Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 369
November 7, 2013
November 7, 2013: Berkshire Stories: The Housatonic
[Last month, I had the chance to visit the beautiful Berkshires of Western Massachusetts for the first time. The area’s as full of American history as it is of gorgeous fall foliage, and so in this week’s series I’ll highlight five such Berkshire stories, leading up to a special weekend post!]
On three complex and compelling sides to a New England river.As the presentations and conversations at my upcoming NeMLA panel will illustrate, rivers have occupied a complex and central place in the American imagination for centuries. One of the most exemplary literary engagements with both the realities and the meanings of such settings focuses on two central Massachusetts rivers: Henry David Thoreau’s travel and nature book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). But the Housatonic, the river that winds its way through the Berkshires, has likewise been the subject of a couple connected and interesting cultural works: Robert Underwood Johnson’s poem “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” which illustrates how late 19th century local color (or regionalist) poetry made potent symbolic use of such regional settings; and Charles Ives’ orchestral “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” which uses Johnson’s poem as the text for the third and final movement in his influential and profoundly American symphony Three Places in New England (1914).If Thoreau’s writings partly foreshadowed such regionalist and metaphorical portrayals of natural settings, however, they also anticipated and overtly influenced a very different kind of engagement with America’s rivers (and nature in general): the environmental movement. And viewed through the lens and concerns of that movement, the Housatonic represents something similarly distinct: the destructive influences of industry on the American landscape. Beginning in the early 1930s, significant quantities of the hazardous chemical PCB, produced by the nearby General Electric Plant, began to pollute the river, drastically impacting both its natural life and its usage and role in local communities for nearly half a century. Thanks to environmental activism, and to the Clean Water Act(1972) that is one of the movement’s most enduring legacies, the Housatonic has apparently largely recovered from the worst of that pollution. But remembering this history helps us recognize that the realities of American rivers have been as complex and as significant as any metaphorical use we might make of them.The third Housatonic history I want to highlight here would seem far less directly related to the river, but is perhaps the most broadly meaningful in American culture: the river indirectly helped launch the career of Langston Hughes, one of our greatest poets. Hughes’ first published poem, completed when he was only 19, was “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921); the poem was published in The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP. W.E.B. Du Bois, the creator and editor of The Crisis, had grown up on the Housatonic in the town of Great Barringon (on which more tomorrow), and would write extensively later in life about the lifelong passion for rivers that this experience produced. And while Hughes’ poem needed no specific cause for its publication—its greatness is only amplified when we realized how young he was when he wrote it—Du Bois would later write that the poem stood out for him (among the many submissions he constantly received) in no small measure because of its deft, multi-layered, historical and cultural and realistic and metaphorical and crucial use of rivers. Next Berkshire story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On three complex and compelling sides to a New England river.As the presentations and conversations at my upcoming NeMLA panel will illustrate, rivers have occupied a complex and central place in the American imagination for centuries. One of the most exemplary literary engagements with both the realities and the meanings of such settings focuses on two central Massachusetts rivers: Henry David Thoreau’s travel and nature book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). But the Housatonic, the river that winds its way through the Berkshires, has likewise been the subject of a couple connected and interesting cultural works: Robert Underwood Johnson’s poem “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” which illustrates how late 19th century local color (or regionalist) poetry made potent symbolic use of such regional settings; and Charles Ives’ orchestral “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” which uses Johnson’s poem as the text for the third and final movement in his influential and profoundly American symphony Three Places in New England (1914).If Thoreau’s writings partly foreshadowed such regionalist and metaphorical portrayals of natural settings, however, they also anticipated and overtly influenced a very different kind of engagement with America’s rivers (and nature in general): the environmental movement. And viewed through the lens and concerns of that movement, the Housatonic represents something similarly distinct: the destructive influences of industry on the American landscape. Beginning in the early 1930s, significant quantities of the hazardous chemical PCB, produced by the nearby General Electric Plant, began to pollute the river, drastically impacting both its natural life and its usage and role in local communities for nearly half a century. Thanks to environmental activism, and to the Clean Water Act(1972) that is one of the movement’s most enduring legacies, the Housatonic has apparently largely recovered from the worst of that pollution. But remembering this history helps us recognize that the realities of American rivers have been as complex and as significant as any metaphorical use we might make of them.The third Housatonic history I want to highlight here would seem far less directly related to the river, but is perhaps the most broadly meaningful in American culture: the river indirectly helped launch the career of Langston Hughes, one of our greatest poets. Hughes’ first published poem, completed when he was only 19, was “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921); the poem was published in The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP. W.E.B. Du Bois, the creator and editor of The Crisis, had grown up on the Housatonic in the town of Great Barringon (on which more tomorrow), and would write extensively later in life about the lifelong passion for rivers that this experience produced. And while Hughes’ poem needed no specific cause for its publication—its greatness is only amplified when we realized how young he was when he wrote it—Du Bois would later write that the poem stood out for him (among the many submissions he constantly received) in no small measure because of its deft, multi-layered, historical and cultural and realistic and metaphorical and crucial use of rivers. Next Berkshire story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
November 6, 2013
November 6, 2013: Berkshire Stories: Lenox
[Last month, I had the chance to visit the beautiful Berkshires of Western Massachusetts for the first time. The area’s as full of American history as it is of gorgeous fall foliage, and so in this week’s series I’ll highlight five such Berkshire stories, leading up to a special weekend post!]
