Love Plot Research Articles

Toward a Literary Psychoanalysis of Postcolonial Haiti: Desire, Violence, and the Mimetic Crisis in Marie Chauvet’s Amour

Critics of Haitian writer Marie Chauvet's controversial novel, Amour, are habitually fascinated by destructive psychosexual complex of novel's protagonist and first-person narrator, Claire Clamont. A sexually repressed upper-class Haitian woman whose fantasy life vacillates between scenes of unbridled sexual desire and self-immolating masochism, Claire, who describes herself as a dark-skinned old maid, is thirty-nine-year-old elder sister and housemate of two bodacious mulattoes. Their successful adventures in love and marriage draw a striking contrast with Claire's position as a subjugated victim of racism in her own family as well as in mulatto elite into which she was born. Stigmatized by color and tortured by decades of repressed desire reignited by presence of Jean-Luze, live-in French husband of her youngest, whitest, and now pregnant sister Felicia, virginal Claire records in her journal lurid details of her revolt. Effaced behind a veil of hypocrisy and politesse, she secretly orchestrates a quasi-incestuous affair between Jean-Luze and her other sister, Annette. In so doing, she projects onto Annette her own violent desire for Jean-Luze and enacts revenge against both her sisters and her brother-in-law, himself visibly tormented by adulterous desire. Although her increasingly sadistic machinations are ultimately unsuccessful, they provide libidinal fodder for Claire's own fantasy life as she repeatedly satisfies her desires alone in her bedroom, assisted by thoughts of her sisters' sexual encounters with beloved Jean-Luze. Claire's neurosis plays out in context of 1930s Haiti, a period that marked final years of presidency of Stenio Vincent, authoritarian light-skinned leader who negotiated end of US occupation of Haiti and was sympathetic to rising black middle class and black nationalist ideals of post-occupation years (Nicholls 166, 178-79; Trouillot 107). In Chauvet's hands, Vincent regime is recast as far more autocratic and brutal dictatorship of Francois Duvalier of 1960s, with its fascistic Noiriste ideology and unprecedented political terror, represented in novel by vicious and brooding black military commander, Caledu. Having seized power in 1957, Francois Duvalier radicalized Haiti's negritude movement so as to legitimate what J. Michael Dash has called the most disturbing manifestation of state power in Haitian history (16), which was characterized by extreme violence and aimed at ending mulatto domination of state (Trouillot 167). Allied with exploitative US business interests and indiscriminately torturing members of former mulatto political elite, particularly women, into submission before new black leadership, character Caledu--whose name literally means who beats hard1--becomes disavowed object of Claire's sadomasochistic fantasies alongside white Jean-Luze. It is this incendiary combination of eroticism, political violence, and social satire that led to novel's extraordinary suppression upon publication in 1968 and to its author's exile. (2) For in addition to subverting norms of elite racial and gender respectability in Haiti through her depiction of sexually famished Claire, protagonist's double-edged critique unmasked prejudices and complacency of mulatto class and corrupt brutality of Noiriste state. For today's readers as well, one of challenges of interpreting Amour derives from novel's striking juxtaposition of domestic love plot with sociopolitical one, both of which are seen through eyes of sexually deprived, racially ostracized, and doubly rebellious Claire. In domestic love plot, Claire waits in vain for validation and sexual satisfaction she feels Jean-Luze's love would bestow upon her. When she does not receive this love, she attempts to sabotage his relationship with her sister Felicia, first by substituting her sister Annette as object of his desire, and eventually by planning Felicia's murder. …

Berlin Alexanderplatz's Serial Women

Critics of Berlin Alexanderplatz (WDR, West Germany, 1980) most often focus on the extended love plot between Franz (Günther Lamprecht) and Reinhold (Gottfried John). This focus is not surprising, given that the vexed relationship between Rainer Werner Fassbinder's leading men is the most prominent storyline in the miniseries. However, across nearly sixteen hours, Berlin Alexanderplatz also introduces us to Paula (Mechthild Grossmann), Minna (Karin Baal), Ida (Barbara Valentin), Frau Bast (Brigitte Mira), Polish Lina (Elisabeth Trissenaar), Eva (Hanna Schygulla), the widow (Angela Schmid), Fränze (Helen Vita), Cilly (Annemarie Düringer), Trude (Irm Hermann), the Whore of Babylon (uncredited), the waitress (Elke Haltaufderheide), and Mieze (Barbara Sukowa). Across successive episodes, these minor characters offer a version of seriality inside the serial form that is Berlin Alexanderplatz. Ultimately these figures make up one vast composite character, a combinatory form that echoes the superimposed photographs from the Weimar era that appear in the miniseries's credit sequence. Both the credit sequence and the serial women offer ways of representing Germany's past as a variegated, multidimensional site. Though often peripheral to the miniseries's major plot arcs, the female characters upend the interpretive authority of the voice-over. Their presence unsettles the voice-over's construction of a somewhat monolithic, omniscient, and in many ways melodramatic historical imagination of the Weimar period.Through the placement of the female minor characters, Berlin Alexanderplatz challenges the traditional terms of value often associated with the historical television miniseries. Contra contemporaneous miniseries like Heimat (WDR/SFB, West Germany, 1984), Roots (ABC, 1977), and Days of Hope (BBC, UK, 1975), Berlin Alexanderplatz does not utilize its extended running time to create an increasingly complex or multigenerational story line. Instead, the extensive breadth of the miniseries allows for an experiment with minor character forms, offering the intimacy often associated with extended serial viewing but refusing legible modes of sympathy and attachment. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, this inscrutability becomes an irritant within the miniseries's larger narrative arc, preventing the mourning of the dead women across the series and the mourning for the lost past for which they often provide a symbolic counterpart.

