tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/literature-9/articlesLiterature – The Conversation2024-03-21T12:25:02Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2186772024-03-21T12:25:02Z2024-03-21T12:25:02ZPurim’s original queen: How studying the Book of Esther as fan fiction can teach us about the roots of an unruly Jewish festival<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582875/original/file-20240319-24-z4q69e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C3%2C1022%2C699&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Esther denouncing Haman, who, according to the Purim story, attempted to have all Jews within the Persian Empire massacred. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/esther-denouncing-haman-haman-a-favourite-at-the-court-of-news-photo/929217364?adppopup=true">Hutchinson's History of the Nations/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Once upon a time, in the ancient Near East, there was a beautiful queen.</p>
<p>Scribes wrote of her lovely form, her regal majesty and her fierce bravery. The people honored her in lavish celebrations marked by debauchery. She was linked to <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/327/oa_monograph/chapter/2616211#rfn55">the morning star</a>, and her name was “Ishtar” – or “Esther,” <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/Jastrow%2C_%D7%90%D6%B4%D7%A1%D6%B0%D7%AA%D6%B0%D6%BC%D7%94%D6%B7%D7%A8.1">as she was called in Hebrew</a>.</p>
<p>This is the story that inspires the Jewish holiday of Purim, which begins this year on the evening of March 23. Across the world, Jews retell the story of <a href="https://bibleodyssey.com/articles/esther/">Queen Esther</a> in <a href="https://theconversation.com/purim-spiels-skits-and-satire-have-brought-merriment-to-an-ancient-jewish-holiday-in-america-177700">lavish spectacles</a>, <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/purim-plays-and-carnivals/">called Purim spiels</a>, that feature costumes, jokes, satire, noisemakers and food and wine.</p>
<p>Purim is the only celebration in Judaism with an entire biblical book about its origins. <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/Esther?tab=contents">The Book of Esther</a> tells how she and her pious cousin, Mordecai, defeated the scheming Haman, a powerful royal adviser, thereby saving the Jewish people from annihilation.</p>
<p>Yet among researchers, the actual origins of the holiday – and of Esther herself – are still hotly contested. Few scholars interpret Esther’s story as a record of historical events, and they note a number of oddities surrounding the book. The text, sometimes called the Megillah, contains <a href="https://www.thetorah.com/article/megillat-esther-a-godless-and-assimilated-diaspora">no mention of God</a>, or of religious activities such as prayer or sacrifice; its narrative is colorful and suggestive.</p>
<p>When archaeologists began to dig up cuneiform texts in the 19th century, a further peculiarity emerged: Esther and her cousin Mordecai shared names <a href="https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/dictionary-of-deities-and-demons-online/ishtar-DDDO_Ishtar">with Ishtar</a> and <a href="https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/dictionary-of-deities-and-demons-online/marduk-DDDO_Marduk">her cousin Marduk</a>, two of the most prominent deities in ancient Mesopotamia. Ishtar, like Esther, was a divine queen associated with both eroticism and battle. Marduk, like Mordecai, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20182036">overcame a deadly enemy and celebrated his triumph with a banquet</a>. Moreover, the name Purim seems to derive from <a href="https://www.thetorah.com/article/on-the-origins-of-purim-and-its-assyrian-name">the Babylonian word “pûru</a>” – a “lot” in both the senses of “<a href="https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared/docs/cad_p.pdf">portion</a>” and “<a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/3209686">fortunetelling dice</a>.”</p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=kwcXAAAAIAAJ&lpg=PA94&ots=Oj4t1mFmis&pg=PA87#v=onepage&q&f=false">Earlier scholars of those cuneiform texts</a> concluded that the Book of Esther was retelling a Babylonian myth about Ishtar and Marduk. No such myth has been found to date, however, leading to an apparent historical dead end.</p>
<p>When I learned about these connections as <a href="https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/religiousstudies/brownsmith-esther.php">a young biblical scholar</a>, a modern parallel immediately came to mind: the genre of fan fiction. </p>
<h2>Fanfic, then and now</h2>
<p>In fan fiction, amateur writers create stories based on the characters and imaginative worlds of popular media.</p>
<p>Sites such as the <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/">Archive of Our Own</a>, <a href="https://www.fanfiction.net/">FanFiction.net</a> <a href="https://www.wattpad.com/">and Wattpad</a> host millions of “fics,” from short sketches to novel-length epics. The popularity of these stories has extended beyond the internet: “Fifty Shades of Grey” <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2017/02/10/fifty-shades-of-green-how-fanfiction-went-from-dirty-little-secret-to-money-machine/">was a fic of the teen series “Twilight</a>,” while the bestselling novel “The Love Hypothesis” <a href="https://www.cinemablend.com/star-wars/bestselling-romance-novel-inspired-by-fanfiction-about-star-wars-rey-and-kylo-ren-is-becoming-a-movie">began as a story about characters from “Star Wars</a>.”</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman in a black shirt and red scarf stands in front of a sign that says 'Fifty shades.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Author E.L. James attends a special fan screening of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ the movie based on her books, in New York in 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/FiftyShades-GreyFanFiction/149d58f2e10f4e548709808c0573a816/photo?Query=fan%20fiction&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:asc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=71&currentItemNo=44">Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File</a></span>
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<p>Fan fiction studies has become an established corner of academia: studying these texts, their creators and the factors that influence them.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2021.2037">I am not the first scholar</a> to wonder whether ancient texts were the fan fiction of their time. Scholars and fans alike have noted the way that <a href="https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=anthos_archives">the Aeneid builds upon Homer’s compositions</a>, for example, and <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20">John Milton’s epic “Paradise Lost</a>” mines the tales of the Bible.</p>
<p>I believe it makes sense to think of Esther, too, as the ancient equivalent of today’s fan fiction: a tale of familiar characters, re-imagined and repurposed to reflect the identities of their creators.</p>
<p>To begin, Esther and Ishtar had more in common than just their name. In fact, everything in my first paragraph describes them both, from the raucous celebrations held in their names to their legendary beauty. The author of the Book of Esther seems to have been describing a character already familiar to readers, just like a modern fan fiction writer does.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An open scroll shows text with a colored floral pattern at the top and bottom of the manuscript." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An 18th-century parchment scroll of the Book of Esther, preserved at the Mejanes Library in Aix-en-Provence, France.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/a-scroll-of-parchment-from-the-xviiith-century-preserved-at-news-photo/949696604?adppopup=true">Patrick Horvais/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>This comparison is not hindered by the fact that the plot of Esther did not derive from a known Mesopotamian myth; plenty of <a href="https://fanlore.org/wiki/Alternate_Universe">“alternate universe” fics</a> tell new stories in new settings, using the change of scenery to reveal new facets of their beloved characters.</p>
<p>Nor does the divide between Mesopotamian polytheism and Jewish monotheism pose a problem. For many authors, fanfic provides an opportunity to <a href="https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479811748.003.0009">transform and critique its source text</a>, adding elements that were glaringly absent from the original, such as queer relationships. </p>
<p>In short, thinking about the story of Esther as ancient “fanfic” could explain the striking parallels between her character and Ishtar. But the implications of this framework are more than simply academic. Calling Esther fan fiction can teach modern readers something about the celebration of Purim – and about storytelling itself.</p>
<h2>Writing ourselves into stories</h2>
<p>The first lesson is that, from ancient Jewish scribes to modern teenage girls, people have been <a href="https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2023.2441">rewriting other people’s stories</a> to reflect their own reality and identities.</p>
<p>Today, a fanfic author might compose a saga about how <a href="https://fanlore.org/wiki/Mary_Sue">a girl like her</a> won hearts and saved lives in male-dominated Middle-earth, the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” series. Back in ancient Babylon, Jewish scribes might have re-imagined a popular goddess as a Jewish heroine. Transformative writing is empowering and defiant, then as now.</p>
<p>The second lesson is that carnival and queerness and joy are built into ancient scripture; they are no modern development. Ishtar was <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25683215">a gender-fluid queen</a> who <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1062957">declared</a>, “I am a woman (but) verily I am an exuberant man.” Her followers included “<a href="https://doi.org/10.25162/9783515130974">assinnu” and “kurgarru</a>,” ranks of Mesopotamian priests who were famous for transgressing gender norms.</p>
<p>It should thus come as no surprise that Esther is a story that names and elevates a number of eunuch characters, ascribes <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4139801">feminine and nonbinary traits</a> to the heroic Mordecai and imagines its heroine as sexual and daring. Purim’s long-standing tradition of <a href="https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/cross-dressing-on-purim/">cross-dressing</a> and <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-03-15/ty-article-magazine/why-do-jews-dress-up-for-purim/00000180-5bb4-d718-afd9-dfbccaa70000">flamboyant costumes</a> has a rich history.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman in an orange bikini-style outfit and a large red headdress dances in the street near a tall stuffed bear figure." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dancers perform during a Purim parade festival in 2012 in Holon, Israel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/MideastIsraelPurim/295ac0e151b849e2886aa0ecf16a2a2e/photo?Query=purim&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:asc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=780&currentItemNo=139">AP Photo/Dan Balilty</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Likewise, fan fiction is a deeply queer practice. A disproportionate number of stories <a href="https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2022.2205">address gender and sexuality</a>, and its creators are themselves <a href="https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/fansplaining/viz/TheFansplainingShippingSurveyResults/SurveyDemographicsGenderandSexuality">disproportionately</a> <a href="https://www.flowjournal.org/2023/02/fan-demographics-on-ao3/">LGBTQ+</a>.</p>
<p>The third lesson is one that I strive to teach all my students: Scripture can be both relatable and startling when we look at it through fresh eyes. </p>
<p>The Bible instructs Jews to retell the story of Esther each Purim. But by <a href="https://urj.org/blog/get-act-yes-you-can-write-purim-spiel">creating themed Purim spiels</a> each year, drawing on sources from Motown to Moana, Jewish congregations clothe the familiar plot in exciting new garb.</p>
<p>Thinking about biblical stories as fan fiction invites readers today to imagine the ancient scribes as “fans,” brimming with emotional reactions and strong opinions. The Bible is a diverse library of texts created in manifold times and contexts, and its authors were passionately invested in the stories they told and retold – just like modern amateur authors.</p>
<p>This Purim, I invite you to approach the Bible’s tales as the result of a dynamic process, a panoply of voices that each sought to influence their tradition by adding their own words to it. In the hands of fan fiction writers and Purim spiel creators, that process continues today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218677/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Esther Brownsmith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Whether thousands of years ago or right now, fans have always created new stories based on familiar characters, weaving their own experiences into the tale.Esther Brownsmith, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, University of DaytonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2252932024-03-08T13:35:16Z2024-03-08T13:35:16ZHow three 18th century ‘deviant mothers’ defied social norms in their novel writing<p>The onset of the French Revolution, at the end of the 18th century, had a <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/England_and_the_French_Revolution.html?id=sA23AAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">seismic impact</a> on British thinking. Ideas of the nation were <a href="https://archive.org/details/representationso0000paul">being hardened</a> through xenophobia, an unquestioned reverence for institutional authority and a vocabulary of English “manliness” and “chivalry”. The publication of philosopher Edmund Burke’s <a href="https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/burke/revfrance.pdf">Reflections on the Revolution in France</a> (1790) reinforced this conservative stance. </p>
<p>But at the same time, a small but steadily growing group of thinkers vocally <a href="https://archive.org/details/englishjacobinno0000kell/page/n7/mode/2up">supported the revolution</a> and called for similar class reforms in England. Many women writers <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/women-writing-and-revolution-1790-1827-9780198122722?cc=gb&lang=en">responded to these ideas with enthusiasm</a>. They knew that change, conservative or revolutionary, would inevitably shape gender relations and the fight for women’s rights.</p>
<p>Three such women, ridiculed at the time for their decisively radical writing, and celebrated for it today, are Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. Their novels feature defiant and non-conforming heroines, who resist the tyranny of forced marriages and indifferent parents. Ultimately, they seek moral, intellectual and economic liberation. </p>
<p>This reconfiguration of the heroine includes portraying them as “deviant” mothers. This was especially important at a time when the definition of “virtuous motherhood” had become <a href="https://archive.org/details/politicsofmother0000bowe/page/34/mode/2up">increasingly restrictive</a>. These women resisted the traditional ideas of mothering not only by writing subversively but also by rebelling against the social norms that expected them to be acquiescent mothers raising submissive daughters themselves.</p>
<h2>1. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)</h2>
<p>Credited as the pioneer of first-wave feminism in England, Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for her book, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3420">A Vindication of the Rights of Woman</a> (1792). But Wollstonecraft also wrote a fictional parallel to this work. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft reading a book" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie (circa 1790-1791).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MaryWollstonecraft.jpg">Tate Britain</a></span>
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<p><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/134/134-h/134-h.htm">Maria: or the Wrongs of Woman</a> (1798) chronicles the life of a woman who is married to an abusive husband. He publicly “proves” her mad, so she is confined in an asylum and can no longer see their infant daughter. Hopeless in prison, Maria writes a manuscript to her daughter, recording episodes from her harrowing life. </p>
<p>The warden at the asylum, Jemima, is a lower-class woman, born out of wedlock and stigmatised from birth. She grows up an impoverished orphan and is sexually abused by her stepfather and later by her employer. Her rape results in pregnancy and she aborts the child. The novel is a bleak commentary on the cyclical nature of sexual violence inflicted on mothers like Jemima and Maria, who live in the shadows of civil society.</p>
<p>We know her as the mother of the novelist Mary Shelley, but before her marriage to William Godwin, Wollstonecraft too had given birth to a daughter out of wedlock. While caring for her infant, Fanny, she coped with the abandonment of Fanny’s biological father. Her autobiographical travel writing, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3529/3529-h/3529-h.htm">Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark</a> (1796), was composed during this difficult period and dedicates extensive sections to her experiences as a new mother.</p>
<h2>2. Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)</h2>
<p>Charlotte Smith was unhappily married to a gambling addict, and of the 12 children born in this troubled marriage, only nine survived. </p>
<p>Her life as a writer was <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Charlotte_Smith.html?id=SfHMCwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y">marked by desperation</a>, as she struggled to support her children and grandchildren and fought a lifelong legal battle for her father-in-law’s property. Smith wrote prolifically and her novels portray women at various stages of their lives, from older matriarchs leading the family to young mothers and women who give birth outside marriage. </p>
<p>These are often sympathetic portrayals, and the narrator doesn’t make a moral commentary. For instance, in <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41646">Emmeline</a> (1788), one of the characters who gives birth to an “illegitimate” child is reunited with her lover and given a happy ending. This is transgressive as the norm was to depict “promiscuous” women as suffering and dying to caution young women readers. </p>
<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=930MDSl9EMQC&rdid=book-930MDSl9EMQC&rdot=1&pli=1">Desmond</a> (1792), Smith’s most overtly political novel, goes even further in its rebellion. Its English hero unequivocally sympathises with the revolutionaries in France. Moreover, he falls in love in love with a young mother of three children. There’s a convergence of personal and political liberation as the plot unfolds.</p>
<h2>3. Mary Robinson (1757-1800)</h2>
<p>Much like Smith and Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson championed women’s rights, education and autonomy. She <a href="https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-23857">acquired celebrity status</a> as a stage actress and was dubbed “Perdita” after the Shakespearean heroine. As a poet, she earned the informal title <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/apr/12/sappho-phaon-mary-robinson">“the English Sappho”</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Painting of Mary Robinson with her dog." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Mrs Mary Robinson (Perdita) by Gainsborough (1781).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gainsborough_Mary-Robinson.jpg">Wallace Collection</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Her initial journey as an author resembles Smith’s. Robinson was coerced to marry young, to a man deep in gambling and debt. When he failed to repay his debts and was imprisoned, Robinson was sent to prison with him. However, she took <a href="https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/perdita-the-life-of-mary-robinson-text-only-paula-byrne?variant=32555097620558">the unusual step</a> of taking her infant daughter to prison with her rather than leaving her in a state care home, as was convention.</p>
<p>Robinson’s eventual rise to literary and theatrical stardom was accompanied by an unconventional personal life, as she separated from her husband and had several affairs. Unlike Smith, who presented herself as a self-sacrificing and chaste single mother to the public, Robinson became <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230118034_4%20OR%20https://www.jstor.org/stable/20798271?seq=29">a sexualised actress and author</a>, an even more “deviant mother”. Her memoirs were posthumously published by her daughter.</p>
<p>Robinson’s novel, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_natural_daughter.html?id=tsQwuAEACAAJ&redir_esc=y">The Natural Daughter</a> (1799), set in the <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/women-writing-and-revolution-1790-1827-9780198122722?cc=gb&lang=en">backdrop of the French Revolution</a>, portrays a newly married heroine who takes an unmarried mother’s baby under her care in order to protect both the mother and the baby. When the biological mother goes missing, rumours arise that the baby is her own from an illicit affair, leading to the breakdown of her marriage. </p>
<p>The novel follows the lives of both women, the adoptive mother who faces shame and social ostracism, and the biological one who rises to fame as an actress – much like Robinson herself.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aditi Upmanyu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Their novels feature defiant heroines, who resist the tyranny of forced marriages and seek moral, intellectual and economic liberation.Aditi Upmanyu, PhD candidate in English Literature, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2213022024-03-04T19:21:30Z2024-03-04T19:21:30ZHash fudge and a fish for Picasso: inside the legendary cookbook of Alice B. Toklas<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579116/original/file-20240301-28-m6lgwe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C0%2C1020%2C723&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Around the Fish – Paul Klee (1926)</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Around_the_Fish_by_Paul_Klee.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Our cultural touchstones series looks at influential books.</em></p>
<p>Alice B. Toklas wrote one of the bestselling cookbooks of all time. One reason for its popularity was the inclusion of stories of her 39-year relationship with the great modernist writer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Stein">Gertrude Stein</a>. Another was its recipe for hash fudge, which made Toklas an icon of 1960s counterculture.</p>
<p>Alice wasn’t a very common name in the 1980s when I was an undergraduate. People used to tease me about it: you can get anything you want at Alice’s restaurant, living next door to Alice, go ask Alice – and mysterious references to Alice B. Toklas. </p>
<p>I had never heard of her before; I wasn’t that cool. And I’m sure I wasn’t the only person to unconsciously associate her with Alice the housekeeper from the 1970s sitcom The Brady Bunch.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, I felt an affinity with this other Alice, who died when I was three years old. (The B, incidentally, stands for Babette.) When I realised <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alice_B._Toklas_Cook_Book">The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book</a> had been published 70 years ago in 1954, I decided it was finally time to become better acquainted.</p>
<h2>The ladies of 27 Rue de Fleurus</h2>
<p>Toklas was born in San Francisco in 1877. She studied piano at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1907, when she was 29, she travelled to Paris and met Gertrude Stein the day after she arrived. It was love at first sight. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573931/original/file-20240206-29-xz8u65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573931/original/file-20240206-29-xz8u65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573931/original/file-20240206-29-xz8u65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573931/original/file-20240206-29-xz8u65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573931/original/file-20240206-29-xz8u65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573931/original/file-20240206-29-xz8u65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573931/original/file-20240206-29-xz8u65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573931/original/file-20240206-29-xz8u65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>In the book Stein wrote about their life, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_Alice_B._Toklas">The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas</a>, Stein has Toklas say: “I was impressed by the coral brooch she wore and by her voice.” The brooch is now in the collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge UK, and appears in <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/488221">Pablo Picasso’s famous portrait of Stein</a>.</p>
<p>The women moved in together and presided over one of the most renowned literary and artistic salons of the time, entertaining Picasso, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway">Ernest Hemingway</a>, <a href="https://www.moma.org/artists/4607">Francis Picabia</a>, <a href="https://www.henrimatisse.org/">Henri Matisse</a>, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edith-sitwell">Edith Sitwell</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Clifford_Barney">Natalie Barney</a>, and many others. </p>
<p>Surrealists rubbed shoulders with cubists and modernists, the exchange of ideas lubricated by delicious food and drink. Toklas was in charge of catering, but they also employed a series of cooks for the day-to-day.</p>
<p>Hemingway described Toklas thus:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[She] had a very pleasant voice, was small, very dark, with her hair cut like Joan of Arc in the <a href="https://www.jeanne-darc.info/art-image/louis-maurice-boutet-de-monvel/">Boutet de Monvel</a> illustrations […] we liked Miss Stein and her friend, although the friend was frightening. The paintings and the cakes and the eau-de-vie were truly wonderful. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Toklas did not like Hemingway, though, particularly because of the sexual frisson between him and Stein – perhaps that was why he was frightened.</p>
<p>In the 1920s and ‘30s, Paris was crawling with American migrants or “expats”. Stein and Toklas were a tourist attraction, like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_of_Llangollen">Ladies of Llangollen</a> before them. If you had an introduction, you could visit 27 Rue de Fleurus and its incredible art collection. </p>
<p>In the first world war, Stein and Toklas drove delivery trucks. In their 60s when the second world war began, they decided to wait it out. By this time, Stein was increasingly unwell with stomach cancer. Stein and Toklas moved to the country, but continued to receive visitors and entertain.</p>
<p>Stein died in hospital in 1946 with Toklas by her side. Toklas said in a letter to a friend that it was the end to all happiness. It devastated her. But it also allowed her to come into her own. She started to put together the cookbook that made her practically a household name.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/pablo-picasso-was-not-a-lone-genius-creator-he-was-at-the-centre-of-several-creative-hubs-and-changed-the-course-of-western-art-181329">Pablo Picasso was not a lone genius creator – he was at the centre of several creative hubs, and changed the course of western art</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A modernist in the kitchen</h2>
<p>Toklas’ literary output was two cookbooks and a memoir. Stein also immortalised her in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (her only bestseller), and the erotic poem <a href="https://www.dca.org.uk/assets/general/Session_2_(9th_July)_Lifting_Belly_-_Gertrude_Stein.pdf">Lifting Belly</a>, written in 1916-17 but only published in 1953.</p>
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<p>The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book was much more than a collection of recipes. It was also semi-autobiographical. It included observations of the differences between French and American food cultures, culinary tales involving their famous friends, and stories of wartime life. </p>
<p>In his book <a href="https://eatingmywords.com.au/alice-among-the-gourmands/">The Gourmands’ Way - Six Americans in Paris and the Birth of a New Gastronomy</a>, Justin Spring called it a “brilliant, deftly comic hybrid”.</p>
<p>Toklas had much in common with the culinary writer <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/dec/08/elizabeth-david-first-lady-of-food">Elizabeth David</a>. David’s recipes brought a taste of the sunny Mediterranean to bleak post-war Britain, where people were still living on rations of powdered eggs and losing their minds over <a href="https://www.zum.de/whkmla/sp/0910/chef/chef2.html#vi">a fresh orange</a>. Toklas aimed her book at a British and American audience, stating that “it will be pleasant if the ideas in it, besides surviving the Atlantic, manage to cross the Channel and find acceptance in British kitchens too”.</p>
<p>Food scholar <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Aesthetic-Pleasure-in-Twentieth-Century-Womens-Food-Writing-The-Innovative/McLean/p/book/9780415703314">Alice McLean</a> noted how both Toklas and David </p>
<blockquote>
<p>claimed the pleasures of gastronomy previously reserved for men. [They] expanded women’s food writing beyond the domestic realm by pioneering forms of self-expression that celebrate female appetite for pleasure and for culinary adventure. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Janet Malcolm, in her 2007 book <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/two-lives-paperback-softback">Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice</a>, says that “most of Toklas’ recipes were and remain too elaborate or too strange to attempt”. The sentiment is echoed by other commentators. Is this a fair assessment? </p>
<p>Certainly, there are recipes like the “hen with golden eggs”, where a boiled chicken is stuffed with mashed potatoes shaped into eggs and fried in butter until golden. With the extras arranged around the chicken on a platter, reduced boiling liquor enriched with butter and cream is poured over. </p>
<p>“This is an amusing way to present a chicken,” Toklas wrote: “a delicious dish”. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Picasso drawing a fish. Le Mystère Picasso – Henri-Georges Clouzot (1956).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxes8pyHkJc">YouTube</a></span>
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<p>For Picasso, Toklas cooked a whole fish and covered it with a design of red mayonnaise, sieved hard-boiled eggs, truffles and herbs. Picasso “exclaimed at its beauty”, but commented that it was more in <a href="https://smarthistory.org/matisse-goldfish/">Matisse’s style</a> than his own.</p>
