“…then we give God the glory for it…”: Snake-handling and Pentecostalism

(Note: I’m not sure when I will be able to follow up on my first essay about Michelle Remembers, so no more prophecies concerning when that will be posted. Suffice to say, I am working on it. In the meantime, enjoy this old piece I originally wrote for an American Studies class back in the day.)

R.G. Robins’s Pentecostalism in America (2010)and Ralph W. Hood and W. Paul Williamson’s Them That Believe (2008)are two fairly recent books that offer complementary but non-identical approaches to understanding Pentecostalism in the United States.  Robins is a historian, and endeavors to write a broad history of the movement in a chronological fashion and addresses the central doctrinal features of Pentecostalism as well as its distinctive practices.  He ably contextualizes Pentecostalism and illustrates its adaptability and role in modern U.S. culture.  Ralph W. Hood and W. Paul Williamson are psychologists who take a more interdisciplinary approach and focus exclusively on one aspect of the movement- serpent-handling.  Serpent-handling has not been a feature of any mainstream Pentecostal church since the early 1920s, though support for the practice appeared in Pentecostal periodicals through the 1940s.  It is today a practice associated exclusively with renegade sects throughout the Appalachian region of the U.S., and stands in marked contrast with the mainstream and global respectability attained by dominant Pentecostal denominations.  With its central ritual involving the handling of dangerous, venomous reptiles, serpent-handling sects are positioned as being in opposition to the dominant culture, depending on the family unit (kin-group formations, if one prefers) for its relative durability and longevity.  Hood and Williamson attempt to understand the appeal and function of this ritual from every perspective, and draw upon a range of disciplines within the social sciences and humanities in order to illuminate it from multiple conceptual angles.  The first portion of their book describes the history of Pentecostalism, and in many respects reads like an abridged version of Robins’ effort, and then moves on to a history of serpent-handling sects in Appalachia, pointing out the parallels with long-standing folk traditions.  From there, the authors describe the practice of snake-handling itself, and its meaning as a ritual.  Drawing on a psychoanalytic and evolutionary framework to explain the allure of the serpent as both sign and symbol, Hood and Williamson proffer an intriguing take on the practice which places the emphasis squarely on lived experience; William James is alluded to more than once. 

The value, I feel, of considering these two texts together has already been hinted.  Robins basically offers a ‘macro’ view of Pentecostalism, investigating the movement as a social and historical phenomenon with populist roots that eventually became institutionalized.  The role of institutionalization is of crucial concern when considering his history next to Hood and Williamson’s study.  According to Hood and Williamson, Pentecostalism’s arrival in the mainstream was the main driving force in the arrival of serpent-handling-as-sect.  Serpent-handling, in addition to providing a glimpse of a more ‘micro’ understanding of a religious movement and sensibility through the practice of rituals amongst small groups of people, serves as the oppositional shadow of the larger movement, a schismatic sect that brings to light the social, philosophical, and theological divisions within a religious movement.  The essence of the division is Biblical textual authority and the role it plays in understanding Pentecostalism’s most salient characteristic and ritual centerpiece- the Sign.  The reason the Division exists at all is social and political.  Biblical literalism makes intense demands on religious followers that are at odds with mainstream American culture and the general ebb and flow of modernity.  As a practice that can maim and kill, snake-handling will always, in all probability, be marginal both within the context of Pentecostalism and the cultural life of the United States, but as Hood and Williamson observe, prevalence is not the only standard that can be used to assess a religious ritual’s vitality; longevity is also important, and by that standard snake-handling has more than kept pace with mainstream Pentecostalism.  Considering the mainstream and marginal in Pentecostalism, as well as the larger social reality in relation to private belief and the often contentious relationship between social and religious values (something often overlooked in more secular-minded considerations of religion) will together be the principle focus of my analysis of Pentecostalism in America and Them That Believe.

                Pentecostalism in America, as already indicated, is a general history of the Pentecostal movement in the United States, a succinct but thorough overview of its historical and cultural roots, its development throughout the twentieth century, a discussion of its key foundational figures, and a speculation of its current import and possible future.  The trajectory of Pentecostalism has been an assured but by no means inevitable sprint to the mainstream, a religious sensibility that emerged as a reaction against the disorienting rootlessness inflicted by modernity.  As indicated by the name (The Pentecost refers to the moment when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles), Pentecostalism drew from the teachings and experiences of the early church and was (and is) deeply concerned with the primeval origins of Christianity.  It is of a set of faith traditions that seek to purify and improve present conditions through a thorough apprehension of the primitive origins of faith.  Pentecostalism placed a strong emphasis on sanctification and the occurrence it sought for most vigorously was baptism- or possession- of believers by the Holy Spirit.  The manifestation of the Holy Spirit was invariably thought to be accompanied by a visual sign, and indeed, the Sign, properly understood, would come to dominate most features of Pentecostal worship.  Although there was much early uncertainty about what constituted a proper sign, it was ultimately- and intuitively- the Bible that would provide guidance to the faithful.  Early founders of the Pentecostal movement, such as Charles Parham, would come to favor glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, as the most conspicuous and persuasive indicator of possession by the Holy Spirit.  The popular stereotype of the ecstatic Pentecostal follower gibbering in a strange language has its origins in Parham’s insistence of glossolalia as the most important sign with scriptural support.  Specifically, Mark 16:17-18 names five signs that the resurrected Christ said would identify believers; speaking in tongues was just one of these.  The centrality of glossolalia is understandable considering that the remaining four signs are either extremely dangerous (taking up serpents, drinking poison) or are difficult to demonstrate in a social setting (healing the sick, casting out devils).  The perceived incompleteness of what would become mainstream Pentecostalism’s approach to the signs would set the stage for the schismatic biblical literalism of the snake-handling tradition.

Robins is forthright in his approach to history, indicating his possible bias from the introduction of his book by quoting the old aphorism that all history is autobiography.  Being raised in the Pentecostal tradition, he brings an insider’s perspective on the practices of the various churches, and places a strong emphasis on the diversity and adaptability of Pentecostal institutions.  In fact, according to Robins, it is the fundamental disunity of the movement that poses the biggest challenge to understanding it, and it is only by uncovering “an organic relation to a common past” (Robins 1) that Pentecostalism, as such, clicks into focus.  The origins lie in the Holiness movement of the late 19^th century, which was principally a Methodist school keen on reviving a Wesleyan understanding of sanctification.  With the benefit of hindsight, the holiness movement’s religious methods and rituals can be seen as being of greater significance than its theology.  The chief organizational practice was the camp meeting, a passionate and fraternal setting that both linked the faithful to a less divided and chaotic past and fostered fellow-feeling that was badly sought after in post-bellum America.  The sensibility was very much in reaction to the modern world, characterized by ethnic tension, urban rootlessness, and industrial-capitalist exploitation.  Compounding the sense of alienation was the often break-neck pace of social and technological change.  Renewal movements generally offered solace through a return to origins, with the early, 1^st century church serving as the exemplar and ideal.  Pentecostalism promised a return to the early church days of miracles.  This vision, it would seem to me, offers a very particular understanding of religious community, both in terms of organizational code and practical function.  Holiness gave people a sense of unity through a certain conception of the past that could be manifested, courtesy of the Holy Spirit, in the present, with the organizing metaphor of purity imputed to the Christian faith’s historical origins; Pentecostalism offered a means of confronting the problems of the day, ordered along the premise that modern life was tainted by myriad moral impurities.  The egalitarian approach and emphasis on spiritual autonomy ultimately doomed the Holiness movement to an early incoherence, but its energy would last into the early twentieth century when a number of preachers and theologians imbued the tendency present in the camp meetings with an appropriately symbolic significance, and empowered Pentecostalism with its own terminology.  Specifically, Charles Parham placed a new-found theological emphasis on glossolalia, which granted Pentecostalism a strong evangelical tool (Speaking in a different language without instruction was supposed to facilitate evangelicalism and thus herald Christ’s return.), a persuasive indicator of the presence of the Holy Spirit, and “the seal of the Bride of Christ” (Robins 23), or the marker of the true church.  Parham’s influence granted Pentecostalism a pronounced eschatological tendency, which was hardly alien to Evangelicalism, then or now.  Pentecostalism, perhaps more than any other faith, understood the evangelizing power of the Sign; it is what would bring unbelievers to God.  Speaking in tongues would not achieve widespread recognition until William Seymour, Parham’s African-American protégé, established a Mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles.  From there, both Pentecostalism and its litany of signs would expand, eventually reaching every corner of the country (and beyond) and encompassing all five of the signs indicated in Mark 16:17-18. 

    Robins mentions the practice of snake-handling only three times in his history.  He is surprisingly non-judgmental, but predictably confers on it marginal status.  Clearly, the ritual cannot be ignored because of its notoriety, but sensible people can continue to doubt its overall importance to the Pentecostal movement.  Robins, like most scholars, locates the arrival of snake-handling as a religious ritual (as opposed to a folk tradition or one-off manifestation of religious enthusiasm) with the arrival of Pentecostalism in the American South.  He offers a persuasive but incomplete explanation for snake-handling’s Southern roots- “Southern Pentecostalism stood out from its regional peers for its emphasis on sanctification, its ethical rigorism (sic), and its strict church discipline.  In addition, the Pentecostal tendencies toward literalism and emotional intensity received their fullest expression here…  the region gave birth to the phenomenon of serpent handling, a Pentecostal subculture that… has etched one of the movement’s most enduring popular images” (44-45). Robins would seem to link the peculiarities of Sothern Pentecostalism to the peculiarities of the Southern character, and neglects the specifics of what Southern culture may have brought to Pentecostalism.  Hood and Williamson draw attention to the possible significance of folk traditions and previous isolated incidents of snake-handling at revivalist meetings across the South.  Robins correctly emphasizes how Southern conservatism magnified the already literalist tendencies of Pentecostalism; if all five of the signs described in Mark 16 were to be put into practice as a religious and ethical mandate anywhere, it would probably be in Appalachia.  What is even more remarkable is the degree of tolerance with which the practice was met by establishment Pentecostals of the time.  Robins writes, “Leaders… were slow to condemn the practice because of its textual basis and its apparent validation of their claim that all of the apostolic signs and wonders had been restored among them.  Condemnation would eventually come, but only after serpent handling had gone unchecked for several years” (45).  This would seem to indicate a tension within the early Pentecostal movement between religious fidelity and social utility.  It is a problem faced by many, if not most, religious movements; the conflict between concerning oneself with business beyond the physical, material world and maintaining an organization that is adaptable to the unavoidable demands of said world.  Snake-handling illustrates that the manifestation of this conflict occurs along (communal) ritual lines.  Ritual serves as the point where a religion’s metaphysics and spiritual orientation can be made manifest to any and all observers; it is the public face of a religion’s spirituality.  Pentecostalism, right from its inception, had pronounced fundamentalist tendencies, and the textual authority of the Bible was- and for the most part still is- regarded as absolute.  Since all of Pentecostalism’s religious signs (the foundation of Pentecostal ritual) have textual origins, this makes any “selective” take on scripture extraordinarily difficult.  However, to gain mainstream respectability in a modern American (later global) context, selective understandings of scripture became necessary.  In this respect, snake-handling sects can be regarded as the religious purity that mainstream Pentecostalism has chosen to reject, although Hood and Williamson make it clear in their study that any generalization about snake-handling in relation to mainstream Pentecostalism should be made with caution.

