sacrifice himself for Trump’s ambitions, not his own. Nevertheless, in the end he did the right thing. In a past post of which I’m particularly proud, I compared Pence to the soldiers for hire in A.E. Housman’s poem “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.”

Unlike Macbeth (at least so far), Trump has not managed to overthrow our aged leader. But he can be compared to Macbeth at the end of the play when he himself is being overthrown. Imagine him as the maddened king engaged in a final showdown, with special counsel Jack Smith playing the role of Macduff. Like Macbeth, who sees the writing on the wall, Trump wants to weasel out of the fight: he keeps trying to delay or have judges throw out indictments (see yesterday’s post). Like Macduff, however, Smith will brook no denial:

Macbeth: I’ll not fight with thee.

Macduff:  Then yield thee, coward,
 And live to be the show and gaze o’ th’ time.
 We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted upon a pole, and underwrit
 “Here may you see the tyrant.”

Macbeth:  I will not yield
 To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet
 And to be baited with the rabble’s curse.
Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane
 And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
 Yet I will try the last. Before my body
 I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
 And damned be him that first cries “Hold! Enough!”

Actually Trump, being a bully at heart, lacks Macbeth’s final desperate courage. I suspect he’ll strike a less impressive figure in court than he does before his fawning fans. We’ll see.

We can only pray that he’ll fare no better than Macbeth, with Smith sending him out of our lives for good.

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Rumpelstiltskin, the GOP’s Dark Side

By Robin Bates | Published: August 1, 2023
Barbara Swan, illus. from Sexton’s Transformations

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Wednesday

Of the many, many court decisions that have gone against Donald Trump in recent years, Monday’s ruling by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney may have been the first to mention a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. Trump, fearing indictment for pressuring Georgia officials to change vote totals in the 2020 election, had asked that McBurney bring the grand jury proceeding to a halt. The judge cited “Rumpelstiltskin” in turning down the application. (Thanks to Jay Kuo for alerting me to the allusion. )

After first observing that Trump’s “rather overwrought allegations of prosecutorial overreach and judicial error do not suffice to show that there is significant risk of ‘wrongful’ indictment,” McBurney then added, in a sarcastic footnote, his Grimm Brothers allusion. Rather than being damaged by indictments, he noted, Trump has been making money and building up fan support from them:

And for some, being the subject of a criminal investigation can, à la Rumpelstiltskin, be turned into golden political capital, making it seem more providential than problematic.”

In the story, a miller’s daughter is victimized when her narcissistic father boasts to the king that his beautiful daughter can weave straw into gold. The king threatens her with death unless she delivers. In fact, he threatens her three times, although he adds a promise of marriage to the third threat. The first two times she gets Rumpelstiltskin to help in exchange for a necklace and a ring, but the third time he demands her first-born child.

Deaf to her pleas after the child is born, he agrees to relent only if, within three days, she can guess his name. Fortunately for the queen, a messenger overhears the dwarf, leading to a happy ending (at least for the her):

And then she said”: “Then perhaps your name is Rumpelstiltskin?”

“The devil told you that! the devil told you that!” cried the little man, and in his anger he stamped with his right foot so hard that it went into the ground above his knee; then he seized his left foot with both his hands in such a fury that he split in two, and there was an end of him.

Judge McBurney’s use of the tale is smart since it shows how Trump takes advantage of those in distress. Because MAGA Republicans are convinced that Trump can save them—they full believe that he can create golden threads out of nothing—they give him the money and the support he demands.

To push the connections even further, I turn to Anne Sexton’s version of the fairy tale. It appears in Transformations, a thoroughly entertaining collection in which the poet tells the great fairy tales through her own lens. As Sexton sees it, Rumpelstiltskin is our shadow side or Doppelganger—which is to say, the darkness within that “wants to get out”:

Inside many of us
is a small old man
who wants to get out.
…
He is a monster of despair.
He is all decay.
He speaks up as tiny as an earphone
with Truman’s asexual voice:
I am your dwarf.
I am the enemy within.
I am the boss of your dreams.

And further on:

I am the law of your members,
the kindred of blackness and impulse.
See. Your hand shakes.
It is not palsy or booze.
It is your Doppelganger
trying to get out.
Beware . . . Beware . . .

A good case can be made that Trump is the GOP’s Doppelganger, the dark side that contradicts the respectable exterior the party has (at least in the past) tried to cultivate: fiscally responsible, committed to law and order, concerned about national defense, upholder of family values. When Trump began to grow in power, establishment Republicans, hoping for their version of a room full of golden thread (money, power), thought they could control this dwarf. They did not realize that he would commandeer their future:

Without a reward the dwarf would not spin.
He was on the scent of something bigger.
He was a regular bird dog.
Give me your first-born
and I will spin.
She thought: Piffle!
He is a silly little man.
And so she agreed.
So he did the trick.
Gold as good as Fort Knox.

