Sarah Monette's Blog, page 7
December 1, 2016
Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, Chapter 4
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press-University Press of New England, 1973.
Chapter 4: Israel in Babylon: The Archetype of the Captivity Narratives (1682-1700)
I have three things I want to say about this chapter.
1. If you need an example of unconscious male chauvinism at work, I have a beaut:
I find this passage hilarious, most especially because he's picked Cotton Mather of all people as his exemplar of a "conscious artist." And it is an absolutely beautiful example of unconscious bias being made manifest. (I also like how he always calls Mary Rowlandson "Mrs. Rowlandson--it's better than calling her "Mary," but seriously, you can't just call her "Rowlandson" the way you call Cotton Mather "Mather"?)
2. What Slotkin is actually saying in this chapter, when he's not busy getting in his own way, is fascinating. He's talking about the Indian captivity narrative both as distinctly American and distinctly Puritan, demonstrating how the lens of the narrative is used to refract American Puritans' cultural anxieties about (of course) the salvation of their souls, but also about their choice to leave England, the generational conflict between the original emigrants and the first generation born in America, and about the Indians, both as threat and as a temptation to abandon the strict and rigorous course of an upright Puritan life.
It should be noted, although Slotkin doesn't, that many Puritan women did abandon the upright Puritan life in exchange for what their captors' culture offered them. He cites Eunice Williams (the subject of John Demos' excellent book, The Unredeemed Captive</em>), but he doesn't show any real understanding that there's an alternative narrative going on behind the racist, patriarchal mythology he's interested in. As I've said before, he consistently offers a demonstration of the very phenomenon he's interested in describing.
He makes an excellent point that the wilderness in the captivity narratives is both an allegory of Hell and an allegory of the psychomachia of the Puritan soul, their psychological landscape. This means that, for Puritans, without the grace of God, the human mind is literally Hell. This explains so much about Calvinism. And his description of the protagonist at the beginning of the captivity narrative, before the Indian attack: "The world seems secure, but apocalypse lies just below the surface of the mind, the world" (104): reminds me strongly of John Clute's definition of horror, that the progress of the narrative (and I'm paraphrasing very loosely) is the revelation of the truth beneath the deceptive surface of the world.
3. Slotkin's argument would actually benefit substantially from feminist theory, because when he describes the cultural work of the Puritan captivity narrative, what he's very clearly describing, although he doesn't seem to recognize it, is rape fantasy. (Which I mean as something quite distinct from actual rape.) The captivity narrative, which is a type of the conversion narrative--he remarks of Rowlandson, "as a good Puritan she longs for some 'affliction' of God to be visited upon her, in order that her sinful will might be overborne by a stronger and purer force of holiness than her own" (103), and this is very clearly the same kind of longing at work in John Donne's "Batter my heart, three person'd God"). Rape fantasy, not real rape. But he also remarks that captivity is "the only acceptable way of acculturating, of being initiated into the life of the wilderness" (102), i.e., against the (feminized, because passive) protagonist's will, and I think an awareness of the subtext of rape fantasy at work in the conversion narratives on which the captivity narrative is patterned would have given him a much stronger and more incisive argument about the mythology that the captivity narrative creates.
Chapter 4: Israel in Babylon: The Archetype of the Captivity Narratives (1682-1700)
I have three things I want to say about this chapter.
1. If you need an example of unconscious male chauvinism at work, I have a beaut:
Mrs. Rowlandson's literary success during her lifetime and her more enduirng success as the originator of a major stream in the American mythology were not due to artistic skill. She was a sensitive woman, a careful observer of both external circumstances and conditions of the mind or soul, reasonably well read in Scripture, and capable of writing clear, vigorous, often moving narrative prose. But the power of her narrative to touch and illuminate the deeper structures of Puritan thought, feeling, and tradition is due less to conscious art than to the fact that her experience, training, and state of mind were accurate reflections of the experience and character of her culture as a whole. Her greater degree of natural sensitivity and her experience as a captive made her more capable than her fellows of discovering and revealing the character of her soul, but the soul she revealed mirrored the aspirations and anxieties of Puritan America.
[...] Unlike Mrs. Rowlandson, [Cotton] Mather was a conscious artist, careful in his selection of material and in his presentation of a consistent point of view. Whereas Mrs. Rowlandson was absorbed in her confession and her memory, Mather is detached, highly conscious of his audience and its reactions, and determined to illuminate fully the theological and historical character of the events he portrays.
(Slotkin 112-13)
I find this passage hilarious, most especially because he's picked Cotton Mather of all people as his exemplar of a "conscious artist." And it is an absolutely beautiful example of unconscious bias being made manifest. (I also like how he always calls Mary Rowlandson "Mrs. Rowlandson--it's better than calling her "Mary," but seriously, you can't just call her "Rowlandson" the way you call Cotton Mather "Mather"?)
2. What Slotkin is actually saying in this chapter, when he's not busy getting in his own way, is fascinating. He's talking about the Indian captivity narrative both as distinctly American and distinctly Puritan, demonstrating how the lens of the narrative is used to refract American Puritans' cultural anxieties about (of course) the salvation of their souls, but also about their choice to leave England, the generational conflict between the original emigrants and the first generation born in America, and about the Indians, both as threat and as a temptation to abandon the strict and rigorous course of an upright Puritan life.
It should be noted, although Slotkin doesn't, that many Puritan women did abandon the upright Puritan life in exchange for what their captors' culture offered them. He cites Eunice Williams (the subject of John Demos' excellent book, The Unredeemed Captive</em>), but he doesn't show any real understanding that there's an alternative narrative going on behind the racist, patriarchal mythology he's interested in. As I've said before, he consistently offers a demonstration of the very phenomenon he's interested in describing.
He makes an excellent point that the wilderness in the captivity narratives is both an allegory of Hell and an allegory of the psychomachia of the Puritan soul, their psychological landscape. This means that, for Puritans, without the grace of God, the human mind is literally Hell. This explains so much about Calvinism. And his description of the protagonist at the beginning of the captivity narrative, before the Indian attack: "The world seems secure, but apocalypse lies just below the surface of the mind, the world" (104): reminds me strongly of John Clute's definition of horror, that the progress of the narrative (and I'm paraphrasing very loosely) is the revelation of the truth beneath the deceptive surface of the world.
3. Slotkin's argument would actually benefit substantially from feminist theory, because when he describes the cultural work of the Puritan captivity narrative, what he's very clearly describing, although he doesn't seem to recognize it, is rape fantasy. (Which I mean as something quite distinct from actual rape.) The captivity narrative, which is a type of the conversion narrative--he remarks of Rowlandson, "as a good Puritan she longs for some 'affliction' of God to be visited upon her, in order that her sinful will might be overborne by a stronger and purer force of holiness than her own" (103), and this is very clearly the same kind of longing at work in John Donne's "Batter my heart, three person'd God"). Rape fantasy, not real rape. But he also remarks that captivity is "the only acceptable way of acculturating, of being initiated into the life of the wilderness" (102), i.e., against the (feminized, because passive) protagonist's will, and I think an awareness of the subtext of rape fantasy at work in the conversion narratives on which the captivity narrative is patterned would have given him a much stronger and more incisive argument about the mythology that the captivity narrative creates.
November 29, 2016
UBC: Whalen & Martin, Defending Donald Harvey
Defending Donald Harvey: The Case of America's Most Notorious Angel-of-Death Serial Killer by William WhalenMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
In its own way, this is one of the strangest books I've ever read.
William Whalen was a defense attorney, appointed by the court to defend Donald Harvey, a nursing assistant accused of murdering one of his patients in what could very plausibly be called a mercy killing. Except that when Whalen asked Harvey if he'd killed other people, Harvey said yes. When asked how many, he said he didn't know. When asked to give an estimate of the top limit, the number he knew he hadn't killed more than, he said seventy.
