Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 414
June 14, 2012
June 14, 2012: Playing with America, Part 4
[The fourth in a series on toys, games, and American Studies. Nominations, suggestions, nostalgic childhood memories, and all other responses very welcome!]
On the contexts and logic behind and yet the downside of the new girl-centered Legos.Larry Summers got in a lot of trouble a few years back for saying something not entirely unlike this—although (I hope) significantly dumber, especially in Summers’ attempt to ground his ideas in pseudo-scientific authorities—but I can’t deny that it has been my experience: that once you have kids, you start to realize that there are indeed some innate biological differences between girls and boys, some seemingly born-in, gendered interests and identities. Obviously there are no absolutes, and my two boys are in many ways as different from each other as they are from any young girl; but nonetheless, they’ve both had (for example) strong interests in vehicles and superheroes from a very young age, interests that we didn’t instill so much as simply observe and try to respond to. Something in these subjects seems to speak to something in them, and to do so differently (from what I can tell) than how they and other subjects speak to most of the girls who are their peers.If you want evidence that’s a little less anecdotal, I direct you to the commercials for kids’ toys, and more exactly to just how gendered so many of those commercials (and those toys) are. They may be a bit outdated, and are perhaps extreme examples, but I think these early 1980s commercials for G.I. Joe figures/vehicleson the one hand and the new Crystal Barbie on the other illustrate my point pretty thoroughly: the dirty, loud, frenetic outdoor world of the boys playing with the Joes couldn’t possibly contrast more with the pristine, elegant, peaceful indoor world of the girls with Crystal Barbie. (The 1990s talking Barbie figure who famously complained that “Math is hard” connects these trends to Summers’ comments quite explicitly.) As we’ve moved into the 21stcentury, you might expect that this kind of gendered categorization of and marketing for toys would have evolved, but that doesn’t seem to have happened; and one of the most famous and controversial recent toys, a new line of Legos intended especially for girls (Lego Friends), provides ample evidence that this kind of gendering remains at the center of much toy design and marketing.Again, having seen my boys and their interests and those of their peers develop, I get it—many if not most Lego sets are of vehicles of one kind or another, and I don’t doubt that not as many young girls as boys are thrilled at the prospect of building a Lego steam train. Moreover, if this new line can get more girls using Legos than would otherwise be the case, then that could in fact push back on narratives like Summers’, on the idea that girls are somehow less interested in or adept at mathematical or scientific skills. Yet on the other hand, even if there are some innate differences between boys and girls, it seems to me that one crucial purpose for children’s toys—just as for early childhood education and other aspects of young socialization—should be to push beyond such starting points, to challenge kids to go outside of their comfort zones or initial identities, to help them become part of broader communities that feature many different such identities (within as well as across genders). Not all toys need to provide such challenges, but I would certainly argue that toys such as Legos, which are not in and of themselves connected to particular subjects or themes, aren’t doing what they could do best if they’re fitting into established gender dynamics and categories.Final (planned) post in the series tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? And the weekend post is still entirely open—any ideas? Within this series or outside of it, I’ll take any and all suggestions as always!6/14 Memory Day nominee: Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin would be more than sufficient to earn her a nomination, but whose long and expansive writing career extended well beyond that most influential work for sure.[image error]
On the contexts and logic behind and yet the downside of the new girl-centered Legos.Larry Summers got in a lot of trouble a few years back for saying something not entirely unlike this—although (I hope) significantly dumber, especially in Summers’ attempt to ground his ideas in pseudo-scientific authorities—but I can’t deny that it has been my experience: that once you have kids, you start to realize that there are indeed some innate biological differences between girls and boys, some seemingly born-in, gendered interests and identities. Obviously there are no absolutes, and my two boys are in many ways as different from each other as they are from any young girl; but nonetheless, they’ve both had (for example) strong interests in vehicles and superheroes from a very young age, interests that we didn’t instill so much as simply observe and try to respond to. Something in these subjects seems to speak to something in them, and to do so differently (from what I can tell) than how they and other subjects speak to most of the girls who are their peers.If you want evidence that’s a little less anecdotal, I direct you to the commercials for kids’ toys, and more exactly to just how gendered so many of those commercials (and those toys) are. They may be a bit outdated, and are perhaps extreme examples, but I think these early 1980s commercials for G.I. Joe figures/vehicleson the one hand and the new Crystal Barbie on the other illustrate my point pretty thoroughly: the dirty, loud, frenetic outdoor world of the boys playing with the Joes couldn’t possibly contrast more with the pristine, elegant, peaceful indoor world of the girls with Crystal Barbie. (The 1990s talking Barbie figure who famously complained that “Math is hard” connects these trends to Summers’ comments quite explicitly.) As we’ve moved into the 21stcentury, you might expect that this kind of gendered categorization of and marketing for toys would have evolved, but that doesn’t seem to have happened; and one of the most famous and controversial recent toys, a new line of Legos intended especially for girls (Lego Friends), provides ample evidence that this kind of gendering remains at the center of much toy design and marketing.Again, having seen my boys and their interests and those of their peers develop, I get it—many if not most Lego sets are of vehicles of one kind or another, and I don’t doubt that not as many young girls as boys are thrilled at the prospect of building a Lego steam train. Moreover, if this new line can get more girls using Legos than would otherwise be the case, then that could in fact push back on narratives like Summers’, on the idea that girls are somehow less interested in or adept at mathematical or scientific skills. Yet on the other hand, even if there are some innate differences between boys and girls, it seems to me that one crucial purpose for children’s toys—just as for early childhood education and other aspects of young socialization—should be to push beyond such starting points, to challenge kids to go outside of their comfort zones or initial identities, to help them become part of broader communities that feature many different such identities (within as well as across genders). Not all toys need to provide such challenges, but I would certainly argue that toys such as Legos, which are not in and of themselves connected to particular subjects or themes, aren’t doing what they could do best if they’re fitting into established gender dynamics and categories.Final (planned) post in the series tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? And the weekend post is still entirely open—any ideas? Within this series or outside of it, I’ll take any and all suggestions as always!6/14 Memory Day nominee: Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin would be more than sufficient to earn her a nomination, but whose long and expansive writing career extended well beyond that most influential work for sure.[image error]
June 13, 2012
June 13, 2012: Playing with America, Part 3
[The third in a series on toys, games, and American Studies. Nominations, suggestions, nostalgic childhood memories, and all other responses very welcome!]
