Dutiful Son Research Articles

Winner of the 2022 Wakley–Wu Lien Teh Prize: the dutiful son by his father's bedside

The 2022 Wakley–Wu Lien Teh Prize invited submissions sharing ideas of “a heart full of great compassion and empathy” in modern Chinese clinical practice.1 We are pleased and grateful to have received 187 submissions—twice the number of submissions in 2021—telling touching and provocative stories about all aspects of medical practice in China. Essays were shortlisted by two editors at The Lancet Group and anonymised essays were sent to external advisers in China for their reflections and thoughts.

Teach your children well: Adam Goodes, from unruly child to Indigenous statesman

ABSTRACT The ‘Goodes saga’ in Australian Football transformed Adam Goodes’ persona as a dutiful son of the sport into a polarising celebrity, most infamously through an encounter with a female teenage fan. In this article, we argue that the ‘Goodes saga’ exposed the contested nature of Indigenous celebrity stemming from settler anxieties about the unruly child and Indigenous statesman. Goodes transformed from a sports star, a dutiful ‘son’ of the sport to the national celebrity of a political statesman – a position of adulthood that might be described as characteristic of Eldership. Goodes’ self-manufactured celebrity persona, based in his concept of Indigeneity as ‘having a foot in both worlds’, was enacted through his mission to incorporate Indigenous cultural practices into the sport and wider settler-Australian culture. These actions were persistently disparaged through recourses to Euro-centric concept of the child and childhood as a state of innocence. We prompt readers to consider why the settler-public and its national institutions like the Australian Football League are so invested with surrounding Indigenous stars with a discourse of childhood. Why might the AFL and settler society more broadly consider the possibility that Aboriginal men might ascend to adulthood such a terrifying proposition?

The Sensitive Son and the Feminine Ideal in Literature: Writers from Rousseau to Roth

The Sensitive Son and the Feminine Ideal in Literature:Writers from Rousseau to Roth Andrew Petracca (bio) Myron Tuman. The Sensitive Son and the Feminine Ideal in Literature: Writers from Rousseau to Roth. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 269 pp. $54.99 The Sensitive Son and the Feminine Ideal in Literature—Myron Tuman's treatise on masculinity's sensitive side, dedicated to Philip Roth—explores how eminent male writers and artists gain a sense of aesthetic appreciation that drives their creativity and their lives. Tuman sees a commonality among these men: they are all "sensitive sons," his own coinage. According to Tuman, the sensitive son is a man who rejects the traditionally masculine path in life because of an intense, idealized view of femininity often instilled by said son's mother. The sensitive son, then, is an aesthetically charged man longing for an ideal he cannot satisfy through actual women, leading him to a life of art, intellectualism, and complicated intimate relationships—or lack thereof. But even with this definition, the concept of the sensitive son feels fluid because that sensitivity affects the behavior of each sensitive son differently and often in ways that oppose the behavior of other sensitive sons. This fluidity seems not like a flaw in the text but a testament to the complexity of the exploration. Tuman juxtaposes the sensitive son with the "alpha son" who, though not analyzed in the text beyond comparison to his sensitive counterpart, also feels fluid, sometimes representing a man who adheres to traditional gender roles and sometimes representing any manifestation of boorishness and toxic masculinity. The way in which [End Page 109] Tuman defines and juxtaposes these two sons allows him to embark upon an incredible exploration of sensitive masculinity but, at times, also creates a troubling gender duality. Tuman claims that the world owes much of its great art to these sensitive sons. The diction of his broader thesis is important: "that the grandest romantic narratives, like those produced by the writers presented here, are products of the most intense erotic longing—a longing, at least for these sensitive sons, that was at once palpably immediate and immeasurably distant" (viii). Here, Tuman establishes two conditions imperative to his exploration: first, that every writer and artist explored is a sensitive son and, second, that his creative work emerges from the "erotic longing" that makes him a sensitive son—that is, that his work emerges from obsession with a feminine ideal because having an ideal enhances aesthetic appreciation. These two conditions also reveal the text's primary strength and weakness: the strength being that it provides new and astoundingly well-researched insight not only into the motivation of eminent writers and artists but also into masculinity itself, the weakness being that its attempts to qualify creative motives behind a specific type of masculinity risks perpetuating harmful gender views—though Tuman aims to celebrate non-traditional gender roles. Sensitive Son comprises fourteen chapters, an introduction and thirteen subsequent chapters each dedicated to specific writers and artists or to specific flavors of the sensitive son. Bookended with an analysis of Philip Roth, "the one son in [the] study most eager to effect a clean emotional break with his mother" (262), the text explores Proust, Freud, Rousseau, Mozart, Kierkegaard, Goethe, Shaw, Da Vinci, Sacher-Masoch, Fitzgerald, Lawrence, Stendhal, Schopenhauer, Hazlitt, Flaubert, and Turgenev in depth, referring to multiple works from each and referencing other writers and artists when germane. From his analysis, Tuman establishes multiple categories of sensitive son, primarily the adoring son and the uneasy son under which the rebellious son, needy son, ambitious son, narcissistic son, masochistic son, bachelor son, and dutiful son all fall. Though each son shares the broader qualities of the sensitive son defined above, those qualities manifest themselves differently in each different type of son, which attests to the complexity of Tuman's study. Such complexity is also revealed in the monograph's structure. Tuman does not study his writers and artists chronologically nor does he study his sons outside of the context of the other sons, visiting the adoring son in chapters three and thirteen, for example. Instead, Tuman organizes his text based on how similar traits emerge in...