Whalen was now the defense attorney for a serial killer--and the police didn't know it.
I don't know that I agree with all of Whalen's choices, but I admire him very much. He made the best, most ethical decision he could under the circumstances, and he stuck with it. He found a way to use the revelation of the full extent of Harvey's crimes to save Harvey from the death penalty and he ensured that he would never have the opportunity to kill again.
I use the word "opportunity" advisedly, because Harvey was one of the most opportunistic murderers I've yet read about, matched only by Marcel Petiot, the subject of Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris. Both of them killed based simply on who was available to them, age, sex, race, class, all matters of complete indifference. And Harvey, very clearly from the evidence presented in this book, had a kind of weird disconnect, a short circuit, where he skipped straight from I'm annoyed with you to poisoning. Boyfriend behaving like an asshole? Sprinkle arsenic in his food. Boyfriend's friend trying to break up your relationship? Give her hepatitis--you work in a hospital, you've got access to all kinds of nasty shit. Nosy neighbor asking too many questions? Give her your poisoned leftovers. So he not only killed on the job, he killed (and poisoned without killing) on an almost random basis at home. And he didn't get caught and didn't get caught and didn't get caught, mostly because poisoning! is just not what people think of, even when they're exhibiting all the symptoms of arsenic poisoning (Harvey is not the only serial killer who's used this to his advantage). And the hospitals where he worked were so much more concerned about their image and their vulnerability to lawsuits that they essentially taught him he could kill with impunity. The hospital where he was working when he got unlucky, and the cyanide-poisoned corpse of his last victim happened to cross paths with a forensic pathologist who was an expert on cyanide, comes off particularly badly, since their reaction to staff coming forward with concerns was to tell them to shut up if they wanted to keep their jobs.
This book is fascinating for the inside view it gives of the defense side of criminal law, and for Whalen's very careful portrayal of Harvey. (Harvey cooperated fully and read and commented on the manuscript.) Whalen is very protective of Harvey and fond of him in a weird way, but he never forgets that although Harvey is charming, and is certainly very attached to Whalen, he's not capable of friendship. He's manipulative and a liar and willing to do whatever is necessary to get what he wants. (Whalen is lawyer-careful and accurate about noting inconsistencies in what Harvey says about himself.) Harvey also apparently functions extremely well within the closed world of the prison--that "productive member of society" tagline that gets trotted out. Harvey is a productive member of the limited and artificial world of the penitentiary, even though he could never be trusted outside.
He gets superb performance evaluations.
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November 24, 2016
Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, Chapter 3
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press-University Press of New England, 1973.
Chapter 3: A Home in the Heart of Darkness: The Origin of the Indian War Narratives (1625-1682)
But first, a wildly out of context quote from the incomparable Stephen Jay Gould: "Mythology does have its use as a powerful aid to narrative" (Wonderful Life 81). Gould is talking about a different subject, but the same problem: the way that mythology shapes stories, the way that it's easier to tell the story the mythology expects than it is to tell what really happened. And the way that that warps the story you're trying to tell.
So the thing that Slotkin is really atrociously awful at is differentiating what he thinks from what his subjects think, just as he's atrociously awful at remembering that his male Europeans are not the only subjects in the game. In fairness to Slotkin, I should make clear that he is well aware of the Puritans' racism, and he explicitly recognizes it as a massive problem, so it isn't that he agrees with them, it's just that he can only see them from the perspective of the default-white default-male historian looking back at them. Please take it as a given that I find this intensely exasperating and creepy.
(His use of Heart of Darkness as a completely unremarked-upon intertext in chapter title and epigraph is certainly symptomatic.)
I also wish Slotkin would close-read and really dig all the meat out of the sublimely self-blind entitlement of Increase Mather's definition of Native Americans: "the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers have given to us for a rightful Possession" (Mather, qtd. in Slotkin 84)--or the more delicate dance of abdication of responsibility in John Underhill's account of an atrocity he participated in (as perpetrator rather than victim): "Mercy they did deserve for their valor, could we have had opportunity to have bestowed it (Underhil, qtd. in Slotkin 74) and later:
Slotkin certainly registers the way Puritan writers shift agency onto God--it's the culminating point of his chapter, that they shift glory as much as blame (at least they're consistent): if they do terrible things, it's God's will, but if they survive, it's also God's will. No personal heroism, which is Slotkin's point in my cut-text. I picked it because there's a secondary connotation that I think is equally apt: the lack of human heroes in the accounts of King Philip's War. Because really King Philip's War and the wars that followed it will have no human heroes, in the sense of those who triumph because they are brave and their cause is just. The Native Americans are defeated, and the Puritans are treacherous and vile, and the in-fighting between the colonies means you can't even ascribe them the virtue of loyalty to their own side. Slotkin talks about the Indian Wars as the "distinctive event of American history, the unique national experience" (78), and while he means that unironically (because for him only the (1) white and (2) male Americans have a subject position and everyone else exists to be acted against or upon), it's still, horribly, true if you read it the other way, if you read this "unique national experience" as one fundamentally of betrayal and injustice and self-righteous bigotry providing all the explanations. And that's the distinctive event of American history.
Why, yes, I am bothered by our current national nightmare, thank you for asking.
Slotkin is very good at conveying how the Puritans saw and understood America and their own place within it. America was a wilderness peopled by cannibals, witches, and devils; it was a microcosm of the universe and the externalized stage of the Puritan psychomachia. The Puritans themselves were sinners subject to the wilderness' temptations, with the potential to fall and become as beasts; they were also always and forever world without end the protagonists who acted upon this stage, the especial favorites of Providence, for whom this continent had been offered up that they might have a proving ground. Puritans saw themselves as the center of the universe, their spiritual defeat being synonymous with the destruction of the world (I described this as "catastrophic solipsism" in a marginal note, both in the sense that something bad happening to you personally becomes CATASTROPHE on the grandest macro-scale, and in the sense that your solipsism becomes catastrophic to those around you). And if you believe that, and you believe that everyone who is not One Of You is either damned or a tool of the Devil or both, then, well, yes, the way that Puritans formed their mythology of America makes perfect, dreadful sense.
(...I should probably apologize for posting this on Thanksgiving.)
Chapter 3: A Home in the Heart of Darkness: The Origin of the Indian War Narratives (1625-1682)
But first, a wildly out of context quote from the incomparable Stephen Jay Gould: "Mythology does have its use as a powerful aid to narrative" (Wonderful Life 81). Gould is talking about a different subject, but the same problem: the way that mythology shapes stories, the way that it's easier to tell the story the mythology expects than it is to tell what really happened. And the way that that warps the story you're trying to tell.
So the thing that Slotkin is really atrociously awful at is differentiating what he thinks from what his subjects think, just as he's atrociously awful at remembering that his male Europeans are not the only subjects in the game. In fairness to Slotkin, I should make clear that he is well aware of the Puritans' racism, and he explicitly recognizes it as a massive problem, so it isn't that he agrees with them, it's just that he can only see them from the perspective of the default-white default-male historian looking back at them. Please take it as a given that I find this intensely exasperating and creepy.
(His use of Heart of Darkness as a completely unremarked-upon intertext in chapter title and epigraph is certainly symptomatic.)