On three very distinct stages in a small town’s evolution into a social and cultural center.Lenox, Massachusetts has a resident population of just over 5000 people, about 1/10th that of its neighbor (and the region’s largest city), Pittsfield. Yet over the course of the last two centuries this small Berkshires town has become a significant New England and American community, through a series of distinct but equally telling stages. The first stage was driven by a few culturally significant individuals who identified the town and area’s beauties and chose to make it a seasonal home: novelist Catherine Maria Sedgwick and actress Fanny Kemble in the 1820s and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family in 1850, to cite three prominent examples. Through such individual choices the town became a kind of seasonal art colony, and thus at the same time (thanks as well to the 1838 completion of a railroad line into the area) a cultural tourist attraction for all those interested in this relatively new concept of artistic celebrities.These artistic and cultural identities continued to evolve in Lenox over the next half-century, with the most prominent turn of the 20thcentury addition being Edith Wharton and her estate The Mount. But over the same period, the town was becoming not just a tourist attraction but a Gilded Age resort community, one in which New York and Boston elites competed to purchase suddenly exorbitant tracts of land and hired architects such as Charles McKim to build lavish summer homes there. Exemplifying this period is Ventfort Hall, build in the 1890s by Boston architects Rotch and Tilden for Sarah Morgan (J.P. Morgan’s sister) and her husband. Or perhaps the most exemplary detail would be the summer’s annual Tub Parade, which transformed Lenox’s small Main Street into a sea of fancy carriages competing to out-decorate each other (and which is historically re-created to this day). In any case, whether we see this resort stage as an organic outgrowth of the art colony starting points or a significant shift away from those origins, turn of the century Lenox was a thoroughly Gilded Age community.The same questions would apply to the next and still ongoing stage in Lenox’s cultural development: starting in 1937, the elaborate Tanglewood estate (which is partly located in neighboring Stockbridge) has served as the summer home for the Boston Symphony Orchesta, hosting a series of artistic performances and events throughout the summer months. The Tanglewood performances certainly draw from each of the communities I’ve discussed: artists and other residents living in the area; tourists traveling to it (perhaps still on the train); wealthy urban families summering in the Berkshires. Whether we see those performances as (among other possibilities) a unifying artistic endeavor or an elitist cultural tradition depends in part, of course, on what we think of the role of classicial music in 21st century America. But it also depends on how we understand and analyze the complex and multi-part history of little, influential Lenox, Mass.Next Berkshire story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On three very distinct stages in a small town’s evolution into a social and cultural center.Lenox, Massachusetts has a resident population of just over 5000 people, about 1/10th that of its neighbor (and the region’s largest city), Pittsfield. Yet over the course of the last two centuries this small Berkshires town has become a significant New England and American community, through a series of distinct but equally telling stages. The first stage was driven by a few culturally significant individuals who identified the town and area’s beauties and chose to make it a seasonal home: novelist Catherine Maria Sedgwick and actress Fanny Kemble in the 1820s and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family in 1850, to cite three prominent examples. Through such individual choices the town became a kind of seasonal art colony, and thus at the same time (thanks as well to the 1838 completion of a railroad line into the area) a cultural tourist attraction for all those interested in this relatively new concept of artistic celebrities.These artistic and cultural identities continued to evolve in Lenox over the next half-century, with the most prominent turn of the 20thcentury addition being Edith Wharton and her estate The Mount. But over the same period, the town was becoming not just a tourist attraction but a Gilded Age resort community, one in which New York and Boston elites competed to purchase suddenly exorbitant tracts of land and hired architects such as Charles McKim to build lavish summer homes there. Exemplifying this period is Ventfort Hall, build in the 1890s by Boston architects Rotch and Tilden for Sarah Morgan (J.P. Morgan’s sister) and her husband. Or perhaps the most exemplary detail would be the summer’s annual Tub Parade, which transformed Lenox’s small Main Street into a sea of fancy carriages competing to out-decorate each other (and which is historically re-created to this day). In any case, whether we see this resort stage as an organic outgrowth of the art colony starting points or a significant shift away from those origins, turn of the century Lenox was a thoroughly Gilded Age community.The same questions would apply to the next and still ongoing stage in Lenox’s cultural development: starting in 1937, the elaborate Tanglewood estate (which is partly located in neighboring Stockbridge) has served as the summer home for the Boston Symphony Orchesta, hosting a series of artistic performances and events throughout the summer months. The Tanglewood performances certainly draw from each of the communities I’ve discussed: artists and other residents living in the area; tourists traveling to it (perhaps still on the train); wealthy urban families summering in the Berkshires. Whether we see those performances as (among other possibilities) a unifying artistic endeavor or an elitist cultural tradition depends in part, of course, on what we think of the role of classicial music in 21st century America. But it also depends on how we understand and analyze the complex and multi-part history of little, influential Lenox, Mass.Next Berkshire story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
November 5, 2013
November 5, 2013: Berkshire Stories: Monument Mountain
[Last month, I had the chance to visit the beautiful Berkshires of Western Massachusetts for the first time. The area’s as full of American history as it is of gorgeous fall foliage, and so in this week’s series I’ll highlight five such Berkshire stories, leading up to a special weekend post!]
On the impressive natural site through which multiple American stories can be traced.Near the top of Monument Mountain, an open space reservation in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, is a summit known as Squaw Peak. The nickname implies what poet Lydia Sigourney makes explicit in her “Indian Names” (1838): the ways in which Native Americans remain part of our national landscape and language, even when we have often otherwise worked to elide them from our histories. And indeed William Cullen Bryant, Sigourney’s peer and one of the first American professional poets, penned an early poem entitled “Monument Mountain”(1815) in which he narrates the legend of a local “Indian maid” who threw herself from the summit (suffering from an unrequited love, as all such tragic poetic ladies seem to be). Bryant’s poem concludes with his own recognition of the continued presence of such native identities and stories on our landscapes, both real and literary: “Indians from the distant West, who come / to visit where fathers’ bones are laid, / Yet tell the sorrowful tale, and to this day / The mountain where the hapless maiden died / Is called the Mountain of the Monument.”A few decades later, Monument Mountain would be the site and source of a very different kind of literary inspiration. On August 5th, 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville met for the first time during a group excursion to the mountain; both men were staying at family homes in the Berkshires at the time, and while they knew each other by reputation and writing had not previously had the chance to meet. The group hike included not only the two authors but many other literary figures of the period, including Evert Duyckinck and James T. Fields, and this collection of creative voices helped produce what became a truly mythic version of the excursion: one in which a sudden thunderstorm forced the group to take refuge, during which time Hawthorne and Melville connected so immediately and deeply that some of the starting points for Moby Dick (which Melville would dedicate to Hawthorne) arose out of the conversation. I don’t mean to imply that the excursion did not include these events—it may well have—but rather that this mythic Monument Mountain moment also captures ideas of artistic genius and inspiration that embody much of what defined American literary narratives in this American Renaissance era.Over the next century, Monument Mountain would be influenced by two distinct and competing national histories. On the one hand, the ongoing Industrial Revolution would threaten its continued existence as a natural space: for example, logging in support of iron foundaries in places like nearby Lenox heavily deforested the area. Yet at the same time, the burgeoning conservation movement pushed back on such trends: in 1899 the reservation was acquired by the Trustees of Reservations, a non-profit conservationist organization that reforested the area by planting red pines throughout the reservation in the 1930s. Fortunately for those of us who want to make our own ascent to the top of Squaw Peak, perhaps to find the kinds of inspiration there that could lead to the next literary classics (or at least blog posts), the conservationist efforts have won the day, and Monument Mountain reservation remains a vital part of the Berkshires’ natural beauty and power.Next Berkshire story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On the impressive natural site through which multiple American stories can be traced.Near the top of Monument Mountain, an open space reservation in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, is a summit known as Squaw Peak. The nickname implies what poet Lydia Sigourney makes explicit in her “Indian Names” (1838): the ways in which Native Americans remain part of our national landscape and language, even when we have often otherwise worked to elide them from our histories. And indeed William Cullen Bryant, Sigourney’s peer and one of the first American professional poets, penned an early poem entitled “Monument Mountain”(1815) in which he narrates the legend of a local “Indian maid” who threw herself from the summit (suffering from an unrequited love, as all such tragic poetic ladies seem to be). Bryant’s poem concludes with his own recognition of the continued presence of such native identities and stories on our landscapes, both real and literary: “Indians from the distant West, who come / to visit where fathers’ bones are laid, / Yet tell the sorrowful tale, and to this day / The mountain where the hapless maiden died / Is called the Mountain of the Monument.”A few decades later, Monument Mountain would be the site and source of a very different kind of literary inspiration. On August 5th, 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville met for the first time during a group excursion to the mountain; both men were staying at family homes in the Berkshires at the time, and while they knew each other by reputation and writing had not previously had the chance to meet. The group hike included not only the two authors but many other literary figures of the period, including Evert Duyckinck and James T. Fields, and this collection of creative voices helped produce what became a truly mythic version of the excursion: one in which a sudden thunderstorm forced the group to take refuge, during which time Hawthorne and Melville connected so immediately and deeply that some of the starting points for Moby Dick (which Melville would dedicate to Hawthorne) arose out of the conversation. I don’t mean to imply that the excursion did not include these events—it may well have—but rather that this mythic Monument Mountain moment also captures ideas of artistic genius and inspiration that embody much of what defined American literary narratives in this American Renaissance era.Over the next century, Monument Mountain would be influenced by two distinct and competing national histories. On the one hand, the ongoing Industrial Revolution would threaten its continued existence as a natural space: for example, logging in support of iron foundaries in places like nearby Lenox heavily deforested the area. Yet at the same time, the burgeoning conservation movement pushed back on such trends: in 1899 the reservation was acquired by the Trustees of Reservations, a non-profit conservationist organization that reforested the area by planting red pines throughout the reservation in the 1930s. Fortunately for those of us who want to make our own ascent to the top of Squaw Peak, perhaps to find the kinds of inspiration there that could lead to the next literary classics (or at least blog posts), the conservationist efforts have won the day, and Monument Mountain reservation remains a vital part of the Berkshires’ natural beauty and power.Next Berkshire story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
November 4, 2013
November 4, 2013: Berkshire Stories: Vincentini’s Photos
[Last month, I had the chance to visit the beautiful Berkshires of Western Massachusetts for the first time. The area’s as full of American history as it is of gorgeous fall foliage, and so in this week’s series I’ll highlight five such Berkshire stories, leading up to a special weekend post!]
On the photos that represent a unique American story, and the photographer who does as well.In 1936, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Projectsent photographer Noel Vincentini to take pictures of the Shaker villages in New York and Massachusetts. One of the Federal Art Project’s principal goals—most famously exemplified by the Southern journey that became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men —was to document and help preserve unique communities and cultures across the United States, and the Shaker villages, the populations of which had dwindled substantially by this period, represented a perfect candidate for such efforts. Vincentini took more than 200 black and white photographs of the villages and their inhabitants, and as part of the WPA’s Index of American Design they were displayed in libraries and department stores around the country, bringing these complex communities to widespread national audiences.As I discovered when I visited Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, the story of the Shakers combines the ideal and the real in ways that feel distinctly and powerfully American. On the one hand, the rule in Shaker communities was that all members would be entirely celibate, dedicating themselves solely to God and to the daily practices and customs through which they embodied that faith; it’s hard to think of a more utopian goal, given that if achieved it would literally threaten the community’s future existence. Yet on the other hand, and due in part to the population struggles produced by that rule, the community at Hancock Village (like, I would imagine, all Shaker communities) consistently employed outside laborers, non-Shaker young men whose presence represented a necessary but very complicated contrast to the Shakers’ coherent community and worldview. Vincentini’s photos include both Shakers and outside laborers, documenting the distinct work and worlds of these two communities yet also, inevitably, their overlapping and interconnected, and I would argue very American, shared presence within the Shaker villages. If Vincentini’s photos thus captured a complicated American history, so too did his life—uncertain as many of its details are, in part because his name was sometimes spelled “Vicentini”—represent an equally multi-part American story. Apparently (most of these facts are, again, uncertain) a 1923 immigrant from Trinidad, the son of a Trinidadian father and a French mother, Vincentini then shows up on the 1930 census in New York City, working as a “manufacturer of cameras”; he subsequently went to work for the WPA from 1935 until 1942, when he enlisted in the Army and served in World War II (becoming a sergeant). Little else is known of him until his 1963 death—but given those first two decades in America, it’s hard to imagine he didn’t have an eventful last two. And honestly, it’s hard for me to imagine anything more American than a French Trinidadian immigrant photographing the multiple sides to Shaker villages for a WPA project that would showcase these communal images in Depression-era department stores, y’know?Next Berkshire story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On the photos that represent a unique American story, and the photographer who does as well.In 1936, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Projectsent photographer Noel Vincentini to take pictures of the Shaker villages in New York and Massachusetts. One of the Federal Art Project’s principal goals—most famously exemplified by the Southern journey that became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men —was to document and help preserve unique communities and cultures across the United States, and the Shaker villages, the populations of which had dwindled substantially by this period, represented a perfect candidate for such efforts. Vincentini took more than 200 black and white photographs of the villages and their inhabitants, and as part of the WPA’s Index of American Design they were displayed in libraries and department stores around the country, bringing these complex communities to widespread national audiences.As I discovered when I visited Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, the story of the Shakers combines the ideal and the real in ways that feel distinctly and powerfully American. On the one hand, the rule in Shaker communities was that all members would be entirely celibate, dedicating themselves solely to God and to the daily practices and customs through which they embodied that faith; it’s hard to think of a more utopian goal, given that if achieved it would literally threaten the community’s future existence. Yet on the other hand, and due in part to the population struggles produced by that rule, the community at Hancock Village (like, I would imagine, all Shaker communities) consistently employed outside laborers, non-Shaker young men whose presence represented a necessary but very complicated contrast to the Shakers’ coherent community and worldview. Vincentini’s photos include both Shakers and outside laborers, documenting the distinct work and worlds of these two communities yet also, inevitably, their overlapping and interconnected, and I would argue very American, shared presence within the Shaker villages. If Vincentini’s photos thus captured a complicated American history, so too did his life—uncertain as many of its details are, in part because his name was sometimes spelled “Vicentini”—represent an equally multi-part American story. Apparently (most of these facts are, again, uncertain) a 1923 immigrant from Trinidad, the son of a Trinidadian father and a French mother, Vincentini then shows up on the 1930 census in New York City, working as a “manufacturer of cameras”; he subsequently went to work for the WPA from 1935 until 1942, when he enlisted in the Army and served in World War II (becoming a sergeant). Little else is known of him until his 1963 death—but given those first two decades in America, it’s hard to imagine he didn’t have an eventful last two. And honestly, it’s hard for me to imagine anything more American than a French Trinidadian immigrant photographing the multiple sides to Shaker villages for a WPA project that would showcase these communal images in Depression-era department stores, y’know?Next Berkshire story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