<p>A cake they enjoyed in the town of Mâcon had four layers of almond meringue, separated by mocha, kirsch and pistachio butter cream, and decorated with crystallised apricot and angelica flowers. Toklas experimented until she had got it as close as she could to the original.</p>
<p>But then there were recipes as simple as this: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mutton roasted and basted with port is out of this world. Try it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>My own forays include Chicken à la Comtadine, where a jointed chicken is simmered in butter and flambéed in red vermouth. Salad Port Royal consists of boiled potato slices and green beans, mixed with shredded apple, and dressed with mayonnaise. The silky texture of a home-made mayonnaise makes this simple salad delectable. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/betty-crocker-turns-100-why-generations-of-american-women-connected-with-a-fictional-character-168443">Betty Crocker turns 100 – why generations of American women connected with a fictional character</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A light snack in Dante’s Inferno</h2>
<p>So what about the “haschich fudge”? It wasn’t actually an original Toklas: the recipe was contributed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brion_Gysin">Brion Gysin</a>, in a section of the cookbook with recipes from many of Stein and Toklas’s friends. </p>
<p>Gysin was a Canadian experimental artist, who moved to Paris in 1934. He was expelled from the Surrealists by the autocratic control freak <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/artist/breton-andre/">André Breton</a>. In 1954, he opened a restaurant in Morocco. </p>
<p>The recipe stated, tongue-in-cheek, that it was suitable for a ladies’ bridge club. Lucie Hamilton, in a review for the Australian magazine The Farmer and Settler, said it was “more akin to a light snack taken in Dante’s Inferno”.</p>
<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/epPzZbT42B0?si=4ZEiULEX6sJfOsEW" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>As she explains at the end of her reading of the recipe in the recording above, Toklas was not aware the hash fudge would cause a controversy in America, where consuming narcotics was illegal. </p>
<p>The irony is that the fudge does not actually contain hashish, the resin extracted from the cannabis plant. The recipe recommends foraging for wild <a href="https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/indica-vs-sativa"><em>cannabis sativa</em> or <em>cannabis indica</em></a> and grinding the dried leaves to add to the fudge. </p>
<p>After the censored fudge recipe was finally published in a 1960s US edition of the book, it was transformed into the <a href="https://littleindianabakes.com/history-brownies/">all-American brownie</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/cannabis-how-it-affects-our-cognition-and-psychology-new-research-180987">Cannabis: how it affects our cognition and psychology – new research</a>
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<hr>
<h2>If you’re going to San Francisco</h2>
<p>In 1968, the year after Toklas died, Peter Sellers starred in the movie <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063115/">I Love You Alice B. Toklas</a>. A conservative lawyer is given hash brownies by a young woman and turns into a hippie. He tries to return to his conventional life, but finds that he can’t do it any more. </p>
<p>In the final scene, he leaves his fiancée at the altar and runs into the street, saying “there’s gotta be something beautiful out there! There’s got to be. I know it!”</p>
<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/f5VaFyBCU0g?si=ZhgCJ-M_Qgn_kEHh" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>1967 was the “summer of love” where hippies who had “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out#:%7E:text=%22Turn%20on%2C%20tune%20in%2C,tune%20in%2C%20drop%20out%22.">turned on, tuned in and dropped out</a>” congregated in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The city Toklas had left in 1907 for a more exciting life was the now the epicentre of a global movement of environmental awareness and grassroots peace activism. </p>
<p>Across the world, young people were repudiating the values of the previous generations. They rejected war, encouraged self-discovery, and embraced Eastern mysticism. </p>
<p>Hash brownies were part of a panoply of mind-altering substances that opened the door to cosmic oneness. </p>
<p>While Stein gradually became part of the literary canon, Toklas entered the annals of popular culture. In the 1990s, both women were elevated to the ranks of the celestial when craters on the planet Venus were named after them. </p>
<p>Toklas’ fame was not just a result of the haschich fudge, though. The doyen of American gastronomy, James Beard, <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/03/specials/stein-toklasobit.html?_r=1&oref=slogin">said of her</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Alice was one of the really great cooks of all time. She went all over Paris to find the right ingredients for her meals. She had endless specialities, but her chicken dishes were especially magnificent. The secret of her talent was great pains and a remarkable palate.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She also had imagination, wit and a charming arrogance. </p>
<p>But perhaps Gertrude Stein described her best, in Lifting Belly:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She is a dish.<br>
A dish of good.<br>
Perfect.<br>
Pleasure.<br>
In the way of dishes.<br></p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221302/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alice Gorman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Alice B. Toklas and her partner, the influential modernist writer Gertrude Stein, hosted a celebrated Paris salon. Toklas would go on to write an unusual bestseller.Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2243202024-03-01T17:24:54Z2024-03-01T17:24:54ZAn ode to the social realism of ‘boring’ lyrics – from The Kinks to The Streets<p>The majority of chart artists content themselves with writing lyrics about relationships, breakups or their lavish lifestyles. Take the current top 10 song, Prada by Cassö, RAYE & D-Block Europe. As one might expect from the title, it speaks of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGT_C_kuZQ">designer clothes, fancy hotels and expensive cars</a>. Other artists, however, satisfy themselves with something a little less glamorous – songs about the everyday, with lyrics about the ordinary and banal.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.routledge.com/Realism/Grant/p/book/9781138283206?gad_source=1&utm_source=cjaffiliates&utm_medium=affiliates&cjevent=6dd0caa2d7b311ee836ca00b0a18b8f8">Social and literary realism</a> have long been valuable tools in detailing the everyday lives of people, and they have been a staple in popular music for decades. When The Kinks released <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/2zYEcirgirihBtUr9ninD6">The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society</a> in 1968, it was perhaps the first album to actively focus on the mundane, everyday aspects of life as lived by the average person in Britain. </p>
<p>It was about as far removed as it was possible to be from the psychedelic introspection that was popular among the biggest selling bands of the time (led, of course, by The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society delighted in detailing the smaller joys of life, with songwriter Ray Davies singing about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc7dmu4G8oc">strawberry jam, draught beer, custard pies and Desperate Dan</a> in songs that gave an insight into a world that was familiar and relatable to its listeners.</p>
<h2>The Smiths to The Streets</h2>
<p>The Kinks started a trend. In the 1980s, The Smiths chose the name to be as unglamorous and bland as possible, positioning themselves as the antithesis to the Spandau Ballets and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Darks of the music world. Lead singer Morrissey <a href="https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-song-that-that-bonded-the-smiths-duo-morrissey-and-johnny-marr/">told an interviewer</a>: “It was the most ordinary name and I thought it was time that the ordinary folk of the world showed their faces.” </p>
<p>With lyrics that portrayed a life of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3IjN8whXM0">rented rooms</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnv0JnyOaTE">high-rise estates</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXrbR2rOZz0">motorway service stations</a>, Morrissey was writing lyrics about unexceptional, everyday experiences that jarred with the glitz and glamour the New Romantic bands were singing about. </p>
<p>And while The Smiths provided an alternative to the pomposity of early 1980s music, The Streets’ debut album Original Pirate Material was released in 2002 into a UK music market dominated by cheesy lyrics like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz_pZ_feXM0">“I’m flying high ‘cause your love’s made me see”</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FsEyEUU4oU">“Baby I would climb the Andes solely to count the freckles on your body”</a>. Its lead vocalist Mike Skinner instead wanted <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Story_of_The_Streets/CMBDN6JcozsC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=mike+skinner+to+write+good+lyrics+about+contemporary+British+life&pg=PA89&printsec=frontcover">“to write good lyrics about contemporary British life”</a>. </p>
<p>His songs about Playstations, London Underground travel cards, cans of Carling, bottles of Smirnoff Ice, smoke-reeking jeans, McDonald’s and KFC documented the lives many of us were actually living.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Could Well Be In by The Streets (2004) includes lyrics about JD Sports, playing pool and ITV.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When COVID swept the world in 2020 and we were confined to our houses, gazing out of our windows at a world that was off limits, songs with everyday lyrics became even more important. </p>
<p>After all, did we really want to be listening to Ed Sheeran’s boast about how he’d <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGwWNGJdvx8">found love in a bar</a> when we couldn’t go to bars, or Dua Lipa going on about how she was once again <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHuBW3qKm9g">dancing her ass off</a> when we couldn’t go to clubs? What many of us really wanted were lyrics that showed solidarity with our situation and represented the lives we were living, with all the glamour, excitement and gloss wiped off.</p>
<p>Lyrics to 2021 songs like Niko B’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGjg_MMMhRU">Who’s That, What’s That?</a> (“Copped a Big Mac, milkshake and some large fries … take the gherkin out of the inside”) or Lady Leshurr’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktFemM-LNPU">Quarantining</a> (“I went Sainsbury’s just to get bog roll”) became poignant. </p>
<p>Even love song supremo Paul McCartney got on board, pondering in the track <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmF1H_vUhbc">When Winter Comes</a> (2021) how he must “dig a drain by the carrot patch” and “fix the fence”. Not a hint of “patron”, “poolside drinking”, or “Margarita rounds” in sight (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDNaVtTzPvg">sorry, Drake</a>).</p>
<h2>The future of the banal</h2>
<p>Sixty years since champions of the everyday The Kinks came onto the scene, the ordinary lyric is alive and well. <a href="https://diymag.com/news/the-streets-are-back-announcing-new-album-the-darker-the-shadow-the-brighter-the-light">Mike Skinner is back</a> releasing albums as The Streets after a decade-long hiatus, and new pretenders to the throne of the mundane, Leeds’s Yard Act, are about to release their second album Where’s My Utopia.</p>
<p>The band have been praised for how their songs have <a href="https://www.theskinny.co.uk/music/interviews/yard-act-on-their-debut-album-and-documenting-modern-britain">documented modern life in Britain</a>. With <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPIk27ve3uo">lyrics like</a>: “We’re gonna put Poundshop terracotta frogs everywhere / And wrap solar power fairy lights round the gutter … I got a prosecco o’clock poster half price in Ikea”, they continue to fly the flag of joyous banality. </p>
<p>Songs about love, breakups and extravagance will undoubtedly continue to dominate the charts, but in among it all, it seems, there’s always room something a little more ordinary.</p>
<hr>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Glenn Fosbraey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Social and literary realism have long detailed people’s everyday lives – and they have been a staple in popular music for decades.Glenn Fosbraey, Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of WinchesterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2225882024-02-27T19:40:15Z2024-02-27T19:40:15ZBetty Smith enchanted a generation of readers with ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ − even as she groused that she hoped Williamsburg would be flattened<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577625/original/file-20240223-28-ht6czh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C11%2C3691%2C2714&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Betty Smith's novel sold millions of copies in the 1940s.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/group-of-young-women-smile-as-they-crowd-around-another-who-news-photo/119076541?adppopup=true">Weegee/International Center of Photography via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Eighty years ago, in the winter and spring of 1944, Brooklyn-born author <a href="https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/smith-betty">Betty Smith</a> was entering a new chapter of life.</p>
<p>A year earlier, she was an unknown writer, negotiating with her publisher about manuscript edits and the date of publication for her first book, “<a href="https://archive.org/stream/ATreeGrowsInBrooklynByBettySmith/A+Tree+Grows+In+Brooklyn+by+Betty+Smith_djvu.txt">A Tree Grows in Brooklyn</a>,” a semi-autobiographical novel about the poor but spirited Nolan family. </p>
<p>Now she was one of the lucky few. Her book was spotted in cafes, on buses and in bookstores all over town. The following year, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038190/">when it was being made into a film</a> directed by Elia Kazan, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=H1MEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA43&dq=A+Tree+Grows+in+Brooklyn&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj25depp-CDAxXiSTABHYd3C6YQ6AF6BAgKEAI#v=onepage&q=A%20Tree%20Grows%20in%20Brooklyn&f=false">Life magazine reported</a>, “Betty Smith’s ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ (2,500,000 copies sold) has become one of the best-loved novels of our time.”</p>
<p>New York in the 1940s was not the city we know today. The Empire State Building had not reached its <a href="https://www.esbnyc.com/about/history">full height</a>, nor had the statue of <a href="https://www.centralpark.com/things-to-do/attractions/alice-in-wonderland/">“Alice in Wonderland” taken up residence in Central Park</a>. And it would be decades before anyone was humming along to a tune that brashly commanded, “Start spreadin’ the news, I’m leavin’ today, I want to be a part of it: New York, New York!” </p>
<p>Brooklyn, too, was still becoming itself – and no other 20th-century American novel did quite so much for the borough’s reputation.</p>
<h2>Readers fall for Brooklyn</h2>
<p>During World War II, writes law professor <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/when-books-went-to-war-molly-guptill-manning">Molly Guptill Manning</a>, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” was one of the most popular books among the Armed Services Editions, which were mass-produced paperbacks selected by a panel of literary experts for distribution to the U.S. military during World War II. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Green horizontal copy of 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' with creases along the cover." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Armed Services Edition of ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://blogs.lib.unc.edu/ncm/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2017/03/A-Tree-Grows-in-Brooklyn-ASE.jpg">UNC Libraries</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It seemed like everyone wanted to declare some affiliation with the novel-turned-film and, by extension, with Brooklyn. Even readers who had never set foot in the borough nonetheless found themselves enchanted by it through Smith’s portrayal. </p>
<p>As one reader wrote to Smith, “Raised as a ‘rebel of the old South,’ Brooklyn has long been my symbol of all yankee, thus learning to hate it; but now I have learned to love it through Francie’s eyes … as Francie loved it.”</p>
<p>Advertisers also took note, riffing on Smith’s title with tags such as, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=SlMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA8&dq=A+Tree+Grows+in+Brooklyn&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjgn8vbp-CDAxU6RDABHX3uAF44ChDoAXoECAkQAg#v=onepage&q=A%20Tree%20Grows%20in%20Brooklyn&f=false">A Dress Grows on Peggy</a>,” or Rheingold extra dry lager – the “beer that grows in Brooklyn.”</p>
<h2>Poverty loses its sheen of shame</h2>
<p>Meanwhile, readers who had grown up in the borough responded enthusiastically to Smith’s evocations of their favorite neighborhood haunts, writing to her to share their own memories of the shops and streets that she had included in the novel. </p>
<p>“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” had done something remarkable for them: It removed the veil of shame that surrounded tenement living and, as historian Judith E. Smith has written, <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/visions-of-belonging/9780231121712">helped them reclaim their humble origins</a>.</p>
<p>And not just reclaim them. The novel affirmed the desire to move beyond poverty, as the protagonist, Francie, had done, and Betty Smith, too.</p>
<p>Francie’s wanderings through Brooklyn lead to her discovery of a more inviting public school than her own. With her father’s help, she manages to enroll in the school, which is better funded but farther from home. Despite the extra-long schlep, Francie sees it as “a good thing” to have found this new school: “It showed her that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable.” </p>
<p>It was a feeling that people of many backgrounds could understand, and not just in Brooklyn. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Red and white brick apartment buildings in Brooklyn." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">702 Grand Street in Williamsburg, where Smith spent part of her childhood and which served as the setting for ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,’ pictured in 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.compass.com/listing/702-grand-street-brooklyn-ny-11211/265170627315403233/">Compass Real Estate</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Smith certainly understood the importance of broadening her horizons: Although she never finished high school, when her marriage to a University of Michigan graduate student brought her to Ann Arbor, she was able to audit classes as a special student.</p>
<p>There, her work for her playwriting classes led to a prestigious playwriting prize, and then an invitation to study at Yale School of Drama. Divorced at that point, Smith was free to pursue her education in theater at Yale. The theme of self-improvement through education made “A Tree Grows” relatable for readers of modest origins.</p>
<p>Readers were quick to see the novel as a paean to Brooklyn, and often sought to bond with Smith over their presumed shared love of Brooklyn.</p>
<p>“I hope you will give us further stories of the Brooklyn which you know, and, I am sure, love so well,” wrote one reader. </p>
<p>“Some day, if you have time, it might be fun to chew the fat a bit about old Williamsburgh (sic),” journalist Meyer Berger wrote to Smith after reading and reviewing her novel. </p>
<p>“Betty Smith obviously loves Brooklyn and is proud of it,” Orville Prescott declared in his <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1943/08/18/issue.html">glowing New York Times review</a>.</p>
<h2>Smith scorns the borough’s new arrivals</h2>
<p>But did Betty Smith love Brooklyn? </p>
<p>After all, she wrote the novel while living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina – years after having moved away from New York. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.bkmag.com/2021/08/20/priced-out-the-2020-census-throws-brooklyns-affordable-housing-crisis-into-relief/">Like so many who leave Brooklyn today</a>, Smith did not return to take up residence, in part because she could not afford to live there on her own. By the time she had earned a windfall from “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” she had come to love Chapel Hill.</p>
<p>Smith also left Brooklyn with mixed feelings about her hometown. <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/visions-of-belonging/9780231121712">She wrote to her publishers in 1942</a>, “If Hitler’s bombers should ever get over and if any portion of this great city has to be wiped out, it would be a blessing if it were (Williamsburg).” </p>
<p>“Evil seems to be part of the very materials that the sidewalks are made out of and the wood and the brick of the houses,” she added. </p>
<p>Although writing about Brooklyn had brought her fortune and fame, she had no desire to return. </p>
<p>As she explained in her 1942 letter, Smith perceived Brooklyn’s current situation as the result of a changing population and growing crime: “A hundred years ago, it was a quiet peaceful village settled by hard-working, sturdy, honest burghers,” Smith reflected in her letter, adding that even 25 years ago, Williamsburg was a gentler place. “But now it’s a fearful one.” </p>
<p>Smith offered her own analysis of the situation: “The feuds in the neighborhood came about because most of the Italians originally came from Sicily and were fierce and murderous. The Jews in the neighborhood were mostly Russian Jews, conditioned to pogroms and much fiercer and more ready to fight.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Kids tug and pull at one another while a woman cries in the background and another woman tries to keep order." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A crowd gathers in Williamsburg in 1941 to see the corpse of a man shot twice by an unknown gunman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/premium-rates-apply-a-crowd-gathers-in-the-williamsburg-news-photo/2716771?adppopup=true">Weegee/International Center of Photography via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like many Americans at the time, Smith held some entrenched and intolerant views about immigrants and their character. Since she was often invited to contribute guest essays to publications during the height of her fame, she had ample opportunity to express her worldview. </p>
<p>After World War II, Smith directed this hostility toward foreigners at America’s wartime enemies. In her August 1945 essay “<a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1945/08/26/305533912.html?pageNumber=104">Thoughts for These Days of Victory</a>,” she encouraged readers not to forget their anger at wartime enemies: “Let us hold this bitterness so that we’ll not again be lulled into a false sense of security. The war proved conclusively that not all men are brothers and that not all nations are sisters.” </p>
<p>A full understanding of the Betty Smith behind the novel that changed how Americans felt about Brooklyn – and their humble origins – are complicated by Smith’s own views and her experiences away from Brooklyn. </p>
<p>As Smith knew, making something of yourself often requires leaving home. It’s hard to tell whether distance made her heart grow fonder. In leaving Brooklyn, Smith had not suddenly started seeing her hometown through rose-colored glasses.</p>
<p>In Chapel Hill she was finally able to see Brooklyn – and write about it – in a way that brought readers of all kinds closer to Brooklyn and legitimized their own origin stories. That, in and of itself, is a kind of love, even if it’s not the unconditional kind so many had imagined.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222588/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachel Gordan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation. But Smith rarely saw her hometown through rose-colored glasses − and even grew to resent it.Rachel Gordan, Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies, University of FloridaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2221602024-02-21T19:11:58Z2024-02-21T19:11:58ZGuide to the classics: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We inspired Orwell and influenced the Western imagination<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575490/original/file-20240213-16-bwem2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3394%2C2376&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Wassily Kandinsky – Composition 8 (1923).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wassily_Kandinsky_Composition_VIII.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>This year is the centenary of Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/we-9780241458747">We</a> – a major influence on George Orwell’s dystopia 1984, as well as an important early contribution to the burgeoning genre of science fiction. </p>
<p>We and 1984 (published in 1949) were crucial influences on Cold War western imagination of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state. But Orwell had never been there, and Zamyatin wrote his dystopia in 1920, a time of chaos and civil war just three years after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and two years before the Soviet Union formally came into being. </p>
<p>Both novels portray a state in which the individual has been merged into the collective: “I” has become indistinguishable from “we”. The state is run by a remote but all-seeing leader (the “Benefactor” in Zamyatin, “Big Brother” in Orwell), who is revered as the font of wisdom and universal wellbeing. The leader is backed up by a secret police (the Guardians, the Thought Police), who organise the disappearance of potential trouble-makers. </p>
<p>Life is meticulously regulated according to a state plan, leaving only a minimal personal sphere. In Zamyatin’s novel, houses are all glass. The only time the blinds can be lowered is for the regular hour of sex with a registered partner. Thinking differently is an offence against the state. </p>
<p>In both novels, falling in love is the fateful assertion of an “I” that is not part of “We.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-orwells-1984-and-how-it-helps-us-understand-tyrannical-power-today-112066">Guide to the classics: Orwell's 1984 and how it helps us understand tyrannical power today</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>An instinctive satirist</h2>
<p>Zamyatin wrote his novel while living in a special House of the Arts in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) under the protection of the writer <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Maxim_Gorky">Maxim Gorky</a>, who used his clout with Bolshevik leaders to shelter writers and artists from the worst privations of the Civil War period and the newly established revolutionary police, the <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/state-security/state-security-texts/the-all-russian-extraordinary-commission-for-struggle-with-counter-revolution/">Cheka</a>. </p>
<p>It might be assumed that Zamyatin was one of many members of the Russian intelligentsia who, having been fashionably radical under the Tsar, recoiled from the reality of rampaging mobs and social and political breakdown that led to the Bolsheviks taking power in October 1917. In fact, Zamyatin had been a Bolshevik, although he was no longer an active party member.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Yevgeny Zamyatin c.1919.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zamjatin.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He was born in 1884 in Lebedian, a town 370 kilometres south of Moscow, undistinguished except for its race track. His father was a priest (the lower rungs of Orthodox clergy were allowed to marry) and his mother, surprisingly, a pianist. This would have made them provincial intelligentsia, marginal to almost all their neighbours. </p>
<p>Judging by his bleak memories of Lebedian, Yevgeny was a lonely child who took refuge in reading. Having become a socialist as a teenager, he joined the Bolshevik party in time to participate in the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 in the capital, where he was a student at the St Petersburg Polytechnic. </p>
<p>Arrests and exile to the provinces followed, but he nevertheless managed to graduate as a ship-building engineer. He also started writing, winning praise from the critics for his vivid portrayal of provincial boredom and inertia in a novella, <em>Uyezdnoye</em> (A Provincial Tale), published in 1913. </p>
<p>The Russian government sent Zamyatin to England in 1916 to work on the building of ice-breakers at the Newcastle docks, so he missed the February Revolution and the ferment that followed. He returned just before October in an “antiquated little British ship”. The journey took about 50 hours, the passengers in lifebelts the whole time due to the threat from German submarines. </p>
<p>His late arrival for the revolution was something he always regretted – it was like “never having been in love and waking up one morning ten years married”. But it is difficult to imagine Zamyatin succumbing to the euphoria that gripped the Russian intelligentsia in 1917. He was a born loner and instinctive satirist, whose usual response to collective enthusiasm was to dissent. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/world-politics-explainer-the-russian-revolution-100669">World politics explainer: the Russian revolution</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>It was the oddness of the situation after October that struck Zamyatin first. He remembered the winter of 1917-18 as “merry, eerie […] when everything broke from its moorings and floated off somewhere into the unknown”. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mikhail Bulgakov (1928).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BB-%D0%91%D1%83%D0%BB%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2.jpg">Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Revolutionary Russia, with its privations, dysfunctions, identity adjustments and lofty rhetoric, provided many opportunities for satire. The genre flourished throughout the 1920s in the work of writers such as <a href="https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/literature/mikhail-zoshchenko/index.html">Mikhail Zoshchenko</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mikhail-Bulgakov">Mikhail Bulgakov</a>, and <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ilf_and_Petrov">Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov</a>. </p>
<p>This was for the most part the satire of insiders, rueful and affectionate, rather than that of regime critics. Bulgakov, to be sure, ran into political trouble in the late 1920s with his novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita">The Master and Margarita</a>, but the books of Ilf and Petrov, featuring their Soviet conman hero <a href="https://russiapost.info/culture/ostap_bender">Ostap Bender</a>, became Soviet classics, loved by generations of Soviet children as well as adults. </p>