A Jewish Life on Three Continents: The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden by Menachem Mendel Frieden

Reviewed by: A Jewish Life on Three Continents: The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden by Menachem Mendel Frieden David B. Levy Menachem Mendel Frieden. A Jewish Life on Three Continents: The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden. Translated, edited, annotated, and with an introduction and afterword, by Lee Shai Weissbach. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. 520Cloth $60. ISBN 978-0-8047-8363-7. The memoir of Menachem Frieden (1878–1963) makes a significant scholarly contribution to the study of a tumultuous era influenced by Haskalah, nation building, mass migration from Eastern Europe to America, and the creation of the modern Jewish homeland in Israel. He depicts life in the shtetl, and the scope covers several generations of family history, his early years in a Lithuanian village, schooling and the life of yeshiva students, courtship, marriage, tensions between Hasidic elements of his family and anti-Hasidic Mitnagdic members, travel and the readjustment that comes with migration, his business experience as a peddler in the south of the United States and entrepreneurship in Norfolk, Virginia, and settlement in Palestine in 1921 through the middle of the twentieth century. While Frieden’s memoir seeks to transmit his own family memories, one of its strengths is that it also aims to place those events in historical context. Thus, for example, we learn through this deeply personal story aspects of the impact of the Arab riots of 1929, and of the functioning of early charity organizations in nineteenth-century Palestine. The memoir offers a window on the generation of Jews who lived through great transformations of Jewish life. Frieden’s identity is grounded by his refusal to forget his roots in the old country, and the folkways of Ashkenazic Jewry. His identity is not that of a self-hating Jew, as identified by Sander Gilman in On the Origins of Jewish Self Hatred (2012), but Frieden is rather outspokenly proud of his Jewish heritage. He openly bemoans the choices he made that took him away from Jewish tradition, and chooses to record his memoirs so that others may learn from his mistakes and avoid making them too. His voice is jaded; with the sadness of [End Page 195] abandoning his yeshiva studies and his admiration, valorization, and respect for learned rabbis, which meant the most to him. He clearly was a devoted family man, dutiful son, loving husband, and concerned and caring father but in the end, being a part of something greater than the self, being a part of a living tradition, is what Frieden values. He confesses that he regrets not accepting an offer to lead one of Norfolk’s synagogues, which he speculates might have led to his children being educated differently. Yet he states that he has no “Nietzschean” regrets about marrying a second time or making aliyah. His memoir also sheds light on the many Jews who came to Palestine but did not take up agricultural development. Frieden worked in banking, seeking to bring American “know-how” to help establish an urban entrepreneurial infrastructure in the Yishuv. He identified as a strong Zionist. Thus Frieden’s identity as family patriarch often gives him a pedagogic voice and role, to transmit to familial memories of religious rituals and customs that he wishes his heirs to remember. Some readers may be challenged in identifying individual personalities of his times, the geographic locations in eastern Europe, his allusions to rabbinic commentators such as the Maharsha, and his references to Yiddish novelists like Shomer that were a part of the common culture of the East European Jew. Frieden’s identity is informed by the concept of “yerida” (descent), which holds that each generation is of a lower stature than the previous one. Thus he takes on pedagogic goals: to transmit and keep alive the religious fervor, culture, and folkways of past generations for Jewish continuity. Frieden’s frequent moments of introspection about turning points in his life sheds light on his identity and what he valued in life: to take the best of the new but not forget the good of the past. He at times bares his soul so that readers may learn from his life experience. The fact that Frieden chose...

