by Hendley Badcock

 

J. Hogan’s 2003 film Peter Pan is my favorite version of the classic fairy tale, although Steven Spielberg’s 1991 film Hook is a close second. Maybe you prefer the original 1953 Disney movie or one of its sequels. Or the 2004 film Finding Neverland or Pan, which came out just last year. Or you could be a traditionalist and just really prefer J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy. Regardless, we certainly are not short of options when it comes to enjoying the story.

Fairy tales like Peter Pan have survived not only through their abstract adventures and supernatural characters, but also through their narrative lessons and social commentary that both children and adults can grasp. Entertainment lies just at the surface of a timeless fairy tale. Tolkien writes that “a ‘fairy-story’ is one that touches on or uses Faërie [a fantasy realm which humans can experience], whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy.”[i] Modern writers continue to modify or extend the narrative of fairytales to better analyze or critique their current culture.

Barrie’s Peter and Wendy has replanted itself in the cultures of every generation since its first on-stage production in 1904 and its publication as a novel in 1911. Literary critics speculate why we’ve held on so closely to Peter Pan and its exciting, mysterious, alluring fantasy world of flying across the stars and fighting pirates. Allison B. Kavey and Lester D. Friedman attribute its endurance to its unique genre, “one that is originally written for children, but not primarily read by adults and absorbed by children through other media, such as films.”[ii] They cite Peter Pan as an alter-reality for twenty-first century men and women’s desire to stay young and beautiful and to escape the constant demands and responsibilities crowding our schedules.

The above-mentioned films have all tweaked the story or perspective of Peter Pan in some way, but one of the most interesting renditions I’ve come across since I’ve been in college seems a bit like fan fiction but is writing with a biting, witty tongue. In her 2013 chapbook Darling Hands, Darling Tongue, poet Sally Rosen Kindred argues that women suffer from oppressive binds of traditional Victorian and Edwardian gender stereotypes in Barrie’s Peter and Wendy. She comments on the original work’s sexism by recasting the story’s largely unheard female characters of Tinker Bell, Wendy, and Tiger Lily as the focus of her verse.

In “Tiger Lily Leaves the Book for Now,” Kindred assigns angry and smart speech for the extremely self-aware American Indian princess. Tiger Lily, is the least active or vocal of Barrie’s women. Although Tiger Lily assumes command over her father’s tribe on Neverland, the princess embodies a paradox of power and passivity in both her femininity and ethnicity. She’s portrayed as an erotic, exotic parody to Peter and the Lost Boys. Be mindful that the British Empire was rising to the height of its global spread in the early 1900s.

Disturbed by Barrie’s racist and sexist portrayal of the girl, Kindred’s Tiger Lily lives in the present and embodies modernist ideals more so than any of the other characters in verse:

 

If my mouth were a place
the plot came aground, found
sand, found words rounded like wet stones
and teeth,
if my arms                                                                               5
held bones demanding description
and each bone were a song
or a weapon,
if my fists were full of opals
I’d keep reading.                                                                     10
If my lips moved in this story
we could talk.
I’ve shut your book. Just think
if my sisters and brothers were more
than a smudge on the page, than Redskins                  15
moving in tandem, marching
in some dim
ellipse, waiting to be elected
for salvation
or the Superbowl.                                                                   20
Imagine me, waking: the chapter’s
light defined
by my lids swinging wide.
I want to be specific, arch my left
brow, my story                                                                       25
all linguistics
and technology. I want to be so ugly
you can’t look. I want a family
but you’ve given me a beer in the cheap seats.
Make me a crazed spiral,                                                        30
nautilus scrawling
Newton’s laws in the sand. Or a girl, fine,
and American, I’ll do it still:
all I need’s something to write with,
a quarter or a cigarette.                                                            35
I’ve thrown down your book.
Bend or kneel to find it. Open it
back up, light your fervent candles.
I’m the patron saint of getting out of here.

 

Tiger Lily, who never speaks in Barrie’s original work, here speaks in the first person and addresses the original author directly, assertively telling him that she has “shut” and “thrown down” his book (24-25). She makes a deal with the author—“if [her] mouth were a place the plot came aground,” “if [her] arms held bones demanding description,” “if [her] fists were full of opals,” “if [her] lips moved in this story” (24). Given the same attention and authority as other characters, Tiger Lily would be willing to reconsider her rejecting Barrie and Peter Pan. She indeed shows signs of agency and ambition, as she prefers to construct with her mouth and eyes an alternative plot.

Tiger Lily is also intelligent and crafty, appealing to her male oppressors with language they might understand—the language of professional football. But she also mentions physics as she alludes to “scrawling Newton’s laws in the sand” (25). After all, the third law of motion is all about action and reaction and Kindred is responding to Barrie. Additionally, she knows what she wants—“to be so ugly [he] can’t look,” as well as to have a family (24). The former resists any sexual objectification that was present in the novel. The latter cannot be bought from her with “beer in the cheap seats” (24). It is clear Kindred’s Tiger Lily will not settle for any nonsense and nothing less than she deserves.