<p>Zamyatin’s satire was colder and harsher. To be a heretic, whether the regime was Tsarist or Soviet, was an internal necessity for him – and, he argued, for “true literature”. He despised the “nimble” writers and artists – “futurists”, “proletarians”, and so on – who jumped on the Bolshevik bandwagon and curried favour with the new regime, proclaiming themselves “the court school” and filling the air with their “yellow, green and raspberry red triumphant cries”. </p>
<p>In the highly political and factionalised world of the arts in early Soviet Russia, this disdain was energetically returned. Denunciation in the literary journals was one of Zamyatin’s perennial problems. He had trouble with the Cheka, too, which arrested him several times. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The first edition of We (1924).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Weyevgenyzamyatin.png">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Written in 1920, We was turned down for publication by Soviet censors. An American publisher, E.P. Dutton, would produce the first complete edition in 1924, in Gregory Zilboorg’s English translation. The novel would not be published in the Soviet Union until 1988.</p>
<h2>Cogs in the machine</h2>
<p>We depicts a future society in which almost everyone willingly, even eagerly, sacrifices their individuality to become cogs in the machine, with the Guardians there to deal with any dissenters. </p>
<p>Clearly, Zamyatin’s experiences with the Cheka, the censors and his conforming writer colleagues were part of his inspiration. The Benefactor’s “socratically-bald head” was no doubt a swipe at Lenin, but his moral smugness probably owes something to <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Feliks-Edmundovich-Dzerzhinsky">Felix Dzerzhinsky</a>, the first head of the Cheka. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lenin – Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lenin_(Petrov-Vodkin).jpg">Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For educated contemporaries, however, the Benefactor had loftier literary antecedents: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Inquisitor">Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov</a> and Vladimir Solovyev’s Antichrist in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Solovyov_(philosopher)">Tale of the Antichrist</a>. </p>
<p>Both of these stories have a spokesman for institutionalised collective wisdom (the established Christian church) make the argument against a heretic (Jesus), with whom the authors’ sympathies lie. Zamyatin – a priest’s son, though he had abandoned Christianity in his youth – called the emerging orthodoxy of the Bolshevik Revolution “a new branch of Catholicism, which is as fearful as the old of every heretical word”.</p>
<p>The totalitarian society described in We may have been the Soviet future, but it was far from the Soviet reality when Zamyatin wrote. In the first years after the revolution, the Bolsheviks were trying to run Soviet Russia under an improvised system later called “War Communism”. This meant nationalising everything in sight and using force, rather than market relations, to extract grain from the peasantry and feed the cities and the Red Army, which was fighting foreign-backed White Armies on multiple fronts. </p>
<p>Soviet Russia was indeed cut off from the world, as Zamyatin’s dystopia is by the Green Wall, but at this point that was not the Bolsheviks’ choice. It was the result of war, foreign intervention and economic sanctions. The Bolsheviks believed in economic planning, but it would be ten years before they would seriously try to implement it. </p>
<p>In other words, the Bolshevik government in 1920 was as incapable of achieving the seamless regimentation of We’s dystopia as it was of building the space-craft that provides the novel with its science-fiction theme.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
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<p>Zamyatin’s novel is often read as a prescient foretelling of Stalinism, ten to 15 years before it came into being. That could be. But Zamyatin was also drawing on a more immediate source: the vision of a regimented and mechanised Soviet society of the future – seen as a utopia, not a dystopia – that was being trumpeted by the same futurist and “constructivist” artists whose embrace of the Bolshevik Revolution Zamyatin found so suspect. </p>
<p>A particular target, mentioned several times in We, was the worker poet <a href="https://monoskop.org/Aleksei_Gastev">Alexei Gastev</a>. Like Zamyatin, Gastev was a longtime Bolshevik revolutionary. In 1920, he set up a Central Institute of Labour whose mission was to train workers to function like machines. </p>
<p>This revolutionary version of the American capitalist concept of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/Taylorism">Taylorism</a> was aimed at maximising worker efficiency to increase productivity and profit. It did not go down well with the Soviet industrial ministry, still less with Soviet trade unions. It was closed down at the end of the 1920s, about the time serious industrialisation got underway. </p>
<p>But revolutionary regimentation of life, the cult of the machine, and submerging of the individual in the collective were staples of the “futurist” imagination, explored not only by Gastev, but the poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/vladimir-mayakovsky">Vladimir Mayakovsky</a>, the theatre director <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Vsevolod_Meyerhold">Vsevolod Meyerhold</a>, and constructivist artists like <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/artist/tatlin-vladimir/">Vladimir Tatlin</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Vladimir Mayakovsky c.1920.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Majakovszkij.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>The revolutionary avant-garde had great artistic achievements to its credit, but tolerance was not one of its characteristics. It bullied writers and artists who did not conform to its ideas, frequently appealing to the authorities (usually the Communist Party, but sometimes the Cheka) to put their opponents out of business. </p>
<p>That is one of the subtexts of Zamyatin’s 1921 essay <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1921-2/death-of-a-poet/death-of-a-poet-texts/zamiatin-i-am-afraid/">I Am Afraid</a>, as he was one of the major targets. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Association_of_Proletarian_Writers">Russian Association of Proletarian Writers</a>, a group claiming (with only partial accuracy) to represent the Party, imposed a dictatorial local rule on literature in the 1920s. It gave Zamyatin a relentless bashing – particularly after parts of We were published (perhaps without Zamyatin’s knowledge) in bourgeois Czechoslovakia. </p>
<p>This was the context of Zamyatin’s famous <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1929-2/proletarian-writers/proletarian-writers-texts/zamiatins-letter-to-stalin/">letter to Stalin</a> in 1931. Stalin was already looking more like the Benefactor than Lenin had ever done, but he occasionally intervened to protect writers who were the Association’s victims. Zamyatin asked permission to go abroad with his wife because he was unable to work in the “atmosphere of systematic persecution that increases in intensity from year to year”. He named, in particular, the Association’s Leningrad branch and the weekly literary journal it controlled. </p>
<p>Zamyatin phrased the request to leave, which Stalin approved, as a temporary one. He left open “the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men”. </p>
<p>In fact, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers was dissolved by government decree on Stalin’s initiative the next year. Zamyatin’s sometime patron, Maxim Gorky, who had departed for Europe earlier, returned to the Soviet Union. Zamyatin did not. </p>
<p>Perversely, although English was his best language and he was often called “the Englishman” in Russia, he went to France, a centre of Russian émigré culture, whose opinion-makers he anticipated would boycott him because of his Bolshevik past. </p>
<p>After some unhappy and lonely years, still a Soviet citizen, Zamyatin died of a heart attack in Paris in 1937 – the year of the Great Terror which, had he remained in the Soviet Union, would probably have killed him.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-stalins-great-terror-can-tell-us-about-russia-today-56842">What Stalin’s Great Terror can tell us about Russia today</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222160/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sheila Fitzpatrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Yevgeny Zamyatin was a born loner and instinctive satirist, whose usual response to collective enthusiasm was to dissent.Sheila Fitzpatrick, Professor of History at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2231592024-02-16T13:19:19Z2024-02-16T13:19:19ZWhat’s behind the astonishing rise in LGBTQ+ romance literature?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575427/original/file-20240213-24-vujzz2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C9%2C6000%2C3991&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">America's biggest book publishers originally viewed LGBTQ+ romance as a niche market.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/lesbian-couple-relaxing-and-reading-in-couch-royalty-free-image/857306488?phrase=gay+couple+reading&adppopup=true">Klaus Vedfelt/DigitalVision via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Graphic reading 'Significant Figures: 40% - Sales growth of LGBTQ+ romance books from 2022 to 2023 – the largest increase in any genre.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>A major transformation is underway in Romancelandia. </p>
<p>Once upon a time, romance novels from major U.S. publishers featured only heterosexual couples. Today, the five biggest publishers regularly release same-sex love stories.</p>
<p>From May 2022 to May 2023, <a href="https://www.circana.com/intelligence/press-releases/2023/soaring-sales-of-lgbtq-fiction-defy-book-bans-and-showcase-diversity-in-storytelling">sales of LGBTQ+ romance grew by 40%</a>, with the next biggest jump in this period occurring for general adult fiction, which grew just 17%.</p>
<p>The data from 2023 extends a boom that began in 2016: In the five years from May 2016 to May 2021, sales of LGBTQ+ romance grew <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/books/lgbtq-romance-novels.html">by a jaw-dropping 740%</a>.</p>
<p>It’s tempting to see this trend as a sign of the times. </p>
<p>After all, same-sex couples now populate TV shows, commercials and even <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/opinion/hallmark-lgbtq-christmas-movies-gay-lesbian-couples-rcna130407">Hallmark Christmas movies</a>. </p>
<p>Surely it was only natural for books such as Casey McQuiston’s “<a href="https://www.caseymcquiston.com/red-white-royal-blue">Red, White & Royal Blue</a>,” Lana Harper’s “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672445/paybacks-a-witch-by-lana-harper/">Payback’s a Witch</a>” and Cat Sebastian’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15171247.Cat_Sebastian">sparkling same-sex historical romance novels</a> to eventually find their way onto bestseller lists. </p>
<p>But it turns out that this rise in LGBTQ+ romance was far from inevitable.</p>
<p>Our <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231218991">recent paper</a>, based on interviews with romance editors and authors, shows that America’s biggest book publishers originally viewed LGBTQ+ romance as a niche market, tweaking their approach only after witnessing the huge success of independently published LGBTQ+ e-books. </p>
<h2>The business of romance</h2>
<p>Book publishing, like most of the entertainment industry, has traditionally operated under what <a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2013/12/the-way-of-the-blockbuster">Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse</a> calls the blockbuster strategy: Publishers invest huge sums into acquiring and promoting surefire bestsellers, such as Prince Harry’s “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/books/prince-harry-spare-review.html#:%7E:text=The%20prince%20claims%20to%20have,who's%20leaking%20what%20and%20why.">Spare</a>,” which earned <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9805467/A-book-Harry-written-Meghan-Royals-brace-20m-Megxit-memoir.html">a US$20 million advance</a>. </p>
<p>It’s simply more efficient for publishers to pursue a “one-to-many” business model – that is, to sell one book to a mass audience – than a “many-to-many” business model, selling a wider variety of books to many more small markets. </p>
<p>Historically, publishers assumed that same-sex romance would draw relatively small niche audiences, making them a riskier investment. As a result, for decades, LGBTQ+ love stories were left to small gay or lesbian presses.</p>
<p>Starting around 2010, however, digital romance publishing – both from self-published authors and small digital-only publishers like <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/57460-patty-marks-sex-romance-and-erotic-bestsellers.html">Ellora’s Cave</a> and <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/69517-samhain-publishing-to-shut-down-operations.html">Samhain</a> – revealed a vast, untapped appetite for more varied romance. The “<a href="https://bookscouter.com/blog/big-five-publishing-houses/">Big Five</a>” publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster – realized their go-to strategy was leaving money on the table.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Crowds of people browse the HarperCollins exhibition at a book fair." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">HarperCollins is one of the ‘Big Five’ publishing houses.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-harper-collins-stand-during-the-first-day-of-the-london-news-photo/1251977849?adppopup=true">Richard Baker/In Pictures via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Initially, big publishers tried to shoehorn digital romance authors into the blockbuster model by acquiring their books and issuing them in print. </p>
<p>That worked for E.L James’ “<a href="https://www.eljamesauthor.com/books/fifty-shades-of-grey/">Fifty Shades of Grey</a>,” which started out as fan fiction, was later released by a tiny online publisher and was eventually published by Penguin.</p>
<p>But for LGBTQ+ romance authors, the economics of high overhead, big print runs and a yearlong production schedule simply didn’t work for books geared for presumably smaller audience segments. </p>
<p>As romance readers abandoned mass-market paperbacks for a wider, fresher range of stories, romance editors at large and medium-sized publishers realized they needed to become more like digital presses.</p>
<h2>Making love pay</h2>
<p>How did they do this? </p>
<p>First, they hired new editors who had cut their teeth at tiny digital publishers with a history of releasing same-sex romance. For our paper, we interviewed several of these editors, including <a href="https://read.sourcebooks.com/editorial-mary-altman.html">Sourcebooks’ Mary Altman</a> and <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/22629-james-tabbed-to-run-harlequin-s-e-book-only-carina-press.html">Angela James</a>, founder of Harlequin’s Carina Press. Harlequin has been owned by HarperCollins since 2014.</p>
<p>James, formerly at Samhain, broke sacred publishing rules when she launched Carina, the first digital-only imprint at a traditional publisher. Carina lowered production and distribution costs by publishing only e-books and by offering authors higher royalties but no advances.</p>
<p>The lower-overhead strategy worked so well that in 2020 the imprint created <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/82161-harlequin-s-carina-press-to-launch-queer-romance-line.html">Carina Adores</a>, an e-book and print line dedicated to LGBTQ+ romance. </p>
<p>Altman, who had been accustomed to acquiring same-sex romance during her tenure at Ellora’s Cave, continued to do so at Sourcebooks, a mid-sized publisher partly owned by Penguin Random House. In 2020, she released the breakout LGBTQ+ bestseller “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Boyfriend-Material-Alexis-Hall/dp/1728206146">Boyfriend Material</a>” by Alexis Hall. Sourcebooks also launched a new imprint, <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/91686-dominique-raccah-does-it-her-way.html">Bloom Books</a>, in 2021, which sped up publishing schedules to meet the demands of self-published and other entrepreneurial authors.</p>
<p>These structural changes made romance imprints at large publishers nimbler, more innovative and more open to all kinds of couples.</p>
<p>Ironically, many of these more inclusive stories ended up appealing to mass audiences after all. </p>
<p>“<a href="https://read.sourcebooks.com/fiction/9781728206141-boyfriend-material-tp.html">Boyfriend Material</a>” dominated Best Romance of the Year lists in 2020. Adriana Herrera, Alyssa Cole, K.J. Charles and dozens of other authors of LGBTQ+ romance now regularly appear on such lists. “Red White and Royal Blue” is now an Amazon Original movie. </p>
<p>It’s important to note that LGBTQ+ romances still represent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/books/lgbtq-romance-novels.html">only 4% of the print book romance market</a>. Meanwhile, other diverse voices, including Black authors, <a href="https://www.therippedbodicela.com/state-racial-diversity-romance-publishing-report">are still underrepresented</a>. As a whole, the Big Five publishing houses are still adhering to the blockbuster strategy. Nonetheless, the structural changes they’ve made in romance imprints have fostered an outpouring of more diverse love stories. </p>
<p>At a time when other institutions, including universities and businesses, are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/27/dei-affirmative-action-legal-challenges-corporate-america/">dismantling programs that support diversity, equity and inclusion</a>, the LGBTQ+ romance boom serves as a reminder that inclusion doesn’t “just happen.” </p>
<p>Ongoing social and cultural change requires new systems, processes and structures. Without institutional support, many people won’t get their happy ending.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223159/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s tempting to see this trend as a sign of the times. But the biggest book publishers started changing their approach only once they realized they were leaving money on the table.Christine Larson, Assistant Professor of Journalism, University of Colorado BoulderAshley Carter, PhD Student in Journalism, University of Colorado BoulderLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2222112024-02-13T12:59:20Z2024-02-13T12:59:20ZWhy retranslate the literary classics?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574385/original/file-20240208-18-joywyw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C5%2C1997%2C1035&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Retranslations are making their way into book covers.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>While browsing the shelves of a library or a bookshop in search of the adventures of Gregor Samsa or Raskolnikov, you may be facing an impossible dilemma. Which version of the <em>Metamorphosis</em> or <em>Crime and Punishment</em> should you choose? Because in a particularly well-stocked library or bookshop, you could find more than ten different English translations of these two literary classics.</p>
<p>We’re not talking of different editions here, but of different texts, different words. In fact, people say and think having read Kafka or Dostoevsky, but what they have actually read are the words of Willa and Edwin Muir, Susan Bernofsky, Christopher Moncrieff, or again those of Constance Garnett, David McDuff or Michael Katz, to name just a few of the English translators of these two masterpieces of world literature.</p>
<h2>The art of choosing a translation</h2>
<p>So, which translation should you choose? Most readers will make their choice according to the same criteria that drive their choice of an English classic: affection for a publishing house or a particular collection, introduction and other paratexts, price, book cover, etc. Very few of them will be influenced in their choice by the renown of their translators, those invisible figures of translated literature, and silent actors of an interpretation which is often perceived as impersonal and objective, and certainly not crucial.</p>
<p>By the way, why all this fuzz around one single book? A legitimate question, given the countless books which are still awaiting their first translation – especially so in English, a language from which the whole world widely translates, but which itself translates very little from other languages (see the <a href="https://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/about/"><em>Three Percent</em> project</a> for a reaction to the small percentage of translated literature in the United States). If the primary goal of a translation is to make a book accessible to an audience who is unable to read it in its source language, then retranslations are clearly operations of little to no use. And yet, very few English speakers today read Dante, Cervantes or Rabelais in a century-old English translation, not to say older. On the contrary, Italian, Spanish and French speakers (and English speakers, for that matter) do continue to read their own leading authors in a language that is several centuries old, duly assisted in the process by long, explanatory notes.</p>
<p>So why do we keep retranslating our foreign literary classics? Because a classic is a text that we never stop retranslating, one might say, reversing the terms of the question. The phenomenon of retranslation is both paradoxical and inherent in every culture, to the point that an historian of translation, Michel Ballard, has identified it as one of the few constant features in the history of translation.</p>
<h2>Censorship, inaccuracies and ageing</h2>
<p>There are, of course, many reasons behind such urge to retranslate. Most often, the driving force behind a retranslation – or new translations, as the publishers quite obviously prefer naming them – is a sense of dissatisfaction with previous translations. Because of some forms of ideological or moral censorship, for instance, which may have deprived its readers of certain aspects of the book. No need of a dictatorship to see a text stripped of certain references to the culture which produced it: the simple decision to make the book accessible to new readers involves applying some cultural filters to it (regarding food, habits, sports, or other culture-specific items). In other cases, the sense of dissatisfaction may be due to errors or inaccuracies, originated by human fallibility or limited resources. Just think for a moment to the working conditions of pre-Internet translators, for whom some basic fact-checking could require several days of research, and that only thirty years ago.</p>
<p>Take one of the most famous so-called “errors” in the history of translation, the horns on the head of Michelangelo’s <em>Moses</em> (1515). The artist based his work on the Latin translation of the Bible carried out by St. Jerome some 1,100 years earlier (supreme longevity for a translation). Hebrew, a consonantal language, dispenses with vowel indications, thus opening the way to an ambiguity between <em>keren</em> (horned) and <em>karan</em> (radiant), in a crucial passage of the <em>Exodus</em>. While Jerome interpreted it as “horned,” inspiring much of the Christian iconography of the centuries to come, all contemporary translations of the Bible give Moses a radiant, beaming face upon receiving the tablets of the law. The possible ambiguity of that wording was cleverly recreated by Chagall’s “intersemiotic” translation, which found in a different medium a way to attribute Moses true horns of light.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569567/original/file-20240116-26651-cb9bdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569567/original/file-20240116-26651-cb9bdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569567/original/file-20240116-26651-cb9bdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569567/original/file-20240116-26651-cb9bdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569567/original/file-20240116-26651-cb9bdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569567/original/file-20240116-26651-cb9bdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569567/original/file-20240116-26651-cb9bdl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Michelangelo, <em>Moses</em>, 1513-1515. Marc Chagall, <em>Moses receiving the tablets of the law</em>, 1950-52.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Fourni par l'auteur</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>One of the most frequently cited reasons for retranslating is that translations inevitably age. What about “originals”? They age too, of course, but not quite in the same way. They seem to ripen with age, whereas translations often turn grotesque. The difference lies essentially in the status of originals and translations: as a derivative text, a translation cannot exist without the primary text from which it comes from, and this secondary status deprives it of the authority of a “true” literary text. One may add to that the fact, widely demonstrated by <a href="https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/meta/1998-v43-n4-meta169/003302ar/">corpus linguistics</a>, that translations tend to be stylistically more conservative than their sources, and therefore may lack that unique charge of meaning which is the essence of a literary masterpiece.</p>
<p>The impression of ageing can also come from a better knowledge of the target culture, particularly with regard to certain cultural elements which have become commonplace: a footnote explaining what <em>sushi</em> is would not only be unnecessary today, but decidedly comical.</p>
<p>Sometimes retranslations bring forth major changes, in either titles, character names or key concepts, often triggering inflamed reactions from both critics and readers. Whether Camus’s hero was a stranger or an outsider (and whether it was his mother, mommy or <em>maman</em> who died at the beginning of the novel) is debatable and indeed got readers and critics <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translation-what-the-first-line-of-the-stranger-should-be">talking</a>. Divine temptations, however, proved much more controversial and destabilising, as shown by the reactions stirred by the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/06/led-not-into-temptation-pope-approves-change-to-lords-prayer">reform of the Lord’s prayer</a>. Retranslations can be disturbing because they introduce relativism into an interpretation which we thought of as definitive and unique. Translation scholars Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere came to define it as the “Proust’s Grandmother effect,” drawing on her disappointment in reading a new translation of the <em>Odyssey</em> where Ulysses had become Odysseus. Other scholars, such as <a href="https://www.temporal-communities.de/events/lecture-naturalisation-of-the-foreign-venuti.html">Lawrence Venuti</a>, also observed a somewhat nostalgic reaction on the part of some readers, when confronted with new translations of classical works.</p>
<p>In some cases, it is the very text that we thought of as “original” which turns out to be derivative: for instance, the most recent retranslations of Kafka resort to a “new” version of the German text, liberated from <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opinion/translating-franz-kafka-diaries.html">Max Brod’s editing</a>.</p>
<p>In a few cases, retranslations are simply determined by commercial or editorial reasons, since it may be easier, cheaper and more lucrative (or the three things at once) to propose a new translation rather than to reissue an old one.</p>
<h2>Can we anticipate the path of a translation series?</h2>
<p>In the wake of Antoine Berman (1990), a pioneering translator scholar in this field, a “retranslation hypothesis” has been put forward, to describe the direction of translation-retranslations series. According to such hypothesis, first translations would tend to be introductory works which “domesticate” foreign texts in order to make them acceptable to their target audience, and retranslations would be more and more inclined to come closer to the source text and display its multiple facets. Such a vision of a progressive approach toward a perfect identity with “originals” is certainly fascinating, but unrealistic, as it fails to take into account the multiple reasons behind a retranslation. As a counterexample, one may think of the free translations/adaptations of Greek and Latin classics in the 1600-1700, during the era of so-called “belles infidèles” or “libertine translations”: they were mostly retranslations, yet as distant as possible from their sources.</p>
<p>Can we anticipate when and how often a classic will be retranslated? Several hypotheses have been put forward: every century, every generation, every 20 years… However, the series of translations and retranslations of a literary classic show very little regularity, and quite unpredictable gaps, jumps or accelerations. Several case studies exist, but still no exhaustive studies providing reliable, large-scale statistics for a given period, genre or country. The only prediction we can make is the appearance of a peak in retranslations when canonised authors fall into the public domain, i.e., 70 years after their death in Europe. At this time, publishers are inevitably prompted to issue new translations of such authors, in order to capitalise on their cultural power. In the first weeks of 2015, for example, Turkish readers found no fewer than <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/february/turkish-versions-of-the-little-prince">30 versions of <em>The Little Prince</em></a>, as soon as the novella fell in the public domain in Europe (but beware, not in France, nor in the United States <a href="https://www.ccdigitallaw.ch/copyright-on-the-work-le-petit-prince-by-antoine-de-saint-exupery-the-complexity-of-the-different-national-copyright-laws-on-an-international-level/">yet</a>).</p>
<p>In 1994, Isabelle Collombat, professor at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, predicted that the 21st century would be the <a href="https://hal.science/hal-01452331">age of retranslation</a>. Upcoming studies will tell us whether this is indeed the case. One thing is certain: retranslation has a bright future ahead. It is the perfect antidote to the idea of a unique translation, and it reminds us that every single translation relies on a peculiar process of interpreting and rewriting. And that multiple readings, such as metamorphoses, are not a crime, but a true source of vitality for literature, and of pleasure for the reader.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222211/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Enrico Monti ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.</span></em></p>Which version of “The Metamorphosis” or “Crime and Punishment” should you choose? In a particularly well-stocked library or bookshop, you could find many different English translations.Enrico Monti, Maître de conférences en Anglais et Traductologie, Université de Haute-Alsace (UHA)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2225902024-02-09T13:33:14Z2024-02-09T13:33:14ZSome of the Renaissance’s most romantic love poems weren’t for lovers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574483/original/file-20240208-16-27mgyx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C5%2C750%2C552&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sonnets still have a reputation for being about the unrequited love of a man for a woman.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Codex_Manesse_Bernger_von_Horheim.jpg">AndreasPraefcke/Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As poets have demonstrated for centuries, a sonnet for your beloved never goes out of style. The gift of verse may carry extra cachet this Valentine’s Day, on the heels of Taylor Swift’s announcement that <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swift-tortured-poets-department-track-list-1234962007/">her next album is poetry-themed</a>. </p>