Negotiating Ethnic Difference in RestorationTravel Fiction

Abstract Following the skeptical attitude towards foreign nations and culturesduring the Renaissance, travel fictions during the English Restoration took amore liberal approach to ethnic difference. The anonymous novel Peppa (1689)artfully presents Western stereotypes about ethnic others as being based on falseassumptions and outright lies. A crucial scene in this cross-national love plot isbased on ethnic fakery, thereby presenting to its readers the constructedness ofnational and cultural identities. A second text example discusses John Dunton’sA Voyage round the World (1691), arguing that through its unusual form and theresulting openness it reveals the relativity of all cultural norms and nationalstereotypes. By presenting domestic scenes through the prism of colonialistderision, Dunton turns the tables on English nationalist discourse. Both textsthus invite their readers to confront national, ethnic, and cultural differencemore open-mindedly and be aware of the power of language and discourse toinfluence public opinion.

DOCTORS, DANDIES AND NEW MEN: ELLA HEPWORTH DIXON AND LATE-CENTURY MASCULINITIES

This article examines Ella Hepworth Dixon's engagement with late-century models of masculinity, namely the doctor, dandy and the New Man, in The Story of a Modern Woman (1894). Specifically, it argues that Dixon isolates the doctor and the dandy as particularly threatening to the New Woman. Though these roles constitute radically different identities, she shows how they similarly confront the New Woman's feminist politics and stand in the way of her desire for intellectual, social and sexual equality. Dixon also gestures to more positive versions of masculinity, even if they are not fully realized in the novel. Many New Women, especially eugenic feminists and social purists, imagined a New Man who could be on equal terms with the New Woman. Such a figure is largely absent from Dixon's novel, though the artist Perry Jackson comes closest to New Manhood. Jackson's status as an artist frees him from conventionality, though his growing commercial interests challenge his non-conformity. Dixon's decision to avoid such an idealized relationship for Mary ultimately demonstrates her commitment to rejecting traditional love plots in favour of a more realistic mode.

Adultery-Within-Marriage: Joyce's Love Plot

Janine Utell's James Joyce and the Revolt of Love explores why Joyce came to see adultery as a part of conjugal life and not as a unique site for passionate love. Utell argues that Joyce moved away from dramatizing the story of adultery as the model of a rebellious love; instead, he presented adultery as an ethical problem that can be solved within marriage, in which each partner must be reconciled to the other's right to sexual desire outside the margins of marriage. She supports her argument by applying to Joyce's adultery narratives the postmodern concept of alterity, the idea that men and women cannot be fully known or appropriated as sexual beings. Utell also addresses the significance of Joyce's adultery-within-marriage narrative for a theory of comedy. She demonstrates that Finnegans Wake posits an older couple, educated in the ethics of desire, as a model for comic reconciliation.

Impacting on Intimacy: Negotiating the Marriage Equality Debate

Impacting on Intimacy: Negotiating the Marriage Equality Debate

Relation of Baseline Systolic Blood Pressure and Long-Term Outcomes in Ambulatory Patients With Chronic Mild to Moderate Heart Failure

We studied the impact of baseline systolic blood pressure (SBP) on outcomes in patients with mild to moderate chronic systolic and diastolic heart failure (HF) in the Digitalis Investigation Group trial using a propensity-matched design. Of 7,788 patients, 7,785 had baseline SBP data and 3,538 had SBP ≤ 120 mm Hg. Propensity scores for SBP ≤ 120 mm Hg, calculated for each of the 7,785 patients, were used to assemble a matched cohort of 3,738 patients with SBP ≤ 120 and >120 mm Hg who were well-balanced in 32 baseline characteristics. All-cause mortality occurred in 35% and 32% of matched patients with SBPs ≤ 120 and >120 mm Hg respectively, during 5 years of follow-up (hazard ratio [HR] when SBP ≤ 120 was compared to >120 mm Hg 1.10, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.99 to 1.23, p = 0.088). HRs for cardiovascular and HF mortalities associated with SBP ≤ 120 mm Hg were 1.15 (95% CI 1.01 to 1.30, p = 0.031) and 1.30 (95% CI 1.08 to 1.57, p = 0.006). Cardiovascular hospitalization occurred in 53% and 49% of matched patients with SBPs ≤ 120 and > 120 mm Hg, respectively (HR 1.13, 95% CI 1.03 to 1.24, p = 0.008). HRs for all-cause and HF hospitalizations associated with SBP ≤ 120 mm Hg were 1.10 (95% CI 1.02 to 1.194, p = 0.017) and 1.21 (95% CI 1.07 to 1.36, p = 0.002). In conclusion, in patients with mild to moderate long-term systolic and diastolic HF, baseline SBP ≤ 120 mm Hg was associated with increased cardiovascular and HF mortalities and all-cause, cardiovascular, and HF hospitalizations that was independent of other baseline characteristics.