Yes, Trump spun his web of power out of bullshit straw and now has become the GOP godfather. Or “papa,” to use Sexton’s word:

And then the dwarf appeared
to claim his prize.
Indeed! I have become a papa!
cried the little man.
She offered him all the kingdom
but he wanted only this –
a living thing
to call his own.
And being mortal
who can blame him?

In the story, this dark force can be defeated only if it is named. It’s like saying that the establishment GOP can only be saved if enough of its members call out the cancer that is eating away at them—which is to say, if they recognize and acknowledge that their narcissist, racist, money-grubbing , power obsessed leader has been born from their own darkness. The GOP has in recent decades–which is to say, before Donald Trump–danced an ugly dance with racists (in the tale, a narcissist father and a tyrant king). They have been not only a beautiful woman weaving gold but also an “ugly as a wart” dwarf.

When Rumpelstiltskin’s essence/name comes out into the open, he splits in two and we can see both sides for what they are. As Sexton puts it,

Then he tore himself in two.
Somewhat like a split broiler.
He laid his two sides down on the floor,
one part soft as a woman,
one part a barbed hook,
one part papa,
one part Doppelganger.

Until this happens, he will continue to demand that we give away what is most precious.

Here’s the poem in its entirety:

Rumpelstiltskin
By Anne Sexton

Inside many of us
is a small old man
who wants to get out.
No bigger than a two-year-old
whom you’d call lamb chop
yet this one is old and malformed.
His head is okay
but the rest of him wasn’t Sanforized?
He is a monster of despair.
He is all decay.
He speaks up as tiny as an earphone
with Truman’s asexual voice:
I am your dwarf.
I am the enemy within.
I am the boss of your dreams.
No. I am not the law in your mind,
the grandfather of watchfulness.
I am the law of your members,
the kindred of blackness and impulse.
See. Your hand shakes.
It is not palsy or booze.
It is your Doppelganger
trying to get out.
Beware . . . Beware . . .

There once was a miller
with a daughter as lovely as a grape.
He told the king that she could
spin gold out of common straw.
The king summoned the girl
and locked her in a room full of straw
and told her to spin it into gold
or she would die like a criminal.
Poor grape with no one to pick.
Luscious and round and sleek.
Poor thing.
To die and never see Brooklyn.

She wept,
of course, huge aquamarine tears.
The door opened and in popped a dwarf.
He was as ugly as a wart.
Little thing, what are you? she cried.
With his tiny no-sex voice he replied:
I am a dwarf.
I have been exhibited on Bond Street
and no child will ever call me Papa.
I have no private life.
If I’m in my cups the whole town knows by breakfast
and no child will ever call me Papa
I am eighteen inches high.
I am no bigger than a partridge.
I am your evil eye
and no child will ever call me Papa.
Stop this Papa foolishness,
she cried. Can you perhaps
spin straw into gold?
Yes indeed, he said,
that I can do.
He spun the straw into gold
and she gave him her necklace
as a small reward.
When the king saw what she had done
he put her in a bigger room of straw
and threatened death once more.
Again she cried.
Again the dwarf came.
Again he spun the straw into gold.
She gave him her ring
as a small reward.
The king put her in an even bigger room
but this time he promised
to marry her if she succeeded.
Again she cried.
Again the dwarf came.
But she had nothing to give him.
Without a reward the dwarf would not spin.
He was on the scent of something bigger.
He was a regular bird dog.
Give me your first-born
and I will spin.
She thought: Piffle!
He is a silly little man.
And so she agreed.
So he did the trick.
Gold as good as Fort Knox.

The king married her
and within a year
a son was born.
He was like most new babies,
as ugly as an artichoke
but the queen thought him in pearl.
She gave him her dumb lactation,
delicate, trembling, hidden,
warm, etc.
And then the dwarf appeared
to claim his prize.
Indeed! I have become a papa!
cried the little man.
She offered him all the kingdom
but he wanted only this –
a living thing
to call his own.
And being mortal
who can blame him?

The queen cried two pails of sea water.
She was as persistent
as a Jehovah’s Witness.
And the dwarf took pity.
He said: I will give you
three days to guess my name
and if you cannot do it
I will collect your child.
The queen sent messengers
throughout the land to find names
of the most unusual sort.
When he appeared the next day
she asked: Melchior?
Balthazar?
But each time the dwarf replied:
No! No! That’s not my name.
The next day she asked:
Spindleshanks? Spiderlegs?
But it was still no-no.
On the third day the messenger
came back with a strange story.
He told her:
As I came around the corner of the wood
where the fox says good night to the hare
I saw a little house with a fire
burning in front of it.
Around that fire a ridiculous little man
was leaping on one leg and singing:
Today I bake.
Tomorrow I brew my beer.
The next day the queen’s only child will be mine.
Not even the census taker knows
that Rumpelstiltskin is my name . . .
The queen was delighted.
She had the name!
Her breath blew bubbles.

