Margaret Fuller

Fuller, Sarah Margaret Ossoli.
The blow-by-blow for the Papers on Art ----

A Dialogue. Poet. Critic. --

Poet vs critic in socratic dialog, each insist on the value of his own. The critic tenatively manages to justify herself, denying the poet's accusation of lack of emotion on the basis that part is better than nothing, that reason explores things that would be left unexamined.

The Two Herberts --

Lord Herbert and George Herbert is "intended chiefly as a setting to the Latin poems of George Herbert," and prefers George's more ethereal observations to his brother's richer stylel (15).

The Prose Works of Milton --

Reads like dust-jacket material for a Works of Milton, and reminds one that into the 20th Century, Milton enjoyed a prominence very near that of Shakespeare. Herein find Fuller's amended Romantic and Transcendental eidos in praise of M's spirituality and the grander span and grasp of his insight. Sublime does not come up, it it's very near the point.

The Life of SIr James Mackintosh: By his son; Robert James Mackintosh --

Clearly, clearly written as a book review, given that it discusses things like the binding, and goes through the pleasantness of owning a thing to which Fuller doth not grant genius. The drift seems to be how the elder Mack did not altogether reach fame and genius for human qualities that may be more admirable. One really wonders whether the younger were not a personal friend or patron.

Modern British Poets --

Campbell -- "... a poet; simply a poet-no philosopher. His forte is strong conception, a style free and bold . . ." (58).
. . . Anacreon Moore, sweet warbler of Erin! What ecstasy of sensation must thy poetic life have been!

The poetry of Walter Scott has been superseded by his prose, yet it fills no unimportant niche . . . . These poems are chiefly remarkable for presenting pictures of particulare epochs . . . " (63).

"Crabbe has the true spirit fo the man of science; he seeks truth alone . . . . The poor and humble owe him much, for he has made them known to the upper classes, not as they ought to be, but as they really are; and in so doing, in distinctly portraying the evils of their condition, he has opened the way to amelioration" (67).

"The youth of Shelley was unfortunate. He commited many errors" (68). But we don't hear which in any specific way. He is "most lyrical," yet "the struggles of Shelley's mind destroyed that serenity of tone which is essential to thei finest poetry, and his tenderness has not always that elevation of hope" (69), which I'd reather call a compliment than a criticism. She only faults him for lacking "unity of purpose and regulation of parts," for which I can only imagine that she's referring to the longer poems rather than substantial jewels like "Mont Blanc" and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty."

". . . a sorrowful indignation curls too strongly the lip, lightens too fiercely the eye, of Byron" (74). On the other hand ". . . Byron's moral perversion never paralyzed or obscured his intellectual powers, though it might lower their aims" (76) -- an odd separation of moral and intellectual, but I think we're hearing that Byron's often clever without being profound.

She does go on to Southey, Cage, Wordsworth and eventually Coleridge. The comments are more evaluative than analytical.

All in all we have here a catalog for potential readers, and the long quotes that she includes are display rather than meat for close reading.

The Modern Drama -- Shakespeare's "children should not hope to walk in his steps" (103), though british drama far exceeds the american.

". . . if you burn or cut down an ancient wood, the next offering of the soil will not be the same kind, but raspberries and purple flowers will succed the oak, poplars the pine. Thus, beneath the roots of the drama, lay seeds of the historic novel, the romantic epic, which were to take its place to the reader, and for the scene, the oratorios, the opera, and ballet.
"Music is the great art of the time" (104).

She argues further that more respect be shown the actor and what Artaud call the mise en scene. But she trails off in sundry observations of minor work -- accurate enough, but leaving little to report.

Dialogue -- Old friends discourse about not seeing each other so often, the one feeling neglected. They have recourse to various Romantic poets to augment their discussion -- and of course, to Shakespeare.

Poets of the People: Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-Loom Weaver by WIlliam Thom, of Iverrury.

"in this book, the recollections are introduced for the sake of the 'Rhymes,' (2).

Here, finally, is an aesthetic statement:

"There are two ways of considering :oems, or the pruducts of literature in general. We may tolerate only what is excellent, and demand that whatever is consigned to prin fo r the benefit of the human race should exhibit fruits perfect in shape, color, and flavor, enclusing kernels of permanent value.
"Those who demand this will be content only with the Iliads and Odysseys of the minds' endeavor. -- They can feed no where but at rich men's tables; in teh wildest recess of nature roots and berries will not content them. . . . .
"But, on the othe rhand, literature may be regarded as the great mutual system of interpretation betweeen all kinds and classes of men. it is an epistolary correspondence between brethren of one family, subject to many and wide separations, and anxious to remain in spiritual presence of one another" (2).

This is a pretty fair statent of the credo of the departments that would bring the academic study called "Literature" to "Cultural Studies," the contextualists. It's a more self-aware statement than I've read otherwise. This is worth quoting at more length as she extends the principle to criticism:

"In like manner are there two modes of criticism. On which tries, by the highest standard fo literary prefection the critic is capable of conceiving, each work which comes in his way; rejecting all that it is possible to reject, and reserving for toleration only what is capable of standing the severest test . . . .
"There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain . . . " (3).

It's easy to see where Fuller's sympathies lie. She mistakes better work of the formal critic, who should be not so much evaluating, or not evaluating as an end, but should determine and describe the workings of text.