<p>But in carrying out <a href="https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463720274/petrarch-and-the-making-of-gender-in-renaissance-italy">my research on Renaissance literature and gender</a>, I’ve been struck by how many of that period’s love poems were not for lovers.</p>
<p>These sonnets, composed for friends and family, are not just beautiful; they’re also a reminder that love and Valentine’s Day aren’t exclusively for couples.</p>
<h2>The love sonnet is born</h2>
<p>The sonnet was invented in 12th century Italy as a 14-line poem with 11 beats per line and various rhyming patterns. Its originator, Giacomo da Lentini, was a poet in the Kingdom of Sicily who had been inspired by <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-heretical-origins-of-the-sonnet/">older Arabic and French poetry</a>.</p>
<p>But it was the Italian poet <a href="https://poets.org/poet/petrarch">Petrarch</a> who put the form on the map. In the 14th century, he wrote a collection of 366 poems, mostly sonnets. He penned the collection for a woman named Laura, whom he loved from afar in life and after her death.</p>
<p>Petrarch died in 1374, but his poetry became the <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Petrarch/tkbVMQEACAAJ?hl=en">most widely published</a> literature of the Italian Renaissance. It was so popular that it inspired generations of poets, imitators known as “Petrarchists.” Petrarchism became a global phenomenon in the 16th and 17th centuries, spreading to Spain, France, England <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo3645653.html">and even the Americas</a>. </p>
<h2>Playing with sonneteering stereotypes</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thomas-wyatt">Thomas Wyatt</a> is thought to have written the first English sonnets, in the early 16th century. His poems strongly relied on Petrarch; some of the best known, like “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/aug/10/poem-of-the-week-thomas-wyatt">Whoso list to hunt</a>,” are quasi-translations of the Italian poet’s work.</p>
<p>Writing <a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-poems/#:%7E:text=While%20he%20may%20have%20experimented,writing%20sonnets%20seriously%20around%201592.">a half-century later</a>, Shakespeare changed the form, ending his sonnets with a rhyming couplet, giving birth to the “Shakespearean sonnet.” </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Title page of a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets featuring a colorful illustration of Shakespeare, flowers and two cherubs." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many of Shakespeare’s sonnets were addressed to an unnamed young man.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/detail/FOLGERCM1~6~6~1189282~187533:-Songs--Songs-and-sonnets--manuscri?qvq=q:112125&mi=0&trs=1#">Folger Digital Image Collection</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More than four centuries after the first printing of Shakepeare’s sonnets in 1609, his poems are still oft quoted. Many valentines will find themselves <a href="https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/read/18/">compared to a summer’s day</a> or swearing there can be no impediments between <a href="https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/read/116/">the marriage of true minds</a>.</p>
<p>Less well known, however, is the fact that half of Shakespeare’s poems were addressed to a young man, an unnamed “<a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/mysterious-identity-fair-youth/">Fair Youth</a>.” Depending on which Shakespeare scholar you ask, the gesture is either platonic, romantic or a little of both. In any case, it introduces an element of queerness, in that there’s homoeroticism and a <a href="https://huntington.org/verso/queerness-shakespeares-sonnets">challenge to what society deems natural</a>.</p>
<p>Yet today the Renaissance sonnet still has a reputation, even among scholars, for being about the unrequited love of a man for a woman. But even before Shakespeare, in Renaissance Italy, the sonnet was a lot more varied than that.</p>
<h2>For friends and lovers</h2>
<p>For starters, even Petrarch wrote about more than just his love for Laura. </p>
<p>A number of his poems were composed for friends, with several of them for the Florentine poet <a href="https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/petrarchs-plague/#p-3-0">Sennuccio del Bene</a>. In <a href="https://petrarch.petersadlon.com/canzoniere.html?poem=113">poem 113</a>, Petrarch writes about returning to the region where Laura was born, but he opens by describing his love for his friend, saying he is only “half” himself without Sennuccio, and that both men would only be “whole” and “happy” if they were together.</p>
<p><a href="https://petrarch.petersadlon.com/canzoniere.html?poem=287">Poem 287</a> is a sonnet on Sennuccio’s death, in which Petrarch’s mourning is only mitigated by the knowledge that his friend is in heaven with other great poets, like Dante, and the now-deceased Laura. The short poem mixes his love and grief for both people, his beloved and his friend.</p>
<p>Today’s “<a href="https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a26052713/galentines-day/">Galentine’s Day</a>” – a celebration of female friendship – has yet to spawn a male-friendship-centered “<a href="https://theconversation.com/galentines-day-has-become-a-thing-why-hasnt-malentines-day-130862">Malentine’s Day</a>.” </p>
<p>But platonic love between men carried no stigma in the Renaissance. Take the verses of Venetian writers <a href="https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/orsatto-giustinian_(Dizionario-Biografico)/">Orsatto Giustinian</a> and <a href="https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/celio-magno/">Celio Magno</a>, who published their poetry in a single book in 1601. </p>
<p>Magno and Giustinian portray their friendship with the vocabulary of Petrarchan love. <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Rime_di_Celio_Magno_et_Orsatto_Giustinia/SI81w2hdFcMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA160&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22tu%20non%20viui%22">In one sonnet</a>, Magno describes how he hates being separated from his friend, which is almost like being severed from himself: “You do not live, I do not live; together we are far from ourselves in this bitter state.” </p>
<p>At the risk of being the <a href="https://archermagazine.com.au/2021/03/heteronormativity-popular-history/">“and-they-were-roommates” historian</a>, I’ll note that the book also contains passionate poems from Giustinian to his wife, Candiana Garzoni. </p>
<p>That doesn’t cancel out the homoerotic tension in the men’s poems to each other, but it does make classifying their sexuality challenging. And maybe this shouldn’t be the point. If anything, their <a href="https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a46410977/broad-city-10th-anniversary-loving-your-best-friend/">romantic friendship</a> seems to skirt simple categories of sexual orientation. </p>
<h2>Sororal sentiment</h2>
<p>Most published writers in Renaissance Italy were men, but a not-insignificant number <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Five-Women-Shaped-Italian-Renaissance/dp/0367533995">were women</a>. Existing in a single copy in a library in Siena, Italy, is a joint poetry collection written by two sisters, Speranza Vittoria and Giulia di Bona. They lived with their mother and four other sisters.</p>
<p>Their sisters Lucrezia and Cassandra both died at a young age. The sonnets that Speranza and Giulia <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=ahDhW3sAAAAJ&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=ahDhW3sAAAAJ:Zph67rFs4hoC">composed for them</a> take the sort of heartbreaking imagery used to describe a lost partner, but is repurposed to portray their grief: the swan song, the sun gone dark, the poet’s wish to die in order to be near the object of their love. </p>
<p>In one melancholic poem about Lucrezia’s death, Speranza weeps for the “strange place, dark earth, and bitter stone” that “possess” her sister, and thus her own happiness.</p>
<p>The poems traded between Speranza and Giulia are brighter, exhibiting an abundance of love and admiration. In one pair of sonnets, written playfully yet impressively with matching rhyme words, the two liken each other to white ermines, <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/lady-with-an-ermine/HwHUpggDy_HxNQ?hl=en&ms=%7B%22x%22%3A0.5%2C%22y%22%3A0.5%2C%22z%22%3A8.872019804523145%2C%22size%22%3A%7B%22width%22%3A2.7206646564529637%2C%22height%22%3A1.2375000000000012%7D%7D">an animal considered a symbol of moral virtue</a>. </p>
<h2>Love is big</h2>
<p>There are so many other Renaissance Italian poems written for friends, parents, children and grandchildren – not to mention fiery love poems dedicated to Jesus and the saints, some by clerics, like <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv15d81vf?turn_away=true">Angelo Grillo</a>.</p>
<p>They serve as reminders of what the love poem can be. They push back against narratives that champion heterosexual relationships or that tout <a href="https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/teaching-premodern-asexualities-and-aromanticisms-908cc375af12">romantic coupling and sexual attraction</a> of any orientation as the most important relationship in a person’s life, <a href="https://theconversation.com/single-on-valentines-day-and-happily-so-155191">minimizing the importance of other loving relationships</a>.</p>
<p>These poems also encourage everyone to think more expansively about their own love and home lives. As an unmarried mother of a 5-year-old – and as someone who has only ever lived with friends or siblings – I have benefited immensely from <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/12/01/1216043849/bringing-up-a-baby-can-be-a-tough-and-lonely-job-heres-a-solution-alloparents">alloparenting</a>, the care provided for my son by all of the nonparents in his life.</p>
<p>I ended up in these living situations in part because of the pandemic, which, in a way, was a form of luck: Sometimes it takes a disruptive event <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-rhaina-cohen.html">to break cultural expectations</a> for the nuclear family and childrearing.</p>
<p>If writers could describe different types of love during the Renaissance, why limit what we can envision for ourselves?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222590/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shannon McHugh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>These moving poems are a reminder that on Valentine’s Day, it’s OK to celebrate a broader definition of love.Shannon McHugh, Associate Professor of French and Italian, UMass BostonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2222532024-02-08T22:34:47Z2024-02-08T22:34:47ZRethinking masculinity: Teaching men how to love and be loved<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573917/original/file-20240206-16-s8urnh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1212%2C664%2C4275%2C2550&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">We need to speak more about how to become the kind of man who can openly show love for others while accepting love from those who care. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>How will young men learn to love when many messages seem to be <a href="https://theconversation.com/stop-scolding-men-for-being-toxic-113520">either focused on what is wrong with them</a> — or how they can dominate? </p>
<p>Many masculinity critics speak of the dangers of traditional gender ideologies, rape culture or toxic ways of being male.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, some men, like <a href="https://theconversation.com/social-media-misogyny-the-new-way-andrew-tate-brought-us-the-same-old-hate-191928">Andrew Tate, promote visions of masculinity based on misogyny and male domination</a>, while others, like Jordan Peterson, reinforce <a href="https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-115920">traditional gender ideologies</a> as a misguided way of responding to men’s search for meaning and belonging.</p>
<p>My scholarship examines masculinity and critical race theory <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/797617">in both early modern drama</a> and contemporary Canadian literature, with a focus on Black <a href="https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.v0i239.191511">and Indigenous literature</a>. </p>
<p>I am a mixed-race (Black, Métis, and Scottish) cisgender scholar who teaches in Treaty One Territory, in the heart of the Métis homeland, on the University of Manitoba campus. I live in a world that shows more than enough hatred to Black and Indigenous men. I want to focus more on how Black and Indigenous men can love and be loved. </p>
<h2>Patriarchy, ‘interlocking’ oppressions</h2>
<p>Many of the ways of being male that are under scrutiny or that some men are trying to reclaim are connected to patriarchy. </p>
<p>The late Black feminist philosopher bell hooks defines patriarchy as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…"<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Will-to-Change/bell-hooks/9780743456081">a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating</a>, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence"</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A hand is seen drawing on a black board next to symbols of the male and female genders." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573840/original/file-20240206-16-odyr5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=563%2C496%2C4514%2C2858&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573840/original/file-20240206-16-odyr5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573840/original/file-20240206-16-odyr5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573840/original/file-20240206-16-odyr5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573840/original/file-20240206-16-odyr5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573840/original/file-20240206-16-odyr5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573840/original/file-20240206-16-odyr5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many of the ways of being male that are under scrutiny are connected to patriarchy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As hooks and other Black feminists have also noted, patriarchy, racism, sexism and homophobia can be interlocking systems of domination. For these reasons, my work on masculinity also comes out of an <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-curb-anti-black-racism-in-canadian-schools-150489">anti-racist teaching practice</a>. </p>
<p>My teaching builds on a long tradition within Black and Indigenous feminist traditions that understand Black and Indigenous men as people who experience racism and domination in the world, and who have to learn how to love their families, partners and children without recreating cultures of domination and control within communal settings. </p>
<h2>Lesser-discussed forms of masculinity</h2>
<p>As Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice notes in <a href="https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/W/Why-Indigenous-Literatures-Matter"><em>Why Indigenous Literatures Matters</em></a>, the stories settlers tell about Indigenous communities often amplify toxic stories of lack and deficit. Too often, such stories presume the perverse success of colonialism. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-stories-about-alternate-worlds-can-help-us-imagine-a-better-future-dont-call-me-resilient-ep-7-transcript-167520">How stories about alternate worlds can help us imagine a better future: Don’t Call Me Resilient EP 7 transcript</a>
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<p>The collection <a href="https://uofmpress.ca/books/indigenous-men-and-masculinities"><em>Indigenous Men and Masculinities</em></a>, edited by scholars Robert Alexander Innes, a member of the Cowessess First Nation, and Kim Anderson (Cree/Métis), considers what we know or could learn about masculinities in less-patriarchal societies.</p>
<p><a href="https://uofrpress.ca/Books/C/Carrying-the-Burden-of-Peace"><em>Carrying the Burden of Peace: Reimagining Indigenous Masculinities Through Story</em></a> by white settler scholar Sam McKegney explores “Indigenous literary art for understandings of masculinity that exceed the impoverished inheritance of colonialism.”</p>
<p>Likewise, Black feminist scholars like hooks have encouraged men to be better and suggested a central task of <a href="https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/feminism-is-for-everybody-bell-hooks/">feminist criticism ought to be articulating less dominating ways for men to preform their masculinity</a>. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Audre-Lorde">poet and author</a> <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/198292/sister-outsider-by-audre-lorde/">Audre Lorde’s essay “Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response</a>” she reflects on mothering her son, noting: “Our sons must become men — such men as whom we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among.” As a mother, Lorde says, “this task begins with teaching [her] son that [she does] not exist to do his feeling for him.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Brown hands holding a heart." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573954/original/file-20240207-26-r8t2em.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573954/original/file-20240207-26-r8t2em.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=292&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573954/original/file-20240207-26-r8t2em.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=292&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573954/original/file-20240207-26-r8t2em.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=292&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573954/original/file-20240207-26-r8t2em.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573954/original/file-20240207-26-r8t2em.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573954/original/file-20240207-26-r8t2em.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">What could we learn about masculinities in less-patriarchal societies?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Contempt and politics</h2>
<p>While I take the point of writers like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/books/pauline-harmange-i-hate-men.html">Pauline Harmange</a> or <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250193421/howtodatemenwhenyouhatemen">Blythe Roberson</a>
that misandry (contempt or dislike) can be politically useful, I fear the language <a href="https://www.harpercollins.ca/9780008457600/i-hate-men">of “hating men”</a> is unproductive — even when meant <a href="https://www.papermag.com/blythe-roberson#rebelltitem4">humourously</a> — and can turn men away from the very feminist work that aims to help them become better lovers, fathers, friends and brothers. </p>
<p>Stories we tell about Black and Indigenous men can create fear of them, and this can serve as a justification for racism. Racism, as political geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, can be defined as “<a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242012/golden-gulag">the state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death</a>.” </p>
<p>Stories representing Black men as inherently violent and prone to antisocial behaviour are part of a long racist tradition which <a href="https://theconversation.com/george-floyds-legacy-derek-chauvin-guilty-verdicts-could-spell-the-end-of-police-immunity-158194">places the lives of Black men at risk</a>. </p>
<h2>Love and tender feelings</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="The word 'Brother' in large white font on a book cover." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573921/original/file-20240206-24-jusf5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573921/original/file-20240206-24-jusf5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573921/original/file-20240206-24-jusf5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573921/original/file-20240206-24-jusf5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573921/original/file-20240206-24-jusf5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573921/original/file-20240206-24-jusf5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573921/original/file-20240206-24-jusf5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Brother’ by David Chariandy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(McLelland & Stewart)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Love can be a tool of anti-racist and decolonial education, but only if we encourage men (and women and non-binary people) to take the risk of expressing tender feelings for others. </p>
<p>I teach David Chariandy’s novel <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/26281/brother-by-david-chariandy/9780771023330"><em>Brother</em></a> and Cherie Dimaline’s <em><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/744474/the-marrow-thieves-by-cherie-dimaline/">The Marrow Thieves</a></em>. These writers depict men who are processing complex and inter-generational traumas. In these books, the characters Michael and French are imperfect men who struggle to show tender emotions. Their struggle, however, is the point. </p>
<p>Through trying to process their feelings within found families, these men are healing themselves. They are becoming emotionally available members of their communities who do not need to dominate others to prove they are real men. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A face seen with a white streak of paint and long black hair." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574103/original/file-20240207-26-ssxbld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574103/original/file-20240207-26-ssxbld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574103/original/file-20240207-26-ssxbld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574103/original/file-20240207-26-ssxbld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574103/original/file-20240207-26-ssxbld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574103/original/file-20240207-26-ssxbld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574103/original/file-20240207-26-ssxbld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘The Marrow Thieves’ by Cherie Dimaline.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Cormorant Books/HarperCollins)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Speaking of these men in terms of the struggle to love is, in itself, an anti-racist practice. Almost all of the young men I work with struggle to express tender emotions, and seeing these characters struggle helps them see Black and Indigenous men as emotional role models. </p>
<h2>Encouraging flourishing</h2>
<p>Through teaching such stories, my students and I discuss how learning to love is a way of learning how to be fully human. Love cannot come from places of domination or abuse, nor can it be maintained through cultures of power and control. </p>
<p>As analytic philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues in <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9781400826063/the-reasons-of-love"><em>The Reasons of Love</em></a>, love is an orientation to the beloved, whereby I care about doing thinks that encourage their flourishing as human beings. </p>
<p>Literature is a wonderful tool for opening these healing conversations about love and being loved. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-humanities-should-teach-about-how-to-make-a-better-world-not-just-criticize-the-existing-one-190634">The humanities should teach about how to make a better world, not just criticize the existing one</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Taking responsibility for thinking, loving</h2>
<p>In poet <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/On-Lies-Secrets-and-Silence/">Adrienne Rich’s essay “Claiming an Education</a>,” she distinguishes between the passive act of receiving an education and the active act of thinking of education as a responsibility to oneself.</p>
<p>Discussing love in curricula has the potential to be lifesaving, <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-students-are-developing-solutions-to-the-problem-of-campus-sexual-and-gender-based-violence-210445">to help reduce instances of</a> physical, sexual or emotional abuse and to contribute to creating cultures of consent. This works best, I have found, when it comes from a loving disposition. </p>
<p>Teaching students with care while showing emotional attachments to works of literature allows me to reinforce, as a man, that it is OK to be a man and to express love and admiration in public. </p>
<p>If love is something we do, and not just something we feel, then it is something men can learn to do better.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222253/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jamie Paris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Encouraging men to take the risk of expressing tender feelings for others is part of relying on love as a tool of anti-racist and decolonial education.Jamie Paris, Instructor, Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media, University of ManitobaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2108912024-01-25T20:45:36Z2024-01-25T20:45:36ZJ.M. Coetzee’s provocative first book turns 50 this year – and his most controversial turns 25<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571104/original/file-20240124-27-p6w3fe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=71%2C11%2C1859%2C985&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J._M._Coetzee_Nov_2023.jpg">Photo of J.M. Coetzee: Laterthanyouthink, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>J.M. Coetzee, one of the leading novelists of our age, turns 84 this year. Last year, he published <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-pole-and-other-stories">The Pole and Other Stories</a>, his 18th book (excluding volumes of criticism, commentary, letters and translations). Its flowering of mature style confirms that this writer remains at the top of his game. </p>
<p>Coetzee celebrates another milestone this year: 50 years of publishing serious, provocative fiction. His work is always formally daring, brave in its social critique and its refusal to play by the rules.</p>
<h2>Dusklands</h2>
<p>Coetzee’s first book, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/dusklands">Dusklands</a>, appeared in April 1974. It was published by a small press in Johannesburg called Ravan, which had built a modest reputation for oppositional writing under apartheid. Coetzee’s debut was a slim volume with an unassuming – even deliberately dull – cover that belied the incendiary force of the two stories it contained.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569202/original/file-20240114-29-eik4qp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The first edition of J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974).</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Its first part, The Vietnam Project, is set in the United States during the early 1970s. Its narrator, Eugene Dawn, meditates on his work as propaganda-warfare analyst for the US military’s operations in Vietnam. </p>
<p>“I have an exploring temperament,” he declares. “Had I lived two hundred years ago I would have had a continent to […] open to colonization.”</p>
<p>Eugene Dawn’s dreams of “total air-war” precipitate his decline. He holes up in a motel with Patrick White’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/voss-9781742756882">Voss</a> and Saul Bellow’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/herzog-9780141184876">Herzog</a> – novels concerned with the decline of overreaching rational minds.</p>
<p>The drive to explore and dominate also compels the protagonist of the book’s second part, The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee. The story is presented as as a translation, with parodic scholarly apparatus, of a record by a (real) 18th-century explorer. Jacobus Coetzee describes expeditions into the interior of what is now the Western and Northern Cape provinces of South Africa. </p>
<p>“I am a hunter,” he states, “a domesticator of the wilderness, a hero of enumeration.”</p>
<p>He recounts how, in 1760-61, he encounters the indigenous Khoisan people in the hinterlands of the Dutch settlement. He regards them as “completely disposable” and treats them like animals, seeing them as “game”. Their murder by the increasingly unhinged frontiersman is narrated with stomach-turning glee, as Jacobus Coetzee appears to descend into a madness born of megalomania. </p>
<p>“I am a tool in the hands of history,” he declares. “I have other things to think about.” </p>
<p>Each part of this bracing debut, then, offered an implicitly satirical engagement with the excesses of colonial adventuring. The book was formally daring, too. Was this a novel or two novellas, its first readers wondered. How was one to interpret the 18th-century “narrative” that presented itself as a historical document? </p>
<p>The juxtaposition of two widely divergent settings drew attention to what the narratives shared. It connected the narrators’ self-satisfied posturings as missionaries of “civilization” in a bravura indictment of Western Enlightenment discourses.</p>
<p>The boldness and novelty of approach led Jonathan Crewe – the book’s first South African reviewer – to herald of the arrival of the modern novel in the country. Some of the more avant-garde and oppositional Afrikaans writers of the previous decade would no doubt have demurred. But Crewe’s comparison of Dusklands with Joseph Conrad’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Heart-of-Darkness">Heart of Darkness</a> remains apt. </p>
<p>Both books feature the “journey of the Western consciousness out of the polity and into the void,” Crewe wrote. Both cast that journey as critique rather than celebration of Western attitudes.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-conrads-imperial-horror-story-heart-of-darkness-resonates-with-our-globalised-times-94723">How Conrad’s imperial horror story Heart of Darkness resonates with our globalised times</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A revolutionary text</h2>
<p>Rita Barnard, a South African-born academic at the University of Pennsylvania who has taught Dusklands for many years, has observed that her students increasingly baulk at the book’s violence. They resent that they are being asked to occupy the subject position of the white perpetrator. </p>
<p>Barnard has some sympathy with this response. “After all,” she muses, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>revelations about colonial discourse that Dusklands stunned us with in the 1970s are no longer new; my students were already trained to look for silences, racist misrepresentations, and epistemic violence in a text.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet Dusklands was undoubtedly revolutionary for its moment. Nelson Mandela was eight years into his life sentence. The Soweto Rising and the death of Steve Biko in police custody had not yet galvanised internal opposition. Overtly anti-apartheid works were routinely repressed. The formal end of apartheid was still 20 years away. </p>