Them That Believe, in contrast to Robins’s work, is not strictly a history, but an interdisciplinary analysis that draws on historical, sociological, anthropological, psychological, and neurophysiological approaches to studying a specific religious ritual in its appropriate context.  Hood and Williamson announce at the outset that they are sympathetic to snake-handling sects, but do not practice the faith itself or share in its religious convictions.  This again provides a contrast to Robins, who brought an insider’s perspective to his study of Pentecostalism.  Them That Believe positions itself as an understanding outsider’s take on religious praxis.  The methodology employed by Williamson and Hood  is multi-faceted, as befits a resolutely interdisciplinary work, but the most important empirical evidence brought forth by their study was culled from several years’ worth of travel around the Appalachian region, visiting snake-handling churches as ‘participant observers’ and conducting extensive interviews with practitioners.  For this reason, it may be most useful to regard Hood and Williamson’s book as a work of anthropology, and the structure and on-the-ground functionality of the snake-handling ritual is given primary focus.  The early chapters of Them That Believe, however, are historical overviews, considering the history of Pentecostalism generally, the practice of snake-handling specifically, and the initial acceptance and eventual rejection of snake-handling by major Pentecostal churches.  There is some overlap between the material covered by Robins and Williamson and Hood, but for fairly intuitive reasons, Hood and Williamson give more attention to theology and ritual, though they share Robins’ understanding of the importance of region in accounting for Pentecostalism’s diversity and adaptability. 

The third and fourth chapters of Them That Believe contain the material of the greatest historical interest, not only in the context of Hood and Williamson’s study, but of the snake-handling tradition generally.  Snake-handling cannot be traced to any one figure in particular, but the man most commonly given credit for popularizing snake-handling and decisively establishing it as a religious tradition is George Went Hensley.  In yet another ironic historical turn, the most profoundly anti-modern incarnation of a profoundly anti-modern religious movement gained its early notoriety through the decidedly modern phenomenon of media sensationalism.  Hensley, a minister ordained at a prominent Pentecostal church called the Church of God, came to be troubled by the Church of God’s selective reading of Mark 16:17-18, which, as indicated previously, stipulated five signs that would signify true belief in Christ.  Although the specifics are uncertain owing to a dearth of textual evidence, it is commonly held that Hensley, while ministering at Owl Hollow in rural Tennessee, retired to the peak of a nearby mountain and came upon a rattlesnake, which he then took up without harm to himself.  Between 1910 and 1914, Hensley developed a reputation as an intensely charismatic preacher who regularly handled dangerous, venomous snakes, and he received a great deal of attention from local and national newspapers and magazines.  Hensley was by no means the first snake-handler; it is probable that, as a youth, he witnessed a young woman named Nancy Kleinieck handle serpents at a coal camp revival.  The handling of snakes as a sign of devotion was not without precedent in Appalachia, but it is generally agreed that Hensley’s charismatic religious work, backed by the perceived theological authority of emerging Pentecostalism, effectively paved the way for serpent handling as a viable religious tradition.  The history provided by Hood and Williamson is instructive for a number of reasons.  It demonstrates the process by which a religious practice becomes a tradition or ritual.  Historical authority (in this case textually mediated) articulated by a prominent figure of the faith joins with the right social milieu to create the impression of a divine manifestation, or something like a sacrament.  Evangelicalism provides a narrative foundation which makes the practice of the ritual seem coherent and desirable. 

Inevitably, the intrinsic danger of handling venomous reptiles brought this newly arrived ritual into conflict with the wider culture.  In 1936, a young man named Alfred Weaver attempted to handle a rattlesnake at one of Hensley’s sermons, and received multiple bites that would prove fatal.  This event is commonly thought to mark the beginning of Hensley and the tradition’s troubled legal status; as the twentieth century went on, more laws were passed forbidding snake-handling.  Presently, every Southern state with the exception of West Virginia has laws restricting the practice of handling dangerous snakes.  Hensley himself would later leave the Church of God to found his own church, the Church of God with Signs Following, and eventually die from a snakebite. 

What is remarkable is that the mainstream Church of God and its sister church, the Church of God of Prophecy, actively endorsed snake-handling for a time, citing its textual justification.  Official condemnation from the Church of God would occur in the 1920s, but as late as 1943 prominent Pentecostal leaders defended the practice.  M.A. Tomlinson, the son of Church of God of Prophecy founder A.J. Tomlinson, wrote in an editorial for a Pentecostal periodical, “We do not make a show of taking up serpents, but if they are brought to us and God’s power is present to manifest this sign that follows believers, then we give god the glory for it” (qtd. in Hood and Williamson 54).  Although the process was uneven, mainstream Pentecostalism would eventually abandon snake-handling entirely; indeed, many Pentecostal churches condemned it from the beginning.  Hood and Williamson argue that a useful model for understanding the schism between mainstream Pentecostalism and snake-handling sects is church-sect theory.  Church-sect theory, though imperfect, helps explain a counterintuitive fact; that the most conservative, high-demand churches are the ones that frequently possess the most longevity and vitality.  One would think intense religious requirements, whether social, personal, or conceptual, and their attendant stressors would run the risk of alienating church members over time, but this is not the case at all.  The members of sects, in contrast to churches, are almost exclusively voluntary in their association (one can be merely born into a church) and experience a great deal of tension with the dominant culture; inasmuch as this tension is distinctive, sects have a means of preserving themselves and their traditions, as the like-mindedness of the sect members in conjunction with their estrangement from a disapproving mainstream culture reinforces the centrality of the sect as the basis for social identity and a sense of belonging.  Importantly, Hood and Williamson observe, “…it… is important to recognize that as some sects grow by abandoning high-cost behaviors, a residual group that maintains these behaviors survives- although it may be seen as less successful when emphasis is on growth rather than survival…” (58) The high-cost behavior associated with snake-handling is one of the aspects of the faith that encourages its preservation.  Legal prohibitions add to the cost of snake-handling, ironically reinforcing the dynamic that ensures the longevity of controversial schismatic sects.  When viewed in the light of the history of Pentecostalism, this pattern reveals a compelling truth about Pentecostalism and perhaps religious movements generally.  It would seem that the features of a faith that enable its growth are not necessarily the same features that guarantee its preservation.  Pentecostalism got its start and early rapid growth by being relatively egalitarian, flexible, and adaptable, but some of the longest-lasting and most iconic traditions within the faith are the least flexible or amenable to alteration or compromise.

No consideration of snake-handling would be complete without an analysis of the practice of handling snakes itself.  Hood and Williamson helpfully devote a chapter to a more worldly consideration of the serpent as both sign and symbol (The distinction between the two concepts and how they interact through the ritual is crucial.) across cultures.  The snake is commonly associated with death and the phallus, although many traditions, such as Romanticism, have associated it with knowledge, the marginal, or the transgressive.  The fear of snakes would seem to be a human universal, probably with evolutionary origins.  The symbolic value of the snake takes on a special power when it is also manifested as a sign in the context of the snake-handling tradition.  The experience of handling the snake itself as part of a religious service is preceded, in the words of the believers themselves, as an acutely felt desire; as a ‘wanting to do.’  This in turn is replaced by fear and anticipation as the reptile is approached, and a sense of elation and victory when it is taken up without bodily harm.  It is important to understand that snake-handlers regard their practice as an imperative, or as something they must do.  They do not consider it as proof of faith and they do not expect to necessarily come away from the act unscathed.  The signs are followed because they are divine orders, what marks ‘them that believe.’  The appeal of the practice to believers is a direct connection with God.  In every instance, it is God, and not the believer, that manifests the sign.

Hood and Williamson conclude their study with an evaluation of the current state of snake-handling churches.  Because of the legal prohibitions on the practice in most states, many snake-handlers are reluctant to openly identify themselves.  As a consequence, the exact number of adherents to snake-handling is difficult to ascertain.  The typical church has very low membership, usually about 10-20 people.  A larger one may have up to 100 participants.  The most compelling point made in this final section of the book concerns the role of the family in maintaining the practice of snake-handling.  Because no mainstream institution supports the practice anymore, snake-handlers are dependent on the smaller but nonetheless powerful foundational unit of the family to practice and preserve their faith.  It is the practice, backed by familial support and granted narrative coherence thanks to both scripture and evangelical teaching, that preserves snake-handling as a faith tradition.  When attempting to understand snake-handling in relation to Pentecostalism generally, a number of challenges present themselves, but I feel this quote concerning the crisis of Pentecostalism on the eve of the First World War may capture something of the essence: “Pentecostalism was a bumptious, contrarian movement with sectarian instincts.  Pride, purity, and proof-texts dictated ‘separation from the world.’  But an extroverted, missionary-minded movement like Pentecostalism could never truly separate from the world it defined itself over against yet lived within and sought to save” (Robins 49-50).  In short, I feel it may be helpful to understand snake-handling as the embodiment of all of Pentecostalism’s most ‘separatist’ tendencies, the seeking of religious purity among a select few, even to the point of death, in relative seclusion.  The regional and theological coloring this separatist movement has taken on can give some indication about the character of the religious movement generally beyond its perceived, dominant socio-political aspects.  Purity would seem to be stronger at the margins of a faith, and in the case of Pentecostalism, faith is the conquest of death through signs and symbols.             

Works Cited

Hood, Ralph W. and W. Paul Williamson. Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian
Serpent-Handling Tradition. Berkeley: University of California, 2008. Print.
Robins, R.G. Pentecostalism in America. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2010. Print.

“…the rules of blood would not permit…”: Insu Heinz Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother

(Note: I am a little delayed on the completion of the follow-up post for my reading of Michelle Remembers, so here’s something to tide you over that was originally set to be published next week. I’m gunning for some point during the first half of next week for the second part of my Michelle Remembers analysis.)

(Another Note: I originally wrote this piece while in grad school, hence the fidelity to MLA style and citations.  At the time I wrote it, my political orientation was a bit more ‘incipiently radical’ than it is today, so I am not sure I would stand by every assertion made here now.  For example, today I don’t think I’d characterize the relationship between [South] Korea and the USA as ‘exploitative and neo-colonial,’ though it is still undoubtedly unequal.  I nonetheless prefer to keep this paper more-or-less in its original state for coherence purposes, so I present it here with only minor edits.)

Insu Heinz Fenkl’s novel Memories of My Ghost Brother is one of those helpful texts that announces its thematic intentions from the title page; it is indeed a story about memory, with a special emphasis placed on memory’s relation to the family dynamic.  Specifically, the narrative of Memories concerns a young boy, presumably drawn heavily from the author’s own experiences and subjectivity, named Insu Fenkl who lives in a Korean ‘camptown,’ a community in Korea situated near a U.S. military base during the 1960s and 70s.  Insu is the son of a Korean woman with a possible- if not probable- history of prostitution and a German-American army sergeant.  Although the generic conventions of Insu’s story strongly suggest the memoir (and indeed, Memories functions quite well within the parameters of the memoir form), there are numerous digressions which possess an emotional or generic character not typical of that literary mode.  The most conspicuous of these digressions are the numerous quasi-moralistic folk tales told throughout the novel, coupled with dreams and fantasies similarly evocative of the fantastic and supernatural.  For Fenkl, the act of remembering (The desire to remember no doubt led to his selection of the memoir as his ‘base’ genre.) is intrinsically creative, but also imbued with a sense of personal and familial responsibility.  He articulates this literary approach near the conclusion of his novel: “I went trying to name the dead to give them peace… and if I could not name them with a word, I could name them with their stories” (269).  Over the span of his narrative, Fenkl recounts the deaths of a number of friends and family members who had a significant influence over the course of his childhood.  It is well worth noting that all of Insu’s dead friends and relatives are treated to creative re-imaginings of their lives and struggles, or are otherwise associated with creative narrative styles.  The young baby and maid who fall down a well are envisioned by Insu as lonely, frightened ghosts.  His friend James is thought to have been deliberately drowned by his mother (This theory is never verified, but it fits Insu’s emerging conception of the social dynamics of his community.) and his uncle, and later his father, are fond of retelling Korean and Vietnamese folk tales as a means of inculcating moral values and the capacity for inventive expression.  Fenkl’s articulation of the various personalities he encounters through stories amounts to a means of him negotiating a necessarily conflicted identity.  As a mixed-race child growing up in Korea near a U.S. military base, Insu is in a liminal state marked by the legacy of war, racism, imperialism, and much else besides.  He must endeavor to situate himself socially and historically to banish the acute sense of isolation that comes when one does not comfortably or obviously fit into any one particular culture or society. 

