Emmeline Gros
Emmeline Gros is an Associate professor of English at the University of the South in Toulon, South of France. Emmeline has a special interest for literary representations of masculinity. Her Ph.D. thesis focuses on the ways in which the power and privileges attending men's performances and identifications in the American South were at all times shadowed by and imbricated with the insecure and fragile nature of patriarchal/gentleman masculinity.
As a fellow of the Georgia Rotary Student Scholarship, she attended Georgia State University from 2002 to 2008 and then the Université of Versailles St Quentin en Yvelines in France from 2008 to 2010. She has written her Ph.D thesis under the international joint doctorate direction of Dr. Thomas McHaney (GSU, USA) and Dr. Jacques Pothier (UVSQ, France) and has published articles on Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Mitchell and given talks about John Pendleton Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, etc.
At the University of Toulon, she served as the Chair of the Department of Modern Languages from 2017 to 2021. She is also Special Advisor to the University President - Partnerships and Programs with English-Speaking Countries.
Supervisors: Jacques Pothier, Thomas McHaney, Ineke Bockting, and Pearl McHaney
Address: Université Sud Toulon Var
Y 203
UFR Lettres et Langues
Avenue de l'Université, 83957 La Garde
France
As a fellow of the Georgia Rotary Student Scholarship, she attended Georgia State University from 2002 to 2008 and then the Université of Versailles St Quentin en Yvelines in France from 2008 to 2010. She has written her Ph.D thesis under the international joint doctorate direction of Dr. Thomas McHaney (GSU, USA) and Dr. Jacques Pothier (UVSQ, France) and has published articles on Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Mitchell and given talks about John Pendleton Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, etc.
At the University of Toulon, she served as the Chair of the Department of Modern Languages from 2017 to 2021. She is also Special Advisor to the University President - Partnerships and Programs with English-Speaking Countries.
Supervisors: Jacques Pothier, Thomas McHaney, Ineke Bockting, and Pearl McHaney
Address: Université Sud Toulon Var
Y 203
UFR Lettres et Langues
Avenue de l'Université, 83957 La Garde
France
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Rather than implying that competing versions of masculinity did not exist, the concept of hegemonic masculinity assumes resistance and tension and suggests “ascendancy achieved within a balance of forces” (Connell 183-5). To achieve ascendancy, labeling men and women along clearly-delineated race, gender or class lines was key. In the conception of the woman ideal for example, Southerners missed the human element, treating them as categories only: these were ladies or whore; hardly anything in between.
These roles were not, it should be stressed, mere window-dressing. Joel Williamson assures us, “[t]he relishing …of the idea of men as chivalrous knights and women as castellated ladies was not merely coincidental, nor was it frivolous. On the contrary, it was imminent and deadly serious” (6-7). Not surprisingly maybe, and as Stephen Berry regrets, “the story of Southern masculinity [thus] continues to be understood better in its postures and poses, more for what it claimed to be than for what it was [. . .] Men [like women] are denied a measure of their humanity” (All That Makes a Man 11).
Focusing on the “dandy label,” my paper seeks to interrogate the construction of hegemonic manhood in the American South. Southern aristocrats understood that aristocracy was created and maintained through careful posturing. Yet, categories, as John Pendleton Kennedy emphasizes, were not to be confused: a dandy was not a gentleman and a true Southern lady was to recognize the true man from the con artist. In Swallow Barn (1832), Kennedy thus conducts a sustained exploration into constructions of aristocracy through the figure of the dissipated, deviant gentleman: the dandy. Through a typical process of categorization, Kennedy reveals how the gentleman-to-be needs to learn to dissociate himself from the feminine and from the dandy figure: the Southern Beau learns to internalize gender-induced behavior through a series of dichotomies connected with the older patriarchal generation: man/woman, self/other, true/deviant. True masculinity is defined through separation.
In Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1929), categories have become porous. The Gentleman and the Dandy figures have become mixed and in her attempts to categorize men rather than understand them, Scarlett reveals how the crisis of the New South projects itself onto a crisis of Southern masculinity. If gentlemen have always measured their values and codes against the other—in Kennedy’s case, against the dandy—true (genteel) masculinity, Mitchell seems to argue, is no longer defined through separation but through attachment and reconciliation.
Quoting Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room on One’s Own”, Sarah Frantz and Katharina Rennhak, in chapter 1 of Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters 1750-200, remind us that “women do not write books about men”—at least, they are not supposed to. If they do, men’s bodies are rarely explored or depicted in any extensive way, maybe because, as Peter Brooks explains, “vision is a typically male prerogative, and its object of fascination the woman’s body, in a cultural model so persuasive that many novelists don’t reverse its vectors”.
Southern women writers have dared to explored men’s bodies with women looking at, objectifying men’s bodies, making the latter visible and more than once, visibly lacking! Ellen Glasgow offers one such example in The Sheltered Life with the portrayal of General Archbald, a wounded/failing/aging patriarch or Mr. Birdsong, a young able-bodied seducer who figures as a self-defeated gentleman. Both appear as clearly exposed sites/sights of male anxiety. Margaret Mitchell explores similar issues of male visibility and female vision in Gone with the Wind and thus clearly complicates the workings of what Laura Mulvey sees as the patriarchal unconscious: “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, sexual pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly”.
The treatment of manhood—as seen through women’s eyes—is a theme that, I believe, deserves further inquiry, for as many theorists have now identified, women representing and/or looking at men’s bodies are said to produce and proliferate instabilities thus providing a space for reconstitution of gender relations. According to Nghana Tamu Lewis, Mitchell and Glasgow both highlighted “without necessarily resolving, the problems created at the moment of defining what are and should be southern woman’s roles within and outside familiar structures” (167) . In exploring the theme of gender reversal that seemed to have fascinated both writers, this paper aims to investigate the extent to which Mitchell and Glasgow both produce new and innovative ways for understanding not only the Southern woman’s role as Lewis argues, but for theorizing gender, vision and corporeality and the Southern man’s role. What does it mean for Glasgow to look at men’s bodies? What does it mean for Mitchell? Here are some of the questions I would like to explore.
