A Handmaid's Tale: episode six: nothing to lose but their chains?

As others have commented, this episode ends a more upbeat note, but the framing continues to be quite dark. 

One dark moment comes when the Commander (Fred) demands a kiss from Offred as a pure power play, not a matter of erotic desire. Sex is again used openly to punish and control.

Offred and the Commander: it's all about power. (I couldn't find a still of the two kissing.)

He is at angry at her for not focusing her attention on him in his study. He has privileged her by inviting her into this sanctum where his wife does not enter. But this evening Offred is disinterested in him. She does not adequately play her role of an adoring handmaid grateful for the favor of his company. 

So he dismisses her abruptly for not being attentive enough to him. This means she will have to return to her room, where she has nothing to do but sit around. She is forbidden to read. She also knows that for him to perform sexually, very important as she now is having sex with Nick, he needs to be in emotional relationship with her. She may be killed if it becomes obvious that the sperm impregnating her is not Fred's. Moreover, to be protected by the victimization of his wife, she needs his patronage.

We see her, in a raw, painful moment, with her back to him, her hand on the study's door handle. The camera moves in on her face, showing her chokingly intense struggle to compose herself. We see what it costs her to force herself, by sheer dint of will, to overcome her revulsion against the lies she must tell to survive and her desire to assert her independence. At what is clearly a shattering soul cost, she manages  to compose her face and turn around to grovel to him, begging him to let her stay. He can't see her face during her struggle, but he must sense her inner battle in the time she spends at the door, and he must intuit what it costs her to swallow her pride and perform abjectly.

This scene reminded me of one in Sophie's Choice, where the young daughter of the Nazi family with which Sophie is staying as a servant discovers she has a radio. If the parents find out, it will mean death for Sophie, and we witness her throwing herself on her knees, begging this little girl not to betray her. In this case it works, as the little girl likes having power over a grown woman. In the story of Inkle and Yarico, Yarico's only hope is also abjection: she begs on her knees for him not to sell into slavery, but in this case it doesn't work. 

Offred's abjection does not engender any sympathy in the Commander. Instead, he is determined to punish her. He makes her kiss him with her tongue in his mouth, as if she wants to, because he can. He thus communicates his power over her. He can force her to that. It is a form of rape, but a form of rape or coerced oral sex in which he insists, as he can't in the Ceremony, that she further degrade herself by pretending she likes it. She does it as part of an implicit bargain that he'll let her stay in the room. But once he forces the humiliating concession, he dismisses her--because he can. This is Orwell's boot in the face. I do agree with Ellen that his power--he has too much power--corrupts him. When we see Offred violently brushing her teeth afterwards and spitting into the sink, this conveys that she understands the extent of her degradation and underscores that this act was a proxy for the oral sex he wouldn't let his wife perform. I wonder now if in refusing his wife's gesture he was not rejecting her sexually but attempting to shield her from humiliation. I give the series credit for creating him as a complex character.

Serena Joy: the backstory shows how the regime change she worked for as a powerful woman led to her chains.

This coerced kiss acted as the counterpart to the powerful scene in which Offred tells the ambassador--and summarizes for us as an audience who have witnessed it--the truth about the abuse, enslavement and degradation she and the other handmaids have suffered. At this point,  Offred  can't pretend anymore. Her summary is direct and harrowing, and yet the ambassador's dehumanizing response is very real: too often the "greater good" and "dire need" arguments are used to justify unneeded cruelty. The series cries out between the lines that it doesn't have to be this way. Fertile women can provide children to a society without having to be enslaved and forced to play a part in a sick, twisted fantasy. When you view events from the subaltern perspective, you long to shake the ambassador and say to her, you can achieve your goals without throwing away these women's lives.

The ambassador is no different from Aunt Lydia: she offers sweet talk and some chocolates, but will do nothing to help the handmaids. There's talk and there's walk ...

I found the serendipity of the ambassador's assistant just happening to know Luke and to know who June (Offred) a bit much, at the same time noting that serendipities like that do occur in real life. We all have only, at most, five degrees of separation from most other people on the planet and all that ... but still. However, the hope that Offred can be in touch with Luke  does move the plot in a more hopeful direction. We also now know that the handmaids are more important than we thought: they do have power if they can only realize it, and nothing to lose but their chains. The regime can't kill them, as they are the only commodity it has to shore up their collapsing currency.

As an aside, I initially thought the Mexicans wanting to trade for handmaids a completely new twist on the novel, but I began rereading it and realized the seeds of that plot are embedded in the original: a  Japanese woman tourist asks Offred if she is happy. I recognize that the novel also problematizes our time/culture by emphasizing that ours is a world in which a woman has to very careful, where date rape occurs, and where male power poses a different kind of threat.

I appreciate this series for, as does Man in the High Castle, showing us life from the subaltern point of view, not glamorizing violence and depicting how degrading coerced sex is. I wonder if the entrance of two powerful series told from "below" in the last six months indicates, an awareness that this is the reality for a growing number of Americans. 

Fens serendipities

Lately I have been coming across literature set in the English fens, so I thought I would write about three "fen" settings I have encountered in the past few weeks: a Father Brown story (my first) by G.K. Chesterton called "The Sins of Prince Saradine," the movie version of Waterland, based on the Graham Swift novel, and just today, Virginia Woolf's "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn." All three use the fens--the emptiness, the melancholy marshes, the waterways--to lyrical effect, and to evoke the fairyland, both enchanting and frightful, of childhood.