For this inquiry, I will explore how stories, dreams, and fantasies function within Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother.  I argue that, although Insu is chiefly concerned with untangling his conflicted subjectivity, his imaginings and the stories he encounters offer intriguing ways of understanding and describing the Korean American, Amerasian, and mixed-race experiences, as well as how such experiences and troubled identities enable original approaches to literary expression. Novel approaches to the literary in turn can aid in conferring a sense of cohesion to a complex, multifaceted, and divided sense of self.

            As indicated previously, the chief purpose of Insu’s narrative is to negotiate his conflicted identity and social position, and his principle method is creative remembering, or memorializing key personalities through stories.  In order to fully understand the nature of Insu’s troubled state, it would be helpful to say something about the specific social and historical circumstances in which he found himself throughout his childhood.  Insu spent his childhood years in a Korean camptown during the late 1960’s with the politics of the Vietnam War looming in the background.  Camptowns constituted socially controversial zones that were characterized by prostitution, black marketeering, crime, and a legacy of displacement.  In Ji-Yeon Yuh’s account of Korean war brides and ‘western princesses,’ the historical context of the camptown is ably described- “Because U.S. bases were one of the few steady sources of income in the poverty-stricken years of the 1940’s through 1970’s, the camptowns attracted not only poor women, including war widows, and orphans seeking to make a living, but also entrepreneurs and criminals” (241).  This created an illicit atmosphere that was often dangerous to those who had to live and work in one of these zones.  Fenkl describes the experiences of his literary alter-ego as very often being precarious, and he becomes involved with everything from petty theft to black marketeering, and he has some memorably confused and anxious encounters with some prostitutes.  His family was certainly not spared from the dysfunction.  Insu’s mother, aunt, and cousins all need to do what they need to survive, including working the black market and possibly the meat market.  Insu and his family exist in an insular, Korean-speaking enclave with many other families with mixed-race children, with duty keeping Insu’s father away most of the time.  They are, to varying degrees, estranged from both the culture of the United States and the culture of Korea.  It is quite possible that Insu’s mother’s position as a camptown woman (Though not necessarily a prostitute, her association with the camptown and her having a white husband and mixed-race child would be enough to cause people to perceive her as a camptown woman.) has defined the family’s estranged state.  As Yuh has stated, “Their connection to the envied and admired America, however, does not save camptown women and military brides from contempt and ostracism” (244). The reason for this contempt?  Yuh posits that the camptown dynamic served- and continues to serve- as a constant reminder of the essentially exploitative, unequal, and neo-colonial relationship between South Korea and the United States.  By denying the Korean military bride and holding the western princess in contempt, South Koreans can effectively maintain (seemingly) self-sustaining national identities that are autonomous and conform to conventional patriarchal conceptions of the state.  Fenkl’s inside narrative does much to dismantle such a tenuous perspective.  In a particularly vivid account of his experience inside and around the base, Insu notes, “I had walked down alleys where girls not much older than me would suck a GI’s penis for a few dollars, where boys my age would let a man fuck them and then pretend to be their family friend.  I had seen a man stabbed in the gut with a sharpened afro pick, had my shoulder slashed by a fast straight razor, smashed a thief’s head with a brick” (249).  Preceding this description is a disquieting anecdote about a young Korean boy from the area who finds a piece of unexploded ordinance on an American firing range and blows himself up.  Insu, utilizing his standard imaginative method, imagines the obliterated child as a ghost, unconscious of its own post-death state and pleading to the living for attention.  Tellingly, the standard living Korean’s reaction to the ghost’s presence in Insu’s account is in keeping with Yuh’s interpretation- they ignore him and try to banish him from memory. 

SOUTH KOREA. 1961. Tae Song Dong. Women entertaining GIs.

            Insu’s ghosts are never just metaphors for memory but narrative schemes in themselves.  The conception Insu has of storytelling seemingly emerges from three distinct sources- folklore, literature, and dreams.  These three brands of evocation determine how ghosts and the memories they come to represent are depicted in Memories of My Ghost Brother.  This in turn allows Insu to re-imagine his conflicted Amerasian identity apart from the exploitation and alienation which dominates most of his lived, conscious experiences.  The ghost which comes to have the final word on this point is the ghost of the title, one whose ghostly qualities may very well completely reside in Insu’s imagination.  Kuristo, or Christopher, is envisioned at first in a dream as a protecting or liberating force.  Insu suspects this specter may possess a flesh and blood analogue, and questions his older cousin, Haesuni, on the topic.  It turns out Insu’s mother had a previous mixed-race baby named Kuristo of unknown paternity (more evidence of prostitution) whom she was forced to give up upon marrying Insu’s father.  Kuristo was adopted and sent to America, and his ultimate fate remains unknown to the family.  In the form of a ghostly vision, he comes to symbolize Insu and his mother’s fantasy of America.  Insu remains ambivalent about his American half and the United States generally throughout the novel, and for the most part asserts a Korean identity.  This is probably best exhibited by a moment when Insu compares the Christian faith to which his father attempts to convert him to his native Buddhism, “…the American religion I could not understand…  I believed in ghosts and ancestors and portentous dreams of serpents and dragons because those were the things I could touch in my world” (Fenkl 241). This makes explicit that Insu’s approach to storytelling and his understanding of reality and experience is closely tied to an Eastern, Korean identity.  Kuristo is the intrusive American side of his identity, the part forcibly and unwilling exiled to the West, and one which had to be disavowed in order for him to live and think as he does. When Insu departs for America at his story’s conclusion, the connection between Kuristo and the unrealized, largely inscrutable American half of Insu’s sense of self is suggested: “And in the end, just before the departure… I would look back to see Kuristo waving a sad-eyed goodbye.  He is walking away from me into that next world… I am too terrified to run forward and look at his face because I know it will look too much like my own…  Kuristo, my ghost brother, gone already into the Westward Land” (Fenkl 270).  Using the metaphor of a ghost passing its way into the afterlife, Insu imagines his brother transitioning into the ambivalent, still-imagined (though not idealized) sphere of an American identity.  Kuristo’s exit marks the departure of a certain imaginary America, and to follow is the lived reality.  Naturally, this process is accompanied by a great deal of ambivalence, with the promise that Korea will still be central to Insu’s identity: “…I had wondered about America… [but] I knew… that I would long to return to the place of my birth and the language of my mother” (Fenkl 269).

            Insu did not arrive at his conception of ghosts by accident.  Numerous people and forces pass on instructive stories, often of a supernatural character, to him over the course of the narrative.  The most memorably grotesque of these tales comes from Insu’s uncle, Hyongbu, who delights in retelling old Korean folk tales as a means of instruction.  He tells Insu three such tales at different points in the novel, one involving a man who marries a woman who, unbeknownst to him, is a blood-sucking fox demon who makes short work of his family, friends, and neighbors and who transforms into a mosquito after the man successfully burns her alive, another about a tiger who rescues a virtuous man from imminent disaster, and another about a woman who undergoes hideous trials, including being raped by several goblins, in order to cure her sick husband and ensure his future success as a great ginseng hunter.  Hyongbu clearly wishes for these stories to be instructive, and importantly insists on an ancestral connection between the stories’ characters and his and Insu’s family.  For example, the story about the great ginseng hunter is supposedly about Hyongbu’s great uncle.  This approach would seem to suggest that Insu’s uncle needs to recalibrate cultural memory along folkloric and supernatural lines in a manner quite similar to Insu himself; creative re-imaginings of the past inform the coherence of their understanding of Korean identity. And despite the didactic aspects of the ginseng hunter story, Hyongbu becomes strangely recalcitrant when Insu presses him to explain the significance of it and the other stories he tells.  After imparting the tale of the ginseng hunter, Insu’s uncle tells him, “You always asks me what it means… and I always try to explain to you that the meaning of the story is in the story.  If I could tell you what it meant, I’d just tell you the meaning and throw the story away” (Fenkl 228).  Insu then alludes to Aesop’s Fables, a volume which is very explicit about the moral intentions of folk tales and myths.  Here we see two strands of Insu’s creative development, or the cultivation of memory- the traditional, oral folktale and printed literature; we won’t be distracted by the irony that Aesop’s stories originated in an oral tradition and that most of their written versions seek to mimic that tradition.  Insu’s uncle supplies some advice on how to best appreciate the significance of stories, clearly favoring the oral mode: “Well, professor Aesop can eat my shit.  And you can wipe my ass with the pages of your book.  We tell stories because they’re meant to be told.  Just remember the story, and you can worry about the meaning later, understand?” (Fenkl 228) In other words, storytelling is the means by which memory is preserved, while the meaning or significance assigned to it is deferred, and can only be recovered through an act of remembering that the story itself makes possible.  While it is quite debatable that this principle applies to the grotesque folk tales told by Hyongbu- they impart fairly unambiguous messages about the value of patriarchal control over women, the notable exception being the parable of the heroic tiger- Insu nonetheless comes to apply this lesson to his recollection of the living people he has encountered or imagined, especially the ones who are dead by the end of the novel.  An especially powerful example comes about concerning the fate of his play-friend James and a decision made by Changmi’s mother.  James, who was the son of a black GI and a Korean prostitute, mysteriously drowns in a shallow creek, and not long afterward, his mother marries a white GI and moves to the U.S.  It is speculated, though not confirmed, that James’s mother murdered her son in order to free herself and relocate.  Changmi’s mother, on the other hand, expresses the desire to give her probably infertile black GI husband a child by sleeping with another black GI.  The reader never learns if she goes through with this plan, but Insu supplies a narrative and an interpretation for both women that ties right back into the racist and neo-colonialist arrangement that colors all aspects of life in the camptowns.  He reflects, “The irony and the symmetry of what [James’s] mother and Changmi’s mother had done never struck me until twenty years later.  How pragmatic was that balancing act James’ mother destroying her half-Black son to find a white husband, Changmi’s mother plotting to bear a half-black son to keep her new black husband” (Fenkl 232).  Not content to merely draw an association between the two, Insu crafts an instructive lesson from the (possible) events that brings his observations into the realm of elegy.  “It was unfortunate that the rules of blood would not permit one mother to hand her son to the other, to keep the balance sheet in the world of the living and not in the sad realms of ghosts and memory.  I would learn that women… will traffic in children for the mythic promise of America.  And they would look back in regret from the shores of the Westward Land” (Fenkl 232).  Obviously, this passage would be echoed at the novel’s conclusion, and evokes a tragic melancholy about the degree of Korean-ness that must be sacrificed in pursuit of a possibly illusory American-ness.  The sacrifice, if not coerced, is certainly made under strain and in the context of an unequal power relationship.  Most striking is that it goes right to the heart of the family unit; the nation state has its claim over familial bonds and their dissolution or formation.  The rule of “blood,” as Fenkl indicates, is what makes the nation’s claim tragic. 