One may think, for instance, of the young males in Death of a Salesman who imagine an escape from their ordinary and disappointing life in the American West. Biff, for instance, has spent many years “in Nebraska when [he] herded cattle, and the Dakotas, and Arizona, and now in Texas” (17), and declares that “there’s nothing more inspiring or—beautiful than the sight of a mare and a new colt” (16). He invites his brother Happy to “come out West” (17), to “buy a ranch. Raise cattle, use our muscles,” for “Men built like we are,” he tells his brother, “should be working out in the open” (17).
In Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into the Night, life at sea or the sea-shore (not the open spaces of the Western territories) offer a sort of metaphysical voyage into a dream-like reality where suffering family members seem to find momentary relief. In Act 4 of the play, Edmund, the 23-year old son of James Tyrone and Mary Tyrone, reminisces his life at sea, traveling abroad on a merchant ship and explains the moments of ecstatic freedom he felt at sea:
I was set free! I dissolved into the sea, became white sails and flying spray - became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky. I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of man, to Life itself! To God if you want to put it that way.
This longing for movement might well be the very essence of the American people, which John Steinbeck defined best in Travels with Charley when he said:
I saw in [American’s] eyes something I was to see over and over again in every part
of the nation—a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, any place, away
from any Here. They spoke about how they wanted to go somewhere, to move
about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something (140)
Seamen, however, and the fierce need to be left “unanchored”, can quickly become transgressive. As Rediker explains, most pirates indeed started their careers as seamen (258) Such is, I believe, the message conveyed by Tennessee Williams in the portrayal of his very own Southern outlaw, Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie. Tom, the rebel, goes out at night and claims he “wear[s] a patch over one eye and a false moustache,” and adds “sometimes I put on green whiskers. On those occasions they call me—El Diablo” (31). The patch over the eye and the moustache are the stereotypical components of a pirate’s costume. By referring ironically to “El Diablo” and “the underworld,” Tom refers quite explicitly to Death and Evil, two characteristics of piracy.
Instead of finding refuge in the west, Tom seems to imagine a life at sea as the ideal symbol of liberty and adventure. He admits to his friend Jim that he has subscribed to the Merchant Seamen with the money Amanda gave him to pay the electricity bill. But this life at sea is no ordinary life as Williams also includes slides in his play “to give accent to certain values” as well as “strengthen the effect of what is merely allusion in the writing and allow the primary point to be made more simply and lightly” (9). Interestingly enough, he chooses to incorporate the picture of “a sailing vessel with Jolly Roger,” (The Glass Menagerie 39) the flag of pirates, also referred to as “the banner of King Death” (Rediker, Bandits at Sea 140). It appears twice during the play: it is first projected on the wall when Tom explains to his mother why he goes to the movies every night. The second time, he is outside on the fire escape with Jim his friend from the warehouse, explaining his plans to join the Merchant Seamen.
Two pirate-figures are presented in the play: Tom Wingfield and Jim, the Gentleman-caller, who, during his senior year, had assumed the lead role of the high school production, the operetta “The Pirates of Penzance” by Gilbert and Sullivan. Through the importance given to the pirate (but also to Malvolio, the magician and trickster figure in the play), Williams seems to have found an insurgent space through which the American theater challenges the models and meanings of an American society marked by the Depression of the 1930s; a world in which the Old South and its Southern comforts (including its Gentleman callers) is anachronistic in this new 20th Century capitalistic society.
In exploring these two figures of piracy and the references to the pirate-ship disseminated throughout the play, I would like to explore this “pirate” drama as the articulation of a counterculture (piracy itself was considered as an egalitarian, anti-authoritarian counterculture to the nation). At the same time, however, the play offers a containment of this oceanic model of community and belonging. At the end of the play, Tom indeed becomes a mock-pirate whose Jolly Roger turns into a merchant ship on which Tom merely “will be furnishing food, clothing, and arms to other men and ships, not stealing such resources from them, as murderous pirates would do” (Cardullo 91). Tom’s failure, in that sense, will leave the world with other mock-pirates, the Jim Connors of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operetta, whose adventures are limited to “accumulating—or dreaming of accumulating—knowledge, money, and power in that order” (Cardullo 91). I will thus explore how the “pirate” drama offered T. Williams and its readers an imaginative space through which the playwright not only contested but also disciplined radical forms of community that challenged and violated the insurgent discourses against the American nation-state.
Not caring about pirates is certainly the symptom of an “hydrophobia” identified by Margaret Cohen in an article published in PMLA. Cohen argues indeed that literary scholars have too readily mapped the land onto the sea and regrets what she calls “a disregard for ocean travel” (657) in an American literature written by those she names “armchair sailors” (657) whose “gazes [remain] fixed on land” (657). For Cohen, this hydrophobia is part of a pervasive 20th Century attitude that the photographer and theorist Allen Sebula has called “forgetting the sea” (658).
Of course, the attitude of forgetting the sea is not exclusive to the 20thCentury and some pirates or buccaneers (whatever one might call them) do make their appearance in the pages of Southern fiction. Allusions to pirates can even to be found in traditional best-selling romances like Gone With the Wind. For Margaret Mitchell, pirates and rogues even seem to be emblematic of an anachronistic South. In Gone with the Wind, isn’t Rhett Butler himself qualified of “rogue”? One reads that, “[h]e was dark of face, swarthy as a pirate, and his eyes were as bold and black as any pirate's appraising a galleon to be scuttled or a maiden to be ravished”. Rhett’s grandfather on the Butler side “was a pirate [. . .] made people walk the plank if there was any money to be made that way. At any rate, he made enough money to leave my father quite wealthy. But the family always referred to him carefully as a “sea captain” (950). The mention of the pirate in his family—said to be a sea captain—suggests that the “proper” title of sea captain may be a mask, like the title of gentleman, worn by an intricately subversive character.