Fuller's tone throughout seems that of a social reformer rather than an artist, clear and sharp rather than subject to transports in the Romantic mode she describes. One can picture Thoreau or Whitman engaged with Emerson's transparent eyeball, but Fuller will be there to remind the boys what work remains to do when they stumble down from that hill.

The rest trails into discussions of poverty, and of Victoria -- which are perhaps in part the same topic.

Miss Barrett's Poems -- F considers BB as free from "morbid sentimentalism" (23). F greets warmly the lush lyricism by which BB remains popular, without playing much with its excesses, as might be imagined from the above.

Browning's Poems -- Interesting that Browning must be Robert and not Elizabeth, even for Margaret Fuller, whom one suspects of other sympathies. Actually, her response to him seems more perceptive than most of what's gone before:

"['Paracelsus'] is one of those attempts, that illustrate the self-consciosness of this age, to represent the fever of the soul pininig to embrace the secret of the universe in a single trance. Men who are once seized with this fever, carry thought upon th eheart as a cross, instead of finding thesmselves dailly warmed and enlightened to more life and joy by the sacred fire to which their lieves daily bring fresh fuel" (31).

Fine notion, and apparopriate to RB, hang it all. Also, this is pretty revealing of Fuller, and who she is and who she is not. Let's note first that insofar as one does not "embrace the secret of the universe in a single trance," one does not embrace it, but stands aside and recognizes and perhaps describes. Fuller's in the latter house, clear where Emerson's not, but, having never seen from that transparent eyeball, she does not fully appreciate the value of getting it all at once.

"Byron could only paint women as they were to him. Browning can show what they are in themselves" (41).

Lives of the Great Composers; Hayden, Mozart, Handel, Bach, Beethoven.

"It is easier to us to get the scope of the artist's design and its grown as the area where we see it does not stretch vision beyond its power" (47).

Left politic and rightis aesthetics -- not an unusual combination.

An interesting comparison between the apparent processes of Emerson and Fuller occurs. Harkening back to the explanation of logic with non-discrete words, one might say that Emerson feels forcibly the instability of his discrete pronunciations and repeatedly weaves back to respond to the unspoken. He has some faith that at some level Kosmos unifies and organizes and so forth -- his transcendent level, of course. For Fuller, the associations of discourse resolve adequately within the sentence, and the recursions of paragraphs and larger units revisit only what has been made relatively explicit in the prior text; where they extend it, they do so relatively straightforwardly.

This difference is quantitive, and anything but absolute. Emerson's trying for clarity, too, and Fuller for profundity. And both achieve some of each. But Emerson spills over regularly, whereas Fuller falls back into abstraction.

This is much of what the business of jumping around consists of in freshman compositions, too. Only they haven't the experience or desire to police it, so they allow it where they have little call to do so.

This has something to do with the difference between linguistic and mathematic analysis. In mathematical analysis, the terms are quantities, their natures fixed or presumed to be fixed. In language one tries for similar strictures, or approximations of them, but the language is presumed referent, therefore it continues always subject to the dissonance of reference. Also, it remains subject to the dissonance involved in categorization, in the parting of externals by the separate samplings of sense and the fictions of its subsequent reassembly.

Mathematics further tends to presume the referent as expressible in quantities, or in a quantity of quantities. Language, conversely, favors the subjectively irreducible goache-fluxus of sense. Mathmind takes the world to be asensual, to hold Meaning or Nature unavailable to the senses or to vision -- possible available to sound or movement, in kinesis.

Here we bend back to a surprising unity -- Fuller is the master of the kinesis in her sentences and paragraphs; Emerson is not. She owns or spans the effective sentence, the long moment of meaning. She has the measure. THE PROCESS OF MEASURE, OF MEASURING, IS TEMPORAL. One measures from __ to __, :. movement.

Now, here's also the problem with the stylistic alterations often requisite of simpler prose. They don't strive like Robert Browning to embrace their topic-wisdom at once. They treat a whole as assembled of parts. Therefore, they tend to lose the specific relationship of those parts. The logical phrase, then, loses the possibility of feeding those aspects into the general pattern, then determining whether other constructs can or cannot be staged mutually with the first construct.

Ooh.

Well, back to Fuller-Ossoli-- She's on to A Record of Impressions of Mr. Allson's Pictures in the Summer of 1839.

"I seemed to recognise in painting that self-possessedelegance, that transparent depth, which I most admire in liaturere; I thought with delight that such a man as this had been able to grow up in our bustling, reasonable community, that he had kept hsi foot upon the ground, yet never lost sight of the rose-clouds of beauty floating above him" (109-110).

The operative concept here seems to be transparence. The relations to Emerson's images of transcendance and transparency describe something of the aesthetic to which Fuller refers. Transparency may involve an alignment of molecules or surfaces. Thus glass is transparent while it lays as melted or poured. Light passes through the aligned surface with little reflection. We see ground glass as white because light of various frequences bounces from the various surfaces. Likewise one considers the moment of recognition as one of clarity or transparency because factors under consideration align; one can also thereby ignore certain aspects of them, because these can be assumed to be in alignment. One can consider other aspects that would normally have to be bracked away from consideration. On has the impression of great or universal perception.

American Literature --

She bops through a few near-contemporaries, admitting a general lack in amlit, but noting Dr. Channing, a Unitarian preacher near to the transcendentalist movement; and JF Cooper, more noted for his faults than blessings, though we're still awaiting Twain on this one. I guess the Sage of Concord must be Emerson, though she ought to say. She disses Longfellow as elegant but "artificial and imitative," Lowell as less. Emerson's mentioned differently, so the Sage above is probably Channing, or the elder Channing. There is also William Ellery Channing "nephew and namesake of Dr. C."

