Starting Over

Since my laptop crashed I've been frantically trying to write some portions of my thesis. My notes are mostly gone, so it's like a fresh start... which is usually good, but not always. I've started with a chapter on The Fruit of the Tree

Here's a little of what's been mustered:


Like many writers of her moment, Edith Wharton was deeply concerned with questions regarding nature and artifice. Although as scholar James L. Machor, author of Pastoral Cities, suggests, this concern was not a “central configuration of her work” but rather “a part of the imaginative pattern” (205). Still, even as a few threads in a finely wrought cloth, this part of the pattern is important and persistent across many of Wharton’s novels. Manchor looks to the canonical novel The House of Mirth for his example. There he finds that both the language and plot positioning of Nettie Crane’s story exhibit Wharton’s dissatisfaction with the notion of the “the home as pastoral enclave in the city” (206). For Manchor Lily Bart’s death “constitutes perhaps Wharton’s most ironic, tragic comment on the tenuous appeal but final inadequacy of urban-pastoral projections” (206). Although I find this reading quite compelling, I am somewhat troubled by its through reliance on the symbolic for it’s portrayal of the pastoral project. Of course when dealing with humanity and its cultural products, everything has a symbolic status, nevertheless I think an equally interesting critique of the urban-pastoral can be found in Wharton’s second, and less acclaimed novel, The Fruit of the Tree. In this work the urban-pastoral project in described in both symbolic and ecologic terms.

The opening pages of her 1907 novel The Fruit of the Tree establishes the tension between nature and artifice through Wharton’s descriptions of Justine Brent and John Amherst, two of the primary characters. Wharton presents Justine Brent in the following terms: “[s]he did not use, in speaking, the soothing inflection of her trade: she seemed to disdain to cajole or trick the sufferer. Her full young voice kept its cool note of authority, her sympathy revealing itself only in the expert touch of her hands and the constant vigilance of her dark steady eyes” (4). From this beginning Wharton develops traits in Justine that remain pivotal throughout the novel. Justine, although she fades into the background of the text for several chapters is really the main character, and it is through her perceptions that the reader first glimpses John Amherst who initially seems to be the main actor in the text.

Wharton states:
The nurse, sensitive by nature and training to all physical characteristics, was struck at once by the contrast between his alert face and figure and the silent way in which he moved. She noticed, too, that the same contrast was repeated in the face itself, its spare energetic outline, with the high nose and compressed lips of the mover of men, being curiously modified by the veiled inward gaze of the grey eyes he turned on her. It was one of the interests of Justine Brent's crowded yet lonely life to attempt a rapid mental classification of the persons she met; but the contradictions in Amherst's face baffled her, and she murmured inwardly "I don't know" (5)

Although this passage will likely slip from the readers mind as the text becomes powerfully focused on Amherst, this initial presentation of him is quite meaningful. Justine’s confusion regarding Amherst is well justified by the end of the novel, and so here Wharton is giving the reader exactly what she suggests in her description of Justine Brent, a character that is perceptive, honest, “sensitive to physical characteristics” and given to “rapid mental classification of the persons she met”. Justine Brent represents a scientific mind, a naturalist of sorts, in a highly urbanized setting. The contradictions in Amherst are troubling to her, but for the reader they seem perhaps enticing, after all the many appears to possess both a physique made for action and a mind made for reflection, two traits highly valued in men by western culture. If this troubles the perceptive Brent the reader might imagine that perhaps this is only because a girl in her “lonely” circumstance has not yet met a man possessing so many fine qualities.

However, Wharton’s prose continues to favor Brent’s perceptions. Outside of the hospital in the next chapter Justine “was amused to see that he [Amherst] failed to identify the uniformed nurse with the girl in her trim dark dress, soberly complete in all its accessories, who advanced to him, smiling under her little veil” (8). Brent can identify Amherst in the dim October evening, but he cannot pick her out, the language of this passage suggests that the reason for this is that Amherst has made her a social “type”, a nurse, rather than having examined her physical traits as is Justine Brent’s method.

