Violent Passions Research Articles

HISTORICISING THE MONSTROSITY OF JEALOUSY IN OTHELLO AND THE WINTER’S TALE

This article historicises the monstrosity of the passion of jealousy and situates it in its early modern cultural context with special reference to Othello and The Winter’s Tale; hence, the study is separate from the pure discussion of the nature or causes of jealousy. The cultural effects of the Reformation and the Renaissance and the abundant availability of literature, both original and in translations, inspired Shakespeare to portray the monstrosity of jealousy with all its early modern character. Most of such literature retained a strong influence from the classical antiquity. Moreover, the patriarchal standards of the period and residual elements of the shame culture rendered jealousy such a strong inflammability that it could, in early modern culture, “Burn like the mines of sulphur” (Othello: III.3.323).i The study contextualises and historicises the monstrosity of the passion of jealousy in the chosen plays and concludes that jealousy in Shakespeare’s society was regarded as a complex male-oriented malady, accompanied by monstrosity of violent passions capable of wreaking havoc in the family life of the victim. Shakespeare portrays Othello and Leontes as the epitome of this monstrous passion as was known to the people, the intelligentsia and the stage-goer which gave it an axiomatic status

“Bésame otra vez”: The Use of Obscenity to Denounce Violence in Pedro Lemebel’s Incontables (1986)

‘“Bésame otra vez’: The Use of Obscenity to Denounce Violence in Pedro Lemebel’s Incontables” examines the role of obscenity in Pedro Lemebel’s Incontables (1986). Through my analysis of four short stories – “Ella entró por la ventana del baño”, “Bramadero”, “Monseñor” and “Bésame otra vez forastero” – I define obscenity in two related and mutually imbricated yet contradictory ways. First, I consider the radical potential of obscenity as excess. Obscenity, in this case, means unsatiated illicit sexual desire and excess of dirt/filth/ lo sucio. I am particularly interested in Lemebel’s neobarroso writing style to connote excess and “lo sucio” in what I define as the obscene. In many ways, what makes sexuality and lo sucio obscene is their excess and how their extremity elicits affective responses of excitement or repulsion in the reader. At the same time, it is the excess of power, violence, and state neglect that framed Pinochet’s dictatorship. In the stories, we also see how the extremity of state violence permeates and transforms into quotidian acts of gendered violence throughout Chile. This second form of obscene represents the absurdity of the regime’s power in its enactment of violence, pain, and ultimately, death.

ARNOLD BÖCKLIN’S PICTORIAL MOTIFS IN THE POETRY OF IVAN BUNIN AND ANDREY BELY

The article deals with the reception of Arnold Böcklin’s pictorial heritage in the Russian culture and literature of the Silver Age. It has gone through all the stages from a violent passion to cooling and almost complete oblivion. Th e focus is on the lyrics of Ivan Bunin and Andrey Bely of the 1900s. The author reveals the ways of acquaintance of the Russian public with the paintings of the Swiss painter (foreign travels, reproductions) and the peculiarities of their perception. By means of comparative analysis, the author reveals the similarities in the plots and images of some of the poems of two contemporary poets with the most famous paintings of the artist: The Island of the Dead and Th e Battle of the Centaurs. It is concluded that the culture of Russian modernism as a whole was characterized by a metaphysical interpretation of Böcklin. Bunin valued more symbolic lyrical landscapes that convey a sense of the mystical enigma of being and human life, or allegorical canvases (Oceanids), impressive because of the beauty of the plastic scene. Bely sought in the artist’s work support for the assertion of the existence of another, otherworldly reality, the realm of myth and ancient legends, and this was refl ected in his poetry. And in the symphonies, allusions to Böcklin create a satirical effect. Nevertheless, both in Bunin’s poem and in Bely’s works, we fi nd interesting examples of a modernist artistic synthesis that combines painting and literature and is aimed at spiritualizing reality, overcoming positivism and materialism. We see how the images of the Swiss artist become the language for someone else’s creative thought, fi t into a different national culture.