<p>In this context, it is difficult to conceive of a bolder attack on the ideas of apartheid’s ideologues. No other work had dared to link apartheid’s originary narratives (as the explorer accounts undoubtedly are) to Kissinger-era <em>realpolitik</em>.</p>
<p>For all our laudable attention to trigger warnings, we should welcome fiction that unsettles our complacent sense that philosophical opposition to colonial violence and its legacies might be sufficient absolution. Dusklands forces the reader into uncomfortable cohabitation with characters who are implicated in genocide, but convinced of their moral rectitude. </p>
<p>One hardly need elaborate the ongoing lesson this holds for readers in the present.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/in-j-m-coetzees-latest-story-collection-questions-of-the-soul-become-urgent-as-the-body-becomes-frail-206406">In J.M. Coetzee's latest story collection, questions of the soul become urgent as the body becomes frail</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Disgrace</h2>
<p>As arbitrarily neat temporal markers would have it, this year is also a significant anniversary for another of Coetzee’s most provocative works. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/disgrace">Disgrace</a> was published in August 1999, five years into the “new” South Africa, and against the backdrop of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the country’s great experiment in truth-telling. It won Coetzee his second Booker Prize, making him the first author so celebrated. </p>
<p>Set in a recognisable present, Disgrace is Coetzee’s most deceptively straightforward realist narrative. Its university setting, similar to the University of Cape Town, generated all manner of misguided speculations about whether it was a <em>roman à clef</em>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571099/original/file-20240124-29-aevpnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Disgrace is a novel that interrogates the transparency of language, more specifically English. Its protagonist, David Lurie, is an academic whose research interest is the poetry of the Romantics. He wonders at one point whether English is a fit medium for communication in post-apartheid South Africa. It appears “tired”, he reflects. </p>
<p>Early in the novel, Lurie goes to see a play called Sunset at the Globe Salon, a farce that offers ironic commentary on his intellectual identifications. The play is set neither in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, nor in an 18th-century salon, but in a hairdressers’ parlour, where the melodrama unfolds in gloriously creolising English. The sun is going down on an “old” South Africa – and Lurie appears stranded.</p>
<p>Like Dusklands, Disgrace does not shy away from violence – in this case, a violent gang rape of Lurie’s daughter Lucy by three black men. </p>
<p>Lucy is a model “new” South African. She is a lesbian who runs a boarding kennel in the rural heartland, having turned her back on self-satisfied metropolitan social circles. She is attempting to live ethically, with a social conscience. </p>
<p>The country’s ruling party, the African National Congress, took umbrage. In a submission to the country’s Human Rights Commission, they condemned Disgrace as an instance of white racism lingering in media and the arts. Specifically, they objected to the novel’s key moment of crisis – the rape – and Lucy’s suggestion that such sexual violence might be the “the price one has to pay for staying on”.</p>
<p>Coetzee, they averred, “represents as brutally as he can the white people’s perception of the post-apartheid black man”.</p>
<p>What the ANC failed to note was that the rape is not represented. <em>Disgrace</em> might appear to be a realist novel with an omniscient narrator, but it is, in fact, entirely focalised through its white male protagonist, who is in denial about his complicity with prejudice and violence. </p>
<p>Indeed, David Lurie is himself a rapist. Lucy’s rape is mirrored by Lurie’s rape of one of his students, Melanie Isaacs, who is coded as mixed race (a detail readers often miss). He justifies his exploitation of a student as “not rape, not quite that, but undesired … to the core”. </p>
<p>David’s punishment is a retreat into forms of self-abnegation and “service” that the novel invites us to read as ultimately narcissistic.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/patrick-white-was-the-first-australian-writer-to-win-the-nobel-prize-in-literature-50-years-later-is-he-still-being-read-214724">Patrick White was the first Australian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature – 50 years later, is he still being read?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Problems with language</h2>
<p>One of the striking aspects of Dusklands – and part of its boldness – is its insistence on the global connections between oppression and injustice. It insists, too, on addressing a global audience, in a style that refuses to be marked as parochial or nationalist. Its form refuses to endorse any single speaking position. </p>
<p>Barnard puts this eloquently. Dusklands, she writes, “opens up a speaking place that is global, rather than national, or even strictly monolingual or monogeneric”.</p>
<p>These moves have characterised Coetzee’s subsequent work. His novels incorporate apparent contradictions, undermine occasions of narration, and frame narratives as the speech acts of characters who are obviously compromised and unreliable. They undermine the premises of canonical texts and stage outrageous metafictional interventions – as when the writer-protagonist of one Coetzee novel, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/elizabeth-costello">Elizabeth Costello</a> (2003), shows up part-way through the next, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/slow-man">Slow Man</a> (2005), and proceeds to direct the plot.</p>
<p>Language makes worlds, and Coetzee’s work has from the outset interrogated the presumption that this is a straightforward operation without ideological implications. Language is never transparent, never innocent of the designs of those who claim to police forms of expression. </p>
<p>Coetzee was regarded by some of his peers as insufficiently engaged with the emergency in South Africa – notably Nadine Gordimer in a <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1984/02/02/the-idea-of-gardening/">famously puzzled review</a> of his Booker Prize-winning novel <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/life-times-of-michael-k">Life & Times of Michael K</a> (1983). But the difficulty of taking positions, when those positions are already taken by people determined to force compliance with one view of historical events or another, is a recurring dilemma for Coetzee. </p>
<p>Only fiction, his 50-year career continues to insist, offers a writer the means to intervene in the world in ways that have relevance beyond immediate contexts. It places the author at a remove from the political demand that we speak, for such speaking is inevitably only ventriloquism.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/summertime">Summertime</a> (2009), the final instalment in a trilogy of memoirs that challenge readers’ presumptions about the genre (it features a biographer interviewing significant figures in the life of the deceased author John Coetzee), a former lover of the author speculates that Dusklands was not only “a book about cruelty, an exposé of the cruelty involved in various forms of conquest”, but also “a project in self-administered therapy”. </p>
<p>This is a joke of sorts. But it is also insightful, in that it acknowledges the part-autobiographical nature of any writer’s work. </p>
<p>Coetzee has been ahead of his readers from the outset. He is implicated in the “translation” of The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee (a distant relative, if not a direct antecedent). And Eugene Dawn’s demanding supervisor at the sinister RAND-like corporation he serves is named “Coetzee”. </p>
<p>All of Coetzee’s works are a self-recriminating interrogations. They address the complicity of writers in events that are too easily dismissed as beyond their capacity to influence. They examine privileges inherited at the expense of others in ways that remain profoundly important. Their honesty and power to discomfort makes them as necessary today as when they first appeared.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210891/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Coetzee is both Honorary Graduate and holds an Honorary Research affiliation at the University that employs me, but there is no direct benefit to either of us, or to the University, of a reflection on the anniversaries of significant publications independently recognised as worthy of note.</span></em></p>The fiction of J.M. Coetzee is always formally daring, brave in its social critique and its refusal to play by the rules.Andrew van der Vlies, Professor, School of Humanities, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2206552024-01-24T19:06:29Z2024-01-24T19:06:29ZHow Dostoevsky overcame his gambling addiction<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570509/original/file-20240121-27-zvcxdt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C4%2C3190%2C2045&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky – Vasily Perov (1872).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vasily_Perov_-_%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%82_%D0%A4.%D0%9C.%D0%94%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Dostoevsky had to write <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gambler_and_Other_Stories/The_Gambler">The Gambler</a> in two months. He had no choice. He had accepted 3,000 roubles from a publisher named Stellovsky to keep his creditors at bay. If he failed to deliver a work of not less than ten printer’s sheets (160 pages) by November 1, 1866, Stellovsky would receive the rights and income for all of Dostoevsky’s previous and future work for nine years. </p>
<p>Dostoevsky broke off writing <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2554">Crime and Punishment</a> to take on the seemingly insurmountable task of completing a novel in such a sort period of time. He drew on his experience of being addicted to gambling.</p>
<p>His gambling mania had first seized him in 1863 on a tour of Europe, where he developed a passion for roulette. Dostoevsky soon fell into a pattern of chasing his losses, telling himself that his fortunes would change and he would redeem himself: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>…one turn of the wheel, and all will be changed, and those very moralists will be the first (I am convinced of that) to come up to congratulate me with friendly jests. And they will not all turn away from me as they do now. But, hang them all! What am I now? Zero. What may I be tomorrow? Tomorrow I may rise from the dead and begin to live again! There are still the makings of a man in me.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Boundless egoism</h2>
<p>In Crime and Punishment, an impoverished student named Rodion Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawnbroker with an axe. The reader follows his dialogue with himself until he confesses and seeks atonement for his actions. </p>
<p>In The Gambler, there is only a spiral downward with no landing point. Alexei Ivanovich, a tutor working for the family of a once wealthy general, initially shows no interest or desire to gamble. By the end, he is totally addicted to roulette. His character is transformed. From what Dostoevsky calls an aristocratic disinterest in winning (or losing), Alexi becomes a person with a plebeian willingness to lose his very last coin. </p>
<p>The “aristocratic” type gambles only for pure pleasure. The “plebeian” embraces the risk of gambling in the hope of changing his life – if only he can win big enough. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The novel reminds the reader of what it is like to be drawn into a culture of gambling, where the first win at a roulette table (or in any form of gambling) is burned into one’s memory for ever. </p>
<p>The compulsive gambler holds on to the idea that continued gambling will, through improved skills, lead to proportionally higher rewards. But what takes hold in reality is the erroneous belief that they can develop an infallible gambling system, governed simply by the power of reason, which will allow them to conquer the ever-spinning roulette wheel. </p>
<p>Another trait evident in The Gambler is “boundless egoism” – this was <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/dostoyevsky-and-parricide#:%7E:text=Source%20Citation,%2C%2021%2C%20173%2D196.">Sigmund Freud’s</a> reading of Dostoevsky. As the gambler becomes addicted, he loses all sense of socially motivated feelings, such as sympathy for family members or friends. </p>
<p>For Alexi, an emotional numbness prevails: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am living, of course, in continual anxiety. I play for the tiniest stakes, and I keep waiting for something, calculating, standing for whole days at the gambling table and watching the play; I even dream of playing – but I feel that in all this, I have, as it were, grown stiff and wooden, as though I had sunk into a muddy swamp. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a heartfelt description of the internal experience of fear, hope, defeat and entrapment. Alexei reflects on where he is in life: his hopes and dreams, the “whole days” spent stuck in one spot “watching the play”. He loses all desire for Polina, his romantic interest at the start of the novel. He has “grown stiff” and “stuck”, despite the love, comfort and connection she might provide.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/crime-and-punishment-is-150-and-its-politics-are-more-relevant-than-ever-69259">Crime and Punishment is 150 – and its politics are more relevant than ever</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Addiction and revelation</h2>
<p>The treatment of gambling addiction is not a topic in The Gambler – only Alexi’s tragic fall from grace. But without psychiatric knowledge, or perhaps in spite of his personal awareness of what he was describing at the time, Dostoevsky tapped into the raw experience of gambling and the issue of how to understand gambling addiction.</p>
<p>Our understanding of gambling addiction is still evolving. Treatments are being explored and developed. From 1980, the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14459795.2019.1638432">American Psychiatric Association</a> included compulsive gambling in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a form of impulse control disorder, alongside kleptomania and pyromania. </p>
<p>In 2013, gambling was reclassified as gambling disorder, within the substance-related and addictive disorders categorisation. This marked, among other things, a turn towards the investigation and use of pharmaceutical treatments, such as <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00206/full">dopamine</a>, to control the gambling impulse. It is noteworthy, that online gambling or gaming is not classified in this space. </p>
<p>So how does one overcome these challenges when knowledge, while no longer in its infancy, is still expanding? </p>
<p>Dostoevsky offers a potentially valuable example of how one moment or a chance happening can change everything. It might sound counterintuitive to wait for such an event in a modern world such as ours, where advice from professionals or the internet is close to hand, but those cured of gambling addictions have often emphasised the role of chance or sudden revelation in their rehabilitation. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevsky, née Snitkin (1871).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anna_Dostoyevskaya_in_1871.jpg">Public domain</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Eight days after having completed The Gambler, Dostoevsky proposed marriage to his stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkin. She accepted and they soon went abroad for a number of years. During this period, Dostoevsky gambled heavily, often pawning their belongings so he could gamble further. He would travel ahead to a town or resort with gaming tables, then write letters back to Anna chastising himself for losing all their money. </p>
<p>Anna believed Dostoevsky needed gambling as a kind of cathartic, physiological release from his daily frustrations. She felt it cleared his mind to concentrate on his writing. By all accounts, she was unsuccessful in reversing the gambling tendency in Dostoevsky. As with most gambling addicts, Dostoevsky oscillated between confessions to his wife, hope for forgiveness, and promises it will not happen again – promises he would then break. </p>
<p>But then, in a letter to Anna in 1871, he shares a life changing epiphany: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>By half past nine I had lost everything and I fled like a madman. I felt so miserable that I rushed to see the priest (don’t get upset, I did not see him, no, I did not, nor do I intend to!) […] But I lost my way in this town and when I reached a church, which I took for a Russian church, they told me in a store that it was not Russian but a synagogue. It was as if someone had poured cold water over me. I ran back home. And now it is midnight and I am sitting and writing to you.</p>
<p>A great thing has happened to me: I have rid myself of the abominable delusion that has tormented me for almost 10 years. For 10 years (or, to be more precise, ever since my brother’s death, when I suddenly found myself weighted down by debts) I dreamed about winning money. I dreamt of it seriously, passionately. But now it is all over! This was the very last time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And so it was. Dostoevsky lost all interest in gambling for good. He no longer dreamed of winning. The delusion that he might win enough to transform his life had left him as easily as it had arrived. The change in his character was permanent. </p>
<p>The key moment, with its many spiritual echoes was: “it was as if someone had poured cold water over me”. Worthy of comment, too, is his inability to access the familiarity and reassurance of the Russian Orthodox church. Disoriented, he arrives instead a Jewish synagogue. Arguably, it was this strangeness that made him uneasy and vulnerable to an experience, spiritual or otherwise, that had a lasting effect on his view of gambling and its personal consequences. </p>
<p>There is, however, another account that does not quite line up with the timeline of his cure – one that is less mysterious, but of interest nonetheless. </p>
<p>Gambling had been for Dostoevsky a “kind of obsession”, an experience defined by the thrill of “half-hanging over an abyss so as to peer into its very depths and – in certain, though not frequent cases – flinging oneself headlong into it”.</p>
<p>In 1871, Dostoevsky went abroad to Ems for a cure. He had a bronchial condition, the first symptoms of which had appeared as early as 1868. Could it be that his abandonment of gambling was related to his not being able to endure the excitement of gambling? His health had deteriorated to such an extent that he lacked the necessary physical strength; it was physiologically too much for him. Perhaps physical incapacity had a hand in his cure?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220655/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen Dobson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Dostoevsky’s sudden recovery from his gambling mania is an example of how a chance happening can change everythingStephen Dobson, Professor and Dean of Education and the Arts, CQUniversity AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2112872024-01-11T17:16:14Z2024-01-11T17:16:14ZHedd Wyn: how the life of one of Wales’ most promising poets was cut short by the first world war<p>The names Passchendaele, the Somme and Mametz Wood stand as grim sentinels, forever bound to the unimaginable carnage of the first world war. Almost 500,000 men were killed in three months at Passchendaele, the <a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-third-battle-of-ypres-passchendaele#:%7E:text=Casualties%20were%20heavy&text=Casualties%20among%20German%20forces%20were,the%20Third%20Battle%20of%20Ypres.">third battle of Ypres</a>. On the first day of that battle, Wales lost one of its most talented poets. </p>
<p>Born on January 13 1887, Ellis Humphrey Evans was the eldest child of Mary and Evan Evans and one of 11 siblings. He became known by his bardic name, <a href="https://www.ylolfa.com/products/9781784610425/cofiant-hedd-wyn">Hedd Wyn</a> (Blessed Peace). The family lived and worked at a remote farm outside Trawsfynydd in north-west Wales, called <em>Yr Ysgwrn</em>.</p>
<p>Evan Evans bought his son a book on the rules of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-welsh-developed-their-own-form-of-poetry-73299">strict-metre Welsh verse</a> when Hedd Wyn was 11 years old. He read the book with passion and enthusiasm, and soon mastered the difficult and intricate rules of strict-metre verse, known as <em>cynghanedd</em>.</p>
<p>He wrote his first ever <em>englyn</em> (a short four-lined poem in strict-metre) before his 12th birthday. Soon after, he began competing at local <em>eisteddfodau</em>, Welsh cultural festivals which showcase literary and artistic endeavours.</p>
<p>Hedd Wyn spent most of his short life at home. He received little formal schooling. His education was spasmodic and he was frequently absent from school when the weather was bad, as there was a substantial distance between the school and his home.</p>
<p>Hedd Wyn was an inept farmer and shepherd, but he loved looking after the sheep out on the mountain pastures, though only because the solitude and silence gave him ample opportunity to meditate and to write poetry.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="An old black and white photo of a man wearing a suit." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hedd Wyn was 30 years old when he was killed.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Conscription</h2>
<p>And then came war. Hedd Wyn’s fate, along with thousands of others, was sealed when parliament passed the <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1916/104/contents/enacted">Military Service Act</a> in 1916. This new legislation imposed conscription and was aimed at unmarried men or widowers. </p>
<p>Hedd Wyn had no choice but to enlist. He joined the 15th battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and by July 1917, he was stationed at Fléchin, a small village in northern France. </p>
<p>He and thousands of other soldiers were to participate in one of the major engagements of the war, the third battle of Ypres, otherwise known as the battle of Passchendaele. British troops were to occupy the village of Pilkem on Pilkem Ridge, and the marshlands to the east of Ypres before advancing towards Langemarck. Capturing the village of Pilkem and Pilkem Ridge, and holding both positions, was one of the main objectives of this enormous campaign. </p>
<p>It was during a period of intense fighting on Iron Cross Ridge on July 31 that Hedd Wyn was mortally wounded. </p>
<h2>The National Eisteddfod</h2>
<p>For a Welsh poet, winning the coveted chair at the <a href="https://eisteddfod.wales">National Eisteddfod</a>, an annual festival celebrating arts, language and culture, represents the <a href="https://blog.library.wales/the-chairing-of-the-bard-3/">pinnacle of achievement</a>. The chair is awarded to the winning entrant in the competition for the <em>awdl</em> – poetry written in strict-metre <em>cynghanedd</em> . A crown is awarded separately to those writing in free verse.</p>
<p>Chairing ceremonies are presided over by the archdruid, who reads the adjudicators’ comments before announcing the nom de plume of the winning bard. Nobody knows the true identity of the poet until the archdruid asks them to stand. </p>
<p>Before enlisting, Hedd Wyn had started working on an <em>awdl</em> for the chair at the 1917 National Eisteddfod. Due to the war, the Eisteddfod that year was held in England, in Birkenhead near Liverpool. Hedd Wyn had almost won the chair the previous year in Aberystwyth.</p>
<p>While stationed in France, he finally completed his <em>awdl</em> titled <em><a href="https://www.library.wales/discover-learn/digital-exhibitions/manuscripts/modern-period/yr-arwr-hedd-wyn">Yr Arwr</a></em> (The Hero) and posted it to Birkenhead under his nom de plume, <em>Fleur-de-lis</em>. He was working on the poem until the last possible minute.</p>
<p>A packed crowd was watching the chairing ceremony in Birkenhead in early September, and among them was the prime minister at the time, David Lloyd George, himself a Welsh speaker. Without knowing he had died of his wounds several weeks earlier, the adjudicators had unanimously awarded the chair to Hedd Wyn. </p>
<p>As is customary, the archdruid called out <em>Fleur-de-lis</em> three times. But nobody stood up. Then he solemnly announced that the poet had been killed in battle six weeks earlier. The empty chair was draped in black in front of an emotional crowd. The 1917 eisteddfod became known as <em>Eisteddfod y Gadair Ddu</em> (the Eisteddfod of the Black Chair). </p>
<h2>Hedd Wyn’s legacy</h2>
<p>A volume of Hedd Wyn’s poetry, entitled <em>Cerddi’r Bugail</em> (The Shepherd’s Verses), was published a year later. The first 1,000 copies were sold in five days. Eventually every copy of the 4,000 first edition was sold. </p>
<p>In 1923, a statue, depicting Hedd Wyn as a shepherd, the work of artist L. S. Merrifield, was unveiled by his mother in Trawsfynydd. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lAU8frR8GiA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Hedd Wyn was the first Welsh film to be nominated for best foreign language film at the Oscars in 1993.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On St David’s Day 2012, Wales’ then first minister, Carwyn Jones, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-17221011">announced</a> that Hedd Wyn’s home, <em>Yr Ysgwrn</em>, had been bought for the nation, to secure and safeguard the poet’s legacy. Two years later, it was renovated and turned into a <a href="https://yrysgwrn.com/en/">museum</a> by the Eryri (Snowdonia) National Park.</p>
<p>Hedd Wyn was a highly talented poet who wrote exquisite work. His <em>englyn</em> in memory of his friend, Lieutenant D. O. Evans of Blaenau Ffestiniog, for example, became an elegy for all the young men who had fallen on the killing fields of the Great War: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ei aberth nid â heibio – ei wyneb</p>
<p>Annwyl nid â'n ango</p>
<p>Er i'r Almaen ystaenio</p>
<p>Ei dwrn dur yn ei waed o.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It can be translated as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>His sacrifice was not in vain, his dear</p>
<p>Face will always remain,</p>
<p>Although he left a bloodstain</p>
<p>On Germany’s iron fist of pain.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211287/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alan Llwyd does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Bard Hedd Wyn was killed in action in France in 1917.Alan Llwyd, Professor of Welsh, Swansea UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2188012024-01-08T19:16:18Z2024-01-08T19:16:18Z‘Cli-fi’ might not save the world, but writing it could help with your eco-anxiety<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564752/original/file-20231211-17-uxgzy8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C0%2C5961%2C3097&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Morpheus Szeto/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The consequences of climate change weigh on all of us, especially as we face an El Niño summer, with floods and fires already making themselves felt in the Australian environment.</p>
<p>But even outside of being directly affected, there is evidence that mere awareness of climate change can be <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/19/7836">detrimental to your mental health and wellbeing</a>. Terms such as “<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266727822300010X">climate change anxiety</a>”, “<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667278221000444">eco-anxiety</a>” and “<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18027145/">solastalgia</a>” are regularly used to describe the negative emotional states created by thinking and worrying about climate change and environmental destruction.</p>
<p>If just knowing about climate change is emotionally difficult, what is it like spending years focusing on and writing about the topic? Research has looked at the emotional impact close engagement with climate change can have on groups such as <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1755458617301251">climate scientists</a> <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-11741-2_12">and</a> <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1103308818817603">climate activists</a>. </p>
<p>But little time has been given to writers of climate fiction, or “cli-fi” – a relatively new genre of fiction focused on climate change.</p>
<h2>What can a genre do?</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/36205.Cli_Fi_Climate_Change_Fiction">Cli-fi</a> has been touted as one of the ways to help save the world, with an emphasis on how imagining our future might make us reconsider our relationship to the natural world. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Fictions in this genre have primarily imagined <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/we-don-t-need-more-dystopian-stories-despair-is-stopping-us-from-acting-20220905-p5bfjg.html">dystopian worlds</a> where the very worst has happened and humanity is (often barely) surviving in flooded or desolate wastelands. These apocalyptic visions are meant to serve as warnings, to galvanise us to action, making sure this bleak future doesn’t happen.</p>
<p>This seems a good idea in theory, but do dystopian fictions help us engage with the climate crisis? An empirical study of the <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/10/2/473/136689/The-Influence-of-Climate-FictionAn-Empirical">effects of climate fiction on readers’ attitudes or actions</a> found little evidence that those who read cli-fi have a stronger engagement with environmental concerns.</p>
<p>There has been some discussion of the <a href="https://www.energyhumanities.ca/news/why-read-fiction-while-the-planet-is-in-crisis-reflections-on-cli-fi-book-clubs">influence of these books on readers</a>. But perhaps the value is not in the reading, but in the writing? Might writing provide emotionally supportive strategies for all of us? Can the act of writing itself counter “eco-anxiety”?</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/can-cli-fi-actually-make-a-difference-a-climate-scientists-perspective-83033">Can 'cli-fi' actually make a difference? A climate scientist's perspective</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Waking in the night</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>We talked to <a href="https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/90091">16 Australian and New Zealand authors of “cli-fi”</a> , including <a href="https://cityoftongues.com/">James Bradley</a>, <a href="http://www.mireillejuchau.com/">Mireille Juchau</a> and <a href="https://jennifermills.net.au/">Jennifer Mills</a>. Their responses made it clear that writing about a climate-changed future does more than bring up the anticipated negative emotions.</p>