In a similar manner, through the importance given to the pirate in an American play like The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams seems to have found an insurgent space through which the American theater challenges the models and meanings of an American society marked by the Depression of the 1930s; a world in which the Old South and its Southern comforts (including its Gentleman callers) is anachronistic in this new 20th Century capitalistic society.
If the figures of piracy (and the “pirate” drama) can be read as the means to articulate a counterculture (piracy itself was considered as an egalitarian, anti-authoritarian counterculture to the nation), few of these fictional pirates, as Marvin Hunt admits, “resemble the swashbucklers and freebooters of popular legend” (648). The pirate-figure is certainly used as a narrative tool that allows authors to expand/revisit/displace the borders of the South and explore a liminal space in which the fantasy of piracy may indeed seem like a momentary relief from too harsh a reality. Yet, most of these narratives end as tales of redemption and reformation, with tamed or mock-pirates who remain, largely so, non-threatening figures. They eventually abandon a life of banditry and embrace heartily their newly-found “path” as husbands, fathers, justice providers, navy men, etc. These narratives, to use Cohen’s term again, “forget the sea” by offering a containment of the oceanic model of community and belonging.
For this conference, I would like to explore William Gilmore Simms’s choice of the pirate-figure in two novels that have—it seems—escaped critical attention. Published only recently, in 2015, Pirates and Devils gathers the last major primary texts of Simms’s prolific career, two incomplete literary manuscripts—the pirate romance "The Brothers of the Coast" and the folk fable "Sir Will O' Wisp".
If the reference to pirates in Simms’s manuscripts is certainly highly entertaining for the reader, one could argue that the world of piracy may be used as one of these guises used by Simms to capture, reflect on, or even question events in Southern history that many writers at the time were trying to articulate. For the editors of the volume, Nicholas G. Meriwether and David W. Newton, Simms was, at the time of production, “wrestling with issues he and the defeated South faced in the aftermath of the Civil War economic and social collapse and the triumph of Northern-isms”.
One could argue that Simms was reaching the end of his career and was simply (?) trying “to recoup his fortunes […] by writing tales and romances”. For this reason, and “recalling the success with the subject of piracy in The Cassique of Kiawah, [this is why] he wrote over 170 pages of a pirate romance still in manuscript, “The Brothers of the Coast” (Wimsatt 219).
One may also argue that Simms had had enough of the Southern gentleman figure and was looking for a more masculine, more aggressive masculine type, one he could only trace in the pirate model. Indeed, at the end of the Civil War (and even before the Civil War, as early as the 1840s as a matter of fact), “the perception of the planter-cavalier [was] not quite up to the demands of a rapidly changing contemporary world” (Cobb). As Cobb remarks, the planter—the Southern hegemonic model of manhood—certainly had “admirable intentions,” yet those “were often neutralized by ineffectual behavior. The planter might be gracious hosts or gifted orators, but for all their talk of honor and pride, they were often of little use in a real crisis” (Away Down South). Such was indeed the view defended by Simms himself. “In disastrous periods,” Simms complained that planters “fold their arms, in stupid despair.” The indecisive planter was, “but a latter-day embodiment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “whose native hue of resolution/Was sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought” (Simms, qtd. in Cobb).
One might also argue that the mode of the romance in “The Brothers of the Coast” and the fantasy entertained by the world of piracy can read as ways to avoid a realistic representation of the deterioration and violence of the newly-defeated South. Yet, and as Gillian Beer notes, since the romance shows the us the ideal, it is implicitly instructive as well as escapist. The romance, as Simms himself made it clear, “should both satisfy those who read merely for fun and instruct those who wish to improve their minds” (Nakamura 107). How instructive are pirates in Simms’s unfinished manuscripts? How can we explain Simms’s resorting to the subversive figures of piracy? Here are some questions that this communication will dig into.
“More and more, place needs to be constructed not as a stable site of tradition and history within a progressive nation but as something more provisional, more fleeting, more subversive, and likewise more creative…a site of memory and meaning both for the past and the future. Places, like memories, are always in transition, always redefined, resituated, by experience over time” (Ladd 56).
Barbara Ladd is talking here (in her contribution to Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith’s collection South to a New Place (2002)) in the context of the increasing need to view Southern places transnationally, to liberate them from the strictures of an imposed U.S. nationalistic historiography. Compelling new directions in Southern Studies have developed in recent years that ask what happens to our views of the South if we consider it in terms that complicate its relation to the United States and to the Americas and wider world accordingly. The Souths that emerge from this work tend to be more malleable, more transnational, more fluid, and less centered on certain events in US national history.
For the 2019 Global Souths Conference at the University of Lafayette, I would like to engage with the ways in which one specific battle during the Civil War can be considered and reconsidered along lines that move it away from the confines of nationally-bound conceptions and projections. Looking specifically at the C.S.S Alabama, a cruiser that the South designated as a “commerce raider,” which conducted seven expeditionary raids in areas of the globe, I will present the sea-battle between Union and Confederate Navy vessels that took place, not off the coasts of America, but outside of American waters, off of Cherbourg, France, in 1864. This Battle of Cherbourg (between the U.S.S. Kersarge and the C.S.S Alabama) established Raphael Semmes, C.S.S. naval commander as a true (even if defeated) Confederate hero.