Kindred could not see Tiger Lily sustaining Barrie’s time period and thus created an agentic, decisive, and serious young woman who demands equality and respect. But, writing with a new perspective and current society in mind, Kindred successfully extends the story of the trapped and voiceless women of Peter Pan and challenges our repeated acceptance of a one-hundred-year-old plot.

 

[i] Tolkien , J. R. R. . “On Fairy-Stories.” Trans. Array Tree and Leaf. George Allen and Unwin, 1964. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

 

[ii] Kavey, Allison B., and Lester D. Friedman. Second Star to the Right: Peter Pan in the Popular Imagination . Rutgers University Press, 2008. Print.

 

by Mansie Hough

Whether it takes form in a classic piece of literary fiction, a creatively creepy poem, or a pop-culture beach read, I love a good mystery story. It seems the genre, in all its broadness, will never run out of innovative ways to look at human nature, psychology, and the concept of trust. Mystery, when done well, is tricky and engaging for both the reader and the author. The active reader must think critically, suspiciously, and frequently when reading a good mystery story. If that reader is me, she must also resist the temptation to quickly search the ending on Wikipedia or stay up until 5 am on a school night to find out what happens. More crucially, though, for an author, great difficulty lies in some crucial decisions: which information to withhold, when to schedule big (or small) reveals, how to set a tone that puts people on edge, and suspect characterization. Not surprisingly, a lot of these issues can either be solved or exacerbated by the mystery’s narrator. We all learned about this in school when our English teachers taught us about the unreliable narrator.

Perhaps the greatest and most well-known example of the impact of an unreliable first-person narrator came from the notoriously unnerving Edgar Allan Poe. In classic works like “Annabel Lee,” ““The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Bells,” the mentally unstable narrators speak in either fast-paced, jumpy styles or a voice that drones on and on about petty surface details of the plot. Additionally, Poe’s narrators rarely, if ever, stop to question the possibility of their own insanity. It’s always the world’s fault rather than their own, and that’s if the narrator can even come around and acknowledge they are in an unusual situation. The narrator in “Annabel Lee” has romanticized his love interest so much that he regresses to a childlike, obsessive state, and this distorts the way the story is told. Similarly, in “The Cask of Amontillado,” Montresor sees no other reasonable reaction to being insulted other than to brutally murder the culprit, which results in an inappropriately casual mention of the incident. And, finally, “The Bells” shows us that depending on the point of view of the story’s narrator, symbols of beauty, hope, and joy can quickly turn into something much more dark and sinister. Poe’s innovative use of perspective in these stories puts the reader into a position of uncertainty and uneasiness from start to finish, and the deeper subplot comes from the narrator’s twisted rendition of the surface plot.

By no means did Poe invent the unreliable narrator—the trend can be identified in certain Ancient Greek works and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. But by focusing on the narrator’s delusions, Poe popularized a strategy that has been applied to a diverse array of literary works. Ralph Ellison used the tactic in his 1952 novel Invisible Man. In Invisible Man, the plot develops independently as we witness the anonymous main character begin to psychologically break down. Kate Chopin employs the unreliable narrator in her work of short fiction The Awakening—not exactly a mystery, but the strategy works well for her. In the end, we are left as an audience to decide if the main character Edna’s self-destructive actions are a result of an oppressive society or her own selfish mania. Edna is not the same unreliable narrator as one that Poe would dream up or as Ellison’s unnamed protagonist. Montresor is a vicious, narcissistic madman; Edna is a conflicted liar; The Invisible Man is an anxious, paranoid victim. One could even say Huck Finn and Holden Caufield are unreliable narrators as they cannot see past their lack of experience to tell a truly accurate story. It’s hard to draw the line at where unreliability ends and distinct narrative voice starts, because every first-person narrator will tell a story hindered by personal biases to an extent. But that’s why the Poe-esque exaggerated unreliability is so interesting and lends itself well to diversity in voices and tones.

So what has become of the unreliable narrator in pop culture mysteries today? Our old pal is thriving, in the form of a literarily controversial condition: amnesia. S.J. Watson’s wildly popular 2011 novel Before I Go to Sleep features a first-person narrator who suffers from short term memory loss, and must slowly piece together secrets around who she has become in the time that she lost. Similarly, Paula Hawkins’ 2015 novel Girl on the Train uses the main character’s alcoholism to (literally) black out important clues and scenes pertaining to an ongoing investigation. Ruth Ware’s 2015 novel In a Dark, Dark Wood uses violence-induced amnesia to muddy its mystery’s waters as well.

