Morality Play Research Articles

Inuit morality play: the emotional education of a three-year-old

Is your mother Are you good? Do you want to come live with me? Inuit adults often playfully present small children with difficult, even dangerous, choices and then dramatize the consequences of the child's answers. They are enacting in larger-than-life form the plots that drive Inuit social life -- testing, acting out problems, entertaining themselves, and, most of all, bringing up their children.In a riveting narrative, psychological anthropologist Jean L. Briggs takes us through six months of dramatic interactions in the life of Chubby Maata, a three-year-old girl growing up in a Baffin Island hunting camp. The book examines the issues that engaged the child -- belonging, possession, love -- and shows the process of her growing.Briggs questions the nature of sharedness in culture and assumptions about how culture is transmitted. She suggests that both cultural meanings and strong personal commitment to one's world can be (and perhaps must be) acquired not by straightforwardly learning attitudes, rules, and habits in a dependent mode but by experiencing oneself as an agent engaged in productive conflict in emotionally problematic situations. Briggs finds that dramatic play is an essential force in Inuit social life. It creates and supports values; engenders and manages attachments and conflicts; and teaches and maintains an alert, experimental, constantly testing approach to social relationships.I could not be more enthusiastic about this brilliant book. It makes persuasive, nuanced arguments about culture, internalization, and personal individuality, and it is a mesmerizing ethnography. -- Nancy J. Chodorow, author of Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory

Stage Fright or Death Wish: Sociology in the Mass Media

Let me start from where we are at this point: Almost all of America and a good part of world are discussing sexual politics, peccadilloes, and privileges of president of United States. Stranger than fiction, of course. If I had written a novel that included a nation having a dialogue about whether oral was sex and whether it constituted adultery, it would have l een considered outrageous impertinence and fantasy although perhaps, properly timed, it could have heen a bestseller. On other hand, that unlikely timing has already been accomplished with movie Wag Dogfiction and nonfiction are now forever married. Life and al^t have few koundaries. The nation has indulged in an orgy of gossip. Did he or didn't he? If he did, is lie worse than act? Were his acts i.e., only province of himself and Hillary or do they concern nation? Is adultery so a character flaw that it imperils presidencyor is it merely a statistically likely behavior of powerful men? And, at a more coffee klatch level, is there a difference tetween hidden sins and public probity i.e., would all of it have been acceptal le if it had been discreet? Is problem a woman, women, or taste in women? Are psychologists or sociobiologists correct in their hypotheses about nubile young women and irresistible attractions they present for men? Or is attraction a mixture of culture and psychology allure of bad girls and thrill of l eing a bad boy, especially in White House? And let's not forget a more Freudian analysis. Should we have expected all this as a death wish for overachieving or, more close to subject, oedipal outcome for a child of a flaml oyant mother and an absent father? There is not much sociology here, is there? The debate about president has keen at o ut character, individual behavior, and a morality play. Only a few questions have had any sociological content. The most interesting was reaction to lack of public condemnation of president. When president's approval ratings stayed up, a surprised press (and, more interestingly, surprised kehavioral scientists) were at a l it o f a loss to explain or even interpret data. Current research on nonmonogamy would have suggested a eluite different pul lic reaction condemnation Something sociological was going con although exactly what it was remained uncertain Hundreds o f journalists looked frantically for an authoritative explanation of how president's approval ratings ctuld stay so when his personal actions seemed to violate traditional values of monogamy and honesty At this point and many others many sociologists who study sexuality, marriage, and intimacy were called to comment in print on radio, television, and Internet So we were communicating with pulDlic and perhaps using a sociological frame to explain p ublic's apparent toleration of possil le presidential infidelity incleed, reportedly, repeated infidelities But, as much fun as that kind of discussion can l e, these conversations with worlcl and with press are prol al ly not what we should aim for, not t ecause they aren't high minded enough, but l ecause these scattered observations don't amount to much especially lecause all our commellts are cast in prevailing moral framework and not truly in a sociological one What most sociologists and other social scientists involved in fray of media appearances have been doing is merely hitching o n to a juggernaut that uses them up in drive-by quotatic)ns on random topics If we wish to make a real contribution, we have to frame debate, by creating and interpreting data more polemically, earlier in game o r later, with possil ility of more complete information and contemplation It is hard to gain an audience or create meaning in eye of a storm; we need composure and some distance to assess wreckage There is little any one sociologist can do during media feeding frenzy of a big story They have their story it is rare under any circumstances that journalist is actually doing detective work to find a thesis to proceed from And while the expert may have impression that he or she has reached perfect understanding with a given journalist, this is o ften al out as real as any other relationship begun suddenly and intensely, with limited mutual knowledge of each other and goals that are not necessarily coordinated Courtship by media is a cold sort of affair They act like they love you, and then they're