In "The Sins of Prince Saradine," Father Brown accompanies his friend Flambeau on a month's holiday, traveling in a small boat on "little rivers in the Eastern counties ... [rivers] so small that the boat looked like a magic boat, sailing on land through meadows and cornfields."  The men delight in "overhanging gardens and meadows, the mirrored mansions or villages, lingering to fish in the pools and corners ..."

A narrow waterway through the fens

They end up, by design, at the home of Prince Saradine, called Reed House, on Reed Island, Norfolk. The day they arrive there, they awake before daylight:

" ... a large lemon moon was only just setting in the forest of high grass about their heads, and the sky was of a vivid violet-blue, nocturnal but bright. Both men had a simultaneous a reminiscence of childhood, of the elfin and adventurous time when tall weeds close over us like woods. Standing up thus against the large low moon, the daisies really seemed to be giant daisies, the dandelions to be giant dandelions. ... 'By Jove!'  said Flambeau, 'it's like being in fairyland.'"

Reed House has an Asian fairytale quality:

"... in the middle of this wider piece of water, fringed on every side with rushes, lay a long, low islet, along which ran a low, long house or bungalow built of bamboo or some kind of tough tropic cane."

Fittingly enough, they stumble on a murder and a mystery involving an Orientalized Sicilian in this exotic island fairyland: exotic in the midst of the ironically all-too-ordinary English fens.

Memories of childhood and adolescence on the fens also crowd the thoughts of middle-aged high-school history teacher Tom Crick (Jeremy Irons) as he tries to reach his disinterested students in the movie Waterland.  Here the fens also provide a lyrical  backdrop for a story about love, family and fractures that explores why history matters. The cinematography is breathtaking, the fens a land of magic and memory, as murky, insubstantial, real, and bittersweet as the past itself.

What can be said about "The Journal of Joan Martyn," an early, fictional exploration of woman's biography, written in 1906 when Woolf was 24? Woolf is brilliant and this story, set (mostly) in the 15th century village of East Harling, a real place, captures the poetry and intensity of what it is like to be a quiveringly free and alive adolescent girl on the brink of marriage,  a matrimony that is perhaps a too-majestic estate of "great honor and ... great burden."

Joan's story is framed by the modern-day tale of narrator Miss Rosamond Merridew, aged 45, a brittle and long-winded maiden historian, yet perceptive, imaginative, and thus linked to her subject, Joan. Miss Merridew writes:

I have not scrupled ... to show, vividly as in a picture, some scenes from the life of the time; here I knock at the serf's door, and find him roasting rabbits he has poached ... [Joan will describe a scene far harsher]

Rosamond, through instinct and intuition, and her "archaeological eyes" which "telegram" her, comes to

long low walls of buff coloured plaster; and on top of them, at no great distance was the roof of ruddy tiles, and finally, I beheld in front of me the whole of the dignified little house, built like the letter E with the middle notch smooth out of it.

This is Joan's ancestral manor, "one of those humble little old Halls," now owned by the middle-aged Martyns. They give Rosamond a tour and then reveal to her old papers. Mr. Martyn, like Austen's Sir Walter Elliot, is primarily interested in the family genealogy, "an elaborate ... tree ... [that] his finger travelled sagaciously ... as though it were so well used to this occupation it could almost be trusted to perform it itself."

He is far less concerned about what excites Miss Merridew, the journal of Joan Martyn. In his defense, he is matter-of-fact rather than pompous (like Sir Walter) about his heritage. His ancestors are casually alive to him not as status symbols but as friends, as if there were no gulf between past and present.

He is carelessly pleased to lend Rosamond Joan's journal, though bemused as to why she wouldn't want Willoughby's, yes Willoughby's, Stud book, no doubt a nod to the horse gifting and randy Mr. Willoughby of Jane Austen fame.

Miss Merridew, however, eschews the Stud book for the teenage girl's journal and the rest of the story comes from the journal as our focus moves to Joan.

For the duration of her account, Joan, though every day closer to matrimony, is the light, dancing, vibrant, happy daughter with "a clear vision." She writes;

"Oh, how blessed it would be never to marry or grow old; but to spend one's life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which can alone keep one childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world! Marriage of any other great joy would confuse the clear vision which is still mine."

We hear the voice and vision of the young Virginia Woolf echoing through the words of Joan Martyn. Or, for that matter, the voice of Jane Austen, who never let marriage confuse her clear vision.

Joan is alive to the wonder of the world. On a winter day she perceives the sun as

"made of gleaming ice and not fire; and its rays were long icicles that reached from sky to earth. They splintered on our cheeks and went glancing across the fen."

One could weep at the beauty of that language. When the wandering storyteller, Master Richard, arrives at the small castle, Joan, aquiver with desire, admires his book:

"the capital letters framed bright blue skies, and golden robes; and in the midst of the writing their came broad spaces of color, where you might see princes and princesses, walking in procession and towns with churches on steep hills, and the sea breaking blue beneath them. They were like little mirrors, held up to those visions which I had seen passing in the air but here they were caught and stayed forever."

Joan has arrived at a time when her feelings are "true" and she

"saw them as solid globes of crystal; enclosing a round ball of earth and air, in which tiny men and women labored, as beneath the dome of the sky itself."