When the dwarf returned
she called out:
Is your name by any chance Rumpelstiltskin?
He cried: The devil told you that!
He stamped his right foot into the ground
and sank in up to his waist.
Then he tore himself in two.
Somewhat like a split broiler.
He laid his two sides down on the floor,
one part soft as a woman,
one part a barbed hook,
one part papa,
one part Doppelganger.

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Melville Would Have Understood Trump

By Robin Bates | Published: July 31, 2023

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Tuesday

As today (August 1) is Herman Melville’s birthday, I’m reposting a blog essay I wrote seven years ago on The Confidence Man. Donald Trump was running against Hillary Clinton when I wrote it, and Melville’s challenging novel gave me some insights into his political success, although I didn’t realize at the time that his con would eventually pull millions into his orbit.

Confidence Man explains how conmen con, including how a man who has made millions from bilking people could have convinced America that he was more truthful than a former Secretary of State. Whatever her faults, Clinton was fairly honest for a politician, but it was Trump who, despite the 30,000 lies he told while president, still receives plaudits from his supporters for “telling it like it is.”

That Melville provides a compelling depiction of the type (as does Mark Twain with the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn) indicates that the figure of the American conman is not new. Sadly, Trump has not only tapped into this history but has taught wannabe imitators to follow suit. When Melville’s barber dismisses “sheepish” truth and declares, “Lies, lies, sir, brave lies are the lions!”, he provides a template for all those politicians and enablers who conjure up “alternate facts” out of thin air. Some of them (Steve Bannon, Roger Stone) even announced publicly and ahead of time that they would be lying about the 2020 election if it didn’t go Trump’s way. As Stone, knowing that Trump might well be ahead election night before mail-in ballots started arriving, advised,

I really do suspect it’ll still be up in the air. When that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is nine tenths of the law. “No, we won. Fuck you, Sorry. Over. We won. You’re wrong. Fuck you.”

French epigrammatist François de La Rochefoucauld famously said that “hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue,” but Trump has taught his wannabe imitators that they need not pay that homage. Don’t tilt your hit to being good. Just make things up.

Occasionally we have seen some accountability. Fox News has had to pay almost a billion dollars when its commentators lied about Dominion voting machines changing votes; several Trump lawyers are facing disbarment for repeating his false claims and pressing frivolous lawsuits; and those whose lies ruined the lives of two Georgia election workers may have to pay severe fines. In other words, our society hasn’t totally dispensed with truth.

But the MAGA right is certainly going after society’s truth adjudicators, especially judges, lawyers, journalists, health professionals, and academics (all of whom can be drummed out of their professions if they make baseless claims or engage in unethical behavior). If the final guardrails that separate truth from falsehood are ever removed, then power will devolve to those who can tell—and then back up with force—the most effective lies.

But for the moment, take your mind back to a time when Trump was still a longshot candidate. Literature’s ability to grasp the essence of such a man makes it yet another essential adjudicator of truth.

Reprinted from August 15, 2023

One of the most memorable lines for me from the National Democratic Convention was New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg saying about Donald Trump, “I am from New York and I know a con when I see one.” Since then, I’ve been reading Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man to see if it will give me insights into the nature of Trump’s con.

I’ll be turning to the novel a number of times during this election season, but let me start with this. Melville helps explain why, as Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times puts it, “One persistent narrative in American politics is that Hillary Clinton is a slippery, compulsive liar while Donald Trump is a gutsy truth-teller.” In a recent NBC poll, only 11% of voters chose to describe Clinton as “honest and trustworthy” (as opposed to 16% for Trump).

Even the idea that Clinton and Trump are in the same category Kristof finds to be preposterous. “If deception were a sport,” he writes, “Trump would be the Olympic gold medalist; Clinton would be an honorable mention at her local Y.”

A study by Politifact of presidential candidates since 2007 bears Kristof out. Clinton is second only to Obama in truthfulness, finishing ahead of Jeb Bush and Bernie Sanders. Trump, on the other hand, leads everyone in lying, even Michele Bachman and Ted Cruz. One of the characters in The Confidence Man explains why we may find ourselves surprised by Hillary’s high rating.

Melville’s novel is about a flimflam artist who boards a steamboat and dons a series of disguises to bamboozle the passengers. At one point he goes to work on the ship’s barber, who has put a “No Trust” sign—meaning no credit—in his window. The confidence man convinces him to start trusting people, after which he wriggles out of paying for his shave.