Will it Never End?

Seriously.... I feel like this is the term from hell, and winter break promises little relief. The paper is in process, but I am not sure it is making any sense. Oh well. I will simply be glad to be done with it.

Introduction So Far

On November 9, 1989 representatives from fifteen countries gathered together to discuss the politics of food. From their discussion the Slow Food International movement was formed and began to promote their manifesto that, “[i]n the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer” (“Manifesto” par. 8). Since its inception the Slow Food movement has spread to 122 countries. This movement is not the only one of its kind. In recent years the focus on food has been a critical part of the ecological movement, introducing new concepts and even new language to describe the human relationship with food (locavore for example). These movements represent a sensible ordering of thought around a logical central idea. Food is a logical point around which to organize ones feelings and actions regarding their relationship to nature and resource use, because food is one of the few items that make obvious human reliance on and interconnection with the natural world.

The body of American literature contains multitudes of works focused on humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Many of these works, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, rely upon a worldview which vilifies the urban and elevates the wild as a sacred place apart. This tension between urban and wild is a central element in Willa Cather’s 1925 novel The Professor’s House. Characters such as Tom Outland and Louis Marsellus seem emblematic of this dichotomy. Even their names provide support for this concept, Outland (out-land) as the mesa dwelling place apart, and Marsellus (mar-sell- us) as the eager capitalist who Cather portrays as corrupter of Outland’s legacy. While this division has been widely accepted in many circles for generations, the concepts of glorified “wild” and vilified “capitalist” are not in the end polar opposites, but rather reflections of a similar human desire to manipulate and organize the natural world while conveniently ignoring the relationship between humanity and nature that exists at all levels of landscape.

A useful place for interrogating this binary in The Professor’s House rests in Cather’s representation of gardens. According to garden enthusiast and philosopher Mara Miller, “[t]he task of the garden is to mediate those tensions or polarities which are important for a given culture” (25).

Ending with a Boom/ Beginning with Slow Food

It was the last regular day of 121 for my classes today. We ended on a great note, especially in my 10 am class. They were so intensely interested and interactive, it was tremendous. We laughed and joked and learned. I was totally delighted by the experience and I hope some of them will end up in my 214 class. 

In my own work, I've been pleasantly surprised to find that very little has been done addressing food and ecocriticism. In my brief preliminary search I found only a few links. One of the most interesting was a Call For Papers that I wish I'd found sooner.  Even this however does not make the link between food, ecocriticism and fiction. It seems much more interested in the literature of slow food or locavore movements. 

I am eager to really begin the paper, hopefully my enthusiasm will last. 

I also need to find a copy of "Loving Ourselves Best of All". A brief glance at this article has me pretty excited.

Thesis Thursday Strikes Again

Meeting with Betj today to discuss the thesis. I've been entertaining thoughts of adding Cather to the mix, but perhaps I won't. I don't know. I am feeling some confusion about the whole thing. I've started looking at Dana Phillips' Truth of Ecology again, and I am really enjoying it. So far the book sticks it to Buell and most ecocritics, accusing them of being more interested in their own personal revelation than in either ecology or literature. It is hard for me to hear this in some ways because I'd been willing to call myself an "ecocritic".... however I don't share these views or methods. I think the "pastoral" in literature and life has been a mess. People deluding themselves into deepening the illusory divide between humanity and nature... I see no such divide. 

Phillips writes: "ecocriticism ought to cultivate an attitude of wary impartiality, which should be the best way to avoid what Buell calls the "environmentalist's dilemma of having to come to terms with actual natural environments while participating in the institutions of a technological culture that insulates one from the natural environment and splits one's allegiances." This is a dilemma that Buell say the pastoral "anticipates," and I agree, because I think it's a dilemma that by anticipating the pastoral first helps to create, then sustains and exacerbates. The pastoral does this when it buys wholesale the distinction between natural environments and "technological culture"" (19).