Amnesia and memory loss can be a tough point in mystery thrillers. It is quite difficult to pull this method off without making the story feel contrived, convenient, and implausible. If critics do not deem your use of memory loss successful, be prepared for a barrage of sarcastic jokes about the Adam Sandler film 50 First Dates. But, when done right, this tool paces the story in a unique way that makes the reader feel helpless as he or she struggles along with the frustrated, mentally exhausted narrator. This approach also throws a wrench into the “likely suspects” trope of the genre. When the narrator’s mental facilities and memory are totally intact, it’s easy to rank all tangential characters from “definitely a psychopath” to “not a chance.” However, amnesia yanks this rug from underneath us and forces us to be more in the present moment with the narrator, and this makes us vulnerable. All of these enjoyable results of an unreliable narrator are reasons why I love mystery stories, and I am excited to see what the trend will twist into next.

by Camille Hunt

The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the flowers are blooming. Each year, the turning of seasons from winter to spring conjures up the old pastel cliché of green grass and warm weather, Easter eggs and daffodils Literature sometimes provides an alternative vision of spring, however; poet William Wordsworth puts a dark spin on the bright season, particularly in his late eighteenth century poem “Lines Written in Early Spring.”

Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” reflects his concerns about the development of industrialization, which took hold during his 19^th century writing career. The Industrial Revolution took place from the 18^th and 19^th centuries, transitioning Europe and America from primarily agrarian to urban societies. Industrialization introduced new technology, mass production, and a focus on factory work. The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution was Great Britain, its extensive deposits of coal and iron ore setting it up as an abundant source of raw materials. Nature took on a completely new meaning; it became a source to be exploited to contribute to a material world. Where Nature previously existed as the allegorical provider of life, industrialization made it a source for man to create a new life for modernized humans. The poet considers “What man has made of man” in his verse of alternate rhyme.

 

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ‘tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

The first stanza of the poem has only become increasingly relevant over time. Man is now facing the consequences of the Industrial Revolution, the repercussions of “what man has made of man.” The wild weather this spring has made the season unpredictable, fluctuating between snow and temperatures above 80 degrees Fahrenheit. With each warm, sunny day, we might be “In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind,” at first elated by a cloudless sky before being reminded that an abruptly hot day amidst rising and falling weather patterns could be a result of global warming.

“What man has made of man” goes against what Nature made man to be. Man has made itself a rival of Nature, a creator with no right to change what Nature created, and yet that is what we have done. We do not live harmoniously in Nature’s world, and each unnaturally warm spring day comes with a nagging reminder that the warmth we enjoy now is the result of “What man has made of man.”

Poet Wendell Berry’s 2009 poem “A Speech to the Garden Club of America” echoes Wordsworth’s thoughts in a modern world. Published in the New Yorker, the poem continues Wordsworth’s lamentation of “What man has made of man,” referencing the burning of fossil fuels to sustain the lives of men instead of living by Nature’s laws, asking, “Why not survive / By Nature’s laws that still keep up alive?” and denouncing “our economic pyre / That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire, / An anti-life of radiance and fume.”

 

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

As we transition into spring this year, let us be mindful of our relationship with the earth and appreciate the life it sustains. Wordsworth and Berry, too, would encourage us to accept what Nature provides, not exploit what Nature produces.

 

http://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-lundberg/spring-poems_b_2884434.html

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/28/a-speech-to-the-garden-club-of-america

 

by Meaghan Latella

If you are of complete or at least partial Irish descent: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! And if you are not Irish, I might as well wish you a happy holiday too. This holiday may have begun in Ireland as a religious homage to Ireland’s patron saint (St. Patrick), but it is now a widespread phenomenon that has breached Ireland’s borders and infiltrated many other cultures, most notably in the United States. Every March 17^th, people around the world celebrate this holiday by attending parades, wearing green, and feasting on traditional Irish food—and beverage.

Like any holiday, St. Patrick’s Day has become commercialized over the years, and most people probably don’t even know why it began. It’s funny how initial purpose can be lost over time. Take Christmas for example. When you ask someone what their favorite part of the Christmas season is, most people would say something about spending time with their families, or singing Christmas carols, or baking pies and decorating cookies. Rare is it for someone to say that they most look forward to celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. And yet, this is technically the sole purpose of Christmas.

We are all guilty of losing sight of our ancestry. It is not something you think about on a daily basis. Even though nearly one third of Americans can trace its lineage back to someone who migrated from Europe and went through Ellis Island, we do not spend loads of time looking into our family histories.

Today, I’d like to reference a poem written by Eavan Boland. Boland is often referred to as “Ireland’s greatest female poet.” Her work addresses a variety of topics, but it heavily focuses on the oppression of Irish women, and on the impact of the Famine. One of Boland’s more famous poems—“The Achill Woman”—recounts the story of when Boland met an old Irishwoman on Achill Island.

On its surface, the poem doesn’t appear to be about much of anything. The speaker—a young college girl, who we presume is Boland—meets the Achill woman one evening when she carries a bucket of water up to the cottage that Boland is renting. The poem characterizes a young Boland as ignorant and slightly dismissive of the old woman’s hardships. In the poem, Boland laments how “nothing now can change the way I went / indoors, chilled by the wind / and made a fire / and took down my book / and opened it and failed to comprehend / the harmonies of servitude…”

In an essay about the poem, Boland elaborates on the details of the conversation she had with the woman from Achill:

“She was the first person to talk to me about the famine. The first person, in fact, to speak to me with any force about the terrible parish of survival and death which the event had been in those regions. She kept repeating to me that they were great people, the people in the famine. Great people. I had never heard that before. She pointed out the beauties of the place. But they themselves, I see now, were a subtext. On the eastern side of Keel, the cliffs of Menawn rose sheer out of the water. And here was Keel itself, with its blond strand and broken stone, where the villagers in the famine, she told me, had moved closer to the shore, the better to eat the seaweed.” (Stef Crap, 2009).