The barber helps us understand how Trump makes his lies compelling, even getting at the way the Trump’s flamboyant hair gives him confidence. (The barber also gets at Trump’s underlying insecurity–without such hair, the barber says, a man is shamefaced and fearful.) We also learn why Clinton’s careful word choices damage her as much as Trump’s “pants on fire” “four Pinocchios” fabrications. Responding to the question, “how does the mere handling of the outside of men’s heads lead you to distrust the inside of their hearts?”, the barber replies,

[C]an one be forever dealing in macassar oil, hair dyes, cosmetics, false moustaches, wigs, and toupees, and still believe that men are wholly what they look to be? What think you, sir, are a thoughtful barber’s reflections, when, behind a careful curtain, he shaves the thin, dead stubble off a head, and then dismisses it to the world, radiant in curling auburn? To contrast the shamefaced air behind the curtain, the fearful looking forward to being possibly discovered there by a prying acquaintance, with the cheerful assurance and challenging pride with which the same man steps cheerful assurance and challenging pride with which the same man steps forth again, a gay deception, into the street, while some honest, shock-headed fellow humbly gives him the wall!

And then the passage that explains Clinton’s problem:

 Ah, sir, they may talk of the courage of truth, but my trade teaches me that truth sometimes is sheepish. Lies, lies, sir, brave lies are the lions!”

So there you have it: Trump tells brave lies whereas Hillary engages in sheepish equivocations.

The follow-up passage has relevance to the Trump campaign as well. When the confidence man accuses the barber of participating in a fraud, the man replies, “”Ah, sir, I must live.”

This sounds very much like the ghostwriter who wrote Trump’s The Art of the Deal and now, according to Jane Mayer’s remarkable, is wracked with guilt. Like the barber, he says that he did it because he had bills to pay:

Around the time Trump made his offer, [Tony] Schwartz’s wife, Deborah Pines, became pregnant with their second daughter, and he worried that the family wouldn’t fit into their Manhattan apartment, whose mortgage was already too high. “I was overly worried about money,” Schwartz said. “I thought money would keep me safe and secure—or that was my rationalization.”

What happens when we dance with a professional confidence man? We get conned. Why are we surprised?

Further thought: Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an authority on strong men figures who believes that Trump is “a competent authoritarian,” cites another expert on authoritarianism to get at the danger Trump poses:

As for Trump’s grass-roots supporters, he has taken millions of them closer to a situation that the philosopher Hannah Arendt identified as critical for the success of authoritarian rule. As she wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

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Barbie: Love Her, Hate Her

By Robin Bates | Published: July 30, 2023
Gosling, Robbie in Barbie

Monday

Julia and I attended Barbie over the weekend, and at one point the women in the audience–my wife include–burst into cheers. The occasion is Gloria (America Ferrera), now a mother, giving a speech how on difficult it is to be a woman.

The scene occurs after we have watched her daughter Sasha (Arian Greenblatt) complain about the damage the doll has done to women. Calling Barbie a fascist, she says that her image is used to indoctrinate little girls with its dangerous beauty standards, not to mention an ethos of “sexualized capitalism” and “rampant consumerism.”

Sasha is voicing some of the critique to be found in Marge Piercy’s poem “Barbie Doll”:

This girlchild was born as usual
and presented dolls that did pee-pee
and miniature GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose and fat legs.

She was healthy, tested intelligent,
possessed strong arms and back,
abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.
She went to and fro apologizing.
Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.

She was advised to play coy,
exhorted to come on hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and her legs
and offered them up.

In the casket displayed on satin she lay
with the undertaker’s cosmetics painted on,
a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink and white nightie.
Doesn’t she look pretty? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy ending.

Piercy’s girlchild, unable to live up to both the beauty and behavior expectation of her society, finally gives up (“her good nature wore out like a fan belt) and she commits suicide. Cutting off her “great big nose and fat legs” is another way of saying that she disposed of herself in such a way that they could no longer be criticized.

Edgar Allan Poe notoriously wrote that “the death…of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world (“The Philosophy of Composition”), and he may have thought this because one no longer has to worry about her flawed physique, no to mention her intelligence, abundant sexual drive, and manual dexterity. Instead she can be as ethereal as Annabel Lee in “her tomb by the sounding sea. Instead of asserting her selfhood, she is like Snow White in her glass casquet, lying “still as a gold piece” (as Anne Sexton puts it in “Snow White”).

The film acknowledges this danger but doesn’t stop there since it also wants to explore the exact nature of Barbie love. A very smart New Yorker article by Leslie Jamison points out that girls have always had a love-hate relationship with Barbie and credits the film for noting it. She herself remembers punishing her doll for confronting her with impossible standards, even as the doll also helped her articulate various longings:

If Barbie embodied something that always felt beyond my reach, then playing with Barbie—subjecting her to an array of trials and tribulations—was less about becoming her than it was about exerting some sort of power over the archetypes that tyrannized me. I didn’t have to become her; I could be her god—a loving god, or a vengeful one….Perhaps this is what Barbie offers, the chance to feel both things at once: wanting something and wanting to destroy it. Wanting to become something and hating yourself for wanting to become it.