If You’re Reading This by Trent Reedy (review)

Reviewed by: If You’re Reading This by Trent Reedy Elizabeth Bush Reedy, Trent If You’re Reading This. Levine/Scholastic, 2014 296p Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-545-43342-6 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-545-70049-8 $16.99 Ad Gr. 7-10 Mike has spent the last few years being the dutiful son, focusing on school and his part-time job and keeping his mother calm as she continues to grieve for his father, a National Guardsman killed in Afghanistan. This year, however, the high school sophomore is ready to cut loose, and a series of letters from his father, planned by the man before his death to arrive in the run-up to Mike’s sixteenth birthday, finally impel Mike to act on his restlessness. In each letter his father assigns him a “mission,” and Mike takes those missions seriously. To get involved in school activities, Mike forges Mom’s signature on permission forms for him to play football; to find a girlfriend, Mike rethinks his relationship with Isma, a Muslim classmate who’s also in the midst of resetting her submissive relationship with her parents. The actual sender of the letters remains a mystery, though, and as Mike pursues his identity, he discovers the lingering guilt that fuels his mother’s sadness, and the long-concealed pain within a neighbor who has been a support to the family over the past years. The letters themselves, though, are often outright mawkish, and the change football wreaks in Mike’s life, with his almost immediate star status, is contrived. Fans of Reedy’s recent blood and thunder thriller Divided We Fall (BCCB 1/14) may, however, be pleasantly surprised to see what he can do with a quieter, more thoughtful take on a boy stepping into a man’s shoes. Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

“Speak What We Feel, Not What We Ought to Say”: Moral Distress and Bioethics

At the tragic end of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Edgar, the son of the Earl of Gloucester, clearly sides with the emotions as he laments the state of the king and his kingdom: “The weight of this sad time we must obey,/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (V.iii.323–324). Although long debated by Shakespeare scholars, these last lines, according to Russell A. Peck, illustrate Edgar’s passage from a naive and egocentric though dutiful son, who is deceived by his brother and disinherited and exiled by his father, to that of “a good man” (1967, 235) and even “a kind of universal son” (1967, 230), who “learns to see beyond himself” (1967, 224) and “empathize with and take upon himself the afflictions of his fellow men” (1967, 226). “Through his trials,” Peck notes, “Edgar attains maturity and even gains a kind of authority” (1967, 234)—but an authority beyond merely that of victor on the side of justice. Rather, he is painted as a philosopher, whose examined life (as Socrates would have it) through the donning of various disguises and identities enables him (and us) to answer “the most oft asked question in the play: ‘What are you?’” (Peck 1967, 231). Moral philosophers, of course, when reading this line outside of the context of the play surely would think Edgar has it backwards: that one “ought” to say (or do) what is morally required, not whatever fits best one’s inclinations. The “ought” in “not what we ought to say” as used by Edgar and Shakespeare, however, refers to the desires of others, particularly those in various positions of power that can bestow upon us pleasure or pain. And in phrasing the concept of “doing what is morally required” in this way—that is, in terms of “[s]peak[ing] what we feel, not what we ought to say,” Edgar and Shakespeare re-elevate that “unruly emotion,” long discredited as the disruptive and dark forces of “passion” and “Unreason” (Held and Lloyd cited in Held 2002, 54), and thus illuminate its role and essential value in the good. Peck translates Edgar’s and King Lear’s final lines in this way: “Behold and feel: that is all we may conclude. Bioethical Inquiry (2013) 10:277–281 DOI 10.1007/s11673-013-9470-7

Performing Memory: Vladimir Putin and the Celebration of World War II in Russia

AbstractBy making World War II a personal event and also a sacred one, Vladimir Putin has created a myth and a ritual that elevates him personally, uniting Russia (at least theoretically) and showing him as the natural hero-leader, the warrior who is personally associated with defending the Motherland. Several settings illustrate this personal performance of memory: Putin's meetings with veterans, his narration of his own family's sufferings in the Leningrad blockade, his visits to churches associated with the war, his participation in parades and the creation of new uniforms, and his creation of a girls' school that continues the military tradition. In each of these settings Putin demonstrates a connection to the war and to Russia's greatness as dutiful son meeting with his elders, as legitimate son of Leningrad, and as father to a new generation of girls associated with the military. Each setting helps to reinforce a masculine image of Putin as a ruler who is both autocrat and a man of the people.

