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  • Poet, Lamp Designer, Artist: Why More People Should Read Mina Loy

    Poet, Lamp Designer, Artist: Why More People Should Read Mina Loy

    Written by Anna Dolliver

    Perhaps the magic stems from the lyrical cadence of her words, the lattice of lines easily read in shifting orders and voices. Perhaps the intrigue emanates from the eccentric clothing she wore, a trash-to-treasure wardrobe filled with knickknacks crafted into composite art. Whatever the source, Mina Loy designs an ethereal, brazen and beautiful dreamscape in the realm of her poetry, inviting readers to question the roles of gender, sexuality, art, and order during the Modernist era in a style whimsically reminiscent of folklore’s rambunctious faeries.

    But who, you might wonder, is Mina Loy?

    Despite her influential work as a Modernist and Futurist poet, few readers who aren’t specifically Modernist scholars have heard of this Anglo-Jewish woman’s poetry or visual art. Loy worked in the same circles as her more well-known contemporaries; she spoke with Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso, and she published poems alongside writers like T. S. Eliot. But just as her poems drive readers to question binaries, explore alternate meanings through ambiguity, and revise and restructure the ways in which they interpret art and poetry, Loy constantly reinvented herself. As Roger L. Conover notes in the foreword to his collection of her work, “[S]he  refused identification with many groups and causes that seemed natural for her to adopt … Rather than allowing herself to be fixed by an identity, she interloped, using her various identities to transform the cultures and social milieus she inhabited.” Loy devoted her time to creating art, refusing to censor or pigeonhole her work for the sake of her popularity. She crossed mediums and genres, crafting lamps and jewelry alongside poems and paintings, dabbling in futurism and Dadaism. Many of her contemporaries criticized her work for its brazen and graphic exploration of sexuality, to the point that the poet Amy Lowell refused to publish her work in journals that included Loy’s poetry.

    In a time when polarized views increasingly drive people apart, Loy’s binary-bending works encourage introspection and constant reflection for the patient reader or viewer.

    Over the past few years, scholars have grown more accepting of women’s voices in the literary canon. As writers create Women Surrealist Survival Kits and local presses reprint books that examine the suppression of women’s writing, more people have sought to recognize marginalized artists of the present and past. While a few writers have published books including or discussing Loy’s work in the last couple of years, her name remains far from familiar to the average reader.

    Where could a new reader of Loy start? For a poem that features a mishmash menagerie of her formal structures and thematic content, you could turn to “Songs to Johannes,” her most popular work. Loy’s narrator overlaps her explicit expressions of sexuality with references to feathers and flight, blending her and Johannes’ relationship with a winged sanctity that couples nature with religion. She brings the two together through section X of the poem, which reads “Shuttle-cock and battle-door / A little pink-love / And feathers are strewn,” consummating the couple by the swing of a badminton racket, launching a shuttle-cock that transforms into a living bird in flight. By describing the lovers’ connection with euphemistic and casual allusions to sport and transformation, Loy criticizes the stigmas surrounding overt sexuality for women. Similarly, Loy pairs her descriptions of sexuality with religious iconography, referencing how the pair have “broken flesh with one another / At the profane communion table,” to question how the reader can reinterpret boundaries between sexuality and religion. Instead of separating the two as another poet might, she suggests a correlation between them, coupling the seemingly contradictory concepts through their shared imagery.  Granted, she criticizes aspects of organized religion in her word choice, but she encourages a more flexible interpretation rather than disavowing religion entirely. The ambiguous narrator sprawls across her words as both pagan bird-faerie and religious light-angel, fluctuating across identities as she boldly claims her sexuality.

    Just as Loy experiments with nature and myth, she encourages a revision of chronology through the course of the poem’s events. Some sections seem like calls toward the past rather than the narrator’s current predicament, as when she describes the “unimaginable family / Bird-like abortions / With human throats” — more images that set the narrator in the company of small animals turned macabre through human appendages (54). Other images, like the hypothetical “birth to a butterfly / With the daily news / Printed in blood on its wings” and the intimate knowledge of the “Wire-Puller” that would set back Time, restructure the story in reference to possible futures (54 – 55). These temporal shifts encourage the concept of a narrator who does not suffer the typical restraints of a human life, a concept that invites the reader to contemplate the influence of the binaries — such as animal and human, past and present, sanctity and sexuality — that humans consider natural. This subversion suggests a liminal space that emerges through thinking beyond the boundaries that physically and socially constrain human life. Rather than anthropomorphizing the machine like her fellow Futurists, Loy breathes life into the fantasies present in nature, incorporating Icarian images and faerie phrasings to speak to Greek myths that transcend time and surpass the limitations of space.

    For a shorter poem that incorporates her recurring images of felines and fertility, look into “Parturition.” Loy presents a cat in one brief stanza near the end, unifying realization and resolve as she claims the feline’s identity for her poem’s subject. After beginning the childbirth poem with sensations of her pain, she introduces a human figure: the portrait-painter. The painter sets up the contemporary expectations of women before a subversion in the final line, singing “All the girls are tid’ly did’ly / All the girls are nice / Whether they wear their hair in curls / Or—.” This sudden break from the painter’s song, aside from the more obvious questioning of whether “all the girls are nice” at all, opens limitless possibilities for the visual interpretation of the girls. At first glance, the question may seem limited to the narrator’s hair, but as Loy continues describing the poem’s subject in relation to various animals, she transforms from human to beast and back again, adding nuance to her identity with each new mask she observes. The speaker separates herself from the expectations set for women by the portrait-painter and admits her concerns surrounding childbirth, such as the “blind kittens” who do not yet know of the social structures and stigmas present in living as a human, especially as a women, with her artistic interests. As she couples the concept of a cat — often accentuated with mystical or macabre imagery — with the woman, Loy works to encompass the breadth of women’s experience and capabilities, surpassing the typical human expectations and subverting them through her speakers’ explorations of identity.

    Other works of Mina Loy, such as her “Feminist Manifesto” and her “Aphorisms on Futurism,” provide examples of her innovative poetic structures, while also offering a glance into Loy’s social complexities regarding her former affiliation with the misogynistic futurists and her reclamation of their ideas into her own feminist work. Or you may explore the startling, surreal impact of Loy’s visual art, from her Communal Cot collage to her mixed media Christ on a Clothesline. In a time when polarized views increasingly drive people apart, Loy’s binary-bending works encourage introspection and constant reflection for the patient reader or viewer. Though her name is unfamiliar to many — perhaps due to her determination to challenge social and artistic boundaries while being a woman of Jewish heritage and indeterminate genre — Mina Loy continues to complicate the emotions and perceptions of those who engage with her work. Wherever you start with Loy, you will find paintings and poems that challenge, captivate, unnerve, and innovate all at once.

     

    Photo by Man Ray

  • We Live in a Dystopian Prequel: Now What?

    We Live in a Dystopian Prequel: Now What?

    Written by Christie Basson

    Global warming. Women losing all reproductive rights. Technology encroaching on every aspect of our lives. A growing distaste for freedom of speech. Dystopia has never seemed more realistic. 

    So, what do we do when our day-to-day lives read like the prologue of a dystopian novel?

    If the popularity of The Handmaid’s Tale, Black Mirror, or The Hunger Games is any indication, we flock to media that sheds light on the what-ifs: What if our government decided women were total property of the state? What if technology outpaced our morality? What if the state had complete control over our every move and thought? 

    Since its origin, the dystopian genre has been looking at the what-ifs of its time periods. The genre began as a mode for cultural and political commentary in the 19th century through political speeches and essays, though it wasn’t until 1921 with the publication of We that the dystopian novel took its more familiar form. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel, We, deals with citizens forced to live under a totalitarian government that suppressed any  creativity or passion. These tropes later became markers of the genre, and influenced later authors like George Orwell and Ayn Rand.

    Over time, the genre continued to build upon itself in every time period it was written in as new threats to society solidified and became rich subject matter. In our time, these fears seem to have solidified in new and terrifying ways, encouraged by a society that relies on speedy communication. Never before has information been so easily accessible and the nature of our sharing, posting, and tweeting, has changed not only our ways of discussing our fears, but the fears themselves.  To fully understand the importance of this iteration of the genre in modern times, however, one must first look at its progression throughout the last century to properly understand the context. Here are some great dystopian works of the twentieth century.

    Then

    In the 30s and 40s there was political unrest and revolution abundant — it’s no wonder this directly engendered the kind of atmosphere where authors often imagined the very worst of what could happen. With one world war barely ended and another looming on the horizon, dystopia of this period dealt mostly with government control, free will, and the power of the state.

    In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, humans are genetically engineered to live within a certain class. The smarter you are, the higher you climb the social ladder. Just don’t ask too many questions or you might be exiled to Iceland.

    Huxley says: “…[M]ost men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”

    In Anthem by Ayn Rand, individuality is no more — people aren’t named and refer to themselves in the collective. Technological advancement is a rationed activity, lives are decided by outside forces, and love can’t be expressed because there’s no “we” in “I love you”.

    Rand says: “To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.”

    In the 50s and 60s, the rise of communism and the fear of the domino effect meant a mistrust of the general population as the world dealt with the a global threat that was hard to predict and harder to stop.  As can be expected, the concerns of dystopian authors shifted accordingly. More interested in war and governments’ hidden motivations behind it, authors of this period focused on propaganda, censorship, and the importance of freedom of speech (and, rather disturbingly, thought).

    In 1984 by George Orwell, the government knows what you’re thinking. In fact, the Thought Police and Big Brother are always watching through two-way telescreens so be careful not to commit any thought crime – a.k.a. controversial ideas that question or oppose the government. Those who do will be “cured” (read: tortured until they’re brainwashed like the rest of the population).

    Orwell says: “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

    In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, it’s firemen as you’ve never known them. Books are banned and firemen are the ones tasked with incinerating them. An illiterate society, nuclear bombs, and an eight-legged robot dog: what else could a novel need?

    Bradbury says: “We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

    With threats of war fading, society in the 70s and 80s turned its attention to newfangled issues. Human rights and essential freedoms, the rise of corporations, and the decline of economic prosperity meant dystopian authors had more than enough material to work with.  