<p>Of course, sitting with the climate crisis is challenging. It demands we wrestle with guilt, shame, responsibility, rage and despair. Writers of climate fiction are often drawn to the genre because they are already thinking about the climate and feeling anxious.</p>
<p>Clare Moleta said her climate anxiety was “a bit more concentrated” while writing her novel <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/Unsheltered/Clare-Moleta/9781761104886">Unsheltered</a>, but also that the manifestations of this anxiety were familiar to her: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had waking patches in the night over that time, where I’d be very intensely imagining something and grieving it […] But to be fair, I do that anyway.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But many of the writers spoke of the writing process as helping, not exacerbating, their anxiety. For some, writing about climate change gave them a sense of purpose. Jennifer Mills, whose cli-fi novel <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781760558604/">Dyschronia</a> was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2019, stated that “having a book to write gives you something to do. [It] makes you feel like you have some power over the events that are happening around you.”</p>
<p>Climate fiction can be a method of transforming anxiety into something useful. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Allinson">Miles Allinson</a> says that “writing about my own fear put that fear to use, in a way that was, if not comforting, then at least energising”. He argues for the therapeutic aspect of imagining and writing one’s worst fears: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes when you turn towards something and start to live it, with all its difficulties and mystery, then something changes […] It’s actually not as hard as you sometimes think it will be. It’s sometimes more terrifying to close your eyes, I have found.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>James Bradley, author of several works of speculative fiction, including <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/clade-9781926428659">Clade</a> and <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/ghost-species-9781926428666">Ghost Species</a>, observed that the</p>
<blockquote>
<p>process of imagining demands you to think about what happens next […] To imagine the complexity of the lived experience of what lies ahead, and to insist that life will go on and history will keep happening.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While peering into our climate-changed future can be emotionally difficult, <a href="https://katemildenhall.com/">Kate Mildenhall</a> said it can help prepare us for what is to come: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have to imagine ten years in the future and we have to imagine 50 years in the future. And if we do that, we are forearmed and we also begin to make small changes immediately, we don’t even know we’re making them, just to move towards or away from that future.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Imagining our future lives can offer a sense of hope. We are currently living with bushfires, floods, pandemics and the extreme challenges of the climate crisis; the future is our present and the ways we think about it will dictate the ways we act and cope.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bushfires near Stacks Bluff, Tasmania.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Matt Palmer/Unsplash</span></span>
</figcaption>
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<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/writing-can-improve-mental-health-heres-how-162205">Writing can improve mental health – here's how</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Theraputic benefits</h2>
<p>Approaching writing about climate change as a process, rather than thinking about writing as a product produced by professional authors, is a new method for alleviating climate anxiety.</p>
<p>The mental health and wellbeing benefits of creative writing have been established. Studies have explored how writing can <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212420919313172">reduce anxiety in those affected by natural disasters</a>. Much of the research in this area focuses on expressive writing or other similar therapeutic-focused techniques that produce quickly written and usually insular work, not intended for an audience. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
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<p>This is different from the experiences of the writers interviewed here. Yet, as the writers quoted here have shown, the imaginative process of crafting fictional narratives about difficult topics comes with its own benefits.</p>
<p>In discussing their findings from one of the few studies to focus on the <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/capr.12435">wellbeing effect of writing fictional narratives</a>, Catherine Deveney and Patrick Lawson state: “it is in the craft of writing, the combination of technique and emotional catharsis, that some of the therapeutic benefits of writing can be found”.</p>
<p>We tend to think of writing as a professional activity, but it is an art form practised by amateurs as well as professionals. The 2022 <a href="https://creative.gov.au/advocacy-and-research/creating-value/">National Arts Participation Survey</a> found that one in seven Australians engage in creative writing. The value of such writing is more than its end product.</p>
<p>We need to shift from worrying about the effects of cli-fi texts to thinking about the <a href="https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/35289-creating-new-climate-stories-posthuman-collaborative-hope-and-optimism">benefits of writing creatively as we imagine our possible futures</a>. As Mireille Juchau observes, the sense of control when writing on a difficult topic </p>
<blockquote>
<p>helps to manage anxiety […] Whether it’s climate change, or something else, when I’m preoccupied, writing helps put some order into the chaos.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218801/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This research receives funding from Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alex Cothren and Amy T Matthews do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Research suggests the act of creative writing can have therapeutic benefits.Rachel Hennessy, Lecturer in Creative Writing, The University of MelbourneAlex Cothren, Associate Lecturer, Creative Writing, Flinders UniversityAmy T Matthews, Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2192372023-12-25T08:58:53Z2023-12-25T08:58:53Z4 must-read books from east Africa: from Tanzanian masters to Ugandan queens<p>East African literature continues to grow and reshape itself in exciting new ways. The world really did take notice of the region when Tanzanian-British author Abdulrazak Gurnah won the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2021/gurnah/facts/">Nobel Prize</a> for Literature in 2021. Interest in Gurnah’s work continued last year when he made a homecoming to east Africa. </p>
<p>But it is in Tanzania that Gurnah made a proper homecoming in 2023 – through the first ever Kiswahili translation of <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/book-review-of-earthly-delights-paradise-abdulrazak-gurnah-hamish-hamilton-14-99-1428925.html">Paradise</a>, now out as <a href="https://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/peponi">Peponi</a>.</p>
<p>I am an interdisciplinary scholar with a research focus that cuts across journalism, creative writing, African literature and postcolonial studies. I’m also a big reader of books from the region. My highlights include a range from the masterful Gurnah to stunning newcomers, a bold biography to a pacy memoir.</p>
<h2>1. Abdulrazak Gurnah in Kiswahili</h2>
<p>Now aged 74, Gurnah has recently headlined a <a href="https://www.macondolitfest.org/abdulrazak-gurnah">literary festival</a> in Kenya which seeks to foster conversations between and among Anglophone (English-speaking) and Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) Africa. Just the other day in Uganda, his life and work was celebrated by the creative collective <a href="https://femrite.org/2023/11/18/femrite-pawa-and-kyambogo-university-to-host-an-international-conference-in-honour-of-the-life-works-of-nobel-prize-laureate-abdurazak-gurnah/">Femrite</a>.</p>
<p>But it is in Tanzania that Gurnah made a proper splash through the first ever Swahili translation of his Booker Prize-nominated historical fiction, Paradise, now out as <a href="https://mkukinanyota.com/product/peponi/">Peponi</a>. </p>
<p>Indeed, Gurnah’s literary interests have always hovered around east Africa, from his seminal <a href="https://www.google.co.za/books/edition/Memory_of_Departure/On1SEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Memory+of+Departure&printsec=frontcover">Memory of Departure</a>, which chronicles the sojourns of a young immigrant in search of education abroad. Haunted by the life left behind, and roiled by the uncertainties of the new lands, he seeks meaning to his life.</p>
<p>This echoes the author’s own pursuit, after his dislocation from Zanzibar. In his many interviews, Gurnah has maintained that immigrants do not arrive on European shores, or any others, <a href="https://newafricanmagazine.com/27089/">empty handed</a>: they have their unique tales and histories and ways of seeing the world that should enrich their adopted lands.</p>
<p>But it is Paradise, first published in 1994, that propelled Gurnah to international fame, following its nomination for the Booker Prize in the same year. A coming-of-age tale of Yusuf, a lad who is pawned to a merchant to offset his father’s debt, it’s a story that’s at once heart-breaking and spellbinding.</p>
<p>Some critics read the novel as a retake of the Biblical saga of Joseph (Yusuf in Swahili) who is sold into captivity by his envious siblings, while others read it as a parody of Polish-British novelist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Conrad">Joseph Conrad</a>’s Heart of Darkness. Whatever the case, Swahili readers who have not encountered the text in other languages are in for a great treat, and Peponi is a good place to start in their exploration of Gurnah’s work.</p>
<h2>2. Kenya’s rising star</h2>
<p>In Kenya, it was the emergence of a new author, <a href="https://www.theafricareport.com/327239/nairobi-takes-centre-role-in-linda-musitas-stories/">Linda Musita</a>, that caused excitement.</p>
<p>Her debut book of short stories called <a href="https://downriverroad.org/2023/02/12/mtama-road-stories-linda-musita/">Mtama Road</a> has been <a href="https://www.theafricareport.com/327239/nairobi-takes-centre-role-in-linda-musitas-stories/">well received</a> locally. </p>
<p>The seven short stories (although perhaps short-shorts is more appropriate – the book comes in at under 100 pages) are all set on one road in Nairobi’s Parklands.</p>
<p>The protagonists of Musita’s stories all find themselves having to navigate different elements of adulting.</p>
<h2>3. Rebirth of the biography</h2>
<p>After nearly 30 years of obscurity, the Kenyan biography appeared to enjoy a rebirth this year, with the publication of <a href="https://msomi.africa/en/home/4320-for-the-record-the-inside-story-of-power-politics-lawmaking-leadership-in-kenya-aden-duale.html">For The Record</a>: The Inside Story of Power, Politics, Lawmaking & Leadership in Kenya, ghostwritten for Kenya’s defence minister, Aden Duale.</p>
<p>A foreword is authored by the Kenyan president, William Ruto, and it prologues the crux of the story: a peep into the machinations that define Kenyan politics, with a particularly penetrating gaze into the fallout between former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta and his successor.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, the book found immediate traction with readers soon after its release in the middle of 2023, following its serialisation in the local press, precipitating five reprints in six months.</p>
<p>Still, the Kenyan biography represents a literary oddity: it’s often staid and formulaic, parroting a predictable trajectory to explain successes, never failures, of politicians and technocrats, as they look back on their lives.</p>
<p>In Duale’s For The Record, we come close to approximating the truth of his political motivations and his quest for power, even though we cannot infer what he intends to do with the power, now that he’s among the most powerful men in the land.</p>
<p>The sprightly diction deployed in the narrative could help buffer readers from the obvious flaws in a story that’s peppered as a rags-to-riches fable, even though his trading parents were people of reasonable means, within their context.</p>
<h2>4. Uganda’s action-packed memoir</h2>
<p>If the new memoir by the Buganda queen is anything to go by, Uganda took literary candour a notch higher in 2023. In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=adE1elPgR98">The Nnnabagereka</a>, Queen Sylvia Nagginda Luswata, the journalist-turned-monarch, recalls her eventful journey from New York, where she lived through most of her childhood, to her unconventional dating of <a href="https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/magazines/life/kabaka-30-years-of-roses-and-thorns-4320302">Prince Ronald Muwenda Mutebi II</a> of Uganda. The tale includes a proposal via email.</p>
<p>“Dear Sylvia, I think I am ready if you are,” Mutebi is reported to have written to his future wife. Another elliptical line in the memoir records another milestone, thus: “On December 6, 2010, I was blessed with two more girls Jade Nakato and Jasmine Babirye born in Kampala… They’re two amazing kids.”</p>
<p>The phraseology does not indicate if they belong to the Kabaka (or king). A statement from the Buganda king’s office clarified the twins did not receive the special drum sounded to herald the Kabaka’s biological children, which fanned online speculation about their paternity. The royal family is blended as the Kabaka has three other children from three different women.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219237/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Kimani does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Swahili readers who have not encountered Abdulrazak Gurnah’s work in other languages are in for a great treat.Peter Kimani, Professor of Practice, Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications (GSMC)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2200652023-12-20T17:06:16Z2023-12-20T17:06:16ZThe seven best books of 2023 reviewed by our experts<p><em>We have covered a lot of new releases this year but these seven really impressed our experts. There’s a feminist retelling of a classic, a twist on the murder mystery from the greatest voice in horror and a giggle-inducing ride through the Middle Ages – not mention one of the most hotly anticipated autobiographies of all time.</em></p>
<h2>1. The Fraud by Zadie Smith</h2>
<p>Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, is her first foray into the world of historical fiction. The result is a stunning, well-studied examination of Victorian colonial England and some of its inhabitants.</p>
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<p>As with other works by Smith, the novel takes a patchwork approach, with several interwoven plots taking place over a period of about 50 years. Centrally placed in the plot is the real-life and highly bizarre trial of a man claiming to be a Sir Roger Tichborne, thought to have been killed at sea and heir to a substantial fortune.</p>
<p>The absurd and very long trial, which had people from all communities in 1870s England hooked, is seen in the novel through the eyes of Eliza Touchet, cousin and companion of William Ainsworth, a novelist well known in Victorian England but relatively forgotten today.</p>
<p><em>By Leighan M. Renaud, Lecturer in Caribbean Literatures and Cultures</em></p>
<p><strong>Read our full review:</strong> <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-fraud-by-zadie-smith-review-a-dazzling-depiction-of-victorian-colonial-england-212808">The Fraud by Zadie Smith review: a dazzling depiction of Victorian colonial England</a></p>
<h2>2. Holly by Stephen King</h2>
<p>At the age of 76, with nearly 70 novels and short story collections behind him, American author Stephen King shows few signs of slowing down. His latest novel Holly, hefty in scale and elaborate in plotting, is the work of an energetic writer, not one who is getting tired.</p>
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<p>The book is a compelling composite of the crime and horror genres, as addictive as the cigarettes which the title character finds herself smoking, as she investigates a spate of abductions in a midwest town.</p>
<p>One of the incidental pleasures offered by Holly is its allusion to books from earlier in King’s long literary career. The terrifying incarceration experienced by the novel’s victims, for example, recalls that of the central figure in Misery (1987). A reference to blood poured over a high school prom queen summons up thoughts of Carrie (1974), King’s first novel.</p>
<p>That said, this new book shows King experimenting and innovating, rather than simply being content to reactivate the tropes of his previous fiction.</p>
<p><em>By Andrew Dix, Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Film</em></p>
<p><strong>Read our full review:</strong> <a href="https://theconversation.com/holly-by-stephen-king-a-timely-work-of-crime-fiction-about-not-judging-a-book-by-its-cover-214649">Holly by Stephen King: a timely work of crime fiction about not judging a book by its cover</a></p>
<h2>3.Julia by Sandra Newman</h2>
<p>Given the relatively cardboard cut-out nature of the original character in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the foregrounding of [Julia’s] sexual experiences and sexuality as well as her early life gives her a vitality in this retelling lacking in Orwell’s portrait.</p>
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<p>This is not so surprising. Orwell’s female characters (even Dorothy Hare, the eponymous heroine of A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) tend to be slight figures. By contrast, Newman’s Julia Worthing is anchored and adventurous. She’s willing to take risks and to suffer for her actions in ways that might seem unlikely if not impossible with Orwell’s Julia.</p>
<p><em>By Simon Potter, Professor of Modern History and Peter Marks, Emeritus Professor in English and Writing</em></p>
<p><strong>Read our full review:</strong> <a href="https://theconversation.com/julia-by-sandra-newman-a-vibrant-retelling-of-george-orwells-nineteen-eighty-four-215735">Julia by Sandra Newman: a vibrant retelling of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four</a></p>
<h2>4. Victory City by Salman Rushdie</h2>
<p>Victory City is an epic chronicle of the rise and fall of Vijayanagar (the capital city of the historic southern Indian Vijayanagara empire), which acquires the name “Bisnaga” through ill-fated attempts at pronunciation by a Portuguese traveller … Throughout the novel, Rushdie explores the process of writing history – how it is recorded and how significance is apportioned. As Pampa Kampana states: “History is the consequence not only of people’s actions but also their forgetfulness.”</p>
<p>Rushdie is interested in how history is argued over and rewritten in contemporary moments. In particular, he takes aim at the populist exploitation of historical narratives for political gain. We hear that “fictions could be as powerful as histories” and that – paradoxically – “they were no more than make believe but they created truth”.</p>
<p><em>By Florian Stadtler, Lecturer in Literature and Migration</em></p>
<p><strong>Read our full review:</strong> <a href="https://theconversation.com/salman-rushdies-victory-city-review-a-storyteller-at-the-height-of-his-powers-199619">Salman Rushdie’s Victory City review: a storyteller at the height of his powers</a></p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-seven-best-tv-shows-of-2023-reviewed-by-our-experts-218196">The seven best TV shows of 2023 reviewed by our experts</a>
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<h2>5. The Woman in Me by Britney Spears</h2>
<p>Britney Spears’ new memoir, The Woman in Me, illustrates once again the potential lifelong damage that can be caused by being a child star. Like many before her, including Judy Garland and Michael Jackson, Spears was ushered into the dangerous terrain of childhood fame by the adults who were supposed to be protecting her, and was utterly unprepared to deal with the fallout.</p>
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<p>Spears’ father’s conservatorship, controlling every aspect of her personal and professional life, was finally rescinded in 2021. She is now able to share the details of her extraordinary years in the limelight and beyond.</p>
<p><em>By Jane O’Connor, Reader in Childhood Studies</em></p>
<p><strong>Read our full review:</strong> <a href="https://theconversation.com/britney-spears-memoir-is-a-reminder-of-the-stigma-and-potential-damage-of-child-stardom-216545">Britney Spears’ memoir is a reminder of the stigma and potential damage of child stardom</a></p>
<h2>6. My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand</h2>
<p>As a diva, Streisand has consistently defied instructions not to do something by doubling up her efforts. For example, at the start of her career when she was auditioning for record labels, one of the executives said she had a nice voice but was “too ethnic”.</p>
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<p>Her response was to loudly embrace her Jewish identity. She played explicitly Jewish characters in her first two and only stage roles, in the musicals I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962) and Funny Girl (1964). She refused to get a nose job and drew attention to her nose a lot in her work. And she co-wrote, produced, directed and appeared in the hit film Yentl (1983), about a Jewish woman who pretends to be a man in order to get an education.</p>
<p>Success has often come to Streisand by doing things people have told her not to do: a twist on the negative diva trope.</p>
<p><em>By Dominic Broomfield-McHugh, Professor of Musicology</em></p>
<p><strong>Read our full review:</strong> <a href="https://theconversation.com/barbra-streisands-autobiography-my-name-is-barbra-shows-how-she-redefined-the-diva-217328">Barbra Streisand’s autobiography My Name is Barbra shows how she redefined the diva</a></p>
<h2>7. Weird Medieval Guys by Olivia Swarthout</h2>
<p>Packed full of satire, stunning imagery and interactive maps and quizzes, Weird Medieval Guys is a deep-dive into some of the most extraordinary – and quirky – aspects of medieval daily life. This little book, which should appeal to older children as well as adults, is split into two parts: The Struggle: Surviving Life, Love, and Death, and The Bestiary.</p>
<p>Weird Medieval Guys is a riot, packed full of brilliant medieval facts. Its author, Olivia Swarthout, has been creative in using quizzes and puzzles to engage readers who might like history but don’t get on with dense scholarly texts in the wonderful, wacky world that is the Middle Ages.</p>
<p>What is particularly evident to me as an expert in medieval literature, is the number of hours she has spent consulting digitised manuscripts from the first century onwards, as well as old and recent scholarship on medieval manuscript culture and life in general.</p>
<p><em>By Madeleine S Killacky, PhD Candidate in Medieval Literature</em></p>
<p><strong>Read our full review:</strong> <a href="https://theconversation.com/weird-medieval-guys-this-deeply-researched-book-takes-you-on-a-romp-through-the-middle-ages-217138">Weird Medieval Guys: this deeply researched book takes you on a romp through the Middle Ages</a></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>These books had our academics gripped until their final pages.Leighan M Renaud, Lecturer in Caribbean Literatures and Cultures, Department of English, University of BristolAndrew Dix, Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Film, Loughborough UniversityDominic Broomfield-McHugh, Professor of Musicology, University of SheffieldFlorian Stadtler, Lecturer in Literature and Migration, University of BristolJane O’Connor, Reader in Childhood Studies, Birmingham City UniversityMadeleine S. Killacky, PhD Candidate, Medieval Literature, Bangor UniversitySimon Potter, Professor of Modern History, University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2197392023-12-19T13:58:18Z2023-12-19T13:58:18ZHow writing ‘made us human’ – an ‘emotional history’ from ancient Iraq to the present day<p>Evidence suggests that writing was invented in southern Iraq sometime <a href="https://iris.unive.it/retrieve/e4239dde-83dd-7180-e053-3705fe0a3322/Maiocchi%20M.%202019%2c%20Writing%20in%20Early%20Mesopotamia%20--%20Beyond%20the%20Meme.pdf">before 3000BC</a>. But what happened next? Anyone interested in this question will find <a href="https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12940/how-writing-made-us-human-3000-bce-now">How Writing Made Us Human</a> by Walter Stephens both an enjoyable and stimulating read. It offers what it calls an “emotional history” of writing, chiefly referencing academics and writers in the western tradition.</p>
<p>The most detailed sections of the book are those on the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, where the author’s expertise and wide engagement with the sources is palpable. Topics that range beyond his expertise are served by well-chosen case studies.</p>
<p>Lots of interesting things – such as <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/graffiti-and-the-literary-landscape-in-roman-pompeii-9780199684618?cc=us&lang=en&">ancient</a> and <a href="https://jisr.ut.ac.ir/article_53144.html?lang=en">modern</a> graffiti, or ancient scholars’ <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_K-8520">efforts</a> to reconstruct even older forms of writing – fall outside of the book’s scope. But its range, from Uruk (modern day Warka, Iraq) in the 4th millennium BC to the present day, is enormous. </p>
<p>Stephens has produced a fascinating story of twists and turns. One of the big debates which lasted up to the Renaissance was about who invented writing. With both archaeology and chronology all but unknown, what thinkers had to go on was largely the Hebrew Bible and Graeco-Roman writers. </p>
<p>Here, the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus (AD37 to AD100) looms large: Josephus offered an <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0146%3Abook%3D1%3Awhiston%20chapter%3D2">account</a> of the invention of writing before the great Biblical flood. Whether later discussants believed, disbelieved, parodied, refuted, or (due to antisemitism) deliberately ignored him, Josephus’ account turns up impressively often in studies of language across the centuries. </p>
<h2>Does writing make us human?</h2>
<p>The title, How Writing Made Us Human, is inspired by the role that learning to read and write played in the emancipation of enslaved people in 19th-century north America. Here, the American public’s acquisition of literacy skills truly promoted the advancement of humanism. It enabled enslaved people who achieved freedom to share their experiences of appalling cruelty with the reading public. The literate public were also to read the arguments for abolition, and to become advocates for it.</p>
<p>Slavery is one of the few places in the book where the effects of and attitudes to writing are discussed in relation to illiterate people. The irony is, of course, that throughout human <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674033818">history</a>, the vast majority of humans couldn’t read or write. Hopefully, nobody would describe the <a href="https://uis.unesco.org/en/topic/literacy">millions</a> of illiterate people around the world today as bad or failed humans. In this regard, the “us” in the title only works in a restricted sense.</p>
<p>On the other hand, writing has certainly played an <a href="https://www.google.it/books/edition/The_Logic_of_Writing_and_the_Organizatio/9Kn8dVDrF50C?hl=en&gbpv=0">important role</a> in shaping and structuring most human societies. In this way, it has far-reaching effects on illiterate people, too. </p>
<p>At various times writing has been a <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230339330_9">tool of resistance</a>, but also a means of <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Language-Bureaucracy-and-Social-Control/Sarangi-Slembrouck/p/book/9780582086227">social control</a>. These aspects, where writing really does impact (almost) all humans, are not much explored in the book, whose concern is historical rather than anthropological. This means that current ethnographic <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/anthropology-of-writing-9781441108852/">investigations</a> of writing and literacy likewise fall out of scope. </p>
<p>The book largely operates by collecting and analysing an imposing number of statements that scholars and literati through the ages made about writing. A complementary approach would be to work by inference, such as looking at <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/spelling-and-society/1044F189F08F6538ED52FE8A443C88CB">spelling</a> choices and traditions. And it would have been useful to see more on the practice of transmission through dictation and <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/666645">memorisation</a>, where writing and oral traditions merged into one.</p>
<p>Even if the book’s focus is, in principle, somewhat narrow compared with the history of writing at large, Stephens develops it in a generous way. He offers ample background information, a highly readable (and often enjoyable) tone and any number of gems – such as the Library of Constantinople reportedly including “the intestine of a dragon twenty feet long on which the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer had been written in letters of gold”.</p>
<p>As well as for the many things it has to say about attitudes to writing, the book can be enjoyed as a microcosmic study of the “western tradition”. The book demonstrates that learned attitudes to, and ideas about, writing are a fascinating vantage point from which to view that long and complicated story.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Worthington does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Evidence suggests that writing was probably invented in southern Iraq sometime before 3000BC. But what happened next?Martin Worthington, Associate Professor, Near & Middle Eastern Studies, Trinity College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2176282023-12-07T13:28:49Z2023-12-07T13:28:49ZHow I identified a probable pen name of Louisa May Alcott<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563019/original/file-20231201-23-1y1dby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=20%2C46%2C3406%2C2692&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Louisa May Alcott took part in a 19th-century literary culture of anonymity and guessing games.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/louisa-may-alcott-american-novelist-portrait-1870s-news-photo/929104084?adppopup=true">Universal Images Group/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Before Louisa May Alcott published the bestselling “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/514/514-h/514-h.htm">Little Women</a>” in two volumes – the first in 1868, the second in 1869 – she wrote melodramatic thrillers, selling these short stories to magazines to bring in cash for her impoverished family.</p>