Or to put it more succinctly, “I wanted her perfection, but I also wanted to punish her for being more perfect than I’d ever be.”

That love/hate relationship with Barbie is at the core of the film. As the plot goes, Gloria has opened up a crack in Barbie’s universe by imagining the Barbie she used to play with as developing cellulite and having thoughts of death. In other words, she is trying to negotiate the disconnect between Barbie’s ambitions (astronaut, Supreme Court justice, president of the United States) and women’s reality. Her monologue is triggered when she witnesses Barbie’s self-doubt, which she both understands and is infuriated by. Here it is in its entirety:

It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.

You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining.

You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.

I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.

The cheers I heard following the speech reminded me of the cheers I used to hear when Lucille Clifton would read her “Wishes for Men,” the wish being that men would experience the world as women do. It alerted me to the depth of the frustrations.

So there you have it: all these mixed emotions, all this psychological processing, poured into a plastic doll. No wonder Barbie, at the end of the movie, wants to become a real woman. It is much more interesting, as both Barbie and Ken learn by the end, if you don’t conform to a shallow stereotype. The lesson, as Dorothy Parker once put it, is that “people are more fun than anyone.”

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An Early Poem about Leah’s Lament

By Robin Bates | Published: July 29, 2023
Rossetti, Dante’s Vision of Leah and Rachel

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Sunday

I recently came across illuminating commentary (or midrash) on the story of Jacob, Rebecca, and Leah, one of today’s Old Testament options in the Episcopal liturgy. Rabbi Ismar Schorsch reflects on something that has always troubled me, which is the difficult position in which Leah finds herself. Along this vein, Schorsch shares a poem by the 6th century Galilean poet Rabbi Yannai that sympathizes with the elder sister.

To refresh your memory of the account in Genesis, Jacob falls in love with Rebecca but, after having served her father for seven years to earn her, is tricked into marrying her older sister Leah, who is described as having weak eyes. The wily Laban then requires another seven years of labor from Jacob as the price for Rebecca. To compensate for Jacob’s Rebecca preference, God makes sure that Leah has the most children. As Genesis put it, “When the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren.”

Leah then goes on to have six sons, the first one called Reuben, meaning “Behold, a son.” One sees her desperate longing throughout her childbearing:

And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben, for she said, “Because the Lord has looked upon my affliction; for now my husband will love me.” She conceived again and bore a son, and said, “Because the Lord has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also.” And she called his name Simeon.  Again she conceived and bore a son, and said, “Now this time my husband will be attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.” Therefore his name was called Levi. And she conceived again and bore a son, and said, “This time I will praise the Lord.” Therefore she called his name Judah.

Yannai’s poem sympathizes with Leah’s longing for her husband’s love and finds some comfort in the thought that, although she is “hated below,” she is “yet beloved above”:

Our eyes are weak
with longing for Your love, O loving One,
for we are hated by the enemy.
Look how afflicted we are from within; see how hated we are from without –
as You looked on the affliction of Leah and saw her tormented by hate.
She was hated within the house and detested without.
But not every loved one is loved, nor every hated one hated:
There are some who are hated below, yet beloved above.
Those whom You hate are hated; those whom You love are loved.
We are hated because we love You, O Holy One!

Providing historical context for Yannai’s poem, Schorsch notes that it was written at a time when Christianity had become firmly ensconced in Rome and Byzantium. Standing in for the Jewish people in the way she is hated by those around her but loved by God, Leah serves to “bridge the chasm between faith and history, a sense of chosenness and the bitter taste of perpetual insecurity.” Through her story, sixth century Jews could reassure themselves that, if God had come to the aid of “the maligned and abused” in the past, maybe He (or She) would do so again.

Poem and poet then passed into relative obscurity, only resurfacing at the end of the 19th century. Then in 1938, with Nazi anti-Semitism on the rise, Menahem Zulay—a Hebrew tutor who had received his PhD at the University of Bonn– published a collection of Yannai’s poetry. Given what was happening in Germany, Leah’s vision of being hated took on new resonance.

Schorsch describes Yannai as “one of the earliest of a remarkable cluster of Hebrew poets who turned the ingenuity of midrash into the artistry of liturgical poetry.” The poem was designed to be recited in the synagogue as “an unrestrained and poignant plea for God’s love.”

Poetry as a vehicle for God’s message is yet another way that literature makes for better living.

