Eating Away at the Foundation (Jess and Averyl)

Averyl and I are considering the ways in which documenting the subversive via acts that contravene the cultural standards of moral rightness set forth in our respective texts conversely gives these subversive acts power, as Greenblatt asks: “But why, we must ask ourselves, should power record other voices, permit subversive inquiries, register at its very center the transgressions that will ultimately violate it?” (50). Then, however, we want to posit that these narratives--Gallathea and What Maisie Knew in this specific instance--open up cans of subversive worms in their respective societies, worms (to continue the metaphor) that may destroy and undermine the stability of cultural systems of power (think worm-eaten supports that can no longer hold the weight of their structure), or, can be incorporated into these cultural systems in a manner that nurtures, enriches, and even strengthens such systems (think gardeners putting worms in their gardens to aerate and fertilize the soil).

In a nutshell, without the worms: Subversion happens --> it becomes a social possibility that undermines cultural norms--> we acknowledge it, usually through cultural strife --> it is then incorporated into our cultural lexicon until we don’t see the original problem, thereby once again restarting the cycle of subversion by investigating a new threat and thereby again giving it power it might not have otherwise obtained on its own. (We are happy to explain this in more depth, just ask).

Before tying this to our novels, we want to briefly point out that Greenblatt’s argument is rather Foucauldian. Greenblatt writes, “Thus the subversiveness which is genuine and radical—sufficiently disturbing so that to be suspected of such beliefs could lead to imprisonment and torture—is at the same time contained by the power it would appear to threaten” (48). Foucault similarly wrote of silence counterintuitively awarding power to the entire discourse of sexuality in The History of Sexuality, “Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.” (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 1508). I.e. because we condemned sex acts (among other things) to silence, we actually exploded the discourse by finding new ways to discuss it (which is admittedly a bit of a sweeping overview, but we wanted to throw it out there).

On to the textual cans of worms...

Gallathea is an extremely subversive text: the same women who disobey their state and the gods in escaping to the forest also undermine patriarchy, heteronormativity, and even the economic system of inheritance by desiring to marry each other. At the very moment in which it appears that Gallathea and Phillida’s actions have called into question nearly every single institution of early modern English culture, Neptune--a literal deus ex machina--agrees to transform one of the virgins into a man so that they can enter into a heterosexual union. By transforming one of the virgins into a man, Neptune also transforms all of their subversions into reaffirmations of the play’s constructed hierarchies. It is not simply coincidental that the gods reaffirm cultural hierarchies through subversive characters; incorporating subversion into systems of hierarchy is the only way to affirm such systems. The marriage promised at the end is, in Elizabethan comedy, a trope that signals the confirmation of kyriarchy and the submission to authority.  Perhaps the only truly subversive moment in the play is that the play ends before the sexual transformation and the marriage can happen.

In What Maisie Knew, James deconstructs the nuclear family by exploring a new and subversive construct: divorce. The “Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857” established marriage as a legal contract rather than a sacrament and moved divorce proceedings from the ecclesiastical (i.e. the church) to the civil courts (wikipedia source and more cool information about this). What Maisie Knew was published in 1897, at which point it could take years to get through the divorce courts and people could, via newspaper updates, follow the story like your best Kim Kardashian gossip. It is postulated that in fact James got his inspiration for this novel from one such ongoing divorce story published in the papers. In our subversion cycle we outlined, then, James takes a controversial/subversive issue (dissolving a marriage no longer “sacred”), applies it to a family so we can observe the effect it has on a child, but then wraps up the narrative in the only more-or-less culturally acceptable way: he has Maisie leave with Mrs. Wix, the only woman who can somewhat adequately perform the role of motherhood. Without her, Maisie would be left to either fend for herself, which doesn’t gel with our conception of innocence and childhood, or she would be forced to choose between her real parents and her pseudo-parents (her stepparents get together as their own couple) in an uncomfortably adult capacity that she’s not equipped to handle. Now, however, divorce is no longer subversive, so it’s almost odd to analyse it.   

So, if subversion is only something that can be seen once it is incorporated, what are we not seeing? We want you to consider this clip about framing cultural narratives relating to Ferguson:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/you-are-promoting-a-certain-narrative-ferguson-protestor-confronts-cnn-reporter/. Is this an example of a veteran reporter dealing with an angry, out-of-control protester, or is it a deconstructive moment in which American media is exposed simply as a person who speaks into the camera louder than anyone else?

We leave you with this Greenblatt quote: “The historical evidence, of course, is unreliable; even in the absence of substantial social pressure, men lie quite readily about the most intimate beliefs.”

Toxic Virgins, Queer Relations

The following is an outline for a teaching discussion about John Lyly's Gallathea using Mel Y. Chen's "Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections" as a lens.

Consider the following passages from the Chen: 

A toxin threatens, but it also beckons. It is not necessarily alive, yet it enlivens morbidity and fear of death. A toxin requires an object against which its threat operates; this threatened object is an animate object — hence potentially also a kind of subject — whose “natural defenses” will be put to the test, in detection, in “fighting off,” and finally in submission and absorption. (265)

Toxins — toxic figures — populate increasing ranges of environmental, social, and political discourses. Indeed, figures of toxicity have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds while retaining their affective ties to vulnerability and repulsion[. . .] (266)

1. Considering Chen's definition of "toxin," what are the toxins in John Lyly's Gallathea? Maybe a more appropriate question would be who are the toxins? 

What are the roles of the citizens, the Danes, and the gods in creating a society that fears toxins? How do the Danes enact toxicity? Can the Danes be considered a racialized, toxic other?