Oh yeh, I'm with this. This idea is pretty much at the base of my thesis. We'll see how the day goes.

Saturday Morning with Georges Bataille

Today I got started on my Ciceronian project for Betjemann's class.

Since we were invited to make this a visual project I thought I would take the opportunity to paint something. Back in the day, 2000-2003, I was in love with abstract art. I painted for hours on end in my parent's garage smoking clove after clove in the wee hours of the morn. Lacking a garage this project is a bit less "animated" but is still coming out well. 

I have so many other things to work on, but spending Saturday morning rendering my understanding of Georges Bataille's "The Solar Anus" in cheap acrylics is delightful.

in parting...a little Andre Masson pour inspiration

Picking a Fight with Gentry

I spent a few hours today considering Deborah Gentry's The Art of Dying. I enjoyed her work immensely. The first chapter was like a crash course in Suicide History and provided me with a number of other theorist's names and ideas to consider for further reading. 

Gentry quotes Margret Higonnet’s essay “Speaking Silences: Women’s Suicide”. Pointing out that “[c]lassical instances of women’s suicide are perceived as masculine” while the “ninteenth-century reorientation of suicide toward love, passive self-surrender and illness [is] particularly evident in the literary depiction of women” (2). This is an interesting notion especially if one considers Jocasta and even the later Shakespearean account of Portia. 

Further on in the text Gentry quotes Gilbert and Gubar regarding the sacrificial aspect of womanhood. “Whether she becomes an object d’art or a saint, however, it is the surrender of self-- of her personal comfort, her personal desires, or both-- that is the beautiful angel-woman’s key act” (3).

Gentry asserts that in many works of the Victorian and Edwardian period “woman’s death is important only in how it affects other characters, mostly men, who remain alive, an effect which is striking in the conclusion of Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shallot”… The poem concludes not with her death but with Lancelot viewing her corpse and stating, “She has a pretty face,” another instance of woman as symbol rather than substance” (14). This of course is totally relevant to my reading of both Chopin and JW Waterhouse.

With regard to Chopin, Gentry asserts that, “Edna’s awakening…is nothing short of an awakening to the true circumstances of existence for a woman shorn of the romantic illusions that society foists upon her-- an existence in which the deck is so stacked against women that the only true choice left to them is… to die” (22). She further states that “Chopin remasculinizes female suicide” (44).

This is the area where I cannot agree. For me Edna remains a self-delusional character until the very end. She is doubtful and confused as she goes to her death just as other Victorian heroines before her have been. 

Gentry, Deborah S. The Art of Dying: Suicide in the Works of Kate Chopin and Sylvia Plath. American University Studies 56. New York: Lang, 2006.

Dialouge and Commodity: an ending

Today in the grad only meeting of Women't Lit class we started discussing Linda Hutcheon's Theory of Adaptation. In the course of this discussion we read where Hutcheon states that "sequels and prequels are not really adaptations...nor is fan fiction" (9).  I found this comment somewhat bewildering. Although I realize that in some ways the three excluded modes do not substantially depart from the "original" or "adapted work", I think that they do fit the three primary criterion Hutcheon establishes earlier in the text (8). Furthermore I think that it might be interesting to pay some attention to the rather recent phenomenon of creating print spin-offs of film and television productions. For me this shift in media strongly suggests adaptation. 

I mentioned this in class by specifically referencing CSI which began as one television program, and is now three television programs which have been the source for a number of paperback novels, magazines, video games, board games etc... This topic brought us all rather quickly to the issue of commodification. Since CSI is a television show produced to make money (not "art") how does this effect the idea of the CSI novel as adaptation? Are the novels:

1) Not adaptations because they are part of a moneymaking franchisee phenomenon?

2) Not adaptations because they are like prequels, sequels and fan fiction?