Boland reveals that she was blind in her youth to the weight that this meeting carried. I’m sure Boland would now call her brief meeting with this woman a truly humbling experience.

After reading this poem, I’ve been forced to do a bit of self-reflection of my own. I am a quarter Irish, and my grandmother is of complete Irish descent. Her mother immigrated to the United States from her home country and settled in Staten Island, N.Y. in the early 1900s. I must confess that I know very little about my great-grandmother. I am one of those people who indulges in St. Paddy’s day celebrations every year, yet I’m guilty of not recognizing the roots of this holiday and my family’s relationship to it.

We as a society may not be the best at paying our respects to the past. In this fast paced world we live in, it’s hard not to devote all of our energies to keeping up with the present and gazing forward toward the future. But I can promise you one thing. Before today is over, I plan on calling my grandmother. After the mandatory greetings of “how are you” and “what’s new,” I want to ask her if she’ll tell me a story about her mother. It may not be a monumental gesture, but it will be my way of lending some authenticity to the green shirt that I’m wearing today.

For reference, here is “The Achill Woman” in its entirety:

 

THE ACHILL WOMAN

She came up the hill carrying water.
She wore a half-buttoned, wool cardigan,
a tea-towel round her waist.

She pushed the hair out of her eyes with
her free hand and put the bucket down.

The zinc-music of the handle on the rim
tuned the evening. An Easter moon rose.
In the next-door field a stream was
a fluid sunset; and then, stars.

I remember the cold rosiness of her hands.
She bent down and blew them like broth.
And round her waist, on a white background,
in coarse, woven letters, the words “glass cloth.”

And she was nearly finished for the day.
And I was all talk, raw from college —
weekending at a friend’s cottage
with one suitcase and the set text
of the Court poets of the Silver Age.

We stayed putting down time until
the evening turned cold without warning.
She said goodnight and started down the hill.

The grass changed from lavender to black.
The trees turned back to cold outlines.
You could taste frost

but nothing now can change the way I went
indoors, chilled by the wind
and made a fire
and took down my book
and opened it and failed to comprehend

the harmonies of servitude,
the grace music gives to flattery
and language borrows from ambition —

and how I fell asleep
oblivious to

the planets clouding over in the skies,
the slow decline of the spring moon,
the songs crying out their ironies.

–Eavan Boland

 

Sources:

http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.wlu.edu/docview/1305129367?pq-origsite=summon

http://nw7pf8as2n.search.serialssolutions.com/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info%3Aofi%2Fenc%3AUTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/summon.serialssolutions.com&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=%27Only+Not+beyond+Love%27%3A+Testimony%2C+Subalternity%2C+and+the+Famine+in+the+Poetry+of+Eavan+Boland&rft.jtitle=Neophilologus&rft.au=Craps%2C+Stef&rft.date=2010&rft.issn=1572-8668&rft.eissn=1572-8668&rft.volume=94&rft.issue=1&rft.spage=165&rft.externalDocID=R04285366&paramdict=en-US

by Rachel Baker

The battling smells of dumplings, snicker doodles, and marijuana waft down the market alley, men in suits brush by carrying tulips, and the whirr and hiss of coffee machines make their own place in the conversations of passersby. Mt. Rainier looks painted into the sky and the Olympic Mountains draw my attention from the skyline to the sound as the neon red sign begins to buzz on a rare clear night. There is a coffee shop and a bookstore on every corner. You can find them under polished signs or tucked into dark allies, big and small, national chains and indie. If you do not like coffee or books, you probably should leave Seattle immediately.

Seattle is known as the city of Amazon and Starbucks, but less notably they are bidding to become a UNESCO City of Literature. Both sides of my family live in the Carolinas, and I have only been to the west coast twice. If it were not for this week in Seattle I would have never known that such a rich literary community existed here. Sure there’re stereotypes. I believed Seattle to be artsy, outdoorsy, and quirky, but I suddenly realized that standing in Pikes Place market I am at a literary crossroads, standing somewhere between old and new, in the transition from print to digital, a witness to the fight to stay local in the face of giants.