Enactment of Violence

Enactment of Violence

The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing by Jeanne-Marie Jackson

Reviewed by: The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing by Jeanne-Marie Jackson Avram Alpert The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing, by Jeanne-Marie Jackson; 232 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. The world of postcolonial literary studies harbors a well-earned suspicion of claims to promoting liberal ideals like civility, rationality, and individuality. The liberal worldview, after all, arose in the same era as European colonial expansion. To many critics, this was not a coincidence: liberal ideals were often crafted in opposition to the peoples that Europeans were encountering around the world. Whereas these other peoples were supposedly bound to collective myths, unaware of the primacy of the individual, and condemned to violent passions, liberals claimed that Europeans used rationality to perceive the value of individual life, and, in so doing, had unlocked the key to promoting civilizational harmony. All that everyone else had to do to experience this new way of life was, in one of history's most wretched paradoxes, to succumb to colonial violence and join the empire of liberty. It is thus quite logical that anticolonial criticism would call into question the basic features of the liberal worldview. But in recent years, an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars—including Sankar Muthu in political science, Sanjay Subrahmanyam in history, Mukti Lakhi Mangharam in literary studies, and Ato Sekyi-Otu in philosophy—have come to question this consensus.1 Their challenge rests on an ironic problem of the critique of ideologies associated with colonialism: by criticizing topics like civility, rationality, and individuality as such, do we not play into the very Eurocentric idea that these ideas were invented by Europeans in the first place? As these scholars have shown across various disciplines, geographies, and time periods, this critique risks giving modern Europe too much credit. Ideals often associated with liberalism have antecedents around the world. Sometimes they are used to advance general equality and well-being; sometimes they subvert these ideals. As Jeanne-Marie Jackson argues in her trenchant new book intervening in these debates, The African Novel of Ideas, we thus need a criticism that is as much attuned to the critique of "false universalisms" as it is open to "the promise of one that is true" (p. 189). Throughout her book, Jackson argues that a reconstructed liberalism is not only fundamental to literature from Africa but that the critical neglect of this fact has distorted the general understanding of literature today. Critics—especially but not exclusively in the West—have become so accustomed to sniffing out hints of liberal, individualist ideology that they routinely cast aside the ways in which African philosophers and novelists have themselves sought to explore and transform these ideals. Jackson's argument is not that liberalism, as it stands, is a noble philosophy that has been unfairly jettisoned. Rather, she posits that African writers are developing a fundamental innovation by considering how they—who were so long exploited by European ideals—can nonetheless find [End Page 495] meaning in both alternative and emergent versions of these very same ideals. What their work emphasizes is the "process of getting from an African locality to its universal resonance" (p. 185). In other words, whereas Europeans had simply presumed that their view of the world should apply everywhere, the contemporary novelists and philosophers discussed in this book engage in thorough intellectual and conceptual labor to tease out how ideas generated in one place might speak (without force) to peoples around the world. Jackson advances this argument through an innovative mix of philosophy and literature. Rather than evoking the standard series of French philosophers summoned to explicate literature, Jackson frames her readings through the work of philosophers such as Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Emmanuel Eze. This allows her to shift the focus of her readings of literature from questions of language and close reading to underanalyzed topics in philosophy and literature, especially about how African literature enacts philosophical questions. She discusses topics ranging from the nature of the self and the meaning of rationality to a meta-interrogation on the purpose of philosophizing itself (pp. 16–17). That purpose...

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

In the name of the Gothic father: François Truffaut’s L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975)

ABSTRACT The reception of François Truffaut’s 1975 film L’Histoire d’Adèle H., dealing with the obsession and descent into madness of the daughter of Victor Hugo, has recurrently focused on its critical engagement with Romantic melodrama, as well as its literary and ‘romanesque’ dimensions. This article argues that the term ‘romanesque’ has camouflaged the film’s active engagement with both cinematic and literary Gothic heritage. This engagement is shown to be inextricably linked to dynamic tensions of paternal influence. Both Truffaut as director and Adèle Hugo as film character actively renegotiate the Father’s artistic heritage of violent passions and dark metaphysical forces, with differing results. The article proposes a double analysis: (a) a close reading of the film’s Gothic tropes, shedding light on Truffaut’s intertextual dialogue with Hitchcock, his favourite ‘Gothic’ father and (b) an examination of the character Adèle H.’s intertextual performance, in which she contends with the powerful Gothico-Romantic myth embodied by the literary patriarch Victor Hugo. This will lead to extended insight into Truffaut’s brand of filmic Gothic as a vehicle of haunted intensity and on his distinctive exploration of the torments of female subjectivity, haunting and neurosis.