But Joan must prepare for marriage, which means the loss of childhood's fairyland, represented by the fens, and instead assume the adult mantle of colonization, possession, domination of one's surround, as her mother explains to her in "theory of ownership:"

"one is as the Ruler of a small island set in the midst of turbulent waters; how one must plant it and cultivate it; and drive roads through it, and fence it securely from the tides; and one day perhaps the waters will abate and this plot of ground will be ready to make part of a new world."

Joan's mother wants "one firm spot of ground to tread on."

But Joan yearns something more insubstantial, mysterious and ephemeral:

"Yet what it is I want, I cannot tell, although I crave for it, and in some secret way, expect it. For often, and oftener as time goes by, I find myself suddenly halting in my walk, as though I were stopped by a strange new look on the surface of the land which I know so well. It hints at something, but is gone before I know what it means."

Joan grasps for the numinous "more" just out of reach. We fear that she has reached her zenith at journal's end.

A Handmaid's Tale, Episode 5: When dystopia is better than real life, do we worry?

Near the end of episode five, the genitally mutilated Emily engages in a spontaneous act of desperation: she leaps into a car and brutally runs over a guard. While we sympathize with her anger, it's an appallingly inhumane act (she is disconnected from reality) and accomplishes all of nothing. It's political energy wasted in the form of inchoate rage. It reminded me of the real woman named Miriam Carey in Washington D.C. shot to death for ramming her car into Congressional barricades, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_Capitol_shooting_incident) obviously confused, perhaps angry, but not deserving to die. She had an infant in the back seat. Clearly the US situation is worse than in Atwood's dystopia: the real woman who rammed the Congressional barricades killed nobody but was killed by the police (I still can't get over it) and in contrast, Emily, who killed somebody in the dystopic world was not killed herself on the spot--she will presumably be subject to some sort of legal process, no matter how dubious. Should we worry--or at least think-- when a dystopic world is not as bad as our own reality?

Episode five is interesting as well in stepping outside of the frame of Atwood's novel to a problematize the time before the new world order. It is troubling that Offred takes such a cavalier attitude--utterly insensitive--towards her lover's wife, demanding that he leave her, and that he agrees, saying that he will divorce her because it is Offred he loves. If Offred is dehumanized, she has previously dehumanized another woman. And what happens when her husband falls "in love" with someone else? That's apparently grounds for moving on. We learn from  Offred's new handmaid walking partner, who comes from a background of drugs and poverty, that her life is better now than it was, and she's not about to mess it up. So we see an intelligent calibrating of what could have become a "the past good, the future bad" dichotomy. The commander speaks the truth, loathsome as he is, about the magazines Offred loves--women in the pages of those kinds of pubs never are good enough, young, enough, pretty enough--because the magazines have to sell product. The trade off seems far worse, but yes, the point is made: social revolutions don't arise in a vacuum.

So this seems to me an interesting gloss on Atwood, who, as I remember, is more unequivocally positive about the old days to show those days as also fraught with problems and cruelties. She shows too the importance of the seemingly trivial rights women in our society have--being able, for instance, to walk boldly down the street with long strides, head held high, boots tucked into jeans.

Ellen makes a good point that the Offred of the past (our time) always appears in some sort of mechanized jungle: she is walking down a city street, or in a hotel, an office, at an amusement park. Beyond that her old existence presents as largely vacuous: she "hangs" with Moira, she goes to work, she has a lover, she bears a child she loves, she gets a latte, but she doesn't have any interests that distinguish her as an individual human in her past any more than she does in her dystopic world. Is the series saying that our world flattens women into banal stereotypes as thoroughly as the new world does? Or is Offred supposed to be "everywoman," at least educated, privileged white everywoman, in both past and future? Why does she seem so vacuous and superficial in her past life? Are we supposed to think that her lack of thinking or substance led to the dystopia? And while it's relieving to see some decent sex at the end of the episode after all the horrifyingly dehumanized sex "acts," a sad desperation drove that final connection.

And then I return to pondering that it is easier to get killed in the United States today, at least if you are black, than it is in a dystopic fiction.

The Handmaid's Tale, episode 4: nothing sexy about men or violence: subversive television

The men in episode four of A Handmaid's Tale are impotent. This is shocking in a mainstream drama. Fred Waterford, the commander-pater of his dysfunctional fundamentalist family, becomes the most important and literal representation of this impotence. In a normal series, pandering to patriarchy, the handsome and politically powerful Fred would be the hero figure. But heros have erections; virility is essential to the package.  I remember the Jeremy Irons character in The Borgias, playing a pope who uses the ruse of erectile dysfunction to rid himself of an aging lover: the joke (and con)  is on her, because after all with the right (younger) woman, he has no problems.

Fred, however, in this episode, can't manage an erection. So much rides on the Ceremony, and he has a young, fertile woman at his knees, but you can hardly blame him for his troubles, given the nature of this dehumanized sex act. Nevertheless, it's painful and embarrassing to watch him trying desperately to arouse himself with his hand down his pants. It's worse when he goes into the bathroom and his wife follows: he still can't manage an erection, we register his distress in his flailing, pacing and furious rubbling, and yet, for reasons too complicated to be easily understood, he rejects his wife's offer of oral sex. The all-important Ceremony has to be postponed.  Patriarchy doesn't portray its alpha-males this way: this kind of vulnerability and emasculation makes for very subversive TV.