Sexual Selection, Automata and Ethics in George Eliot'sThe Mill on the Flossand Olive Schreiner'sUndineandFrom Man to Man

This paper brings together two related areas of debate in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first concerns how the courtship plot of the nineteenth-century novel responded to, and helped to shape, scientific ideas of sexual competition and selection. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), George Eliot strikingly prefigures Darwin's later work on sexual selection, drawing from her own extensive knowledge of the wider debates within which evolutionary theory developed. Maggie Tulliver's characterisation allows Eliot to explore the ethical complexities raised by an increasingly powerful scientific naturalism, where biology is seen to be embedded within morality in newly specific ways. The second strand of the paper examines the extension of scientific method to human mind and motivation which constituted the new psychology. It argues that there are crucial continuities of long-established ethical and religious ideas within this increasingly naturalistic view of human mind and motivation. The contention that such ideas persist and are transformed, rather than simply jettisoned, is illustrated through the example of Thomas Henry Huxley's 1874 essay on automata. Turning finally to focus on Olive Schreiner's Undine (1929) and From Man to Man (1926), the paper explores the importance of these persistent ethical and religious ideas in two novels which remained unpublished during her lifetime. It argues that they produce both difficulty and opportunity for imagining love plots within the context of increasingly assertive biological and naturalistic accounts of human beings.

Family Affairs: Incest in Jorge Isaacs's María

Since its publication in 1867, has enjoyed near-constant popularity throughout Latin America; indeed, it has never been out of print. Donald McGrady claims that Maria [is] the widest-read novel in Hispanic America, having appeared in close to 140 editions in its first hundred years (139). Its popularity has been accompanied by critical attention focusing on topics ranging from the narrative structure, the character of Maria, and the role of Romanticism to patriarchy and nationalism in the novel's social structure. Of these, several critics have commented on the triangle formed by the narrator, Efrain, his father, and herself. Yet one aspect of the novel has not been addressed in detail. That is the relationship between and the father, a relationship that may provoke deeply disturbing implications for the careful reader. In this essay I will argue that a father-daughter relationship with incestuous overtones, whether realized or potential, results in the failure of and Efrain's possible relationship and in the eventual destruction of the family unit. In this reading, it is the father's incestuous approaches toward Maria, not, as some critics have argued, Maria's love for Efrain, that cause her hysterical illness and eventually kill her.Conditions are ripe in the household for the development of an incestuous relationship between the father and Maria. Although is not the father's biological daughter, she does fulfill the role of a daughter within the household; while is Efrain's second cousin by blood, she has been raised since the age of three as his sister and as the daughter of Efrain's mother and father. As Efrain comments, Pocos eran entonces los que conociendo nuestra familia, pudiesen sospechar que no era hija de mis padres (13). Not only does occupy the position of a daughter, but she does so in an exceptionally conventional-even overly so-patriarchal family. The women who might have protected her are absent, either literally or figuratively. Her biological mother, of course, is dead, and her adoptive mother accedes to her husband's wishes in almost all regards, either unable or unwilling to challenge him openly. When the adoptive mother does go against the father's desires, she does so secretly. Tellingly, when she conspires with her son, Efrain, against her husband, Efrain's father, it is to thwart the father's plans to prevent Efrain from declaring his love to and from eventually marrying her, which would result in removing from the father's possessive reach, as we shall see.Efrain's father exerts a degree of control over his family unusual even by nineteenth-century standards. As many critics have commented, depicts a rigidly patriarchal family structure. The father dominates the family and exercises a remarkable control over his wife and children; his decisions are unquestioned, even when they cause Efrain and great unhappiness. Both Efrain and are unfailingly obedient. At the same time, the father is a respected member ofthe community, commanding the respect and loyalty of his tenants and of the other landowners in the valley.The father's dominance has repercussions not just for the personal relationships in the family, but for the family's economic circumstances as well. As Sylvia Molloy avers, underlying the novel's seemingly innocent plot of love lost is the story of a patriarchal control whose ultimate result is the loss not just of love but of paradise, the family home. Molloy notes, Se observa en la conducta paterna presente ... Ia intolerancia absoluta de la perdida, la necesidad de controlarlo todo. Una ferrea economia paterna-autoritaria, despotica-rige los destinos familiares y mas precisamente el destino del hijo (48). Similarly, Rodolfo Borello sees the father as the embodied representative of social control: El padre no es solamente la autoridad; encarna, ademas, los intereses de la familia, la voluntad de Dios, el Destino. …