Rupture in heritage: strategies of dispossession, elimination and co-resistance

ABSTRACT Diaspora and Israel Jews are increasingly engaging their historical narratives of liberation within new forms of co-resistance to the Israeli Occupation, a history that controversially has been weaponized by the settler colonial power to manifest its dispossessive policies. ‘Occupation is not our Judaism’ has become a political slogan to mobilise Jews against land confiscation, house demolitions, trees uprooting, interrogations, and the Annexation Wall. Activists are concerned about the enactment of violence in the name of Judaism, and seek to contest the establishment of a Jewish nation-state as a solution to antisemitism. Their Jewish identities are articulated on the basis of Israel-centrism, and through intersectional struggles for universal liberation. This article explores the ways in which Jewish historical narratives inform the settler colonial policies in Palestine and the counter activism in which Jews play a potential role. It focuses on the patterns of ‘co-resistance’ which emerged after the collapse of the Oslo Accords of 1993. While co-existence was propagated during the 1990s to reveal the occupier and occupied as two equal sides, co-resistance emerged as a counter narrative in which Jewish and Palestinian activists stand in solidarity against the occupation. Interviews and on-site observations in the Old Town of Hebron showed how heritage and history have been weaponized by settlers to construct Jewish-only enclaves and to destroy the social and spatial realities that signify the collective identity of the Natives. Despite the failure of co-resistance to reverse the settlement project, the interviewed activists saw it as a viable form of resistance to this project. This article explored its potential in dismissing any claim that casts the settler colonial project in Hebron as a natural return of Hebron’s Jews to their history, and to link Nakba to tikkun olam, challenging its exclusion from the moral universe of the Jewish legacies of liberation.

Review: In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, by Gema Kloppe-Santamaría

Review: <i>In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico</i>, by Gema Kloppe-Santamaría

What is not real can be felt into being: affective threat in Jordan Peele’s Get Out

ABSTRACT Jordan Peele’s (2017) Get Out presents a political critique of American post-racial discourse. Using Brian Massumi’s concept of affective fact, I articulate how the film navigates a post-race perception of racially motivated threat as solely affective and immaterial in relation to the actual enactment of violence onto the racialized body in contemporary America. I locate this film in the theoretical lineage of contemporary Black radical thought, with particular emphasis on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of fungibility and Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s concept of fugitivity. By analyzing scenes that inaugurate the film’s study of threat, surveillance, and state-mandated control, I argue that Get Out reveals how apparatuses of racial violence intertwine with what Harney and Moten call state-thought. I conclude that Get Out should be read as a commentary on Black cinema and Black aesthetics, particularly how Black aesthetics forms itself against, within, and around neoliberal political discourse.

Toward a Black media philosophy

ABSTRACT Marshall McLuhan is often considered a media philosopher, not a race theorist. Yet, his work is full of racial implications that often go unexamined. For McLuhan, media were ‘any extensions of man’, which is to say that the men of McLuhan’s ‘tribal’, ‘detribal’, and ‘retribal’ cultures were differentiated based on their use of different media. For McLuhan, the phonetic alphabet was an important extension of detribal man, it moved him out of a presumed tribal past. Interestingly, Frantz Fanon made a similar argument: the Black body was a vehicle toward the materialization of Western man. Rather than coming into being through recognition of others, Fanon noted that Western man perceived himself as ‘civilized’ based on his enactment of violence against Black bodies. Bringing together McLuhan and Fanon, I argue that Black bodies function as media: they are extensions of man into his raced self-conceptions of the world. And despite such a media relation, Black people have consistently fought against the reduction of our bodies to extensions of Western man.

The Feeling of Infinity: Late Beethoven and the Aesthetics of the Sublime and the Beautiful

Many Western philosophers, such as Burke, Kant, and Hegel, have examined the concepts of the “sublime” and the “beautiful.” Though they often disagree on the particular characteristics that produce one or the other feeling (or both), it is clear that the realm of the sublime is beyond human understanding. It excites the most violent, noble, terrifying, and ecstatic passions. The works of Beethoven’s final stylistic period, as represented by his Piano Sonata in E Major, Op. 109, explore the farthest reaches of sublimity. The aesthetics of the sublime and beautiful have traditionally been applied to nature and the visual arts. However, they are readily applicable to music as well. Analyzing their development will help place Beethoven in the proper historical context. It can then be shown how Beethoven’s late style helped revolutionize these concepts, expressing them in ways that a philosopher’s words simply could not.