On the very complicated, confusing, and crucial case of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin toys and games.In a long-ago Tribute Post here, I wrote about my Dad, University of Virginia Professor Stephen Railton, and more specifically about his public scholarly and pedagogical websites. While the Mark Twain sitefocuses pretty specifically on Twain’s major works and on their many biographical, historical, cultural, artistic, and scholarly contexts, the Uncle Tom’s Cabin site has a very different additional emphasis (while still highlighting many elements in those categories for Stowe’s novel): tracing the novel’s multi-faceted, multi-century legacy in American culture. It’s fair to ask, as the site itself does in each case, whether any of those aftermaths—from the touring Tom Shows to the dozens of film adaptations, the collectibles to the card games, and many many more—can tell us much at all about Stowe’s novel itself, whether they’re more about their own particular moments or connected to enduring national narratives, how, indeed, we American Studiers analyze this century and a half of Stowe-inspired cultural and material cultural stuff.Those questions are relevant to any and all of the Stowe legacies highlighted on the website, but are nowhere more vexed and challenging than when it comes to the Tom-inspired children’s merchandise (or “Tomitudes,” as the material culture artifacts inspired by the novel are often known). What on earth do we make of these jigsaw puzzles, these Tom’s Cabin pieces included in assemble-your-own-village sets, these paper dolls and cut-outs of characters and scenes from the novel? Do they simply and neutrally reflect the way that (imagine this next word in the voice of Yogurt from Spaceballs) “merchandising” can and will find its way into anything in our capitalist society? Are they part of the process of stereotyping and watering-down that (building on certain aspects of the novel but ignoring many, many others) has reduced Stowe’s novel from impassionated protest to cultural mainstay? Could they instead represent a way in which those moral lessons and goals of Stowe’s novel could be passed down to open-minded and impressionable young Americans, not unlike the ways in which Tom influenced young Eva (and then she in turn influenced her father, the reformed slaveowner St. Clare), in the novel’s most idealized relationship? Hell if I know. But I do know this: while Stowe’s novel may be an extreme case (I’m not familiar, at least, with the Marrow of Tradition jigsaw puzzles, the Ceremony cut-out dolls, the Awakening ocean-suicide dioramas), there’s something unavoidably true and important about the fact that our most prominent cultural figures, events, and texts eventually filter down to our kids. Obviously the versions of the America Revolution and the Civil War, of Mark Twain and Martin Luther King, of the frontier and the Cold War, that become toys and games, children’s books and snippets of kids’ TV shows, and the like can seem far removed from those with which us scholarly, adult American Studiers engage. But we’d better not think of them that way, not treat them as distinct in any absolute sense—had better, instead, remember that national, historical, and cultural narratives are created and passed down in a variety of forms, and that the ones that seem the simplest are often those that become the most ingrained in our identities and communities. I’m not saying we all need to play with the Uncle Tom cut-out dolls, necessarily; but we’d all better think about them.Next playthings tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Any important historical or cultural toys you’d analyze?6/13 Memory Day nominee: Dwight B. Waldo, the scholar and college president whose efforts on behalf of teachers, teachers colleges, and a democratic and public vision of higher education helped change American society for the better.
On the very complicated, confusing, and crucial case of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin toys and games.In a long-ago Tribute Post here, I wrote about my Dad, University of Virginia Professor Stephen Railton, and more specifically about his public scholarly and pedagogical websites. While the Mark Twain sitefocuses pretty specifically on Twain’s major works and on their many biographical, historical, cultural, artistic, and scholarly contexts, the Uncle Tom’s Cabin site has a very different additional emphasis (while still highlighting many elements in those categories for Stowe’s novel): tracing the novel’s multi-faceted, multi-century legacy in American culture. It’s fair to ask, as the site itself does in each case, whether any of those aftermaths—from the touring Tom Shows to the dozens of film adaptations, the collectibles to the card games, and many many more—can tell us much at all about Stowe’s novel itself, whether they’re more about their own particular moments or connected to enduring national narratives, how, indeed, we American Studiers analyze this century and a half of Stowe-inspired cultural and material cultural stuff.Those questions are relevant to any and all of the Stowe legacies highlighted on the website, but are nowhere more vexed and challenging than when it comes to the Tom-inspired children’s merchandise (or “Tomitudes,” as the material culture artifacts inspired by the novel are often known). What on earth do we make of these jigsaw puzzles, these Tom’s Cabin pieces included in assemble-your-own-village sets, these paper dolls and cut-outs of characters and scenes from the novel? Do they simply and neutrally reflect the way that (imagine this next word in the voice of Yogurt from Spaceballs) “merchandising” can and will find its way into anything in our capitalist society? Are they part of the process of stereotyping and watering-down that (building on certain aspects of the novel but ignoring many, many others) has reduced Stowe’s novel from impassionated protest to cultural mainstay? Could they instead represent a way in which those moral lessons and goals of Stowe’s novel could be passed down to open-minded and impressionable young Americans, not unlike the ways in which Tom influenced young Eva (and then she in turn influenced her father, the reformed slaveowner St. Clare), in the novel’s most idealized relationship? Hell if I know. But I do know this: while Stowe’s novel may be an extreme case (I’m not familiar, at least, with the Marrow of Tradition jigsaw puzzles, the Ceremony cut-out dolls, the Awakening ocean-suicide dioramas), there’s something unavoidably true and important about the fact that our most prominent cultural figures, events, and texts eventually filter down to our kids. Obviously the versions of the America Revolution and the Civil War, of Mark Twain and Martin Luther King, of the frontier and the Cold War, that become toys and games, children’s books and snippets of kids’ TV shows, and the like can seem far removed from those with which us scholarly, adult American Studiers engage. But we’d better not think of them that way, not treat them as distinct in any absolute sense—had better, instead, remember that national, historical, and cultural narratives are created and passed down in a variety of forms, and that the ones that seem the simplest are often those that become the most ingrained in our identities and communities. I’m not saying we all need to play with the Uncle Tom cut-out dolls, necessarily; but we’d all better think about them.Next playthings tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Any important historical or cultural toys you’d analyze?6/13 Memory Day nominee: Dwight B. Waldo, the scholar and college president whose efforts on behalf of teachers, teachers colleges, and a democratic and public vision of higher education helped change American society for the better.
June 12, 2012
June 12, 2012: Playing with America, Part 2
[The second in a series on toys, games, and American Studies. Nominations, suggestions, nostalgic childhood memories, and all other responses very welcome!]
On the silliness and the subversiveness of one of the 1950s’ most striking fads, the hula hoop.When it comes to analyzing toys and similar material culture artifacts, one of the most interesting and complex questions has to be why certain ones become insanely (and I mean that word literally) popular at a particular moment. These fads have no apparent logic, and tend to burn as briefly as they do brightly: one shopping season the Cabbage Patch dolls or Tickle Me Elmos are harder to find than El Dorado (I remember being in New York City one December and seeing street vendors selling those Elmos at $300 a pop), and the next they’re remaindered on the bargain shelves. Again, trying to analyze the reasons behind those meteoric rises might well be a fool’s errand, and it would be easy to make too much of social or cultural forces (rather than, for example, simple marketing or publicizing, and of course peer pressure). But with those provisions, I’m going to go ahead and do that anyway for one of the mid-20thcentury’s most prominent such fads: the hula hoop.Hula hoops had been around in one form or another for centuries, but it was with the late 1950s marketing of a plastic hoop by the Wham-O toy company that a national fad began: beginning in July 1958, more than 25 million such plastic hoops were sold in four months, and more than 100 million were sold in the subsequent two years. Given that particular timing and its historical and cultural contexts, I can immediately think of a couple ways to analyze this fad: on the one hand, the Cold War and its tensions were significantly deepening, thanks to the USSR’s 1957 launch of Sputnik and various other factors, and the hula hoop’s mindless silliness would likely have seemed a welcome respite from air raid drills; and on the other hand, one of the decade’s overall national trends was the rise of cookie-cutter suburban developments, and it would be easy to connect that trend to a toy and a fad which requires everyone to do almost exactly the same thing in order to do it successfully (and which almost immediately led to group exhibitions, contests, and other communal efforts).Both of those analyses seem to me to have value, but I would also highlight a somewhat less obvious and perhaps even more meaningful connection. In September 1956, in one of the decade’s most controversial cultural moments, up-and-coming singer Elvis Presley appeared on the hugely popular Ed Sullivan Show;during his performance, Elvis utilized his well-known hip gyrations (which had led to the nickname Elvis the Pelvis), and CBS famously refused to show anything from the waist down. As is so often the case, this attempted censorship thoroughly backfired, with the gyrations becoming more famous than ever and the whole experience catapulting Elvis to a significantly greater level of national prominence. Is it possible that the hula hoop represented a national parallel, a communal embrace of this subversive gesture and of the rock and roll sensibility that it literally and figuratively embodied? Maybe—and in a striking coincidence, one connecting these different cultural trends even more explicitly, two years to the day after Presley’s Ed Sullivan appearance the singer Georgia Gibbs appeared on the show to perform her hit “Hula Hoop Song.” Next plaything tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Any fads you’d highlight and analyze?6/12 Memory Day nominee: John Roebling, the German-born civil engineer and architect whose Brooklyn Bridge, while certainly his most famous (and one of America’s best known and most mythologized) project, was one of many pioneering achievements.