There is an intimacy to bookstores and coffee shops that I do not believe the public is ready to let go of. The fact that independent stores are still flourishing in Seattle is a testament to the community’s support of literature. Signs for readings, book signings, and writer’s workshops are plastered on every window. I passed four independent bookstores on one street, all apparently unfazed by the digital trend. But then again I do not see their bank accounts. Amazon.com recently launched their first bookstore in Seattle. It seems odd to me that the online empire would expand to bricks and mortar when the national trend is to go digital. Amazon certainty does not need a bookstore to be successful, nor does it need one in order to compete with the independent booksellers in Seattle. However, their move to a physical store says something about what readers are longing for. A bookstore creates a sense of community that a website cannot. A bookstore is a place where people can meet, rest, read, discover, and hang out. Wherever you look you can see that green, Starbucks mermaid, staring at you from a window, but people still gravitate towards the cozy coffee shops that will draw hearts in your latte. Like local coffee shops, there is an intimacy to bookstores that I do not believe the public is ready to let go of. Bookstores provide an experience along with a book. The Elliott Bay Book Company is one of the largest and most successful independent booksellers in Seattle, and their store is filled with handwritten notes and recommendations from the staff. Your experience seems personalized, and an anonymous review online is not able to create that same connection. There something about an independent bookstore that you do not get from anywhere else, and that’s coming from someone who has a Kindle.

I got my love of reading from my mother. She used to take me to our public library where I would check out 20 books at a time. I believe I probably read every children’s chapter book in our library. My mom gave me my first Kindle when I was in middle school. The concept was crazy to me, but before long, Amazon replaced my public library. Before I go on a trip I’ll buy an arsenal of novels that I can hold in the palm of my hand. However, I still love physical books. I like thumbing the pages as I read, I love the smell, I love dog-earing the pages. I’ve had to draw a separation in my mind, balancing my love of books with the convenience and low price that a Kindle brings. Books I care about sit on my bookshelf, while books I will only read once sit in my Kindle.

Juggling pixels and paperbacks is not uncommon for today’s readers. It was once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, but instead, digital sales have slowed. A recent Nielsen survey shows that people who read primarily on e-books dropped from 50 percent in the first quarter of 2012 to 32 percent in 2014.

Seattle’s literary community is so strong because it lies between the old and the new, managing to stay a step above outdated while hanging onto the intimacy and charm of mom and pop bookstores. Literature is not a passive art. For it to flourish, there needs to be a strong dialogue between artists and readers, and I found that in Seattle.

 

 

 

by Emma Nash

As a little girl growing up in Atlanta, I spent many of my weekends with my godmother’s mother, an inimitable septuagenarian whom I affectionately called Miss Lily. My parents were Northern transfers, and most of my extended family still lived in the Midwest; Miss Lily served as something of an adoptive grandmother. She was the type of woman who seemed made for the finer things in life—in my memory, she is constantly dressed in a silk robe and feather boa, constantly laughing, forever draped in diamonds and pearls. She was Blanche Dubois’s more respectable older sister, Scarlett O’Hara’s refined cousin—all elegance and gentility. On Saturdays, she would push the chaise lounges and authentic Roman busts to the corners of her ballroom and we would dance and eat Oreos until we felt sick. Once, when I was very young, Miss Lily was talking with my mother about a recent dinner guest she’d had over. The dinner was pleasant, but it had been a week and she still hadn’t received a thank you note. “Barbara,” she whispered in her perfect sweet-tea-James-Dickey drawl, “you would have thought they were Yankees”. My mother laughed and reminded Miss Lily that she was a Yankee herself. This prompted Miss Lily to pause in horror at the thought that she might have caused offense. After a moment, she spoke again, in a voice lowered to display her gravity, “Oh Barbara, darling, don’t you worry. Nobody’s thought of you as a Yankee in years.”

To me, Miss Lily was the perfect Southern lady. It wasn’t until I was nearly an adult I learned that, while I was growing up, she was dying of cancer, being stolen from by her caretaker, and in denial of her advancing years. With each new fact I learned about her bittersweet and complicated life, the more I understood just how much I had pigeonholed Miss Lily. As she became more three dimensional, so did my perception of what it meant to be Southern. The more I discovered, the more I saw was left to be discovered. So, even as a native Georgian, I cannot help but agree with Caroline that the South resists representation—even a lifetime of living here has not necessarily prepared me to comment with authority on its character. If anything, it has helped me better appreciate the trouble with representing the intricacies, ambiguities, and contradictions that comprise its enigmatic profile. Reading Caroline’s post made me wonder what, at its core, makes the idea of “the South” so elusive and captivating, and what makes it so distinct that it requires its own literary genres (Southern literature and the Southern Gothic are omnipresent manifestations of the region’s idiosyncrasies, real and perceived). I set about to form some sort of succinct, coherent explanation. The reader will be surprised to hear that, despite several Google searches and the benefit of all my twenty-one years’ experience, I failed. I comfort myself with the fact that there didn’t seem to be any particular consensus amongst the scholars whose work I read either. After encountering many answers and explanations, all of which seemed valid and none of which seemed to encompass the whole breadth of Southern peculiarity, I decided that my meager blog post perhaps might not be sufficient to answer such a multidimensional question. As such, here are a few suggestions as to the cause of what could be called the South’s “Otherness”:

The Civil War Undeniably, the Civil War had a large effect on the development of Southern identity and, by extension, Southern Literature. Mr. Jay B. Hubbell, writing in 1921, argued “It was the overthrow of the Confederacy and the bitterness of Reconstruction that created a posthumous demand for a Confederate literature—Confederate is a more accurate term than Southern”.[1] His argument suggests that Southerners felt the need to distinguish their literature from that of the North. While Mr. Hubbell’s suggestion of calling it “Confederate literature” is perhaps not as viable today, many scholars agree that the Civil War first created the idea of Southern literature as separate from and perhaps even opposed to American identity (see Michael Kreyling’s Inventing Southern Literature). Their perceived estrangement might account for the concurrent but conflicting tides of pride and shame in the Southern mindset. These contradictory perspectives, coupled with Southern separation, would doubtless be confusing to outside observers.

 

Christianity Christianity, in particular Protestant Christianity, is more strongly associated with the South than with any other area of the country. Truthfully, the “Bible Belt” nickname is apt; significant portions of the South’s cultural identity are based upon Christianity—many Southerners still largely draw their moral values from the Bible, and one’s involvement in the church often determines citizenship in a community. The close association between Christianity and the South allows that Southern people become inextricably identified with that religion and its values, whether or not they ascribe to them (see Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” and “The Life You Save Might Be Your Own”). Any particular religion is already alienating to those outside of it; a whole culture based upon a religion is thus even more inaccessible to outsiders (especially considering the implied hypocrisy of an individual within such a culture behaving against its values).

Storytelling The South’s penchant for storytelling is well documented. Oral tradition is a large part of the historical culture. In her memoir, One or Two Things I Know For Sure, South Carolina native Dorothy Allison cites storytelling as her way out—both figuratively and literally—of the harsh realities of a life bounded by poverty and abuse. The Southern predilection for storytelling is often characterized by a preoccupation with the ugly and the surreal (think Southern Gothic). Describing Welty’s A Curtain of Green, Susan Donaldson notes that “In story after story, the possibility of alternative gazes, alternative perspectives, alternative narratives, is raised repeatedly, often by underscoring the limitations of the collective gaze leveled upon those labeled as strange, marvelous, grotesque, and suffering”.[2] Donaldson’s summary is applicable to much of Southern literature. Its preoccupation with the grotesque and reactions to the grotesque means that many depictions of the South feature over-the-top characters and situations. These likely contribute to the perceived “Otherness” of the South.

Stereotypes The factors listed above, along with many others, allow that Southerners are often stereotyped. According to much of the media, Southerners can be recognized by our disdain for orthodontia and secondary education, our unnatural fondness for trans fats, and our affinity for homemade alcohol. If one is to believe Deliverance, we also might have a taste for banjo music and inbreeding. As Caroline aptly pointed out, stereotypes limit a person’s understanding of what it means to be Southern. For many, the South exists behind a veil created by these stereotypes, many of which are rooted in the past and have not been revised since the nineteenth century or even earlier.

Regional Differences Stereotyping permits that the South often exists in the collective mind as one homogeneous region, bound by universal values and characteristics. Such thinking prevents an observer from forming a nuanced and realistic impression of the South. Just as Boston has a different culture from Hoboken, so Houston’s is from that of New Orleans. Accordingly, Pat Conroy’s South is different from Eudora Welty’s is different from Tom Wolfe’s. Thinking otherwise is injustice to both scholar and subject.

To me, much of the South’s personality stems from the peculiar intermingling of stereotypes and contradictions. It both wants to be understood and insists upon being individual, leaving even native Southerners (or at least this one) unable to fully assimilate its fickle nature. Perhaps this is my ultimate conclusion: that the South’s primary characterization is qualified by its defiance of characterization. Perhaps its allure lies in its amorphous silhouette, and attempting to define it is patently impossible.

[1] Hubbell, Jay B.. “ON “SOUTHERN LITERATURE””. Texas Review 7.1 (1921): 8–16. Web…

[2] Donaldson, Susan V. “Making a Spectacle: Welty, Faulkner, and Southern Gothic.” Mississippi Quarterly 50.4 (Fall 1997): 567-583. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 142. Detroit: Fale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Feb. 2016.

by Nolan Doyle

Note: On the eve of the second episode of a series that documents one of the most culturally captivating “true crime” narratives of our time, American Crime Story: The People v O.J. Simpson, here are some thoughts on the significance of the genre.

The consensus was that no title on Jack the Ripper ever gathers much dust … the hottest backlist titles now, in the true crime genre, deal with serial killers
– the more gruesome and grotesque the better.[1] 

The above quote comes from an article in Publisher’s Weekly in 1993. With some slight modification, it could have been published last week. True crime still dominates media from a publisher’s backlist to Netflix. As the quote suggests, this is not a new phenomenon. It is, has been for centuries, a genre of consistent popularity and dubious respect. Respect aside, literary or otherwise, I’ve noticed a recent trend: its titles are growing increasingly popular. It’s beginning to shake its Rodney-Dangerfield-syndrome.

What is True Crime?