Boys negotiate violence and masculinity in the primary school

In this paper, we contribute to the understandings of young masculinities by turning attention to the South African schooling primary school context. In the context of scarcity of interventions around violence in the primary school, we focus on how young boys construct, negotiate and experience violence. Notwithstanding dominant discourses around childhood innocence we argue that young boys are active participants in violent gendered cultures at school. We show how boys’ bodies are key sites for the enactment of violence and is especially a valuable resource in the context of food insecurity. The paper also shows the fluidity of masculinity as boys who are regarded as ‘victims’ can also defend and resuscitate masculinity that endorses violence. Implications for addressing young masculinities in the primary school within local context are considered in the conclusion of the paper.

Passions and Society: Do we need a new Galateo?

In this paper I will try to define a possible way to respond to the increase of violent passions and violent reactions in our societies. It might well work in everyday life, but perhaps mostly at a political level. In the first part, the focus will be devoted to the idea (and practice) of Galateo, that is kindness or politeness. We will later wonder if and how a new Galateo (etiquette) could be an effective tool for social action, in view of overcoming the current violence of language and political passions.

The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama: Murderous Texts ed. by Caroline Blyth, Alison Jack

Reviewed by: The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama: Murderous Texts ed. by Caroline Blyth, Alison Jack Brandon R. Grafius caroline blyth and alison jack (eds.), The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama: Murderous Texts (LHBOTS 678; Scriptural Traces 16; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019). Pp. x + 194. £85. This consistently engaging collection of essays brings the biblical text into conversation with crime fiction, film, and television, exploring the ways that the Bible is quoted or alluded to, and provides a thematic foundation for a variety of narratives. Whether biblical references offer a clue to the identity of the murderer, or whether the Bible is used as a way to introduce “themes that reverberate throughout the biblical tradition” (p. 2) into the narrative, these essays demonstrate the surprising frequency with which the Bible becomes a significant presence in a variety of crime narratives. After a brief introduction by the editors, Matthew Collins (“On the Trail of a Biblical Serial Killer: Sherlock Holmes and the Book of Tobit”) examines a Sherlock Holmes radio broadcast from 1945 entitled “The Book of Tobit.” Holmes and Watson trail a killer named Asmodeus, who has made Diana a widow several times over through the murder of her husbands. The duo discovers that Asmodeus is a fictional creation of Diana’s, who is attempting to cover her own crimes. This solution leads Collins back to the Book of Tobit to ask whether Sarah might be the murderer, or even possibly, as suggested by the “unsolved murder” in Nineveh that occurs near the book’s beginning, whether Sarah and Tobias might [End Page 150] have been “in on it together” (p. 24). Alison Jack (“Tartan Noir and Sacred Scripture: The Bible as Artefact and Metanarrative in Peter May’s Lewis Trilogy”) engages with this series of Scottish crime novels published between 2011 and 2013. While maintaining a complicated relationship with the church and the biblical text, the trilogy frequently employs biblical references to discuss themes of salvation and vengeance. “This language,” Jack writes, “is an apparently unavoidable yet ghostly presence” (p. 39) throughout this trilogy. Moving from Scotland to Scandanavia, Caroline Blyth (“Faith in a Cold Climate: The Bible and Violence in Henning Mankell’s Before the Frost”) explores the connection between “religious fervor and the enactment of violence” (p. 46). Mankell’s novel tells the story of Erik Westin, a survivor of the Jonestown massacre who lives out a violently prophetic theology. Throughout the novel, Blyth sees that “Mankell is at pains to separate the violence of Westin’s cultic fundamentalism from mainstream Swedish Christianity” (p. 52), instead seeing Westin’s violence as a deep perversion of the Christian faith. Suzanne Bray (“‘Understanded of the People’: C. J. Sansom’s Revelation as a Contemporary Cautionary Tale”) turns to crime fiction with a historical setting. Against the backdrop of Reformation-era London, lawyer Matthew Shardlake wrestles with the dual mysteries of a teenager (Adam) who seems to have gone insane and of a serial killer. Shardlake eventually realizes that these mysteries share a similar cause: “Like Adam, the man is obsessed, inappropriately applying one tiny part of scripture, out of context, to himself” (p. 67). For Bray, this novel serves as an extended meditation on the dangers of fundamentalist appropriations of Scripture. Benjamin Bixler (“Where Have All the Good Men Gone? Male Antiheroes in the Book of Judges and American Television”) compares Samson and Breaking Bad’s Walter White. In both characters, Bixler sees a critique of “the violence of hyper-masculinity” (p. 89), suggesting that this violence leads both characters to a dead end. This violence “results in a cycle of retribution, leaving everyone empty and disillusioned” (p. 92). James Oleson (“‘Long Is the Way and Hard, That Out of Hell Leads Up to Light’: Serial Murder as Homily in Se7en”) explores the gritty 1995 film in which a serial killer is selecting victims according to the seven deadly sins and choosing methods for his murders through a lex talionis conception of justice. For Oleson, viewers should be open to the possibility that this killer is the film’s true hero, which has the potential to offer viewers “a serious moral and ontological challenge” (pp...