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It’s Hotter’n Milton’s Hell

By Robin Bates | Published: July 27, 2023
John Martin, Pandemonium

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Friday

“Over 170 million people are under heat alerts from California to Maine,” read a headline in yesterday’s Washington Post, and the news in the rest of the world is just as bad, making descriptions of Milton’s hell all too relevant. It’s as though we are the fallen angels in Paradise Lost, trying to figure out what to do next now that we find ourselves attached with “adamantine chains” to “penal fire.”

One of the proposals sounds, unfortunately, like what climate denialists advocate—which is, to do nothing and hope things get better. Belial, Milton tells us, counsels “ignoble ease and peaceful sloth,” which is about par for today’s Republican Party:

                                                        This is now
Our doom; which if we can sustain and bear,
Our Supreme Foe in time may much remit 
His anger, and perhaps thus far removed
Not mind us not offending, satisfied
With what is punished…

Or maybe, Belial adds, we can just accustom ourselves to the “new normal” (my words, not his). Simply by our enduring rising temperatures and conforming to the changed circumstances,

Familiar [will become] the fierce heat, and void of pain;
This horror will grow mild, this darkness light…

Belial, at least, acknowledges that the suffering they are undergoing has been brought about by their own actions. That’s a step further than our climate denialists are willing to go.

Or perhaps they are taking comfort in another poem about extreme weather events. Once we’re all dead, as Shakespeare points out in Cymbeline, heat and cold will no longer be a problem for us:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun;
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney sweepers come to dust.

Responsibility is called for, however, for those of us who believe we should take care of the earth we have been given. As the angel Raphael points out to Adam in book seven, God’s purpose in creating this heavenly garden has been to provide those humans with the chance to dwell “holy and just” as they “rule over his works, on earth, in sea, or air.” Our job, Adam later tells Eve, is to figure how “best to fulfill the work which here God hath assigned us.”

Returning again to Raphael, he reassures Adam that humans will be “thrice happy…if they know their happiness, and persevere upright.”

Persevering upright remains a challenge.

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Obey Your Parents or Face the Lion

By Robin Bates | Published: July 26, 2023

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Thursday

Today is the birthday of conservative satirist Hilaire Belloc, which gives me an excuse for sharing one of his Cautionary Verses for Children. When I was a child, I loved and memorized many of Belloc’s darkly comic poems, which mocked the didactic verse intended to instruct people my age. Belloc writes about what can happen to children who stray from their nannies (get eaten by lions), tell lies (are burned in house fires), slam doors (die), eat pieces of string (again, die) or play with loaded guns (get scolded by their parents).

Belloc wrote in the spirit of Lewis Carroll, who also mocked heavy-handed didactic poetry. “How Doth the Little Crocodile,” for instance, is a send up of Isaac Watts’s “How Doth the Little Busy Bee,” which has such passages as the following:

In works of labor or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.

Lewis writes:

How doth the little crocodile
  Improve his shining tail
And pour the waters of the Nile
  On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
  How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
  With gently smiling jaws!

Alice is often an inadvertent rebel against the adult world, one who tries to follow—but in the process accidentally mocks or subverts—its rules. Sometimes these rules are capricious, at other times so self-evident that they shouldn’t need explaining. For instance, when Alice encounters a bottle that says, “Drink me,” she hesitates:

It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not”; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked “poison,” it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.

In Cautionary Verses, Belloc comes up with his own “nice little histories.” One of my favorites is “Jim, Who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion”:

There was a Boy whose name was Jim;
His Friends were very good to him.
They gave him Tea, and Cakes, and Jam,
And slices of delicious Ham,
And Chocolate with pink inside
And little Tricycles to ride,
And read him Stories through and through,
And even took him to the Zoo—
But there it was the dreadful Fate
Befell him, which I now relate.

You know—or at least you ought to know,
For I have often told you so—
That Children never are allowed
To leave their Nurses in a Crowd;
Now this was Jim’s especial Foible,
He ran away when he was able,
And on this inauspicious day
He slipped his hand and ran away!

He hadn’t gone a yard when—Bang!
With open Jaws, a lion sprang,
And hungrily began to eat
The Boy: beginning at his feet.
Now, just imagine how it feels
When first your toes and then your heels,
And then by gradual degrees,
Your shins and ankles, calves and knees,
Are slowly eaten, bit by bit.
No wonder Jim detested it!
No wonder that he shouted “Hi!”

The Honest Keeper heard his cry,
Though very fat he almost ran
To help the little gentleman.
“Ponto!” he ordered as he came
(For Ponto was the Lion’s name),
“Ponto!” he cried, with angry Frown,
“Let go, Sir! Down, Sir! Put it down!”
The Lion made a sudden stop,
He let the Dainty Morsel drop,
And slunk reluctant to his Cage,
Snarling with Disappointed Rage.
But when he bent him over Jim,
The Honest Keeper’s Eyes were dim.
The Lion having reached his Head,
The Miserable Boy was dead!