            Young Insu’s capacity for interpretation and reimagining causes him to outpace the rather simplistic ideological tendencies of his uncle’s stories.  As already indicated, the purpose of Hyongbu’s stories, despite his claims to the contrary, are within the realm of the traditional understanding of the folk tale.  It has been observed that “’…profound messages’ are usually embedded in folklores, and a close examination of such tales leads to a revelation of ‘a people’s moral principles’” (Propp qtd. in Park). The most basic value conveyed by Hyongbu’s two longest stories is a validation of the patriarchal family unit, and as Joohyun Park observes, these have a larger significance to the social order: 

[T]he folk tales play an important role in Memories in that through the tales, the readers are introduced to the common sentiment toward the ‘fox girls’ i.e. ‘Western Princesses…’  Hyongbu, resembles men in the post war Korean society who were unwilling to admit that the women’s ‘fall’ derives not from their individual morality, but from the very situation in which Koreans had to live under the influence of the American army residing in Korea. (127)

Hyongbu does not seem to have much love for the Americans, at various times referring to them as ‘Yankee bastards’ and similar epithets, but can still find fault with the women in his life and the decisions they make.  The simple reason for this is probably the fact that Hyongbu’s traditional masculine role has been much diminished due to his failing health and present circumstances.  However, whatever the bigotry and grotesqueries of his tales, Hyongbu’s fables are notable for their conspicuous Korean-ness, drawing on characters and archetypes that are either from or have special resonance within Korean culture (the fox demon, Buddha).  Also, by insisting on a connection between the characters in the folk tales and his own family, Hyongbu establishes a degree of continuity with this imagined Korean past and his present moment, insisting on the continued vitality of traditional Korean values despite the American neo-colonial presence.  The transference of such values from Hyongbu to Insu cannot be uncomplicated though because of the inevitable modern and American influences Insu is routinely exposed to.  His father, a well-read man with a love for literature, exposes him to Western texts like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, and films like Night of the Living Dead play routinely at ASCOM.  Such Western influences are reflected not only in allusions to certain texts, but in the structure of Fenkl’s novel itself.  As the critic Kun Jong Lee observed, “In Memories of My Ghost Brother, Fenkl twists key episodes and political contexts of [Rudyard Kipling’s] Kim to emphasize the continuity of the Great Game in Asia…  At the same time, he resurrects the native voice silenced by colonial discourse…” (320) The oral tradition of the East is imbedded into the literary tradition of the West and colored by the lived experiences of the author.  This kind of genre experimentation constitutes the creative act of remembering that I have been attempting to elucidate throughout this paper.  It is a project that is both personal and political, and involves re-orienting problematic Western and Eastern narrative modes in relation to real world events and human subjectivities.  It is worth noting that when Insu’s father gives him a copy of Kim, Insu does not immediately read it, and so does not understand the numerous references that his father makes to it over the years.  It is only after Insu reads the novel in young adulthood that he comes to understand its relevance to his father.  By incorporating the then-unread Kim into the structure of his novel which recounts events from a deeply personal perspective- events that could not have had any relation to Kim at the time they transpired- Fenkl develops one of his key themes; namely, that memory determines the emotional significance of events, and that the act of remembering is an intrinsically creative, narrative-oriented endeavor that prevents the lived experiences from ever being recovered in their purity.  This lack of purity need not be deplored, however, as the inventive dimension of remembering is what lends human beings the possibility of forging coherent identities.  Just the same, it is important to recall that the process is also politically charged, and forged in zones of struggle and conflict; Kim is emphatically not a politically neutral text.  By using it in conjunction with his Uncle’s folk tales and his own dream visions, Fenkl successfully critiques a certain Western literary brand of memory while simultaneously making it more pluralistic.  Kun Jung Lee provides a perfect example by comparing two aspects of Kim and Memories pertaining to colonial rule of subject populations.  She observes that the major characters of Kim are all members of groups subjugated by the British Empire, but the circumstances of their story eventually make them happy and content with British rule- the ultimate colonialist fantasy.  In Memories, Insu’s father recounts his experience training the Montagnards, the people of the central highlands of Vietnam, in the war effort against the Viet Cong.  Significantly, he uses a Montagnard folk tale to describe their displeasure with the Americans and several other groups that have persecuted them over the years; it is a story about how monkeys became alienated from humans (previously treasured and equal companions) through repeated human betrayal.  Not only does this convey displeasure with colonial rule, a noticeable reversal from the Kipling novel, but it does so in the voice of the colonized, placed in the mouth of the colonizer in an ironic reversal of Kipling’s happy ventriloquism (327).  Here we see again how Fenkl utilizes Eastern oral traditions to both subvert and expand Western literary forms to a political purpose. 

            The political component of Fenkl’s novel goes to the very core of the narrative voice, which is deeply introspective, thoughtfully attempting to piece together the fragmented structure of memory.  Fenkl’s political concerns are actually personified by Insu, the character who, as the critic Hyungji Park has noted, “physically embodies the liminality and hybridity of the base camp communities” (308).  The reason the Korean half of this hybrid position seems to win out in the end again can be understood through the presentation of the Eastern and Western styles of narrative.  The presence of the West as purely “text” is not just a literary trick on Fenkl’s part but a feature of his actual relationships.  The narrative of the East is conveyed orally, through one on one communication with a family member.  The narrative of the West is communicated textually, largely through novels, films, and stilted letters from an absent father.  “’Daeri [Insu’s father] stands in Insu’s life and in this narrative as the representative of the West, particularly as mediated through ‘text…’  Texts… stand in for any real father-son relationship, and only reiterate the inadequacy of the relationship.”  The inadequacy of the relationship goes hand-in-hand with the inadequacy of the Western literary project in relation to colonialism.  It is inadequate to the task of memory and does not do justice to the ghosts.  Fenkl chooses to address this problem not by overturning the Western model, which would scarcely be possible considering his mixed heritage, but addressing the nature of memory itself and how it exists as a means of producing awareness within literary texts.  In other words, it “does not posit naïve or wholesale retrieval as the desired or even possible corrective to historical and narrative erasure, but rather attends to the… complex problem of knowledge production” (Kim 281-282).  The sort of real-world, non-aesthetic knowledge that Fenkl seems to want to produce through his literary, aesthetically realized project is the memorialization of key personalities in his life, properly given their history and context.           

    

Works Cited

Fenkl, Heinz Insu.  Memories of My Ghost Brother.  New York: Dutton, 1996.  Print.      

Kim, Jodi.  “’I’m Not Here, If This Doesn’t Happen’:  The Korean War and Cold War

            Epistemologies in Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student and Heinz Insu Fenkl’s

            Memories of My Ghost Brother.”  Journal of Asian American Studies.  11.3 (2008):

            279-302. Web.  12 November 2013.

Lee, Kun Jong.  “Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother: An Amerasian

            Rewriting of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.”  Journal of American Studies.  42.2 (2008):

            317-340. Web.  12 November 2013. 

Park, Hyungji.  “Western Princesses in the Great Game: US Military Prostitution in Memories

            Of My Ghost Brother.”  n.t.  14.3 (2007): 305-331.  Web.  12 November 2013.

Park, Joohyun.  “How Folk Tales Function in Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost

            Brother and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl.”  Journal of American Studies.  43.1 (2011):

            115-142. Web.  12 November 2013. 

Yuh, Ji-Yeon.  “Out of the Shadows: Camptown Women, Military Brides, and Korean

            (American) Communities.  Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader. Eds.

            Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University

            Press, 2010.  239-255. Print.  

“Let man keep his many parts…”: On Melville, Ellison, and CLR James.

(Note: This piece was originally a paper I wrote for a lit course on Ralph Ellison I attended while in grad school, hence the fidelity to MLA citations. I present it here with some edits.)

When considering the issues surrounding the matter of literary inheritance, the writer’s process of interpretation coupled with creative application stands out as especially interesting and complex.  When a writer is influenced by another writer, they bring their understanding or interpretation of a text to the task of the creative process.  The demands of the writer’s particular project (which can be in part determined by their literary influences) govern how an influence is incorporated into a new composition, and how an influence functions as a literary device that signifies to the reader.  The procedure is never neutral or arbitrary.  The challenges adjacent to the puzzle of influence can seem especially urgent when a writer engages essential ethical, moral, and political questions and themes.  The black American author Ralph Ellison, most famous for the only novel he published in his lifetime, Invisible Man (1952), was particularly invested in the related issues of American identity, race relations, and citizenship, and he understood his project to be in line with the “continuity of moral purpose” that centered the nineteenth century American literary classics.  He was attracted to the works of Herman Melville especially, and Invisible Man is peppered with allusions to Melville’s works, and many other writers as well.  The most explicit reference to Melville comes even before the narrative proper commences; a quotation from Melville’s novella Benito Cereno (1855)serves as the epigraph (along with a quote from T.S. Eliot) to Ellison’s novel.  It is a line of dialogue, spoken by the protagonist Amasa Delano, the captain of an American merchant ship, to the traumatized titular character near the end of the narrative: “’You are saved,’ cried Captain Delano,  more and more astonished and pained; ‘you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?’”  The answer, not given in the epigraph, is, of course, “the negro.”  Benito Cereno is in essence a story about the moral evil of New World slavery, and Ellison’s decision to utilize a quote from that work as an epigraph announces from the outset that one of the chief themes of his novel will be the legacy of that moral evil and the challenge that legacy poses in modern American life and American identity.  In fact, I would argue that the question of American identity is of central importance to Invisible Man, and that the position Ellison takes on the matter is an affirmation of the founding principles supplemented by a greater commitment to cultural pluralism.  Ellison rejects the legitimacy of class and race-centered ideological critiques of “the principle” of American citizenship, while also challenging the pervasive racism characteristic of American cultural life by troubling the centrality of whiteness in the wider national dialogue.  A creative engagement with the works of Melville generally and Benito Cereno specifically at least partially informs Ellison’s cultural commentary and his novelistic aesthetic. 

           

Another writer of African ancestry roughly contemporaneous with Ellison was the Trinidadian cultural critic C.L.R. James, who was similarly admiring of Melville’s work.  Although James demonstrated aptitude, and even mastery, in multiple forms, including fiction and poetry, his most overt engagement with Melville came in the form of literary and cultural criticism.  In 1953, the same year Invisible Man won the National Book Award, James  published the book-length study of Melville entitled Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.  It was a study, as implied by the title, with an explicitly political dimension.  At the time James was writing his book on Melville he faced deportation from the United States courtesy of the Immigration and Naturalization Services (Pease viii).  The motivation for this punitive move was James’s “subversive” political activities, and the justification was the McCarran Act, a piece of Cold War-inspired legislation that gave the federal government more powers concerning the monitoring, detainment, and deportation of political subversives, often understood to be synonymous with communists (Pease xxv).  Although James addresses multiple works in Melville’s oeuvre, including Benito Cereno, he focuses most of his attention on Moby-Dick.  The crux of his critique begins with the familiar assertion that the megalomaniacal Captain Ahab represents a totalitarian type, but James eschews the then-standard critical line that Ishmael represents the democratic opposition to authoritarianism (an untenable view since Ishmael explicitly identifies with Ahab’s quest to slay the white whale) and instead insists on the heroic centrality of the Pequod’s diverse crew (who also identify with Ahab’s quest but exhibit moral potential beyond it).  This analytical gesture reflects James’s then-current political and legal situation; he wished to protest the state mechanisms that denied him both citizenship and due process, and he did so by reformulating the concept of citizenship in the American cultural milieu.  For James, a critical reading of Melville allowed him to rethink race and nation and articulate a post-national and transnational conception of citizenship.  James is less inclined than Ellison to affirm American exceptionalism, and his sensibility is much less individualistic, but it is quite remarkable that Melville served as an intellectual ‘in’ for both writers to approach questions surrounding American race relations and national identity in the context of the Cold War.  I would like to argue that both Ralph Ellison and C.L.R. James used the works of Herman Melville, most notably Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick to interrogate the concept of American citizenship, especially as it pertained to race, but that each writer, owing to somewhat different ideological orientations, arrived at markedly different creative social visions which nonetheless had some intriguing points of overlap.  In the case of Ellison, the aspiration was a more inclusive, pluralistic American identity buttressed by the doctrine of American exceptionalism and the supremacy of the American creed, while James gestured towards a transnationalism that eschewed the telos of a nation state-oriented identity.  For Ellison, pluralistic multi-nationalism served as the raw material for a revised American identity, while for James American identity could potentially serve as a starting point for an enlightened world citizenship beyond nation; but first, the contradictions needed to be engaged, and the writings of Melville served as exemplary conceptual aids to think through the pertinent issues.   