In case the moniker doesn’t describe the genre sufficiently, a definition:

True crime is a non-fiction literary and film genre in which the author examines an actual crime and details the actions of real people.[2]

Do forgive the phrasing of this definition: it sounds just like the opening credits disclaimer for Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. As a work of fiction, SVU happens to be classified as a “legal drama,” a fact for your consideration. Unlike SVU, in true crime the author examines a real-life criminal case. The author acts as an investigative journalist, who reports to the audience. For the author, that it is an “actual” crime adds consequence and importance to the case. As for the viewer, that these are “real” people adds the gravity of human consequence. In tandem, it may be that the pleasure in a true crime narrative is in participation in a larger, culturally significant story. And, in the modern incarnation of the narrative, the degree of “audience participation” has been amplified.

Origins:

There has been much speculation with regard to the origin of “true crime.” One of those speculators and part-time true crime author, Joyce Carol Oates attempted to describe the phenomenon in 1999:

Accounts of true crime have always been enormously popular among readers. The subgenre would seem to appeal to the highly educated as well as the barely educated, to women and men equally.[3]

According to Oates, true crime does not have any intellectual barriers; anyone can participate. It seems to be the case that true crime is accessible. Since its accessible and engaging, it tends to be popular. As a function of its popularity:

“true crime” has become a crowded, flourishing field, though few writers of distinction have been drawn to it.[4]

That she says that few writers of distinction have been drawn to it is an interesting statement: with herself and Truman Capote as two that I can name off-the-cuff. Historic appeal to writers of distinction aside, a few things have changed since Oates wrote on the subject: namely, the subject matter and the storyteller’s medium.

Modern True Crime (continued in part two):

Once home to gruesome, grotesque retellings of serial killers’ lives and murderous careers, the genre has pivoted in an interesting, engaging way. Typically an arena for heavyweight investigative journalism (think: In Cold Blood) the genre has become host to the revisionist court case. The revisionist court case, where the author/investigator reports on the investigation and the audience supplants the jury.

Yesterday, the Broncos defeated the Panthers in the Super Bowl. A few times during the game, the referees went to the booth to review a call. This brought to mind something we consider in regard to revisionist procedure: in football, we live in an era of instant replay—where the audience knows better than the referee, or at least thinks that he does…

Note: In part two, let’s consider three important narratives in modern true crime: Serial, The Jinx, and Making a Murderer. With respect to these stories, a look at audience size and critical reception. With audience participation in mind, we’ll examine the legal, cultural consequences of each story and why we like to feel involved.

 

 

 

[1] David Schmid (2010). “True Crime”. In Charles J. Rzepka; Lee Horsley. A Companion to Crime Fiction. John Wiley & Sons.

[2] Ray Surette (2010). Media, Crime and Criminal Justice: Images, Realities, and Policies. Cengage Learning. p. 92.

[3] Oates, Joyce Carol (1999), “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey”, The New York Review of Books, Vol. 46, No. 11, 24 June 1999.

[4] Oates, Joyce Carol (1999), “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey”, The New York Review of Books, Vol. 46, No. 11, 24 June 1999.

by Emma Nash

With graduation fast approaching, college seniors everywhere are faced with the terrifying prospect of their impending adulthood. We have reached the point in our lives at which we must start contributing to the nation’s workforce in one way or the other (excluding of course those of us who have deferred in favor of a few years in grad school). Since I understand the horror of not knowing what the future holds, I want to proffer one potential career option to my fellow soon-to-be graduates: why not try your hand at writing Young Adult fiction? It’s an excellent alternative for those of us who are too creative and free-spirited to sit in an office all day. As a YA author, you’ll never have to worry about things like break room etiquette or finding the perfect pair of black slacks for the office.

Toward this goal, here is my (un)patented how-to guide, “How to Write a YA Novel”:

What you’ll need:

1. Spare time
2. MacBook
3. English degree (recommended, not required)

What your story will need:

1. Setting: should be one of the following—
   1. Dystopian America
   2. Future/Space Dystopia
   3. Mythical/Medieval Dystopia
   4. Washington state
2. A corrupt/ totalitarian government, so rigidly evil as to resolve any ethical grey area concerning the protagonist’s choice to oppose it.
3. Strong Female Protagonist who (choose at least 3 of the following):
   1. Recently turned 16, 17, or 18 years old.
   2. Is beautiful, but doesn’t know it. Be sure that this is one of her defining character traits.
   3. Is very slim, usually despite the fact that she never exercises.
   4. Has special previously undiscovered mystical powers.
   5. Is secretly good at archery.
   6. Is missing one or more parent.
   7. Has at least one dependent (perhaps an archetypically innocent little sister?).
   8. Is a lovable loner.
   9. Has an inconvenient/unnecessarily extravagant name (ex. Selene Stonehenge or Alana Fairmeadow).
   10. Bad attitude masquerading as independence.
   11. Has a distinct hairstyle.
   12. Has secret musical ability.
   13. Looks like the author, but isn’t a vehicle for the author to live out her fantasies.
   14. TRUST ISSUES
   15. Is poor.
   16. Secret princess!?!?
   17. Has undergone a traumatizing childhood experience
   18. Is unfailingly, impractically selfless (enough so to make Ayn Rand roll over in her grave).
   19. Makes attempts at witty banter.
   20. Is terminally ill.
   21. Experiences repressed sexual desire.
   22. Isn’t like other girls (exactly how she is so different, we may never know).
   23. Has disturbingly low self-esteem.
4. Gratuitous angst.
5. A plucky best friend (not necessarily human) (not as attractive as protagonist).
6. A love triangle; be sure to note that:
   1. The love interests should be constantly described as vastly different from one another (be sure to never provide any evidence of substantial dissimilarity of character—differences should be purely cosmetic).
   2. One love interest must be familiar, safe, and overly protective. The other must be new, dangerous, and overly protective.
7. Adults who just don’t understand
8. Place names derived from ancient languages.
9. A larger-than-life moral quandary (the answer to which should be obvious to the reader, but utterly indecipherable to the protagonist).