    For those who have been living under a rock or have not seen the Hulu adaption, the world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is simple. Woman = child-maker. Those who are part of the rapidly shrinking fertile population are treated as property of the theonomic dictatorship. These women essentially become walking uteruses – something that seems less and less far-fetched every day.

    Atwood says: “Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”

    The Earthsea Saga, written by Ursula K. Le Guin, was one of the first to break the mold of white main characters that dominated the genre. This unique coming of age story draws inspiration from Native American legends and Norse Mythology, features a dark-skinned hero, and includes dragons (!!!).

    Le Guin says, “War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off.”

    Now

    The turn of the twentieth century brought a turn in the genre. What was feverishly speculated about in previous decades could now be disproved — the robots didn’t rise up, the world didn’t succumb to nuclear war, and instead of making us super-humanly smart, technology has made us complacent. The kind of pessimism seen in modern dystopia revolves around how we have grappled with certain what-ifs and the directions we have allowed technology, government, or the state of the environment to go; instead of far-off imagined futures that might happen, these kinds of dystopian novels feel more current in that they deal with problems we’re creating right now and the aftermaths we will have to face in the not-so-far future.

    It’s a difficult time to distinguish between the issues that can be remedied with effort and those that are past the point of no return. Pick a current issue that keeps you up at night and you could probably find a dystopian novel to match. In our modern times, you could even find those classic dystopian novels enjoying a renaissance in a new medium, such as the upcoming Bladerunner 2049 and Fahrenheit 451 movies, and The Handmaid’s Tale television show. This phenomenon isn’t limited to the classics –  the film rights of new dystopian novels are rapidly being bought by film and television studios (think  The Maze Runner, The Darkest Minds, or The 100). With the rise of the young adult dystopia sub-genre and numerous dystopian adaptions for the big screen, many of these classic (or wholly modern) tales become accessible to new fans who wouldn’t necessarily read the books – be that for lack of enthusiasm for the genre or even books in general.

    Who knew — your Netflix binging was actually a master class in survival for the end of the world as we know it.

    An expansion of the dystopian genre means that these narratives reach a wider audience, though the changes created in bringing the narratives to this new medium cannot be ignored. In reimagining the classics, it is impossible not to have our current societal environment influence how these adaptations are produced and creatively executed. On one other hand, modern adaptations mean that producers can add to or gloss over that which was lacking in the original novels. For example, the Hulu version of The Handmaid’s Tale has a relatively diverse cast, but in the original book, that inclusivity is rather… lacking. As Angelica Jade Bastién writes, black people in Atwood’s novel are “mentioned in only a few sentences to alert readers that they’ve been rounded up and sent to some colony in the Midwest.” To Bastién, this move “resembles South Africa’s apartheid” and “feels like the mark of a writer unable to reckon with how race would compound the horrors of a hyper-Evangelical-ruled culture.” While the show faced criticism for its representation of racial issues, remaking the story in 2018 means that producers can aspire to a more inclusive reality than its source material and will be held to this new expectation.  

    Of course, this 21st century awareness expands to recently written novels as well. Authors like Maggie Shen King and Tahereh Mafiare are writing acclaimed dystopian novels with diverse protagonists about issues that haven’t been explored previously, expanding not only the subject matter, but the audience as well. Diverse dystopian novels written by authors who experience these issues more acutely means that we have material where the dystopian future is a little more realistic, reflecting the times and the globality of these issues.

    In a world where freedom of the press is dubious, women have to fight for the rights to their own bodies, and refugees are treated as criminals instead of victims, it is no wonder we grasp onto all things fictitious. Dystopian novels had always been an exemplary part of imagination on the author’s part — half-fantastic worldbuilding, half-cautionary tale. However, some of the age-old trends we see and love in our favourite dystopia have started to feel more like fact and less like fiction. Things that seemed unlikely, ridiculous even, have one by one happened in the United States and other nations, which raises a new question: Do we still enjoy dystopia when it’s no longer far-away and unlikely?

    Although there are those who will scoff at the modern dystopian novel (and the genre’s tendency towards a YA audience) it is impossible to ignore its merit, especially in light of the current state of things. For close to a century we have used these books to measure the likelihood of some narratives playing out; we can follow the events that landed this imaginary world in their predicament and appreciate the fact that we would never fall for the same plot. Not only can it serve as a cautionary tale or a fantasy of what-ifs, it serves as a way for us to process and dissect our current culture. Not to mention, it’s a coping mechanism. If it happens every Tuesday on HBO, what are the odds of our worst fear actually being realized?

    So what changes when the fictitious gets a little too close for comfort? Is dystopia now even scarier than it was before? One thing we can say if this is in fact the prequel to a dystopia: we’ll be prepared. Things that previously seemed possible only between the pages of a novel are now played out  on the news — and that can be terrifying. What was once fiction is now fact, and our society — and the genre — must adapt. Who knew — your Netflix binging was actually a master class in survival for the end of the world as we know it. 

    Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo

  • Misguided Bookstores and Scornful Critics: The Importance of Horror in Literature

    Misguided Bookstores and Scornful Critics: The Importance of Horror in Literature

    Written by Alex Taylor

    The other day, as I was walking through a bookstore looking for a copy of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves — this great horror book that all my peers had told me I absolutely needed to read — I found myself lost. As highly raved about as this book was, I couldn’t find the book anywhere. Imagine my surprise when I realized that, of all the genres, from Manga to Graphic Novels to Romance, there was no section for Horror.

    At first, I thought this had to be a mistake. I went past each of the shelves again, searching for the books and authors I loved. I found Lovecraft tucked away in Science Fiction, King in New Fiction, and Poe in Literary Fiction. These authors, whose texts speak to and about each other and should be tucked closely together in conversation with one another, were scattered about the store, isolated. Sure, the argument can be made that H.P. Lovecraft belongs in Science Fiction, and that all of Stephen King’s books belong in New Fiction because they’re always coming out, but it remains significant that these texts are forced into secondary genres when what really defines them is horror.

    And yet, for one reason or another, people are afraid to label them as horror.

    When I finally found House of Leaves, it was nestled under Fiction. Oftentimes, when horror texts become popular enough to achieve their deserved literary acclaim, they are wrenched free from their rightful genre and moved to something more palatable in a move that drips with disdain for such a ‘lowbrow’ genre. It’s a problem not limited to House of Leaves — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one famous example, and it’s the same reason why I was met with such surprise when I told people I was reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved for my American Gothic and Horror class. They told me that they didn’t realize the novel—a story about hauntings, torture, ghosts, and murder—had anything to do with the horror genre (a misunderstanding explored in an article by Grady Hendrix found here). And that’s because of the tendency to think that if something is worthwhile, it can’t be horror—a fundamental misunderstanding.  

    Part of why horror is often considered a lower genre is because it is disgusting or disturbing. But so is our world.

    Now, to be fair, many bookstores do have a horror section—obviously, this isn’t an indictment of every last one. But my personal experience still points to a larger problem: the fact that the horror genre is often looked down upon as a “lesser” form of storytelling than other types of literary fiction. The common misconception lies in the underlying assumption that horror is only meant to scare the reader and is therefore a singular kind of entertainment. One of the biggest mistakes is to assume that horror is a surface-level genre — that there is no reason to dig deeper. It ignores the fact that much of horror reveals anxieties and worries about our society and the people in it. I think most people would agree that to say Frankenstein is a monster story with no insight into the human condition would be a false and belittling statement. Just as Frankenstein is about scientific overreach and aching loneliness, other horror texts are so much more than their monsters. To portray Lovecraft’s Cthulhu as a mindless ‘Godzilla with tentacles,’ is to ignore what he represents — the ultimate smallness of Earth and humanity in an infinite universe.

    Horror holds up a mirror to the world, unafraid of just how strange or horrible the reflected image is.  It’s less important to think about a text as being scary or not than it is to consider why it scares us — just because something is ugly doesn’t mean you should avoid looking at it. Part of why horror is often considered a lower genre is because it is disgusting or disturbing. But so is our world — and we can’t fault stories that, through metaphors and monsters, show us how terrible we can be. Zombie narratives, for example, reveal our anxieties about mass outbreaks of disease and losing ourselves completely to illness. Werewolf stories reveal the inherent and uncontrollable violence in people while pointing to the fact that humans are animals too. Ghost stories—like Beloved — are stories of pain, regret, and loss, their “unfinished business” revealing our anxiety of not doing enough with our brief, unpredictable time on this planet. And the monsters of horror tackle some of the fundamental questions of religion: what happens to us after we die? Is it possible to come back? In many ways, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, H.P. Lovecraft, and more all argue the same thing: maybe, but not without consequences. Not without losing part or most of who you are.

    Even beyond the monsters, horror makes us look at what we most fear about ourselves. Take a look at Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House or any of Poe’s guilt-ridden narrators, and you’ll find hugely important discussions about who we are and what we’re capable of. If you want to know to what limits someone who is spurned will go, look no further than Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” or for the reasoning behind why we commit self-destructive acts, “The Imp of the Perverse.” Psychological horror is a process of self-reflection, of looking within and realizing that monsters don’t have to be external, alien figures. We read and watch slashers about deranged serial killers to see just how much a “safe” suburban environment can be disrupted by a single individual, to see how fragile our world really is — to see just how easily it can all break down at the hands of someone who might otherwise be just like us.

    Horror allows for the safe exploration of human fear. It is a genre that lets people look the source of their terror in the eye, to examine from all angles the object of their disgust from the comfort of their living room chair. It pushes boundaries that other genres cannot or will not because it is inherently transgressive. Trauma that can only be hinted at in other genres takes center stage in horror — both Beloved and stories by other authors like Carmen Maria Machado use the frightening and the supernatural as a means of showcasing the terror in suffering. And, more and more often, horror is being used by people of color and other oppressed groups as a way of exploring their own social and political anxieties. Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out showcases a particular form of liberal racism that often lies buried, one that many people fail or outright refuse to acknowledge. So it makes sense why there would be such an undeserved negative reaction to it — nobody wants to look at something horrible or disgusting. But sometimes, you have to. It’s important to recognize that people aren’t always good; that the world can be a horrible, tragic, and disturbing place. Fear is one of the greatest motivators in existence, so why should the genre that employs it the most be the most disdained?