When Nurse informed his Parents, they
Were more Concerned than I can say:—
His Mother, as She dried her eyes,
Said, “Well—it gives me no surprise,
He would not do as he was told!”
His Father, who was self-controlled,
Bade all the children round attend
To James’s miserable end,
And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

I love how the “self-controlled” father instantly finds a way to turn the tragedy into a moral lesson.

Although I’ve associated Belloc with Lewis, there’s another influence that may be more direct. The 1845 children’s classid Der Struwwelpeter (“Shock-Headed Peter”), written by German author Heinrich Hoffmann, terrified me as a child when its images of a scissor man who cuts off the thumbs of children who continuous sucked them or a girl who burns herself up while playing with matches. (Only her cat is upset.) Although his stories are over the top,  Hoffman appears to be serious, writing with the design of terrifying children into submission.

It may be that the poem about thumb sucking is actually a warning against masturbation. Whatever the case, the images of the scissor man chasing the little boy haunted my childhood dreams.

And it’s worth reflecting on the presence of sadism, not only in Der Struwwelpeter and Cautionary Verses, but also in Lewis Carroll and in one of Belloc’s most famous successors, Roald Dahl. Terrible things happen to characters in all of these supposedly comic works for children. In Alice, cats eat mice and birds (so Alice informs a collection of mice and birds), a queen orders beheadings, and the walrus and the carpenter devour a group of oysters they have invited to the beach for a friendly walk and talk. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one child blows up like giant blueberry while another falls into a river of chocolate. And of course there’s headmistress Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, who imprisons children in “the chokey” and throws them out of windows.

Rather than turn away in horror, however, children—or at any rate, children who are like I was—are fascinated. They understand such stories and poets are comically satiric, which is one way to handle the conflicting emotions they are starting to have as they learn about violence and death in the world.

In fact, the sadistic thrill they get from bad things happening to literary kids is a way of inoculating themselves. As Hobbes famously theorized, we laugh to proclaim our superiority over  those who have some defect or weakness, the weakness in this case being child vulnerability. Children are (in part) Hobbesian creatures, driven by self-interest, and in Belloc they get to relish the demise of children who are both them and not them. If others suffer, maybe we’ll escape.

Of course, when children encounter non-comic versions of child victims, they often sober up. Melodrama tugs at the heart and helps develop empathy. But one must go turn to other kinds of children’s lit to get that. One won’t find it in Belloc.

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Morrison on the Death of Emmett Till

By Robin Bates | Published: July 25, 2023
Emmett Till

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Wednesday

Yesterday President Biden announced the establishment of a national monument honoring Emmett Till, the 14-year-old who was brutally murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi and whose death helped launch the civil rights movement. The monument also honors Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who made sure the world experienced the horror of the murder by choosing to have an open casket funeral.

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is one of many literary works that mentions the lynching. In a barbershop conversation, we see the men of the community attempt to process the event.

As with any discussion, there are multiple perspectives. Freddie, a shrewd operator, blames Emmett for being (as he sees it) stupid. Walter, a character who only appears this once, naively believes that the law will intervene. The others push back.

As protagonist Milkman enters the barbershop, the others are listening to the radio:

 It was some time before Milkman discovered what they were so tense about. A young Negro boy had been found stomped to death in Sunflower County, Mississippi. There were no questions about who stomped him—his murderers had boasted freely—and there were no questions about the motive. The boy had whistled at some white woman, refused to deny he had slept with others, and was a Northerner visiting the South. His name was Till.

Railroad Tommy was trying to keep the noise down so he could hear the last syllable of the newscaster’s words. In a few seconds it was over, since the announcer had only a few speculations and even fewer facts. The minute he went on to another topic of news, the barbershop broke into loud conversation. Railroad Tommy, the one who had tried to maintain silence, was himself completely silent now. He moved to his razor strop while Hospital Tommy tried to keep his customer in the chair. Porter, Guitar, Freddie the janitor, and three or four other men were exploding, shouting angry epithets all over the room. Apart from Milkman, only Railroad Tommy and Empire State were quiet—Railroad Tommy because he was preoccupied with his razor and Empire State because he was simple, and probably mute, although nobody seemed sure about that. There was no question whatever about his being simple.

Milkman tried to focus on the crisscrossed conversations.
“It’ll be in the morning paper.”
“Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t,” said Porter.
“It was on the radio! Got to be in the paper!” said Freddie.
“They don’t put that kind of news in no white paper. Not unless he raped somebody.”
“What you bet? What you bet it’ll be in there?” said Freddie.
“Bet anything you can lose,” Porter answered.
“You on for five.”
“Wait a minute,” Porter shouted. “Say where.”
“What you mean, ‘where’? I got five says it’ll be in the morning paper.”
“On the sports page?” asked Hospital Tommy.
“Or the funny papers?” said Nero Brown.
“No, man. Front page. I bet five dollars on front page.”