I also wish Slotkin would close-read and really dig all the meat out of the sublimely self-blind entitlement of Increase Mather's definition of Native Americans: "the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers have given to us for a rightful Possession" (Mather, qtd. in Slotkin 84)--or the more delicate dance of abdication of responsibility in John Underhill's account of an atrocity he participated in (as perpetrator rather than victim): "Mercy they did deserve for their valor, could we have had opportunity to have bestowed it (Underhil, qtd. in Slotkin 74) and later:
Many [of the Pequot Indians] were burnt in the fort, both men, women, and children. Others forced out, . . . which our soldiers received and entertained with the sword. Down fell men, women, and children. . . . Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along. . . . Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. Sometimes the case alters; but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.
(Underhill, qtd. in Slotkin 76)
Slotkin certainly registers the way Puritan writers shift agency onto God--it's the culminating point of his chapter, that they shift glory as much as blame (at least they're consistent): if they do terrible things, it's God's will, but if they survive, it's also God's will. No personal heroism, which is Slotkin's point in my cut-text. I picked it because there's a secondary connotation that I think is equally apt: the lack of human heroes in the accounts of King Philip's War. Because really King Philip's War and the wars that followed it will have no human heroes, in the sense of those who triumph because they are brave and their cause is just. The Native Americans are defeated, and the Puritans are treacherous and vile, and the in-fighting between the colonies means you can't even ascribe them the virtue of loyalty to their own side. Slotkin talks about the Indian Wars as the "distinctive event of American history, the unique national experience" (78), and while he means that unironically (because for him only the (1) white and (2) male Americans have a subject position and everyone else exists to be acted against or upon), it's still, horribly, true if you read it the other way, if you read this "unique national experience" as one fundamentally of betrayal and injustice and self-righteous bigotry providing all the explanations. And that's the distinctive event of American history.
Why, yes, I am bothered by our current national nightmare, thank you for asking.
Slotkin is very good at conveying how the Puritans saw and understood America and their own place within it. America was a wilderness peopled by cannibals, witches, and devils; it was a microcosm of the universe and the externalized stage of the Puritan psychomachia. The Puritans themselves were sinners subject to the wilderness' temptations, with the potential to fall and become as beasts; they were also always and forever world without end the protagonists who acted upon this stage, the especial favorites of Providence, for whom this continent had been offered up that they might have a proving ground. Puritans saw themselves as the center of the universe, their spiritual defeat being synonymous with the destruction of the world (I described this as "catastrophic solipsism" in a marginal note, both in the sense that something bad happening to you personally becomes CATASTROPHE on the grandest macro-scale, and in the sense that your solipsism becomes catastrophic to those around you). And if you believe that, and you believe that everyone who is not One Of You is either damned or a tool of the Devil or both, then, well, yes, the way that Puritans formed their mythology of America makes perfect, dreadful sense.
(...I should probably apologize for posting this on Thanksgiving.)
November 20, 2016
UBC: Rule, ...And Never Let Her Go
And Never Let Her Go: Thomas Capano: The Deadly Seducer by Ann RuleMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
One of the things that reading Man-Apes or Ape-Men?: The Story of Discoveries in Africa reminded me of is how important taxonomy is. The way human beings are wired means that (1) it's hard for us to talk about things we don't have names for and (2) we understand the world by categorization and comparison, so being able to put like things together in groups is an incredibly powerful conceptual tool. It's true in biology and geology and meteorology; it's true in literary studies, where if there's a theory I have an allegiance to, it's genre theory, precisely because it lets you talk about why it's meaningful that some texts have certain things in common, like "revenge tragedy" or "comedy of manners." And, at least for me, it's true in criminology.
I've already, semi-flippantly, christened one genre of murder "why buy the cow?" and my exemplar is Chester Gillette. I'm calling this other genre of murder, which has many things in common with "why buy the cow?", "every woman's nightmare," and my exemplar is Thomas Capano, the subject of . . . And Never Let Her Go.
Capano is everything I was talking about in my review of The I-5 Killer, a man who obsessively stalks and harasses and ultimately murders a woman for the crime of trying to end their relationship. He would not leave Anne Marie Fahey alone, and although she was scared of him, the sad thing is, she wasn't scared enough. Capano was a monster, and the two things about him that horrified and repulsed me the most were that (1) after he murdered Anne Marie Fahey, he lied about her, calling her "ditzy" and "airheaded" and suggesting she was absolutely the type of woman who would just waltz off for a weekend, skipping a dinner date with her family and boyfriend, and not tell a soul, when she was not, when she was anything but. He habitually lied about the women he pursued, claiming it was they who came onto him, and they who were obsessive and clingy (and also sluts, don't forget sluts), and he told much worse lies than calling Ms. Fahey an airhead, but for some reason, I found that particular example of his lies just loathsome. And then (2), when he was in prison and trying to finesse and finagle his way around the rules (because rules do not apply to Thomas Capano), he not only allowed, but encouraged his teenage daughters to talk on the phone with, write letters to, and send their pictures to a sex offender, specifically convicted of indecent exposure to a minor (I looked the man up. He's in the sex offender registry of Florida and Delaware.), so that the man would do Capano favors. And not even big favors, like the guy he tried to get to burgle and vandalize his lover's house, or the guy he tried to get to put out a hit on Capano's brother for testifying against him. Not big favors. Little favors. For little favors, just so that Thomas Capano wouldn't have to obey the rules, this proudly overprotective father was coming very very close to pimping out his daughters. Again, not the worst thing he did, but for me personally, vile.
Capano reminded me, in a number of very creepy ways, of Ted Bundy, particularly in the way that being subject to the rules that apply to the defendant in a criminal trial drove them both just nuts, and I think the biggest difference between them is that Capano was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a devoted, loyal, wealthy, powerful family, and he parlayed that into a lot of personal power. (He made a kind of side-career out of "fixing" things for his brothers when they were caught doing drugs or bribing politicians or stalking, kidnapping, and raping their ex-girlfriends. And when he was caught, early on, harassing and stalking a young woman, his connections to Delaware's old-boy network let him slide out of trouble as smooth as silk.) It took a lot longer for Capano to come up against someone he couldn't make do what he wanted, and so he got caught for his first murder instead of, y'know, his thirtieth.
The "Bechdel Test fail" label applies to Capano, just as it applies to Bundy and Woodfield, but that's a much more overarching categorization; Capano is different from Bundy in important ways, too, particularly in the fact that he murdered Fahey because she was under his control and trying to escape. Bundy murdered strangers; Capano murdered someone he claimed to love deeply and then disposed of her body the same way he would a toy he'd broken, dumping her body off the Atlantic coast in a spot known as Mako Alley.
This is a very good book--Rule has a very complicated story to tell, and she lays it out probably as clearly as is possible. There was just one place where she made a false step, and it's so weird and jarring that I'm actually going to discuss it. Capano's long-time lover, Deborah MacIntyre, who he made buy the gun that he intended to use to murder Anne Marie Fahey (and meanwhile MacIntyre has no freaking idea that Fahey exists; she thought Capano had left his wife for her and that he was faithful to her, while he was actually involved with Fahey and with at least one other woman), when she finally realized, because of his relentless pressure on her to commit perjury to protect him that when Capano said "love," what he meant was jealousy, in exactly the way that a little boy is jealous of his toys and won't share them with his siblings, she released the lawyer Capano had told her to hire and found her own. The new lawyer worked in partnership with his wife, who was his paralegal, and there's this weird weird moment where Rule says:
Debby liked the Bergstroms and felt protected for the first time in many long years. They were no-nonsense people who were demonstrating that they cared about what happened to her. Dee, particularly, was intuitive about Debby's feelings. Women know how other women feel, although it is almost impossible to explain this to a man.