    Horror has been given carte blanche to show things that happen in the world in ways that no other genre can. Horror relishes in the horrible deaths, traumatic experiences, and gruesome mutilation — to name a few things — that other genres shy away from for the sake of their audience. And while the stories may be intense, thrilling, and frightening, they’re often equally subtle. They teach you lessons, warn you of the dangers of the world, and you may not even realize it. They can be political commentaries, cautionary tales, suggestions of how to make a better world — and yes, they can sometimes scare you.

    Digging deeper into horror texts isn’t just a good idea, it’s necessary. Just as we wouldn’t boil Moby Dick down to chasing whales, these texts require careful analysis. Monsters like whales, vampires, and tentacled alien creatures are more than what they seem to be— if being predatory was the only thing that made a monster scary, there would be no reason to be afraid of many of the creatures in Lovecraft’s mythos. But careful examination doesn’t happen when an entire genre is dismissed off-hand as mere entertainment (as if being entertaining is a negative quality in the search for worthwhile fiction). So the next time you’re at your local bookstore, demand that they dedicate a section to horror. Find something that truly terrifies you and stare it in the eye, refusing to look away until you understand why it has the effect on you that it does. Because that’s what horror is all about — facing our fears.

    Photo found on WDEF.com

  • The Case for Video Games as a Compelling Form of Literature

    The Case for Video Games as a Compelling Form of Literature

    Written by Sydney Stewart

    When someone mentions video games, you probably think immediately of games like Fortnite, Super Mario Bros., or Call of Duty – not exactly games with stories that would fit seamlessly in the pages of a book. However, I would say that it’s time to start considering video games as legitimate mediums for effective storytelling. While many video games are indeed simple games where your only goal is to shoot as many characters as possible, there are numerous video games where character development, plot mapping, and world-building are just as important as the the death toll in these other games. Video games offer well-composed plots and characters while providing an immersive experience in the wonderfully rich and colorful world of the game, where your autonomy contributes to and can drastically shift the path of the narrative. These features – inventive plots, relatable characters, complete immersion, and autonomy – certainly earn video games a different reputation than their current stereotype of mindless, simplistic pastimes.

    The plots of many video games work to convey messages about the world and how it ought to work, all whilst deepening your playing experience. The award-winning Portal franchise exemplifies the power of complex plots. While you may play a nameless character that solves puzzles to escape a mad robot, you confront the hard questions and potential pitfalls of constant scientific and technological development (as this robot has gone mad in her quest for scientific innovation). Another exemplary video game that utilizes exceptional plot structure (and rewarded for this work with numerous accolades and awards) is Assassin’s Creed. This game-turned-franchise grapples with the long-running question of autocratic societies and importance of free-will, and brings up the modern anxieties of threats to freedom and peace. Assassin’s Creed mirrors plots found in dystopian novels, but you aren’t simply reading about stories that bring up these big questions. Rather, you’re thrust into the world in which these things are playing out and are expected do something about it. This immersive effect is achieved also in the expansive array of characters in video games.

    The story no longer becomes an event that is happening to someone else, but rather something that is happening to you. Wouldn’t you be a little more invested in the story if that story was actually yours?

    In addition to the colorful plots of video games, there are the compelling and intriguing characters that populate video games who all contribute towards creating a world bursting with life. The characters that inhabit the world of the video game and interact with your character are deceptively complex, and have backstories and traits you can uncover through gameplay even if they aren’t the main focus of the story. This attention to all characters further contributes to the complex world the player can explore and provide the game with life and depth. There is, of course, the main character, or the character you play: they may be premade and neatly packaged with proper backstory, motivation, and personality by the game developers, or they may be a character you create yourself.

    In creating your own character, you can either concoct a character with an illustrious backstory and complex personality, or you can project your likeness onto the character. Naturally, in making the character a mini-you, the character becomes as interesting as you are – to drive the plot forwards, you can place yourself into unfamiliar situations and consider how you may react. By providing the opportunity to place yourself quite literally into the video game, the line between the player and the character, as well as reality and the story before you becomes blurred. The story no longer becomes an event that is happening to someone else, but rather something that is happening to you. Wouldn’t you be a little more invested in the story if that story was actually yours?

            In addition to the varied and well-constructed plots and characters that you can manipulate to reflect yourself, video games offer an immersive and engrossing experience in their world-building. You can hear and see everything happening around your character or in other parts of the video game’s world, and you aren’t limited to the main character’s perspective as often as you might be with a book. Video games don’t place the onus on you to create the mental images of what is being described – rather, you are placed into the thick of conflict. In video games, you witness and experience all of these pivotal plot points in a more tangible way than in a story. In fact, by watching the story manifest around you, it becomes easier to suspend disbelief and believe in the story being told. You are fully integrated into the narrative, and you confront those real-world questions firsthand. Further, you can explore the beautiful world crafted by expert game designers – and I do mean explore. In open-world role playing games (RPG’s for short), you can wander through the setting in which the story takes place, whether this be a postapocalyptic Nevadan desert (like in Fallout: New Vegas) or a seemingly endless galactic empire (as in the Mass Effect franchise). Much like the vivid and in-depth worlds created by Tolkien or George R. R. Martin, an incredibly rich and detailed universe awaits you – except now, you can interact with this world, unlock some of its mysteries, and discover new plot points or characters that only deepen your experience and the story being told. 

            Sometimes, you only experience and react to the plot points around you with maybe a few side quests or two before you  uncover the predetermined story you set out to play. In some games, however, you are an autonomous agent, and can manipulate the path and eventual ending that the narrative will take with your actions and reactions. Your decisions influence the world around you, and often, these decisions aren’t easy. One game that performs this task exceptionally well is Dragon Age: Inquisition, whose effective work in integrating the player and leaving them with ground-breaking autonomy in the game earned it the title of Game of the Year in 2014. Some decisions the player has to make involve choosing which of your companions dies in order to save your character, whether you allow one of your companions to kill her friend-turned-traitor, or whether to permit a man to continue abusing toxic substances in order to become more powerful. You, the player, have complete autonomy and dictate the outcome of character’s lives and the fate of the world before you. You control the narrative and the plot. For all intents and purposes, you become the writer of a story – an exhilarating step forward in how we tell our stories. 

            Storytelling shifts constantly. Due to technological developments, the medium with which we tell our stories is changing from the easily recognizable forms of literature or film to the unfamiliar. Video games depict stories in powerful, pioneering, and unprecedented ways. People tend to primarily recognize video games for their technological innovations like graphic capability and virtual reality, instead of their abundance of rich storytelling. Video games take advantage of the modern technology we have in order to tell stories in an innovative way, and should be regarded as just of an authoritative medium for storytelling as the books we’ve grown familiar with in our lives.

    Photograph by Patrick T. Fallon — Bloomberg via Getty Images

  • The Epistolary Form and Trauma in The Star of the Sea

    The Epistolary Form and Trauma in The Star of the Sea

    Written by Kevin LaTorre

    Conventional views of literature value the immersive effect of a story, so much so that most writers would accept “believable world building” as a high compliment. But what happens when novelists choose to remind the reader that the pages are fiction, consciously devised by someone real? In that instance, the form of the novel—its selected arrangement— becomes as important as the novel’s story.

    Including metafictional commentary can be a gamble for some readers: if the novel’s world admits to being fiction, they may lose the emotional connection to the characters in the novel, and, perhaps, interest in the book. On the other hand, other readers, such as co-editor of Psychopomp journal, Sequoia Nagamatsu, find that “reality, physical, metaphysical, mental, and emotional reality is rarely neat, linear, and contained.” As such, readers may find that experimental forms more faithfully depict the fragmented, unknowable spaces of our lives, and would read the text more gratefully because of the choice. To these readers, interrupting the conventional “immersion” through experimental presentation best highlights the content, especially if that content involves suffering.

    One experimentally-arranged form is the epistolary novel, meaning a story compiled from characters’ letters or diary entries, where there is sometimes one narrator, but often multiple. Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula is the example of the epistolary genre, and thus the reference point for all others.  Jonathan Russell Clark in Read It Forward refers to it as “exemplary epistolary,” as it presents letters, journal entries, and telegrams as tools with which to unspool its plot. But in Dracula, the reader can trust the characters to give the objective truth of the tale. Every word Jonathan Harker, Dr. Seward, and other characters write reflects their absolute goodness as they pursue the absolute evil of the vampire. The modern narrative trends of form, especially the post-modern dissatisfaction with simplified, moral narratives, provide no such luxury to the reader.

    Joseph O’Connor’s 2004 Star of the Sea pushes the boundaries of the epistolary genre, its experimental form rejecting the reliable narration of a conventional structure to attempt a fragmented portrayal of the Irish Famine in 1847. Like Dracula, it records a dastardly mystery of murder and vengeance which the characters investigate. Like Dracula, its form uses various disjointed sources to tell the story, though Star is more historical fiction than horror. But the diversity of of its records intentionally grows overwhelming: the plot unfolds from an arrangement of prose passages, period cartoons, captain’s records, letter excerpts, newspaper columns, and even a few bars of transcribed sheet music. The depiction of the novel’s narrator, the fictional American columnist Grantley Dixon, adds to the unconventional mode of storytelling—he is proven thoroughly unreliable by page thirty. A form of so much uncertainty, whose faulty narrator has to reconcile varied sources, calls into question whether traditional historical fiction can accurately depict the pain of the Irish Famine. Recounting any historical event is inherently troublesome because records must reconcile various perspectives, including those which historically have been ignored. But retelling the Great Famine of 1845–49 for an Irish audience is especially tricky due to the remaining memory of its trauma. Bearing this damage in mind, O’Connor does not presume to definitively depict his country’s most horrific period. His larger point, woven throughout a narrative which suggests storytelling itself is fallible, is that words can fail to communicate horrors, and that fiction must adapt.

    Form adapting to trauma is a step towards honoring it; what’s broken necessarily deserves to be told with broken terms.