<p>On a cold November day in 2021, I was rereading Madeleine B. Stern’s introduction to her 780-page edition of “<a href="https://search.worldcat.org/title/louisa-may-alcott-unmasked-collected-thrillers/oclc/31971792">Louisa May Alcott’s Collected Thrillers</a>.” </p>
<p>In the 1940s, Stern, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=fueoOloYKugC&dq">with her research partner Leona Rostenberg</a>, helped reveal that Alcott had written many of these sensational tales <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.37.2.24293383">under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard</a>.</p>
<p>But Stern wondered if any other stories written by Alcott were still out there.</p>
<p>For example, in “Little Women,” Jo March – the character who most closely resembles Alcott – also writes short stories to support her struggling family. </p>
<p>“‘A Phantom Hand’ put down a new carpet,” Alcott writes, “and the ‘Curse of the Coventrys’ proved the blessing … in the way of groceries and gowns.”</p>
<p>Stern points out that there’s a related reference in Alcott’s journals – “not to ‘A Phantom Hand’ but to ‘A Phantom Face,’ for which she earned $10 in 1859.”</p>
<p>“But,” Stern adds, “neither the ‘Phantom Hand’ nor the ‘Phantom Face’ has been tracked down.” </p>
<p>At the time, I was a graduate student working on my dissertation. I was on the hunt for pseudoscientific short stories, so the mention of Alcott’s missing tales piqued my interest.</p>
<p>Where was this phantom “Phantom” story? Could I find it?</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Scan of old story titled 'The Phantom' in a periodical." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘The Phantom’ appeared in an 1860 issue of the Olive Branch.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Max Chapnick</span></span>
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<p>After searching digital databases, I came across one such story, called simply “The Phantom,” with the subtitle, “Or, The Miser’s Dream, &c.” It had been published in the Olive Branch in early 1860, months after Alcott listed having written “The Phantom” in her journals. But the byline under the story read E. or I. – I couldn’t quite make out the first initial – Gould, which wasn’t a known pseudonym of Alcott’s.</p>
<p>So I went to sleep. Sometime later I awoke with the thought that Gould might be Alcott. What if, along with her several known pseudonyms – A. M. Barnard, Tribulation Periwinkle and Flora Fairfield, among others – Alcott had yet another that simply hadn’t been identified yet? </p>
<p>I cannot say for certain that Gould is Alcott. But I’ve encountered enough circumstantial evidence to consider it likely Alcott wrote seven stories, five poems and one piece of nonfiction under that name.</p>
<h2>More clues emerge</h2>
<p>The publication dates of Gould’s stories – and the outlets where they appeared – certainly suggest Alcott’s authorship.</p>
<p>From the mid-1850s onward, Alcott regularly churned out stories, and yet the record leaves a noticeable gap between spring 1857 and late 1858. In one of Alcott’s letters from the period, she wrote to a friend asking if the magazine Olive Branch would be interested in more of her work. Years earlier, in 1852, Alcott had published “The Rival Painters” in that magazine. Until now, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Louisa_May_Alcott_Encyclopedia/FTtaAAAAMAAJ">all scholars assumed</a> it was her only story published in the Olive Branch.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2023.a909300">In the course of my sleuthing</a>, I found several other pieces that were written by Alcott or had likely been written by her, including a 1856 Saturday Evening Gazette piece called “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2023.a909300">The Painter’s Dream</a>” and an anonymous Olive Branch story from 1857, “The Rival Painters: A Tale of Florence.” </p>
<p>The latter “Painters” was published in the exact period – and in the same magazine – as many of the Gould pieces. Several other outlets that published Gould also have connections to Alcott. For example, one of the Gould stories appears in the magazine Flag of Our Union, where Alcott later published under the Barnard pseudonym. </p>
<p>But to me, the clearest evidence connecting Gould to Alcott comes from the stories themselves. The name Alcott serves as the last name of the protagonists in two of Gould’s stories. Additionally, “The Wayside” – the name of one of Alcott’s homes – is the title of a nostalgic piece of nonfiction authored by Gould.</p>
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<img alt="Large, old yellow house with big windows and a thick, tall chimney, flanked by trees." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Wayside, where Alcott lived with her family in Concord, Mass., was also the title of a piece of nonfiction by E.H. Gould.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-wayside-is-a-national-historic-landmark-lived-in-by-news-photo/545147518?adppopup=true">Joanne Rathe/The Boston Globe via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>The stories also resemble Alcott’s early fiction in important ways. As I argue in one of my dissertation chapters, Alcott pioneered the “sensation” genre. These stories combined elements of sentimental tales with melodramatic thrillers. Instead of taking place in European castles and British landed estates, they were set in the types of places that would have been familiar to the emerging American middle class, such as doctors’ offices and insane asylums. Alcott’s stories show how tensions of gender and class can make those mundane spaces fraught with danger and possibility.</p>
<p>At the same time, there are signs that Gould might not be Alcott. Gould was a common name, especially around Boston. Alcott also kept lists of her stories, and only one of the Gould pieces – “The Phantom” – shows up on those long lists.</p>
<p>However, evidence suggests that the lists aren’t exhaustive – some stories appear on one list but not another – and Alcott refers to stories in her diaries that don’t appear on any lists.</p>
<h2>Pseudonyms and guessing games</h2>
<p>Why would an author like Alcott use pseudonyms anyway? </p>
<p>For one, <a href="https://public.wsu.edu/%7Ecampbelld/engl368/transoats.pdf">Alcott was poor</a>. So early in her career she wrote and published for money, and she might not have been particularly proud of everything she wrote. By disguising her name, Alcott could publish in less prestigious venues for a quick buck without worrying about tarnishing her literary reputation.</p>
<p>Even though she was poor, Alcott’s family had wealthy and cultured connections. Among them was Henry David Thoreau who, in “Walden,” <a href="http://thepersonalnavigator.blogspot.com/2012/02/thoreau-and-olive-branch.html">disparaged the Olive Branch</a> as one of the papers spreading “the gossip of Boston.” And while Alcott’s own mother often praised her writing, she did so only when the Alcott name was printed in more highly regarded venues, like The Atlantic.</p>
<p>Pseudonyms also allowed Alcott to write about topics she might not have felt comfortable attaching her name to. <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Alternative_Alcott/PfOjRvcWHrQC">Many stories written under the Barnard pseudonym</a> depict drug use, reverse gender roles and discuss class conflict in ways that were radical for the late 1850s.</p>
<h2>A culture awash in authorial ambiguity</h2>
<p>Are there any other Alcott stories that remain unidentified? I would say there almost certainly are. As to whether Alcott used any pseudonyms in addition to the ones that have been identified, that’s less likely but possible.</p>
<p>However, I also hope that the identification of Gould restarts a conversation about authorship, especially for literary figures of the past.</p>
<p>Alcott found herself awash in authorial ambiguity. Her first Olive Branch story, “The Rival Painters,” appeared next to a short essay by the wildly famous and pseudonymous <a href="https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1049&context=englishfacpubs">Fanny Fern</a>, who was a master at manipulating public perceptions.</p>
<p>After the blockbuster success of “Little Women,” Alcott published a novel, “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Modern_Mephistopheles/_9oBAAAAQAAJ">A Modern Mephistopheles</a>,” as part of the “No Name Series.” Released by the publishing house Roberts Brothers, the collection featured books written anonymously by famous writers. Readers would try to guess the real authors, but Alcott didn’t reveal she wrote the novel until a few months before her death. </p>
<p>Alcott was deeply embedded in a culture of unknown, and yet guessable, authorship. Anonymity liberated Alcott, Fern and other writers – particularly women – by allowing them to tackle risky topics. But anonymity and pseudonyms didn’t stop people from sleuthing, now or then. Readers delighted in trying to figure out an author’s possible masks, just like I’m doing now with Gould. And it wasn’t just readers: Editors and writers withheld information while at the same time leaving clues. Everyone got in on the fun of hidden identities.</p>
<p>I’ll keep gathering evidence that may either prove or disprove Alcott’s authorship of Gould’s stories. But if I never know, that’s fine with me. </p>
<p>Alcott herself loved acting, and she loved wearing masks, both literally on the stage and figuratively in print. In the spirit of the masquerade, the Gould pseudonym adds to the allure of mystery – and the joy of discovery.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217628/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Max Chapnick first presented this research at the American Literature Association Conference in 2022, where he recieved funding from the Louisa May Alcott Society of which he is also a member. </span></em></p>By disguising her name, Alcott could publish in less prestigious venues without worrying about tarnishing her literary reputation.Max Chapnick, Postdoctoral Teaching Associate in English, Northeastern UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2184002023-12-04T12:29:33Z2023-12-04T12:29:33ZHow A.S. Byatt’s northern identity and anger over climate change informed her fiction<p>A.S. Byatt’s highbrow fiction has a vast, international appeal. The writer, who died <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/17/as-byatt-author-and-critic-dies-aged-87">in November</a>, was known for her voracious appetite for knowledge and her insatiable <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/25/as-byatt-interview">curiosity</a>. </p>
<p>Inspiration for her work draws from as diverse sources as <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230248595_9">Elizabeth I</a>, <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-2684-3_9">Norse mythology</a>, <a href="http://www.connotations.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/sturrock01201.pdf">Amazonian butterflies</a> and <a href="https://intellectdiscover-com.ezphost.dur.ac.uk/content/journals/10.1386/fict.3.2.221_1">Matisse’s paintings</a>. And she turned her hand to many different styles, from <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40002513">Victorian poetry</a> to <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iZpyDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=byatt+dragon%27s+breath&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjKmevD7dOCAxUFS0EAHW8JCCQQ6AF6BAgLEAI#v=onepage&q=byatt%20dragon's%20breath&f=false">fairy tales</a>.</p>
<p>In their statement about Byatt’s death, her publisher, Penguin, called her “<a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2023/11/a-s-byatt-statement">a girl from Sheffield with a strong European sensibility</a>”. That European sensibility is evident in her writing and <a href="https://lithub.com/a-s-byatt-i-have-not-yet-written-enough/">interviews</a>, including on the topic of Brexit. </p>
<p>There are several distinctly northern images in her writing. Possession features <a href="https://www.bejeweledmag.com/possession-props-supporting-role-whitby-jet-film-collectible-current-jewel/">jet brooches</a> bought in Whitby. There are recollections of Sheffield in her work of auto-fiction, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/22386/sugar-and-other-stories-by-a-s-byatt/">Sugar</a> (1987). She explores memories of a traumatic childhood in a mining town in <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/405473/the-childrens-book-by-a-s-byatt/9780099535454">The Children’s Book</a> (2018). These examples suggest how pivotal and constant the northern presence is across Byatt’s early and more recent work alike. </p>
<p>In her writing, the north of England became a space where the relation between humans, nature and culture could be put to the test. More than simply recurrent themes, in her <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2022.2030119">later fiction</a> especially, northern locations become emblems of the climate crisis and of how human actions have detrimental effects on the whole planet.</p>
<h2>Climate change in Byatt’s writing</h2>
<p>Filey Beach in Yorkshire is one such landmark. In <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/357513/the-virgin-in-the-garden-by-byatt-a-s/9780099478010">The Virgin in the Garden</a> (1978), a vicar named Daniel Orton courts Stephanie Potter on this very beach. Here, they share their first kiss and decide to get married, but, in the midst of the salty, freezing northern wind sweeping “six miles of sand”, they are reminded of how small and impotent humans are when confronted with the formidable forces of nature. </p>
<p>Daniel and Stephanie’s romance is forged by natural elements and (spoiler alert) is later interrupted at the end of the sequel, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/354149/still-life-by-byatt-a-s/9780099479918">Still Life</a> (1985). Stephanie is electrocuted by her fridge after trying to save a sparrow who has entered the kitchen, therefore bringing nature quite literally where it does not, or cannot belong: the 1950s family home.</p>
<p>The same beach reappears in a much later tale, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/15/as-byatt-short-story-sea">Sea Story</a> (2013). This story shows how, in times of climate emergencies, a romance as hopeful as Stephanie and Daniel’s is no longer possible. </p>
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<img alt="Black and white photo of a beach" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/seashore-in-grayscale-photo-2l9BhKOvSNI">Connor Dugan on Unsplash</a></span>
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<p>Young Harold, an ecopoet and sea lover, and marine biologist Laura seem destined for one another. But before their romance can properly blossom, Laura leaves for fieldwork in the Caribbean. </p>
<p>Byatt twists the proverbial message in a bottle trope into tragedy: Harold sends her a plastic bottle of Perrier which ends up in the Caribbean Trash Vortex, causing the deaths of birds and fish, and, ultimately, of Laura herself. </p>
<p>Harold, who, as in most cases of “<a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674072343&content=toc">slow violence</a>”, never finds out what happened to Laura, marries a local woman and engages in small campaigns to clean the beach of plastic refuse. The beach becomes not just the counterpoint to the home where love grows and ends, but a place where an act as simple as throwing a bottle into the sea causes death and destruction on the other side of the planet. </p>
<p>The story does not end on a hopeful note, but underlines instead how plastics in the ocean live for far longer than humans: <a href="https://rc.library.uta.edu/uta-ir/bitstream/handle/10106/26234/02_Alaimo_Thinking+as+Stuff_OZone_Vol1.pdf?sequence=1">polluting for eternity</a>. </p>
<p>Similarly, <a href="https://canongate.co.uk/books/526-ragnarok-the-end-of-the-gods/">Ragnarok: The End of the Gods</a> (2011) closes with the end of the second world war, but gestures towards the <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/729485">impending climate catastrophe</a> that post-war normality, industrial farming and consumer culture would accelerate. The flowers Byatt’s alter ego passes as a child are “made extinct”, and peace for humans is an empty word if it cannot guarantee that there is a thriving planet to live on.</p>
<p>For a writer best known for her postmodern pastiches, Byatt’s eco-fictions read as pessimistic, as they lose the joyful aspect of storytelling that her earlier work displays. Yet, it is precisely this lucid exposure of the irreversible damages that humans cause to the planet that makes of Byatt a powerful and relevant voice in understanding the world we inhabit.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barbara Franchi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In Byatt’s fiction, northern locations become emblems of the climate crisis and of how human actions have detrimental effects on the whole planet.Barbara Franchi, Teaching Fellow in Postcolonial and World Literature, Durham UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2119402023-11-27T13:48:37Z2023-11-27T13:48:37ZBooker prize: rediscovering the first female winner, the often-forgotten Bernice Rubens<p>One of the most captivating and enigmatic novelists of the 20th century, Bernice Rubens remains largely unknown despite her remarkable literary achievements. She was the <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-elected-member">second recipient</a> of the Booker prize in 1970 for her novel <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Elected_Member/V1vODwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">The Elected Member</a> and its first female winner. </p>
<p>She remains the only Welsh winner in the history of the prize – a fact that perhaps speaks volumes for the way Welsh writing in the English language is perceived and recognised outside of Wales. </p>
<p>Rubens was born in the working class area of Adamsdown in Cardiff in 1923, to Polish and Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. She attended the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff (now Cardiff University), where she received a BA in English in 1947. Having taught English and worked on documentary films early on in her career, she only started writing at the age of 30. </p>
<p>Rubens went on to publish more than 20 novels and one work of non-fiction before her death in 2004, but still <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/oct/14/guardianobituaries.books">referred</a> to her own writing as merely “better than most, not as good as some”. </p>
<p>This wry view underplays just how versatile her style and subject matter was, however. And while Rubens was well known and applauded during her lifetime, her work, like so many other Welsh women, is often unknown outside of Welsh university circles, some English literature degrees and more adventurous book clubs. </p>
<p>Some of this relates, perhaps, to the fact that she never really fitted into the Cardiff literary scene and was often overshadowed by some of her contemporaries, especially Welsh poet, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/dannie-abse">Dannie Abse</a>. </p>
<p>But as a working class Welsh-Jewish writer, her ability to unflinchingly explore the traumas and legacies of her own cultural heritage makes her writing especially memorable and haunting. </p>
<h2>Cultural background</h2>
<p>In The Elected Member, Rubens looks at how the façade of a respectable Jewish family crumbles when their beloved son plunges into the depths of drug addiction.</p>
<p>Her 1983 novel, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Brothers/eM_fD3_TOuAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Brothers+Bernice+Rubens&dq=Brothers+Bernice+Rubens&printsec=frontcover">Brothers</a>, explores the experiences of four generations of a family as they face the Tsarist army in Russia in the 1830s, the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20101343">1871 Odessa pogrom</a> in Ukraine, emigration (to both Wales and Germany) and concentration camps. </p>
<p>The novel exemplifies the worst of human behaviour in relation to marginalised and persecuted people. But it also underlines the need for human connection and, ultimately, hope. No one who reads Brothers could walk away from the experience unchanged. </p>
<p>From a Welsh perspective, her 1975 novel, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/I_Sent_a_Letter_to_My_Love/tBP9DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=I+Sent+A+Letter+to+My+Love+Bernice+Rubens&printsec=frontcover">I Sent A Letter to My Love</a>, is one of Rubens’ most disturbing and strangely poignant works. Set in the “one-eyed” seaside town of Porthcawl, the novel follows the struggles of unmarried, middle-aged Amy and her disabled brother, Stan, and their close friend, Gwyneth, as they live out their tedious existences. </p>
<p>Much of the novel’s action revolves around the drama that ensues from Amy placing an advert in the personal column of the local newspaper under the pseudonym “Blodwyn Pugh”. Instead of receiving an overwhelming postbag of suitors, Amy receives a single reply –- from her brother, Stan.</p>
<p>Their letter writing becomes increasingly sexual, until Stan starts to develop feelings for Gwyneth. This willingness to confront the quasi-incestuous nature of the siblings’ relationship (albeit unknowing, at least on Stan’s side), is one of the reasons Rubens’ work is so discomfiting. It refuses to be easily labelled or contained in a genre or style. </p>
<p>The novel was later made into a French film, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082182/">Chère Inconnue</a>, in 1982, starring Simone Signoret and Jean Rochefort, which also plays on the novel’s disturbing central plot. </p>
<h2>Defying genre</h2>
<p>Overall, Rubens’ fictions are hybrid and sit between different cultural identities. They are impossible to neatly pigeonhole. Indeed, critics like <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/rubens-bernice-ruth">Hana Sambrook</a> have referred to the “maddening” refusal of her writing to fit neatly into a single category. </p>
<p>However, this refusal to fit is exactly why Rubens is so important. Why should she fit neatly into any category? Why do we put so much value on genre and style being so precisely categorised? </p>
<p>Readers today will find much of Rubens’ back catalogue available second hand. But only a single novel, I Sent A Letter to My Love, has been incorporated into the <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales">Library of Wales</a> series from publisher Parthian Books, which aims to republish significant works of classic Welsh literature in English.</p>
<p>Rubens sits alongside a small handful of other women writers in the collection, including <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales/products/in-and-out-of-the-goldfish">Rachel Trezise</a>, <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales/products/rhapsody">Dorothy Edwards</a>, <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales/products/the-battle-to-the-weak">Hilda Vaughan</a> and <a href="https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/library-of-wales/products/turf-or-stone">Margiad Evans</a>. </p>
<p>Perhaps the way we immortalise our own cultural history in Wales is part of the reason why working-class women writers such as Rubens are yet to reach a wider audience, beyond the popularity of their day. </p>
<p>However, even more importantly in my view, it lies with the failure of prominent prizes to fully recognise Welsh women’s contribution to literary history. Sadly, it’s a failure that seems unlikely to be overturned any time soon.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211940/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Deininger is a member of the Green Party. </span></em></p>Bernice Rubens won the 1970 Booker prize for her novel, The Elected Member, and is the only Welsh person to have ever won the prize.Michelle Deininger, Senior Co-ordinating Lecturer in Humanities, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2177402023-11-23T12:55:14Z2023-11-23T12:55:14ZPaul Lynch wins Booker prize 2023: why we’re in a ‘golden age’ of Irish writing<p>Irish author Paul Lynch has won the 2023 Booker prize for dystopian novel <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/reading-guide-prophet-song-by-paul-lynch">Prophet Song</a>. But he wasn’t the only writer from Ireland nominated. <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/authors/paul-murray">Paul Murray</a> was also the shortlist and, on the long list of 13 novels, Elaine Feeney’s <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/448213/how-to-build-a-boat-by-feeney-elaine/9781787303454">How to Build a Boat</a> and Sebastian Barry’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/27/old-gods-time-book-review-sebastian-barry">Old God’s Time</a> made the cut. </p>
<p>While Barry and Murray have previously been listed for the Booker prize, Lynch and Feeney are new additions to the catalogue of Irish Booker prize nominees which includes <a href="https://www.faber.co.uk/author/claire-keegan/">Claire Keegan</a>, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/168034/anne-enright">Anne Enright</a> and <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Colm-Toibin/1760537">Colm Tóibín</a>. </p>
<p>Both Murray and Lynch are part of what Barry, as <a href="https://www.artscouncil.ie/laureate/">Irish Laureate for Fiction</a>, calls a “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/08/sebastian-barry-named-irish-fiction-laureate-golden-age#:%7E:text=Sebastian%20Barry-,Sebastian%20Barry%20named%20Irish%20fiction%20laureate%2C%20hailing,golden%20age%20of%20Irish%20prose'&text=The%20award%2Dwinning%20author%20Sebastian,new%20laureate%20for%20Irish%20fiction.">golden age</a>” of Irish writing.</p>
<p>Irish writers have benefited from structural factors in recent years, including: a strong Arts Council, legislation which since 1969 has exempted artists from income tax, an artist’s three-year basic wage <a href="https://news.artnet.com/news/ireland-artists-basic-income-results-2278099">pilot</a> and the sheer proliferation of excellent <a href="https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsandculture/arid-41091904.html">literary journals</a> at the moment. </p>
<p>Irish writers have been over-represented on other prize lists, too, with three Irish writers winning the <a href="https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Sunday-Times-Audible-Short-Story-Award-2021-Podcast/B098RCB6L4">Sunday Times Audible short story award</a> in the last few years.</p>
<p>However, ask them in person and Irish writers are more likely to highlight impediments to producing work. The housing crisis has been taken up by former Booker prize long-listee <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/2023/03/18/sally-rooney-renters-are-being-exploited-and-evictions-must-be-stopped/">Sally Rooney</a>, for example. The <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/video/video/2022/06/14/dublin-has-become-blander-artists-protest-studio-closures/">closure</a> of arts spaces in Dublin given over to short-time lets is also a common cause for concern.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-win-the-booker-prize-is-there-a-formula-for-the-finest-in-fiction-191528">How to win the Booker prize: is there a formula for ‘the finest in fiction’?</a>
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<h2>The nominated novels</h2>
<p>Murray’s The Bee Sting is a tragicomedy of epic proportions. Clocking in at 656 pages, it follows the Barneses – mother, father, 17-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son – as the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis places unbearable strain on an already tense family dynamic. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Paul Murray talks about his Booker-nominated novel.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Lynch’s slimmer offering, Prophet Song, takes place in a dystopian Ireland hurtling towards authoritarianism. It is both recognisable and unknown – Ireland, but “under some foreign sky”. Its main character is a stalwart of Irish literature: a mother and wife named Eilish. Her attempts to protect her family in a world not of her making is resonant back through the canon, while taking on a new and eerie prescience in Lynch’s portrait of an Irish police state.</p>
<p>The Bee Sting and Prophet Song deal with one of the abiding themes of Irish literature – the trickiness of memory, both personal and collective. This literary preoccupation with the past has sometimes come under fire.</p>
<p>In 2001, Irish Times journalist <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/writing-the-boom-1.273557">Fintan O’Toole</a> alleged that Irish writers were struggling to analyse the times in which they were living, instead reverting to old tropes and themes and depicting an Ireland that “most competent writers can do […] with their eyes closed”.</p>
<p>Both Murray and Lynch seem to speak directly to O’Toole’s concern. In one instance in Prophet Song, Eilish muses: “All your life you’ve been asleep, all of us sleeping and now the great waking begins.” </p>
<p>Indeed, both novels deal with wake-up calls. Murray revisits the financial crash – a moment in recent Irish history whose trauma remains, it could be argued, partially suppressed. Meanwhile Lynch takes aim at Irish political “<a href="https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/research/spotlight-research/are-far-right-threat-irish-democracy">stability</a>” and complacency.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Paul Lynch talks about his Booker-nominated novel.</span></figcaption>
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<p>In Murray’s depictions of personal, buried histories and in Lynch’s concern with the vulnerability of consensus and humanity, these novels reflect how we can simultaneously know so much and so little of the people and places closest to us. </p>
<p>Both writers masterfully reveal the strangeness of familiarity, and the familiarity of strangeness. They both question the extent to which we know the depths of our own capabilities, for good and for bad, and sketch the intersection of existential crises with normal, individual lives.</p>
<p>Writing in The Stinging Fly magazine, <a href="https://stingingfly.org/review/the-bee-sting/">Stephen Cox</a> wryly notes that Murray’s back catalogue could be summarised as “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/20/we-dont-know-ourselves-by-fintan-otoole-review-sweeping-account-of-irelands-evolutions">We Don’t Know Ourselves</a>” à la Fintan O’Toole’s 2021 memoir of the same title. </p>
<p>It has historically been the job of Irish writers to reflect the worst elements of their society back at itself. In Prophet Song and The Bee Sting, Lynch and Murray are continuing this tradition. Ireland should pay attention.</p>
<p><em>This article has been updated to reflect the outcome of the Booker prize.</em></p>
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Orlaith Darling receives funding from the Irish Research Council.</span></em></p>Irish writers have benefited from structural factors in recent years. However, ask them in person and Irish writers are more likely to highlight impediments to producing work.Orlaith Darling, PhD Candidate, Contemporary English Literature and Critical Theory, Trinity College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2148652023-11-22T10:27:37Z2023-11-22T10:27:37ZBooker prize 2023: the six shortlisted books reviewed by our experts<p><em>From a longlist of 12, six novels have been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker prize. Our academics review the finalists ahead of the announcement of the winner on November 26.</em></p>
<h2>Western Lane by Chetna Maroo</h2>
<p>Chetna Maroo’s subtle novel follows a British Asian girl, Gopi, who plays squash fiercely to cope with the grief of her mother’s death. </p>