Orientalism and Sympathy in Maria Susanna Cummins’s <i>El Fureidîs</i>

The Lamplighter has long monopolized scholarship on Maria Susanna Cummins and her treatment of sympathy, despite rich sympathetic texture of her other three novels: Mabel Vaughan has more than seventy references to sympathy; Haunted Hearts is saturated with allusions to heart; and El Fureidis teems with signs of sympathy. Craig Taylor has defined sympathy as primitive response to another's suffering which is partially constitutive of our understanding of what it is to suffer as a human (113); Lauren Wispe characterizes it as the increased sensibility of another person's suffering as something to be alleviated (68). These definitions of sympathy derive from A Treatise of Human Nature, wherein David Hume notes that because of human resemblance, feelings of others produce [in us] an emotion similar to original (86), and from opening chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where Adam Smith writes, As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in like situation (9). El Fureidis (The Paradise) is unique among Cummins's works, not only because its setting, Lebanon, is a far cry from Boston, New York City, northeastern New Jersey, and Illinois prairie (settings of her other works), but also because in El Fureidis conventional meanings of sympathy are continually undercut by an Orientalist point of view. Indeed, El Fureidis is unique among other major antebellum fictions, discussed below, in which interplay between sympathy and Orientalism is prominent. Cummins so often bends and twists accepted definitions of sympathy in an Oriental milieu that text's sentimental assurances are negated by its very infatuation with Eastern culture. El Fureidis depicts a contradiction between two discrepant sensibilities--compassion for human beings, no matter what their race, nationality, or religion, and Orientalist assumptions about Lebanese culture. Contained within every sign of sympathy in El Fureidis is a sign of antipathy based in Orientalism, no less disparaging for being genteel and, for most part, subtle. Carried along on tide of what Anna Brickhouse has termed renaissance (8), Cummins's novel is riddled with contradictions and rhetorical impasses attending a nation whose geographic borders were expanding even as its imagined borders were narrowing and calcifying (6-7). Brickhouse's concentration on this transnational dynamic as played out between United States and Cuba, Haiti, and Mexico in first half of nineteenth century sheds light on literary border crossing undertaken by Cummins in more distant regions and with different connotations for Americans. In El Fureidis, racial ideologies and cultural fantasies that Brickhouse sees proliferating and feeding anxieties about wider Americas are expressed in Cummins's sympathy for Oriental culture and antipathy that permeates Orientalism (23). A simultaneously affiliative and expansionist transamerican discourse means that even texts encoded in what Brickhouse identifies as language of sublime transcendence can harbor imperialistic qualities (138,26). El Fureidis is one such text: It looks beneficently on Orient (birthplace of Christianity, location of paradise) even as it closes in to colonize it. Cummins channels American ambivalence toward Lebanese manners into sentiment and distills anxiety into a love plot that doubles as an allegory of imperialism, and she does this even though all evidence suggests that a conscious plan to discredit East was far from her mind. In spite of itself, sympathy Cummins manifests in El Fureidis works on behalf of an agenda of expansionism. The novel's English protagonist succeeds in invading paradise, and Western reader collaborates in his antipathetic enterprise largely because sympathy paves way. …

Knowing Love: The Epistemology of Clarissa

My essay focuses on the eighteenth-century gender revolution, in particular, how the obsessive retelling of seduction narratives provided contesting narratives for knowing love. Love's plot changes with the emergence of bourgeois ideology, a change which many feminist scholars interpret as negative for women. In doing so, scholars read late eighteenth-century seduction narratives as always already reflecting the nineteenth-century ideal of passive desexed femininity. My essay focuses on Samuel Richardson's paradigmatic novel Clarissa in order to demonstrate that Clarissa's multiple narratives provide contesting epistemologies. Clarissa shows that the ideal of passive femininity was not the only and inevitable outcome of the gender revolution and that the multiple plots in the novel reflect the heterogeneous terrain for knowing love in the mid-eighteenth century.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, and: The Merchant of Venice (review)

Reviewed by: A Midsummer's Night Dream, and; The Merchant of Venice Douglas E. Green A Midsummer's Night Dream Presented by Park Square Theatre. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 10-December 7, 2006. Directed by Jef Hall-Flavin. Scenic design by Erik Paulson. Costume design by MaryBeth Gagner. Lighting design by Michael P. Kittel. Sound design by Katharine Horowitz. Original music by Adam Wernick. Property design by Star Michaelina Newman. Fight choreography by Doug Scholz-Carlson. Choreography by Brian Sostek. Stage management by Daniel J. Hanson. With Paul de Cordova (Theseus, Oberon), Courtney Peterson (Hippolyta, Titania), Brian Sostek (Philostrate, Puck), David Coral (Egeus, Quince, First Fairy), Hope Cervantes (Hermia, Starveling, Mustardseed), Aaron Cook (Demetrius, Snout, Peaseblossom), Matt Rein (Lysander, Flute, Mote), Jaimi Paige (Helena, Snug, Cobweb), Terry Hempleman (Bottom). The Merchant of Venice Presented by Ten Thousand Things Theater Company at the Playwright's Center, Open Book, Minnesota Opera Center, and other venues, Minneapolis, Minnesota. October 19-November 19, 2006. Directed by Michelle Hensley. Music by Peter Vitale. Sets by Stephen Mohring. Costumes by Kathy Kohl. Assistant direction by Nancy Waldoch. With David Wiles (Antonio, Lancelot), Matt Guidry (Bassanio, Tubal), Stacia Rice (Portia), Steve Hendrickson (Shylock), Darien Johnson (Gratiano, Prince of Morocco), Catherine Johnson (Nerissa, Solanio), Lisa Clair (Jessica, Salerio, Balthasar, Leonardo), Kiseung Rhee (Lorenzo, Duke, Prince of Aragon). In fall 2006, two small but long-established companies in the Twin Cities staged popular Shakespearean comedies. These productions shared one common feature: in both cases casts of under ten players performed all the parts, so most performers took more than one role. But the similarities ended there. Park Square Theatre's A Midsummer Night's Dream was a typical crowd pleaser, dispensing with the comedy's darker sexual themes and compounding its many opportunities for stage business and slapstick. Ten Thousand Things Theater Company's Merchant of Venice stressed language and character, both of which were underscored by barebones staging. Though both small-scale productions could be characterized as intimate, they couldn't have been more different. [End Page 45] Park Square is a well-established St. Paul theatre company with a strong educational mission as well as an appeal to general audiences. Its Midsummer Night's Dream was clearly aimed at both high school and college students. Guest director Jef Hall-Flavin didn't deny the play's tragic possibilities in the early scenes—the chill between Theseus and Hippolyta at the outset or the weight of Egeus's evocation of patriarchal law or disharmony in nature arising from the quarrel between Oberon and Titania. But he emphasized the comic chaos that developed out of the initial tensions. His casting, in which all actors except Terry Hempleman (Bottom) doubled or tripled roles, had the effect—intended or not—of diminishing individuality and emphasizing the topsy-turvy world of lovers at odds and the worldly odds against lovers. The most novel and daring aspect of this populist production was the doubling and tripling of parts: as is common, the fairy king and queen and the Athenian royal couple mirrored one another. Theseus, Hippolyta, and Philostrate double as Oberon, Titania, and Puck; as a result Philostrate became infinitely more interesting in the play's last act. Five actors tripled parts, so that they each had one part in the love plot, one "rude mechanical" role, and one small part in the fairy world: Egeus-Quince-First Fairy, Hermia-Starveling-Mustardseed, Demetrius-Snout-Peaseblossom, Lysander-Flute-Mote, and Helena-Snug-Cobweb. Bottom, always himself whatever world he inhabits, was not paired with another character. The fairy-human doubling worked thematically to convey to us that everyone participates in the magic of the fairy kingdom and in the joys and chaos of human society and to connect the local and cosmic levels of the play. The cross-gender casting among the rude mechanicals led to some fascinating cross-characterizations: Helena-Snug had to learn to roar like a lion; Starveling was almost as aggravated with the response to her portrayal of Moon by the carping nobles as Hermia was with that "tall personage" Helena. Demetrius redeemed himself as Wall, who ironically aids the commerce between lovers. Lysander redeemed himself through Flute's strong...