    Accordingly, O’Connor refuses the more linear narrative usually seen in historical fiction. A smooth organization of the jagged history would feel forced: arranging fragments from disagreeing perspectives emphasizes the underlying turmoil, even if it can’t quite be stated. His text openly admits that the Famine’s lived horror is inexpressible. Dixon (the fictional author, to keep track) visits a workhouse full of starving Irish peasants, and he notes that “an artist had been seated at an easel, trying to draw whatever was happening inside[…] He was weeping very quietly as he tried to draw[…] His hands were trembling as they attempted to form shapes.” The artist cannot bring himself to recreate what he sees, prompting the question of whether he should. Is his art a capable medium for the subject? And, by extension, are our novels adequate either? Since at least last century’s modernism, writers have struggled with the question of whether language can accurately communicate our splintered, brutal reality. O’Connor introduces this dilemma through Dixon, who concludes that he “had no words for [the Famine],” and more concerningly, that “[n]obody did.” O’Connor complicates this view held by his character, as his form does allow for language’s fallibility when it rejects glossy fictionalization for a pieced-together novel sometimes at odds with itself. But O’Connor still tries to accommodate the inexpressible suffering by utilizing the epistolary form to address it.

    Engaging with the Famine’s deeply-rooted horrors requires the form to both simulate and respect them. A historical fiction mystery ignorant to the Famine’s severely complex history would be tone-deaf. Extraordinary histories require extraordinary ways of being told, to account for all of their fractured, unspeakable contents. Form adapting to trauma is a step towards honoring it; what’s broken necessarily deserves to be told with broken terms. Eimar McBride’s 2013 novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, demonstrates a harrowing, beautiful example of this form-to-content agreement. Her book harnesses misspelling, puzzle-piece syntax, and stunted one-word phrases to create the disrupted mind of her abused narrator, every word building the bildungsroman story per the narrator’s terms. O’Connor does for Ireland’s national trauma what McBride did for the personal: adapt a classic genre to best tell the story of suffering.

    Thus, not only does Star of the Sea’s form emulate the inherent challenges of attempting to retell traumatic history, it pushes the boundaries of the epistolary form to allow for them. O’Connor suggests that art doesn’t need to definitively portray pain, but that it should consciously strive to respect it with every feature of its form. The epistolary novel, used by Dracula to recreate one absolute horror, manages in Star of the Sea to acknowledge a host of horrors from Irish history. O’Connor’s stylistic adjustments and in-text commentary help the reader to infer that many more nightmares remain, acknowledged but unstated in the space language cannot address.

    In my first reading of the novel, I did my best to ignore what I could see of the strange form. For me, the disagreements of a dozen sources were distractions from what I thought to be an immersive revenge story. But the novel deserves a closer look, one which reveals that every “distraction” expresses the content more truthfully than any character or plot device could. A conventional reading would have obscured O’Connor’s commentary on his craft and his country: Star of the Sea needs to challenge us to be true to its pain.

    Photo found on Joseph O’Connor’s Website

  • Translating Borges’ First Facebook Post

    Translating Borges’ First Facebook Post

    Written by JoJo Phillips

    Today, I am sitting on a stool in a long, grey hallway, looking at the portraits on the walls. The one in front of me is of a sad, old man named Borges. He is on the wall, like a fish, and looks down at me, also Borges. All around us, or really me, are wallpapered leaves and vines. They reach out to touch the other portraits. I like this Borges—he is a well-accomplished writer and will live forever—but he does not care for me. He finds me, always late, always at night, always when I have shut my book of poetry, pulled the cord of the lamp, and closed my eyes, he finds me and calls to me. When he calls, he does not address me as Borges. That is to say he pretends I am not him. Instead he opts for a wealth of names. Sometimes I am André Gida, sometimes Goya. He has called me Perón before. He says, you are the same age as him. Then I say, I am the same age as you. Then he says, has perdido la confianza del pueblo. Then I say, your translations have more artistic merit, and he usually agrees.

    We are both very old, Borges and I, but I feel much older. I have lived my life in full, while he has only taken moments from it and trapped them in ink. Many years ago I tried to leave him, but he followed closely, and became my new work. Borges does not scare me, he becomes me. I think, perhaps, I become him too. He does not let on if I do. I wonder, when people read this and search for me, whom they will see. When they like my post and decide to comment, will it be for me or for him? The hallway has an infinite number of frames, but no doors. There exist, beneath the infinite frames, infinite plaques with infinite captions. Somewhere, there is his portrait, with his caption. Somewhere, there is my portrait, with the same caption. Somewhere, there is a guitar, and a book of runes, and the Third Folio. These things are no more me than these words are him, but when people request to friend me I know it is because of Shakespeare, Baldur, and the strumming of popular chords. I have looked for some of my friends, but the hallway is longer than I thought. Joyce’s profile is private and he will not respond to messages. Homer’s portrait is missing, but I have seen his words—the Ancient Greek stands out, even to my fading eyes—in thousands of captions.

    I am getting old. I do not think I will join Twitter, although the thought of people reduced to their briefest selves excites me. I am sure Borges is already there.

     

    Nota Bene:

    This translation was provided by Joseph P Phillips, a student of English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where Jorge Luis Borges briefly taught. They did not know each other. In the margins of the manuscript, there are page numbers referring to an early Spanish phrasebook—for sightseeing in Milan—which we can assume he used to translate the prose. A curious choice on his part was to forego rendering the line has perdido la confianza del pueblo into English. Instead, he wrote in hasty pen beneath it: la pierre éternellement veut être pierre et le tigre un tigre.

    Phillips was versed only in Arabic and Latin.

  • A Portrait of the Artist and his City: The Inextricable Link Between James Joyce and Dublin

    A Portrait of the Artist and his City: The Inextricable Link Between James Joyce and Dublin

    Written by Kevin LaTorre

    “Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”

    Stephen Dedalus—protagonist of James Joyce’s coming-of-age novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—is blunt in his accusatory view of Ireland. Stephen often seems to act as Joyce’s fictional alter-ego, even if Joyce’s works are much more than stylized autobiography. Tellingly, Joyce littered Portrait, Ulysses, and his Dubliners short stories with veiled criticisms of his home. The structures of religious piety, nationalist politics, cultural identity, and familial responsibility struck Joyce as restrictive to his own voice, his artistic soul-in-the-making. So he escaped. But for all his complicated dissatisfaction with the city that reared him, Joyce could never quite escape, spiritually or artistically, the places where he grew up.

    Just like Stephen at the novel’s ending, Joyce left Dublin to try la vie bohème in Paris, and he only returned to Dublin to care for his dying mother in 1903. After her death, Joyce eloped with the lovely Nora Barnacle in 1904 to live abroad. He visited Ireland intermittently for business purposes until 1912, when he conducted his final trip to the island. Despite Joyce remaining at a physical distance from his hometown,  his writing always circled back to Dublin, to its streets, to its people.

    Dublin, in return, also bears Joyce’s indelible mark. Davy Byrne’s boasts a Ulysses quote over its door near Grafton Street. To one side of O’Connell Street, Joyce leans on his cane as a jaunty statue, a monument locals grudgingly dub “the prick with the stick.” The James Joyce Centre offers Joycean tours from North Great George’s Street: the epicenter of the annual Bloomsday Festival (circa 1956) that occurs on June 16th, where Dublin commemorates Ulysses with tours of the novel’s settings and costumed reenactments of its scenes. Joyce lives on the streets of Dublin and as new generations continually interact with him, they will render new interpretations of his works. They will give him more reason to keep living in Dublin. Take the newest stage adaptation of Portrait that ran some weeks ago in Dùn Laoghaire by Rough Magic.

    Rough Magic’s production of Portrait seems especially relevant for the city at this moment.  One comment often attached to the show is how inventive it is, how bold its visual choices are within the ensemble cast. Online snapshots of the show spotlight Stephen as he stands highlighted as an individual against the uniform ensemble of the other actors. Rough Magic has staged the story to fit the present: an Irish soccer jersey differentiates Stephen Dedalus from everyone else, as both actors and actresses wear it throughout the performance. The show punctuates the progression from shamed Catholic schoolboy to shameless free-thinking artist with stylized movement under modern music, the songs featured resounding heavily, closer to spoken word than song.

    Joyce’s themes and language remain, but today’s Dubliners have taken creative control that best adapts the work to their present, lending a timeliness to Joyce’s timelessness.

    Sara Keating of The Irish Times mentions these “artfully chosen pop songs” in her review to illustrate why the adaptation is “fast-paced, fun and refreshingly unconventional.” The playwright, Arthur Riordan, described one morning: “The song Peter [Corboy] sings is anachronistic but strikes me as being perfect for this moment in the play…. in Ronan’s hands [the moment] has become a full production number.” He adds that the directorial choices are “surprising but also surprisingly apt.” “Surprisingly apt” captures many choices within the play,  particularly Rough Magic’s use of pop music and soccer jerseys where Joyce, in the original, would use Catholic rituals—as symbols laden with meaning for the audience experiencing them. That jersey might mean more to a theatregoer than the Latin of Stephen Dedalus’s school days; “She” by Elvis Costello likely carries more weight today than the call-and-response of Mass. Joyce’s themes and language remain, but today’s Dubliners have taken creative control that best adapts the work to their present, lending a timeliness to Joyce’s timelessness.

    For this, Rough Magic’s production stands out from the crowd of many Joyce adaptations. 1977 saw a film adaptation of Portrait, while the novel hit the stage first in 1962 and then again in 2012. Joseph Strick took it upon himself to attempt a film version of Ulysses in 1967. But Arthur Riordan’s adaptation, under the direction of Ronan Phelan, is not an adaptation borne out of the 1960s, or even out of 2012. Gay marriage passed its referendum in 2015; abortion did the same back in August. Dublin gave Pope Francis a chilly reception a few weeks later. You could say that the island’s is undergoing a fundamental transformation. This revised backdrop generated the need for a new kind of Portrait. About Rough Magic’s production, Keating writes that the  adaptation “is as relevant to conceptions of Irishness now as it was then.”

    Irishness is still evolving further, to be sure. The island faced another referendum on October 26th, this time to to delete the word “blasphemy” from a constitutional amendment. Voting “Yes” would decriminalize the mockery of religion, and the Irish voted decisively to remove that provision. Seeing as politicians first wrote the constitution with the pervasive help of the Catholic church, removing this part of the amendment is a significant step towards reducing the Church’s influence. Nearly two weeks before the vote, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man left the Pavilion Theatre to begin touring the country’s other stages.