“What the fuck is the difference?” shouted Guitar. “A kid is stomped and you standin round fussin about whether some cracker put it in the paper. He stomped, ain’t he? Dead, ain’t he? Dead, ain’t he? Cause he whistled at some Scarlett O’Hara cunt.”
“What’d he do it for?” asked Freddie. “He knew he was in Mississippi. What he think that was? Tom Sawyer Land?”
“So he whistled! So what!” Guitar was steaming. “He supposed to die for that?”
“He from the North,” said Freddie. “Acting big down in Bilbo country. Who the hell he think he is?”
“Thought he was a man, that’s what,” said Railroad Tommy.
“Well, he thought wrong,” Freddie said. “Ain’t no black men in Bilbo country.”
“The hell they ain’t,” said Guitar.
“Well, he thought wrong,” Freddie said. “Ain’t no black men in Bilbo country.”
“The hell they ain’t,” said Guitar.
“Who?” asked Freddie.
“Till. That’s who.”
“He dead. A dead man ain’t no man. A dead man is a corpse. That’s all. A corpse.”
“A living coward ain’t a man either,” said Porter.
“Who you talking to?” Freddie was quick to get the personal insult.
“Calm down, you two,” said Hospital Tommy.

The conversation continues as to whether the law will hold the men accountable. As it happens, the cynics will prove correct: even though the murderers talked openly about their crime, the jury still set them free. Our knowledge of this makes the subsequent discussion darkly ironic:

“I’m serious now,” Hospital Tommy went on. “There is no cause for all this. The boy’s dead. His mama’s screaming. Won’t let them bury him. That ought to be enough colored blood on the streets. You want to spill blood, spill the crackers’ blood that bashed his face in.”
“Oh, they’ll catch them,” said Walters.
“Catch ’em? Catch ’em?” Porter was astounded. “You out of your fuckin mind? They’ll catch ’em, all right, and give ’em a big party and a medal.”
“Yeah. The whole town planning a parade,” said Nero. “They got to catch ’em.”
“So they catch ’em. You think they’ll get any time? Not on your life!”
“How can they not give ’em time?” Walters’ voice was high and tight.
“How? Just don’t, that’s how.” Porter fidgeted with his watch chain.
“But everybody knows about it now. It’s all over. Everywhere. The law is the law.”
“You wanna bet? This is sure money!”
“You stupid, man. Real stupid. Ain’t no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair,” said Guitar.
“They say Till had a knife,” Freddie said.
“They always say that. He could of had a wad of bubble gum, they’d swear it was a hand grenade.”
“I still say he shoulda kept his mouth shut,” said Freddie.
“You should keep yours shut,” Guitar told him.

At this point the conversation turns to personal experiences of how the men have coped with racism. Some of the men turn to comedy, knowing (as Jews have also known) that sometimes laughter is the only way of handling a reality that is stacked against you:

The men began to trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they’d witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves. A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness.

We later learn that many of the men in the shop, including Guitar, are members of “the Seven Days,” a group that kills an innocent White for every innocent Black who is killed by Whites. In imagining the group, Morrison is exploring what happens when murderous violence responds to murderous violence. Angry though she herself is—the Seven Days is a dark wish fulfillment—she realizes that such violence can spiral out of control. In fact, by the end of the novel Guitar is not only going after Whites but after fellow Blacks who don’t see the world exactly as he sees it.  

In fact, his shooting of Milkman’s aunt Pilate, who earlier put on a black mammy act to spring him and Milkman out of prison, shows the hatred ideologues have for people who find other ways to deal with oppression. His attempt to kill Milkman grows out of the paranoid delusions that his violence has brought on.

Toni Morrison uses her novel to find a balance between angry Black separatism and identity-denying Black assimilation. Milkman finds out who he is by connecting with and claiming his rich Black heritage, which in turn shows him a way forward. There are good reasons why Song of Solomon is Barack Obama’s favorite novel.

These days, the struggle is between those who want to erase this heritage and those who want to honor it. Although racists have demolished three previous signs indicating the spot where Emmett Till’s body was retrieved from the river, a New York sign company has created and installed a fourth sign, bullet proof and monitored, that appears here to stay. And although figures like Florida governor Ron DeSantis are attempting to rewrite this country’s racial past—in his case by having his Education Department essentially claim that slavery was like an unpaid internship or a skill-building program (!)—others are setting up national monuments so that we will never forget. As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said Monday night, “It’s good to remember it’s not just the authoritarian right that is ascendant as a global trend. It is also ‘resistance’ to authoritarianism that can be a global trend.”

Maddow concluded, “The fight back is ascendant too. Resilience matters.”

Let us hope.

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