In another, earlier scene, Offred rejects another form of dehumanized sex when her gynecologist, arguing that Fred is infertile, proposes to impregnate her himself on the examination table.  It's a favor that Offred, for all her helplessness, rightly refuses from this creepy unseen man on the other side of a curtain. Her refusal--her agency--leaves him as impotent, if metaphorically so, as Fred.

It's hard to imagine humanity propagated so joylessly as through the sex that is offered Offred.

Offred's handsome young chauffeur is equally impotent: he has no wife, and adultery is clearly out of the question in this new world order, at least for subalterns, so we assume he has no sex life. He is unable to protect or save Offred, though he clearly empathizes: no Rambo he, again muddying our expectations of male potency and protectiveness. In a normal drama, he would have jumped in by this time to use violence and virility to save her. Here, more realistically, he is at the mercy of larger forces.

Offred, however, realizes that she has the power over Fred's sex life. She recognizes that Fred needs an emotional connection to maintain an erection--and she uses that to her advantage, manipulating him so that he forces his wife to free her from her imprisonment in her room. This "punishment" for a "crime" Offed has no control over (though she abjectly apologizes for it to try to get some humane treatment) shows the cruelly arbitrary nature of power and violence.

We see Offred exercise power too in a flashback in which she and her friend Moira kidnap an "aunt" in their training institute and use her garb to get past their guards. Offred is captured, but Moria escapes: that is a striking display of power.  Offred faces torture, but the series relies on fearful, anxious anticipation (Hitchcockian) rather than the actual violence itself to make its point. We know the grammar of this society well enough to understand that something terrible will happen to Offred for her flagrant crime (it is surprising, except that they need her womb, that she is not killed).

We see her strapped by her wrists and ankles face down on a table. She is writhing, terrified and begging for mercy. We feel a sense of deep dread as we witness her vulnerable body. The woman she kidnapped shows up with a switch. Offred heaves and writhes, moans in fear. The woman beats her not on the buttocks, which might sexualize the violence, but on the soles of her bare feet. We know if we have read the novel that the feet are full of nerve endings, so this is very painful, torture, not punishment. The woman strikes her soles, Offred screams, the woman strikes again, Offred screams in agony, and the scene ends. We next see Offred, the soles of her feet bloody, being dragging half conscious and dumped in her dormitory bed. This is desexualized (unless perhaps you have a foot fetish) violence perpetrated on a defenseless person. It is not empowering, not sexy, not glamorous, but simply sordid: violence-torture stripped to its essentials.

At the end of this flashback, we see a glimpse of humanity that creates a stark contrast with the dehumanizing society in which these women are trapped: Offred's dormitory mates, as they file past, each drop a bit of food on the bed for her--tiny, gentle, domestic gestures that signify empathy and humane connection. In essay called “The Pacifist Image,”  Mary Evelyn Jegen writes:

"Goodness expresses itself in love, trust, truth and justice; evil shows itself in deception, injustice, and the reduction of other persons to instruments of self-aggrandizement—three dimensions of violence."

She writes as well that:

"An insight into goodness is born in pain.” 

A Handmaid's Tale dramatizes both Jegen's truths. Evil dehumanizes everyone, even Fred. But the starker victims of its cruelty understand what humanity is. The women's small acts of kindness are not trivial. They show the women haven't capitulated, haven't accepted the cruelty inherent in their overlords. The show intuitively understands that it must, at the risk of triteness and sentimentality ( I have some reservations and could have wished for something more original, less clobbering and cloying, yet ...),  let the camera linger on this scene of quiet generosity, showing the power of genuine connection in which hope lies. 

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A Handmaid's Tale: violence unvarnished, episodes 1-4

The question buzzes: will the "sex" and violence perpetrated against women in A Handmaid's Tale be taken up and enjoyed by people hostile to women? Does showing a high level of violence inure us to it, and make it acceptable and even pleasurable?

Any work of art, once it is released into the world, is open to interpretation and appropriation, often in unexpected ways. And any work of art that includes sex and violence will seized on in the wrong ways by people who relish and perhaps want to reenact the cruelty and sadism they see: they will approve of it. And one can worry greatly that the high levels of ultra-violence in popular miniseries can inure us to it and make it seem normal. I worry when over and over we are inundated with the message that the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and 100th response to any provocation is violence and more violence, and then more, as if this is the only form of power, and the only solution we can possibly conceive to any problem.

A Handmaid's Tale: violence enforces docility 

So the question is not if A Handmaid's Tale may be misappropriated--it will. If that becomes a reason to disavow a mini-series, it is a weak reason indeed: we would at that point have to condemn every program with the faintest whiff of non-redemptive sex or violence. We would, in fact, have to go back to the Hayes rules censoring film. And that we do not want to do.

So while a work of art opens itself to alternative interpretations and while the depiction of violence always holds the danger of valorizing, glamorizing or inuring us to brutality, it seems more fruitful to look at what a particular series might be really be communicating about (sex and) violence.