2. Are Gallathea and Phillida toxins? Remember that the sacrifice to the Agar must be "the fairest and chasest virgin in all the country," which appears to fall under the requirements of Chen's "new kind of purity" (266), since outward beauty and sexual absistence can be see as manifestations of purity and innocence.

View the following clip:

3. How does toxicity function according to temporality? Once intoxicated, is a subject or object always toxic? This is, at least, the running joke in Monsters, Inc., in which the character "George Sanderson" is constantly subjected to new detoxifying regiments. If Gallathea and Phillida are toxic, when did they become toxic? Does their impending gender/sex transformation at the end of the play detoxify them? Consider the following passage from Chen: "Unlike viruses, toxins are not so very containable or quarantinable; they are better thought of as conditions with effects, bringing their own affects and animacies to bear on lives and nonlives" (281-82).

4. The Rafe/Robin/Dick subplot is often ignored among critics and scholars, for various reasons. Even though the subplot appears to be a low-brow, simple farce that makes fun of dimwitted servants, some of the brothers health is endangered as they work for different masters, which can be seen as an early modern echo (if we can echo back in time) of the Chinese workers who are exposed to lead paint. Chen says of the Western concern (or lack thereof) for these workers: "the conditions of labor needed to be made just visible enough to facilitate the territorial/state/racial assignation of blame, but not enough to generally extend the ring of sympathetic concern around the workers themselves" (269). Can these servant brothers be compared to the Chinese workers? Does the play encourage us to pity or sympathize with the servant brothers, or are the just visible enough for "blame," but not enough for "the ring of sympathetic concern"?

Killing the Idealistic Dreams of Young Activists

One of the common contemporary methods of interpreting Gallathea is as a forerunner of the modern gay rights movement, or even more boldly, as proof that some of our modern concerns about gender, sexuality, and trans* bodies have always already been present in literature. While I believe that there is enough evidence in Gallathea to support an argument along these lines, I am wary of this kind of heady interpretation because it can lead to undergraduate students thinking that it is okay to dismiss cultural and historical influences before they have mastered them. I do not believe that new historicism is the answer to all early modern literary criticism, but in my experience, undergraduates who fail to learn the value of cultural and historical influence on early modern texts cannot develop the skills to eventually move on from new historicist readings to other schools of criticisms.

The teaching idea that I am sharing would hypothetically be taught to an undergraduate English literature course. I find Armstrong's Foucaldian analysis in "Gender Must Be Defended" to be the best argument by which to teach undergraduates about the problems of reading modern culture onto early modern texts (even though Armstrong focuses entirely on 19th-century works, which disproves my concern for historical accuracy, but let's pretend that didn't happen.... and in fact, it might be helpful to look at these Victorian novels because odds are more undergraduates have read them than have read Gallathea). After a lengthy analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Armstrong says that "being an individual and having a gender amount to pretty much the same thing. As the heroines of sensation fiction demonstrate, the minute one leaves the protection of the household, she ceases to be a 'woman' and loses the protection and support owed a gendered body" (544). While Gallathea and Phillida's escape to the forest and donning of masculine attire may seem thrilling and powerful to modern students who enjoy breaking down gender barriers and binaries, Armstrong's article would interpret their forest adventures differently. Gallathea and Phillida are not self-empowered by their ambiguously-gendered bodies, instead, they lead to both girls' anxieties about their relationship to the "youth" they see before them, and fear that they will eventually be discovered and sacrificed or murdered anyway. The forest is not a green world in which they can escape from society and live outside gendered constraints, rather gender becomes even more important while in the forest because it is so maddeningly ambiguous, and the girls begin to obsess over it.

Armstrong again analyzes Jane Eyre to prove an important point about gender and society:

Readers are fond of noting that Brontë cuts Rochester down to size and feminizes him before she can imaginatively incorporate him into a traditional household. Readers do not tend to notice, however, that this move virtually condemns to death anyone who cannot enter their charmed circle. If, as Foucault suggests, the biopolitical turn translates class warfare into a matter of biological difference, then it follows that the masculine protection of traditional femininity produces the negative femininity that identifies certain people as those who can be allowed to die. (545-46)

From this perspective, the gods' promise to change one of the girls into a man at the end of the play is not an early modern imagining of the transgender body as much as it is a way of imaginatively reinforcing society's values and maintaining the status quo of class warfare. The main plot of Gallathea does not feature your typical upper/middle/lower class warfare, but the relationship between humans and the gods may suffice as a form of class warfare. The conflict between humans and gods led to the demand of a sacrifice, which, like Jane Eyre, is based on a gendered, biological difference: only beautiful, virginal young women can be sacrificed to Neptune. The language of the play sexualizes these virgins in such a way that it is difficult to call them children, and yet their virgin status makes it impossible to call them wives. Because of their liminal existence outside of these two traditional roles of femininity, they are categorized as "those who can be allowed to die."

The marriage between Gallathea and Phillida, then, is the logical conclusion of such biopolitical powers at play. Because the plot cannot allow for their deaths, they must be assimilated into what Armstrong calls the "charmed circle" of the traditional household. Like Jane Eyre's assimilation of Rochester, the assimilation of Gallathea and Phillida requires imagination and creativity. But as radical as Neptune's promise of a change in sex may appear to modern audiences, it is actually the most conservative option available. By incorporating Gallathea and Phillida into a heteronormative union, Lyly reinforces social constructs of marriage, gender, and class.

The moral of the story? If you want to start a cultural revolution and bust up the status quo, don't look to early modern comedies for inspiration, kids. They almost always disappoint.