November 2, 2013
November 2-3, 2013: October 2013 Recap
[A recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]
September 30: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: The Blog: A series of reflections on the 2013 New England ASA conference starts with our now-annual pre-conference blog.October 1: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: The Site: The series continues with our pitch-perfect host site, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center.October 2: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: Diverse Voices: A panel discussion that reflects the conference’s impressively diverse contributors, as the series rolls on.October 3: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: MacFarlane Prize Winners: Two undergraduates carrying the AmericanStudies torch for a new generation of scholars.October 4: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: Plenary: The series concludes with the three impressive folks whose voices we were fortunate enough to have on our plenary panel.October 5-6: What’s Next for NEASA: Three ways you can get involved with the New England ASA, wherever you are!October 7: Legends of the Fall: Young Adult Lit: A series on American images of falls (seasonal and symbolic) starts with two dark and compelling YA novels.October 8: Legends of the Fall: American Pastoral: The series continues with the Philip Roth novel that symbolizes the loss of innocence in its quietest moment even more than in its brash overtones.October 9: Legends of the Fall: The Body and Stand By Me: The novellas that’s explicitly about the “fall from innocence” and the film adaptation that’s decidedly less so, as the series rolls on.October 10: Legends of the Fall: Presumed Innocent: The multiple layers of revelations and guilt at the heart of great mystery fiction.October 11: Legends of the Fall: American Pie: The series concludes with the distinct cultural meanings of a ballad that’s all about the loss of innocence.October 12-13: Crowd-sourced Falls: Fellow AmericanStudiers weigh in on the week’s posts and themes. Add your thoughts!October 14: John Sayles’ America: Secaucus and the ‘60s: A series on AmericanStudying Sayles begins with a film that reinforces but also challenges narratives of a pivotal decade.October 15: John Sayles’ America: Brother and Race: The series continues with a quote we would do well to think about, and a film that would help us to do so.October 16: John Sayles’ America: Matewan and Work: The film that doesn’t need subtlety, but could use a little more of it nonetheless, as the series rolls on.October 17: John Sayles’ America: Passion and Home: On whether you can indeed go home again, and why it makes for a great story in any case.October 18: John Sayles’ America: Five Runners-Up: The series concludes with a handful of even more Sayles-errific goodness!October 19-20: Northeast MLA Excitement!: A weekend trip to the site of next spring’s NeMLA conference led me to think about the many exciting things we’ve got going on—all of which could use your input!October 21: Book Talks Thoughts: MOCA: On the unbelievably ideal and inspiring site for my first public book talk.October 22: Book Talks Thoughts: U of Maine: On two distinct and equally compelling spaces and connections in the Pine Tree State. October 23: Book Talks Thoughts: URI Diversity Week: A wonderful event at which I was fortunate enough to give a talk, and the two panel conversations there that challenged and enriched my ideas.October 24: Book Talks Thoughts: Harrisburg: On the importance and power of audiences, both captive and really really not.October 25: Book Talks Thoughts: Next Up, San Fran!: On what I was most looking forward to for this weekend’s trip to and talk in the Bay Area.October 26-27: Book Talks To Come: Five more upcoming talks, and one thing I’m especially excited about for each.October 28: Symbolic Scares: The Wendigo: A series on the meanings behind our scary stories starts with a cultural and cross-cultural terror.October 29: Symbolic Scares: Sleepy Hollow: The series continues with the original American scary story that’s also an ironic origin story.October 30: Symbolic Scares: Last House on the Left: The film that’s scarier for where it takes its audience than how it frightens us, as the series rolls on.October 31: Symbolic Scares: The Lost Boys: On entirely superficial pop entertainments, and what they can still symbolize.November 1: Symbolic Scares: The Shinings: The series concludes with the two very distinct versions of one scary story, and the American narratives they each symbolize.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to read about on the blog? Guest Posts you’d like to write?
September 30: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: The Blog: A series of reflections on the 2013 New England ASA conference starts with our now-annual pre-conference blog.October 1: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: The Site: The series continues with our pitch-perfect host site, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center.October 2: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: Diverse Voices: A panel discussion that reflects the conference’s impressively diverse contributors, as the series rolls on.October 3: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: MacFarlane Prize Winners: Two undergraduates carrying the AmericanStudies torch for a new generation of scholars.October 4: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: Plenary: The series concludes with the three impressive folks whose voices we were fortunate enough to have on our plenary panel.October 5-6: What’s Next for NEASA: Three ways you can get involved with the New England ASA, wherever you are!October 7: Legends of the Fall: Young Adult Lit: A series on American images of falls (seasonal and symbolic) starts with two dark and compelling YA novels.October 8: Legends of the Fall: American Pastoral: The series continues with the Philip Roth novel that symbolizes the loss of innocence in its quietest moment even more than in its brash overtones.October 9: Legends of the Fall: The Body and Stand By Me: The novellas that’s explicitly about the “fall from innocence” and the film adaptation that’s decidedly less so, as the series rolls on.October 10: Legends of the Fall: Presumed Innocent: The multiple layers of revelations and guilt at the heart of great mystery fiction.October 11: Legends of the Fall: American Pie: The series concludes with the distinct cultural meanings of a ballad that’s all about the loss of innocence.October 12-13: Crowd-sourced Falls: Fellow AmericanStudiers weigh in on the week’s posts and themes. Add your thoughts!October 14: John Sayles’ America: Secaucus and the ‘60s: A series on AmericanStudying Sayles begins with a film that reinforces but also challenges narratives of a pivotal decade.October 15: John Sayles’ America: Brother and Race: The series continues with a quote we would do well to think about, and a film that would help us to do so.October 16: John Sayles’ America: Matewan and Work: The film that doesn’t need subtlety, but could use a little more of it nonetheless, as the series rolls on.October 17: John Sayles’ America: Passion and Home: On whether you can indeed go home again, and why it makes for a great story in any case.October 18: John Sayles’ America: Five Runners-Up: The series concludes with a handful of even more Sayles-errific goodness!October 19-20: Northeast MLA Excitement!: A weekend trip to the site of next spring’s NeMLA conference led me to think about the many exciting things we’ve got going on—all of which could use your input!October 21: Book Talks Thoughts: MOCA: On the unbelievably ideal and inspiring site for my first public book talk.October 22: Book Talks Thoughts: U of Maine: On two distinct and equally compelling spaces and connections in the Pine Tree State. October 23: Book Talks Thoughts: URI Diversity Week: A wonderful event at which I was fortunate enough to give a talk, and the two panel conversations there that challenged and enriched my ideas.October 24: Book Talks Thoughts: Harrisburg: On the importance and power of audiences, both captive and really really not.October 25: Book Talks Thoughts: Next Up, San Fran!: On what I was most looking forward to for this weekend’s trip to and talk in the Bay Area.October 26-27: Book Talks To Come: Five more upcoming talks, and one thing I’m especially excited about for each.October 28: Symbolic Scares: The Wendigo: A series on the meanings behind our scary stories starts with a cultural and cross-cultural terror.October 29: Symbolic Scares: Sleepy Hollow: The series continues with the original American scary story that’s also an ironic origin story.October 30: Symbolic Scares: Last House on the Left: The film that’s scarier for where it takes its audience than how it frightens us, as the series rolls on.October 31: Symbolic Scares: The Lost Boys: On entirely superficial pop entertainments, and what they can still symbolize.November 1: Symbolic Scares: The Shinings: The series concludes with the two very distinct versions of one scary story, and the American narratives they each symbolize.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to read about on the blog? Guest Posts you’d like to write?