As to the stage of development, she mentions "those who find the theatres of this city well filled all the year round by an audience willing to sit out the heroisms of Rolla" (134). The city is probably New York. She goes on to complain of the play, but the people are there.

". . . the most important part of our literature, wile the work of diffusion is still going on, likes in teh journals, which monthly, weekly, daily, send their messages to every corner of this great land, and form, at present, the only efficient for the general education of the people.
Among these, the Magazines take the lowest rank. Their object is principally to cater for the amusement of vacant hours, and as there is not a great deal of wit and light talkent in this country, they do not even this to much advantage. More wit, grace, and elegant trifling, embellish the annals of literatuer in one day of France than in a year of America.
"The Reviews are more able. If they cannot compare, on equal terms, with those of France, England, and Germany, where, if genius be rare, at least a vast amount of talent and culture arebrought to bear upon all the department so fknowlege, there are yet very creditable to a new country . . . " (137-138).

Swedenborgism ---

"The claim to be the New Church, or peculiarly the founders of a New Jerusalem, is like exclusive claims to the title of Orthodox. We have no sympathy with it" (160).

Blau du Plessis

In Writing Beyond the Ending, Du Plessis concerns herself almost entirely with women's writing per se. Her term "beyond the ending" feeds on poststructural associations of ending with fixity and idee fixe. But she does not go into any of this, preferring instead to chat about social aspects of the writing using modes remniscient of Frederic Jameson.

She describes the project of 19th and 20th century women writers (and, by extension, one presumes, her own very interesting, though not always very accessible, verse) as a re-mythologizing. So, very coarsely, in this particular myth, Patriarchal Society has some very binding, closed, limiting set of myths for women. There are few roles, few viable options for female life. These are Marriage, Spinsterhood, Whoredom-and-Death.

To describe how these are re-mythologized and/or broken down -- and she seems to take these two activities for one and the same -- she gives several chapter headings that suggest formal analysis, but does not follow through with said analysis.

Chapters :

1. Endings and contradictions -- she really means disagreements, not contradictions; some would disagree with the way others would define their ends or stories. It's not a matter of aporia.

2. The Rupture of Story and The Story of an African Farm. Again, all she means is that the author attempts to recast women in a different light.

And so on.

She spends two chapters analyzing Woolf and says some interesting things. She sees Woolf as decentering first the romantic couple, and finally atomized-western-individual consciousness, and she does look at the weaving of POV's that make up much of W's narrative style to do that. W's handling does happen to be formally inventive, and formally inventive in ways that do seem to support what Du P does here: W really does re-shape the story to recontextualize actions, roles, and so forth to recenter or redefine femininity and humanity.

These are probably the best chapters of Du Plessis' book.

The analysis of HD's Trilogy bears some interest; HD's re-mantling of the Magdalene story makes for a pretty direct example of what Du Plessis is talking about, and the theory seems to work pretty directly on a key figure of what can really be seen as contemporary mythology in a literal sense -- though in part the comparison may be aided by HD's lifelong comfort with hellenic image and reference.

Ostriker

Ostriker, Alica. Stealing the Language: The emergence of women's poetry in America Boston: Beacon, 1986.

As I review my notes, I find my dispproval of most of the method here strong enough that I may offend. I agree that women should be free to determine and appraise themselves as thinking subjects, and that they should feel free to appraise men too, just as men appraise women. I agree that many women write wonderful things that should be canonical in whatever sense any canon should exist. I hope all of this may remain obvious.

Writing of women's gradual and partial triumph over stereotypes, Ostriker cites voluminously and makes interesting observations but analyzes little. This is by no means a habit unique to her or to feminists. It seems a broad assumption of many critics that taking formal characteristics of texts into consideration subverts or distracts from their polemical concerns. Reading many, including Ostriker, I find myself alternately agreeing and disagreeing with qualifications of various authors and incidents without feeling entirely certain as to the initial aesthetic assumptions.

With Ostriker, my disagreements usually come when she describes as characteristically female things that are not. For instance, the ambiguities of Dickinson are "duplicity" (38). The term may not hold for Ostriker all of its usual stigma, but she goes on to discuss it as a strategy that Dickinson follows because of primarily male prohibitions against full female feeling and expression. Dickinson, for example, "wrote that she was Nobody at approximately the same moment that Walt Whitman was claiming to be everybody" (39). Dickinson's response is taken as "what many women were feeling," and Ostriker does treat such responses, rather mysteriously given her straightforwardly positive evaluation of Dickinson as a poet, as lacking (40).

Further clues may come in the discussion of Adrienne Rich's early work.

"Throughout her early poems, Rich explains, 'Formalism was part of the strategy -- like asbestos gloves, it allowed me to handle material I couldn't pick up barehanded.'She was following, in other words, the intellectual line in women's poetry, which required distancing of personal feeling and cautiousness regarding public issues" (57).

Ostriker appears to assume that there are blanket prohibitions against feeling that apply to women and not to men, and that these are more extensive than those that apply to men, that men primarily enforce these while women may to varying degrees internalize them. Perhaps as a consequence, she seems to believe that women's art, and probably art in general, consists of the expression of the emotion of the artist, with more direct expression making for fuller or more satisfying art. I'm not sure how she would qualify the latter idea because she does not bother to state it, at least not here.