    The show’s posters, now spreading across the country, illustrate the play’s spirit succinctly: a pair of hands hold the portrait of the contemplative, wide-eyed Joyce over an unseen face. All ten fingernails are painted, mismatched green, red, and orange. It could be anyone behind the poster, ready to speak with the voice of the writer. Dubliners spoke first, and now it’s on to Waterford, Cork, and Galway. Such is the power of James Joyce today—the young and daring can still speak through his words, reimagining them for the landscape of 2018.

    Photo found on Rough Magic’s Website

  • Beyond That Which We Reap: A Look at Literary Responses to Nature

    Beyond That Which We Reap: A Look at Literary Responses to Nature

    Written by Sydney Stewart

    One glance at any reputable news source, and the grim reality of climate change and environmental destruction is clear: the earth changes day after day largely as a result of human actions, and soon the environment won’t be hospitable, or even recognizable.

    Obviously, this is a problem.

    Massive amounts of literature acknowledges the beauty of the natural world, with poets and authors from the Romantic era to modern times utilizing nature as a mirror with which to view themselves and the world around them. The environment becomes the physical reference point from which authors can delve into introspection or connect to memories. Yet, only using nature as a mirror or point of introspection ignores the worth of the environment in favor of applying human value to nature.

    One of the most recognizable periods of environmental appreciation comes from the Romantic era, making it a strong starting point with which to view works that interact with the environment. Most poetry of this time period exalts the environment because it produces an introspective effect within the writers.

    One poem in particular that exemplifies this concept is “Tintern Abbey,” composed by William Wordsworth and published in 1798. Wordsworth is fixated with the natural beauty of the Wye river and Tintern Abbey, using the physical world around him as a means to reflect on how he has changed since his last visit five years ago. Though the landscape has remained the same, Wordsworth himself has changed.

    Wordsworth’s idea of nature is one of simplicity and beauty. As this is one of Wordsworth’s earlier pieces, he isn’t yet responding to the environmental decline brought about by the industrial revolution, so his interaction with the environment must be contextualized outside of this future destruction. Wordsworth acknowledges the beauty around him, but, more importantly, he laments how he has changed and how his memories of this land affect him. The depiction of nature begins to reflect the mood of Wordsworth’s introspection, as he sits beneath a “dark sycamore” with “thoughts of deep seclusion.” Nature, specifically the Wye and Tintern Abbey, acts as a jumping point from which Wordsworth can grow the seedlings of his internal thoughts.

    Though Wordsworth considers himself “a lover of the meadows and the woods,” it is because he uses nature as a mirror through which he can view himself, as well as hear “the still, sad music of humanity.” Thus, Wordsworth’s humanity interjects itself into the inherent value of the natural world, warping its worth with that of human value. While Wordsworth’s piece offers a particularly salient example, this phenomenon can be seen in numerous other writers of the Romantic era, such as Blake and Keates.

    Past the Romantics, nature continues to act as a mirror through which a writer can view themselves, though this reflection is often in response to potential environmental destruction. In Goodbye to a River, the narrator and author, John Graves, revisits the Brazos river in 1957 upon hearing of plans for a series of dams to be built that would potentially alter the path of the Brazos and the landscape surrounding it. While Wordsworth wistfully observes nature and reminisces about his own previous trips without threat of the site disappearing, Graves faces the very real loss of the setting of his childhood memories in the destruction of the Brazos. In this piece, Graves’ concern extends past the loss of the physical setting of his childhood memories to the lifestyle change for all who live on the Brazos.

    Graves fills Goodbye to a River with his own memories, the history of the Brazos, and with stories of the people he meets there. Graves isn’t only looking at the Brazos as a means through which he can reflect on himself, as he also records the memories of others who have lived on the river. He recalls stories of the Native American tribes that lived in the area and the cabins that once housed people dependent on the Brazos, and speaks with other countrymen and women who live by the river and hears their stories. While both Wordsworth and Graves reminisce about their respective rivers, Graves is motivated to write Goodbye to a River and journey down the Brazos because there is a real threat of loss of the environment, as well as those who depend on it.

    Though Graves does use the environment as a tangible bridge with which to connect to the intangible realm of memories, he also writes about this in order to save it, and those who depend on it. In fact, Graves was so successful in detailing the beauty and importance of the Brazos, that Goodbye to a River was actually believed to have been integral in preventing the construction of many of the proposed dams¹. In this case, using nature as a tool to reflect oneself actually had a tangible, positive result on the environment, though strictly for its nostalgic worth to the author.

    The audience can recognize the potential for change and can act, rather than grimly accepting the fate of the planet.

    Now, when we look to the modern perspective, the environment isn’t so much used as a mirror for self-reflection, but rather as a dire warning of impending climate change. Authors are no longer reliving memories or saying a fond farewell, but anticipating the very worst of outcomes. There is a recent trend of modern authors opting for “cli-fi” – fiction that details severe environmental consequences – in attempts to demonstrate that we could see these destitute environments in the not-so-distant future. Often, this genre concerns itself with the harrowing results of climate change, which provides either a bleak backdrop for the story or a challenge for a character to overcome (think of the inhospitable and seemingly endless winters of A Song of Ice and Fire, or the dying Earth in Interstellar). As the audience, we see these worst-case scenarios placed in a far-away and imaginary land or at some point in the distant future, instead of the reality of climate change right at our doorstep.

    By placing these environmental disasters in these remote locations, authors are better able to inspire hope in the audience for the issue at hand – the environmental tragedy within the screen or pages of a book hasn’t occurred quite yet, so there’s still time to prevent it. The audience can recognize the potential for change and can act, rather than grimly accepting the fate of the planet. Since the environment is steadily declining to the point of being almost inhospitable, authors invert the self-reflective nature of the environment developed by writers in the Romantic era and beyond to a warning directed at the audience that climate change is steadily approaching, and that something must be done.

    When authors use the environment as a method of self-reflection, or as a mirror to reflect upon themselves, they ignore the environment itself. While Wordsworth is a “lover of the meadows and the woods,” his love for the environment stems from the internal knowledge he gains upon viewing it. Though Graves writes to (ultimately) save the Brazos, he does so because the environment is an anchor for his childhood memories, meaning that the worth of the Brazos isn’t in the environmental value of the area, but in its contributions to the lives of humans. In other words, nature becomes worth saving because humans use it as an opportunity to self-reflect or gain wisdom or grow their knowledge. Humanity appreciates nature for what its purpose seems to be – a mirror through which we can view ourselves – which is an ultimately selfish perspective towards the environment. While people may then be motivated to save the planet, the motivation for doing so isn’t based on the innate value of nature, but because of what humanity gains from it.

    This selfish act ultimately produces a problematic perspective on nature: nature is only worth saving because it is useful to humanity, not because it has its own inherent worth. In modern times, this perspective raises the question of why we’re even fighting for the planet that we’re killing. Is the planet only worth saving because it has a physical and introspective use for us, or because it has value entirely on its own?

    “Texas Classic: John Graves Says ‘Goodbye to a River’.” Dallas News. September 20, 2014.

  • Rewriting Witches: Evaluating the Renditions of Circe and Sabrina

    Rewriting Witches: Evaluating the Renditions of Circe and Sabrina

    Written by Anna Dolliver

    The Halloween witching season has come but not gone because apparently it is here to stay. According to this Ploughshares article: “The era of vampires and werewolves and brooding male anti-heroes on the screen and on the page seemed to be over, with female-centric stories of witchcraft emerging as a powerful symbol of the reclamation of power.” Over the past few years, witches have been claiming more space in social conversations and creative productions. From covens meeting to hex political figures to influencers promoting occult books and tarot decks, witchcraft and those who practice it have featured more prominently in popular culture as women respond to suppression. At times when the female voice and body are threatened, stories about witchcraft abound, and women (unlike men who denounce witches in their versions of the witch’s tale) identify with the witch. To identify with the monstrous is a source of strength. In the literary and cinematic spheres, witches are either sparking new stories, embodying good or evil, or both at once (the best kind), and demanding fresh takes on old tales. The reboot of Charmed came out this month, and Mary Poppins Returns will reach theaters in December among many others. The ones I am most interested are two: the reimaginings of Circe in Circe by Madeline Miller, and Sabrina Spellman in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix.

    Aside from an admirable taste in animal companions (Sabrina lives with her goblin-turned cat familiar, Salem, while Circe summons her own familiar in the form of a lioness), the two women share aspirations in their new interpretations. At this time when witchcraft has become a portrayal of female power and agency, Circe and Sabrina strive to embody feminist ideals while retaining aspects of their original conceptions. Both characters conjure a conversation with their old personas—Madeline Miller gives Circe’s Odysseus the amount of screentime that Circe received in the Odyssey, and the Chilling Adventures Sabrina challenges the origins and restrictions of her power where Teenage Witch Sabrina accepted the regulation without protest.

    While Chilling Adventures of Sabrina attempts to label itself as feminist and revolutionary, its attempt at empowering women falls to words alone.

    The original, ‘90s Sabrina the Teenage Witch followed a girl as she learned how to regulate her powers; she succeeds when she shows restraint in her use of magic. In her Vox article, Constance Grady describes the ‘90s Sabrina story as one “of learning how to wield her power while continuing to follow the rules, of learning to be a teen witch and a squeaky-clean and positive role model.” The Sabrina of 2018 challenges the male source of power, who changes from the ‘90s character Manton to Satan in the new series. In her attempts to subvert his control and use her power without a man’s regulation, Sabrina responds to the character of the ‘90s and adapts to the political climate of the present. However, even as the show presents current conversations in its explicit dialogue, the new Sabrina perpetuates underlying systems of power in its actions.