No filmed media that aspires to critical applause will admit to aiming at the basest instincts, and so we have a history of disingenuousness in many highly-acclaimed works. In a trend possibly started by the original Godfather movies, a film will focus on a single, extraordinary, heroic male, such as Don Corleone. He is a mafia boss, initially shown as a person to respect, soft-spoken but ruthless, cunning but conscious of a strict honor code, willing to kill cold-bloodedly when needed but one who takes care of women, children and his weaker Italian neighbors. Gradually, he and his underworld are then shown to be sordid and reprehensible--but it is the initial, positive, heroic version of this "great" man that lodges and persists in our imaginations. The directors know too well, as did Jane Austen, the power of the first impression, the near impossibility of dislodging it.

Don Corleone, a rich, respected alpha male, attaining an enviable place through violence.

So other filmed series--and now I turn to miniseries that are righty acclaimed for their marvelous acting, scripts and production values--follow the paradigm. The Sopranos, for example, initially sets up Tony Soprano, mafia boss, as a hero and a sympathetic one at that (his own gruesome mother wants to kill him)--and if the series shows him as ever more flawed and ugly, this doesn't dislodge our first impression.

Likewise Walter White in Breaking Bad. How can we not initially feel sympathy--and a condescending pity-- for this downtrodden sad sack of a high school chemistry teacher, moonlighting at a car wash, abused by his boss there, henpecked by his controlling wife, and then diagnosed with lung cancer?  How can we not feel some sense of pleasure when he develops a spine and begins to fight back, using his keen intelligence and science skills to cook the best crystal meth on the street? How can we not feel vindicated as he grows in confidence and begins to outsmart and outdare--to become more audacious--than the most brutally weird sociopaths he deals with? By the time he himself has become the ruthless sociopath, it's too late--we may be appalled when, for instance, he murders his best friend's girlfriend--but we are on his side. If the series increasingly pretends to condemn his behavior, in reality it does not: it admires him for his cunning, brains and ruthlessness. It celebrates that the most ruthless man wins.

Glamorized violence, from the point-of-view of the aggressors.

And it is a man. Always. Women are always put in their place in these series, and it would be a rare woman watching who didn't take away the message "don't ever dare to compete in a man's world or you will be destroyed." (And if nature imitates art, we saw that enacted in the last election: our miniseries propagandized well.) In these series, any woman who has ever in any way stood up to dominant male can expect some form of humiliation, if not death.

But then there are extraordinary series that are rife with violence that don't convey this message message of misogyny or that violence is the only effective form of power. One is the recent Man in a High Tower. Another, so far (and I take the caveat so far seriously) is A Handmaid's Tale.

The show is saturated with disturbing sex and violence, depicting a Christian fundamentalist dystopia in which women are firmly put into their place as subordinate to men. Sterility is a huge problem in this culture and women of a liberal, secular background who happen to be fertile are saved from a slow death sentence cleaning up radioactive waste in order to be bred with important males in the new hierarchy. They are handmaids, like the handmaid Rachel in the Bible used to have children with Jacob. (The series entirely stays away, as the novel does, from Mary as a handmaid to God.)

De-individualized handmaids sit, a hanged body dangling as a reminder of state power.

These women are unequivocally coerced through ever-present violence that ranges from the mundane to the life-threatening into lives they would not in any way choose--dressed in long gowns and ridiculous bonnets, forced to be submissive and docile, compelled to submit to ritualized, unpleasant rape in "The Ceremony," in which, sitting between the spread legs of an older woman, the wife of the man in question, they are subjected to a cold-blooded, humiliating, ritualized intercourse meant to impregnate them.

Rape ritual: Offred is frozen, trying to be elsewhere.

If one has to show violence and coercive sex (rape) in a series, A Handmaid's Tale does it in the best possible way. This is unvarnished, unromanticized violence, that, if we are to see violence, we need to see: real violence that is not heroic, not "empowering," not "ennobling", not even "necessary" and not for a greater good: not to defend one's home or children (a common fantasy encouraging violence), not to defend one's country, and not to enhance one's masculinity (the perpetrators of violence in this series are by and large women so far and unattractive women at that; the men are mere automatons with machine guns): it is violence, as Ellen Moody rightly notes, meant solely to destroy and control less fortunate people, which is what violence most often IS: shown naked, ugly, brutal, and applied both in physical and psychological ways to break its victims. The series reveals the brutality relentlessly and doesn't allow us a way to justify it. It shows us as much as we need to see (which is and should be very uncomfortable--after all, this IS what violence IS) and not more--the camera cuts away once it has made its point.

Further, and this is significant, compared to shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, in A Handmaid's Tale we are wholly meant to identify with the victims of the violence, not the perpetrators. We are, unusually in a mini-series, running with the hare, not the hounds. This is not Walter White achieving confidence and selfhood through murder and mayhem and crushing his enemies to a pulp to become the man at the top of the heap (there are no Walter Whites or Tony Sopranos or Don Corleones in this series): we witness ordinary women (and men, if we include the young chauffeur) who are coerced through violence--witnessing endless hangings and themselves subjected to slaps, kicks, punches, beatings, electric shocks, imprisonment, isolation, cruelty--with no chance (which is very realistic) to fight back in kind. We ought to find it hard to become inured to this violence because it isn't heroicized violence and it is not justified or made palatable as for a greater good in any way: it would be a strange mind indeed that would attracted to or inured to this kind of un-aesthetic terror rather than repelled. It is the ugly violence of bullies, applied to people who can't fight back. The series thus attacks our comforting paradigms about paternalistic violence.