The Picture Desk Ltd Rebel slave on a slave ship

            One of the more noteworthy analyses of the kinship between Benito Cereno and Invisible Man is the essay “The Variations on a Masked Leader: A Study on the Literary Relationship of Ralph Ellison and Herman Melville” by Stuart E. Omans.  Omans is more interested in identifying the myriad ways Benito Cereno manifests itself in Ellison’s novel than in connecting it to a single theme or idea; this is perfectly legitimate of course, since Ellison would seem to wish to keep his acquired literary material flexible and thematically fluid.  “He [Ellison] has carefully reworked, varied, and remolded Melville’s themes so that they finally become a unique part of his own creation” (Omans 15).  However, interested critics could perhaps narrow their focus in order to link Benito Cereno to Invisible Man’s sense of American citizenship.  The antagonist (not necessarily the villain- critical interpretations are legion) of Benito Cereno is Babo, the leader of an African slave revolt aboard the Spanish slave ship San Dominick in the later part of the eighteenth century.  After the failure of the revolt, Babo is captured, tried, and executed by Spanish authorities in Peru.  The description of the legal proceedings is quite revealing: “Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to.  His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words…  On the testimony of the sailors alone rested the legal identity of Babo” (Melville 315).  The “legal identity” being referred to here is in accordance with Spanish law of the period, which, unsurprisingly, did not grant the slave Babo anything by the way of legal rights, autonomy, or self-definition.  In the absence of legal rights, the authority of the state over the individual can be said to lack legitimacy, and this condition tends to create a potent sense of alienation and rage in the person whose rights are not recognized.  In Lima, Peru (the destination of the San Dominick) Babo would have the social status of a slave; his solution is to secure his freedom through violent rebellion and return to Africa with his fellow freed captives.  An attempted change in social status is pursued through action.  When the mechanisms of the enslaving state prevail, Babo performs his citizenship in accordance with its underlying logic.  He is voiceless and inert, robbed of the right to self-definition and agency.  The unnamed protagonist of Invisible Man (whom I will refer to as “Invisible Man”) experiences a set of conditions that are not identical to those experienced by Babo, but are clearly related both historically and structurally to similar cultural factors (racism, most obviously) and force similar challenges to his identity, social status, and sense of self-worth.  As Omans observes, “Constantly Ellison looks to Melville for his views concerning the democratic American experience but particularly for his searching portrayal of the Negro’s implications within that experience” (16).  The experiences of Invisible Man are more multifaceted than Babo’s, or indeed, any of the characters’ in Benito Cereno.  Invisible Man is a much longer work with a more epic and expansive scope, so the range of citizenship possibilities presented is much wider.  Invisible Man experiences, and comes to reject, both the racialized social hierarchy of the Jim Crow South, the materialist internationalism and more subtle racism of a thinly-disguised communist party, and the apocalyptic exhortations of Black Nationalism (If Melville had granted Babo the opportunity or inclination to speak at length about his experiences or views, he may have sounded much like Ras the Exhorter.).  Ultimately, Invisible Man is left dejected and alienated by his experiences, and his alienation is articulated through the apt metaphor of invisibility.  When pondering the sense of self he has cultivated over the course of his experiences near the end of the novel, Invisible Man recalls his grandfather’s enigmatic advice and links it to a social and political identity- “I’m still plagued by his [grandfather’s] deathbed advice… Perhaps he hid his meaning deeper than I thought… Could he have meant- hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men…”  He goes on: “Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word.  Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states…  America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain… Our fate is to become one, and yet many” (Ellison 574 and 577).  This is he foundational political principle of the United States harmonized with a pluralistic conception of American cultural and social life, an aspirational condition that is the closest Invisible Man comes to a foundation for a secure identity. Tellingly, this position comes in the form of a creative utterance, and invisibility is mitigated through the discovery of a coherent artistic voice. 

            The self-originating quality of this voice is of central importance, and again Ellison engages Melville’s novella as a means to represent its development and eventual articulation.  The phrase “Follow your leader” recurs throughout Benito Cereno, being the words written on the bow of the slave ship by Babo after the initial and short-lived success of the rebellion.  Leadership and social power are manipulated by Melville in Benito Cereno to create ambivalent and disquieting effects. Throughout the story, Babo forces Don Benito to make a show of being in charge in order to deceive Captain Delano.  Captain Delano, for his part, is incapable of seeing Babo as a possible, credible figure of authority because of his slave status; Babo effectively utilizes his invisibility to his own advantage.  The instability of social power and its relation to identity is explored by Ellison through an engagement with Melville’s text.  “Ralph Ellison was so affected by the implications of the phrase [“Follow your leader”] that he revised it to become a repetitive note in his own hero’s search for identity.  It became, in fact, the major theme of Invisible Man…  Nearly every character in the novel claims to be the protagonist’s leader” (Omans 17).  All of these claims turn out to have a cumulative deleterious effect on the protagonist, of course.  A preacher at one point tries to uphold the authority of the corrupt and draconian Negro university president Dr. Bledsoe, the man who leads a system representative of Booker T. Washington-style racial reform.  The preacher utilizes especially fulsome language: “For has not your present leader become his living agent, his physical presence?  Look about you if you doubt it…  How can I tell you what manner of man this is who leads you?”  (Ellison 132) Bledsoe, of course, betrays Invisible Man and reveals himself to be a morally bankrupt and self-interested little Caesar.  A similar pattern holds for other would-be political and spiritual leaders the protagonist encounters.  Following one’s leader proves to be a consistently unfulfilling and occasionally dangerous business.  As Omans observed, “The boy searches for some stable force throughout the book to lead him to freedom, or visibility.  In his attempt to find a visible identity he at first wishes to follow an outside force, to have his identity defined for him by others” (17).  The motif of “leadership” is an echo of an aspect of the earlier Melville work, one Ellison, as an admirer of jazz music, appropriates as a theme on which he can riff in several different variations. 

            The dominant theme of invisibility generates much ambiguity in Ellison’s novel, particularly in the arena of social relations.  Invisibility and obscuration occur in multiple forms, and masking is one of them.  Symbolic masks are featured throughout Benito Cereno as well.  The San Dominick has a stern-piece that Melville likens to “a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked” (qtd. in Omans 18-19).  This is clearly a symbolic representation and a foreshadowing of the deceptive pose adopted by Benito Cereno and Babo during Delano’s visit on the ship.  It is a social mask crafted out of the violence of slavery.  Similarly, socially masked figures appear in Invisible Man.  As the critic Valerie Bonita Gray observed, “Babo, Bledsoe, and [Invisible Man’s] grandfather are all black characters who wear masks.  In order to function in the white world in which they find themselves, they recognize the need to hide their real selves” (37).  Masking can become a habit, and soon enough one which assists the condition of total invisibility.  Of course, masks are not intrinsically limiting throughout Invisible Man.  The memorable episode near the end of the novel where the narrator acquires a pair of dark sunglasses and wanders around Harlem and is routinely mistaken for a man named Rinehart is probably the best example of a potentially empowering mask.  Although Invisible Man is initially ambivalent about being mistaken for somebody else, he eventually comes to see in Rinehart an expansive world of possibilities.  The ambivalence at the beginning emerges from the lack of social stability intrinsic to the process of masking.  Invisible Man muses, “Perhaps I’m out of his territory at last, I thought and began trying to place Rinehart in the scheme of things.  He’s been around all the while, but I have been looking in another direction… What on earth was hiding behind the face of things?  If dark glasses and a white hat could blot out my identity so quickly, who actually was who?” (Ellison 493) Masking has the disquieting potential to obscure identity to the point that it becomes doubtful that there is any “real” self at all.  In this conception, social performance is such a powerful, potent, oppressive force that self-definition is all but impossible, and stability and a sense of certainty regarding the self and one’s relation to others is all but obliterated.  However, this uncertainty and fear concerning Rinehart does not remain with the protagonist for long.  He begins to see the possibilities in Rinehart’s protean social presence, and how a multiplicity of masks may overcome the limitations of a singular, imposed mask.  Rinehart is still a condition of invisibility, but he is the one manifestation of invisibility that is something other than tragic and disempowering.  The narrator concludes, “Can it be I thought, can it actually be?  And I knew that it was… could he be all of them: Rine the Runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend?…  What is real anyway?…  His world was possibility and he knew it.  He was years ahead of me and I was a fool… The world in which we lived was without boundaries” (Ellison 498). The mask morphs from a set of restrictive boundaries to a world of freedom and expansive possibilities once it multiplies. This empowering and multi-faceted brand of masking is not really present in Benito Cereno (Babo is temporarily granted power by his mask, but it has a somewhat singular quality), but animates another Melville text centered on a character very much like Rinehart- The Confidence-Man.  “A fraud and a trickster, Rinehart is reminiscent of Melville’s Confidence Man.  Just as the Confidence Man can be a deaf-mute, a cripple, or an agent for an orphanage, Rinehart too changes” (Gray 52).  An important difference between the two characters, however, is the nature of their roles in their respective texts.  The Confidence Man is essentially a villain whose protean qualities serve as a commentary on the corruption and rootlessness present in American society, while Rinehart more optimistically suggests a strategy for survival in an often hostile cultural landscape.  This trickster condition suggested by Rinehart opens up the possibility of agency and a viable range of identities for black Americans in the United States, although his lack of stability still leaves the protagonist with a lingering feeling of ambivalence.  He says in the epilogue of his story, “But what do I really want, I’ve asked myself.  Certainly not the freedom of a Rinehart…” (Ellison 575)  Masks may aid the development of the citizen-subject, but they cannot be an end in themselves.

            Both the works of Melville and the works of Ellison are deeply invested in the role memory plays in the creation of a political and cultural subject.  The dominant metaphor for memories of a troubled past in Benito Cereno is the shadow.  The shadow is mentioned in the quote that serves as the epitaph to Invisible Man, and given the name “negro.”  The critic James Booth is quite helpful on this point, and persuasively draws the connection to Ellison’s project: “The shadow here is cast by the memory of a slave revolt on his [Benito Cereno’s] ship, or perhaps by slavery itself.  Delano’s (characteristically American) appeal to turn away from the past expresses an optimism, and a future-directed gaze, made possible, in part, by forgetting.  Ellison, too, wrote of shadows, and in particular, ‘the shadow of the past’” (684).  Historical consciousness is no light matter in Ellison’s novel, and it is closely bound to his concept of American citizenship.  The climax of Invisible Man involves a destructive riot in Harlem instigated by the perfidious pseudo-communist organization called the Brotherhood, and largely carried out under the “leadership” of the black nationalist Ras the Exhorter, who takes on the more appropriately apocalyptic persona of Ras the Destroyer in his vengeful campaign against the racist institutions of the United States.  The episode culminates with Invisible Man experiencing a bleak vision involving his castration at the hands of Brother Jack.  The vision involves the protagonist’s confrontation with all the would-be cultural and ideological leaders that “kept him runnin’” over the course of his narrative; he asserts his right to self-determination, and Brother Jack “frees him from his illusions” in the form of a violent castration.  Invisible Man witnesses his bloody genitals flung over the river and onto a bridge.  This gesture robs the protagonist of the generative possibilities that come with the capacity to self-define, but it also unburdens him of the illusory myths that dominate the social order.  He says to his tormentors, “It’s not invisible… that there hang all my generations wasting upon the water… there’s your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you’ve made, all you’re going to make…” (Ellison 570)  The racial injustice that has been a near-constant feature in American life draws the oppressor into its twisted logic along with the oppressed; when white attempts to negate black, it establishes the conditions of its own negation.  As it pertains to history, castration is both the symbol of a denied future and a forgetting or denial of history.  White effaces black out of time and space, and from his excluded position, the protagonist can witness the destructive logic of this program.  Ellison’s project is at least in part a creative act of remembering that un-erases the black presence in American life and restores an informed historical consciousness.