(Rule 447)
Okay, first of all, bullshit. There's nothing about having two X chromosomes that makes you magically "intuitive" about the feelings of other people with two X chromosomes. I have two X chromosomes, and I'm about as intuitive as a cinderblock. There are experiences that women are more likely to have in common with other women than they are with men--sexual harassment springs to mind (although I am of course not saying that men are never sexually harassed)--and thus more likely to understand, but that's not what Rule says, which leads to the second problem: what exactly is the "this" that is almost impossible to explain to a man? Over the page, the second half of this weird little alien inclusion may explain the "this":
Dee Bergstrom understood Debby's anguish and explained to her husband and the all-male prosecuting team that very few women would be able to turn off overnight a love that had lasted for two decades. Often to their own detriment, women cling to memories of how they perceived their relationship. For the moment, Debby was fragile, but she was doing her best to break free of Tom.
"We don't wake up one morning," Dee told them, "and just say, 'I don't love him anymore.'"
(Rule 448)
But that doesn't actually help at all. Why would men not understand that it's hard, even in the face of excruciatingly cruel and obvious betrayal, to stop loving someone you've loved for nearly half your life? That horrible situation is not exclusively the property of women and any human being with functional empathy should be able to understand it.
If it's that, looking objectively at Capano and MacIntyre's relationship, the male prosecutors didn't understand why she loved him in the first place, well (a) that's not what Rule says, (b) that's an excellent question, and (c) it has much less to do with sex/gender and much more to do with the relationship between an abuser and their victim, and that relationship can be between two men, two women, or an abusive woman and a male victim just as much as it can be a relationship between an abusive man and a female victim.
If she's trying to say something about the particular way in which gender expectations and socialization constructed the relationship between Capano and MacIntyre, and the way in which Dee Bergstrom, as another woman socialized with the same expectations as MacIntyre, could grasp that more easily than a group of people socialized male--and, as part of that package, not taught to take women's emotions into account--then she needed to say it much more carefully. Because what she did say jarred me straight out of her story--and it stands out, because in this 650+ page book, that's the only time she tries to draw that "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" line. Everywhere else, she recognizes that Capano was a manipulator and a user, and that men were his victims, too, although not to the same extent.
No one was his victim to the extent that Anne Marie Fahey was, and one thing that this book does excellently well is make you understand the terrible loss, both Anne Marie Fahey's own loss, the life she was finally putting together, facing her demons, getting the help she needed, but then the loss of her to everyone who knew her. What Capano ripped apart can never be repaired, and Rule shows that very very well.
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UBC: Thomsen, Ghost Towns
Ghost Towns: Lost Cities of the Old West by Clint ThomsenMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is a well-designed and attractive little book, with fascinating subject-matter, breath-taking photographs (Bannack, Montana, and Rhyolite, Nevada, are especially stunning), and terrible text. It reads like a Freshman Composition paper, and not a very good one, with sweeping overgeneralizations, no understanding of what constitutes meaningful evidence, and a raging case of thesaurusitis, like saying that Deadwood, South Dakota, is "brusquely named" or (reprehensibly) my favorite, that Calico, California, was founded "the year after Bodie's population climaxed" (38). There are other problems, like the mysterious absence of Native Americans from his presentation of the American frontier, but you won't be surprised when you reach them.
So, photographs five stars, and if--as I did--you find the book for cheap, worth it. Text, one star.
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November 19, 2016
UBC: Le Gros Clark, Man-Apes or Ape Men?
Man-Apes or Ape-Men?: The Story of Discoveries in Africa by W.E. Le Gros ClarkMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is about taxonomy, which is like genre theory for living things. I love it.
I imprinted on Lucy: the Beginnings of Humankind at an early age, which is how I recognized Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark's name. Aside from being fascinating, this book is an interesting historical artifact. It was published in 1967, just before the discovery of Australopithecus afarensis, and it provides a snapshot of what was going on in palaeoanthropology in the middle of the controversy over Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus robustus, Homo habilis, Zinjanthropus, Telanthropus, Paranthropus, Pleisanthropus, Meganthropus and all the other specimens given names of their own. It was a nontrivial problem; one of the things going on in this book is a examination of the way in which we can't talk accurately about things we don't have accurate names for: "Probably nothing has done more to introduce confusion into the story of human evolution than the reckless propensity for inventing new (and sometimes unnecessarily complicated) names for fragmentary fossil relics that turn out eventually to belong to genera or species previously known" (9), and the purpose of this monograph is to realign and correct the unnecessary overproliferation of names in discussions of pre-human evolution.
Le Gros Clark was an anatomist, and dude knows his shit. I won't pretend that I could follow the ins and outs of his exhaustive discussion of australopithecine skull (or even worse, australopithecine pelvises), but he explains himself carefully, and I certainly did come out with a clear understanding of exactly why australopithecines are not apes and are not human beings. He writes very clearly and carefully, and what I love most about him is the way he lays out and explains all the steps in how taxonomy works. Why do you name one fossil Australopithecus and one fossil Homo? How do you decide whether two specimens found in different places with very different provenances (which I know is totally not an appropriate word in palaeontology, but every fossil has a different story of discovery, and that story can make a huge difference in how the fossil is interpreted) are members of the same species? Le Gros Clark uses statistics like John Henry's hammer, showing the range of variation in well documented species like Homo sapiens and then showing that the differences between specimens called Australopithecus africanus and specimens given new and glorious names of their own fall well within statistical variations for a single species.
He is extremely stern about the way palaeoanthropologists overemphasize the uniqueness of every find but he also emphasizes over and over again that what he and his colleagues are engaged in is a process of discovery and that part of that process is making mistakes. He analyses his own mistakes, and other people's mistakes, and he ends with a really lovely defense of making mistakes:
Probably no scientist, however distinguished, has been invariably correct in the interpretations and theoretical hypotheses that he has advanced to explain his observational or experimental data. Hypotheses are of vital importance for progress in all branches of scientific knowledge, for only by formulating hypotheses is it possible to put them to the test by further observation and experiment, or by the application of new and more refined techniques. It is perhaps the fate of many hypotheses to be superseded sooner or later. If they are genuine scientific hypotheses, that is to say, if they are hypotheses that accord reasonably well with the facts available to their authors at the time and are susceptible to the test of observation and experiment, they will have played their part in promoting and accelerating the advance of scientific thought and research even if eventually they are discarded. A well-known Scottish author, Samuel Smiles, once remarked, over a hundred years ago, "Probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery." There is a great deal of truth in this aphorism, and certainly those who have made so many and such important discoveries by their energetic field work readily may be excused if one or other of their hypotheses should eventually prove to be unsubstantiated or untenable.
(Le Gros Clark 134)
He means specifically Robert Broom and Raymond Dart, who discovered and championed Australopithecus africanus in the face of tremendous opposition (of which Le Gros Clark is also sternly disapproving), and who were fundamentally right, even if some of their conclusions were overenthusiastic. And like the rest of this book, Le Gros Clark is saying, This is how you do science. It's a process of mistake and correction, making a hypothesis, testing it, reformulating it--or rejecting it for a new hypothesis. The fact that that is what the book is about means that it doesn't matter that it's out of date and some of its conclusions are obsolete. (Le Gros Clark did not like Homo habilis, considering the Olduvai fossils to be well within the range of variation for Australopithecus africanus, but he lost that battle. And of course Lucy is waiting just over the horizon from where he's standing.) And I personally love the fact that Le Gros Clark's science is taxonomy, the science of names.
The naming of cats is a difficult matter . . .
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November 18, 2016
Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, Chapter 2
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press-University Press of New England, 1973.
Chapter 2: Cannibals and Christians: European vs. American Indian Culture
Again, it helps to remember that Slotkin's interest is in white men, not anybody else. He does do a surprisingly good job of specifying which Native American culture he's talking about, which is something many historians of colonial America are just awful at. And he does a not-terrible job of considering how the Europeans looked to the Native Americans, even though his focus is on how the Native Americans looked to the Europeans. (And he's consistent in his bias. He's talking exclusively about Native American men and their world view, not about Native American women at all, just like European women are invisible to him.)