The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich: A Son’s Memoir (review)

Reviewed by: The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich: A Son’s Memoir Robert Melson The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich: A Son’s Memoir, by Howard Reich. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. 200 pp. $22.95. For the most part survivors of the Holocaust have proved to be remarkably resilient. If they were young and physically fit, they were able to emigrate from the Displaced Persons’ camps where they wound up after liberation. In the new countries of emigration—usually the United States, Israel, Australia, Canada, and Latin America—they were able to find jobs or found new businesses, to marry and to raise new families. Nevertheless war and genocide did not leave them unscathed. Even the strongest among them suffered from heart-breaking and terrifying memories and nightmares. In the privacy of their thoughts and dreams they returned to the ghettoes and the camps where they saw their loved ones killed. If they survived in hiding, they experienced the recurrent terror of an abandoned, hunted animal. However they survived, they felt the irrational guilt of the survivor—“ I don’t deserve to live”—or the realistic guilt of having abandoned loved ones who had depended on them in order to save themselves. If anything, such memories, anxieties, and nightmares—what psychologists have labeled PTSD: “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders”—became worse as the survivors grew older. When they were relatively young and trying to make it in their new homes they were so preoccupied with quotidian matters that their memories were kept at bay by the daily post-war struggles of work and family. When the demands of work eased a bit, and the children grew up and left home to make it on their own, survivors started to have time on their hands, but it was a dangerous period in their lives. Time left them open to invasion by unwanted memories and anxieties. They were especially in danger when they had lost a beloved mate, another survivor with whom they had established a life after the war. With his or her death they lost the only person [End Page 195] who truly understood them and could share their current anxieties and past memories. Howard Reich is a jazz critic for the Chicago Tribune and a writer for DownBeat magazine. He is also the son of Sonia and Robert Reich, Holocaust survivors, who had made a home for themselves and their two children after the war in Skokie, near Chicago. Years after Howard and his sister had left home and had established separate lives from their parents, Robert died and Sonia suffered a severe mental breakdown. She thought that she was being followed by unknown assailants who wanted to kill her: “I heard his voice in the house. He said, ‘I’m going to put a bullet in your head.’” And so she fled her home, wandering the streets until she was picked up by the police and brought to the emergency room of a local hospital. Ever the loving and dutiful son, Howard tried to help his mother and to understand her illness. However, it wasn’t until a psychiatrist suggested PTSD that it occurred to him that her symptoms were related to her wartime experiences. He knew her story in outline: When she was ten years old, Sonia had fled the Dubno ghetto as it was being liquidated and had lived in hiding among Polish peasants for four years. After the war she had met Robert, a survivor of the camps; they married and emigrated to the United States. What had happened to her while she was in hiding Howard didn’t know. Except for some cousins left in Poland, most of her family had been killed. Believing that by piecing together her story he might help his mother recover, and driven too by a reporter’s inquisitiveness, Howard set out to discover Sonia’s remaining relatives in Poland. In Warsaw he met Leon, Sonia’s first cousin—an attractive and accomplished retired military officer—who had grown up with her in Dubno and who like her had fled the ghetto and survived in hiding. Together with Leon, Howard traveled to Dubno and there...

The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu (review)