November 1, 2013
November 1, 2013: Symbolic Scares: The Shinings
[Horror has long been as much about the sources of the scares as the jumps they produce, and American horror is no exception. In this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy some of the symbolisms behind our scary stories. Add your spooooooky thoughts, please!]
On what we can make of the two opposed endings to the novel and film versions of the same scary story.I don’t like losing readers, even for the best of reasons; but if you either haven’t read Steven King’s The Shining (1977) or haven’t seen Stanley Kubrick’s film version (1980) of the novel, and are interested in checking them out sometime, you should probably skip this post, as I’m gonna spoil the heck out of the endings to both. Because while there are definitely stylistic and even thematic differences between the two versions throughout, it’s really the endings where they become not only distinct but starkly contrasting and opposed. I won’t spoil every single detail, but suffice it to say that King’s novel ends hopefully, with notes of redemption for its protagonist Jack Torrance and especially for his relationship to his son and family; whereas Kubrick’s film ends with Torrance murderously pursuing that same son with an axe and, thwarted, freezing to death, more evil in his final moments than he has been at any earlier moment in the film. There are various ways we could read this striking distinction, including connecting it to the profoundly different worldviews of the two artists (at least as represented in their collected works): King, despite his penchant for horror, is to my mind a big ol’ softie who almost always finds his way to a happy ending; Kubrick has a far more bleak and cynical perspective and tended to end his films on at best ambiguous and often explicitly disturbing notes. Those different worldviews could also be connected to two longstanding American traditions and genres, what we might call the sentimental vs. the pessimistic romance (in that Hawthornean sense I’ve discussed elsewhere in this space): in the former, such as in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the darkest supernatural qualities give way by the story’s end to more rational and far happier worlds and events; in the latter, such as in his contemporary Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (also 1851), the darkness is only amplified and deepened by concluding events, leaving us adrift (literally and figuratively) in an eternally scary world.King’s and Kubrick’s texts, and more exactly their respective conclusions, certainly fit into those traditions. But given that both create similarly horrifying worlds and events right up until those endings, I would also connect their distinct final images to the dueling yet interconnected ideas at the heart of my current book project: dark histories and hope. Where the two versions differ most overtly, that is, is in whether they offer their audiences any hope: in King’s novel, Torrance finds a way through his darkest histories and to final moments of hope for his family’s future (achieved at great personal sacrifice); in Kubrick’s film, hope has abandoned Torrance as fully as has sanity, and both his family and the audience can only hope that they can survive and escape his entirely dark world. Obviously you know which I prefer; but I would also argue that, whatever the appeal of horror for its own sake, without the possibility of hope and redemption it’d be a pretty bleak and terrible genre.October Recap tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?
On what we can make of the two opposed endings to the novel and film versions of the same scary story.I don’t like losing readers, even for the best of reasons; but if you either haven’t read Steven King’s The Shining (1977) or haven’t seen Stanley Kubrick’s film version (1980) of the novel, and are interested in checking them out sometime, you should probably skip this post, as I’m gonna spoil the heck out of the endings to both. Because while there are definitely stylistic and even thematic differences between the two versions throughout, it’s really the endings where they become not only distinct but starkly contrasting and opposed. I won’t spoil every single detail, but suffice it to say that King’s novel ends hopefully, with notes of redemption for its protagonist Jack Torrance and especially for his relationship to his son and family; whereas Kubrick’s film ends with Torrance murderously pursuing that same son with an axe and, thwarted, freezing to death, more evil in his final moments than he has been at any earlier moment in the film. There are various ways we could read this striking distinction, including connecting it to the profoundly different worldviews of the two artists (at least as represented in their collected works): King, despite his penchant for horror, is to my mind a big ol’ softie who almost always finds his way to a happy ending; Kubrick has a far more bleak and cynical perspective and tended to end his films on at best ambiguous and often explicitly disturbing notes. Those different worldviews could also be connected to two longstanding American traditions and genres, what we might call the sentimental vs. the pessimistic romance (in that Hawthornean sense I’ve discussed elsewhere in this space): in the former, such as in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the darkest supernatural qualities give way by the story’s end to more rational and far happier worlds and events; in the latter, such as in his contemporary Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (also 1851), the darkness is only amplified and deepened by concluding events, leaving us adrift (literally and figuratively) in an eternally scary world.King’s and Kubrick’s texts, and more exactly their respective conclusions, certainly fit into those traditions. But given that both create similarly horrifying worlds and events right up until those endings, I would also connect their distinct final images to the dueling yet interconnected ideas at the heart of my current book project: dark histories and hope. Where the two versions differ most overtly, that is, is in whether they offer their audiences any hope: in King’s novel, Torrance finds a way through his darkest histories and to final moments of hope for his family’s future (achieved at great personal sacrifice); in Kubrick’s film, hope has abandoned Torrance as fully as has sanity, and both his family and the audience can only hope that they can survive and escape his entirely dark world. Obviously you know which I prefer; but I would also argue that, whatever the appeal of horror for its own sake, without the possibility of hope and redemption it’d be a pretty bleak and terrible genre.October Recap tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?