I'm torn between my suspicion that he's romanticizing the "primitive" and their "natural" connection to their myths and my admiration for the way he conceptualizes the juxtaposition of Puritan and Native American world views. (And, like I said, he specifies that he's talking about the Delaware Indians, also called the Lenni Lenape. I hope the beliefs he ascribes to them are their actual beliefs.) He's very influenced by Campbell and Jung (with Freud lurking in the background, as Freud so often does), and he's still got this horrific failure to understand how storytelling and art work:
There are so many problems here I almost don't even know how to start. He has a serious down on courtly love (which he thinks is a distorted travesty of the myth of the hero who sexually conquers the Earth-mother) and will say nothing good about it. But my real issue is with the implication hidden in this passage that Greek poets were "free" of artifice and convention, when in fact the truth is anything but. Any oral tradition of poetry (which is what Homer is) is built of conventions. It has to be, because the poet has to have those blocks ready to hand as he's building his poem on the fly. And Greek drama, which I am significantly better acquainted with, is certainly not free of artifice. Greek drama is a highly artificial art form--which I don't mean in a negative sense. Artifice is not a bad thing; you can't turn a series of events into a story without it. And the mental picture Slotkin induces, of Euripides, of all people, warbling his native wood notes wild, is . . . well, it's freakin' hilarious. But it's also very very wrong.
The Greek poets were not innocent myth-makers, and if you want to talk about somebody "imposing rigid artistic categories on the received material," let's sit down and talk about Aristotle's theory of tragedy for a while. Slotkin is imposing a false dichotomy between "primitive" and "civilized" art, and while this irritates me for several reasons, the big one is that it denies artistic agency to "primitive" poets, "primitive" meaning those who work or worked in oral traditions or who come early in his teleological schema of chronological progress from "pure" myth to "artificial" poetry. I don't know enough about Delaware/Lenape traditions of story-telling and poetry to know if he's doing them the same disservice, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the answer is "yes."
So it's all very Campbellian, with a healthy side of The Golden Bough, and there's a Jungian anima wandering around and a Freudian Id, and I'm skeptical in several places, partly because I am always skeptical when twentieth century psychological schematics are imposed on pre-twenteith century people, and partly because Slotkin makes it all sound so simple when I know it's anything but.
(There's also a serious problem wherein nobody told him that More's Utopia is Janus-faced. It's a utopia, but it's also a satire. It cannot be read as simply an idealization of the New World without missing a good 50% to 90%, depending on where you draw that satirical line, of what More's actually doing.)
I love his point about European mythology about the West: "In the mythology of Europe, the West and its peoples were strongly associated with the kingdom of death and dreams, the underworld" (28). That puts such a dark and beautiful spin on the whole idea of exploration (and resonates for me with Hamlet's "undiscovered country") that I love it and distrust it at the same time.
But then I think Slotkin's straight up brilliant when he starts talking about the Puritans and how they understood the New World. He points out that the Puritans in America were far from being the only Puritans who decided that subjugation and extermination were the only way to deal with an inconvenient native people: cf. Cromwell and the Irish. He talks about the stark contrast in Puritan and Native American understandings of the divine, where for the Native American peoples, the divine was in the world and for Puritans, the divine was what Slotkin calls "otherworldly," which I think is not a great term, but what he means is that the divine is separate from the world. God can choose to reach down and affect the mortal, sublunary world of sin and suffering, but he is not part of that world. That's one of the reasons Jesus is a vital part of Christian mythology: he is the part of God that experiences the sublunary world in all its imperfection and pain. And then, significantly, returns to that perfect place outside the spheres of Creation when his Hero's Journey is complete.
(There's no place in Christian mythology to talk about whether Jesus' understanding of Heaven was changed by his sojourn in the world, as the Campbellian Hero's understanding of the world is changed by his sojourn in the underworld, but it's a really interesting question.)
Okay, sorry. Tangent. My point is that Slotkin's point is that the Puritans and Native Americans had diametrically opposed and incompatible views of how the divine and the human interact. This is coupled with another problem, which is the Puritans' understanding of their own cultural teleology, their mission statement, if you'll forgive the anachronism. (Maybe my favorite sentence in this chapter is "[Puritan] religion portrayed the progress of the soul as a rising up from the degradation of man's condition at birth to ultimate sanctification through divine grace--a kind of spiritual upward mobility" (37).") In setting out for the New World, the Puritans "desired above all [...] a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their dream: the outline of an idealized Puritan England, a Bible commonwealth, a city on a hill exemplifying the World of God to all the world" (38). The Native Americans are monstrously inconvenient to this mission, and even worse is the Puritans' us vs. them thinking, which is something inherent to Puritanism: the Elect vs. the damned, the godly vs. the ungodly, the New Jerusalem vs. the Wilderness. When they looked around them, they saw everything through the lens of "a psychological and spiritual quest, a quest for salvation in the wilderness of the human mind and soul. The physical world of America was but the physical type of this primary wilderness" (39). Puritans lived in a very Manichean world of stark contrast between good and evil, and they also lived by typology, which is the practice of reading everything in the Old Testament as a "type" or vehicle for the only true story, which is the New Testament. Once you get the hang of that, you start reading everything as typology, and like Procrustes' bed or Cinderella's stepsisters, you chop off bits as necessary to fit.
Slotkin is kind of cavalier about dates, since he argues that the Puritans saw their colonization of America in terms of Pilgrim's Progress--and while I think that comes to be true, it does help to remember that Pilgrim's Progress wasn't published until 1678, a good fifty years after the Mayflower found Plymouth Rock. But Bunyan is a valuable primary source for understanding Puritan thought and their conception of themselves (and Pilgrim's Progress has the advantage of being far more entertaining than the sermons and diaries that are your other primary sources).
Puritans also saw themselves as constantly besieged, constantly at war against the ungodly who sought to destroy them--a narrative that does not help when encountering cultures alien to your own. (I ended up drawing a little Puritan City on the Hill in the margin, with the Church of England as a besieging army on one side and the Native Americans as a besieging army on the other.) (Also, damn the word "siege." It never looks right no matter how I spell it.) And the final piece he articulates that I think is incredibly valuable is the way the Puritans' Manichean thought patterns dealt with evil:
I don't know if his representation of Native American beliefs is accurate, or if he's done some dichotomous thinking of his own to make the contrast with the Puritans stronger, but he is spot-on about Puritan beliefs about evil being a part of the world and good being separate from it. (This also explains a lot about Puritan conceptualizations of the body and sexualilty.) And about how those beliefs, in practice, justifying as they did any kind of slaughter or betrayal, were so cruel and disastrous for both the people and the land of America
Chapter 2: Cannibals and Christians: European vs. American Indian Culture
Again, it helps to remember that Slotkin's interest is in white men, not anybody else. He does do a surprisingly good job of specifying which Native American culture he's talking about, which is something many historians of colonial America are just awful at. And he does a not-terrible job of considering how the Europeans looked to the Native Americans, even though his focus is on how the Native Americans looked to the Europeans. (And he's consistent in his bias. He's talking exclusively about Native American men and their world view, not about Native American women at all, just like European women are invisible to him.)