Punch-Drunk Love

Punch-Drunk Love

Realism and romance in the East German Cinema, 1952-1962

In Gerhard Klein and Wolfgang Kohlhaase's 1965 film Berlin um die Ecke (Berlin around the Corner) Horst, a young East Berliner, reminisces about his short stay in the West: 'I went to the movies every day', he says, 'sometimes twice. And not like the flicks we have here: Lovers doing self-critique' ('Liebespaar macht Selbstkritik'). Horst's sneering appraisal of the East German film studios' inferiority rests on their inability to produce a convincing love story. DEFA's couples, it seems, are interested more in principles than in passion. Indeed, Horst's statement captures a sense felt by many audiences of early East German movies: there is something de facto unromantic about these productions. This is not to say there were no love plots during this period. As a March 1953 editorial in Neues Deutschland pointed out: 'There is hardly a film made by DEFA in which love relationships do not play a thematic role'.1 Yet something feels amiss in these love stories: they seem uncomfortably suspended between genres, stranded halfway between realism and romance. The following investigation explores this intuition, examining the fraught ambivalence around the treatment of romantic plots in 1950s East German film culture. The changing fortunes of East German romance reveal the inconsistency of an uncharacteristically erratic party line. In the early part of the decade GDR cultural policy underwent an extensive revision, reversing the mandate of cultural producers overnight while insisting that the underlying principles remained the same. This drift – in fact a fairly precipitous slide – toward a romantic model associated more with Lubitsch than with Lenin did not just represent a capitulation to the West or a concession to the demands of GDR audiences, but rather it marked an internal rift in the ideological self-under-standing of the socialist party (SED). If the cultural climate of the GDR's socialist construction phase (the late 1940s and early 1950s) was inherently inhospitable to the flowering of romance, this seems most readily attributable to a contradiction between the traditions of romantic narrative and the demands of doctrinal socialist realism. Whereas the former insists on narrative and ideological autonomy, on what Piotr Fast in a short but evocative chapter on romantic conventions in Soviet socialist realism calls the 'autotelicity' of love, the latter by definition 'evaluates the individual, particular experience of reality from the standpoint of the future [socialist] society'.2 In the early 1950s even love stories are subject to socialist realism's characteristic politicisation of any and all intimate interpersonal ties; here, desire is cut to the measure of politics. Roman einer jungen Ehe (Story of a Young Couple, 1952), directed by Kurt Maetzig and written by Maetzig and Bodo Uhse, exemplified this dynamic. The 'young couple' in the title are Jochen (Hans-Peter Thielen) and Agnes (Yvonne Merin), struggling actors in post-war Berlin. While Jochen drifts into the not-so-successfully denazified West German theatre scene, Agnes inclines toward the East, working on a highly political – and in Jochen's eyes shamelessly propagandistic – film project. Eventually the political divisions between Agnes and [End Page 88] Jochen become too great, and they file for divorce. A last-minute courtroom reconciliation, however, saves their marriage – just in time for the opening celebration of the Stalinallee, a newly designed grand boulevard in the classical Stalinist style of the 1950s, intended to be the cynosure of socialist East Berlin. Click for larger view Figure 1 Agnes (Yvonne Merin) and Jochen (Hans-Peter Thielen), the 'young couple' of Kurt Maetzig's Roman einer jungen Ehe (Story of a Young Couple, 1952), share a romantic moment. Their marriage barely survives the political pressures of Cold-War Berlin. [Photo courtesy of Film museum Potsdam/DEFA-Kilian.]