October 31, 2013
October 31, 2013: Symbolic Scares: The Lost Boys
[Horror has long been as much about the sources of the scares as the jumps they produce, and American horror is no exception. In this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy some of the symbolisms behind our scary stories. Add your spooooooky thoughts, please!]
On mindless pop entertainment, and what it can still symbolize.Roger Ebert wrote of Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987) that it ends up devoid of anything deep or lasting, becoming “just technique at the service of formula”—and as usual, Rog was right on point. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect anything else of a film that stars both of the ‘80s Coreys (Haim and Feldman), each in his own way a symbol of the decade’s tendency toward style over substance. Certainly hindsight should clarify for us just how much “style over substance” seems to define Joel Schumacher’s directorial mantra. But in any case, the salient question about The Lost Boys isn’t whether there’s any there there—it’s why on earth I’m writing about it in this series and this space when there so clearly isn’t.Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to make the case for hidden depths to the film—I like the “and yet” second paragraph transition as much as anybody, but it has its limits. But what kind of AmericanStudier would I be if I couldn’t find cultural symbolism in even the most vapid pop entertainments? For one thing, I think it’s possible to see The Lost Boys as originating—or at least representing a very early example of—one of the most significant cultural trends of the last couple decades: turning vampires into sexy, cool teenage icons. Vampires have been alluring since at least Dracula, of course; but when it comes to Angel, Edward, the cast of the Vampire Diaries, and so many other teen-demographic forces on our recent cultural landscape, I think Kiefer Sutherland and his fellow Lost Boys might have really gotten the ball rolling. Which, given the momentum that ball now possesses, would make Schumacher’s film pretty darn influential.But I also don’t think we have to look into the subsequent decades to find significant symbolic value to The Lost Boys. I’m pretty sure that Schumacher didn’t think about it on this level—and I don’t even know that the trio of screenwriters can be credited with any part of this insight—but the film seems to me to reflect a significant and interesting cultural tension in its portrayals of the era’s titular young men. On the one hand, Kiefer and his fellow vampires are pretty much pure evil, young punks whose appearance and affect precisely parallel their darkest intentions. But on the other hand, protagonist Jason Patric is drawn to the vampires because he’s quite a bit like them in every way—and he and his younger brother (Haim), the sons of an overworked and somewhat absentee single mother, seem scarcely less lost than the vampires they end up fighting (with the help of a couple of similarly wayward boys, including Feldman’s character). So are the lost boys villains or heroes, a threat to their small towns or the saviors of those places? They seem, in this slight yet symbolic film, to be both and all of those things.Next scary story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?
On mindless pop entertainment, and what it can still symbolize.Roger Ebert wrote of Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987) that it ends up devoid of anything deep or lasting, becoming “just technique at the service of formula”—and as usual, Rog was right on point. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect anything else of a film that stars both of the ‘80s Coreys (Haim and Feldman), each in his own way a symbol of the decade’s tendency toward style over substance. Certainly hindsight should clarify for us just how much “style over substance” seems to define Joel Schumacher’s directorial mantra. But in any case, the salient question about The Lost Boys isn’t whether there’s any there there—it’s why on earth I’m writing about it in this series and this space when there so clearly isn’t.Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to make the case for hidden depths to the film—I like the “and yet” second paragraph transition as much as anybody, but it has its limits. But what kind of AmericanStudier would I be if I couldn’t find cultural symbolism in even the most vapid pop entertainments? For one thing, I think it’s possible to see The Lost Boys as originating—or at least representing a very early example of—one of the most significant cultural trends of the last couple decades: turning vampires into sexy, cool teenage icons. Vampires have been alluring since at least Dracula, of course; but when it comes to Angel, Edward, the cast of the Vampire Diaries, and so many other teen-demographic forces on our recent cultural landscape, I think Kiefer Sutherland and his fellow Lost Boys might have really gotten the ball rolling. Which, given the momentum that ball now possesses, would make Schumacher’s film pretty darn influential.But I also don’t think we have to look into the subsequent decades to find significant symbolic value to The Lost Boys. I’m pretty sure that Schumacher didn’t think about it on this level—and I don’t even know that the trio of screenwriters can be credited with any part of this insight—but the film seems to me to reflect a significant and interesting cultural tension in its portrayals of the era’s titular young men. On the one hand, Kiefer and his fellow vampires are pretty much pure evil, young punks whose appearance and affect precisely parallel their darkest intentions. But on the other hand, protagonist Jason Patric is drawn to the vampires because he’s quite a bit like them in every way—and he and his younger brother (Haim), the sons of an overworked and somewhat absentee single mother, seem scarcely less lost than the vampires they end up fighting (with the help of a couple of similarly wayward boys, including Feldman’s character). So are the lost boys villains or heroes, a threat to their small towns or the saviors of those places? They seem, in this slight yet symbolic film, to be both and all of those things.Next scary story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?
October 30, 2013
October 30, 2013: Symbolic Scares: Last House on the Left
[Horror has long been as much about the sources of the scares as the jumps they produce, and American horror is no exception. In this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy some of the symbolisms behind our scary stories. Add your spooooooky thoughts, please!]
On the horror film that’s more disturbing in what it makes us cheer for than how it makes us scream. The Last House on the Left (1972) was Wes Craven’s directorial debut, as well as one of the only films that he wrote and edited as well as directed (although it was at least partly based on Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring [1960], as Craven has admitted). But despite launching one of the late 20thcentury’s most significant horror talents, Last House is far less well known than Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street series, or even (I would argue) his other prominent early film, The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Partly that’s because Last House feels extremely raw in execution, the product of a talent still figuring out much of what he could do; but partly it’s because it also feels raw in another and more troubling way, one that makes us more deeply uncomfortable than horror films generally do.That rawness is most obviously comprised by the extended and very graphic abduction, rape, and murder sequence that opens the film—a sequence that feels less like horror than like cinema verité of an extremely disturbing kind. But even more raw, both in its emotional brutality and in the places it takes the audience, is the film’s culminating sequence, in which the killers find themselves in the home of the parents of one of the murdered girls—and the audience finds itself rooting for those parents to take the bloodiest and most violent revenge possible on these psychopaths. I suppose it’s possible to argue that we’re not meant to root in that way, or that we’re meant to feel conflicted about these ordinary and good people turning into vengeful monsters—but to be honest, any audience that has watched the film’s opening seems to me to be primed instead to cheer as the killers get their violent comeuppance, even—perhaps especially—if it requires this transformation of grieving parents into their own terrifying kind of killers.To be clear, if we do find ourselves cheering for the parents, we’re doing so not just because of how Craven’s film has guided us there. We’re also taking the next step in what I called, in this post on the comic book hero The Punisher, the long history of vigilante heroes in American culture; and perhaps at the same time living vicariously the most potent (if extra-legal) arguments for the death penalty. Yet the rawness of Craven’s film, whether intended or simply a result of its stage in his career, serves one additional and crucial symbolic purpose: it reminds us that vigilante justice and executions, however deserved they might feel, are also grotesque and horrifying, as difficult to watch as they are to justify when the heat of the moment has cooled off. Last House is scarier for what it reveals in ourselves than for anything that’s on screen—but what’s on screen can also help us examine that side of ourselves honestly, and that’s a pretty important effect.Next scary story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?