It is my contention that the Battle of Cherbourg does not only allow to view the South in a transnational political, economic, and military context, but also serves to problematize “stable” notions of the region and its people and codes. Indeed, what becomes highly interesting in the rendering of the Battle of Cherbourg is how Raphael Semmes is remembered and inscribed in collective memory: at times, presented as the embodiment of chivalry and heroism and at other times, presented as a “pirate captain,” “the rebel pirate of Alabama,” and his ship compared to the Flying Dutchman or presented as “a piratical cruiser that roamed the seas, robbing and destroying, … shunning all armed antagonists.”
The charge of piracy, I believe, speaks to the power and complicated pleasure of the South at asserting itself in showing off, scandalizing, or resisting Northern influence. Given his contribution to the historical development of the coastal south, Raphael Semmes, like pirates in general, is relatively absent in the present southern literary canon and its criticisms. It might be so, Wakelyn argues, because “the South is a region that prides itself on law and order, and those who support the protection of private property do not know quite what to do with a leader whom history has accused of piracy and treason” (339). And yet, I will argue that the charges of piracy and southern writers’ caring about pirates are far more common than usually envisioned. Particularly telling is the mention of Raphael Semmes in novels like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind or William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In GWTW, isn’t it interesting that Rhett Butler, the most notorious pirate (the rogue) of Southern Fiction, should be bearing the title of Captain while Raphael Semmes should be deprived of the very same title? Such references to Raphael Semmes in the southern literary canon encompass, I believe, the cultural role of pirate fiction in triangulating gender, colonial, racial, economic, and nationalistic attitudes with respect to the entire coastal American South.
Auteur d’une des plus grandes œuvres romanesques françaises du XXe siècle, écrivain bilingue à la croisée de deux cultures, Green ne cesse de s’interroger sur la mémoire d’un pays disparu, sur le déchirement d’appartenir à deux cultures et à deux langues, et peut-être sur le nécessaire et difficile lien transatlantique"
Southern women writers have dared to explore men’s bodies with women looking at, objectifying men’s bodies, making the latter visible and more than once, visibly lacking! Ellen Glasgow offers one such example in The Sheltered Life with the portrayal of General Archbald, a wounded/failing/aging patriarch or Mr. Birdsong, a young able-bodied seducer who figures as a self-defeated gentleman. Both appear as clearly exposed sites/sights of male anxiety. Margaret Mitchell explores similar issues of male visibility and female vision in Gone with the Wind and thus clearly complicates the workings of what Laura Mulvey sees as the patriarchal unconscious: “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, sexual pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly”.
The treatment of manhood—as seen through women’s eyes—is a theme that, I believe, deserves further inquiry, for as many theorists have now identified, women representing and/or looking at men’s bodies are said to produce and proliferate instabilities thus providing a space for reconstitution of gender relations. According to Nghana Tamu Lewis, Mitchell and Glasgow both highlighted “without necessarily resolving, the problems created at the moment of defining what are and should be southern woman’s roles within and outside familiar structures” (167) . In exploring the theme of gender reversal that seemed to have fascinated both writers, this paper aims to investigate the extent to which Mitchell and Glasgow both produce new and innovative ways for understanding not only the Southern woman’s role as Lewis argues, but for theorizing gender, vision and corporeality and the Southern man’s role. What does it mean for Glasgow to look at men’s bodies? What does it mean for Mitchell? Here are some of the questions I would like to explore."
gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.
Following this premise, one becomes a man by performing the man. For Butler, therefore, an analysis of the ways in which hegemonic masculinity is given shape—through language and performance—may reveal to what extent the political and ideological constructs of a text are gendered constructs whose ambivalence and contradictions turn masculinity into an unstable, tentative, negociable and constestable realm of experience.
Focusing on the “ideal” of manhood as it is performed in John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn, I wish to show how the ideal of the Southern Gentleman and the customs of the Old South have become perverted into a masquerade of manhood. Nevertheless, using an anti-essentialist logic, I will not envisage the theatrical performance or masquerade of masculinity as the dramatic performance of a pre-existing form of masculinity for, as I will show, the masquerade of manhood in Swallow Barn—far from sustaining the model of Southern gentility—puts emphasis on a confused, deviant and even transgressive type of manhood. Envisioning performance as what engenders and could possibly engender a new model of masculinity in a changing American South, I will try to answer the following question: can masquerade simply serve to “recreate” gendered norms or can it serve to undo and possibly rebuild or reinvent new models of masculinity? If so, are these new models of manhood viable or imaginary only?"
In suggesting how her son should behave, when he should get up, and where he should work, Amanda dishonors the artist by locating him as an economic actor in a market place rather than as a creative spirit. The vulnerability of the masculine is fully evident from the first pages of the play separating the poet/artist from the debased cultural form provided by the consumer/magazine salesperson. Horrified by this prospect, Tom retreats into the position of wounded spirit fighting against the domination of women.
Recovering authorial power—free from mother’s haunting and spectral influence—marks the play as the process of recovering self-endeavored identity. Tom’s memory play, his fiction, by mixing past, memories, and masculine performance, authorizes man’s entry into a female-dominated realm of masculine performance and cultural production. It also becomes the way to return to the only place of mastery at a time of masculine impotency: Tom “frames himself” in words and in the world of the non-physical as a way to liberate a self that has been framed by the overwhelming presence of women in the play.