To be continued ...

Jane Austen and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The parallels between Agatha Christie and Jane Austen are striking, leading one to wonder: could Jane Austen have been the famous crime writer's literary mentor?

Certain clues tantalize us and suggest yes. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Christie names a character Mrs. Ferrars. Like the Mrs. Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, this Mrs. Ferrars is a wealthy widow. Christie, however, adds her own wicked twist: the new Mrs. Ferrars is widowed because she poisoned her abusive, alcoholic husband (though nobody knows it for sure but her blackmailer).

In another possible Austen parallel, Ursula Bourne, who comes to Roger Ackroyd's home as a parlor maid, is beautiful and elegant and from an impoverished family of Irish "gentlefolk." She is secretly married to Ralph Patton, both the stepson and "adopted" son of Roger Ackroyd. Like Frank Churchill, he is under the thumb of a frugal and controlling guardian, in this case Ackroyd. He dares not announce his marriage, despite Ursula's distress at the secrecy, for fear his stepfather will cut him off without a penny. He uses a pretend engagement to Flora, his pretty and wealthy step cousin, to cover up his marriage and get his debts paid. Flora doesn't know that Ralph, as unstable and charming as Frank Churchill, is married and simply using her, but she doesn't really care a fig for Ralph either. She is in love with an older man, Hector Blunt, who is around 45, who has all along secretly been in love with her, shades of Mr. Knightley.

The parallels to Emma seem almost too obvious to state: Flora is Emma, pretty, in love with an older man, and used by a capricious younger man who doesn't want his guardian to know of his involvement with a penniless lover for fear of losing his inheritance. Further, we're told explicitly that the penniless beauty Ursula could have become a governess--Jane Fairfax's threatened and dreaded fate-- and chose to be a parlor maid:

  Detemined to earn her living and not attracted to the idea of being a nursery governess - the one profession open to an untrained girl, Ursula preferred the job of parlourmaid. She scorned to label herself a 'lady parlourmaid.' ... At Fernly, despite an aloofness which, as has been seen, caused some comment, she was a success at her job - quick, competent, and thorough.

This sounds very much like Jane Fairfax, not only beautiful, but aloof and competent.

Of course, Christie has ratcheted up the stakes, perhaps reflecting a novel written in 1926 rather than 1816: Ursula and the happy-go-lucky Ralph are secretly married, not secretly engaged, but the point remains. (And who is to say that the wedding we never see at the end of Emma is a clue by omission that the two have been wed all along?)

Further, our first introduction to Flora has echoes of  Emma Woodhouse:

Quite a lot of people do not like Flora Ackroyd [as with Emma], but nobody can help admiring her. And to her friends she can be very charming. The first thing that strikes you about her is her extraordinary fairness. .... her skin is cream and roses. She has square, boyish shoulders and slight hips. And to a jaded medical man it is very refreshing to come across such perfect health.

Flora is blond and blue-eyed in contrast to Emma, but the similarities also pop out: not well liked but charming to her friends, good looking and radiating perfect health.

Roger Ackroyd picks up the small village setting of Emma and narrator James Sheppard's sister has some uncanny parallels to Miss Bates: they are both middle-aged spinsters who know everything that is going on in the village. And as in Austen's novels, characters get together to plays games, though in this case it is Mah Jong rather than whist or backgammon.

Thus, Christie points us towards Austen, via Mrs. Ferrars (who in Christie's novel has committed suicide at its opening so is never onstage)  as well as through the stories of Ralph and Ursula, Hector and Flora, and the small English village setting, complete with its own Miss Bates figure.

Language

To me, however, a more important parallel emerges from the way both writers tell a story through conscious omission, misdirection, euphemism, and understatement as well as the use of the throwaway comment. In Persuasion, for example,"about a week or ten days after the Croft's arrival [in Bath] it suited her [Anne] best to leave her friend, or her friend's carriage ... and return alone to Camden place." It's easy to skim over this sentence, but it indicates -- with the euphemism "it suited her"--that Anne doesn't just "accidentally" run into Admiral Croft a few minutes later: she has planned this. She is not without craftiness. And why a "week or ten days" when we know Austen kept careful story calendars? And why "her friend, or her friend's carriage:" was she in it alone that day? If so, where was Lady Russell?

Similarly, Roger Ackroyd hinges on the reader skimming over certain words. The novel's twist is that its narrator, Dr. James Sheppard, tells the story accurately and in first person, even though he himself is the murderer! This works because the reader will slide over his careful euphemisms. He praises himself at the end for his "neat" phraseology, as he stated the facts of the case in his narrative but passed over the crucial detail that between twenty to nine and ten to nine on the day in question, he murdered Roger Ackroyd:

'The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread."

The moral issues of are of different magnitudes, but the technique of euphemism is the same.

Likewise, omitted thefts. In Emma, during Mr. Elton's courtship of Emma, which is supposed to be (in Emma's mind) a courtship of Harriet, Harriet steals several worthless remembrances of Mr. Elton's, such as a bit of lead pencil and a bit of plaster. However, these thefts are omitted from the narrative at the time of the courtship, presumably because Emma, whose point of view we follow, never notices them. We learn later, after Mr. Elton has married and long since ceased to visit Emma, that Harriet had previously purloined these items when she reveals them to Emma. A small detail, but it serves to raise questions: what else hasn't Emma seen? What else might Harriet have stolen?