On the silliness and the subversiveness of one of the 1950s’ most striking fads, the hula hoop.When it comes to analyzing toys and similar material culture artifacts, one of the most interesting and complex questions has to be why certain ones become insanely (and I mean that word literally) popular at a particular moment. These fads have no apparent logic, and tend to burn as briefly as they do brightly: one shopping season the Cabbage Patch dolls or Tickle Me Elmos are harder to find than El Dorado (I remember being in New York City one December and seeing street vendors selling those Elmos at $300 a pop), and the next they’re remaindered on the bargain shelves. Again, trying to analyze the reasons behind those meteoric rises might well be a fool’s errand, and it would be easy to make too much of social or cultural forces (rather than, for example, simple marketing or publicizing, and of course peer pressure). But with those provisions, I’m going to go ahead and do that anyway for one of the mid-20thcentury’s most prominent such fads: the hula hoop.Hula hoops had been around in one form or another for centuries, but it was with the late 1950s marketing of a plastic hoop by the Wham-O toy company that a national fad began: beginning in July 1958, more than 25 million such plastic hoops were sold in four months, and more than 100 million were sold in the subsequent two years. Given that particular timing and its historical and cultural contexts, I can immediately think of a couple ways to analyze this fad: on the one hand, the Cold War and its tensions were significantly deepening, thanks to the USSR’s 1957 launch of Sputnik and various other factors, and the hula hoop’s mindless silliness would likely have seemed a welcome respite from air raid drills; and on the other hand, one of the decade’s overall national trends was the rise of cookie-cutter suburban developments, and it would be easy to connect that trend to a toy and a fad which requires everyone to do almost exactly the same thing in order to do it successfully (and which almost immediately led to group exhibitions, contests, and other communal efforts).Both of those analyses seem to me to have value, but I would also highlight a somewhat less obvious and perhaps even more meaningful connection. In September 1956, in one of the decade’s most controversial cultural moments, up-and-coming singer Elvis Presley appeared on the hugely popular Ed Sullivan Show;during his performance, Elvis utilized his well-known hip gyrations (which had led to the nickname Elvis the Pelvis), and CBS famously refused to show anything from the waist down. As is so often the case, this attempted censorship thoroughly backfired, with the gyrations becoming more famous than ever and the whole experience catapulting Elvis to a significantly greater level of national prominence. Is it possible that the hula hoop represented a national parallel, a communal embrace of this subversive gesture and of the rock and roll sensibility that it literally and figuratively embodied? Maybe—and in a striking coincidence, one connecting these different cultural trends even more explicitly, two years to the day after Presley’s Ed Sullivan appearance the singer Georgia Gibbs appeared on the show to perform her hit “Hula Hoop Song.” Next plaything tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Any fads you’d highlight and analyze?6/12 Memory Day nominee: John Roebling, the German-born civil engineer and architect whose Brooklyn Bridge, while certainly his most famous (and one of America’s best known and most mythologized) project, was one of many pioneering achievements.
June 11, 2012
June 11, 2012: Playing with America, Part 1
[The first in a series on toys, games, and American Studies. Nominations, suggestions, nostalgic childhood memories, and all other responses very welcome!]
On the histories, stories, and effects of the American Girl dolls.There are lots of reasons why it’s crucial to include the study and analysis of material culture as a part of any American Studies approach, but perhaps the most obvious is this: nothing impacts our lives and identities more consistently and fully than the stuff with which we interact. That’s certainly true for adults—he typed on his laptop, just after checking the time on his cell phone and just before getting in his car to go buy lunch—but it’s perhaps even more true for kids; after all, while kids learn about the world and about their specific society through a variety of means, nothing is more central to their day to day life than their playthings, the toys and games with which they occupy so much time. And while there would be many different ways to analyze those childhood material culture artifacts—how and where they’re made, for example, and what those details can reveal about world economies—this week my interest is in what kids, and all of us, might learn about American culture from its toys and games.In most cases, that learning is implicit, requires us to analyze what meanings kids and all of us can find in those playthings; but in the case of today’s subject, the American Girl line of dolls, learning about American history and society has been an explicit and core purpose since the product was first created (in 1986). Pleasant Company’s first three dolls, Samantha, Kirsten, and Molly, were each designed—in their appearance, their clothes and accessories, the back stories and books that came with them, and more—to capture aspects of a particular historical moment (1904, 1854, and 1944, respectively). In the decades since, while the line has branched out to include many contemporary dolls as well, it has likewise added in multiple other periods, as well as different ethnicities and communities: Marie-Grace and Cécile, an interracial pair of friends in antebellum New Orleans; Josefina Montoya, a Mexican American from the 1820s; Kaya, a Nez Perce Native American from the 18th century; and many others. Over these same decades, the small independent company has been purchased by Mattel, and I’m sure there are a whole range of other American Studies narratives to be found in the many changes that expansion have entailed (such as the creation of mega-stores, movies and TV shows, and other products) as well as in the complex relationship between these American Girls and Barbie, that parent company’s most famous (and also still evolving) line of dolls.Yet I think the most interesting and significant material culture analyses don’t focus, at least not solely, on those broader questions and narratives. After all, every individual American Girl doll might be created within those material, economic, social, and ideological worlds, but her destination is a good deal more specific and intimate: the hands of (most likely) another American girl, a young person who is of course influenced by those broader narratives (and many others) but who likewise brings her own evolving identity and perspective to the equation. And if we focus on that more intimate level of experience, a range of new analytical questions open up for us: in what ways does each girl find herself in an American Girl doll, and in what ways does she find something unfamiliar or different? Do the historical and cultural contexts matter to her play, or is the experience more about relatively timeless or universal themes (childhood, gender, family, and so on)? For girls who have more than one doll (or who play with friends who have their own dolls), does it change things to put the different identities and characters in conversation with each other, or is play in one 21st century moment defined more by its own period and contexts than by the dolls’? Needless to say, I don’t have all the answers! I’d love to hear yours, though. More tomorrow,BenPS. So, what do you think? And any other toys or playthings you’d want to analyze? 6/11 Memory Day nominee: Jeannette Rankin, whose historic status as the first woman elected to Congress only scratches the surface of her impressive and inspiring life, activism, and legacies.
On the histories, stories, and effects of the American Girl dolls.There are lots of reasons why it’s crucial to include the study and analysis of material culture as a part of any American Studies approach, but perhaps the most obvious is this: nothing impacts our lives and identities more consistently and fully than the stuff with which we interact. That’s certainly true for adults—he typed on his laptop, just after checking the time on his cell phone and just before getting in his car to go buy lunch—but it’s perhaps even more true for kids; after all, while kids learn about the world and about their specific society through a variety of means, nothing is more central to their day to day life than their playthings, the toys and games with which they occupy so much time. And while there would be many different ways to analyze those childhood material culture artifacts—how and where they’re made, for example, and what those details can reveal about world economies—this week my interest is in what kids, and all of us, might learn about American culture from its toys and games.In most cases, that learning is implicit, requires us to analyze what meanings kids and all of us can find in those playthings; but in the case of today’s subject, the American Girl line of dolls, learning about American history and society has been an explicit and core purpose since the product was first created (in 1986). Pleasant Company’s first three dolls, Samantha, Kirsten, and Molly, were each designed—in their appearance, their clothes and accessories, the back stories and books that came with them, and more—to capture aspects of a particular historical moment (1904, 1854, and 1944, respectively). In the decades since, while the line has branched out to include many contemporary dolls as well, it has likewise added in multiple other periods, as well as different ethnicities and communities: Marie-Grace and Cécile, an interracial pair of friends in antebellum New Orleans; Josefina Montoya, a Mexican American from the 1820s; Kaya, a Nez Perce Native American from the 18th century; and many others. Over these same decades, the small independent company has been purchased by Mattel, and I’m sure there are a whole range of other American Studies narratives to be found in the many changes that expansion have entailed (such as the creation of mega-stores, movies and TV shows, and other products) as well as in the complex relationship between these American Girls and Barbie, that parent company’s most famous (and also still evolving) line of dolls.Yet I think the most interesting and significant material culture analyses don’t focus, at least not solely, on those broader questions and narratives. After all, every individual American Girl doll might be created within those material, economic, social, and ideological worlds, but her destination is a good deal more specific and intimate: the hands of (most likely) another American girl, a young person who is of course influenced by those broader narratives (and many others) but who likewise brings her own evolving identity and perspective to the equation. And if we focus on that more intimate level of experience, a range of new analytical questions open up for us: in what ways does each girl find herself in an American Girl doll, and in what ways does she find something unfamiliar or different? Do the historical and cultural contexts matter to her play, or is the experience more about relatively timeless or universal themes (childhood, gender, family, and so on)? For girls who have more than one doll (or who play with friends who have their own dolls), does it change things to put the different identities and characters in conversation with each other, or is play in one 21st century moment defined more by its own period and contexts than by the dolls’? Needless to say, I don’t have all the answers! I’d love to hear yours, though. More tomorrow,BenPS. So, what do you think? And any other toys or playthings you’d want to analyze? 6/11 Memory Day nominee: Jeannette Rankin, whose historic status as the first woman elected to Congress only scratches the surface of her impressive and inspiring life, activism, and legacies.