    While Chilling Adventures of Sabrina attempts to label itself as feminist and revolutionary, its attempt at empowering women falls to words alone. Hilda and Zelda, Sabrina’s aunts, both criticize and murder each other regularly and feature in each other’s worst nightmares. Though Sabrina encourages her two friends at the human high school, the women she meets at the Academy of Unseen Arts subject her to “harrowing” (the magical version of hazing). Sabrina nearly kills them in an act of revenge—urged by her aunt. At high school, Sabrina and her friends protest banning books and start a club as a support group for their female classmates. Though Sabrina defends her agency against the Dark Lord and fights to retain her relationships in both worlds, using familiar phrases that clue the reader into metaphors about the bodily autonomy of women and male power structures, the show’s progressive messages often emerge in the dialogue alone. Whether to cater to a sensationalist audience or to find simple sources of conflict, the show often pits women against each other until faced with life-or-death circumstances.

    Rather than fitting subtext-laden lines into the mouths of her characters, Miller frames Circe as a feminist witch rebirth through the novel’s narrative style and her main character’s actions. When Circe first emerged as a character in Homer’s Odyssey, her character served to amplify Odysseus’s wit and masculinity. Like many women of the story, Circe was less of a character than a plot device, a woman with just enough depth to intrigue readers so Odysseus’s honorable escapades will impress them, yet limited enough so (most) readers will not feel too distraught when Odysseus leaves her island for his next adventure.

    Miller structures her novel not as a retelling of the Odyssey from Circe’s perspective but as her own odyssey of her life, tracing her experiences back through the myths of Scylla, Daedalus, Medea, and countless others. Rather than grounding Circe’s story in Odysseus, Miller creates her own interwoven mythos, allowing Circe’s experience to drive her story and reshape even the Odyssey-derived encounters. As she comes to terms with her magic, Circe hurts others and attempts revenge, transforming Scylla into a beast when her beloved snubs her and mutating men into swine after a crew of sailors rapes her. But as Circe comes to terms with her power, she learns when to leverage it and when to collaborate with others, and she often works to help the people she encounters. From giving advice to Medea to sharing stories and wisdom with Penelope, Circe builds women up rather than tearing them down. Even after she exacts revenge, Circe attempts to make amends; she tries to change Scylla back into a nymph, and she helps her cruel sister Pasiphaë deliver the Minotaur with the use of her magic. Circe takes the feminist witch archetype and expands it with her roles as a guardian, a warrior, a nurturer, a mother. And even when she exhibits her power, it is an act of female strength, anger, passion—what woman will not cheer for the terror in men’s eyes when they come up against Circe? All in all, her actions and observations are reminiscent of the #MeToo era, her personality is of a complex character whose strength cannot be encompassed in words (classically, a feminine association as a tool for confrontation, for instance) but has surpassed into action (classically, masculine).

    Rather than grounding Circe’s story in Odysseus, Miller creates her own interwoven mythos, allowing Circe’s experience to drive her story and reshape even the Odyssey-derived encounters.

    Though both Circe and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina reimagine old witches in the context of the modern, feminist themes of magical women, Circe’s new self is more poignant than this second Sabrina. While Sabrina and her peers read lines that empower women—in theory—their actions present a more toxic, competitive, revenge-driven culture when women with powers meet. Though Circe’s words fit the mythological tone of her story, her actions align closer to the ideals that Chilling Adventures of Sabrina strives toward. By using her magic and working with other women in addition to pursuing her autonomy, Circe upholds the concepts that modern women and witches praise.

    Perhaps the literary tradition crafts Circe as the more palpable, poignant character. Readers who are familiar with Greek mythology see Circe shift from villain to heroine (notwithstanding that the two may be equivalent and that many women might crave that kind of new story). Her interactions with members of other myths demand greater attention toward her captivating character. Sabrina, while sidestepping the choices of her ‘90s self, remains a similar character with the same amount of screentime as her first rendition received. Perhaps the scope of Circe’s story arc allows her to manifest as a stronger character; since readers see her experience a broader range of events over a longer time frame, they have the opportunity to see her engage in different identities—the sister-witch, the warrior-witch, the mother-witch—and work through the implications of each one. Sabrina’s story occurs over a matter of months, and though her character faces new challenges, she has little opportunity to change until the final episode.

    The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina cannot rewrite its ‘90s source to create a greater distance between the two, and a narrative over a greater time span would change the premise of the show. However, the new Sabrina can adopt a few ideas from Circe. Circe succeeds in its adaptation of witch archetypes and complexity in character interactions. Perhaps Sabrina could introduce a broader range of interpersonal encounters, asking which actions may develop the characters rather than jumping to the most dramatic path. Investing more effort into the characters themselves can increase the impact of the tension created by plot. As Sabrina enters season two, it can look to Circe for wisdom about creating a witch protagonist who resonates beyond her words, who swells beyond her feminine shell to occupy male territory of unchecked power, who swells into a hero of a classical villain, the woman many modern women long to be: a formidable witch.

  • Reviewing Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House: Have you Ever Seen a Ghost?

    Reviewing Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House: Have you Ever Seen a Ghost?

    Written by JoJo Phillips and Carolina Eleni Theodoropoulos

    As you return home to family or family returns home to you this week, you will be inevitably confronted with the past. Childhood homes always look smaller and grownup children always look too tall. I’m from New England, and when I go home I notice the shortness of the days and the dragging feeling of evening all afternoon. When the dark has settled and the wine has been poured, there will be stories and questions. This year, after your uncle has finally broached the subject of what everyone is watching on Netflix, I invite you to reply with a question of your own:

    Have you ever seen a ghost? Really seen one? And by seen I mean felt, and by felt I mean—it was always there.

    Mike Flanagan’s hit Netflix adaption The Haunting of Hill House, a ten part mini-series based on the famous Shirley Jackson novel of the same name, desperately wants to ask this question. The show, which follows the Crane family as they wander apart and are pushed back together by tragedy, is constantly seeking to define the very word. What is a ghost? Sometimes, a ghost is the way an old house settles before falling to sleep in early morning. Sometimes, a ghost is a spot of cold air or the feeling of a warm hand when there is no hand. Other times it is the raw outcome of loss, grief, and trauma. Once or twice it is simply a bad dream hiding five steps away—just far enough to be shrouded in shadow, to be cast in doubt. Always, an encounter with a ghost ripples through the family and rattles believers and skeptics alike.

    Have you ever seen a ghost? Really seen one? And by seen I mean felt, and by felt I mean—it was always there.

    At its worst The Haunting of Hill House takes the abstraction of the paranormal too far, and we are subjected to monologue, montage, and guitar strings. At its best the show trusts us, its characters, and Jackson’s dark universe, holding the camera steady while the house unravels its trauma and reveals itself slowly. We live in the age of reddit-television, and our shows demand disassembly. These same shows also invite discovery.

    When my editor and I sat down to binge the show together (mostly for moral support) we would discuss the episodes like kids around the campfire. Trading our own tales and telling ghost stories, we would ask each other the natural questions: have you seen one? What was it like? And every night, after the gin was poured and the lights turned down, one of us would get around to telling a true story…

    Have you ever seen a ghost?

    Long before she fled to the city, Mother’s daughter was not the daughter she’d expected. The mother woke drowsy and disoriented that morning but wasted no time in pursuing the daughter. Eventually, she found her, and moved in to the apartment above hers. Every day she spied on the daughter, watching her leave at seven in a maid’s costume to return again at seven in the evening. On days that the daughter returned late, the mother paced the window and chewed on grapes until the skin melted to paste on her tongue. After the daughter would settle, the mother would grab her cane and tap, tap, tap on the floor. She moved about the apartment, and tap-tap-tapped. She crouched downstairs to the empty hallway that shared a wall with her daughter’s and—tap, tap, tap.

    One morning was especially hard for the daughter to leave her apartment: doors slammed in the hallway and dogs barked outside. Shaking, she eventually left for the grocer and saw Mother on the threshold of the building. She took her bags and ushered her inside. Removing her gloves, and grimacing at the apartment’s odor, Mother consoled her daughter, “Mother knows best.”

    The problem was, they soon remembered, Mother and Daughter did not like each other very much.
    —–

    As is the trend in this post Game of Thrones world, The Haunting of Hill House marries camera perspective to character perspective, and almost every episode is given to one of the Crain’s (the exceptions being the sixth episode and the finale). The pilot follows Steven, the oldest son who firmly states he doesn’t believe in ghosts despite being a horror author—to questionably stand in for Jackson. Cinematographer Michael Fimognari relies on mostly static shots and dollies to construct Steven’s rigid world, and he chooses to light his space in heavily contrasted neutral colors. Compare this to the camera given to his preternaturally sensitive but emotionally isolated sister Theo. Her episode, “Touch,” has a number of shots from above and in the corners of rooms, invoking the feeling that someone is always lurking, watching.

    Separately, the camera is careful to frame Theo as distant from whoever is sharing the scene with her. Sometimes she is placed behind barriers, others in front of starkly contrasted backgrounds, and once she is foregrounded in focus while her one-time lover is blurred into the dark behind her. Fimognari’s skill is in its highest form in the sixth episode, “Two Storms.” As one of the two episodes that does not mostly focus on a single character, “Two Storms” seamlessly enjoins the events of two nights thirty years apart. Adding to this difficult task is Flanagan’s decision to shoot the episode in five 15-20 minute unbroken scenes (called one-takes). Fimognari’s camera moves snake-like on a Steadicam around the set, changing in position and speed to mirror the perspective of who he is following. As the characters become drunk and more argumentative (and yes there’s plenty of that in the family) the fluidity of the shots increase and the effect is powerful. Stellar performances from Timothy Hutton and John Thomas (both playing Hugh Crain) ground the tangled narrative of the episode, and the house feels more Hill-like here in these sixty minutes than any other point in the series. When the family is brought back together to mourn, old trauma rises to the surface. As they drink one room over from where Nell’s casket lies open, their tempers flare and dissipate, and there is some bonding, but mostly, there is breaking. The most moving scene comes at the end of the episode, where Nell’s ghost looks over the scene, desolate and alone, representing the one who is never seen, the one, who despite her efforts, is never heard.

    Truly scary stories don’t have wrap-ups, because truly scary things don’t have tidy endings (usually they don’t have endings).