 

And that’s it! If you can fit these elements into your story, you’re guaranteed success as the next big YA author. Look forward to a life of ease and prestige! Well, at least a life of ease.

Sometimes I find myself dispirited, unsatisfied with my writing and wondering whether I should waste my time with it at all. It is not likely that it will ever find its way into the public eye, and even less so that it will have any sort of effect on the world. After all, there are thousands upon thousands of other would-be novelists and poets out there. The practice of writing becomes a rather egotistical undertaking when one considers the multitudes of hopeful writers there are. What right do I have to assume that I have something more important to say than they?

The answer, of course, is none. I am fully aware of this, but I continue to write; this leads me to wonder what my real motivation is for writing. Seeing as I have already given up on changing the world with my work, I can assume that it is a more selfish, personal reason. This could be any number of things: to express myself, to communicate my ideas, for the simple joy of stringing together words on a page.

George Orwell’s essay “Why I Write” details what the author asserts to be his motivations for setting pen to paper. First, Orwell explains to his reader that he has had a penchant for writing since he was practically a toddler. He admits that he was a lonely child, and that writing came as a kind of remedy to his loneliness. Orwell was constantly composing stories in his head, as he puts it: “I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind.” This is certainly familiar to me, and I’m sure to many who feel the need to write. I remember being a small child, bored at a restaurant and one of the only children in a room full of adults. A waitress bent down and asked me cheerfully what my name was. “Emma, said Emma,” I quickly replied, accidentally vocalizing the story I’d been internally writing.

Orwell says, “I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside.” But, he does not proclaim this habit to be his reason for writing. Instead, he gives his audience a list of much more mature, rational motives. These were formulated after he had completed his lonely childhood and are as follows:

1. Sheer egoism.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.
3. Historical impulse.
4. Political purpose.

These are all very fair and seem to cover most of the reasons for writing that I can imagine. Indeed, Orwell asserts that every writer embraces these objectives to some extent.

However, I am not entirely satisfied with them because they are altogether too logical. What Orwell describes as “a kind of compulsion from outside,” and what I feel as a need to write despite all sense telling me not to, cannot be explained by such a rational list of aims. I believe Orwell recognizes this as well; he writes:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Clearly there is something else, some indefatigable impulse that forces us to write, and write again.

Here I have brought myself to a familiar topic. It is often said that true writers have to write. In her book The Midnight Disease, Alice W. Flaherty examines this idea from a neurological standpoint. She writes about several reasons why a person’s brain might feel the need to write. In most extreme cases, a writer may have hypergraphia, which is increased motivation to write caused by temporal lobe epilepsy. According to Flaherty, the author Fyodor Dostoevsky is believed by some to have been hypergraphic, as evidenced by his “spells of altered consciousness, his mood swings and their free-floating feeling of doom and ecstasy, his religious and philosophical temperament, his altered sexuality, and his overpowering desire to write.”

Of course, it isn’t as if all writers are affected by this extreme condition; Flaherty offers other explanation for those who might not be affected by hypergraphia but feel the need to write. She asserts that many writers, and specifically amateur ones, “are suffering from something: bereavement, illness, exile, ‘narcissistic injury’ to self-esteem, adolescence.” This suffering can trigger “limbic system and temporal lobe activity through their roles in emotion [and] increases the desire to write and communicate.”

This would perhaps explain Orwell’s need to write from a young age; his self-described loneliness could certainly be seen as injury in his adolescence. It might be the cause of his mystery compulsion and my steadfast, illogical desire to write. It might be a hard concept to accept− that my writing is more chemical reaction than noble purpose. On the other hand, it is rather amazing to think that authors such as Dostoevsky and Orwell not only wanted to write, but were compelled to by their own brains as if by an outside force. It lends their stories an element of inevitability and fate.

What do you think? Why do you write?

Check out Elise Petracca’s “Why We Write” below! It deals with a similar topic and might be interesting to read with Flaherty’s ideas in mind.