June 9, 2012
June 9-10, 2012: Guest Post: Facebook and the Isolated American
[Kisha Tracy is an Assistant Professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State University, where she teaches medieval literature, linguistics, graphic novels, writing, and more. She also blogs at http://massmedieval.wordpress.com/and showcases her photographic talents at http://maskofthewhitenight.wordpress.com/.]
As is the gift or the curse of any academic, our every action, no matter how seemingly quotidian, eventually calls for reflection. Lately, for me, like many others, I have been thinking a great deal about Facebook and other social media. The stirrings of my meditation have been whipped into a frenzy by a recent rash of news articles by various authors as well as a TED talk by Sherry Turkle, “Connected, but alone?”, investigating an emerging fear that social media is contributing to an ironic rise in feelings of disconnection and loneliness. The argument centers on a conundrum. We feel isolated, so we are attracted to the hundreds of connections on Facebook (or your network of choice) in order to reach out, only to be disappointed when the casual relationships that abound there don’t react in a more meaningful way simply because we have mutually agreed to inhabit the same virtual space together. The act of “friending” (a deceptive choice of wording, in my opinion) seems to imply a contract of caring on a deeper level, but the reality is far from satisfying. We want more complexity, yet we turn to mechanisms that promise to make relationships, even supposedly close ones, as easy as a click of the “like” button. Of course, this perspective is only one potential consequence, and it willfully and gleefully ignores the positive types of relationships social networks can create. Still, the emotional impact of such wide-spread phenomena should be considered – on both a cultural and an individual level – if for no other reason than because the thought exercise is intriguing.About a month ago in the midst of my musing, I read Stephen Marche’s article in The Atlantic, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” While it gave me more to think about concerning the above, it added another angle that had not occurred to me: the connection of social networking to the American representation of isolation. Marche writes, “the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely.” He provides examples from history and literature. The Pilgrims, the cowboy, the astronaut. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. It’s a romantic notion. The ultimate American is the man or woman who needs no one, who forges into the West or into space sustained only by the human spirit. It’s a choice that requires sacrifice; as Marche continues, the “price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price.” Heading out to sea or into the wilderness to found new land meant leaving behind roots and family traditions. It is true that the accounts of the people who went West are riddled with laments of loneliness, although such emotions didn’t slow the waves of migration.In comparing this American “lonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic” with the type of isolation that may be forming as a result of social networking, Marche finds them to be very (and disturbingly) different. The main point of departure he cites is Facebook’s demand for constant performance, its “relentlessness” and its appeal to our vanity. When I first read his statements, I nodded in agreement and felt a sense of helpless outrage that the noble solitude of the proud American is being transformed into a staged, never-ending marionette show. Then the part of my brain that tells my students to question everything they read kicked in. Four points in particular come to mind:· First and foremost, we should ask: how much of the image of the “solitary American” is, if we remove the negative connotation, a performance? Marche’s examples are literary and cultural constructions, what we imagine ourselves as being or what we admire rather than perhaps what we are in strict reality.
· Second, Marche comments that the paradoxical flip side of the solitary American coin is the “impulse to cluster in communities that cling and suffocate.” For this, he cites the darker elements of Pilgrim society, the Salem witch trials, McCarthyism. Agreed, these examples are “suffocating communities,” but he fails to mention the communities that have bonded together throughout American history in a mutually beneficial way to survive or to share skills and abilities (he fails to consider the Native American experience as well, but I’ll let that go). Neither isolation nor community is necessarily positive or negative on its own.
· Third, is it truly possible for social media alone to transform such a long-established idea? If Marche’s definition of American isolationism is correct, it has been developed and promoted throughout our history via several cultural practices. It is difficult to connect its possible transformation just to the relatively unrelated advent of Facebook.
· And four – isn’t how each of us interacts with Facebook an individual choice? Marche is careful to state that it is not social media that is responsible for potential transformations; on the contrary, we are making ourselves lonelier. Yet, his final conclusion is that “Facebookdenies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.” The link Marche does not express is that, as “nonconformist, independent-minded” Americans, it is our right to disconnect if we choose. We can decide not to participate blindly, but to question the quality of our relationships.So is Facebook making us lonely (or lonelier)? Is it changing our image of the self-reliant, solitary American? I certainly ponder its influence on our definitions of relationships. Ultimately, however, my stubborn conclusion is this: only if we let it.Kisha[Ben’s] PS. What do you think? Please share your takes in comments and I’ll make sure to pass ‘em along to Kisha!6/9 Memory Day nominee: Luis Kutner, the pioneering human rights lawyer who co-founded Amnesty International, founded World Habeas Corpus, represented the Dalai Lama and numerous other significant clients, and created the crucial modern concept of the “living will” (among other impressive accomplishments).6/10 Memory Day nominee: Maurice Sendak![image error]
As is the gift or the curse of any academic, our every action, no matter how seemingly quotidian, eventually calls for reflection. Lately, for me, like many others, I have been thinking a great deal about Facebook and other social media. The stirrings of my meditation have been whipped into a frenzy by a recent rash of news articles by various authors as well as a TED talk by Sherry Turkle, “Connected, but alone?”, investigating an emerging fear that social media is contributing to an ironic rise in feelings of disconnection and loneliness. The argument centers on a conundrum. We feel isolated, so we are attracted to the hundreds of connections on Facebook (or your network of choice) in order to reach out, only to be disappointed when the casual relationships that abound there don’t react in a more meaningful way simply because we have mutually agreed to inhabit the same virtual space together. The act of “friending” (a deceptive choice of wording, in my opinion) seems to imply a contract of caring on a deeper level, but the reality is far from satisfying. We want more complexity, yet we turn to mechanisms that promise to make relationships, even supposedly close ones, as easy as a click of the “like” button. Of course, this perspective is only one potential consequence, and it willfully and gleefully ignores the positive types of relationships social networks can create. Still, the emotional impact of such wide-spread phenomena should be considered – on both a cultural and an individual level – if for no other reason than because the thought exercise is intriguing.About a month ago in the midst of my musing, I read Stephen Marche’s article in The Atlantic, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” While it gave me more to think about concerning the above, it added another angle that had not occurred to me: the connection of social networking to the American representation of isolation. Marche writes, “the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely.” He provides examples from history and literature. The Pilgrims, the cowboy, the astronaut. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. It’s a romantic notion. The ultimate American is the man or woman who needs no one, who forges into the West or into space sustained only by the human spirit. It’s a choice that requires sacrifice; as Marche continues, the “price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price.” Heading out to sea or into the wilderness to found new land meant leaving behind roots and family traditions. It is true that the accounts of the people who went West are riddled with laments of loneliness, although such emotions didn’t slow the waves of migration.In comparing this American “lonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic” with the type of isolation that may be forming as a result of social networking, Marche finds them to be very (and disturbingly) different. The main point of departure he cites is Facebook’s demand for constant performance, its “relentlessness” and its appeal to our vanity. When I first read his statements, I nodded in agreement and felt a sense of helpless outrage that the noble solitude of the proud American is being transformed into a staged, never-ending marionette show. Then the part of my brain that tells my students to question everything they read kicked in. Four points in particular come to mind:· First and foremost, we should ask: how much of the image of the “solitary American” is, if we remove the negative connotation, a performance? Marche’s examples are literary and cultural constructions, what we imagine ourselves as being or what we admire rather than perhaps what we are in strict reality.