By studying Tom’s wish to claim individuation through art and magic, this paper seeks to explore the struggle between individualism and a fiercely materialist feminine collectivism in T. Williams' play. Tom, however—as I wish to argue—is plagued by an irresolvable sense of anxiety, yet a pleasurable and almost masochistic one since as Robinson explains, “the artistic realm has long been associated, somewhat illogically with femininity” (92). As a consequence, as Savran tells us, the rebellious literary male: “both identifies with and is possessed by a feminine other, an invader. But insofar as he also self-identifies as a man, he must continually do battle with the femininity that has invaded him and inheres within. For a subject, he is always split into a masculine—and sadistic—half that delights in displaying his prowess and marksmanship, and a feminine—and masochistic—half that delights in being used as a target. His (impossible) project, as man and as writer, is to master the femininity at which he aims and does not aim to write his “way out” (45). In his ineffectual but perpetual rebellion against the conventional wisdom that his mother instills in him and that requires him to “act like a man”, Tom, we could say, is thus humiliated by his failure to be a man but gratified by the freedom from normative masculinity that humiliation announces. Read in this light, Tom's attachment to memory and to fiction is thus characterized by competing interests between desired power and/or vulnerability, simultaneously dwelling on what might be called a feminizing disempowerment of the masculine, and moving toward a recuperation of fully phallic masculinity.
Keywords: Contesting/Subverting prescribed identity constructions; Tennessee Williams; Trauma; Loss and Pleasure; Masculinity
"
Turning to what many critics have defined as a civilization in collapse, Tennessee Williams joined in the refrain: in The Glass Menagerie, Tom Wingfield, the free spirit, "the poet-narrator and author's surrogate, called Shakespeare in the warehouse" (Stein 36) has been reduced to bodily materiality. Working in a warehouse, supporting his sister and his overwhelmingly-present mother, he only temporarily forgets his boredom in theaters or in a magician’s tricks. His trauma is one of masculine possibilities, one that the narrator of this “memory play” explores through the art of remembering, rethinking, reworking, and reimagining a past that, in Nietzschan terms, “returns[s] as a ghost and disturb[s] the peace of a later moment” (61).
I would like to suggest a paper exploring Tom's voicing and representation of masculine trauma. While Tom engages in an identity quest and attempts to trace an absolute history beyond history, as an effort of returning to (and ultimately putting away) an earlier state of society which seems to be preserved in fictional representations, we can argue that, to a certain extent, Tom's trouble comes from his attachment to memory as fiction, since it only serves to further exacerbate a sense of loss: If Tom's memory, as he admits "takes much poetic license," moving freely from the past (the 1930s) and the present (1944-45), we get a sense the past, Amanda his mother and Laura his sister are still too much influential on this undesirable present. Tom's trouble also comes with his own artistic vocation, because, as Robinson points out "the artistic realm has long been associated, somewhat illogically with femininity" (92).
More than a troubling experience, however, Tom's attachment to fiction becomes a sort of pleasurable alternative. Tom's individuation through art allows him to occupy the space of difference (and resistance), by positioning himself as the "wounded, oppressed, [femininized] marked victim whose refusal to be a man makes him both masochistic and heroic" (Robinson 96). The play thus exhibits a pull between two contradictory directions competing between desired power and/or vulnerability, simultaneously dwelling on what might be called "a feminizing disempowerment of the masculine," and moving toward "a recuperation of fully phallic masculinity" (Robinson 26). Read in this light, Tom's attachment to memory and to fiction is thus characterized by competing interests: a desire to heal a wounded masculinity but also a desire to "dwell in the space of masculine crisis, and thus [possibly] reimagine the dominant meanings of white masculinity" in terms other than the traditional either/or dichotomy of feminine vs. masculine (Robinson 11).
Keywords: Trauma, Gender Studies, Masculinity, Identity; Healing.
This prescription of normative gender roles, of course, raises one fundamental question: through what channel(s) of opportunity could women seek their own identity? Mitchell suggests channels of opportunity for women (and men alike), I believe, by resorting to the eavesdropping scenes found in her novel, Gone with the Wind; scenes which contribute to the structural dynamics of the plot. By definition the act of eavesdropping turns the secret witness into one that unintentionally or deliberately acquires pieces of information that were not meant to be disclosed. The eavesdropped thus runs the risk of having his or her secrets fall into the “wrong” ears. Eavesdropping or overhearing also implies a particular placement of a listener in space; a space that transgresses the binaries of public and private areas and one that actually makes the relations between gender, identity, narrative and social agency more complex than what society and ideology often dictated. Although a number of critics have examined issues of gender, femininity and masculinity in Mitchell’s novels, none has considered specifically how eavesdropping (and its attendant anxiety/desire to protect or disclose secrecy) helps shape the story and comments on its ideological implications. As I would like to argue, eavesdropping could serve as a female liberating experience, an opportunity that could be sought, not in transgressing the boundaries between private and public/business spaces (from which Scarlett gets so much condemnation) but in the very same closed space of the “private” room that women were restricted to.
"
Discussing the presence of the alternative male figure in the literature of the South in the 1940s, many historians have noticed for instance that whether it be the aggressive soldier returning from war or the homosexual, this figure had become “a much more feared enemy than the Negro” (Riesman and Glazer 119). Crucial to their analysis is the polyvocality of community, for which Tenessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) offers, I believe, a brilliant example.
The definition of this Southern community in the play indeed becomes closely bound with the positioning of Stanley Kowalski as the “other”. This vigorous “new male,” the child of immigrants, the untamed pioneer, is, for Blanche Dubois, a faded Southern Belle, a lesser man (an ape) whose presence intersects, not only with the waning charm of the Old South she cherishes but also with the shadowy presence of Southern chivalry that hovers in the margins of the play.
The exploration of Southern masculinities in the play actually reveals further “multiple” Southern identities, for there is, we realize, no real monolithic masculinity (that is no master narrative) in the play: the departed beaux or gentlemen of Blanche’s past, we learn, have lost the plantation in part because of their hidden sexual activities and thus hint at the possibility of a plurality of masculinities, subordinate to the traditional gentleman model. There is also Allan Grey, the “boy” that Blanche married who finally committed suicide after Blanche discovered him in bed with an older man. And as if to signify the complete abandonment of the “master” chivalric codes of the Old South, Blanche herself—though an illusionary and self-deceptive woman—can hardly be described as an ailing princess or a damsel in distress.