I'm torn between my suspicion that he's romanticizing the "primitive" and their "natural" connection to their myths and my admiration for the way he conceptualizes the juxtaposition of Puritan and Native American world views. (And, like I said, he specifies that he's talking about the Delaware Indians, also called the Lenni Lenape. I hope the beliefs he ascribes to them are their actual beliefs.) He's very influenced by Campbell and Jung (with Freud lurking in the background, as Freud so often does), and he's still got this horrific failure to understand how storytelling and art work:
In its primary form the hero myth reflects the mental journey of the mystic, the man who drowns his consciousness in the inner ocean of his mind or the ocean of the universal god. The hero myth itself, however, presents the quest of consciousness in social and historical terms: it takes place in the "real" world, the world of time and event; and it involves a hero who is the symbolic vessel of the whole culture's collective consciousness and the agent of their will to survive or their aspiration to power. In Europe during the Age of Discovery, however, such myths were better known in their romantic, conventionalized forms than in their primary forms. Centuries of literary and philosophical embellishment had substituted artifice and convention for mythopoetic spontaneity in epic poetry and tragedy. The Romans imitated the forms of the Greek poems and plays that inexplicably moved them, and in their concern with formal imitation they lost the sense of life inherent in the myths. The medieval scholars and troubadors ornamented and elaborated the received tradition, hiding the core of myth under a panoply of social and religious conventions, imposing rigid artistic categories on the received material, rather than illuminating the mythic essentials that transcend artificial distinctions of genre.
(Slotkin 29)
There are so many problems here I almost don't even know how to start. He has a serious down on courtly love (which he thinks is a distorted travesty of the myth of the hero who sexually conquers the Earth-mother) and will say nothing good about it. But my real issue is with the implication hidden in this passage that Greek poets were "free" of artifice and convention, when in fact the truth is anything but. Any oral tradition of poetry (which is what Homer is) is built of conventions. It has to be, because the poet has to have those blocks ready to hand as he's building his poem on the fly. And Greek drama, which I am significantly better acquainted with, is certainly not free of artifice. Greek drama is a highly artificial art form--which I don't mean in a negative sense. Artifice is not a bad thing; you can't turn a series of events into a story without it. And the mental picture Slotkin induces, of Euripides, of all people, warbling his native wood notes wild, is . . . well, it's freakin' hilarious. But it's also very very wrong.
The Greek poets were not innocent myth-makers, and if you want to talk about somebody "imposing rigid artistic categories on the received material," let's sit down and talk about Aristotle's theory of tragedy for a while. Slotkin is imposing a false dichotomy between "primitive" and "civilized" art, and while this irritates me for several reasons, the big one is that it denies artistic agency to "primitive" poets, "primitive" meaning those who work or worked in oral traditions or who come early in his teleological schema of chronological progress from "pure" myth to "artificial" poetry. I don't know enough about Delaware/Lenape traditions of story-telling and poetry to know if he's doing them the same disservice, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the answer is "yes."
So it's all very Campbellian, with a healthy side of The Golden Bough, and there's a Jungian anima wandering around and a Freudian Id, and I'm skeptical in several places, partly because I am always skeptical when twentieth century psychological schematics are imposed on pre-twenteith century people, and partly because Slotkin makes it all sound so simple when I know it's anything but.
(There's also a serious problem wherein nobody told him that More's Utopia is Janus-faced. It's a utopia, but it's also a satire. It cannot be read as simply an idealization of the New World without missing a good 50% to 90%, depending on where you draw that satirical line, of what More's actually doing.)
I love his point about European mythology about the West: "In the mythology of Europe, the West and its peoples were strongly associated with the kingdom of death and dreams, the underworld" (28). That puts such a dark and beautiful spin on the whole idea of exploration (and resonates for me with Hamlet's "undiscovered country") that I love it and distrust it at the same time.
But then I think Slotkin's straight up brilliant when he starts talking about the Puritans and how they understood the New World. He points out that the Puritans in America were far from being the only Puritans who decided that subjugation and extermination were the only way to deal with an inconvenient native people: cf. Cromwell and the Irish. He talks about the stark contrast in Puritan and Native American understandings of the divine, where for the Native American peoples, the divine was in the world and for Puritans, the divine was what Slotkin calls "otherworldly," which I think is not a great term, but what he means is that the divine is separate from the world. God can choose to reach down and affect the mortal, sublunary world of sin and suffering, but he is not part of that world. That's one of the reasons Jesus is a vital part of Christian mythology: he is the part of God that experiences the sublunary world in all its imperfection and pain. And then, significantly, returns to that perfect place outside the spheres of Creation when his Hero's Journey is complete.
(There's no place in Christian mythology to talk about whether Jesus' understanding of Heaven was changed by his sojourn in the world, as the Campbellian Hero's understanding of the world is changed by his sojourn in the underworld, but it's a really interesting question.)
Okay, sorry. Tangent. My point is that Slotkin's point is that the Puritans and Native Americans had diametrically opposed and incompatible views of how the divine and the human interact. This is coupled with another problem, which is the Puritans' understanding of their own cultural teleology, their mission statement, if you'll forgive the anachronism. (Maybe my favorite sentence in this chapter is "[Puritan] religion portrayed the progress of the soul as a rising up from the degradation of man's condition at birth to ultimate sanctification through divine grace--a kind of spiritual upward mobility" (37).") In setting out for the New World, the Puritans "desired above all [...] a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their dream: the outline of an idealized Puritan England, a Bible commonwealth, a city on a hill exemplifying the World of God to all the world" (38). The Native Americans are monstrously inconvenient to this mission, and even worse is the Puritans' us vs. them thinking, which is something inherent to Puritanism: the Elect vs. the damned, the godly vs. the ungodly, the New Jerusalem vs. the Wilderness. When they looked around them, they saw everything through the lens of "a psychological and spiritual quest, a quest for salvation in the wilderness of the human mind and soul. The physical world of America was but the physical type of this primary wilderness" (39). Puritans lived in a very Manichean world of stark contrast between good and evil, and they also lived by typology, which is the practice of reading everything in the Old Testament as a "type" or vehicle for the only true story, which is the New Testament. Once you get the hang of that, you start reading everything as typology, and like Procrustes' bed or Cinderella's stepsisters, you chop off bits as necessary to fit.
Slotkin is kind of cavalier about dates, since he argues that the Puritans saw their colonization of America in terms of Pilgrim's Progress--and while I think that comes to be true, it does help to remember that Pilgrim's Progress wasn't published until 1678, a good fifty years after the Mayflower found Plymouth Rock. But Bunyan is a valuable primary source for understanding Puritan thought and their conception of themselves (and Pilgrim's Progress has the advantage of being far more entertaining than the sermons and diaries that are your other primary sources).
Puritans also saw themselves as constantly besieged, constantly at war against the ungodly who sought to destroy them--a narrative that does not help when encountering cultures alien to your own. (I ended up drawing a little Puritan City on the Hill in the margin, with the Church of England as a besieging army on one side and the Native Americans as a besieging army on the other.) (Also, damn the word "siege." It never looks right no matter how I spell it.) And the final piece he articulates that I think is incredibly valuable is the way the Puritans' Manichean thought patterns dealt with evil:
To the Indian the wilderness was a god, whether its face at the moment was good or evil; as a god it deserved and received worship for both its good and evil, its beauty and its cruelty. Similarly, all the gods and the earth itself were referred to as members of one's own immediate family, as close blood-relations. For the Puritan the problem of religion was to winnow the wheat from the chaff, the good from the evil, and to preserve the former and extirpate the latter. The evil was of the world, of nature; the good was transcendent and supernatural. Hence it was quite appropriate to destroy the natural wilderness in the name of a higher good--and quite inappropriate for anyone to worship, as the Indians did, the world or the things of the world, such things being evil by nature.