On the horror film that’s more disturbing in what it makes us cheer for than how it makes us scream. The Last House on the Left (1972) was Wes Craven’s directorial debut, as well as one of the only films that he wrote and edited as well as directed (although it was at least partly based on Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring [1960], as Craven has admitted). But despite launching one of the late 20thcentury’s most significant horror talents, Last House is far less well known than Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street series, or even (I would argue) his other prominent early film, The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Partly that’s because Last House feels extremely raw in execution, the product of a talent still figuring out much of what he could do; but partly it’s because it also feels raw in another and more troubling way, one that makes us more deeply uncomfortable than horror films generally do.That rawness is most obviously comprised by the extended and very graphic abduction, rape, and murder sequence that opens the film—a sequence that feels less like horror than like cinema verité of an extremely disturbing kind. But even more raw, both in its emotional brutality and in the places it takes the audience, is the film’s culminating sequence, in which the killers find themselves in the home of the parents of one of the murdered girls—and the audience finds itself rooting for those parents to take the bloodiest and most violent revenge possible on these psychopaths. I suppose it’s possible to argue that we’re not meant to root in that way, or that we’re meant to feel conflicted about these ordinary and good people turning into vengeful monsters—but to be honest, any audience that has watched the film’s opening seems to me to be primed instead to cheer as the killers get their violent comeuppance, even—perhaps especially—if it requires this transformation of grieving parents into their own terrifying kind of killers.To be clear, if we do find ourselves cheering for the parents, we’re doing so not just because of how Craven’s film has guided us there. We’re also taking the next step in what I called, in this post on the comic book hero The Punisher, the long history of vigilante heroes in American culture; and perhaps at the same time living vicariously the most potent (if extra-legal) arguments for the death penalty. Yet the rawness of Craven’s film, whether intended or simply a result of its stage in his career, serves one additional and crucial symbolic purpose: it reminds us that vigilante justice and executions, however deserved they might feel, are also grotesque and horrifying, as difficult to watch as they are to justify when the heat of the moment has cooled off. Last House is scarier for what it reveals in ourselves than for anything that’s on screen—but what’s on screen can also help us examine that side of ourselves honestly, and that’s a pretty important effect.Next scary story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?
October 29, 2013
October 29, 2013: Symbolic Scares: Sleepy Hollow
[Horror has long been as much about the sources of the scares as the jumps they produce, and American horror is no exception. In this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy some of the symbolisms behind our scary stories. Add your spooooooky thoughts, please!]
On the original American scary story that’s also an ironic American origin story.I haven’t had a chance yet to catch any of the new Sleepy Hollow TV show —if you have, please feel free to share your thoughts in comments!—but it’s certainly further proof of the lasting influence of one of America’s earliest professional writers, Washington Irving. Certainly much of Irving’s extensive body of work, including the History of New York about which I wrote in that post, has largely vanished from our collective national consciousness; but two of the stories in his first collection of fiction, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819), have endured across those nearly two hundred years about as fully as any American literary works (from any century) have. I’m referring of course to that hen-pecked sleeper Rip Van Winkle and to the focus of today’s post, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”“Sleepy Hollow” has endured because at its heart, as the new TV show seems (from its previews anyway) to understand, it is about a simple conflict that is at the heart of many scary stories: between an extremely ordinary everyman (awkward and shy schoolteacher Ichabod Crane) and an equally extraordinary supernatural foe (the terrifying Headless Horseman). Like many scary story protagonists, Ichabod has an idealized love interest, the buxon Katrina Von Tassel; and finds himself competing for her affections with a far more popular and confident rival, Brom Bones. The culminating intersection between the two plotlines—between Ichabod’s supernatural and romantic encounters—engages the audience on multiple emotional levels simultaneously, just as so many contemporary horror films strive to do. Indeed, the only significant divergence from the now well-established formula is that the everyman hero loses—the Horseman scares Ichabod Crane away, Brom Bones escorts Katrina Von Tassel to the altar, and Ichabod’s story becomes the stuff of local legend.That resolution lessens the story’s scariness factor (it seems clear that Brom was masquerading as the Headless Horseman), but at the same time amplifies its status as an originating American folktale. For one thing, Irving’s fictional narrator and historian Diedrich Knickerbocker presents Ichabod’s story, like Rip Van Winkle’s, as precisely such a folktale, a part of the collective memory of his turn of the 19th century Dutch New York and thus of Early Republic America more broadly. And for another, it’s possible to read Brom Bones’ triumph, and his resulting union with the town’s powerful Von Tassel family, as an ironic reminder—much like Rip’s concluding images—that the more things seem to have changed in this post-Revolutionary America, the more in at least some ways they have stayed the same. America’s landed elites maintain their power, manipulating our folk legends (even our scary stories) to do so—and our overly ambitious schoolteachers flee in terror before that social force, remembered simply as a funny and telling part of those stories. Next scary story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?