In Roger Ackroyd, Sheppard describes looking through an unlocked curio table:

Then my eye was caught by what, I believe, is called a silver table, the lid of which lifts, and through the glass of which you can see the contents. I crossed over to it, studying the contents. There were one or two pieces of old silver, a baby shoe belonging to King Charles the First, some Chinese jade figures, and quite a number of African implements and curios. Wanting to examine one of the jade figures more closely, I lifted the lid. It slipped through my fingers and fell. At once I recognized the sound I had heard. It was this same table lid being shut down gently and carefully. I repeated the action once or twice for my own satisfaction. Then I lifted the lid to scrutinize the contents more closely. I was still bending over the open silver table when Flora Ackroyd came into the room.

Sheppard omits to mention that he steals a knife from this table to murder Roger Ackroyd. Again, the moral magnitude of stealing a murder weapon is far greater than stealing a pencil nub, but the technique is the same: not until the end of the mystery do we find out that in this table Sheppard found his murder weapon.

Sheppard crows too about his careful wording:

Then later, when the body was discovered, and I sent Parker to telephone for the police, what a judicious use of words: 'I did what little had to be done!' It was quite little just to shove the dictaphone into my bag and push back the chair against the wall in its proper place [covering up his crime].

As easily as the reader slides over Sheppard's initial words about doing what had to be done, so a reader might, in Emma, slide over the incident in which Mrs. Martin, Robert Martin's mother, happy with Harriet as a potential daughter-in-law and obviously meaning to please her, sends a "Mrs. Goddard a beautiful goose ....  Mrs. Goddard had it dressed on a Sunday and invited all the three teachers, Miss Nash, and Miss Prince, and Miss Richardson, to sup with her." But Harriet isn't invited to the party. If Harriet hopes Emma might note the unfairness, she never does, nor do most readers. Nevertheless, such an aside is hardly in the text by accident, any more than is Sheppard's "I did what little had to be done," and an astute reader might begin to suspect that the prerogatives of power might overrun fairness in Highbury Village.

At the end of Roger Ackroyd, Christie points explicitly to Sheppard's word choice, so that the reader can't miss what he has been doing. Austen, on the other hand, never loses her cool, slips her mask or blinks an eye. Christie is by far the less skillful writer, if far more successful in her day, but it may take someone like her to loop us back to what Austen herself was doing.

Islands and utopias, Johnson's Scotland, Crusoe with his animals and a dollop of Austen

I devoted a post to the first of four papers in this panel from the College English Association conference, on ekphrastic representations of Inkle and Yarico: here I do a quick overview of the other three fine papers.

    Utopia and Utopias

    David Macey discussed More's Utopia as having created the utopian genre. More used Plato as a model, as well as Lucian's materialist cosmology based on inversion: eg, gold and silver are used to make chamberpots, sheep attack people and ambassadors from other lands are mistaken for slaves. Macey said that More shows in his work (book II) an island with no private property, and that More critiques problems such as enclosure (which is the privatizing of the public)  but More also accepts forced labor or coercion in which the slaves work harder because they are "used to it." Macey argued this set a precedent used to justify real world exploitation of colonial people seen as "other." (Austen depicts this in Mansfield Park when it is acceptable to the two sisters, Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris, to overwork the poor relation Fanny, from Portsmouth, an island (!),  by having her cut roses in the hot sun, work they won't do themselves because of the heat).

Utopia is an island

Macey cited Carlo Ginzberg, Russell Jacoby, Ruth Levitas and Frederick Jameson as he traced utopias in their shift from a physically distant place to an interior space (Defoe,) then to a visualized future, and finally, in our era, to the science fiction genre in which utopias have moved to other galaxies. He urged thinking beyond dystopic/utopian dichotomies, arguing that both genres are premised on societies built on coercion and exploited labor (we can argue if that is true or not). He questioned whether dystopias are "blinkering us" or a "way of enlightenment." Macey encouraged thinking that transcends trying to create either a dystopia or utopia but instead to focus on imaginatively creating better worlds without reference to either category. This talk was valuable in the richness of its sources and in inviting argument and debate about both its premises and conclusions.

On to Johnson's Scotland

In another talk, "Visualizing Johnson's Scotland," Robert Lowe McManus used slides to help us visualize the embodied experience of Johnson's tour of Scotland in contrast to how it was caricatured in the popular press. Johnson was notorious for deriding Scotland, so when he travelled there in his 60s, the journey was widely ridiculed. McManus argued that rather than the easy time depicted in the press, Johnson scrambled up rocks, visited caves, and embraced a tough journey in difficult physical world in order to fully experience the country. At times he travelled by boat to distant areas, which was easier than overland travel, but also more dangerous. He expressed surprise at experiences of nature he had not before encountered, and was depressed by ruins he saw, understood sorrow as part of humanity, and compared the present with the loss of a greater past. He also imagined what it might be like to live on an island and visited the Isle of Skye, interesting to me both because I have been there and because Woolf set To the Lighthouse there.

Johnson toured Tobermory on the Isle of Mull in the Scottish Inner Hebrides/

Robison Crusoe and animals

  In this talk, Alan Chalmers asserted that animal studies in English literature has elevated Robinson Crusoe to greater interest.
   Enlightenment thinkers, determined to reconceptualize  human-animal relationships, challenged Descartes' reduction of animals to mindless automatons.