            The castration scene in Invisible Man has a precedent in Melville’s Benito Cereno that Ellison may or may not have consciously drawn on for inspiration.  After Captain Delano rescues Benito Cereno, it comes to light that the sword in Cereno’s possession throughout the events of the story was a fake: “The dress, so precise and costly, worn by him on the day whose events have been narrated, had not been willingly put on.  And that silver-mounted sword, apparent symbol of despotic command, was not, indeed, a sword but the ghost of one.  The scabbard, artificially stiffened, was empty” (Melville 315).  Babo had apparently taken Cereno’s sword during the course of the rebellion, and provided a stuffed scabbard as part of his elaborate constructed façade.  This is a symbolic castration, as opposed to a castration with a symbolic significance, but like the castration in Ellison’s novel, it is closely linked to social and national status.  By taking Cereno’s sword, Babo places Cereno in a subordinate position, wearing the costume of his nation but possessing none of the real status the costume usually confers.  Earlier in the story, Babo humiliates Cereno by forcing him to receive a shave in which the Spanish flag is used as a barber’s covering.  Cereno’s symbolic castration estranges him from his national/cultural identity and the protections of citizenship, a fate Cereno himself and his associates inflicted on the abducted slaves.  Ellison clearly understood the potent effect such a metaphor could have when applied to the question of the Negro in American society, and it would seem that Melville’s example suggested some possibilities for representing such an experience.

            When C.L.R. James expressed his appreciation for the works of Herman Melville, it was in the form of a book-length study, Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.  A work of criticism obviously has a different character from the novel, but James’s approach to Herman Melville and his thematic concerns intersected with Ellison’s in a number of ways.  From the introduction, James makes it clear that he wishes to place Melville in an explicitly political context:

  “The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in two novels Moby-Dick and Pierre, and two or three stories, he painted a picture of the world in which we live… the totalitarian madness which swept the world first as Nazism and now as Soviet Communism; the great mass labor movements and colonial revolts- this is the world that masses of men strive to make sense of.  This is what Melville coordinates- but not as industry, science, politics, economics or psychology, but as a world of human personalities…” (3)

Despite James’s insistence that Melville does not coordinate the troubling modern world as politics, his linking of Melville’s work to such historically important political events as the rise of Nazism and communism, as well as mass labor movements and decolonization, indicates a deep concern with the then-current political scene, one molded chiefly by the imperatives of the Cold War state.  This is the same political landscape in which Ellison was working.  For James, the personal is very much political.  He wrote his book on Melville while detained on Ellis Island and awaiting deportation.  He commented, “A great part of this book was written on Ellis Island while I was being detained by the Department of Immigration.  The Island, like Melville’s Pequod, is a miniature of all the nations and all sections of society.  My experience of it… [has] so deepened my understanding of Melville and so profoundly influenced the form this book has taken…”  (James 3) The authoritarian mechanism of the Cold War state, the paranoid atmosphere of the McCarthy era, and the vagaries of American nationalism all intensely colored James’s interpretation of Melville.  What might be the strangest aspect of his study is that it remains so persuasive despite a conspicuous tendentiousness.  James wishes to investigate the modern totalitarian social type through Melville.  Intuitively, he centers his attention on Captain Ahab of Moby-Dick.  “Ahab is no common man… he is a man who wants to live fully and completely according to his beliefs…  His basic religion for years has been the religion of his age- material progress” (James 9).  Of course, the religion of material progress brings Ahab much success and even more alienation and quasi-existential misery.  “His business becomes to reconcile the undoubted advantages of an industrial civilization with what that very civilization is doing to him as a human being” (James 10).  This struggle is not at all unlike the struggle of Ellison’s protagonist, who attempts many times to reconcile his attachment to American civilization with the deleterious effects of its racism.  Of course, Invisible Man pursues his dilemma towards a frustrated but defiant individualism, which he molds into a creative act of communication that may have the potential to mitigate the effects of invisibility.  Ahab is not so fortunate, though he has in common with Invisible Man an instinct toward individualism.  “There is a fatal flaw in his [Ahab’s] misery and his challenge and defiance.  Never for a single moment does it cross his mind to question his relations with the people he works with…  He has been trained in the school of individualism and an individualist he remains to the end” (James 11).  The alienating effects of mechanization and individualism create an untenable situation that has the potential to tip over into the genuinely authoritarian in the event of a catastrophic event that prompts men to seek radically different modes of social organization.  For Ahab, the catastrophic event is his fateful encounter with the white whale, Moby Dick.  This compels a new program of passionate, violent repudiation.  James cannot help but link this mindset to the pathological nationalisms and ideologies that proved so destructive during the first half of the twentieth century.  James views nations and nationalisms as being founded on dubious concepts of race: “This doctrine is that the national race, the national stock, the national blood, is superior to all other national races…  over the last twenty years [the doctrine] has grown stronger in every country in the world.  Who doubts this has only to read the McCarran Immigration Bill of 1952, which is permeated with the doctrine of racial superiority” (13).  Here we have race, nation, modernity, and the totalitarian type all meeting in the space of Melville’s most famous novel.  In this formulation, citizenship is not a desirable status in the least.  For James, the possible redeeming factor for this volatile and possibly tragic scenario can be found in the make-up of the Pequod’s crew. The critic Donald E. Pease wrote that James would eventually consolidate his political views into a three-part doctrine: “the rejection of the Soviet Union’s bureaucracy as a form of state capitalism, the rejection of the vanguard party, and the insistence on the relative autonomy of spontaneous social movements” (ix).  The latter is especially important when considering James’s reading of Melville.  When considering the matter of social change, James rejected the centralizing tendencies of the vanguard party and placed the emphasis on collective action.  His earlier book American Civilization brought this view to bear on America’s troubled race relations: “it… advanced the argument that various sectors- the family, the political community, the civil sphere- of American civilization were in crisis along a racial division that could only be resolved through the development of a mass revolutionary movement that would reorganize American culture on an egalitarian and participatory basis” (Pease ix-x).  The diverse, subaltern mix of Ahab’s crew can be understood as the necessary action that could be taken against the totalitarian type in incipient form.  Of course, in Melville’s novel the actual outcome is tragic, not emancipatory or triumphant.  The totalitarian type leads his social order to ruin.  However, James’s project is more one of advocacy on the crew’s behalf than an interpretation of an actual conflict in the novel.  James sees in the Pequod crew the diverse collection of marginalized individuals who could break the racist and authoritarian model of the modern nation state, if only they could see their dilemma with clarity and unity of purpose.  This renegotiation of nationality and citizenship has some similarities and differences with Ellison’s project.  Like Ellison, he values cultural pluralism, and considers America’s troubled race relations and efforts to efface pluralism through rigid racial hierarchies and impose a unitary whiteness on cultural life as major social evils.  However, Ellison wished to navigate this corrupted landscape and offer his challenge through the cultivation of a renewed brand of American exceptionalism and individualism; Ellison’s ideal America would seem to be its present diverse mix of individuals organized on the same creed but untainted by an artificial racial hierarchy centered on white supremacism.  James, by contrast, wants to be a citizen of the world, and gestures toward a transnational and post-national construction of the social subject.  Both of these writers, I feel, chose to engage with Melville because of the circumstances of their historical moment, which was dominated by the Cold War and the very recent memory of two brutal world wars.  Melville, along with Dostoevsky, was the nineteenth century writer who arguably saw the most keenly that modernity and industrialized society would not be able to eliminate the problem of evil, and in fact, the burdens of history and social alienation may be felt even more acutely in the brave new modern world.  Ellison and James, both being writers of African ancestry and deeply concerned with the problem of American racism, responded to Melville’s insights and aesthetics and deployed them in their own work to imagine new possibilities beyond the limits of the then-current sociopolitical order.

Works Cited

Booth, W. James.  “The Color of Memory: Reading Race with Ralph Ellison.”  Political Theory.

            36.5 (2008):  683-707.  Print. 

Ellison, Ralph.  Invisible Man.  New York: Vintage Books, 1995.  Print.

Gray, Valerie Bonita.  Invisible Man’s Literary Heritage: Benito Cereno and Moby Dick. 

            Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1978.  Print.

James, C.L.R.  Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World

            We Live In.  Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2001.  Print.

Melville, Herman.  Great Short Works of Herman Melville.  New York: HarperCollins Publishers,

            2004.  Print.

Omans, Stuart E.  “The Variations of a Masked Leader: A Study on the Literary Relationship of

            Ralph Ellison and Herman Melville.”  South Atlantic Bulletin.  40.2 (1975):  15-23.  Print.

Pease, Donald E. Introduction. Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman            Melville and the World We Live In.  By C.L.R. James. 2001. Hanover and London:

            University Press of New England, 2001.  Print. 

Kissing the Whip with Cole Porter: A Reading of Kiss me Kate

(Note: I originally wrote this when I was in grad school, hence the meticulous adherence to MLA style and citations. I present it here with some minor edits and nifty YouTube videos for anyone who might find it compelling.)

William Shakespeare, standing as the supreme canonical figure of Anglophone literature, has been used by different societal milieus as a tool of cultural interpretation, or a tried and tested means of attaining cultural self-knowledge.  It is perhaps axiomatic, or merely common-sensical, that the task of cultural interpretation develops a sense of urgency during periods of profound social change.  In such instances, Shakespeare has proven to be an invaluable tool to establish a sense of continuity, and to gain a seemingly accurate understanding of how human beings change and why, what prompts changes in character, and how those changes relate to both the personal and public spheres. Encircling all these concerns is the question involving what aspects of the human condition are permanent and which ones are fluid and/or contingent.  The United States in the aftermath of the Second World War was a social and cultural space with tremendous anxieties concerning gender and sexuality.  The necessities of the war effort propelled women into previously male-dominated jobs, and labor-saving technologies further blurred the distinction between men and women’s work, making a gendered division of labor and, by extension, much of the patriarchal social and economic structure, seem less viable, or at least less “necessary.”  However, the social imperatives of Cold War politics and social mores placed a strong emphasis on the traditional nuclear family commanded and headed by the father, and so we are blessed yet again with a historical pivot point beset with contradictions.  The desire to affirm ‘tradition’ in the face of perceived (and profound) social and political change is a conspicuous feature of many American cultural products of the late 40s and 50s.  The celebrated musical Kiss Me Kate, written by Samuel and Bella Spewack with memorable music and lyrics contributed by Cole Porter, is in some regards an example of this rule, and in others a subversion, and it utilizes Shakespeare as a tool of interpretation and affirmation of the prevailing sexual politics of its time.  Specifically, it takes one of Shakespeare’s most notoriously problematic plays, The Taming of the Shrew, a work that has been regarded as controversial to varying degrees since its initial composition and performance in the late sixteenth century due to its apparent advocacy of female submission to male authority, and transposes it onto a modern setting, taking a meta-theatrical approach to the material.  The plot covers the backstage antics of a group of actors putting on a performance of a musical version of Shakespeare’s play (also called Kiss me Kate).  The relationships and romantic stresses the performers endure mirror the events of The Taming of the Shrew, but are significantly altered and have very different implications due to the changed nature of the relations between the sexes since Shakespeare’s time (and place).  It is a storytelling approach that invites- in fact demands- comparisons between the past and present (or at least how both temporal conditions are imagined) and an assessment of the nature of social change.