On the original American scary story that’s also an ironic American origin story.I haven’t had a chance yet to catch any of the new Sleepy Hollow TV show —if you have, please feel free to share your thoughts in comments!—but it’s certainly further proof of the lasting influence of one of America’s earliest professional writers, Washington Irving. Certainly much of Irving’s extensive body of work, including the History of New York about which I wrote in that post, has largely vanished from our collective national consciousness; but two of the stories in his first collection of fiction, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819), have endured across those nearly two hundred years about as fully as any American literary works (from any century) have. I’m referring of course to that hen-pecked sleeper Rip Van Winkle and to the focus of today’s post, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”“Sleepy Hollow” has endured because at its heart, as the new TV show seems (from its previews anyway) to understand, it is about a simple conflict that is at the heart of many scary stories: between an extremely ordinary everyman (awkward and shy schoolteacher Ichabod Crane) and an equally extraordinary supernatural foe (the terrifying Headless Horseman). Like many scary story protagonists, Ichabod has an idealized love interest, the buxon Katrina Von Tassel; and finds himself competing for her affections with a far more popular and confident rival, Brom Bones. The culminating intersection between the two plotlines—between Ichabod’s supernatural and romantic encounters—engages the audience on multiple emotional levels simultaneously, just as so many contemporary horror films strive to do. Indeed, the only significant divergence from the now well-established formula is that the everyman hero loses—the Horseman scares Ichabod Crane away, Brom Bones escorts Katrina Von Tassel to the altar, and Ichabod’s story becomes the stuff of local legend.That resolution lessens the story’s scariness factor (it seems clear that Brom was masquerading as the Headless Horseman), but at the same time amplifies its status as an originating American folktale. For one thing, Irving’s fictional narrator and historian Diedrich Knickerbocker presents Ichabod’s story, like Rip Van Winkle’s, as precisely such a folktale, a part of the collective memory of his turn of the 19th century Dutch New York and thus of Early Republic America more broadly. And for another, it’s possible to read Brom Bones’ triumph, and his resulting union with the town’s powerful Von Tassel family, as an ironic reminder—much like Rip’s concluding images—that the more things seem to have changed in this post-Revolutionary America, the more in at least some ways they have stayed the same. America’s landed elites maintain their power, manipulating our folk legends (even our scary stories) to do so—and our overly ambitious schoolteachers flee in terror before that social force, remembered simply as a funny and telling part of those stories. Next scary story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?
October 28, 2013
October 28, 2013: Symbolic Scares: The Wendigo
[Horror has long been as much about the sources of the scares as the jumps they produce, and American horror is no exception. In this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy some of the symbolisms behind our scary stories. Add your spooooooky thoughts, please!]
On the supernatural legend that also offers cultural and cross-cultural commentaries.I’m not sure what kind of collection it was—whether it was an anthology of folk tales, of scary stories, of cultural myths and legends, of Americana—but I do know that only one story from it impacted this young AmericanStudier enough to stick with me nearly three decades later: an account of a party of hunters in rural Canada encountering the demon known as the Wendigo. I can even remember the way I felt inside when my Dad read the lines about the rising and howling wind, which at least in this version of the tale signaled the imminent arrival of—or perhaps even contained—the creature. Let’s just say that, unlike the boy who left home to find out about the shivers, from then on I knew exactly what that condition felt like, and didn’t need to venture outside of the pages of that very scary story to do so.So I’m here to tell you that the Wendigo is, first and foremost, a deeply effective scary story. But the creature and story, across their many versions, also offer complex and compelling lenses into American cultures, on two distinct and equally meaningful levels. For one thing, apparently Wendigo stories can be found in the belief systems and communal myths of numerous Algonquin-speaking native tribes across both the United States and Canada, including the Ojibwe, the Cree, the Naskapi, and others. While those tribes share a basic language system, they are as culturally and socially distinct as they are geographically widespread—and yet they share closely parallel images and accounts of these cannibalistic demons of the woods. While we have to be careful about how we read such potentially but ambiguously symbolic shared mythic figures—Joseph Campbell-like, sweeping structuralist pronouncements being largely discredited these days—there seems to be no question that the Wendigo represents a part of the collective identity and perspective of these tribes.But as they have evolved, Wendigo stories have also come to represent something else, and perhaps even more telling: tales of the perils of cross-cultural exploration and exploitation. That is, in many of the last century’s Wendigo tales, including both the Blackwood one linked above and the one that I remember from my childhood, those being threatened or destroyed by the creature tend to be non-native hunters, often if not always venturing into native territories, encroaching on previously protected or sacred spaces, or otherwise seeking to make their mark on a land not quite their own. Weird Tales such as Blackwood’s often highlight the dangers posed by an sort of spiritual boundary-crossing, so this particular trend is certainly not unique; but in these cases, I’m arguing, the boundaries being crossed are not only spiritual but also, and perhaps more importantly, cultural. Which is to say, while the Wendigo has always been cannibalistic, the particular identity of those upon whom he feasts has significantly, and symbolically, shifted over time.Next scary story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?
On the supernatural legend that also offers cultural and cross-cultural commentaries.I’m not sure what kind of collection it was—whether it was an anthology of folk tales, of scary stories, of cultural myths and legends, of Americana—but I do know that only one story from it impacted this young AmericanStudier enough to stick with me nearly three decades later: an account of a party of hunters in rural Canada encountering the demon known as the Wendigo. I can even remember the way I felt inside when my Dad read the lines about the rising and howling wind, which at least in this version of the tale signaled the imminent arrival of—or perhaps even contained—the creature. Let’s just say that, unlike the boy who left home to find out about the shivers, from then on I knew exactly what that condition felt like, and didn’t need to venture outside of the pages of that very scary story to do so.So I’m here to tell you that the Wendigo is, first and foremost, a deeply effective scary story. But the creature and story, across their many versions, also offer complex and compelling lenses into American cultures, on two distinct and equally meaningful levels. For one thing, apparently Wendigo stories can be found in the belief systems and communal myths of numerous Algonquin-speaking native tribes across both the United States and Canada, including the Ojibwe, the Cree, the Naskapi, and others. While those tribes share a basic language system, they are as culturally and socially distinct as they are geographically widespread—and yet they share closely parallel images and accounts of these cannibalistic demons of the woods. While we have to be careful about how we read such potentially but ambiguously symbolic shared mythic figures—Joseph Campbell-like, sweeping structuralist pronouncements being largely discredited these days—there seems to be no question that the Wendigo represents a part of the collective identity and perspective of these tribes.But as they have evolved, Wendigo stories have also come to represent something else, and perhaps even more telling: tales of the perils of cross-cultural exploration and exploitation. That is, in many of the last century’s Wendigo tales, including both the Blackwood one linked above and the one that I remember from my childhood, those being threatened or destroyed by the creature tend to be non-native hunters, often if not always venturing into native territories, encroaching on previously protected or sacred spaces, or otherwise seeking to make their mark on a land not quite their own. Weird Tales such as Blackwood’s often highlight the dangers posed by an sort of spiritual boundary-crossing, so this particular trend is certainly not unique; but in these cases, I’m arguing, the boundaries being crossed are not only spiritual but also, and perhaps more importantly, cultural. Which is to say, while the Wendigo has always been cannibalistic, the particular identity of those upon whom he feasts has significantly, and symbolically, shifted over time.Next scary story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?
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