3) Cross media adaptations which meet the three major criterion set out by Hutcheon regardless of her later caveat and the market forces behind CSI?

I'm voting three. There is no real point in arguing high culture v. low culture since all modes of communication and literature can be valuable sources of information, the study of which can provide the scholar with critical insights. Furthermore regardless of whether it is Dean Koontz or Edith Wharton or the Bible for that matter, market forces play a role in the availability and production of texts. 

Our little group briefly talked about how the idea of dialogue separate from commodification might benefit entry level academics (i.e. freshmen). Although I can imagine the value of such a worldview, where learning and texts are cherished and explored for no real "market" reason, I have a difficult time envisioning this. If everything is subject to the market in our time and place, then what dialogue is there that is not impinged by the market?

I like to think that I do what I do because I love literature. Ultimately this is probably about 85% true. Somewhere in there you can add in egotism and money, then you'd have a fuller picture.

Today my summer term partially ended. 

Tomorrow more Pendleton.

Oh Eight Oh Eight Oh Eight

In an effort to get even briefly back on track I went to the Valley Library (which incidentally has a webcam, something that I found totally amusing) today and spent some time, more than I had intended, in the archives and maps room. I was looking for historical geologic or hydrological maps of Pendleton, but found only a few State Water Resources maps from the 60's and 70's which depicted the Umatilla drainage basin. I had been hoping to find some maps that pre-dated the McKay Dam, but no success. I did however find some cool digital archive photos of the Pendleton Round-Up.  I also found a large number of news articles about the town dating back to 1878. I must admit that my microfilm skills were a bit rusty, but I figured it all out well enough. Despite all this research I feel that this paper is no closer to completion than it was when the day began. Hopefully after next week I'll be able to make quick work of it.

In the spirit of getting on track I could not ignore the thesis so I looked around the many delightful library databases and found an essay published in Philosophy and Literature which seems promising; Joseph Carroll's "The Ecology of Victorian Fiction". Although I most certainly don't conceive of Wharton as a Victorian writer I felt like this essay might bring up some interesting ideas which I could debate with in my paper.  The first 10-11 pages of this work are dedicated to establishing the author's position in relationship to what he sees as the dominant ecocritical mode. 

Although Carroll's writing seems intensely biased and polarized I think he does raise some interesting ideas. His primary argument is "that ecology cannot by itself generate a theory of literature or serve as the basis for a theory of literature, but...that responsiveness to the sense of place is an elemental component of the evolved human psyche and that it thus can and should be integrated into a Darwinian literary theory" (296).  While I am not overly enthusiastic about using Darwin as the basis of my literary inquiries I was very interested in his presentation of E. O. Wilson's concept of biophilia.  Regardless of whether or not this can be used in my thesis, the concept of affinity with nature as adaptive and evolutionary is thought provoking. I still have another 10 pages to go with this piece before I can make any real assessment. 

Current Leisure Reading: Galway Kinnell Imperfect Thirst

Review and Updates etc...

So Ethan Frome (the film version) was not a letdown. It was actually quite good.

Nella Larsen's Passing was fantastic. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. If one were looking for a quick and interesting read I highly recommend it. 

Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" on the other hand is not my thing at all. We graduate students were instructed to read it for Women's Literature. We're discussing it tomorrow. Although I have a fair grasp of Freudian / Lacanian theory, at least the basics of it, I am not all that interested in it since I find myself unable or unwilling to commit to the underlying assumptions of the theories. Thus, my experience with Mulvey was tainted by my inner resistance to her premise. Nevertheless her rant regarding voyeurism and Hitchcock was fascinating.

I gave my presentation on Chopin's The Awakening in class today. It went reasonably well. The final product was a look at intoxication and archetypes as portrayed in both the novel and visual arts produced during the late 1890's. This topic will likely end up as the basis of my long paper for this class. 

Tomorrow I have a long day of meetings. Tonight I'll start another Wharton novel.