Again, there are a lot of responses against feminist ideas that I would take care to not resemble. I don't doubt that prohibitions against activity and against feeling inhibit women who are artists as well as other women and other artists, and I'm willing to engage the idea that this is a particular difficulty for people who are both women and artists. However, even leaving Ostriker's mischaracterization of WW's narrative persona aside as a glib moment she may not have intended seriously or rigorously, if prohibitions against women's feelings in general in the 1800's were stricter, more extensive, or less forgiving than those against those of male homosexuality, the observation requires support. Perhaps a homosexual male is not a good example, but her comparison is Walt Whitman. Is Whitman's "Calamus" less duplicitous, in any common sense, than the fascicles? Leaving aside comparisons with Ginsberg's "Howl" or Genet's Notre dame des fleurs, we probably agree that Whitman could not have written in the style of Elizabeth Barret Browning and named his lover without reprisals more severe than being dismissed as less than serious.

The restrictions that Ostriker discusses in relation to Rich and the various female poets of from about 1910-1970 or so appear to those formulated by T.S. Eliot as the framework of the New Critical school. The critics she quotes as dismissing women (and they do!) are of the later TS Eliot's camp. But neither Eliot nor his movement limited criticism of sentiment to female sentiment; Eliot took out after Shakespeare and Milton as well. Eliot's verses do seem squeamish about sex, touch, and affection; and his criticism seems squeamish about sentiment in ways that somewhat tar passion, as passionate as his verse remains. But I have seen no argument to join his aestheticism with his asceticism intellectually, even if they may be joined biographically. And not even Eliot asked us to take on his life.

The New Critics were worth revolting against. Many did so, mostly from the 1950's into the '60's; thus we have the Beats, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, Concrete poetry, and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school and various fellow-travellers, Not only has New Criticism now long fallen into disrepute, other formalisms have replaced it, so that by engaging TSE & the boys, Ostriker confines herself to anthropological observation that cannot simply be levelled against contemporary formal innovation. For decades in the US now, innovative verse has in terms of its poetics followed not Eliot, but a train through Saussure or Peirce via the Russian Formalists or French structuralists into one or another form of post-structuralism. In terms of antecedents, most follow Pound rather than Eliot and perhaps Williams more than Pound, and HD more than one seems to read anywhere (spare couplets as in her Trilogy have become extremely common). To engage formal elements in American poetry after 1950, Ostriker might do this -- thereby reaching after something of the theoretical base of American poets like Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Rae Armantrout, Lynn Hejinian, and Leslie Scalapino.

But Ostriker's progressive, as of 1986 at least, has to do with expression, so progress hails from beat-related Wakoski and Diane Di Prima (Jayne Cortez might be a nice addition); politically engagé Levertov, Rich, and Atwood; confessional fellow-travellers Plath, Bishop, and Sexton. It does not apparently progress from any of the more formally progressive authors.

"We have moved from from Dickinson's "Mirth is the Mail of Anguish," from Marianne Moore's humorous acceptance of a need for self-protection in her many poems on armored animals, and from the protective creatve images of shells and cocoons in Mariane Moore and HD.

Since such progress is clearly social, whether that means as opposed to poetic or and therefore, poetic, doesn't it require social rather than poetic or at least as well as poetic support? And if this social liberty is a matter for poetics, why doesn't its explication require an integration of poetics? My concern here, please note, is not to bar social considerations from analysis of poetry, but to mourn the lack of integration of formal aspects of poetry in its evaluation, whatever social or political agenda one may involve. After all, if understanding ourselves and our circumstances means narrating our mythology, then surely we all must engage in our own narrations, and our own appraisal of our own narrations must be part of the recursive refrain involved in that. But can proper criticism of these forms be accomplished in innocence of reflexive consideration of the act of consideration? If anything is to be gained besides the incidentals of one or another story, clearly not.

Framing the Margins, Blow-by-Blow

Harper, Phillip Brian. Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture. NY: Oxford, 1994.

"My aim with this book is to substantiate such claims as [Bell] Hooks makes about socially marginalized groups' anticipatory experience of postmodern 'uncertainty,' but also -- and more importantly -- to suggest that marginalized groups' experience of decenteredness is itself a largely unacknowledged factor in the 'general' postmodern condition" (4).

So, one might hope here for a position that will unite formal and social interests, but Harper's aims appear otherwise.

. . . if formalist aestheticism appears to us as the dominant tendency of 'high modernism,' as it is currently apphrehended, then it must be acknowledged as well that this aestheticism derives its significance from the its status as a reaction against the apparent meaninglessness and absurdity of contemporary life, which was seen as reflected in the modernist works that thematized chaos and contingency. In other words, the dis-integrated, fragmentary nature of modern human existence is always a subtext of high modernist aestheticism, which is also precisely a defensive hedge against the former. Conversely, modernist explorations of discontinuity and disorder always funciton in the context of aesthetist endeavors that counterbalance them and keep them in cjeck.

Given this view of the matter, it becomes possible to see how postmodernism can constitute both a break from and a continuation of the modernist undertaking. Postmodernism breaks with the formalist aestheticism that functioned to suppress modernism's full playing out of the ramifications of experiential disjunctutre, and, this unrestrained exploration that postmodernism accedes to what I have identified as one of its prime characteristices, the thematization of subjective fragmentation, over the more modernist concern of subjective alientation, a distinction invoked by Jameson that we would do well to clarify a bit here (21).