<p>In Western Lane, the squash court becomes an arena for playing out the conflicting emotions flowing between a grieving father and his daughters. Here other tensions also come to the fore, such as her father’s memories of Mombasa in Kenya, the delicate negotiations between British people of diverse south Asian heritages and interracial tension and budding romance. </p>
<p>Powerful descriptions of the physicality of competitive racket sport are accompanied by evocative hints of Gujarati foodways and familial codes. Together, these aspects of Gopi’s life define her adolescent sensibility but also help alleviate loss. </p>
<p>This is a story that defies one genre. At once, Western Lane is a wonderful coming-of-age narrative about a girl navigating her adolescence – exploring identity, familial expectations, first love and more. </p>
<p>It is a story about grief and that which can often go unsaid in the process of mourning. It is also a sports story that uses the physical and mental demands of being an athlete to heighten its emotional narrative. A marvellous read. </p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Ananya Jahanara Kabir, professor of English literature, King’s College London</em></p>
<h2>The Bee Sting by Paul Murray</h2>
<p>Paul Murray’s fourth novel, The Bee Sting, is a rare thing: a 600-page page-turner. It’s also a masterclass in narrative perspective. Starting off in the third person, four novella-length sections introduce us to the Barnes family. There’s failing car salesman Dickie, his frustrated wife Imelda, teenage Cass who dreams of life beyond small-town Ireland, and tween PJ who, like the rest of the family, is nurturing a secret. </p>
<p>The following section, Age of Loneliness, ricochets between the second-person viewpoints of the four protagonists, with brief snatches of ancillary perspectives as the narrative reaches its rapid-fire crescendo. It’s a novel about class and wealth, isolation and connectedness, and the secret histories that lie beneath a family’s stories of itself. </p>
<p>The Bee Sting’s occasional distractions, such as the sparing punctuation in Imelda’s sections, do not take away from its many successes: the gripping atmosphere, its capacity to surprise – even shock – and the rich symbolism that surrounds the titular wound. </p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Bethany Layne, senior lecturer in English literature, De Montfort University</em></p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/paul-lynch-wins-booker-prize-2023-why-were-in-a-golden-age-of-irish-writing-217740">Paul Lynch wins Booker prize 2023: why we're in a 'golden age' of Irish writing</a>
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<h2>Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein</h2>
<p>Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience is a polished pebble of a novel: opaque, contained, unyielding. The story seems to begin when the unnamed female narrator relocates to look after her elder brother, whose wife and children have left. </p>
<p>However, the narrator’s insistent attention on duty and deference is linked to echoes of historical oppression and exclusion rooted in her identity. Though not named, it is inferred by repeated allusions to her scapegoating by the Christian community she lives among.</p>
<p>While there are glimmers both of the narrator’s resistant subjectivity and of her reclaiming service as power, the story preserves its polished surface, committed only to studying obedience as a behaviour. </p>
<p>Not claiming to speak for anyone is part of the moral discipline the narrator prides herself on. But the absence of any dialogue and the sterility of the voice ultimately crafts a narrator who is constrained not just by her brother’s demands but by her own self-perception.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Alison Donnell, professor of modern literatures in English, University of East Anglia</em></p>
<h2>Prophet Song by Paul Lynch</h2>
<p>In his powerfully atmospheric fifth novel, Paul Lynch imagines a near-future Ireland that is inexorably mutating into a repressive, authoritarian state under the control of a right-wing populist government. The reader’s focalising guide to the novel’s ever-darkening moral universe is commercial scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack, who lives in suburban Dublin with her husband Larry, a teacher and trade unionist. </p>
<p>Larry’s summary arrest and detention by the newly formed secret police acts as the catalyst for Eilish’s awakening to the reality that “the state they live in has become a monster”. Once “the great waking begins”, the pace of Eilish’s engulfment by fear and panic accelerates precipitously, in tandem with the country’s spiralling descent into societal breakdown and civil strife. </p>
<p>Lynch’s dense, monolithic paragraphs potently enact Eilish’s tightening encirclement by malevolent forces, from which she desperately tries to shield her family. Prophet Song, like the best dystopian realism, exerts a compelling hold upon the imagination because of its chillingly plausible cautionary message.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Liam Harte, professor of Irish literature, University of Manchester</em></p>
<h2>If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffrey</h2>
<p>If I Survive You tells the interconnected stories of the men from a Jamaican family that migrate to Miami. The novel moves between stories from brothers Trelawny and Delano, their father Topper and their cousin Cukie as they navigate issues of belonging, racial identity, displacement, father-son relationships and hurricanes in 20th- and 21st-century America.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most striking element of Escoffrey’s novel is its lyrical narrative voice. It moves between characters and between first, second and third person to create a kaleidoscopic, cinematic meditation on black masculinity and the immigrant experience. </p>
<p>The novel’s opening chapter recounts Trelawny’s childhood experiences. He reflects on being asked “What are you?” in relation to his racial identity. Escoffery does a skillful job of highlighting the complexities of this question, and the ways in which blackness is understood differently across cultures.</p>
<p>If I Survive You is a beautifully written novel that introduces many unforgettable characters, captivates its reader with humour and heart, and demonstrates Escoffrey’s unmistakable aptitude for the art of storytelling.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Leighan Renaud, lecturer in Caribbean literatures and cultures, University of Bristol</em></p>
<h2>This Other Eden by Paul Harding</h2>
<p>The title of Paul Harding’s richly textured novel, with its wry invocation of Shakespeare’s scepter’d isle, points to the long literary legacy of islands as places of imaginative possibilities. </p>
<p>The story explores the shattering of a mixed-heritage community on the fictional Apple Island, off the coast of Maine, by racist forces of missionary zeal and eugenicist thought. A dazzling array of narrative perspectives bring this world to intense sensory life. </p>
<p>The novel’s elaborate, dreamlike prose sits uneasily at times with the brutal dispossessions of American history, especially the fates of the real-life Malaga Islanders. Its plot strains to accommodate the complexities of transatlantic slavery, colonial conquest and Irish settler diaspora. </p>
<p>Yet Harding’s work is best read, not as historical fiction, but rather as a form of speculative writing. This Other Eden imagines vivid possibilities for human connection, dignity and hope – even as it reminds us of the terrible fragility of these visions.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Muireann O'Cinneide, lecturer in English, University of Galway</em></p>
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From a longlist of 12, six novels have been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker prize.Ananya Jahanara Kabir, FBA Professor of English Literature, King's College LondonAlison Donnell, Professor of Modern Literatures in English, University of East AngliaBethany Layne, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, De Montfort UniversityLeighan M Renaud, Lecturer in Caribbean Literatures and Cultures, Department of English, University of BristolLiam Harte, Professor of Irish Literature, University of ManchesterMuireann O'Cinneide, Lecturer in English, University of GalwayLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2147812023-11-09T08:31:14Z2023-11-09T08:31:14ZHow Balzac created the myth of the spinster<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551421/original/file-20230914-29-r0x6k9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C0%2C1994%2C1497&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dans cette édition illustrée de _La cousine Bette_ (1948), l'héroïne célibataire a les traits durs, la mine sévère et triste. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.edition-originale.com/fr/litterature/livres-illustres/balzac-la-cousine-bette-1948-39977">Editions Albert Guillot, Paris 1948.</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>You only have to hear the word <em>spinster</em> to conjure up the age-old <a href="https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/vieille_fille-9782348072765">stereotype</a> of a woman in her forties, single and sexually inactive, living alone or with a few cats. Ideally, she will be quite ugly, a little bitter, if not downright nasty, recalling our representations of <a href="https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/sorcieres-9782355221224">witches</a>. Feminist theorists have been questioning and criticising this figure for decades, whose presence in our collective imagination serves above all as a <a href="https://www.illustre.ch/magazine/feministe-ou-anticonformiste-la-revanche-de-la-vieille-fille-539866">threat to women who decide not to marry or refuse to become mothers</a>.</p>
<p>When we look at the history of <a href="https://theconversation.com/feminisme-dans-la-fiction-quand-bechdel-regarde-moliere-198252">these representations</a>, it’s hard to avoid Balzac and his colossal <em>Human Comedy</em> (in French: <em>La Comédie Humaine</em>), in which portraits of old maids intersect and resemble each other to the point of constituting a <a href="https://www.maisondebalzac.paris.fr/sites/default/files/dossier_portraits_enseignants.pdf">social type</a>. And were those patterns not incriminating enough, one of his novels is entitled <em>Spinster</em> (<em>Vieille fille</em>).</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Johann Heinrich Füssli, <em>The Three Witches</em>, 1783.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Johann_Heinrich_F%C3%BCssli_019.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The spinster, public enemy number one</h2>
<p>Why did Balzac create a stigmatising “type” for unmarried middle-aged women? It would seem that the starting point was his pure and simple detestation of celibacy, a state he considered “unproductive” and “contrary to society”. He writes</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“By remaining unmarried, a creature of the female sex becomes void of meaning; selfish and cold, she creates repulsion. This implacable judgment of the world is unfortunately too just to leave old maids in ignorance of its causes. ” (Balzac, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7927/pg7927.html">The Celibates: The Vicar of Tours</a>; in French:’Les Célibataires – Le Curé de Tours’).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the preface to his novel <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrette_(novel)"><em>Pierrette</em></a>, he goes so far as to recommend reviving a bill dating back to the Revolution that sought to impose an additional tax on unmarried people. Although he denies suffering from “singlephobia”, Balzac’s deep aversion toward those who were unable to found a family, and above all give birth, is striking. Also bear in mind that both men and women are targeted by his reproaches – and while the portraits of <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Cur%C3%A9_de_Tours">effeminate and ridiculous churchmen</a> or <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Rabouilleuse">bachelors driving their families to ruin</a>, are beyond the scope of this article, they are very much present in <em>The Human Comedy</em>.</p>
<p>But the figure of the old maid receives special satirical attention. Indeed, it appears that the deep empathy that the <a href="https://www.revuedesdeuxmondes.fr/balzac-feministe/">“women’s novelist”</a> usually shows toward women stops at those who do not fulfil themselves in marriage and motherhood.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
À lire aussi :
<a href="https://theconversation.com/relire-balzac-a-lere-des-humanites-numeriques-131090">Relire Balzac à l’ère des humanités numériques</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Of course, this rejection didn’t come out of nowhere, and the stigmatisation of celibacy wasn’t invented by Balzac, with the idea of an additional tax dating back to <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imp%C3%B4t_sur_le_c%C3%A9libat">antiquity</a>. However, it was Balzac who gave the figure of the old maid its letters of nobility – so to speak – through a series of portraits that show us several variations of characters linked to the stereotype of the single woman. In <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vieille_Fille_(Balzac)"><em>The Spinster</em></a>, he light-heartedly pokes fun at the naivety of a woman so uneducated in the ways of love that she fails to marry; in <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cousine_Bette"><em>Cousin Bette</em></a> (<em>La cousine Bette</em>), he describes the manipulations of an old maid prepared to do anything to ruin her own family, drawing from the aesthetics of the witch in no uncertain terms. Finally, in <em>The Vicar of Tours</em> and <em>Pierrette</em>, he paints an almost identical double portrait of two embittered, penny-pinching and ugly spinsteresses conducting those around them to their ruin. In the course of the novellas, the figure of the spinster as we know it today emerges as a woman who suffers from a laughable ignorance in all things sexual, a boring existence, and ultimately, vicious nature.</p>
<p>It is important to note there is a certain paradox in the way Balzac characterises these characters. On the one hand, he criticises celibacy as an unproductive and unnatural lifestyle choice. On the other, he seems intent on showing that this celibacy is not a choice, but stems from the profound nature of his protagonists, for whom celibacy is an absolute inevitability from which they will never escape. Here, celibacy appears less as a free choice than as a state of affairs <a href="https://theconversation.com/tout-le-monde-naime-pas-le-sexe-comment-lasexualite-devient-un-objet-detudes-184801">almost tantamount to asexuality</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
À lire aussi :
<a href="https://theconversation.com/le-feminist-gaze-quand-les-femmes-ecrivent-en-feministes-212586">Le « feminist gaze » : quand les femmes écrivent en féministes</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Now if Balzac detests celibacy, he equally detests the idea of a forced or unhappy marriage, whose disastrous effect on women’s health and psyche he denounces in his novel <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Femme_de_trente_ans"><em>The 30-Year-Old Woman</em></a> (<em>La femme de 30 ans</em>). It therefore appears strange to point the finger at celibacy, which is perhaps the only alternative to undesired marriage.</p>
<p>So why does the 19th-century writer view single women so harshly, framing them in parasitic terms? First of all, non-maternity is at issue:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“They grow sharp and peevish because all human beings who miss their vocation are unhappy; they suffer, and suffering gives birth to the bitterness of ill will” (Balzac, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1345/1345-h/1345-h.htm">The Celibates: The Vicar of Tours</a>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The absence of desire and love is also singled out, especially as Balzac sees desire as a powerful driving force in his novels, pushing his characters to fulfil their role as heroes. It is a lack of love in the broadest sense that characterises Balzac’s spinster daughters. Deprived of romantic or marital affection, they are also incapable of developing family love: Sylvie Rogron tortures her young cousin to death, Cousin Bette manipulates her entire family to plunge them into misery and achieve her ends. The message is clear: the single woman is a danger to the family, the structure underpinning traditional society. She is thus transformed into a terrifying, even monstrous figure, and often bestialised. What is most frightening about the spinster is her independence, her profound inability to be subject to a man.</p>
<h2>A disturbing absence of sex life</h2>
<p>It is this freedom, so unsuited to women as they were thought of in the 19th century, that Balzac demonises. Under his pen, old maids lose their femininity and almost systematically acquire a form of androgyny.</p>
<p>So a woman without a man or children, without the desire to be desired, appears to Balzac to cease to be a woman at all. The debate is far from over: in France, we think of Marie Kock’s essay, <em>Spinster</em> (<em>Vieille fille</em>) published in 2022, or the essay by the writer and former porn actress Ovidie, <em>Alas, the flesh is sad</em> (<em>La chair est triste hélas</em>) or <a href="https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/lsd-la-serie-documentaire-sur-vivre-sans-sexe-du-12-au-15-avril-sur-france-culture-2161159">her documentary series on national radio France Culture</a> on her life without sex. Not having a sex life, or even claiming it, for a short period or throughout one’s life, continues to disturb society.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Embittered, ugly, dry, sickly jealous of her cousin Adeline and her beauty, Cousin Bette sets out to make her unhappy.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When the Balzacian heroine is not possessed by a husband or lover, the forces are reversed, with male domination turned upside down. Mademoiselle Gamard, Sylvie Rogron and Cousin Bette subjugate the men around them in an unnatural ascension. Seen from this angle, the female celibacy portrayed in <em>La Comédie Humaine</em> takes on an anarchic, almost revolutionary quality, capable of threatening age-old institutions.</p>
<p>And while Balzac is at pains to show us his deep detestation of these dangers, we also sense a certain fascination with the profound immorality of his terrible bachelors. After all, one of his most delightful novels, <em>Cousin Bette</em>, is driven by its vicious, sapphic anti-heroine and her Machiavellian schemes, which he describes with obvious glee, making her, more or less in spite of himself, far more charismatic and memorable than her “respectable” peers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214781/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Loup Belliard ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.</span></em></p>In his collection of stories, “The Human Comedy”, the French 19th-century writer Honoré de Balzac turned the shaming of single women into an art.Loup Belliard, Doctorante en littérature du XIXe siècle et gender studies, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2168732023-11-08T13:58:09Z2023-11-08T13:58:09ZWith Slut! Taylor Swift joins a long history of women fighting slut-shaming in their writing<p>One track stands out on the <a href="https://taylor.lnk.to/1989taylorsversion">rereleased edition</a> of Taylor Swift’s iconic album, 1989. In Slut!, Swift addresses her encounters with <a href="https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-slut-shaming-5271893">slut-shaming</a> – behaviour that shames women who are judged to be promiscuous. “But if I’m all dressed up,” the singer muses, “they might as well be looking at us. And if they call me a slut, you know it might be worth it for once”. </p>
<p>“Slut-shaming” is a <a href="https://www.oed.com/dictionary/slut-shame_v?tl=true#:%7E:text=The%20earliest%20known%20use%20of,is%20from%202007%2C%20in%20alt.">relatively modern phrase</a> – but the behaviour itself has scarcely evolved since the 1700s. Back then, the popular vernacular was rife with terms and phrases aimed at degrading women for their supposed sexual indiscretions, painting them as inherently untrustworthy beings ruled by carnal desires. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qrxsceexTBw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Taylor Swift’s Slut! from 1989 (Taylor’s Version).</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Dictionaries of the age marked women who accidentally exposed their breasts in public (“<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Lexicon_Balatronicum/iDsJAAAAQAAJ?q=pudenda&gbpv=1#f=false">sported blubber</a>”) as well sexually experienced women (<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Lexicon_Balatronicum/iDsJAAAAQAAJ?q=pudenda&gbpv=1#f=false">“mort wap-apaces”</a>) and “beastly, sluttish women” (“<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/A_Dictionary_of_Buckish_Slang_University/gx9TAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1">fusty luggs</a>”). </p>
<p>The role of the popular press in slut-shaming is also long-standing. Newspapers in the 1700s gladly printed letters judging women’s behaviour and fashion choices. Men often wrote under crude pseudonyms like “Bumfiddle”, which are not too dissimilar to those chosen by today’s internet trolls. They penned vehement letters about the way women dressed, slut-shaming them as “cork-rumped devils”. </p>
<h2>The scandalous Lady W</h2>
<p>Stories detailing the supposedly scandalous behaviour of women were regularly featured in newspapers across both urban and rural areas, catering to a societal appetite for salacious content. “Wanton” Lady Seymour Worsley – who was the subject of the 2015 BBC drama <a href="https://www.hallierubenhold.com/books/the-scandalous-lady-w-reprint-of-lady-worsleys-whim-to-accompany-the-bbc2-drama/">The Scandalous Lady W</a> – was a prime target. </p>
<p>In 1782, she drew outrage for her supposedly brazen sexuality. She was shamed for having multiple sexual partners and became the subject of smutty cartoons. James Gillray’s famous <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw63181/Sir-Richard-Worse-than-sly-exposing-his-wifes-bottom---o-fye">caricatures</a> are among of dozens of shaming images <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw63186/Seymour-Dorothy-Lady-Worsley-A-peep-into-Lady-Wys-seraglio">that sought to “expose” Lady Worsley</a>. They accompanied a vicious attempt by her husband to destroy her reputation in court.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Cartoon mocking Lady W's supposed many lovers" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Peep Into Lady W!!!!!y’s Seraglio by James Gillray (1782).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Trustees of the British Museum</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Lady Worsley’s story shows the long history of slut-shaming. But it also showcases the long history of women fighting back. Instead of bowing to societal shame, Lady Worsley boldly boasted about her reputation in verse. </p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IQ0nCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT130&lpg=PT130&dq=%22An+Epistle+from+Lady+Worsley%22&source=bl&ots=Y4U_mf9KpQ&sig=ACfU3U0HNZwD_r26VjfxztK1KLjKXF_qqw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj1lojNwrGCAxWmVkEAHc_-DYQQ6AF6BAgiEAM#v=onepage&q=%22An%20Epistle%20from%20Lady%20Worsley%22&f=false">Her witty poem</a>, An Epistle from L–y W——y to S-r R—–d W—–y (1782), showed that she was unaffected by the public scrutiny and those who tried to slut-shame her. She confirmed she was not “chaste” and didn’t care what the world said about it. She proudly claimed her right to sexual freedom and autonomy – a significant act of defiance in an era that placed immense value on a woman’s chastity and reputation.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aSRboeGLvx8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Taylor Swift discussing slut shaming in an interview with Zane Lowe.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During the same period, playwright Sophia Lee electrified audiences with her “licentious” comedy <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Chapter_of_Accidents_A_comedy_in_fiv/iNdZAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=the+chapter+of+accidents+as+immoral&pg=PA29&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=the%20chapter%20of%20accidents%20as%20immoral&f=false">The Chapter of Accidents</a> (1780). It used the word “slut”, but had powerful strategies to support its women characters. Their personal and intimate lives were discussed and criticised by others, but in her story, they weren’t ostracised by society or made to become nuns.</p>
<p>Lee objected to the double standards of the day that allowed men to sleep around while bad-mouthing women for the same actions. As a result, her confident characters may get called “slut” for sleeping with their suitors before marriage, but they’re still granted a happy ever after when they reinvent themselves as eligible virgins at the end of the play.</p>
<p>With the release of Slut!, Swift is mirroring these acts of defiance. Like these women who went before her, Swift, too, has successfully rewritten her public persona by openly challenging sexist social attitudes in her work.</p>
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<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lucy Thompson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Men in the 1700s penned vehement letters about the way women dressed, slut-shaming them as “cork-rumped devils”.Lucy Thompson, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2125632023-10-26T16:41:46Z2023-10-26T16:41:46ZFive works of Welsh gothic literature you should read this Halloween<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555845/original/file-20231025-21-tg409h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=60%2C0%2C6720%2C4446&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Celebrate Nos Galan Gaeaf with some Welsh gothic fiction. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/stack-old-books-vintage-book-on-1870101415">zef art/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Wales has sought to rediscover its identity and autonomy since the <a href="https://senedd.wales/how-we-work/history-of-devolution/">devolution</a> referendum of 1997. Authors and publishers have embraced the gothic genre as a means of exploring Welsh language, culture and heritage – reflecting on the anxieties Welsh society has experienced since becoming a devolved nation. </p>
<p>Halloween (or <em><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zbkdcqt">Nos Galan Gaeaf</a></em>, as we say in Wales) presents the perfect opportunity for us to explore these social tensions through the macabre.</p>
<p>Here are five eerie works of Welsh literature for you to catch up with this spooky season. </p>
<h2>Ghostbird by Carol Lovekin (2016)</h2>
<p>In a little Welsh village filled with magic, Cadi Hopkins is on a mission to find herself and learn the truth about what happened to her father and sister. But it’s not long before ghosts appear, and Cadi and her mother learn they have to confront their fears. </p>
<p>Inspired by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mabinogion">Welsh mythology</a>, <a href="https://www.honno.co.uk/books/ghostbird">Ghostbird</a> by Carol Lovekin has the perfect balance of ghost story and magical realism. Lovekin explores themes of identity, mother-daughter relationships, female empowerment and Welsh culture. Think the fantasy film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120791/">Practical Magic</a> meets Wales.</p>
<h2>Dead Relatives and Other Stories by Lucie McKnight Hardy (2021)</h2>
<p>In the opening story of this <a href="https://deadinkbooks.com/product/dead-relatives/">collection</a> of short stories, Iris, a young girl, resides in a big country house with her mother and their servants. But when the Ladies arrive, Iris’ dead relatives begin to stir.</p>
<p>This latest work by Lucie McKnight Hardy deals with themes of motherhood, small town anxieties and weird traditions. It’s the perfect option for those who may not have time to read a whole novel. </p>
<h2>The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen (1894)</h2>
<p>Hoping to unlock the secret of seeing the spiritual world, Clarke witnesses Dr Raymond’s experiment on a young girl’s mind, which leaves her insane. Years later, Clarke realises that similar strange events seem to be happening and a young woman, Helen Vaughan, appears to be at the centre of it. </p>
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<p>Originally published in 1894, Arthur Machen’s novella may be one that you’ve previously read. Nevertheless, its connection with Wales has historically been overlooked, possibly due to the author’s own internal conflict with his Welsh identity. </p>
<p>Edited and re-released in 2018, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Great_God_Pan_and_Other_Horror_Stori/CMBEDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=The+Great+God+Pan+by+Arthur+Machen&printsec=frontcover">The Great God Pan</a> explores themes of the occult, sexuality, insanity and experimentation. It’s an ideal read for people who like traditional 19th-century horror. </p>
<h2>The Library Suicides by Fflur Dafydd (2023)</h2>
<p>Lost and grieving their mother’s death, twins Ana and Nan plan their revenge against the man they believe is responsible: the literary critic Eben. Trapped within the National Library of Wales, Ana and Nan have Eben exactly where they want him, until the plan starts to go awry. </p>
<p>This novel is an English language re-visioning of Fflur Dafydd’s 2009 Welsh language novel, <a href="https://www.ylolfa.com/products/9781847711694/y-llyfrgell">Y Llyfrgell</a>, which was also made into an award-winning <a href="https://ffilmcymruwales.com/our-work/y-llyfrgell-library-suicides">film</a> in 2016. </p>
<p>The Library Suicides is part psychological thriller and dystopian gothic fiction, which deals with themes of literature, complex identities and bereavement. And all this is set against the backdrop of the grand library in Aberystwyth.</p>
<h2>Stranger Within The Gates: A Collection of Short Stories by Bertha Thomas (1912)</h2>
<p>This collection opens with a young Englishwoman arriving in Wales. Soon, she meets her new landlady, Mrs Trinaman, who recalls the extraordinary tale of her former life as the local madwoman, Winifred Owen.</p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Stranger_Within_the_Gates.html?id=hWgfAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Stranger Within The Gates</a> was re-published in 2008 as part of a classics series by <a href="https://www.honno.co.uk">Honno Welsh Women’s Press</a> that aims to rediscover lost Welsh women writers. Bertha Thomas’ short stories examine social changes, women’s rights, hybridity and the significance of “the other”. This is a great read for those who love both satire and the gothic. </p>
<p>The collection also includes Thomas’ pro-suffrage article from 1874, Latest Intelligence from the Planet Venus.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sophie Jessica Davies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>These five works of Welsh gothic literature will not only help you explore Wales through the macabre but are likely to give you a good scare too.Sophie Jessica Davies, PhD Candidate and Part-time Teacher, Aberystwyth UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.