The film version of Kiss Me Kate directed by George Sidney and written by Dorothy Kingsley is one of the more polished and vivacious versions of the musical available, and I will be using it as my source text for an assessment of the story’s gender politics, as well as an analysis of how they relate to the original play.  Then, I will apply the adaptation theory developed and propounded by Linda Hutcheon to the work in order to gain a broader understanding of how inter-temporal cultural dialogues operate, and what the implications of striving for a sense of cultural continuity are.  Central to my interpretation will be a thorough exploration of what I believe is the key difference between the Elizabethan ‘taming’ process depicted in Shakespeare’s play and the modern one depicted backstage in Kiss Me Kate.  In the original The Taming of the Shrew, the lead Petruchio effectively tames his new wife, the quarrelsome and shrewish Katherina (Kate), by taking control of the domestic sphere wherein she is expected to dwell and, to some degree, manage her responsibilities.  His efforts are an apparent success.  In Kiss Me Kate, the lead Fred Graham (who is playing Petruchio in the play-within-the-play) tries to take control of Lilli Vanessi (playing Kate) by manipulating the public sphere in which Lilli has some degree of visibility and sway.  His challenges soon outpace his abilities, as the public sphere is much bigger and difficult to control than the domestic, and the effort at taming apparently fails.  It is only by way of a last-minute contrivance that a happy, guy-gets-the-girl ending is secured.  This contrivance stems from a certain faith in the value of ‘romance,’ a force that gives the musical a decidedly conservative character that is meant to be authoritative, but remains unpersuasive in the end.  The metaphorical (and literal) presence of the Shakespeare play is what is supposed to give the values on display their moral and aesthetic weight, but as the complexities of Shakespeare’s art resist easy identification with any one system of values or glib compartmentalization, so any work derived from it, or at least any work concerned with ideological circumscription, inevitably fails to limit and control the principles it attempts to discover in the Bard’s words.  The failure of the conservatism in Kiss Me Kate, in essence, develops, as well as reveals, more complexities, problems, and anxieties in Shakespeare’s cultural presence.

The storytelling conventions employed in Kiss Me Kate are derived, to a significant degree, from the play on which it is based.  These conventions are altered, and in some instances, expanded to suit the work’s unique artistic goals, but there is hardly a device present in the musical that does not have some sort of obvious mirror in Shakespeare’s play.  For this reason, it may be useful to begin with an analysis of The Taming of the Shrew and a description of how its problematic themes have often been approached in performance. 

Not the most PC of character arcs.

The themes of The Taming of the Shrew are difficult to take at face value thanks to the presence of a framing device, commonly called the Induction, in which a ne’er-do-well drunkard named Christopher Sly is, after a night of indulgence at a local tavern, deceived by a mischievous lord into thinking he is a wealthy lord himself, and the entirety of the main action of The Taming of the Shrew is an entertainment performed for his benefit by a traveling troupe of actors.  As noted by the Shakespeare scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, “…the opening scenes with Christopher Sly place the entire play within quotation marks.  The ‘induction’ presents a series of wish-fulfillment fantasies to a drunken tinker… The effect of the frame is to ‘distance’ the action and so suggest that it does not present the ‘reality’ of proper marital relations” (527).  In short, an extra layer of narrative context has the power to change the significance of words and actions within a work of literature, just as an understanding of context can change an individual’s understanding of events and behaviors in real life.  As usual with Shakespeare, the approach to context taken by the play is multi-layered and complex.  Just as the induction challenges the reader to think twice before taking the story’s surface morals literally, the circumstances surrounding Kate’s climactic speech (the most controversial portion of the play wherein male supremacy and female submission are upheld and advocated) at the play’s end lead any attentive reader to wonder if irony is playing a significant part in the apparently sexist proceedings. “The first half of Kate’s famous submission speech is spoken in the singular, addressed specifically to the widow [whom the character Hortensio has married for largely financial reasons] and not to womankind in general…” (527) Kate’s brand of advice and the social program she seems to be promoting have a dubious relation to the material and economic realities of the union between Hortensio and the wealthy widow.  “…in contradistinction to Kate’s prescriptions, in this marriage it will be the wife… who provides the ‘maintenance’; Hortensio will be spared the labors of a bread-winner” (528).  The theory of female submission does not match the practice of the incredibly complicated and dynamic realities of male/female relations.  Economic conventions and their essential instability seem especially pertinent, as they make any singular theory of marriage and its accompanying social and familial arrangements seem similarly and oddly unstable.  Kate is propounding an ideology that lacks the authoritative aura of credible permanence or decisive inevitability.  Furthermore, her lack of awareness regarding the social bonds arranged by other people in her community has the effect of making her appear isolated and ignorant, which is of course the intuitive consequence of Petruchio’s shrew-taming program, which involved intensive social isolation and sensory deprivation.  By the end of the play, Kate has thoroughly lost the ability to recognize context, and by extension irony, or to recognize particularities or contingencies.  She has only the patriarchal dogma inculcated by Petruchio, which she is inclined to apply uncritically to any and all situations.  It would seem that Shakespeare is closely associating the perception and awareness of context with power: the more one is aware of the broader social programs governing human lives- or in other words, the degree one is aware of the public sphere and how it relates to the domestic- the more likely one will be able to assert one’s will.  The most remarkable thing about Kate’s final speech is that it is undertaken as a performance in front of an appreciative audience, including Petruchio, Hortensio, the Widow, Baptista, Vincentio, Lucentio, among others.  There is an irony to the fact that Kate’s exile to the domestic sphere and estrangement from the public is announced in such a decidedly public fashion, but the artifice of the performing act again puts the whole matter in quotation marks. The artful act of ‘performing’ seems to cast the legitimacy, or at least the ‘naturalness,’ of specific social prescriptions into doubt, and this, of course, mirrors the dynamics present in the induction, in which the social reality in which Christopher Sly finds himself embedded is marked as false due to the presence of performing actors and the deception governing the whole situation.  A Huntsman attending the Lord remarks, “As he shall think by our true diligence/ He is no less than what we say he is” (Shakespeare 531).  This mandate is initially met with resistance.  When Sly awakens in a lord’s bed in a lord’s chamber surrounded by servants, he says, “I am Christophero Sly, call not me ‘honour’ nor ‘lordship’.  I ne’er drank sack in my life… ne’er ask me what raiment I’ll wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs…” (533) It could be considered strange and ironic that Sly would insist on a beggar’s identity when he is placed in the position of one of the higher classes.  When he is first introduced in the very first scene of the play, he puts on airs and insists on noble lineage when he is accused of being a petty, drunken rogue by the Inn’s hostess: “You’re a baggage, the Slys are no rogues.  Look in the chronicles, we came in with Richard Conqueror (sic)” (530).  Self-definition is an extraordinarily important prerequisite for self-respect, dignity, and agency, and Shakespeare shrewdly depicts the pattern of resistance likely to be undertaken by those who have their sense of self imposed on them by others, especially more powerful others.  He also understands the resources and abilities the powerful possess over the powerless that often make said pattern of resistance unsuccessful- the ability to name and label, and access to resources to give their names and labels material significance and, by extension, the impression of authority and permanence.  Sly comes to be what others claim he is, but the reader knows that the performance being put on for his benefit is comically fragile and can be stopped and revealed as false at any moment.  Kate’s situation is hardly any different in structure, although it is largely the opposite in superficial character.  She is debased where Sly is elevated, a clever mirroring that suggests the essentially inauthentic quality of both the master and slave roles, if not their respective material conditions.  Petruchio’s power is derived from both his ability to deprive Kate of resources, and to name things; that is, to bring about an understanding of the external world through a linguistic act.  At the beginning of Act 4 Scene 3, Petruchio and Kate are making the journey from Petruchio’s shrew-taming school to Kate’s home, and they converse about the nature of reality.  Petruchio insists that the shining sun is, in fact, the moon, and Kate predictably challenges him.  Petruchio threatens to return Kate to his ‘school’ if she does not parrot his description of the outside world, and this threat prompts, to an even greater degree than Kate’s final submission speech, Kate’s total acquiescence to Petruchio’s will.  Reality is what he says it is:

            Kate: Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,

            And be it moon, or sun, or what you please.

            An if you please to call it a rush candle,

            Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.

            Petruchio:  I say it is the moon.

            Kate: I know it is the moon. (574)

The audience comes to gain a sense of the fragility of Petruchio’s power moves because the formal structure of the play foregrounds the performative quality of them, and reminds anyone who may be watching that performance confers a measure of fluidity to social relationships.

So even in the original play, the framing device mirrored the events of the drama involving Petruchio and Katherina, and called the events depicted and the values espoused into question.  This approach would be significantly expanded for the production of Kiss Me Kate, though many of the factors enabling the events in The Taming of the Shrew would be conspicuously absent or fundamentally altered.

            Another crucial element at play in the social dynamics of the characters in The Taming of the Shrew is economics.  This may not be immediately obvious, as love and romance in the ideal are elevated and celebrated at many points throughout the play, such as the instance when Baptista is discussing Petruchio’s desire to wed Kate: “Ay, when the special thing is well obtained, / That is, her love, for that is all in all” (549).  However, the practical necessitates of marriage as an exchange of economic resources hover above the actions of the characters at all times.  Indeed, it is the very first thing Petruchio undertakes to discuss with Baptista when first exploring the prospect of marrying Kate:

                        Petruchio: Then tell me, if I get your daughters love,

                        What dowry shall I have with her to wife?

                        Baptista:  After my death the one half of my lands,

                        And in possession twenty thousand crowns.

                        Petruchio: And for that dowry I’ll assure her of her widowhood…

                        Let specialties be therefore drawn between us,

                        That covenants may be kept on either hand.  (549)

The arrangement is material and negotiated exclusively between men.  Kate’s perspective is only considered as an afterthought, and it is a perspective that is understood to be amenable to change.  This mode of exchanging resources was typical of stratified societies that emerged in conjunction with advanced agricultural techniques (it is my understanding that the matter of causality between the two phenomena is still controversial).  The different, post-industrial economic realities of the mid-twentieth century would mean that marriage would be a very different business in Kiss Me Kate.      

Although the text of The Taming of the Shrew is rife with complexities that undermine its ostensible ‘message’ regarding female submission, these can be very easily altered or undermined through the exegesis implicit in the performance.  The performance itself is both an interpretation of a text and an adaptation, as it inevitably provides additional information (assuming the text itself is not abridged, and even then there will be augmentations)- information that may or may not contradict what is written on the page- than can be conveyed exclusively through the play’s written words.  Acting, direction, scenery, pacing, and much else besides both expand and demarcate the viewers’ perception of the events of the story and the words written by Shakespeare.  For instance, I’ve already discussed the parallels between Christopher Sly’s situation in the induction to Katherina’s, but the perception of the parallel can be fundamentally altered through some creative casting.  Marcela Kostihova, in her assessment of various Czech stage productions of The Taming of the Shrew, remarked on one performance, “The Taming directed by Michal Docekal… is the first Czech production to include the Induction and the Epilogue… As a result, Katherina’s taming can be interpreted as the dream of the drunkard Sly, played by the same actor who plays Petruchio…” (73). This approach to the performance adds an extra layer to the dynamics of domination and submission.  If Petruchio is in some sense the powerless and put-upon Sly, then it would seem his abuse of Katherina stems at least in part from his own sense of powerlessness.  This is an impression that can only be achieved through a staging of the play, as there is little in the text itself to support the interpretation of Petruchio as insecure in any sense.  This creates a story in which makes the implicit quotation marks around the main narrative events are now explicit.  The implication is that the medium of performance can become the means by which a different time and cultural space comments on both itself and the past, and registers social, sexual, and political change.  The perception of change is intrinsic to Shakespeare’s art, so it is hardly surprising that during times of cultural uncertainty (that is, most times) he is called on as a valuable tool to understand (and by extension, control) changes in social conventions. “’Shakespeare’ itself is no safe haven but a field of ‘genuine struggles’” (Kostihova 79).

And now for a different kind of struggle- resisting the charms of Ann Miller.