Reviewed by: The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu William Wallis The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu, translated by Mikhteve Yoni. Introduction by Herman Wouk, with a foreword and afterword by his brothers Benjamin and Iddo Netanyahu. New York and Jerusalem: Gefen, 2001. 306 pp. $21.95. This generous fascicle of letters traces the life of a contemporary hero whose entire life was dedicated to honoring and defending the nation of Israel. The son of a scholar—his father’s study of the Marranos is this reviewer’s favorite work on that subject—and a lawyer, and the brother of a major politician, he personified the new Israeli: unbowed, fierce in battle. In the words of Herman Wouk, he lived “bearing witness to the great ness of human nature in extremis.” This volume’s readers will find their sense of Israel’s painful rebirth in the twentieth century enriched by these missives of a modern warrior. The book is a collection of private correspondence written from Jonathan Netanyahu’s seventeenth year as a homesick teenager in Philadelphia to the exhausted paratroop commander who dashed off the last letter to his sweetheart, Bruria, shortly before the remarkable raid on Entebbe Airport on July 4, 1976, which he commanded. Close to the conclusion of this near-miraculous military expedition, Yoni—as he has come to be called by a grateful nation—was shot to death by an Ugandan soldier. He was the only member of the rescue force to die. It was days before his thirtieth birthday. When Israel was founded, Yoni was two. Although born in the United States, he was raised in the green byways of Jerusalem. His childhood was settled and happy. After two years (1963–65) in the United States and three years in Zahal (the Hebrew acronym by which the Israeli army is commonly called), the Six-day War (1967) threw Yoni into battle for the first time: The battle is ended. I’m well and in one piece. We left the expanses of sand strewn with the bodies of the dead, filled with fire and smoke, and now we are once again in our own country. I am eaten up with worry for you. Perhaps in a few days, when it’s all over and we’re together again, perhaps then we’ll smile. Right now it’s a bit hard. When you smile, something inside hurts. Tonight, and maybe tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, we’ll be shooting again, and again there’ll be dead and wounded. I’ll be all right, but I’m sorry for the others. (pp. 137–38) He continued his education at Harvard University from 1967 to 1969. While at Harvard, he writes his father that he is “not at all reconciled with being a civilian” (p. 173). “It’s hard for me to bear the thought that I’m alive to others who protect me with their own bodies,” he writes, “while I’m left to play the role of the [End Page 124] civilian” (p. 171). He was, in short, a born warrior. He was also more, namely an astute critic of Middle Eastern Realpolitik: on page 169 (January 17, 1969), he writes: The Arab world won’t agree to let us live in its midst. Syria and Iraq have already stated explicitly that the only solution to the “Palestinian Problem” is the expulsion of the Jews from Israel. The other [Arab] countries want the same solution, although they haven’t announced it publicly. He then analyzes the distribution of forces enclosing Israel on three sides, the mass and the possibility of fighting Russian troops on the Egyptian front. For students of warfare, there is much detail and wisdom here to appreciate. Even with war threatening, he is a good and dutiful son. In the same letter in which he rejects his father’s loving arguments for not returning to active service in Zahal as an officer, he generously praises his father’s new book: I received your book, father, a few days ago. I’m so happy. It’s time I became more familiar with the field in which you work. By not taking time to delve into your...

Literary and Filial Modesty in Silvae 5.3

The occasional poems of Statius are an enticing field for critics interested in topics like the interaction of Greek and Roman culture or the relationship between public activities like government and private activities like writing poetry. Most recently John Henderson has explored these issues in Statius' poem for the consular Rutilius Gallicus (Siluae1.4). In this paper I will discussSiluae5.3, an epicedion for Statius' own father. Statius uses the occasion of writing the epicedion to celebrate his father's life as a teacher, writer and performer and, by extension, his own life too. In his poem Statius develops a portrait of himself and his father as Greeks in close sympathy with Roman values. Against a backdrop of teaching and performing Greek literature they value above all filial duty and the skills of Roman government. Yet literature does not remain consistently in the background. Because Statius' father was also his teacher and model in literature, Statius as the dutiful son celebrates his father's literary skill and defers to it. By extension, Statius defers also to the subjects of his father's teaching, the famous masters of Greek and Latin literature.

Listening to caregiving sons: misunderstood realities.

In-depth interviews with 30 sons actively involved in caring for a parent with dementia expand the understanding of sons' caregiving experiences. The within-group analysis revealed common themes that emerged from the narratives--duty, acceptance, taking charge, common emotions, and work flexibility--as well as common issues--loss, sibling relationships, role reversal, coping strategies, and positive outcomes. The interviews also generated a typology of son caregivers that included such types as the dutiful son, the son who goes the extra mile, the strategic planner, and the son who shares the care.