We we have a quick binary opposition of "formal" modernism "restraining" by "aestheticism" a response to "meaningless." Further, "contingency" is somehow related to "chaos." The resulting field of categorization neatly cuts anything of formal interest from anything involving full and appropriate response to the human needs that Harper treats as "fragmentation" or "alienation," as opposed to, say, poverty, oppression, disempowerment, or social dysfunction.

Since art or thought can no more be "formless" than "pure," such divisions must be intended loosely. Does Harper fight the ghosts of Eliot's minions, actual experimentalists like the NY, Objectivist, or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school and fellow travellers, or is he even crass enough to try to mix them?

He gives Woof's Dalloway as immediate example, describing a "subjective dispersal" that "greatly resembles postmodern alienation" (22), finally concluding that Woolf's is a modern, not postmodern novel for its lack of "emphasis" on the fragmentation. But there's more. It's VW's "aestheticist hedge against experiential fragmentation that I have identified as a key component" (23). This is apparently so because Clarissa "resolves herself" in time for her party (23-24).

This really does not explain how Harper would deal with Dada, Khlebnikov, Marinetti, Breton, Artaud. It doesn't even describe what he might do with Pound, whose Cantos might reasonably considered fragmented. Is Oppen modern and Pound postmodern? Let's see if a suitably postmodern example is given.

Before this is resolved, I find another issue: "Nin and Barnes depict a psychic fragmentation that is unique to women and actually constituted in femininity" (25). So, women are PoMo, men modern? Let's keep Yin and Yang apart, they'll have little dialectics. But no, no explanation is forthcoming. Harper gives a quick catalog of following chapters, and jumps into individual studies.

WEST

So the next chapter deals with Nate West, author of Day of the Locust. H cites some dialog from Snell, two characters considering something vaguely like Zeno or Parmenides. Apparently we are to deduce from this that West's characters' quite coherent discussion is fragmented, whereas, say, Faulkner's Benjy is not.

Oh! He's on to Apollonaire! But he associates GA with "concrete poetry," something that the de Campos brothers or Pignatari would deny, since GA's shapes don't relate to syntax, whereas those in true concrete poetry do. He is onto something here, though, since he appears to be trying to describe a single sign, symbol, or icon (it's not clear which or whether the distinction is part of his appraisal) that means in two ways. So, yes, GA's calligrammes fit roughly if one doesn't want to really examine the mechanism (36-37).

"Linguistic signification can in no way be divorced from human physiology" (42).
'Nice.

Nin, Barnes, Critical Feminist Unconscious

"For women is man's creation, in the view of Nin's characters. . . "

It's been a while, but I don't recall anything special about that in Nin. Perhaps it's just that I do not share certain conventions about men and women being independent of each other. One survives; one is blue. How much suffering constitutes dependency? Nin's characters do produce several believable images of being "split" over love. But frankly, I don't see why one shouldn't react to Nin as a late Romantic humanist working in forms that date from Baudelaire or Rimbaud's old Foolish Virgin, What's-His-Name.

H does engage N's persistant freudian (we're really talking about Otto Rank here, N's analyst). The awkwardness of Freud's boys-only terminology runs through the discussion, but not in any way that Nin herself would find overwhelmingly strange. Nin's romantic personae are fruity and abundant, but why I should think the remove or discontinuity of the post-symboliste imagery and Freud-via-Rank-and-Artaud reflexive gestures constitute a more complete response to anything, I have no idea.

Barnes may be more interesting. Her women are, of course, incomplete (74). Of course, the paunchy guy she roasts in the opening pages can hardly be complete without his Hedwig, hein? Hedwig who thrusts her baby from her, hands it some ridiculous name, and dies. Who's complete? Female desire, or "incompleteness," if we must, occupies Barnes more than any corresponding male anything. All of which is fine, but doth not an ideology make. Harper's take:

. . . Barnes's work, along with Nin's, is informed by a feminist political unconscious that actually provides the narrative tension necessary to bind the work in a choherent whole. The suppression of that feminist content beneath the depiction of a generalized existential malaise reproduces the very disenfranchisement of women that the text simultaneously represents, in the form of psychic fragmentation (89).

All this seems pretty arbitrary. Social and sexual desires have always been as political as they have been anything else, since at least Simone de Beauvoir explicitly so. If all we mean is that the authors have unresolved desires that relate to politics, point granted. What is or is not "conscious" or "repressed" remains unclear. Nin certainly seems somewhat occulted behind the veils of symbol, and I for one would be more willing to call this "aesthetization" than I would use the term for a modernist, which Nin is not. Yet surely, Barnes' evocative, biting text should not be subject to the same criticism just because Nora and Robin don't ride off into the sunset.

A politically conscous criticism will entail the excavation of that feminist content through a reading designed to illuminate the various specific conditions that will become inscribed in the postmodern moment of the late twentieth century (89).

Gwendolyn Brooks.

Here we're establishing black female subjectivity. So in the poem "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon," we're to understand that the parallel sentences are not parallel. If I understand the intention, the personae are not in symmetrical situations, and H finds the latter sentence priviledged grammatically. The semiotics used to further describe this are strange.