Kiss Me Kate debuted on the Broadway stage in 1948 and received its film adaptation courtesy of director George Sidney in 1953.  The plot involves the theater director and thespian Fred Graham directing and starring in a musical rendition of The Taming of the Shrew written by Cole Porter, who, in classic meta-theatrical fashion, is also a character.  Graham manages to entice his ex-wife Lilli Vanessi (who is engaged to a Texan cattle Baron and very much absorbed in her career) into playing Katherina in the production.  Accompanying them are a young couple, the aspiring, up-and-coming actors Lois Lane (playing Bianca) and Bill Calhoun (playing Lucentio).  Lois is vying for Fred’s affections in part to gain money from him, and Bill is incredibly dissolute and gambles excessively, often putting girlfriend Lois in the awkward position of bailing him out of excess debts.  The bulk of the action takes place during the opening night at the theater, and in the tradition of a grand farce, many things go wrong until the climatic romantic reconciliation between Lilli and Fred.  The backstage romantic entanglements and financial woes of the main characters mirror the events they are enacting in The Taming of the Shrew, and their approach to the material fluctuates with their emotional states, which are largely influenced by their off-stage problems.  By this technique, Shakespeare’s work becomes a means by which the characters engage with their lives and, arguably, the culture at large.  Their very modern problems also cast new light on the play they are performing, with the theme of gender roles looming especially large.  The critic Irene G. Dash grasped the method of Kiss Me Kate quite well: “Exploring the roles of women in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, this musical employed song, dance, and plot to present a woman’s dilemma of marriage versus career.  Because the collaborators of Kiss Me Kate framed the Renaissance comedy within a backstage play, they could also immediately leap into the more accessible modern world and offer contemporary parallels” (49).  The dynamics of sex and gender have changed significantly between the time of Shakespeare and the modern world of Kiss Me Kate, but much has remained the same as well.  The most conspicuous difference is the financial significance and power assigned to women.  In the original Taming women’s economic value was closely tied to that of their fathers or husbands.  If a woman was rich, like the widow, it was because she inherited her money.  The degree this arrangement applied to ALL women in Shakespeare’s era is largely irrelevant to the world of the play.  As a cultural interpretative tool and emblem, the play depicts and assumes a patriarchal dynamic.  The lives of its female characters, or at least their material and monetary value and positions, are closely tied to that of their male relatives.  Inevitably, the women of Taming are assumed to confine their interests and duties to the domestic sphere.  By contrast, Kiss Me Kate has women who possess a degree of financial independence and sexual autonomy.  A major source of conflict between Bill and Lois is his tendency to be irresponsible with money, and her tendency to give sexual favors to wealthy men in order to obtain money.  The two (perceived) vices are mutually reinforcing, and tied to a conservatism regarding gender roles.  The lesson is that a man must be responsible in his bread-winning duties if he wishes to secure the sexual loyalty of a woman, and aspects of this dysfunctional dynamic are reflected in the play-within-the-musical.  Bianca’s compliant agreeability becomes not-so-coyly expressed promiscuity (“I’m a maid mad to marry/ And will take double-quick/ Any Tom, Dick or Harry/ Any Tom, Harry or Dick”) as character traits that were previously understood as being in the mould of the passive feminine are re-articulated in terms of relative sexual freedom.  Such alterations-by-juxtaposition-and-reinterpretation are made possible by the device of the induction, which is given a significant overhaul in the musical.

The induction has a much greater importance to Kiss Me Kate than it does to The Taming of the Shrew.  In Taming the induction is short and can easily be omitted.  Omitting the framing device in Kiss Me Kate would render the story incoherent.  “Borrowing this device from Shakespeare’s play but transforming it, the collaborators too rely on the play-within-a-play… This further distances that story and thematically blurs the play’s meaning” (Dash 52).  In the original play, the ‘performative’ qualities of Petruchio and Kate’s story were merely suggestive.  Here they are central.  Much like Petruchio, Fred Graham attempts to undertake a ‘taming’ of his estranged wife, trying to get her to finish her performance in the play and secure her as a romantic and professional partner.  He does this by manipulating the environment around Lilli as much as possible.  Gangsters arrive to obtain money from a gambling debt incurred by Bill but signed in Fred’s name.  Fred informs them he can get the money if they can intimidate Lilli into finishing the show.  He disseminates similar bits of misinformation to Tex, Lilli’s fiancé, and others in order to gain the upper hand, and the romantic and financial struggles of these characters often spill out into their performance of Taming.  One of the most memorable moments in the musical is when the gangsters take on bit parts in the play in order to keep an eye on Lilli and hilariously misquote a variety of Shakespeare plays irrelevant to the production.  The hyper-modern features of their slang contrasts comically with the mellifluous qualities of the Elizabethan poetry, making the clash between the modern and early modern aesthetics most overt.  The essential difference between Petruchio’s efforts and Fred’s is twofold.  First: Petruchio successfully dominates Kate by controlling the domestic sphere which is understood to be her rightful ‘place,’ and Fred unsuccessfully dominates Lilli through a failed effort to control the section of the public sphere of which they are both a part.  Second: Petruchio possesses the power to name, and Fred does not.  The essential difference between the Elizabethan and the modern social milieu in regards to gender is spatial.  The necessary ability to isolate the ’shrew’ in Kiss Me Kate is absent, because women are now effective agents in the public sphere in a world where the domestic and familial are considerably diminished.  Shakespeare’s play is the tool used to tease this truth out, and serves as the hermeneutic guide to a specific cultural moment. 

One of the most conspicuous qualities of this specific cultural moment is the position of marriage.  In the modern world, the economic importance of marital arrangements is noticeably diminished (though obviously not eliminated), and this is reflected in Kiss Me Kate, which uses a play which displays multiple and shifting attitudes toward marriage and its functions, both romantic and practical.  “How one is to understand this show, depends inevitably on the particular aspect that catches one’s attention…. The show praises marriage, yet shows wedlock as inconvenient and unnecessary… various approaches suggest how Shakespeare’s figure functions in American culture… [and] serves metaphorically as a sort of magic ring granting wishes or as a universal solvent dissolving problems in the fiction” (Teague 138).  The problem that is effectively dissolved is the material necessity of marriage.  Shakespeare’s play is used to affirm romance in the face of the economic utility of wedlock falling into obsolescence.

If one were to apply an effective theoretical lens to the curious relationship between The Taming of the Shrew and Kiss Me Kate, it would need to pertain to adaptation.  Kiss Me Kate is in dialogue with a cultural product which, owing to its canonical status, has the power to both challenge and interpret the mores of the cultural moment of which Kate is part.  Linda Hutcheon’s adaptation theory, the most thorough of its kind to date, will be useful here to both understand the dynamic present in Kiss Me Kate and similar works, and to place it in a larger cultural and historical context.  Hutcheon remarks in her book A Theory of Adaptation, “Part of this pleasure [of adaptations]… comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise.  Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure… of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change” (4).  The repetition present in Kiss Me Kate comes with the aspects of gender and art that are presented in The Taming of the Shrew and affirmed in the modern setting.  The ending in which Fred and Lilli are reconciled is especially revealing here.  Fred ultimately fails to keep Lilli in the theater and admits his defeat to her in private.  His failure to control the public sphere has apparently thwarted any hope for happiness in the diminished private.  He returns to his performance expecting an understudy to recite Kate’s final submission speech.  However, to the surprise of absolutely no-one except Fred, Lilli returns at the last moment and performs the last scene as Kate before an enthusiastic crowd, and it is implied that she and Fred are again ’together.’  Lilli’s performance of the speech is ironic considering Fred’s admission of defeat to her in private.  In Kiss Me Kate, patriarchy has a public face but little private significance.  The ironic context of Kate’s submission speech is retained from the original Taming (the repetition as described by Hutcheon), but is altered by the self-awareness of the heroine (the change) so that it takes on something close to a heroic dimension.    

Another important and helpful insight offered by Hutcheon that can be applied to Kiss Me Kate concerns the manner of story presentation, or medium.  She remarks, “…considering changes in the more general manner of story presentation, however, other differences in what gets adapted begin to appear.  This is because each manner involves a different mode of engagement on the part of both audience and adapter” (12).  The most noticeable change in the presentation of the story of Kate and Petruchio undertaken by Kiss Me Kate is the change in the nature of the induction.  The centrality of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ events renders the action of The Taming of the Shrew more artificial, and more conspicuously ‘performed.’  In the original text, it is very easy to forget that the main plot is a performance for Sly’s benefit, and indeed, many productions of the play omit the induction entirely.  In Kiss Me Kate, despite the absence of anything that can be credibly called ‘realism,’ art is not allowed to cast its spell to the same degree because attention is constantly being drawn to its manufactured and constructed nature.  Art cannot make reality, and reality is always undermining art, as the constant interruptions of the staged show in Kiss Me Kate demonstrate.  The mode of engagement this encourages in the audience is essentially of a contextualizing character.  Kiss Me Kate, in its own whimsical way, is constantly encouraging its audience to draw comparisons to different artistic styles and between different times and places.  It is an aesthetic that enables the perception, and appreciation, of change.

The third, and final, point espoused by Hutcheon that I would like to draw attention to vis-à-vis Kiss Me Kate concerns both the definition of adaptation itself and the process of artistic production and reception.  “[Adaptation] is actually very difficult to define, in part… because we use the same word for the process and the product.  As a product, an adaptation can be given a formal definition, but as a process- of creation and reception- other aspects have to be considered” (15-16).  The full range of these ‘considerations’ are beyond the scope of this inquiry, so I will focus on just a few aspects that pertain to Kiss Me Kate.  As a musical, it foregrounds the process of its own creation and anticipates its reception.  It is a musical about a musical being performed.  This complicates its engagement with the text it is ostensibly adapting, The Taming of the Shrew.  It is by now well understood that modern peoples cannot have access to Shakespeare’s creative process.  Distance in time and culture prevent us from really knowing what compelled him to write his plays, beyond the obvious financial incentives, but even if we cannot fully grasp his art, we have some idea of his technique, and it, quite suggestively, included adaptation.  The Taming of the Shrew itself is thought to be adapted from texts by George Gascoigne and Ludovico Ariosto (Bate and Rasmussen 529).  This would seem to suggest that Shakespeare’s play was in dialogue with a number of cultural traditions and backgrounds, making it an act of interpretation and a receiving.  The process of adaptation is the process of recycling stories, and commenting on them anew with each cycle.  Kiss Me Kate is very much a link in the continuous process of Taming’s reception, an invitation to construct a relation with the cultural dialogues and conflicts presented through the aegis of Shakespeare’s art and, perhaps, have a say in how the process will continue. 

The preceding analysis of Kiss Me Kate and its sister text The Taming of the Shrew is by no means exhaustive.  My primary concern was to convey an understanding of the essentially conflicted nature of Shakespeare’s work, and how that sense of conflict and uncertainty makes the play an effective tool for artistically interpreting the realities of social change, especially change that pertains to gender.  I also wished to offer a theoretical paradigm (adaptation theory) that may prove useful for gaining a broader understanding of how inter-cultural and inter-temporal dialogues exist through art.  Kiss Me Kate presents conflicts between men and women which have the aura of intractability but are always continually resolved through the healing power of ‘romance.’  The fragility of this concept is revealed by its engagement with The Taming of the Shrew (a play which doesn’t offer much hope for the fulfilling power of marriage minus the presence of female submission and monetary gain) and yet paradoxically affirmed by the use of a parallel structure that augments and extends Shakespeare’s artistic methods into a modern setting and deprives the original play of at least some of its superficially misogynistic bite by revealing that the conflicts it depicts can never have a final and decisive victor. 

A reminder that ‘kinky’ is in the eye of the beholder.

Works Cited

Bate, Jonathan and Eric Rasmussen.  “Introduction to The Taming of the Shrew.”

            William Shakespeare: Complete Works.  Ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.

            New York: The Modern Library, 2007.  526-529.  Print. 

Dash, Irene G. Shakespeare and the American Musical.  Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press, 2010.  Print.

Hutcheon, Linda.  A Theory of Adaptation.  New York: Routledge, 2006.  Print. 

Kostihova, Marcela.  “Katherina ‘humanized’: Abusing the Shrew on the Prague

            Stage.”  World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and

            Performance.  Ed. Sonia Massai.  New York: Routledge, 2005.  72-79. 

            Print. 

Shakespeare, William.  The Taming of the Shrew.  William Shakespeare: Complete

Works.  Ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.  New York: The Modern Library, 2007. 530-583.  Print.

Teague, Frances.  Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage.  Cambridge: Cambridge

            University Press, 2006.  Print.