(Slotkin 51)
I don't know if his representation of Native American beliefs is accurate, or if he's done some dichotomous thinking of his own to make the contrast with the Puritans stronger, but he is spot-on about Puritan beliefs about evil being a part of the world and good being separate from it. (This also explains a lot about Puritan conceptualizations of the body and sexualilty.) And about how those beliefs, in practice, justifying as they did any kind of slaughter or betrayal, were so cruel and disastrous for both the people and the land of America
November 16, 2016
UBC: Phelps, The Devil's Rooming House
The Devil's Rooming House: The True Story of America's Deadliest Female Serial Killer by M. William PhelpsMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I wanted to like this book. I really, truly did. It's about the abominable Amy Archer-Gilligan, who is the many, many times removed inspiration for the Brewster sisters in Arsenic and Old Lace. She ran a cross between a boarding house and a nursing home, and between 1908 and 1916 she murdered somewhere between five and sixty-six people. For their money. She also committed fraud, theft, embezzlement, what we would today call "elder abuse" . . . Two of her victims were her husbands. And she was a Tartuffe of the highest quality, claiming that the investigation was a witch hunt begun because some of her neighbors had taken against this poor, saintly Christian widow and that everyone who was suspicious of her ought to be ashamed of themselves.
I wanted to like this book. But it is honestly a mess.
Partly, this is because of the nature of the material. The Archer-Gilligan case is insanely complicated, because you have (1) the course of the perpetrator (fraud, embezzlement murder, etc.); (2) the widely varied courses of her victims; (3) an investigation that was begun by a reporter named Carlan Goslee years before the police got involved, which ranged hither, thither, and yon over Connecticut and Massachusetts, tracking down the relatives of Archer-Gilligan's victims and other interested parties; (4) the police investigation, including exhumations and autopsies of corpses with enough arsenic in them to kill five men apiece; (5) the trial, appeal, retrial, conviction, prison sentence, and Amy Archer-Gilligan's eventual committal to an insane asylum, where she died in 1962. That's a lot of trails to follow, and I don't know how to arrange it coherently, either.
But Phelps causes a lot of his own problems. He bounces back and forth in his chronology to create "narrative tension" rather than because it's the only way to tell the story (and I put "narrative tension" in quotes because that's not what his technique causes). He opens with one of Archer-Gilligan's borders who thinks he's being poisoned, but he never tells us what happened to that particular man. For reasons that remain entirely opaque to me, the beginning of the book describes the incredible, lethal heat wave of 1911, which--while a fascinating piece of forgotten American history--has nothing whatsoever to do with Amy Archer-Gilligan except for the fact that she was alive and murdering her boarders in Windsor, CT, at the time. He gets horrifically tangled in the chronology of one of Archer-Gilligan's victims, and ends up sneering at the newspapers for getting Smith's age wrong in his obituary, when--to the best of my ability to tell--it's Phelps who's wrong, and that's simply from doing the math on the information he provides. He leaves out bits of the story; for example, there's a gap between the DA saying emphatically it was first-degree murder or nothing and the DA accepting a plea of second-degree murder that makes it impossible to figure out what happened. He is a sloppy writer, using anachronistic slang (like saying Archer-Gilligan "lawyered up" (191) or that something "must have rattled her cage real good" (175)) . And he has the trait that I hate above all others, of using a word that sounds sort of like the right word, but actually means something entirely different, like "emphatically" for "empirically" (154). It happens again and again in this book, and it drives me straight up the wall.
So, fascinating material--and Phelps clearly did a metric fuck-ton of research--but lousy execution, leaving me disappointed and sad. This book could have been so awesome and it just missed its grip.
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November 13, 2016
Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, Chapter 1
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press-University Press of New England, 1973.
Chapter 1: Myth and Literature in a New World
Okay, so, first off, it is so very extremely 1973 in this book. Women don't exist; Native Americans have a monolithic culture and no subject position. This is exasperating. However, comma, the reason that this does not cause me to reject the book as not worth my time is that, even though he doesn't say so explicitly (because it's 1973 and he doesn't have to), Slotkin is examining the mythology and myth-making of the white male American. And because in that mythology women don't exist and Native Americans are just the second half of playing Cowboys and Indians, the blind spots in Slotkin's analysis are part of the very thing he's studying. He's demonstrating the myth at the same time he's analyzing it, and that in itself tells you something about how powerful the myth is.
Still, hoo boy and boy howdy, it is all 1973 up in here.
With that said, Slotkin still has things to say that are valuable. Let me quote:
And:
He's more than a little wobbly on the anthropology of how myth is formed--although he does remember to define "myth," which puts him one up on several historians and literary critics I have read. "Myth," in Slotkin's definition, is "a complex of narratives that dramatizes the world vision and historical sense of a people or culture, reducing centuries of experience into a constellation of compelling metaphors" (6). Now, there are enormous problems with this definition, including the idea that a "people" or a "culture" can be treated as a monolithic object, but the big one, and the one that he's wrestling with, is that American mythology isn't reducing "centuries of experience" into an archetypal narrative. When he was writing, America hadn't even made it to its bicentennial, and although you gain another century and a half if you start the clock with the first efforts at colonization, the fact still remains that what Slotkin is looking at isn't mythology as he's just defined it. It's the making of mythology, and part of his problem--I just realized--is that because other cultural mythologies were made in prehistoric eras or in cultures whose myth-making narratives were still primarily oral rather than written, meaning that all we've got are the myths at the point at which they were written down and therefore pinned like butterflies to a display board, he assumes that the myth-making process for them was fundamentally different from the myth-making process in America, rather than merely undocumented.
So there's a bunch of stuff he doesn't understand about how storytelling happens and how it does the cultural work it does, and he throws around terms like "universal archetype" with reckless abandon, but he seems to me to understand very clearly how myth works:
That part of Slotkin's argument I buy. I don't like the way he fails to distinguish between the subject position of his white male myth-makers and actual reality, and I think he's talking absolute nonsense when he tries to explain how artists create myths, as if the artist's conscious intentions had anything whatsoever to do with whether or not their audiences internalized their metaphors and narratives and made them part of the mythologizing process. (There's another myth that I think he's bought into without consciously being aware of it, which is the myth of the Great Artist.) But I like his distillation of the elements of white male American myth-making in the colonial period:
wilderness vs. paradise (the colonists' perception of the American continent as simultaneously incredibly hostile and incredibly welcoming; "wilderness," for Puritans, is a terrible thing--a better modern analogue would be "wasteland")
the lack of any external controls, in the shape of other technologically advanced civilizations, on expansion
the Native Americans, who were demonized and dehumanized into savage bestial devils (and the Puritans meant "devil" quite literally), who were always poised to attack and who had to be either destroyed or assimilated (i.e., converted, because making them become Christians would of course automatically mean that they would recognize the Puritans as the beloved children of divine providence, the God-ordained masters of the American continent, and become meek and obedient. Of course.)
exile (I think he's quite right to point out that even those colonists who came gladly would be subject to terrible homesickness, and those who didn't choose to return to Europe--because people did go back, it wasn't impossible--would be stuck with that feeling of displacement.)
So if you kind of ignore all the stuff that he's ignoring, because it's 1973 and he can get away with it, both, y'know, the large segments of the human race who don't get subject positions and the responsible use of anthropology and folkloric study (he makes grand sweeping generalizations about the mythologies of prehistoric and/or pre-print cultures and basically never bothers to cite examples), and focus on this as an exploration of white, male, phallocentric, patriarchal mythmaking, he's very good at articulating the patterns of storytelling that start to build the myth of the frontier. And that's the thing I'm reading him for.