These subordinate identities, I would like to argue, open a space of resisting and conflicting gender identities against traditional narratives of hegemonic manhood in the South. Yet, drawing from this space of resistance, I would like to interrogate the “new” conceptualisations of gender that have been part of the transformations of the New South, and inversely, as I would like to show, the novel manifestations of resilient gender asymmetries that have emerged in this post Civil War, post World War I era.
Keywords: Marginal; Master narrative; Masculinities; Southern Identity; A Streetcar Named Desire; Tennessee Williams
Being five international educators, all teaching a different class of English or linguistics, we wish to address the intercultural relationships within a multicultural university classroom setting and the resulting changes for the conceptualization of student and teacher roles. We also wish to consider how teaching in this ever evolving atmosphere forces us to question ourselves.
Old English etymologies of eaves, for example, suggest "edge" and "margin" and "border" (Webster's New; Oxford); an archaic definition of eavesdrop suggests "to learn or overhear" (Webster's Third); and a Middle English definition of eavesdropper suggests "one who stands on the eavesdrop [the spot where water drops from the eaves] in order to listen to conversations inside the house" (Random). Together, these lexical threads weave a composite definition of eavesdropping that may offer an effective rhetorical tactic: standing outside, in an uncomfortable spot, on the border of knowing and not knowing, granting others the inside position, listening to learn. Through such a composite definition, eavesdropping becomes a rhetorical tactic of purposely positioning oneself on the edge (of one's own knowing) so as to overhear and learn from others.
The motif is obviously repeated in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ophelia points out to St Clare that the master’s house is never private, for it is “so full of these little plagues now […] that a body can’t set down their foot without treading on’em. I get up in the morning and find them asleep behind the door, and see one black head poking out from under the table, one lying on the door mat” (279). The threat to the homeowner’s privacy is one of the plot’s main refrains and Stowe describes scenes of peeping, spying, and eavesdropping that are shown to complicate and disrupt the normal transactions of slavery. The act of listening behind doors in these instances is also presented as a means of humanizing the African American slave in a way which was unheard of for its time. In many circumstances, the true nature and inner emotions of the slaves are portrayed in these scenes of secretive or accidental eavesdropping.
In a similar manner, listening behind doors actively contributes to the structural dynamics of Gone with the Wind. Hearing, and more specifically eavesdropping and secret/illicit listening, feature as pre-eminent senses with which to experience, understand and reminisce the plantation South of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Yet, unlike in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, from Mammy’s “Monkey Face” to “the Black apes” of postwar Atlanta, the black characters are defined by their dehumanization. In Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, the narrator alludes to “that black grapevine system which defies white understanding,” and presents the darkies as spies who “know everything that goes on.” Allowing indirect access to private/secret information, these acts of illicit listening, however, are performed by men and women alike; by both the older and the young generations, by whites and their black servants alike, indoors as much as outdoors. On numerous occasions indeed, we do not have a servant eavesdrop on its white employer in order to benefit from its secrets, but it is the master who must appeal to the servant to benefit from his secrets (or to the servant's talent at eavesdropping and listening behind doors). For instance, the Tarleton twins rely on Jeems, their black servant, when they wish to understand Scarlett’s intriguing behavior. If at first, Jeems tries to lie about it, he eventually gives up “further pretense of not having overheard the conversation.” Scarlet herself is often found resorting to this tactical device, when she tries, for instance, to overhear what Ashley is saying to Melanie. Because eavesdropping or overhearing implies a particular placement of a listener in space—a space that blurs and transgresses the binaries of public and private areas—the act of illicit listening allows access to the space of the in-between. And because it represents “not being fully a part of the private world, but somewhat protected, while still part of the natural and public world” (Gaylin 2), secret-sharing, through eavesdropping, thus becomes an apt device to represent figuratively the liminality of identities in Gone with the Wind. Both scenes suggest the contingent connections between spheres and spaces that antebellum society tried to keep distinct. The novel here questions the respectable “domestic” virtues of a household founded upon less than virtuous racial and social intercourse: it suggests that the private and public, the white and the black, the deviant and the norm, cannot, in fact, be neatly walled off from each other. By exploring the abyss between what is unseen yet known, what Yaeger calls the “white ways of not knowing,” Gone with the Wind also admits to “a third knowledge system into [its] lexicon—the importance of exploring unofficial information systems that have been subjugated to nominally “higher” ways of knowing” (111).
If the organizers deem it fit, I could also possibly investigate the case of Rosa Coldfield in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom who recalls her younger self constantly and nervously eavesdropping: she has never been taught anything as a girl, “save to listen through closed doors”, trembling, as Richard Gray sees her, “on the margins of events that appear both suspicious and terrible (she was kept, Mr. Compson insists, in a “closed masonry of females”). According to Linda Wagner-Martin, Rosa “is given the role of hiding behind the door eavesdropping…. Kept away from power, hidden behind the observable actions, Rosa learns by stealth, complicity and fear all that she needs to know for the kind of life the Southern culture will permit her to lead” (232). Again, one of the most important lessons Rosa learns is that her “marginal” position in society gives her a kind of power; she is outside of social conventions and therefore can break them.
At the completion of this course, you should be able to:
a) Demonstrate the processes and competencies in translating documents usually from English to French
b) Demonstrate proficiency in the use and application of different translation tools used in the field (such as dictionaries, software, internet search, among others).
c) Be familiar with the main difficulties involved in the English/French Translation process, words and expressions that are usually difficult to translate, specific translation techniques and tools.
a) the translation of texts in a variety of cultural topics,
b) the continued study of comparative stylistics,
c) an introduction to the field of interpretation, both consecutive and simultaneous.