· Second, Marche comments that the paradoxical flip side of the solitary American coin is the “impulse to cluster in communities that cling and suffocate.” For this, he cites the darker elements of Pilgrim society, the Salem witch trials, McCarthyism. Agreed, these examples are “suffocating communities,” but he fails to mention the communities that have bonded together throughout American history in a mutually beneficial way to survive or to share skills and abilities (he fails to consider the Native American experience as well, but I’ll let that go). Neither isolation nor community is necessarily positive or negative on its own.
· Third, is it truly possible for social media alone to transform such a long-established idea? If Marche’s definition of American isolationism is correct, it has been developed and promoted throughout our history via several cultural practices. It is difficult to connect its possible transformation just to the relatively unrelated advent of Facebook.
· And four – isn’t how each of us interacts with Facebook an individual choice? Marche is careful to state that it is not social media that is responsible for potential transformations; on the contrary, we are making ourselves lonelier. Yet, his final conclusion is that “Facebookdenies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.” The link Marche does not express is that, as “nonconformist, independent-minded” Americans, it is our right to disconnect if we choose. We can decide not to participate blindly, but to question the quality of our relationships.So is Facebook making us lonely (or lonelier)? Is it changing our image of the self-reliant, solitary American? I certainly ponder its influence on our definitions of relationships. Ultimately, however, my stubborn conclusion is this: only if we let it.Kisha[Ben’s] PS. What do you think? Please share your takes in comments and I’ll make sure to pass ‘em along to Kisha!6/9 Memory Day nominee: Luis Kutner, the pioneering human rights lawyer who co-founded Amnesty International, founded World Habeas Corpus, represented the Dalai Lama and numerous other significant clients, and created the crucial modern concept of the “living will” (among other impressive accomplishments).6/10 Memory Day nominee: Maurice Sendak![image error]
June 8, 2012
June 8, 2012: America is For Lovers, Part 5
[As we enter the month of weddings, this week I’ll feature a series on interesting, relatively unknown, and meaningful American lovers, fictional and real.]
On some of the idealized and the more realistic depictions of love and marriage in our contemporary popular culture.It’s been said by literary scholars that one of the origin points for the realistic novel, in the mid-19th century, was when authors began seeing marriage as the starting point for, rather than the endpoint of, their novels. Obviously literary history is a good deal more complex than that, but it’s certainly interesting to note the overarching shift from novels that end with variations on “Reader, I married him” to those in which unhappy marriages form a core plot device, and the ways in which individuals and societies respond to thema core element for characterization, setting, and theme. Yet it’s more accurate still to say that the realistic novel allowed for these different narratives—of marriage as a romantic ideal and of it as a practical reality—to co-exist in literary texts; one of the greatest American novels about marriage, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), focuses on the conflict of precisely those different narratives in its central character’s perspective, identity, and communities. While our 21st century popular culture has become so expansive that it’d be foolish for even the most daring American Studier to argue for any dominant threads, I’d certainly argue that this conflict between idealized and romanticized images vs. realistic and practical depictions of love and marriage continues to form a core theme for our cultural texts and conversations. I’m not sure if I can think of any romantic comedy film, for example, that doesn’t end with either the marriage of its focal couple or at least the sense that said couple is moving in that direction; at the very least, the arc of every romantic comedy depends on us rooting for the couple to overcome the obstacles that life (often aided by themselves) throws their way and achieve that happy ending. At the same time, some of the most successful and awarded independent films in recent years have depicted with brutal and unflinching honesty the hardest realities of married life—I’m thinking in particular of the at times almost unwatchably painful Blue Valentine (2010), with its non-chronological structure that contrasts Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling’s romantic young love with their disintegrating marriage. If contemporary films tend to focus on one narrative of marriage or the other, television provides for a different possibility, one more akin to the realistic (and, specifically, the serial) novel: the opportunity to present both ideals and realities of love and marriage within a single text. Since the birth of my older son in December 2005 I’ve watched exactly two shows that don’t feature talking animals or adorable preschoolers, and neither of those (24 and Lost) spent too much time depicting married couples; but I get the sense that many of the best-received and most enduring recent shows have indeed had such complex couples at their core: The Sopranos, Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and more. Even some of the best-loved sitcoms of the last couple decades have relied heavily on couples at once hugely realistic and yet ultimately idealized: Marge and Homer Simpson, Ross and Rachel (and eventually Monica and Chandler), Jim and Pam, and many more. In each case, there’s a great deal to be said about the portrayals of love and marriage on their own terms—but I’d also stress how fully they consistently depend on an audience’s interest in the best and worst of marriage, on the romantic ideals for which we all still strive and the more realistic lives that we all come to inhabit. Changing gears this week with the next guest post! See you then,BenPS. What do you think?6/8 Memory Day nominee: Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, designer, writer and philosopher, educator, and American legend whose legacies have informed countless aspects of contemporary society and life.
On some of the idealized and the more realistic depictions of love and marriage in our contemporary popular culture.It’s been said by literary scholars that one of the origin points for the realistic novel, in the mid-19th century, was when authors began seeing marriage as the starting point for, rather than the endpoint of, their novels. Obviously literary history is a good deal more complex than that, but it’s certainly interesting to note the overarching shift from novels that end with variations on “Reader, I married him” to those in which unhappy marriages form a core plot device, and the ways in which individuals and societies respond to thema core element for characterization, setting, and theme. Yet it’s more accurate still to say that the realistic novel allowed for these different narratives—of marriage as a romantic ideal and of it as a practical reality—to co-exist in literary texts; one of the greatest American novels about marriage, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), focuses on the conflict of precisely those different narratives in its central character’s perspective, identity, and communities. While our 21st century popular culture has become so expansive that it’d be foolish for even the most daring American Studier to argue for any dominant threads, I’d certainly argue that this conflict between idealized and romanticized images vs. realistic and practical depictions of love and marriage continues to form a core theme for our cultural texts and conversations. I’m not sure if I can think of any romantic comedy film, for example, that doesn’t end with either the marriage of its focal couple or at least the sense that said couple is moving in that direction; at the very least, the arc of every romantic comedy depends on us rooting for the couple to overcome the obstacles that life (often aided by themselves) throws their way and achieve that happy ending. At the same time, some of the most successful and awarded independent films in recent years have depicted with brutal and unflinching honesty the hardest realities of married life—I’m thinking in particular of the at times almost unwatchably painful Blue Valentine (2010), with its non-chronological structure that contrasts Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling’s romantic young love with their disintegrating marriage. If contemporary films tend to focus on one narrative of marriage or the other, television provides for a different possibility, one more akin to the realistic (and, specifically, the serial) novel: the opportunity to present both ideals and realities of love and marriage within a single text. Since the birth of my older son in December 2005 I’ve watched exactly two shows that don’t feature talking animals or adorable preschoolers, and neither of those (24 and Lost) spent too much time depicting married couples; but I get the sense that many of the best-received and most enduring recent shows have indeed had such complex couples at their core: The Sopranos, Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and more. Even some of the best-loved sitcoms of the last couple decades have relied heavily on couples at once hugely realistic and yet ultimately idealized: Marge and Homer Simpson, Ross and Rachel (and eventually Monica and Chandler), Jim and Pam, and many more. In each case, there’s a great deal to be said about the portrayals of love and marriage on their own terms—but I’d also stress how fully they consistently depend on an audience’s interest in the best and worst of marriage, on the romantic ideals for which we all still strive and the more realistic lives that we all come to inhabit. Changing gears this week with the next guest post! See you then,BenPS. What do you think?6/8 Memory Day nominee: Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, designer, writer and philosopher, educator, and American legend whose legacies have informed countless aspects of contemporary society and life.