    Living together again, Mother and Daughter were reminded they did not get along. Things only got worse once mother fell ill. The daughter was convinced Mother’s complaining had made her ill; Mother resented that remark. The city was too loud and the closets were too small and the people were too young and the wallpaper was too thin and the walls—something moved inside the walls. Then there was the smell. Since day one, there was the smell. The mother pulled up the floorboards and hammered holes in the walls and tore the wallpaper and traced the baseboard of the apartment on her knees, following the odor. “Coming, mother, coming. Just a minute,” the daughter would call in the night but they could never locate the smell. “Child, it’s gotten on my skin,” the mother said, and the daughter brought in several doctors. The mother cursed their incompetence and threw them out. The daughter eventually stopped being around, stopped yelling to Mother that she was “coming.”

    Before long, the mother died. Her arm hung from the bed, limply, over an overturned bowl of grapes. The daughter stepped on some by accident before she noticed. Mother’s eyes were open and her skin was stained.
    ——–

    When Flanagan was approached by Netflix to adapt Jackson’s novel, he was more than hesitant. Like many of his colleagues in horror, he grew up with the book, and didn’t see how it would translate into a ten hour show. There was not enough material that could be displayed—the novel occupied the mindspace of its narrator, Eleanor, and bore too many unknowns that would doubtlessly resist interpretation and adaptation. He had no desire to incense any Hill House fans with an unfaithful adaptation. Instead, he chose to write a narrative divorced from the plot of the novel but descending from the same universe. The final product is oddly self-aware—full of easter eggs and even entire paragraphs from the novel in new voices (the most explicit being the opening paragraph of the book serving as the opening narration for the show). These details—teacups rimmed with stars, a copy of “The Lottery,” yellowed wallpaper—ensure Shirley Jackson’s presence is felt throughout the series, but simultaneously they suggest she has become a spirit herself. As she fades into the background like the little faces Flanagan hides for patient viewers, so does the book this is all built on. Like all stories about the paranormal and the strange, Hill House warps and changes over time, always reflecting the voice of the one doing the telling. Flanagan fails to quite capture what Jackson’s Hill House stood for, though he did, in part, capture what stood within.

    After mother died, the daughter moved into a top floor apartment across town and stopped saying Mother’s name. When people asked how she died, the daughter said, “Same as anyone.” People began to talk: Mother choked on a grape; she was neglected; she rotted from mold.

    They said the daughter checked the wallpaper every night, they said she barked back at barking dogs, they said she kicked the walking sticks from under old folks. They said she threw up at the sight of grapes. There were never too few or too many stories to go round.
    ——–

    Where The Haunting of Hill House fails, unfortunately, is at its close. Truly scary stories don’t have wrap-ups, because truly scary things don’t have tidy endings (usually they don’t have endings). Shirley Jackson’s novel concludes in tragedy and has no patience for answering our questions. Flanagan, conversely, is no longer asking the question of what a ghost is, and is instead trying to answer it. In a series of convoluted monologues that somehow feel oversimplified, Nell and Steven undermine Jackson’s core conceit: some things, late at night after everyone else has gone to sleep, grip you and shake you until you are consumed by them. These things can be causal but they can also be terrifyingly random. Shirley Jackson understood this deeply, and the latter of the two fears is never far from her pages.

    As Jackson fades into the background like the little faces Flanagan hides for patient viewers, so does the book this is all built on.

    To a true Hill House fan, Flanagan failed to deliver the complexity of Jackson’s story of Eleanor. Her tale was not fit for the rough hands and narrow mind of disbelieving Steven. Jackson told a story about a lonely woman with neither the support nor the love of her friends or family, who lived on borrowed dreams, who survived entirely on the life of her imagination. This woman felt lost and trapped and craved attention, even attention so dark and ominous as that exuded by Hill House. For the first time in her life, Eleanor felt spoken for, she felt something call out to her, she felt a sense of belonging. Eleanor’s tale is tragic, it is not idyllic by any means. But Jackson captured a sweet and disturbing complexity of the female mind and she left many questions unanswered as they are, in reality. Jackson spoke to girls and women who at one time or other could relate to quirky, awkward Eleanor. As for the haunted house tale—especially from a feminist tradition—it is a tale of trauma and untold secrets and silenced voices. Nell was primarily that voice in the show, until she was reduced to a scapegoat to save the rest—the beautiful young woman as martyr.

    So, if you decide to commit ten hours of your break to chasing frights by watching The Haunting of Hill House, I urge you to allow yourself a few more to read the source material.

    As happens often in any city, there was a jumper from the top floor who some say was the daughter, and others say, wasn’t. But who knows? Who’s to say but the living what happens of the dead?

    Photo found on LAD Bible Website

  • From Book to Broadway: 6 Notable Costumes Inspired by Our Favorite Stories

    From Book to Broadway: 6 Notable Costumes Inspired by Our Favorite Stories

    Written by Alyssa Jingling

    The spectacle of theatre is so compelling for audiences in part because it adds new life to the stories limited to the tiny print of books. From the characters, to the sets, to the body language and movement, and even to the actors’ individual expressions—the entire story that was once confined to a page unfolds in a multi-sensory experience from the seats of a theatre. While the reader is restricted to their own interpretation of a story, the director and designers of a theatrical adaptation add layers of interpretation to the tale that complements that of the viewer’s.

    One of the most distinctive qualities that separates literature and theatre is costuming. In a production, costumes can be used to convey a character’s age or the story’s time period, or they can be used to convey the tone of the show or socioeconomic tensions in the setting. In a phrase, costumes are important for the audience’s ability to make connections and assumptions about the characters, setting, and story.

    Here are six productions that translated printed literature onto the stage in notable ways through costuming.

    1. Gigi (2015 Broadway Revival)

    Photo by Joan Marcus
    Photo by Joan Marcus

    This musical is based on the novella of the same name written in 1944 by French author Colette. It follows an energetic and youthfully defiant teenager, Gigi (Vanessa Hudgens), as she grows up and eventually falls in love with family-friend Gaston (Corey Cott). In the novella, Colette describes Gigi’s looks with such extreme detail that it borderlines on ridiculous. Even though she is only fifteen, the author describes Gigi’s “heron-like legs,” long, flowing hair, and deep blue eyes – typically in the context of her being flushed and embarrassed.Towards the end of the book, because she is restricted in her movement by the “old plaid dress and cotton stockings” she wears, she struggles with “the rise and fall of her bosom under the tight bodice” of the dress. Once the reader moves past the unsettling fact that a 15-year-old girl in early 20th century France was deemed old enough for mature relationships, the descriptions of Gigi really are helpful in seeing Gigi –  quite literally – grow into a woman ready to embrace the adult world.

    On Broadway, Gigi in Act I wears cute, colorful gowns that are perfect for a young and energetic girl. The bright colors match her personality perfectly, but they do not make the dresses look old, like Gigi has been wearing them for years, and, as with the case of her immaturity, growing out of them. They are not frayed at the hemline or visibly tight anywhere on Gigi’s body. The novel’s images lend a purpose that the “little girl” dresses worn by Hudgens do not: Gigi has to grow up. In the novella, Colette makes it very clear that her dress is too small and she is spilling out of it. This makes the dramatic transition from ill-fitting childish dress to courtesan ballgown much easier to visualize than in the musical, where Gigi went from typical,  Madeline-esque dresses to classy, grown-up gowns.

    2. Catch Me if You Can

    Photo by Joan Marcus
    Photo by Joan Marcus

    You might recognize this title from the movie that starred Leonardo DiCaprio, and yes, both the movie and musical are based off the same book of the same name by Frank Abagnale, Jr. – the book itself based on a true story. As a teen, Frank runs away and ends up writing millions of dollars worth of fraudulent checks. He also impersonates multiple professionals, including a doctor, lawyer, and most notably, a pilot. The story places a huge amount of emphasis on clothing. Frank needs many different costumes to pull off his stunts, and, accordingly, the musical mentions this fact many times, especially in songs “The Pinstripes Are All That They See” and “Someone Else’s Skin.” Surprisingly, however, it is the costumes of the female ensemble members that show more of Frank’s character, rather than his own.

    While money plays a large part in Abagnale’s schemes, women are the inspiration behind his multitude of costumes. Soon after Frank runs away from home, he observes the way women look at pilots in their uniforms, and noticed that they were immediately attracted to the pinstriped men. The way he saw it: he’s taken by women, and women are taken by men in uniform. As such, the musical hyper-sexualizes the clothing of the female cast, forcing the audience to watch the show through Frank’s eyes instead of as third-party spectators. In many numbers, there are sexualized nurses, flight attendants, and nondescript dancers. The sexy female costumes present a man’s world, and the man in charge made it clear that he is shameless in his love for the female body.

    Of course, when you really think about it, these costumes aren’t all that shocking. Even though we see nurses in hospitals more commonly wearing scrubs than miniskirts, depictions of oversexed fantasy women are common. However, these costumes really say more of the men who create them and believe them to be realistic, similar to how the sexualized costumes of the female cast members speak more to Abagnale’s ridiculous ideas of women than the women themselves.

    3. Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812

    Photo by Matthew Murphy
    Photo by Chad Batka

    This musical is based on about 70 pages of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, highlighting Natasha and Anatole’s love story (and Pierre’s existential crisis). Visually, every aspect of this show is stunning, but the costumes are especially notable because they show both the historically accurate and the modern.

    The featured characters of Natasha, Anatole, and Pierre all have accurate costumes for the period, but the ensemble is clothed in modern punk fashion. According to costume designer Paloma Young in an interview by American Theatre, the chorus connects the audience directly to the show, as their “punk rock” costumes “combine extreme teenage joy and misery (Natasha) with deep, deep philosophical depression (Pierre) and military and religious iconography (uniforms, camouflage, bullets, crosses and more crosses).”

    This visual combination of the emotional journey of the characters entrenched in the vitality and revolutionary energy of  the chorus acts as a temporal bridge between today and 1812. It connects the audience with all aspects of the story, no matter where they sit or where they come from. Further, the ensemble’s punk costumes connect the main characters’ emotional struggles with the similar struggles that today’s young people face. Of course, in War and Peace, none of the characters wore camouflage jogger pants or skinny jeans, but the symbolism described by Young properly justifies this anachronism. This stylistic choice highlights how the costumes of a production can work to complement the experiences of the audience in ways unique from that of the source text.