Capital Accumulation and Canon Formation in Lope de Vega's De cosario a cosario

This article follows the threads of literary and topical allusions to interpret an underappreciated comedia madrileña, De cosario a cosario . Its action turns on two young nobles who set out to trick one another, each understating a large fortune and pretending to undergo bloodlettings to cure lovesickness. Their eventual marriage gives life to the play's title, a recycled refrán whose provenance infuses the love plot and concluding marriage with irony: Celestina declares that "de cosario a cosario no se pierden sino los barriles" when she cajoles Areúsa with a reminder of the "professional courtesy" that binds dishonest negotiators. In addition to this literary allusion, the comedia 's title signifier invites readings that take into account the other symbolic dimensions of the "corsario/cosario." Lope himself chronicled the life of one such antihero in his La Dragontea , a work that suffered censorship because its account of Francis Drake's death ran afoul of prohibitions against writing about recent, American history. Despite limitations due to censorship, Lope continued to write about the New World's impact on his own society. Though it does not narrate recent, American history in the manner of La Dragontea, De cosario a cosario skips ahead one step, portraying the social consequences of early-modern globalization. That is, the court city that lives on the frenetic extraction of American silver will find its systems of values irrevocably distorted in favor of the cosario/corsario , who lives and trades on the spoils of empire without working.

The Novel's Seductions: Staël's Corrine in Critical Inquiry by Karyna Szmurlo (review)

Book Reviews239 Karyna Szmurlo, ed. The Novel 's Seductions: Staël 's Corrine in Critical Inquiry. Lewisburg: Bucknel U Press, 1999. 321 pp. ISBN: 0-8387-5337-X The Novel's Seductions: Staël's Corrine in Critical Inquiry does just what Ellen Moers in her pioneering work on great women writers requested in her 1976 work, Literary Women: The Great Writers: "Let us try to take Corrine seriously; it was the book ofthe woman ofgenius." Karyna Szmurlo has assembled an impressive array ofarticles by leading Staël scholars (Madelyn Gutwirth, Simone Balayé, Marie-Claire Vallois, Charlotte Hogsett, Susan Tenenbaum) and feminist scholars (Nancy K. Miller, Joan DeJean, Margaret Cohen, April Alliston, Nanette Le Coat), among others, that explore the complexities and impact of Staël's seminal work. Conceived of as a research tool for teachers and students, this collection includes some of the most compelling readings of Staël's Corrine to date as well as an updated bibliography. The Novel s Seductions is organized around three areas of inquiry. Part One, "Transgressive Rhetorics ofDesire," addresses the poetics of language in Staël's novel. To take the acclaimed woman writer, poet, and improvisatrice as subject of discourse in early nineteenth-century France is necessarily to transgress the limits of a circumscribed femininity. As Miller argues, Staël's novel proposes an "authoritative vision within femininity that refuses the legitimacy of a permanent patriarchal structure" (85). But while facing down the Law ofthe Father and its patriarchal strictures, these critics describe the ways in which Corrine defies, but is ultimately re-inscribed, within them (Rogers, Whitman, Miller, Cohen). In Part Two, "Gender/Genre-Bending," Corrine is examined for its many valences as a female literary creation within a male literary world. Seen as a critical text poised between two centuries, simultaneously occupying the position of precursor to the Romantic novel and culmination ofthe eighteenth-century novel, Corrine embraces a female oral mode ofconversational artistry which undermines the domination ofthe male literary tradition in place (DeJean). Moreover, Corrine 's plot of romantic love is embedded within Staël's meditations on history, politics and culture; thereby, broadening female literary authority beyond the intimate sphere (Le Coat, Tenenbaum). Accordingto Marie-ClaireVallois, however, Corrine's voice was ultimately a passive one; in her attempt to speak herself, she is "spoken by the discourse ofthe other, the voice of culture and the father" (137). All these articles speak eloquently ofStaël's attempt to tell the story ofthe woman ofgenius who must pay culture's exacting price for the hubris of attaining greatness. Part Three, "Genie at Large" traces Corrine's affiliations with past and future generations. Paola Giuli traces the historical inspiration for Corrine to the mid eighteenth-century Italian improvisatrice, Corilla Olímpica, whose own controversial coronation at the Roman capítol as "poet laureate" was quickly forgotten, illustrating the ephemeral nature of female glory. April Alliston reads the problematics of female transmission in the sub-text thus linking Corrine to Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves. For later generations, Staël's novel would prove to be an inspiration to poets Felicia Hemans, Maria Jane Jewsbury and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while inducing the anxieties ofinfluence on Nathaniel Hawthorne 240Women in French Studies (Peel and Sweet, Rodier). Lastly, Charlotte Hogsett weaves the spiritual affinities between Marguerite Yourcenar and Germaine de Staël whose specter haunts Yourcenar's reception speech to the Académiefrançaise. Different in many ways, Staël and Yourcenar are nonetheless joined in their desire for literary glory and their huge talents that won them the respect of a literary culture to which they never fully belonged. The Novel s Seduction is an excellent introduction to the critical issues surrounding Staël's pivotal work. To those more conversant readers ofCorrine scholarship , be forewarned: a half dozen articles have already appeared elsewhere in whole, in part, or in translation. This, however, does not detract from the coherency of this rich collection of essays. Aurora WolfgangCalifornia State University at San Bernadino Barbara Klaw, Le Paris de Beauvoir. Éditions Syllepse, 1999, 127p. ISBN: 207993 -94-1. Lors de mon prochain séjour à Paris, j 'aurai en poche Le Paris...