Chapter 1: Myth and Literature in a New World
Okay, so, first off, it is so very extremely 1973 in this book. Women don't exist; Native Americans have a monolithic culture and no subject position. This is exasperating. However, comma, the reason that this does not cause me to reject the book as not worth my time is that, even though he doesn't say so explicitly (because it's 1973 and he doesn't have to), Slotkin is examining the mythology and myth-making of the white male American. And because in that mythology women don't exist and Native Americans are just the second half of playing Cowboys and Indians, the blind spots in Slotkin's analysis are part of the very thing he's studying. He's demonstrating the myth at the same time he's analyzing it, and that in itself tells you something about how powerful the myth is.
Still, hoo boy and boy howdy, it is all 1973 up in here.
With that said, Slotkin still has things to say that are valuable. Let me quote:
A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand change in their psychology, their world view, their ethics, and their institutions.
(Slotkin 4-5)
And:
It is by now a commonplace that our adherence to the "myth of the frontier"--the conception of America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top--has blinded us to the consequences of the industrial and urban revolution and to the need for social reform and a new concept of individual and communal welfare.
(Slotkin 5)
He's more than a little wobbly on the anthropology of how myth is formed--although he does remember to define "myth," which puts him one up on several historians and literary critics I have read. "Myth," in Slotkin's definition, is "a complex of narratives that dramatizes the world vision and historical sense of a people or culture, reducing centuries of experience into a constellation of compelling metaphors" (6). Now, there are enormous problems with this definition, including the idea that a "people" or a "culture" can be treated as a monolithic object, but the big one, and the one that he's wrestling with, is that American mythology isn't reducing "centuries of experience" into an archetypal narrative. When he was writing, America hadn't even made it to its bicentennial, and although you gain another century and a half if you start the clock with the first efforts at colonization, the fact still remains that what Slotkin is looking at isn't mythology as he's just defined it. It's the making of mythology, and part of his problem--I just realized--is that because other cultural mythologies were made in prehistoric eras or in cultures whose myth-making narratives were still primarily oral rather than written, meaning that all we've got are the myths at the point at which they were written down and therefore pinned like butterflies to a display board, he assumes that the myth-making process for them was fundamentally different from the myth-making process in America, rather than merely undocumented.
So there's a bunch of stuff he doesn't understand about how storytelling happens and how it does the cultural work it does, and he throws around terms like "universal archetype" with reckless abandon, but he seems to me to understand very clearly how myth works:
The first colonists saw in American an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation, but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience.
(Slotkin 5)
That part of Slotkin's argument I buy. I don't like the way he fails to distinguish between the subject position of his white male myth-makers and actual reality, and I think he's talking absolute nonsense when he tries to explain how artists create myths, as if the artist's conscious intentions had anything whatsoever to do with whether or not their audiences internalized their metaphors and narratives and made them part of the mythologizing process. (There's another myth that I think he's bought into without consciously being aware of it, which is the myth of the Great Artist.) But I like his distillation of the elements of white male American myth-making in the colonial period:
wilderness vs. paradise (the colonists' perception of the American continent as simultaneously incredibly hostile and incredibly welcoming; "wilderness," for Puritans, is a terrible thing--a better modern analogue would be "wasteland")
the lack of any external controls, in the shape of other technologically advanced civilizations, on expansion
the Native Americans, who were demonized and dehumanized into savage bestial devils (and the Puritans meant "devil" quite literally), who were always poised to attack and who had to be either destroyed or assimilated (i.e., converted, because making them become Christians would of course automatically mean that they would recognize the Puritans as the beloved children of divine providence, the God-ordained masters of the American continent, and become meek and obedient. Of course.)
exile (I think he's quite right to point out that even those colonists who came gladly would be subject to terrible homesickness, and those who didn't choose to return to Europe--because people did go back, it wasn't impossible--would be stuck with that feeling of displacement.)
So if you kind of ignore all the stuff that he's ignoring, because it's 1973 and he can get away with it, both, y'know, the large segments of the human race who don't get subject positions and the responsible use of anthropology and folkloric study (he makes grand sweeping generalizations about the mythologies of prehistoric and/or pre-print cultures and basically never bothers to cite examples), and focus on this as an exploration of white, male, phallocentric, patriarchal mythmaking, he's very good at articulating the patterns of storytelling that start to build the myth of the frontier. And that's the thing I'm reading him for.
November 12, 2016
UBC, Rule, The I-5 Killer
The I-5 Killer by Ann RuleMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is another get in, get it done, get out account of a serial killer, this one Randall Woodfield, the I-5 Killer, who committed robbery, kidnapping, rape, sodomy (which by its legal definition seems to be an umbrella term for any kind of sex that isn't human-penis-in-human-vagina: Woodfield was fond of fellatio), and murder. He was convicted of the murder of Shari Hull and charged but never prosecuted for the murders of Donna Eckard and Jannell Jarvis (after Woodfield was sentenced to life plus 165 years in the Oregon State Penitentiary, the Shasta County, California, District Attorney decided the ruinous cost of the prosecution wasn't worth the outside chance that Woodfield would not only be sentenced to death but would actually have the sentence carried out). Since Rule's book came out in 1984 (revised edition in 1988) and Woodfield's $12 million libel suit against her was dismissed, he has been linked by DNA testing to the murders of Cherie Ayers, Darci (or Darcey, sources vary) Fix, Douglas Altic, and Julie Reitz (all of whom he was strongly suspected of murdering in 1984).
A lot of murders in America in the twentieth century seemed to have been committed because, as a very broad generalization, there is a significant subset of men who never made the cognitive/psychological leap to understanding that women are human beings who have independent existences, and that that is not wrong. To put it glibly, men whose world view fails the Bechdel Test. And I don't just mean serial killers like Bundy or Brudos or Woodfield, although certainly you can pick that out as an underlying theme in the careers of a number of American serial killers. I'm also thinking of men who stalk and murder ex-girlfriends or ex-wives, or who murder before they even get to the "ex" part. And I'm thinking of Jon Krakauer's book Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, in which a big part of what's going on, both with the Lafferty brothers' turn to Mormon fundamentalism and with their eventual recourse to murder, is the desperate attempts of men who feel entitled to patriarchal control over the female members of their households and see that control slipping away. (For a man like that, his control is always slipping, no matter how obedient his wife (or wives) and daughters try to be. Ron Lafferty turned to the fundamentalist Mormon church because, when he felt he didn't have enough control and reality suggested that perhaps that was because he wasn't supposed to have that kind of micromanaging draconian control, the fundamentalist Mormon church reassured him that, no, it was reality that was wrong.
We have a mismatch, in other words, between two sets of cultural expectations, one that the world works like a fifties sitcom (Father Knows Best, to pick the most obviously, glaringly iconic example), and one that the world is made up of human beings, roughly half of whom are XX and half of whom are XY, and that being one or the other doesn't entitle you to anything. I hope that as the decades roll past, the expectations of patriarchal entitlement will become less ingrained--and less damaging when thwarted, something that little boys can get over, instead of growing up to commit murder simply because their "toys" refuse to wait quietly in the "toybox" when not being played with. No, I'm not saying that all men are like this; I'm saying that a remarkably broad cross-section of men who commit murder are men who murder because it's the only way they can control either one specific woman or, in the case of serial killers, women in general.
Once she's dead, she can't say no. She can't get up and leave. She can't choose another man.
Woodfield used I-5 to spread his crimes out between jurisdictions, ranging from Washington to California. This gave him more time in 1980-81 than it would today, but the law enforcement departments of the I-5 corridor deserve tremendous kudos for figuring out so quickly that they were all looking for the same guy. And for finding him. That's the brighter side to cases like this. For every one guy like Woodfield, there are a dozen or two dozen or three dozen guys who want with every atom of their beings to stop him. And those guys are the reason I read books about guys like Woodfield.
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