"One reason for this lies in what Saussure has identified as the linear nature of linguistic signification" -- if indeed it is the signification that can be considered linear. Signification requires comparison of earlier and later grammatical elements, which requires recursion. A Saussurian system must involve a comparison of said elements with the entire system, so the recursion might be rather involved. H considers that ". . . what is under our consideration at any given moment must necessarily predominate . . ." (100). The reader may judge whether that is always so.

Grimke & Form

Contemporary readers will acknowledge that Scripture condemns slavery without testing her patient explanation, so Grimke's Appeal to Christian Women of the South interests primarily for what it does not say. Here, for instance, slavery is condemned for its similarity to Catholicism:

The Catholics are universally condemned, for denying the
Bible to the common people, but, _slaveholders must not_ blame them,
for _they_ are doing the _very same thing_, and for the very same
reason, neither of these systems can bear the light which bursts
from the pages of that Holy Book.

Before we dismiss Grimke's obvious New England ethnocentrism, let's examine that part of this that is correct. The condition of most Catholics in Europe and the Americas during the 1800's might be described by the word serfs. One might say of serfs, "At least they were not owned," but that isn't rigorously true. One who owns something or someone is held to have certain rights over it, but not others. I own my car, but that does not give me the right to drive on the sidewalk, run red lights, or chase down pedestrians. I must provide for certain features of its upkeep; if the CHP officer decides I'm driving it in poor working condition, I may receive an injunction to fix the car or keep it off the road. Likewise, the owner of a propery may find that others have rights to certain parts of it -- that the city has rights to run a sidewalk across the front yard or that the electric company is entitled to dig for cables. European nobles had less ownership over serfs than did American slaveowners, but in some ways they had more power than did the Hebrew slaveholders that American apologists were fond of citing to defend slavery. Serfs married as they please, but they were serfs for life, as were their children.

If we treat ownership as something that may be nuanced, the group Grimke addresses, Christian Women in the South, is itself more owned than owning. Women are generally an odd group among the oppressed, for they're generally granted luxury (with stipulations), but with reduced sovereignty. That is, certain others, generally male, are seen as having rights over them: they're more owned than owning.

Grimke condemns slavery in part because it's similar to Catholicism. It's similar, she argues, because Catholic orthodoxy witholds information from its subjects. Since the Catholics don't, or didn't read the Vulgate, on which the Papacy has always based doctrine, Catholics have or had less sovereignty over whatever decisions they might make that involved scripture. Now, note, hte abolitionist Grimke considers this aspect of Catholocism sufficiently reprehensible that she may summon it to condemn slavery. But at the same time, the very women she addresses have trouble getting information:

Other books and papers might be a great help to you in this investigation, but they are not
necessary, and it is hardly probable that your Committees of Vigilance will allow you to have any other.

So Grimke finds use of the Vulgate constitutes a loss of sovereignty for the Catholics, a loss commensurate with at least some aspects of slavery, a slavery in itself of sorts. At the same time, these Committees of Vigilance will deny southern women any document except the Bible. Even if one agrees with Grimke that this is a lesser offense than denying the Bible itself, that's witholding a lot of information.

The condition of women in the 1800's, like the institution of slavery, is something from which contemporary Americans might feel we can distance ourselves with justice. But if we see ownership as something that can be nuanced, and knowledge as necessary for sovereignty, the points of similarity that arise can be downright scary:

• Media ownership rules have been lifted, allowing few companies to own nearly all US media, thereby filtering news and culture for most of the population.


• Monopoly media, since it need fear little contradiction, has little motive to risk offending large advertisers, who may have vested interests in political decisions.


• Land-line and satellite-owning conglomerates have lobbied Congress to allow them to charge content-producers for passage of information over high-speed lines. This would


• The above companies have managd to advertise on broadcast television the idea that allowing them to charge and thereby dictate Net content constitutes "Net Freedom." While the campaign failed in Congress (this time), the ads ran largely unopposed.


• Many so-called educators feel that the "job" of education is to "pass on culture," to inculcate values or, more nefariously, to "prepare students for corporate positions."

Clearly, all these involve the same kind of piracy of sovereignty, though advancing media technology has made the media environment more heterogenous, at least for those privelidged to pay attention.

The modernity of the situation of Southern Women becomes even more disturbing when one sees how similar the defenses for modern political fiascos are to antebellum defenses for slavery. Grimke argues against slavery based on the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But this doctrine most are given simply in childhood becomes complex on application. We don't treat chickens as we would be treated, and we excuse that because they are differently other. Vegetarians may protest, perhaps justly, but we might as easily extend the analogy to carrots. I don't mean to minimize the major differences between applying a such a principle to people as opposed to chickens or even chickens as opposed to carrots, but the argument structurally resembles the argument an apologist might present for slaveholders: "The Golden Rule does not apply because the slaves are different."

To be clear, biological science and the slaveowners' well documented reproductive habits sharply contradict the apologists' argument in their behalf. But again the same form of argument comes into play repeatedly with regards to Amercan conflicts abroad. Note how the same form leads to bizarre ideation in each of the following arguments, which I suspect readers will find familiar:

• "We entered Vietnam because they were communists." They already implies that an entire population -- and one engaged in civil war at that! -- uniformly espoused a single ideology. Then, the passive construction were implies no action, but a state of being. Thus, they don't necessarily do anything that makes them communists; but when they sip tea, they sip tea as communists, and when they walk or bend over or scratch, they must do each of these things as communists. We could take their self-determination, then, because they were different. We can take what belongs to them because, not being free people, they are less deserving than us.
  