This class is comprised of readings, texts, and newspaper extracts. The themes to be studied this semester are: Consumers; Distribution; Marketing and Advertising; Firms; Work; the European Union.
Hauntings of all kinds permeate our everyday life. Whether on the stage of Shakespeare’s dramas, in religious rituals, in Dickens’ and Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, in horror movies or TV series (Ghost Whisperer, Haunted House, Medium, Desperate Housewives, etc.), the undead are everywhere.
Haunted houses, monsters, ghosts, madmen and madwomen, specters, vampires, and a wide variety of other creepy, mysterious, and dark things will fill our semester’s texts. This course will give us the opportunity to read and compare works that employ haunting or spirit possession as a central motif. In it, we will consider how and to what extent storytellers use ghosts and haunting in their narratives. Among the questions we’ll ask: why is American Literature, in particular, so enamored with the ghostly, the ghastly, and the supernatural? Because ghosts figure prominently in many canonic literary texts, we’ll look at literary hauntings in order to think about the silences and the omissions that ghosts can make visible. What effect does the supernatural have on us as readers? What’s the appeal?
As part of this inquiry, we’ll think through the relationship between the supernatural and history itself. Specifically we’ll ask: what it is about the US’s particular history—a history that is informed by enslavement, forced land removal, and immigration—that makes it such a rife space for the appearance of all sorts of ghosts. We’ll ask then a series of questions that look something like this: why is American literature haunted in the way that it is? How does haunting disrupt our notion of traditional historical progression? What does it mean when the past refuses to stay put, bubbles up, and careens into the present? What kind of historical possibilities does the novelistic form provide that the history textbook simply can’t?
Over the course of the semester, we’ll do some serious soul searching, tracking down the appearance of ghosts and spirits in 19th and 20th century American literature. We will pay special attention to souls that are given a race, gender, and/or sexuality. We’ll think about who has a soul, who doesn’t, who can get it, and who can’t. Some food for thought: W.E.B. Du Bois maintains that black folk are gifted with second-sight and possess two souls, the 19th-century transcendentalist Margaret Fuller claims women possess a special electrical composition, and Yiddish culture understands the soul, or neshama, as exclusively Jewish. We’ll consider the significance of employing a spiritual rhetoric (like the examples just mentioned) against the backdrop of a mainstream science which was often racist, sexist, and homophobic. In other words, we’ll ask whether a belief in spirits, ghosts, and generally spooky things can be its own form of resistance against social and historical injustice.
The syllabus presents an array of writers coming from various historical periods--history is an important component of this course--as well as, from different social, economical, cultural and racial background. We will read exponents of African American,, Hispanic American, Asian American, native American Literature and we will discuss how their use of canonical genres and conventions contributed to the creation of a distinctively American literary tradition as well as the creation of an American cultural self while aiming at interrogating the very notion of national cultural production.
Issues such as periodization, canon formation, national identity and the interrelationships between literature and other elements of culture are a vital component of this course. In addition, we will study various literary terms and critical theories as they apply to the works read for this class. As a reading and writing intensive course, students will focus on reading comprehension along with writing as a method to learn about and explore various historical and social contexts within American literature.
1.Equip students with various strategies for reading and writing argumentative texts
2.Sharpen their abilities as a critical thinker in any field.
Students write essays through a process of several drafts, learn to invent ideas, work through them, clarify them, and present them to an audience.
The class is conducted through the use of large-group discussions, small-group work, journal writing, reading, private conferences with the teacher, student presentations, and the use of computers.
1.self-consciously evaluate their own writing practices.
2.learn strategies to make their writing more effective.
3.apply their understanding to expository and research writing.
Through this course, the student should develop familiarity and comfort with pre-writing, drafting, and revision via the practice of composing essays, including a research paper.
Students will also be exposed to multiple lessons in grammar, punctuation and mechanics. The class will be conducted through the use of large-group discussions, small-group work, journal writing, reading, private conferences with the teacher, student presentations, and the use of computers.
To understand what may justify Gone with the Wind’s appeal and its continued presence on the literary scene is to enter vexed territory and whether one agrees (or not) with Gone with the Wind being a good plot is indeed an entirely different story. The academic attitude towards Gone with the Wind (and Civil War literature as a whole) is probably best exemplified by Floyd C. Watkins in his article ‘Gone with the Wind as Vulgar Literature’:
Southern readers—and foolish romantic readers everywhere—dream of an impossible past, expect more of the present that can be realized, ignore an authentic culture while praising a false culture that never existed, foolishly defend themselves against attacks from the North, use false defenses of illogic and rhetoric, become vulnerable to attacks that could be avoided, fall victim to false and pretentious characters and dreamers and political demagogues, ignore and condemn the yeomanry and the peasantry (205).
Claudia Roth Pierpont supports Watkins’ argument, by recognizing that “in the history of American literature—in all the published histories—[Mitchell’s] place, when she has one, is in a corner part, as a vulgar aside having to do with numbers rather than words. She doesn’t even make it onto the list of the Best Civil War Novels in either of the studies devoted exclusively to the genre”. Surprisingly, Pierpont continues, for a book that has sold as many copies as it has, “Gone with the Wind hasn’t a place in anyone’s canon; it remains a book that nobody wants except its readers” (130).
This project started with the realization that it seems that the public has not had enough of Civil War tales like Gone With the Wind, since even as late as 2015, that is “more than 75 years after the publication of the epic novel by Margaret Mitchell, a prequel with Mammy at its center is set for release in October” (N.Y Times). Published last August, Donald Craig's Ruth’s Journey has placed Mammy at the center of his narrative, thus hoping to provide, according to Peter Borland, his editorial director, “a necessary correction to what is one of the more troubling aspects of [Gone With the Wind], which is how the black characters are portrayed” (New York Times).