A Prince’s Sojourn in Eighteenth-Century Canada

A Prince's Sojourn in Eighteenth-Century Canada FREDERICK A. HALL On 18 August 1791 the Quebec Gazette with great fanfare announced the arrival of a royal personage: Last Thursday evening arrived here His Majesty’s ships, Ulysses and Resistance in seven weeks from Gibraltar, having on board the 7th or Royal Regiment of Fusiliers under the command of the Colonel HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS PRINCE EDWARD. On Saturday at the Castle of Saint Lewis HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS received the respectful compliment of the officers of the garrison Civil and Military, the Clergy, Merchants, Citizens etc. In the afternoon the Ladies of Quebec were likewise introduced to HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS. . . J This young prince of twenty-five, already colonel of a regiment, was Prince Edward Augustus (1767-1820), the fourth son of King George III and Queen Charlotte. The prince had just finished a tour of duty in Gibraltar following the completion of his education. As he waited in the line of succession to the British crown, Edward, like all his brothers, was instructed to make himself a respectable Christian, good man, and useful member of society.2 For this purpose, King George had laid out a specific plan of education for his young sons which included time spent in Ger­ many and in studying Latin, English composition, French, German, 247 248 / HALL English history, and of course military training, this last to include engi­ neering, artillery, and military tactics.3 In the specific case of Prince Edward, he was sent to Luneburg and Hanover at the age of nineteen, six years before his arrival at Quebec. In a letter to his father in 1785 the dutiful son claimed: “I study every morning, Sundays excepted, from 6 till 10, and in the evening, when I am not invited anywhere, I amuse myself with a little musick. . . .”4 This reference to entertaining himself with music is the first mention of what was to become a lifelong passion for the arts, especially music and the­ ater. Although it is not clear if Edward ever received any formal musical training, he did enjoy singing.5 It is very likely that regimental musicians taught him the basics of music and to play some instruments. The rigorous schedule of study ensured that the prince shunned “low company, idleness and dissipation.”6 Lieutenant-Colonel George Wangenheim, an overbearing taskmaster, was put in charge of Edward’s military training and he proceeded with great diligence to mold this weak young man into a good German officer. Despite Wangenheim’s watchful eye, Edward succeeded in acquiring a substantial debt only two years after his arrival. His allowance could not cover the expenditures for furnishings and entertainment expected of a prince. King George was furious and chastized him for his debts and particularly for squandering the equivalent of a colonel’s salary on the “futile addition to the Band of Musick and Drummers of the Regiment.”7 Edward acceded to his father’s demands to rectify this state of affairs, informing the king in an apolo­ getic reply that he had followed his orders and discharged all “supernu­ merary musicians, drummers and fifers. . . .”8 Edward’s troubles with his father were only beginning. After a twoyear stay in Geneva to escape the bitter cold and generally inhospitable climate of Hanover, Edward could no longer stand the separation from his family and the pleasures of England. Without permission he went home in the fall of 1789; after some futile attempts to see his father and to be accepted at public events, he was finally sent off in disgrace to Gibraltar—a fate worse than being stationed in Geneva. This summary dismissal to a lonely outpost left Edward in a state of depression. In his haste to reach Gibraltar many things had been left behind in Geneva, including his precious collection of music which he planned to take to Canada in prospects of receiving this new posting.9 To boost his spirits Edward also arranged for a woman to join him at Gibraltar, and in the companionship of Therese-Bernardine Mongenet (1760—1830), known as Madame de St Laurent, he found great comfort —the fact that she was a trained singer was...

Pushkin's Narratives and the Hex of Darkness

Among the great poets of the world Pushkin was the first to express with such power and passion the eternal opposition of the cultivated and the primitive man.D. S. MerezhkovksiiI would like to begin this investigation of Pushkinian thematics with a fable, or better perhaps, a parable of my own making.Once upon a time in the land of Rus’ there lived two brothers. And although they were sired by a noble father and reared as befits the sons of a nobleman, they differed from each other as the day differs from the night, for the elder brother was tall and fairhaired and born of a Russian princess, while the younger brother was swarthy, small, and the bastard son of a dark-skinned barbarian maiden.As the boys grew up, to these bodily differences were added spiritual ones. For the elder brother was a dutiful son, who honored his parents and heeded his teachers and obeyed the laws of the land. After coming of age he traveled to the capital city and learned the ways of the imperial court and found favor in the eyes of the tsar.