• We must remain in Iraq (Iran, Afghanistan, upi name it) because they are not ready for democracy.

The same rationale might have been used with equal justice by Edward Teach, for example, to justify his raids upon English and American shipping. The merchant and military crews had often been pressed into service or driven there by poverty; the profits would go to people who had not worked for them; and Teach's crew, by contrast, could vote on its course of action. Teach (AKA Blackbeard) held no slaves, in contrast to the Americans; he had no serfs and his workers voted, in contrast to the Spanish; he did not press people into service, in contrast to the English; he did not press sailors into service. His government may have been the most democratic in the English-speaking world in the 1800's.

Of course, that does no more for the ships he plundered than American voting rights do for Vietnamese, Iraqis, Argentines, Chilenos, Panamanians, Iranians, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Philipinos, Haitians, Nicaraguans, or -- well, given Greg Palast's recent work on how many Indian votes are thrown out, I'm tempted to add native Americans. But even if that constitutes a separate case, the list could be many times longer.

Grimke criticizes a warp in logic that has transcended theology, nominative ideology, and economic system to remain an active force. Formally, she does this by pointing out inconsistencies between a particular position with a document on which its purveyors hold it to be based. This does seem dated, but it's not because either the mistake or the slavery have stopped. And it's not because the Bible has ceased to be perverted as an instrument of torture. Each American president since Jimmy Carter has used faith to excuse killing for profit.

Perhaps Grimke seems dated because of a couple aspects of language. First, she regards scriptural arguments seriously enough to incorporate scripture in her answer, whereas contemporary western theocracy claims literal authorization by a text that it takes figuratively and which its leaders may not have read systematically. The other may be simply because slavery has taken different names. So we can sit over a cup of chocolate and relax, having abolished it.

Grimke & Form

Contemporary readers will acknowledge that Scripture condemns slavery without testing her patient explanation, so Grimke's Appeal to Christian Women of the South interests primarily for what it does not say. Here, for instance, slavery is condemned for its similarity to Catholicism:

The Catholics are universally condemned, for denying the
Bible to the common people, but, _slaveholders must not_ blame them,
for _they_ are doing the _very same thing_, and for the very same
reason, neither of these systems can bear the light which bursts
from the pages of that Holy Book.

Before we dismiss Grimke's obvious New England ethnocentrism, let's examine that part of this that is correct. The condition of most Catholics in Europe and the Americas during the 1800's might be described by the word serfs. One might say of serfs, "At least they were not owned," but that isn't rigorously true. One who owns something or someone is held to have certain rights over it, but not others. I own my car, but that does not give me the right to drive on the sidewalk, run red lights, or chase down pedestrians. I must provide for certain features of its upkeep; if the CHP officer decides I'm driving it in poor working condition, I may receive an injunction to fix the car or keep it off the road. Likewise, the owner of a propery may find that others have rights to certain parts of it -- that the city has rights to run a sidewalk across the front yard or that the electric company is entitled to dig for cables. European nobles had less ownership over serfs than did American slaveowners, but in some ways they had more power than did the Hebrew slaveholders that American apologists were fond of citing to defend slavery. Serfs married as they please, but they were serfs for life, as were their children.

If we treat ownership as something that may be nuanced, the group Grimke addresses, Christian Women in the South, is itself more owned than owning. Women are generally an odd group among the oppressed, for they're generally granted luxury (with stipulations), but with reduced sovereignty. That is, certain others, generally male, are seen as having rights over them: they're more owned than owning.

Grimke condemns slavery in part because it's similar to Catholicism. It's similar, she argues, because Catholic orthodoxy witholds information from its subjects. Since the Catholics don't, or didn't read the Vulgate, on which the Papacy has always based doctrine, Catholics have or had less sovereignty over whatever decisions they might make that involved scripture. Now, note, hte abolitionist Grimke considers this aspect of Catholocism sufficiently reprehensible that she may summon it to condemn slavery. But at the same time, the very women she addresses have trouble getting information:

Other books and papers might be a great help to you in this investigation, but they are not
necessary, and it is hardly probable that your Committees of Vigilance will allow you to have any other.

So Grimke finds use of the Vulgate constitutes a loss of sovereignty for the Catholics, a loss commensurate with at least some aspects of slavery, a slavery in itself of sorts. At the same time, these Committees of Vigilance will deny southern women any document except the Bible. Even if one agrees with Grimke that this is a lesser offense than denying the Bible itself, that's witholding a lot of information.

The condition of women in the 1800's, like the institution of slavery, is something from which contemporary Americans might feel we can distance ourselves with justice. But if we see ownership as something that can be nuanced, and knowledge as necessary for sovereignty, the points of similarity that arise can be downright scary:

• Media ownership rules have been lifted, allowing few companies to own nearly all US media, thereby filtering news and culture for most of the population.


• Monopoly media, since it need fear little contradiction, has little motive to risk offending large advertisers, who may have vested interests in political decisions.


• Land-line and satellite-owning conglomerates have lobbied Congress to allow them to charge content-producers for passage of information over high-speed lines. This would


• The above companies have managd to advertise on broadcast television the idea that allowing them to charge and thereby dictate Net content constitutes "Net Freedom." While the campaign failed in Congress (this time), the ads ran largely unopposed.


• Many so-called educators feel that the "job" of education is to "pass on culture," to inculcate values or, more nefariously, to "prepare students for corporate positions."