What's Love Got to Do with Addison's Cato ?

What’s Love Got to Do with Addison’s Cato? Lisa A. Freeman (bio) On the occasion of the first performances of Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713), Alexander Pope wrote, in a now famous letter, to John Caryll, “The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party on the one side of the theatre, were echoed back by the Tories on the other” as each side tried to lay claim to the patriotic virtue of liberty on display in the drama. 1 Ever since, the political affinities of Addison’s Cato have been the subject of popular as well as critical debate, so much so that John Loftis contended in his influential study of the politics of Augustan drama that the “political meaning of Cato was and is still an enigma.” 2 Yet while so much critical energy has been directed toward solving this “enigma,” little or no attention has been paid to the equally, if not more, intriguing controversy that immediately erupted over the love scenes, which constitute almost half of Addison’s tragedy. This critical omission seems strange especially considering that these love plots provoked some of the most volatile exchanges and virulent attacks on the play in the half-century of critique following its first appearance at Drury Lane. 3 Some readers of Cato have offered rationalizations for the love scenes in the larger context of the play’s heroic themes. 4 Yet no critic to date has considered why so many of Addison’s contemporaries would direct so much energy so persistently not only toward censuring and suppressing the love scenes, but also toward reimagining the very contours of his play. Why, in short, did the love scenes between Portius, Marcus, and Lucia on the one hand and Juba and Marcia on the other provoke such a hostile response? This essay approaches the attacks on the love scenes not only as specific discussions of Addison’s Cato, but as interpretable commentaries that can illuminate the more general question of what kinds of cultural work [End Page 463] tragedies were expected to perform in early-eighteenth-century England. Addison’s Cato provides us with an unusually rich opportunity to explore these larger generic concerns, for the play gave rise not only to this long and controversial reception history, but also, in 1764, to a wholesale revision of the drama titled Cato. A Tragedy. By Mr. Addison. Without the Love Scenes. By analyzing these documents for their characteristic biases, this essay demonstrates that the resistance to the love scenes in Addison’s tragedy was symptomatic of a broader politics of gender and genre that sought to position male characters as the exclusive agents of tragedy and its ideological projects. Those playwrights who accepted the call of the tragic muse in the early eighteenth century almost invariably announced their intentions of using their plays to envision the English nation and the heroic individuals who would champion and exemplify that nation. In prefaces, prologues, and sometimes epilogues, they explicitly invoked service to the state as the primary interest of tragedy and identified the representation of a particular virtue as a means to fulfill this obligation. In their selection of tragic subject matter, they often chose fables and themes which had allegorical, analogical, or even direct significance for these ends. 5 Not insignificantly, moreover, service to country and patriotic virtue were practically the only principles of tragedy upon which contemporary critics agreed. Influential commentators such as Addison and John Dennis, who generally opposed each other on issues of dramatic decorum, both insisted, for instance, that tragic narratives generally achieved their most natural expression when they embraced patriotism. 6 Tragedy’s status as the site for the articulation of a national posterity was made all the more intense to the extent that it was also figured as the first line of defense against both foreign attacks and a latent moral degeneracy. Envisioning themselves as besieged on all sides, defenders of the English stage looked to tragedy as the rational form that could subdue and then drive out those irrational and feminine passions aroused by foreign entertainments such as pantomime and Italian opera. Metadramatic representations of tragedy suggested that if tragedy failed to...

Keeping an "Old Wound" Alive: The Marrow of Tradition and the Legacy of Wilmington

The historical and sociopolitical context of Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition is legacy of Reconstruction, and - more specifically - circumstances surrounding what H. Leon Prather calls Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898. This is what title of novel primarily refers - a whose marrow is colonial racism. Eric Sundquist, in his To Wake Nations, gives The Marrow of Tradition recognition it deserves, as probably astute political-historical novel of its day, not just in its rendering of Wilmington Racial Massacre, but in its illumination of sociopolitical context that produced both massacre and novel itself (13). Precisely because Chesnutt was so heavily constrained - as a writer and as a black man - by same material conditions he sought illuminate and critique, his great, ambitious novel of protest also became agonizingly self-critical. The work of historical revision it contributes to, however, was - and continues be - invaluable. Raymond Williams writes that tradition is most evident expression of hegemony of dominant class, intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present; therefore, the accessible and influential work of counter-hegemony is historical . . . recovery [and] redress (115-16). Williams also writes, however, that creative practice of this political-historical kind is always a difficult remaking of an inherited (determined) practical consciousness . . . a at roots of mind (212). The Marrow of Tradition is product of this struggle within Chesnutt's own mind; tragedy of novel lies in his recognition of futility of his labor, how hegemony of Southern tradition is perpetuated in very marrow of white (and black) consciousness in South. The novel begins with birth of Theodore Felix Carteret, who embodies Major Carteret's dearest - to have children of which he was so proud, write it still higher on roll of honor (2). And historical and socioeconomic meaning of Carteret family name and Major's desire perpetuate it are succinctly encapsulated some pages later; Major, now editor of Morning Chronicle, is investing part of his wife's patrimony in an enterprise that promises immense - profits which would enable his son, upon reaching manhood, take a place in world commensurate with of his ancestors, one of whom, only a few generations removed, had owned an estate of ninety thousand acres of land and six thousand slaves (30). Dodie (as Theodore Felix is affectionately called) embodies Southern itself, idealized socioeconomic order founded on colonial racism. And Carteret's position as editor of Morning Chronicle, along with his reliance on his wife's patrimony, suggests how far dignity of family - and Southern aristocracy as a whole has fallen. At end of this chapter, Carteret writes the famous editorial in which he sounded tocsin of a new for white supremacy; thus, through Chesnutt's construction of novel, Carteret's hope for Dodie - and for Dodie embodies - introduces and figures this crusade (39). In such ways, seemingly Victorian plot of love, marriage, and domesticity is from beginning linked complex historical and sociopolitical context of plot by Big Three of Carteret, General Belmont, and Captain McBane. Too often, however, critics of novel have seen narrative mannerisms of Victorian novel of manners - and, perhaps more importantly, seeming contradictions and ambivalence within text - as what William Andrews calls aesthetic blemishes (203). In his influential 1980 book on Chesnutt's literary career, Andrews states that The Marrow of Tradition - although an important social statement in literature of its time - today . …