The Journalist

THE JOURNALIST / Ai 1 In the old photograph, I'm holding my nose and my friend, Stutz, has a finger down his throat. We're sixteen, in Cedar Falls. It's all still a joke. In my mind, I'm back there. The blonde who used me like a dirty rag is gone in a red convertible. The top is down. She sits beside the Greek from out of town, his hair slicked down with bergamont. I don't care, I do care that she cruises the streets of Little America without me. I take a last drag off my Lucky, pull my cap low and take the old road to the fairgrounds. I'm sixteen. What do I know about love and passion, I think, as I watch the circus set up, watch as the elephants pitch and sway, heads and trunks swinging wildly. When the yellow leaves stir and spin around me, I walk back to the river and skim stones across the clear, gold water of early evening, til the 7:18 whistle blows. Then as if on command, I start running from childhood, from the hometown that keeps me a boy when I want to be a man. Manhood, a dream, an illusion, I think, as I lay down the photograph 66 · The Missouri Review and stand still in the anemic glow of the darkroom lights, my body giving off the formaldehyde smell of the unknown. In Viet Nam in 1966, I stood among the gathering crowd, as the Buddhist nun doused her robe with gasoline. As an American, I couldn't understand and as I stood there, I imagined myself moving through the crowd to stop her, but I didn't. I held my camera in position. Then it happened so quickly— her assistant stepped forward with a match. Flames rose up the nun's robe and covered her face, then her charred body slowly fell to the ground. That year in Viet Nam, I threw my life in the air like a silver baton. I could catch it with my eyes closed. Til one night, it sailed into black space like a wish and disappeared. Or was it me who vanished, sucking the hard, rock candy of the future, sure that a man's life is art, that mine had to be? But tonight, I'm fifty-three. I've drunk my way to the bottom of that river of my youth and I'm lying there like a fat carp, belly-down in the muck. And nothing, not the blonde, the red car, Ai The Missouri Review · 67 or the smell of new money can get me up again. I lay out the photographs of the nun. I remember how her assistant spoke to the crowd, how no one acknowledged her, how we stood another two or three minutes, til I put my hand in my pocket brought out the matchbook and threw it to the nun's side. I stare at the last photograph— the nun's heart that would not burn, the assistant, her hand stretched toward me with the matchbook in it. What is left out?— a man, me, stepping forward, tearing off a match, striking it and touching it to the heart. I throw the photographs in the metal wastebasket, then take the nun's heart from the glass container of formaldehyde. I light a match. Still the heart won't burn. I put the fire out, close my eyes and see myself running, holding a lump, wrapped in a handkerchief. I think someone will stop me or try to, but no one does. I open my eyes, take the heart and hold it against my own. When I was sixteen, I was the dutiful son. I washed my hands, helped my mother set the table, got my hair cut, my shoes shined. I tipped the black man I called 'boy" a dime. I didn't excel, but I knew I could be heroic 68 · The Missouri Review Ai if I had to. I'd set the sharp end of the compass down on blank paper and with the pencil end, I was drawing the circle that would contain...

The Runner

IKJ)I 26 The Runner* by George Strange Detroit, Mich. March 7 To Whom It May Concern: This is to introduce my son, Denton Pridemore, Jr., to any of you who don't remember him or haven't been accorded the pleasure of meeting up with him. He is a fine boy and has been a loving and dutiful son and is now full-grown by four years and of a mind to return to Kentucky, which was my home and the home of generations before me. He is a strong boy and no more afraid of work than a hawk's afraid of a shadow. While he's never farmed, he's wanting work in that line and will do good by any of you who want to hire him on. He's smart and learns fast, and you could pay him whatever you're a mind to until he gets to knowing more and is worth more to you. He is not needing of much money for he will be living on the old homeplace and working my ten acres, and he is not encumbered by as much as a wife or children or anyone to support except himself . 1 have steady worked building Fords for twenty-five years and have no need ofcontributing by him. For those who remember, my father Worth Pridemore and my mother, who was Maudey.Jo Evans, raised six of us younguns. There was me and Felix, Jonas, Daniel, Sophie, and Worthell, all of us living yet. 1 would thank you now in advance for all you can do to help Denton get on with what he wants to do and I would thank you for any news of untoward behavior on his part, not that I expect any such, for he has been a credit to his mother, bless her memory (she was a Detroit girl so you wouldn't have known her), and to his family, and I am yours truly and his loving father, Denton Pridemore, Sr. * © 1981 by George Strange 27 Dear Dad: Beech Grove, Ky. March 10 Everything is right on schedule like an efficient assembly line. I spent last night with the Simpsons like you told me to, and this morning, as soon as I load the truck with firewood that they're giving me for the last of winter, I'm heading up the road a mite, as us country folk say, and make something out of the old homeplace. From what the Simpsons say, that's no easy task. Vester says I'll have to get the cows out first, then the mice and stray dogs or there won't be enough room to swing the broom to sweep the copperheads out. Of course his eyes sparkled so much when he told me that I knew better than to believe him. All the Simpsons say to tell you hello. They were impressed with your letter and said it should get me a job "shorely." Vester says he practically raised you himself, to which his sisters say, "Lord help the Pridemores." The Simpsons are as fun to be around as you said they would, and I can see why you liked them so much. Sadie and Evebell must be getting close to eighty while Vester's just turned seventy. "I'm still a growing boy," he told me. They're always watching him, and he's always giving them reason to. They've been taking care oftheir brother since they were ten, and I guess they'll be taking care of him the day he dies. There's something good to be said for the permanence they've had, living in the house they were born in, milking in the barn they played in as children, and all ofthem playful still. This morning when I sat down with them at breakfast, Evebell told me to get up and wash my hands. 1 turned them up and showed her there was water in my palms. "You washed off the dirt," she smiled. "I'm talking bout getting in there and washing off your city ways." I never could find out how I gave myself away as citified...