     Defoe offers complex and sympathetic reactions to animals,  and in Robinson Crusoe puts pressure on abstract distinctions between human and animals. In Crusoe, animal and human relationships are crucial, Chalmers says. Crusoe himself enters into relationship with animals, needing them for companionship in his isolated situation, but he also establishes an animal hierarchy based on utility.

     For Crusoe, compassion and empathy come into conflict with his desire to exploit the animals. For Crusoe, exploitation wins. (Though Chalmers did not mention this, the outcome is strikingly similar to the Inkle and Yarico story.)
   Chalmers argued that the goat in Crusoe is central to the Oedipal drama of the novel, for the goat  dies like Crusoe's father, and Crusoe actually buries the goat.

    Chalmers spoke of de Quincy writing about Crusoe, and notes that to James Joyce, Crusoe was a true symbol of British conquest. Virginia Woolf, who was sympathetic to the novel, wrote that we must see world through Defoe's ideological lens: Crusoe's island allows us to see the essential solitude of the human soul.
  As an added note, the link we can't help but see between Crusoe moving to exploit his animals and Inkle exploiting Yarico, an "alien" woman, leads once again to condemning denigrating animals and more particularly, to a condemnation of denigrating women through calling them animals names, such as pigs and cows, which at least one of our esteemed leaders has been known to do. As animals are treated with greater respect, so too women.
  I am trying to remember animals in Jane Austen's novels. Charlotte seems to find more solace in her hens than her husband, and Mrs. Norris keeps fowls for profit, naturally. Lady Bertram's pugs are as seemingly purposeless as she is. Horses provide useful services, and men, of course, hunt.

Crusoe with his animals--and Friday.

A loving memorial

I was grateful to have had the opportunity of attending the memorial service this past Saturday for Katharine Jacobsen, who died in January.

Ken wrote a poem two days before Katharine's death that captures my sense of their loving relationship:

Oh my love, as I sit by you, breathing with you
as your body softly lays itself down like a prayer
I'm feeling our ten thousand days--
the gift of our ten thousand days
of traveling together this blue planet among the stars,
this living school for love called earth,
traveling together to find out what love is about.
I'm feeling our ten thousand days--
ten thousand mornings of prayer time in the quiet,
side by side, wherever we've found ourselves,
like here, like now, drinking in the dawn,
listening again, for what Love would have us do this day.
I'm feeling our ten thousands days--
ten thousand evenings of prayer time in the quiet,
side by side, drinking in the darkness
listening again, for what Love has taught us this day,
as we lay ourselves down to sleep.
Oh my love, I'm feeling in my grief
the joy of our ten thousand days,
how this school of love is just beginning,
our school of love is just beginning,
with you needing to leave your body now
and I given to stay in mine,
and we're just beginning to find out
what Love is all about.
Oh my love, I'm feeling in my grief
the joy of our ten thousand days,
on this sweet planet among stars,
thank you, my love, thank you.

This poem moved me in its simplicity and sincerity. Roger and I recently celebrated 30 years or 10,000 days together, and if Ken feels as I do, it has all gone by in an eyeblink, and he feels he could step through a door back into 1986 as if no time has passed.

My main acquaintance with Ken and Katharine has been on a Quaker committee, where instead of seeing me as "difficult," they were able to understand and respond to me as a human being trying to be heard. That was healing for me. The committee members, knowing each other so well, inadvertently and with no malice, had turned into a clique over the years, where despite the Quaker equality testimony, some were more equal than others. I flapped my wings to avoid being overlooked, felt roundly condemned as a troublemaker, was patronized, and felt increasingly both frustrated and determined to speak my truth--for if I couldn't do that, why I was in this spiritual community? There was and is no secular reason for me to be here. Fortunately, Ken and Katharine were able to hear me: I felt I was alive to them as a person, not just as a problem that had to be dealt with. They didn't have to do this, but they did. Naturally, once I was heard and responded to with understanding and respect, everything began to settle down. Naturally, I felt and feel a great outflow of love to both of them: being treated as fully human generates love, and as I felt grateful for their response and the time they took with me, I began to see them in return as more fully fleshed and particularized humans. And that is how love grows.

One other memory stays with me. At a Friends Center event, I was paired with Katharine and she told me about her childhood, when she would sail with her father on the lake at their summer home and how wonderful that was for her. Katharine radiated with joy at that memory, and so what stays with me is an image I have created of a teenaged Katharine on a sailboat.

Further, with the state of public discourse as it, it is deeply solacing to know that there are people like Katharine in the world who are so formed--of such a character--that such words as we sometimes hear would never cross their lips.

Losing a loved one is the most painful experience ever: our heart longs for that person that to be with us now. Ken wrote this poem after Katharine died:

In the end, my love,
in your final days with us,
I found you were made of nothing
but gratitude,
all you could say was
thank you, thank you, thank you.

He also added to the memorial service program words from the Rule of St. Benedict:

When we rise from sleep
Let us rise with the joy of the true Work
we will be about this day,
and considerately cheer one another on.
Life will always provide matters for concern
Each day, however, brings with it
reasons for joy.
Every day carries the potential
to bring the experience of heaven;
Have the courage to expect good from it.
Be gentle with this life,
and use the light of life
to live fully in your time.