June 7, 2012
June 7, 2012: America is For Lovers, Part 4
[As we enter the month of weddings, this week I’ll feature a series on interesting, relatively unknown, and meaningful American lovers, fictional and real. Any and all suggestions very welcome as ever!]
On Georgia O’Keefe, Alfred Stieglitz, and the similar yet often opposing pulls of artistic and romantic passions.In her seminal 1963 text “The Problem That Has No Name” (that’s just an excerpt), the opening chapter in her equally pioneering The Feminine Mystique , Betty Friedan focuses on a variety of complex issues and struggles facing young married women, from media images and gender ideals to the day to day challenges of marriage, parenting, and home. Yet at heart of her analyses, at the core of that unnamed problem, lies a pair of contradictory pulls: on the one hand the desires for family, for marriage, for romantic and human connections; and on the other the desires for education, for career, for individual and professional successes. While there’s no doubt that the 1950s society Friedan analyzes privileged the former over the latter for these young women, I think she recognizes—and I know I would argue—that both pulls are also a part of most individuals, and that their contradictions thus stem at least in part from the complexities of our own identities and lives.Those contradictions and complexities affect all of us who hope to balance family and career, but they are perhaps particularly pronounced for artists, and even more especially in artistic geniuses. While the idea of a “muse” might be somewhat clichéd, it also accurately defines the way in which great artists are so often pulled to do their work, driven to produce by the same kinds of obsessions and forces that can characterize romantic connection and passion. Certainly that seems to have been the case for the modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe, both in her pursuit of her artistic career and in her lifelong romantic connection to photographer Alfred Stieglitz. That connection, which began in 1916 when O’Keeffe was 28 (and Stieglitz 52 and married), led to a professional partnership and a multi-decade marriage, and did not end until his death in 1946, was captured and preserved in the roughly 25,000 letters sent between the two; My Faraway One , the first of two planned volumes of selected letters, was published last year. I don’t want to reduce O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s relationship to any one issue, no more than one painting or photograph could illustrate each artist’s career and talents. Yet it seems clear that O’Keeffe’s 1929 decision to move back west—she had come to New York in 1918 to live and work with Stieglitz, and they had been married in 1924—and live in the burgeoning artistic community of Taos, New Mexico (at the home and compound of Mable Dodge Luhan) was a true turning point, a moment when the painter chose to follow her craft and muse (which the west unquestionably was to O’Keeffe). When Stieglitz wrote to her that “I am broken” (and sent her the above picture with one of his July 1929 letters), she responded with one of the most powerful statements of that artistic pursuit: “There is much life in me … I realized it would die if it could not move toward something … I chose coming away because here at least I feel good – and it makes me feel I am growing very tall and straight inside – and very still.” Their marriage survived and endured, and American art and culture were significantly enriched by O’Keeffe’s works. Not a bad love story all the way around.Final lovers tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Any artistic love stories you’d highlight?6/7 Memory Day nominee: Louise Erdrich, the Chippewa and German American poet, storyteller, and novelist whose interconnected series of multi-generational novels comprise some of the most significant American fiction of the last thirty years.
On Georgia O’Keefe, Alfred Stieglitz, and the similar yet often opposing pulls of artistic and romantic passions.In her seminal 1963 text “The Problem That Has No Name” (that’s just an excerpt), the opening chapter in her equally pioneering The Feminine Mystique , Betty Friedan focuses on a variety of complex issues and struggles facing young married women, from media images and gender ideals to the day to day challenges of marriage, parenting, and home. Yet at heart of her analyses, at the core of that unnamed problem, lies a pair of contradictory pulls: on the one hand the desires for family, for marriage, for romantic and human connections; and on the other the desires for education, for career, for individual and professional successes. While there’s no doubt that the 1950s society Friedan analyzes privileged the former over the latter for these young women, I think she recognizes—and I know I would argue—that both pulls are also a part of most individuals, and that their contradictions thus stem at least in part from the complexities of our own identities and lives.Those contradictions and complexities affect all of us who hope to balance family and career, but they are perhaps particularly pronounced for artists, and even more especially in artistic geniuses. While the idea of a “muse” might be somewhat clichéd, it also accurately defines the way in which great artists are so often pulled to do their work, driven to produce by the same kinds of obsessions and forces that can characterize romantic connection and passion. Certainly that seems to have been the case for the modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe, both in her pursuit of her artistic career and in her lifelong romantic connection to photographer Alfred Stieglitz. That connection, which began in 1916 when O’Keeffe was 28 (and Stieglitz 52 and married), led to a professional partnership and a multi-decade marriage, and did not end until his death in 1946, was captured and preserved in the roughly 25,000 letters sent between the two; My Faraway One , the first of two planned volumes of selected letters, was published last year. I don’t want to reduce O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s relationship to any one issue, no more than one painting or photograph could illustrate each artist’s career and talents. Yet it seems clear that O’Keeffe’s 1929 decision to move back west—she had come to New York in 1918 to live and work with Stieglitz, and they had been married in 1924—and live in the burgeoning artistic community of Taos, New Mexico (at the home and compound of Mable Dodge Luhan) was a true turning point, a moment when the painter chose to follow her craft and muse (which the west unquestionably was to O’Keeffe). When Stieglitz wrote to her that “I am broken” (and sent her the above picture with one of his July 1929 letters), she responded with one of the most powerful statements of that artistic pursuit: “There is much life in me … I realized it would die if it could not move toward something … I chose coming away because here at least I feel good – and it makes me feel I am growing very tall and straight inside – and very still.” Their marriage survived and endured, and American art and culture were significantly enriched by O’Keeffe’s works. Not a bad love story all the way around.Final lovers tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Any artistic love stories you’d highlight?6/7 Memory Day nominee: Louise Erdrich, the Chippewa and German American poet, storyteller, and novelist whose interconnected series of multi-generational novels comprise some of the most significant American fiction of the last thirty years.
June 6, 2012
June 6, 2012: America is For Lovers, Part 3
[As we enter the month of weddings, this week I’ll feature a series on interesting, relatively unknown, and meaningful American lovers, fictional and real. Any and all suggestions very welcome as ever!]
On the idealistic, activist, partly un-American and yet profoundly American lives and love of John Reed and Louise Bryant.I am, for I hope obvious reasons, very hesitant to call anyone or anything un-American. The phrase, after all, has almost always been used as a blatant, and very destructive, attack, one directly linked to treason (the highest national crime, as defined by our Constitution) and a host of other ills. Yet in a way that common usage represents a significant bit of slippage, since the act of treason is much more anti- than un-American, an action taken against the nation rather than simply outside of its definitions or communities. And if we use the word in the latter, more neutral sense, then it’s certainly fair to say that the late 1910s actions of journalists, writers, and lovers John Reed and Louise Bryant—as they embraced the Russian Revolution and the resulting new Soviet government, and indeed in Reed’s case sought formally to join that government’s propaganda efforts—were in a definite sense un-American.Of course it’s nowhere near that simple, though. For one thing, Reed and Bryantboth wrote complex, autobiographical yet also deeply journalistic books about their experiences in Russia, works clearly meant for American audiences and conversations; whatever their individual feelings about the Revolution, that is, they did not in any way abdicate their roles as journalists and writers in the face of it. And remembering those books connects us to both writers’ multi-stage careers as muckraking journalists and activists, histories that are, to my mind, as “American” (particularly in their era) as it’s possible to be. Reed’s 1914 experiences with and article on the Colorado miners’ strike and the resulting Ludlow massacre, for example, provide a unique and indispensable glimpse into a significant, under-narrated, and volatile American community; many of Bryant’s unpublished writings do the same for American artistic communities in the pre-modernist and modernist eras. In this light, Reed and Bryant’s Russian efforts represent just another community to which they traveled and out of which they sought to draw inspiration—one certainly less overtly American, but no less a part of the world they sought to impact.Moreover, Reed’s and Bryant’s passionate and eventually tragic romance provides additional and not at all irrelevant layers to their American stories. Obviously that romance is the most universally compelling side to their lives, as Hollywood proved; but it also connects them to multiple other contemporary stories and identities: the liberated communal lives of modernist authors like Eugene O’Neill, with whom both writers lived and Bryant had an affair; the post-World War I Lost Generation atmosphere, with its social rebellions, searches for meaning and companionship, and international influences and identities; and, perhaps most complexly, the ways in which Bryant’s radical feminism both connected her to the equally radical Reed and yet was (at least in part) silenced as a result of her relationship with him. In all those ways as well, Reed and Bryant exemplified their America, however much their lives (and particularly his life and death) took them away from it.Next lovers tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? And two more posts to come—any nominations or suggestions?6/6 Memory Day nominee: Nathan Hale, who had but one life to lose for his country, and in so losing it became one of America’s first truly mythologized heroes and figures.