The Boer Rebellion in South African English Fiction

Summary This article explores the construction and interpretation of the 1913–1914 Boer Rebellion in five popular romances by English white writers in South Africa. Inverting Frederic Jameson's conception of resistant form, a Utopian vision of a fully democratic South Africa is made to act as arbiter of these novelists’ insights/limitations. The wish to promote white unity is shown to be a common theme, developed mainly via a love plot, though with greatly varying degrees of sympathy for Afrikaners provided they are not rebels. Two of the novels exploit anti‐German contemporary sentiments. Links with the possibility of a black rebellion are, by and large, discreetly evaded. Although one writer has the courage to promote a blend of pacifism and feminism, and the satirical perspective of another reveals a capacity for larger vision, none of these novels comes anywhere near offering a radical challenge to the stock white conception of South African society.

"Scenes of Horror," Scenes of Sensibility: Sentimentality and Slavery in John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam

“Scenes of Horror,” Scenes of Sensibility: Sentimentality and Slavery in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam Tassie Gwilliam* It has been asserted that sentimentality and transracial love plots work to mystify slavery and colonialism—to dematerialize them and take them out of the realm of exploitative labor—but John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790) demonstrates that slavery and colonialism can also themselves serve to illuminate not only the contradictions and internal pressures endemic to sentimental love plots, but also the laborious and problematic process of creating sentimentality itself. 1 In Stedman’s heterogeneous Narrative, the intermittently heard, countering voice of the beloved slave and the contamination of “romance” and the domestic by colonial violence together serve to reveal the holes in sentimentality. 2 Despite (or perhaps even because of) the popularity of sentimentality in the 1780s and 1790s as “a powerful mode for representing colonial relations and the imperial frontier,” in Mary Louise Pratt’s words, its imperatives also tangle Stedman’s text, pushing narrator and narrative into unsustainable extravagance and unsought self-confrontation. 3 Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam is at once the description of a suicidal military expedition against the maroons (the “Revolted Negroes” of the title), a travel book exploring the natural history of South America, the narrative of a man of sensibility encountering a brutal and corrupt plantation society founded on the spectacular torment of slave bodies, a picaresque masculine adventure self-consciously modeled on Roderick Random and Tom Jones, and the avowedly sentimental tale of the transracial romance between Stedman and the mulatto slave Joanna, hopefully defined by Stedman as a reversal of Inkle and Yarico, the seminal sentimental-romantic encounter between new world and old. 4 Not only the wildly divergent genres and models invoked, but the dangerous [End Page 653] congruence between slavery and the sentimental make the narration of this relationship both volatile and disruptive. 5 The ability of the sentimental—and of the love plot to which it is here tied—to represent sexuality in a context of slavery and violence undergoes intensive testing through Stedman’s Narrative. Because the story of Stedman and Joanna documents a series of negotiations with problematic facts—most vitally the fact that Stedman entered into the quintessentially colonial economic/sexual agreement of formal concubinage with Joanna—the text registers with peculiar clarity the compromises and coercion common in the sentimental love plot, both as a genre and as erotic wish-fulfillment. The inescapable, repeated confrontations with bodily torment, the proximity of transformative violence to the body of the heroine, and the baldly economic valuation of that body translate all too seamlessly into sentimentality. I Stedman’s description of his romance with Joanna may be said to offer a classic example of (failed) containment; the juxtaposition and interpenetration between this forcefully but uneasily sentimentalized encounter and the violent spectacles of slavery demonstrate the impossibility of sealing off the realm of the personal from the political and social, as well as the inevitably disfiguring effects of slavery on the love plot. 6 Stedman’s narrative in fact documents the strains of the effort to convert the political to the personal. 7 The collapse of the clear lines of demarcation around romantic and sentimental interludes in Stedman’s narrative echoes the doomed attempt to carve out a domestic space in the overwhelming physical and psychic violence of colonial Surinam. 8 There is no inviolable domestic or narrative space under slavery; at each point that Stedman raises barriers between home and public spaces, or between sentimental diversion and central story, slavery confounds the drawing of boundaries. But the demands of sentimental narration also undermine Stedman’s efforts to cordon off this romance from the other experiences described: the need for a heroine in distress—and a hero suffering through her suffering—calls back in full force the cause of suffering, the heroine’s enslavement. The awkward effects of assimilating the institutional violations inherent in slavery to the modes of sentimentality pervade Stedman’s Narrative. What originates as trading in...