On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the release of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, this project will try to consider “Gone With the Wind after Gone With the Wind”. After all, the timing is perfect: 2016 will mark the 80th anniversary of the novel and 2019 the 80th anniversary of the movie. Given the kinds of racial issues with which the United States has been struggling in recent years and the ongoing disdain for Mitchell's text within the academy, re-opening the pages of GWTW, reflecting on Mitchell's motivations for writing GWTW (which were largely gender driven) as well as her philanthropic work in the wake of GWTW's publication, much of which benefited the African-American community in Atlanta, may be an enlightening exercise.
This issue will be the occasion for academics, researchers, writers, Mitchell’s lovers, performance and arts practitioners to discuss the novel and the movie-adaptation’s long-lasting legacy.
The issue would welcome proposals (in English & French) on topics such as:
•GWW’ most recent adaptations and appropriations in print, in paintings, on stage, or in the media, new and old (radio, film, television, comics, Internet…)
•The issue of serial writing and directing: dramatic links from one novel to the next; productions or fictions presented as sequels or prequels.
•The posthumous reputation and portrayals of Mitchell and Gone with the Wind: how and why has Gone with the Wind endured?
•Fiction, movie, and poetic aesthetics after Mitchell’s portrayal of a specific kind of South in Gone with the Wind: what does it mean to write the South after Gone with the Wind?
•Recapturing the ‘original’ Gone with the Wind post-facto: Mitchell’s work, the creative process, the publishing process, collecting Mitchell’s South and memorabilia …
•Studying Mitchell’s GWW and its movie-adaptation from the viewpoint of contemporary theories of film, language and literature: how does Mitchell help us to create new concepts or review old ones?
•What's left of GWTW 80 years later? How can we explain the success of recent GWW sequels, rewritings, and adaptations? How could both the novel and film stand the test of time (or not)?
Le présent ouvrage a pour point de départ l’un des séminaires transversaux du laboratoire de recherche Babel (EA 2649) de l’université de Toulon.
In recent years, scholars of Southern culture and literature have begun to elaborate on masculinities in the contemporary Southern context (cf. Trent Watts, White Masculinity in the Recent South). Providing an invaluable starting point for discussion of Southern masculinity, these studies have started exploring the connections, continuities, crises and dissonances of Southern male identity, or the recalcitrant (older) models of masculinity in relation to the American South. Their authors have analyzed how men are constructed and constituted at a contextual level, through situations or through their relationships.
Gary Richards, in his Lovers and Beloveds, points out the importance of sexual preferences when it comes to defining southern identity and manners. Likewise in Gay Men in Modern Southern Literature, William Mark Poteet shows how specifically Southern codes of masculinity are subverted by gay writers who tend to depict strong mother figures as they realize the fathers have failed them. A more general study, Marilyn C. Wesley’s Violent Adventure, argues that “textual violence does significant cultural work” by emphasizing not necessarily manly strengths but also weaknesses. If Rhett Butler still appears as an emblematic figure of the “masculine south,” what do characters resembling Ashley Wilkes tell us about the South? What about African-American men? What are the codes that define a gentleman? Are Southern men more credible when portrayed by men or are women writers more apt to describe them? An analysis of how writing the masculine is/has been used not only to produce, counter-produce, but also reproduce certain forms or models of ‘Southern’ maleness, by contrast, has remained largely unquestioned. The issue of race should also hold a central place in (re)considering masculinity in a Southern context.
This volume will focus on the writing of the masculine, to see what specifically (textual) Southern ways are used to produce and reproduce forms of maleness, masculinity, male sexuality or desire. The point will be to highlight and analyze how men are constructed and constituted at a (Southern) textual level through tropes, voices, performances and cultural discourses. What are the assumptions that underlie these representations? The aim of this collection is two-fold: on the one hand, it focuses on studies that questions traditionally normative representations of masculinities and, on the other hand, it seeks to highlight new alternative representations of manhood, looking for more egalitarian models of manhood in and through literature and culture. Besides literary representations, the volume is open to studies of masculinity in cinema, theater, music as well as all kinds of artistic and visual representations.
The questions we will attempt to address, in papers written either in English or French, are:
- What are the discourses/representations that construct normative male identity in Southern narratives as well as resistance to said forces of normalization?
- How do artists and writers subvert the normative constructions through the depictions of other forms of masculinities?
- What is the place of these odd/other/disabled/altered masculine bodies in the South (itself often considered the “odd” member of the nation’s body)?
- How are the lives of men and women enhanced through challenging old/ traditional gender roles?
- What are the methods (if any) to represent/address the ongoing negotiation and fluctuation of masculinity?
Marginalization, however, is often contingent upon the voices present in the narrative. Spencer’s short stories in Starting Over are notable for their male figures and/or narrators. One could even argue that many of Spencer’s short stories take an ambiguous approach to the mother or wife figure who is often physically absent from the plot, remains unheard, or unseen. By examining “Christmas Longing”, “The Everlasting Light”, or “Sightings”, we find that these are texts where the absence of the wife or mother is highlighted by the narrator; a presence now replaced by the importance given to the daughter-figure. If (as critics have often argued) Spencer has a special gift for the nuances in “ordinary” human relationships, marginalizing these female adult characters demonstrates, I believe, an overarching concern for masculine identity. Obviously, it could be argued that both the wives and the daughters in these novels teach men/fathers about their vulnerability as men in different ways. Yet, if telling their own stories is an important part of accurately representing the female voices, the daughters’ voices seem limited only insofar as Spencer’s short stories do not tell their own stories. My paper will argue that, although women in these short stories may be teaching men about their vulnerable positions as fathers and men, the woman herself is left vulnerable because of the way masculinity is prioritized above all else.