On the idealistic, activist, partly un-American and yet profoundly American lives and love of John Reed and Louise Bryant.I am, for I hope obvious reasons, very hesitant to call anyone or anything un-American. The phrase, after all, has almost always been used as a blatant, and very destructive, attack, one directly linked to treason (the highest national crime, as defined by our Constitution) and a host of other ills. Yet in a way that common usage represents a significant bit of slippage, since the act of treason is much more anti- than un-American, an action taken against the nation rather than simply outside of its definitions or communities. And if we use the word in the latter, more neutral sense, then it’s certainly fair to say that the late 1910s actions of journalists, writers, and lovers John Reed and Louise Bryant—as they embraced the Russian Revolution and the resulting new Soviet government, and indeed in Reed’s case sought formally to join that government’s propaganda efforts—were in a definite sense un-American.Of course it’s nowhere near that simple, though. For one thing, Reed and Bryantboth wrote complex, autobiographical yet also deeply journalistic books about their experiences in Russia, works clearly meant for American audiences and conversations; whatever their individual feelings about the Revolution, that is, they did not in any way abdicate their roles as journalists and writers in the face of it. And remembering those books connects us to both writers’ multi-stage careers as muckraking journalists and activists, histories that are, to my mind, as “American” (particularly in their era) as it’s possible to be. Reed’s 1914 experiences with and article on the Colorado miners’ strike and the resulting Ludlow massacre, for example, provide a unique and indispensable glimpse into a significant, under-narrated, and volatile American community; many of Bryant’s unpublished writings do the same for American artistic communities in the pre-modernist and modernist eras. In this light, Reed and Bryant’s Russian efforts represent just another community to which they traveled and out of which they sought to draw inspiration—one certainly less overtly American, but no less a part of the world they sought to impact.Moreover, Reed’s and Bryant’s passionate and eventually tragic romance provides additional and not at all irrelevant layers to their American stories. Obviously that romance is the most universally compelling side to their lives, as Hollywood proved; but it also connects them to multiple other contemporary stories and identities: the liberated communal lives of modernist authors like Eugene O’Neill, with whom both writers lived and Bryant had an affair; the post-World War I Lost Generation atmosphere, with its social rebellions, searches for meaning and companionship, and international influences and identities; and, perhaps most complexly, the ways in which Bryant’s radical feminism both connected her to the equally radical Reed and yet was (at least in part) silenced as a result of her relationship with him. In all those ways as well, Reed and Bryant exemplified their America, however much their lives (and particularly his life and death) took them away from it.Next lovers tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? And two more posts to come—any nominations or suggestions?6/6 Memory Day nominee: Nathan Hale, who had but one life to lose for his country, and in so losing it became one of America’s first truly mythologized heroes and figures.
June 5, 2012
June 5, 2012: America is For Lovers, Part 2
[As we enter the month of weddings, this week I’ll feature a series on interesting, relatively unknown, and meaningful American lovers, fictional and real. Any and all suggestions very welcome as ever!]
On Lorraine Hansberry’s realistic, flawed, and deeply moving young married couple.Walter and Ruth Younger, the young husband and wife at the center of Lorraine Hansberry’s seminal play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), are perhaps the least sympathetic of the Youngers, the drama’s major characters. To be sure, as in the case in any great dramatic work all the characters have their flaws: but while the overly proud, widowed Mama (Lena) is also struggling to keep her family together; self-centered elitist Beneatha is impressively going to school to become a doctor; and naïve young Travis is just trying to grow up; Travis’s parents Walter and Ruth are defined mostly by their hot-and-cold marriage and Walter’s foolish and destructive get-rich-quick schemes. Some combination of those factors, Walter’s individual pipe dreams and the extremities to which their marital problems drive them both, could be said to lead to most of the family’s worst arguments and problems throughout the play.That could be said, but it’d be wrong, as the play’s final scenes reveal a much more systematic and significant culprit, putting the Youngers in the center of a broad and crucial biographical and historical context: the racial “covenants” that made it so difficult for African American and other minority families to move out of cities like Chicago and into suburban neighborhoods in the decades after World War II. While not as regimented or all-encompassing as the South’s system of Jim Crow segregation, the covenants did an equally thorough job of segregating their respective urban and suburban worlds, and proved a powerfully difficult impediment to the dreams of families like the Youngers. Systems like the covenants don’t explain away all of Walter’s irresponsibilities or Ruth’s enabling—again, no dramatic work as impressive as Hansberry’s treats its characters as mere ciphers—but they certainly better reveal the world in which these characters are trying to survive and succeed, and to an open-minded audience render Walter and Ruth significantly more sympathetic as a result.But in the final scene Hansberry takes the couple, and her play, one step further still. The Youngers have been approached by a representative from the neighborhood association of the suburban community into which they hope to move, a man who is offering them money in exchange for their withdrawing their purchase of that suburban home. In one of the play’s most traditional moments, not only in terms of gender roles but also because it embodies the spirit of Walter Sr., the family’s departed father, both Mama and Ruth allow Walter to make the decision; and Walter rises to the occasion, saying no to the lure of easy money and rejecting the offer. He gains a great deal of respect from Mama in the process, but perhaps even more significant is Ruth’s response: she seems to see in her husband for the first time in years the man she married, a man who can model for Travis a strong, proud, resilient African American identity and manhood in the face of some of the worst their society can throw at them. The moment and scene are tremendously moving for many reasons, but certainly at the top of the list is seeing the reconnection between this flawed and troubled but likewise resilient and impressive couple.Next lovers tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Nominations for the series?6/5 Memory Day nominee: Bill Moyers, the pioneering television host and journalist whose investigative reporting, philosophical and spiritual conversations, and
On Lorraine Hansberry’s realistic, flawed, and deeply moving young married couple.Walter and Ruth Younger, the young husband and wife at the center of Lorraine Hansberry’s seminal play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), are perhaps the least sympathetic of the Youngers, the drama’s major characters. To be sure, as in the case in any great dramatic work all the characters have their flaws: but while the overly proud, widowed Mama (Lena) is also struggling to keep her family together; self-centered elitist Beneatha is impressively going to school to become a doctor; and naïve young Travis is just trying to grow up; Travis’s parents Walter and Ruth are defined mostly by their hot-and-cold marriage and Walter’s foolish and destructive get-rich-quick schemes. Some combination of those factors, Walter’s individual pipe dreams and the extremities to which their marital problems drive them both, could be said to lead to most of the family’s worst arguments and problems throughout the play.That could be said, but it’d be wrong, as the play’s final scenes reveal a much more systematic and significant culprit, putting the Youngers in the center of a broad and crucial biographical and historical context: the racial “covenants” that made it so difficult for African American and other minority families to move out of cities like Chicago and into suburban neighborhoods in the decades after World War II. While not as regimented or all-encompassing as the South’s system of Jim Crow segregation, the covenants did an equally thorough job of segregating their respective urban and suburban worlds, and proved a powerfully difficult impediment to the dreams of families like the Youngers. Systems like the covenants don’t explain away all of Walter’s irresponsibilities or Ruth’s enabling—again, no dramatic work as impressive as Hansberry’s treats its characters as mere ciphers—but they certainly better reveal the world in which these characters are trying to survive and succeed, and to an open-minded audience render Walter and Ruth significantly more sympathetic as a result.But in the final scene Hansberry takes the couple, and her play, one step further still. The Youngers have been approached by a representative from the neighborhood association of the suburban community into which they hope to move, a man who is offering them money in exchange for their withdrawing their purchase of that suburban home. In one of the play’s most traditional moments, not only in terms of gender roles but also because it embodies the spirit of Walter Sr., the family’s departed father, both Mama and Ruth allow Walter to make the decision; and Walter rises to the occasion, saying no to the lure of easy money and rejecting the offer. He gains a great deal of respect from Mama in the process, but perhaps even more significant is Ruth’s response: she seems to see in her husband for the first time in years the man she married, a man who can model for Travis a strong, proud, resilient African American identity and manhood in the face of some of the worst their society can throw at them. The moment and scene are tremendously moving for many reasons, but certainly at the top of the list is seeing the reconnection between this flawed and troubled but likewise resilient and impressive couple.Next lovers tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Nominations for the series?6/5 Memory Day nominee: Bill Moyers, the pioneering television host and journalist whose investigative reporting, philosophical and spiritual conversations, and
June 4, 2012
June 4, 2012: America is For Lovers, Part 1
[As we enter the month of weddings, this week I’ll feature a series on interesting, relatively unknown, and meaningful American lovers, fictional and real. Any and all suggestions very welcome as ever!]