    4. Cats

    Photo by Matthew Murphy
    Photo by Matthew Murphy

    This iconic Broadway show is based on the poetry book Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. Eliot was very consciously a prominent face of modernist literature in the 20th century, and, as with many other Modernists, wrote in conversation with great classic authors like Dante and Shakespeare. Practical Cats strays from Eliot’s more common poetic works because it is light and whimsical, and written for children. However, while Eliot was comfortable with this whimsy for younger audiences, I think it’s fairly safe to say he would not be as comfortable with how the costumes of his cats translated visually onto the Broadway stage.

    On stage, the actors are in full fur-suits, with each unique persona representing each unique cat. There is a myriad of symbolism and artistry in each intricate costume. For instance, Old Deuteronomy is gray and raggedy, while the flirtatious friends Demeter and Bombalurina are in tight, sexy, red costumes. However, the sexiness doesn’t stop at the more flirtatious cats – nearly every cast member is in unnecessarily sexual, skin tight bodysuits and furry, thigh-high boots. Even though the costumes allow for great catlike movement across the stage, this sexualization distracts from the actual show because few characters actually need to be sexy. The skin tight fur-suits and coy makeup can be unnerving to the viewer, who’s just trying to watch a show about the everyday struggles of street cats. No one should be made to feel attracted to them.

    5. Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella

    Photo by Carol Rosegg
    Photo by Carol Rosegg

    Based on the fairytale of the same name attributed originally to the French tradition and presented in the collection of Charles Perrault, this musical was adapted to Broadway in 2013,  with Laura Osnes starring as Ella and Victoria Clark as the Fairy Godmother. In the fairytale, the reader understands that they are reading a story containing magic. Through the world he built, Perrault makes it easy for the reader to suspend their disbelief. Yes, a crazy old lady can be a fairy godmother, and yes, she can change a pumpkin to a carriage, and she can change Ella’s raggedy old dress into a stunning ball gown. Because magic is already established as a norm in fairy tales, the reader can easily picture these transformations. Suspending disbelief onstage, however, is harder because the audience still knows that they’re watching something in real life, in real-time.

    Thanks to costume designer William Ivey Long, the onstage costume transformations in Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella look smooth, exciting, and magical. The costumes represent the magic used in the fairytale through multiple onstage quick changes. These changes happen through movement (oftentimes twirling), and the clothes transform, as if magically, in front of the audience. Unlike a movie, where the production team could cut together takes or CGI a magical transformation, transformations onstage like those in Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella have to be more inventive and playful in order for the audience to cooperate in the suspension of disbelief. By making them look seamless, the audience is not pulled out of the story to remember that they’re still sitting in a theater in the real world, where magic is fictional.  

    6. Something Rotten!

    Photo by Joan Marcus
    Photo by Joan Marcus

    This show is not based on any one of Shakespeare’s shows despite the Hamlet reference in the title, but is more of a satirical and fictionalized take on Shakespeare’s life and success. I am thoroughly convinced that The Bard would love it. While at first glance the costumes in Something Rotten! might look fitting for the Renaissance, take a longer look and you’ll see they’re simply too cartoonish to be historically accurate. Instead, they’re just historically suggestive, similar to how a mass-produced Renaissance costume might look.

    The character of Shakespeare wears cool leather and  has his shirt perpetually unbuttoned, showing that he’s famous and well-loved by throngs of fans – not unlike a Renaissance-era boyband heartthrob. Meanwhile, his up-and-coming contemporary Nick Bottom and his posse wear bright, clownish colors to show that they’re trying to be noticed, but they’re just not that cool. These costumes mimic the subtle way Shakespeare would poke fun at himself and his acting company in his shows. Whenever he wrote a play within a play (as he often liked to do), the players are always a bit ridiculous. Think of the Players in Hamlet: while they were adequate performers, they were overly dramatic and unruly forcing Hamlet to direct them. The show manages to poke fun at both the elite top (Shakespeare), and the ridiculous bottom (well, Bottom).

     

  • The Misapplied Female Villainy in Emma Cline’s The Girls

    The Misapplied Female Villainy in Emma Cline’s The Girls

    Written by Kylie Warkentin

    As any young, voracious reader can attest, I used the worlds novels offered as benchmarks in which to measure the unruliness of the world around me. As a teenage girl trying her hardest to scrape together any sort of sense of self, books seemed like they held-if not the answers, then at least some choices for me to answer my worries. It was through this process that I began to notice a sort of benign self consciousness in the female characters I was reading. It seemed like if you wanted a story, you either got James Patterson’s Man With A Gun, Nicholas Sparks’s Woman And Man And Sniffly Love, or Dan Brown’s Art But Not. That is to say, there weren’t very many popular, gripping female characters—they were either all sad printouts of what men thought women were, or women treated with kids’ gloves so as not to offend the legions of women they was accidentally embodying. Not to make sweeping generalizations though—I am one girl in one town who visited one library. But just taking a look at the Best Sellers Lists from the 2000s to the 2010s, my point rings true. And then in 2012, on the shelves enters Gone Girl.

    With Gone Girl’s critical success, female characters in literature and across all forms of media were no longer bouldered with being Woman—there was a fresh desire for women characters to be women in more interesting (dare I say, realistic?), ways in place of generic feminine archetypes or sloppy bad vixens. Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train climbed bestsellers’ lists and received a lucrative movie deal, Tana French developed traction in international markets, and other, more niche novels like Megan Abbott’s Dare Me grew popular in reading circles. Perhaps most recently, Emma Cline’s The Girls was released to rave reviews.

    It is concerned with the mythos of the teenage girl, merely utilizing the lazily-innovated Manson story as a poorly constructed rabbit hole for Evie to narrowly avoid falling down.

    Before I read The Girls by Emma Cline, I was only vaguely aware of the thrumming expectations surrounding its release. I knew that NPR had favourably reviewed it, that it was a fictional depiction of the girls who led the murders committed by the Manson Family cult, and that Random House publishing valued it at two million dollars. I got the gist of its appeal—according to the New York Times Book Review: a “seductive and arresting coming-of-age story hinged on Charles Manson, told in sentences at times so finely wrought they could almost be worn as jewelry.” The Boston Globe labels it “remarkably atmospheric, preternaturally intelligent, and brutally feminist.” The byline of the novel itself boasts “an indelible portrait of girls, the women they become, and that moment in life when everything can go horribly wrong.”

    “Seductive,” “brutally feminist,”  “an indelible portrait of girls,” and “the women they become.”

    It’s a tempting combination of descriptors, promising a glance at the violent underbelly teen girls attempt to hide and all this to be accomplished in a, somehow, feminist way. The Girls’s first problem is that this is nowhere near what the book delivers.

    Cline focuses on the experiences of fourteen-year-old Evie as she, left to her teenage ennui, catches sight of the eponymous girls and is immediately drawn to their careless abandon and dangerous aura. Mesmerized by the illegible Suzanne, an older girl in the group, Evie grows desperate to be accepted into the cult and its hippie existence out on a decrepit ranch with Russell, the group’s leader and Manson stand-in. Russell begins to test her subservience, as he expects the same sexual submission and ecstatic fawning from Evie as from the other girls. Evie is pulled deeper and deeper under the group’s thrall, until she’s sitting in the back of the car with Suzanne and other members of the cult on their way to a record producer’s house to do something in retribution for his perceived maltreatment of Russell—you know where this is going.

    Evie, however, does not, as Suzanne kicks her out of the car. The actual events of the murders are not described, with Cline instead choosing to focus on the after-moments of tension with Evie—would she have taken a knife from Suzanne? Could she have put it in a five-year-old child? Is she a bad person? Would staying in the car have made her one?

    The Girls, then, is not actually concerned with the Manson Family or cult mentality or the realization of an acute moment of violence.

    It is concerned with the mythos of the teenage girl, merely utilizing the lazily-innovated Manson story as a poorly constructed rabbit hole for Evie to narrowly avoid falling down. Why is the Manson Family involved in this narrative at all? The inclusion, as crass as it sounds, seems gratuitously violent in a story that will not even describe the actual event that it has spent the whole novel teasing the reader with; it does nothing beyond changing details as inconsequential as the names of the killers involved. Alexandra Motokow of The Cut sums up my frustrations well:

    “As with many tales of teenage drama, the high-stakes trappings serve primarily to validate low-stakes teenage suffering: to scale up growing pains to mythic proportions or make them look as gruesome as they feel. The book’s biggest problem is that (to repurpose a phrase from Camille Paglia) it “lacks a profound sense of evil.””

    As to its oddly rabid reviews and two-million-dollar price tag, I wish I were at a loss. Had The Girls been dropped in a vacuum bereft of marketing strategies and popular trends, I think I would have enjoyed the story. However, The Girls enters a literary scene changed by the success of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Eight weeks on top of the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller week, twenty-six weeks on NPR’s list of the same name, made into an  financially successful and Oscar-nominated movie, Gone Girl demonstrated that novels written by women about violent women with inhumane psyches would be quickly snatched off the shelves and devoured by readers. In a weird snarl of fate, Margaret Atwood’s much-lauded novels began to enjoy their own sort of renaissance at the same moment. The Handmaid’s Tale was hailed as the feminist critique we need to hear our increasingly-dark times and turned into a successful Hulu show; Alias Grace was made into a Netflix original series for similar reasons; and the “Male Fantasies” quote from The Robber Bride continues to make its rounds on social media.

    It seems like The Girls is yet another novel in a series of novels in this new literary and social scene that have tried to package and profit off of narratives that promise female protagonists, violence, and witty feminist sound bites, but have missed the point by a spectacular degree. More often than not, stories like The Girls attempt to justify smaller (but still necessary!) stories that this new scene has deemed not exciting enough for consumption through unnecessary violence and exploitative sexual behavior committed by men (You All Grow Up and Leave Me is another that comes to mind). In place of the coyly implied aim of fixing these societal ills with a sexy knife thrust or two, this new brand of books ultimately harms the very audience it has set out to vindicate. Gone Girl didn’t resonate with audiences because Amy Dunne popped gum and cracked the Cool Girl monologue while slicing Neil Patrick Harris’s throat open. It was because she was finally a woman who wasn’t saddled with the exhausting weight of being the standard-bearer for all women. She was just individually, unrepentantly nasty.