NOWOCZESNOŚĆ W LUSTRZE HISTORII: JACOB BURCKHARDT I FRYDERYK NIETZSCHE WOBEC KULTURY DAWNEJ I WSPÓŁCZESNEJ

The text explores the connections between the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt regarding past and contemporary culture. The focus here is on both thinkers’ highly negative assessment of modernity as an era which does not match the great past times of European culture, especially the noble civilizations of ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance. The lamentable state of modernity is seen and analyzed in confrontation with those sublime past epochs, with their ethos of individuality, immorality, violent passions and common ambition for greatness. The article ends with a conclusion that although both thinkers were disappointed with times they lived in, it was Nietzsche who pushed his critique of modernity to the extreme, calling for a radical and imminent breach with the failed history and founding a new one, one which would create place only for an elite group of outstanding individuals, while Burckhardt was much more reserved. Although a pessimist too, he kept a desperate faith in the autotelic value of European culture’s spiritual continuum and did not negate its heritage.

Hatred and Civilization in the Oresteia

There is no greater form of estrangement than hatred, and the stigma of hatred pervades our polarized political culture. Along with such a political stigma is a tendency to assume that violent passion is an obstacle to the attainment of wisdom. However, Aeschylus's Oresteia ought to remind us that hatred is neither a mere pathology belonging to our enemies, nor an anti-democratic sentiment. On the contrary, Aeschylus's great play reminds us that hatred may be an indispensible part of wisdom, as well as a tragic necessity of the democratic project.

Situational factors and mechanisms in pathways to violence.

Author(s): Bowman, Brett; Whitehead, Kevin A; Raymond, Geoffrey | Abstract: Background: A large body of research has produced vast quantities of empirical data on risk factors for violence in a range of countries and community contexts. Despite the unquestionable successes of this research in cataloguing these risk factors, relatively little is known about the situational factors and mechanisms that translate risks for violence into enactments of violence itself. Without stronger explanations of these situational pathways to violence, understandings of violence remain “fuzzy”. This special issue aims to address this important limitation through a focus on the situational dimensions of violence. Key points: Although directly observing violence is often ethically and methodologically challenging, the studies in this special issue demonstrate the value of better understanding the situational contexts that shape the well-documented affective, interactional and behavioral variables and processes that constitute violent enactments. Examining these processes and factors as they unfold in situ can advance and deepen theoretical and empirical research on general risks for violence. Implications: Situations in which violence is enacted, and the mechanisms through which it is realized, can and should be systematically studied as part of any attempt to enhance the resolution of existing knowledge with respect to violence. Empirical and theoretical research that attempts to get “closer” to violence offers important and innovative insights and opportunities for understanding violence itself, alongside its causes, correlates and consequences. Investing in the design of robust studies of the situational dimensions of violence is important for advancing the field of violence scholarship and potentially informing policy and intervention practices.