On the inspiring partnerships of Fanny Fern and James Parton.I’ve written in this space about Fanny Fern, and how much I admire and enjoy her sarcastic and serious, light and liberated, playful and powerful voice and style. That voice and style don’t need biographical detail to be clearly unique and important in American literary history; neither does the specific fact that Fern was for many years in the 1850s the highest-paid newspaper columnist in America depend on any contextualizing for its impressiveness. But it’s nonetheless the case that in the decade leading up to her first publishing successes, Fern went through significant traumas on two key levels: in her marriages, first with the early death of her first husband (which left her to care for two young daughters) and then in a very unhappy second marriage (which she courageously ended despite familial condemnation); and in her first professional forays, as she tried to submit her early columns to her brother, the editor and entrepeneur Nathaniel Parker Willis, and found herself more or less blacklisted at his request instead. (Fern fictionalized all of these experiences in her autobiographical novel Ruth Hall [1854] .)By the early 1850s, Fern had already begun conquering the professional challenges, with her unique and engaging style and themes more than compensating for any disadvantages created by either her circumstances or her brother. She got a significant assist in those efforts from James Parton, the young journalist and biographer who was then editing Willis’s magazine Home Journal—Parton began publishing her columns in the magazine, and when Willis objected and demanded that he stop, Parton instead resigned his position and continued the literary partnership. A few years later, in 1856, with Fern’s success and reputation well established, she and Parton united in a domestic partnership as well; Fern was 45 and Parton 33, but their difference in ages was clearly no more an obstacle to their happiness than any other aspect of their backgrounds or circumstances, as they stayed married until Fern’s death in 1872. Two years later, Parton continued the literary partnership and paid one more tribute to his wife’s talents, publishing Fanny Fern: A Memorial Volume .All of those details would be more than sufficient to establish the strength of Fern and Parton’s partnerships—but fortunately for those of us who love Fern’s style, we have further proof in a column of hers, “A Law More Nice than Just” (most of it is excerpted on pages 301-302). The column as a whole is pitch-perfect Fern: responding to a serious women’s rights issue (a woman who had been arrested for wearing men’s clothes in public), turning it into an occasion for humor (Fern decides to put on her husband’s clothes and try for a walk), but retaining social and satirical as well as light and funny tones throughout. And none of it would work anywhere near as well without Parton’s presence—from his genial acquiescence to the original plan to his mixture of laughter and support throughout the experience, Parton serves as a perfect partner for Fern on both of the levels I’ve been discussing; as a husband who helps her be herself and is clearly in love with that self; and as a supporter of and participant in her writing and work. If reading Fern’s columns makes it easy to fall in love with her, reading this one makes it just as easy to love Parton, and what the two meant to each other.Next lovers tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Any nominees, suggestions, or guest post possibilities?6/4 Memory Day nominee: Dr. Ruth Westheimer, whose funny accent, quirky personality, and risqué recommendations shouldn’t disguise the revolutionary and liberating nature of her frank and unashamed embrace of sex and the power of mass media.
On the inspiring partnerships of Fanny Fern and James Parton.I’ve written in this space about Fanny Fern, and how much I admire and enjoy her sarcastic and serious, light and liberated, playful and powerful voice and style. That voice and style don’t need biographical detail to be clearly unique and important in American literary history; neither does the specific fact that Fern was for many years in the 1850s the highest-paid newspaper columnist in America depend on any contextualizing for its impressiveness. But it’s nonetheless the case that in the decade leading up to her first publishing successes, Fern went through significant traumas on two key levels: in her marriages, first with the early death of her first husband (which left her to care for two young daughters) and then in a very unhappy second marriage (which she courageously ended despite familial condemnation); and in her first professional forays, as she tried to submit her early columns to her brother, the editor and entrepeneur Nathaniel Parker Willis, and found herself more or less blacklisted at his request instead. (Fern fictionalized all of these experiences in her autobiographical novel Ruth Hall [1854] .)By the early 1850s, Fern had already begun conquering the professional challenges, with her unique and engaging style and themes more than compensating for any disadvantages created by either her circumstances or her brother. She got a significant assist in those efforts from James Parton, the young journalist and biographer who was then editing Willis’s magazine Home Journal—Parton began publishing her columns in the magazine, and when Willis objected and demanded that he stop, Parton instead resigned his position and continued the literary partnership. A few years later, in 1856, with Fern’s success and reputation well established, she and Parton united in a domestic partnership as well; Fern was 45 and Parton 33, but their difference in ages was clearly no more an obstacle to their happiness than any other aspect of their backgrounds or circumstances, as they stayed married until Fern’s death in 1872. Two years later, Parton continued the literary partnership and paid one more tribute to his wife’s talents, publishing Fanny Fern: A Memorial Volume .All of those details would be more than sufficient to establish the strength of Fern and Parton’s partnerships—but fortunately for those of us who love Fern’s style, we have further proof in a column of hers, “A Law More Nice than Just” (most of it is excerpted on pages 301-302). The column as a whole is pitch-perfect Fern: responding to a serious women’s rights issue (a woman who had been arrested for wearing men’s clothes in public), turning it into an occasion for humor (Fern decides to put on her husband’s clothes and try for a walk), but retaining social and satirical as well as light and funny tones throughout. And none of it would work anywhere near as well without Parton’s presence—from his genial acquiescence to the original plan to his mixture of laughter and support throughout the experience, Parton serves as a perfect partner for Fern on both of the levels I’ve been discussing; as a husband who helps her be herself and is clearly in love with that self; and as a supporter of and participant in her writing and work. If reading Fern’s columns makes it easy to fall in love with her, reading this one makes it just as easy to love Parton, and what the two meant to each other.Next lovers tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Any nominees, suggestions, or guest post possibilities?6/4 Memory Day nominee: Dr. Ruth Westheimer, whose funny accent, quirky personality, and risqué recommendations shouldn’t disguise the revolutionary and liberating nature of her frank and unashamed embrace of sex and the power of mass media.
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