Clearly, all these involve the same kind of piracy of sovereignty, though advancing media technology has made the media environment more heterogenous, at least for those privelidged to pay attention.

The modernity of the situation of Southern Women becomes even more disturbing when one sees how similar the defenses for modern political fiascos are to antebellum defenses for slavery. Grimke argues against slavery based on the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But this doctrine most are given simply in childhood becomes complex on application. We don't treat chickens as we would be treated, and we excuse that because they are differently other. Vegetarians may protest, perhaps justly, but we might as easily extend the analogy to carrots. I don't mean to minimize the major differences between applying a such a principle to people as opposed to chickens or even chickens as opposed to carrots, but the argument structurally resembles the argument an apologist might present for slaveholders: "The Golden Rule does not apply because the slaves are different."

To be clear, biological science and the slaveowners' well documented reproductive habits sharply contradict the apologists' argument in their behalf. But again the same form of argument comes into play repeatedly with regards to Amercan conflicts abroad. Note how the same form leads to bizarre ideation in each of the following arguments, which I suspect readers will find familiar:

• "We entered Vietnam because they were communists." They already implies that an entire population -- and one engaged in civil war at that! -- uniformly espoused a single ideology. Then, the passive construction were implies no action, but a state of being. Thus, they don't necessarily do anything that makes them communists; but when they sip tea, they sip tea as communists, and when they walk or bend over or scratch, they must do each of these things as communists. We could take their self-determination, then, because they were different. We can take what belongs to them because, not being free people, they are less deserving than us.
  
• We must remain in Iraq (Iran, Afghanistan, upi name it) because they are not ready for democracy.

The same rationale might have been used with equal justice by Edward Teach, for example, to justify his raids upon English and American shipping. The merchant and military crews had often been pressed into service or driven there by poverty; the profits would go to people who had not worked for them; and Teach's crew, by contrast, could vote on its course of action. Teach (AKA Blackbeard) held no slaves, in contrast to the Americans; he had no serfs and his workers voted, in contrast to the Spanish; he did not press people into service, in contrast to the English; he did not press sailors into service. His government may have been the most democratic in the English-speaking world in the 1800's.

Of course, that does no more for the ships he plundered than American voting rights do for Vietnamese, Iraqis, Argentines, Chilenos, Panamanians, Iranians, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Philipinos, Haitians, Nicaraguans, or -- well, given Greg Palast's recent work on how many Indian votes are thrown out, I'm tempted to add native Americans. But even if that constitutes a separate case, the list could be many times longer.

Grimke criticizes a warp in logic that has transcended theology, nominative ideology, and economic system to remain an active force. Formally, she does this by pointing out inconsistencies between a particular position with a document on which its purveyors hold it to be based. This does seem dated, but it's not because either the mistake or the slavery have stopped. And it's not because the Bible has ceased to be perverted as an instrument of torture. Each American president since Jimmy Carter has used faith to excuse killing for profit.

Perhaps Grimke seems dated because of a couple aspects of language. First, she regards scriptural arguments seriously enough to incorporate scripture in her answer, whereas contemporary western theocracy claims literal authorization by a text that it takes figuratively and which its leaders may not have read systematically. The other may be simply because slavery has taken different names. So we can sit over a cup of chocolate and relax, having abolished it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I found Gilman a mixed bag. Her story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is admirably trim. She uses the unreliable narrator to full effect, and the tracing of progressive insanity through the descriptions of the wallpaper pattern works wonderfully. Moreover, the so-called cure that the narrator's subjected to -- the so-called rest cure, what a horror! -- stands marvelously as metonym for the mistreatment and misappraisal of women in western society in general, and in the bourgeois classes from the victorian eras into the 1970's in particular. And also, actually, much of the mistreatment of other outwardly pampered and domesticated groups of society -- all the recipients of the mushroom treatment. In this story, Gilman leads the reader through the ideas non-didactically, one at a time, almost one clipped paragraph per idea. It's a masterwork.

Herland, sadly, does not approach the same level. The plot feels like a cross between kinky femdom and The Planet of the Apes. But to discuss Herland on its own terms is to ignore its flaws as fiction and discuss Gilman's ideas of women and men in society. This can better done in conjunction with her Women and Economics.

Gilman, like many reformers inflamed by new problems and opportunities afforded by industry, wanted to socialize the family unit. She confused the effects of democracy witht hose of industry and abjured any idea that women should naturally raise their own children. (The idea that men should raise their own children doesn't come up, but this is not likely Gilman's fault.) Her explanations are very broadly based on a Darwinist positivistic determinism that plays fast and loose with distinctions between "instinct" and "desire" and socially influenced traits.

She finds thus:

Women are dependent on men whereas men are not dependent on women. In this she confines herself to economic dependency, but traces its many effects, mostly the loss to society of healthy, hardy and productive women. Her analysis also deals primarily with proletarian and bourgeois gender economy, leaving other possibilities to analogy.

Women have no particular ability to raise their own children. She regards formal education as key, individual love as unreliable and inadequate. Sex is something that males are over-occupied with, to the detriment of all concerned. Women waste considerable time and suffering in seduction and barter that would be better avoided were they economically equipped to just ignore male desire. Proper understanding of the love of society or mankind or something like that is or will be better. Accordingly, childcare should be hired out to a few pros.

Her suicide note may be as personally revealing as anything she wrote. Obviously retaining her intellectual capacities and her faith in science and objectivity as a basis.

"when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one."