Calm and Violent Passions: The Genealogy of a Distinction from Quintilian to Hume

While the distinction between the calm and violent passions has been treated by Hume scholars from a number of perspectives relevant to the Scottish philosopher’s thought more generally, little scholarly attention has been paid to this distinction either in the works of Hume’s non-English contemporaries (e.g., the French Jesuit Pierre Brumoy) or in the long rhetorical and literary tradition which often categorized the emotions as either calm or violent. This article examines the long history of the distinction between calm and violent, or mild and vehement, emotions from the classical Roman rhetorical tradition through the Renaissance and into the modern period. In doing so, it provides a partial but substantial genealogy of an important heuristic taxonomy in the history of emotions, while suggesting that the philosophical import of the distinction in the eighteenth century owes something to rhetorical and poetic traditions which are often not considered by historians of philosophy.

Romancing the Purse and Sexualizing the Schoolboy in The Fortunate Blue-coat Boy (1770)

Romancing the Purse and Sexualizing the Schoolboy in The Fortunate Blue-coat Boy (1770) Chantel Lavoie (bio) "What can any modest virtuous Lady see in a Blue-coat Boy, to be so very fond of him at first sight? I am really afraid, Ben, that you will be ruined." Orphanotrophian The Fortunate Blue-coat Boy: or, Memoirs of the Life and Happy Adventures of Ben Templeman by the anonymous Orphanotrophian, is a little-known novel about an adolescent who wins the heart of a twenty-fiveyear-old widow when he sings a solo part at chapel on the first Sunday before Lent, performing among his fellow pupils at Christ's Hospital charity school in London.1 The lady, intrigued by his voice and his person, seeks out his acquaintance, "which she imagined very easy to be done, [End Page 115] and without any damage to her reputation, as Ben was but a boy, and so much beneath her in circumstances" (45–6). At this meeting she presents him with money to match the silver crown already sent to him by her in appreciation of his singing—gifts that set the tone for the rest of their relationship. Regardless of his youth and his lowly circumstances, plans are soon underway for the lady to settle her hand on Ben and make him the master of her considerable fortune. To an extent, the two-volume novel echoes and conflates Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews in that young Ben is socially raised up through his attractiveness to a besotted older member of the opposite sex and, like Pamela, marries into that wealth. And yet, although the novel certainly contains uneasy tensions regarding the desire for sexual favours from a young male in exchange for the wealth of an older woman, this is not a tale about virtue or chastity, the threat to one by the loss of the other. Nor is it, as one might anticipate from the set-up and the light tone throughout, a satire. Rather, the serious moral of the story is that love is currency, exchanged for the real object of a worthy hero's quest: money. Concomitant with and indeed dependent on attaining this quest is the hero's capacity to demonstrate gratitude. The plot of The Fortunate Blue-coat Boy is easily summed up, as very little happens in the book once the widow sets her sights on Ben. They have a supper together, she cannot stop thinking about him, and, although at first "perplexed between pride on one side [about Ben's lowly status] and a violent passion on the other" (56), she succumbs to her desires for him by sending a letter proposing marriage. The suitability of the match is reinforced by the fact that the bride—whose name, we eventually learn, is Hannah Williams—although wealthy, is of illegitimate birth. Her "natural" father is a duke, Sir George ___, who does not immediately concede to his daughter's wishes but then acquiesces while acknowledging that he did not advise her well in her first marriage to an unkind and parsimonious old man. Here we might read the word trade for advise. Once the school governors release Ben, he and the lady wed in relative secrecy. The remaining two-volume narrative revolves around purchases made for Ben's wardrobe, gifts to school retainers and other boys in Ben's school house, digressions involving a foolish mathematics master, tradesmen who attempt to cheat their customers, and conversations by lesser characters at inns and in taverns as the newlyweds travel to the lady's estate in Kent. [End Page 116] While the pseudonymous author asserts that his narrative is based on true events, the book is also a fantasy about growing up.2 Ben's departure from the venerable Blue-coat School, Christ's Hospital, sets off one boy from the many; here the rest of the pupils stand as foils—in effect, boys—among whom Ben Templeman becomes a man. Ben's age when he leaves the school prematurely in order to take up his fortunate position is "between seventeen and eighteen," and he has "arrived to the first order"; that...