The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal View

Who's there? Bernardo's anxious shout, which begins Shakespeare's most problematic play, raises fundamental question of Hamlet's identity. Various male authority figures advance simple answers. For Ghost, Hamlet is a dutiful son who should sweep to his revenge and forget about his mother. For Claudius, Hamlet is a possible rebel who should be either made tractable or banished and killed. For Polonius, Hamlet is heir gone mad through frustrated love of Ophelia, whom Polonius has denied him partly for reasons of state. But for Hamlet, roles of dutiful son, ambitious rebel, or mad lovesick heir are just that: roles, to be played for others but not felt for himself. The Who remains unsettled within and without, the heart of my mystery (3.2.351).1 The mixed and contradictory expectations of these father figures reflect their own divided image of dutiful reason and bestial lust. At times their power seems to be defined by their ability to order women and children around. Hamlet sees Gertrude give way to Claudius, Ophelia give way to Polonius, and himself at last yield to Ghost. But Hamlet also sees duplicity and falseness in all fathers, except perhaps his own, and even there his famous delay may well indicate unconscious perception, rather than unconscious guilt ascribed to him by a strict Freudian interpretation. Hamlet resists his father's commands to obey. Despite his illusory idealization of senior Hamlet as pure and angelic, he senses Ghost's complicity in paternal double-speak that bends Gertrude and Ophelia, indeed bends feelings and body itself, to

Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe Ransom.

Carefully and skillfully integrating the unexceptionable details of his personal life and the distinctive accomplishments of his long literary career, Thomas Daniel Young in Gentleman in a Dustcoat presents the story of John Crowe Ransom as a firm record of progressive literary achievement. Beginning with the early interest in literature on the part of a gifted but dutiful son of a Tennessee Methodist parson, Mr. Young describes Ransom's undergraduate days at Vanderbilt and, in illuminating detail, his three crucial years as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford reading the Greats. After giving a summary of Ransom's service as an artillery officer in the First World War, the biographer devotes five authoritative chapters to the first of the two major periods of Ransom's career, the years (I919-I937) Ransom spent at Vanderbilt as teacher, Fugitive poet and critic, and Agrarian philosopher and prophet. The next four chapters, equally authoritative, present the Kenyon epoch (I937-I960), during which Ransom founded the Kenyon Review, made it into a leading quarterly, and composed his culminating essays in literary theory. A last chapter describes a literary Olympian's years of honor and homage and, finally, his slow decline into intellectual vacancy and death at an advanced age. The biographical design of Gentleman in a Dustcoat-essentially that of a literary success story-is justified by the evidence Mr. Young develops. Ransom could be somewhat self-deprecatory at times, but genuine humility-a fatal flaw in a writer-was fortunately unknown to him. While he sought recognition only on his own terms, he wanted and needed it. Literary fame and dominion were not fringe benefits to Ransom; they fulfilled his sense of a life properly designed. But, it may be observed, in Mr. Young's judicious presentation of Ransom's life-particularly in his detached, clear-cut analyses of Ransom's writings-a subtle, counterpointed biographical design emerges. This is delineated in the response Ransom made to the limits he conceived to be imposed on literary achievement by what he called the modern aesthetic situation, or as he referred to this in his early theorizing, the moment. Inherent in the modern society of history and science, the third moment follows hard upon the second, that is, the time when the apprehension of nature was transferred into the cognitive processes of mind. The literary imagination is rooted in the first moment-the moment before the loss of sensual, imagistic perception. It has no power to return

An Interview with James Merrill

sat up and behaved when James Merrill was around. Whether poetry or prose, Merrill's writing always sounded like it fell from a tree, perfect from the start. His memoir, A Different Person, was no exception. In it, Merrill explored his early life as a young poet, a dutiful son, and a gay man in Europe and America. The book's intimate, candid tone may have surprised readers familiar with his poetry. As a poet, Merrill was master of convolution and indirection. However clear his diction, the emotions and ideas which informed it remained stubbornly elusive. The memoir, on the other hand, seemed to lay everything on the line, from Merrill's troubled relationship with his divorced parents to his complicated lovelife. What marked it as unmistakably Merrillean was the delicacy of its insights into art and artists, and its attention to detail.