Drama in Early Tudor Britain, 1485-1558

A time of great changes after nearly a century of foreign wars and civil strife, the Tudor era witnessed a significant transformation of dramatic art. Medieval traditions were modified by the forces of humanism and the Reformation, and a renewed interest in classical models inspired experimentation. Howard B. Norland examines Tudor plays performed between 1485 and 1558, a time when drama reached beyond local, popular, and religious contexts to treat more varied and more secular concerns, culminating in the emergence of comedy and tragedy as major genres. The theater also imported dramas from the Continent, adapting them to English tastes. After establishing the popular dramatic traditions of fifteenth-century Britain, Norland discusses the critical interpretation of the Latin plays of Terence studied in the schools and the views of influential authors, such as Erasmus, Vives, and More about what drama should be and do. The heart of the book is its in-depth analyses of individual plays. Norland examines the secularization of the morality play in Skelton's Magnificence, Bale's King John, Respublica, and Redford's Wit and Science and he traces the changes in comic form from Medwall's Fulgens and Lucres through Calisto and Melebea and Johan to Udall's Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle. The final section examines the first tragedies written in England: Watson's Absolom, Christopherson's Jephthah, and Grimald's Archipropheta. Howard B. Norland is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His articles have appeared in Genre, Sixteenth Century Journal, Fifteenth Century Studies, Comparative Drama, and Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

The English Stage: A History of Drama and Performance

1. Medieval drama, secular and religious 2. The early morality play 3. The Tudor interlude 4. The Elizabethan theatre 5. Marlowe's stagecraft 6. Shakespeare's practice 7. Ben Jonson's comic stagecraft 8. The court masque 9. Jacobean experiment: exploring the form 10. The Restoration stage 11. The Georgian theatre 12. The Victorian theatre 13. Bernard Shaw and his stage practice 14. Twentieth-century developments and variations.

Stage Devils in English Reformation Plays

Stage Devils in English Reformation Plays John D. Cox ? The More Things Change. . . . Prevailing conceptions of stage devils in early English drama derive from patterns of critical interpretation that were established early in the twentieth century. Most influential in forming these patterns was E. K. Chambers, but Chambers was assisted to varying degrees by W. W. Greg, A. W. Pollard, and W. W. Skeat. Pollard's English Miracle Plays, Moralities, and Interludes went through eight editions in a little under forty years (1890 to 1927), becoming the standard anthology for students, who used it until well past the middle of the century. Pollard judged the late morality plays severely; he rejected their penchant for personification because it tended "to didacticism and unreality," and was therefore "wholly undramatic," with the result that "the popularity of the later Morality significantly coincided with the dullest and most barren period in the history of English literature."1 Pollard's view was not seriously challenged until seventy years after his first edition, in the work of Bernard Spivack and David Bevington, who both in various ways vindicated dramatic personification and the Vice in particular. Yet even in their important revision of the critical tradition, they supported an evolutionary teleology that had been established by Chambers. Spivack's interest in distinguishing personifications from fleshand -blood characters was dictated by his thesis about the influence of the Vice on late Elizabethan dramatic characterization, and he therefore exaggerated the place of devils in the mystery plays while understating it in moralities: "The Devil, who in the Christian mythos is the father of evil, has only a negligible place in the morality drama. In the cyclical mysteries and in the miracles he is a familiar personage." Only two plays among those that Spivack designated as "miracles" (usually now called saint plays) 85 86Stage Devils in English Reformation Plays are in fact extant in English, and devils are a late addition to one of them, the Digby Conversion of St. Paul, so Spivack's generalization concerning the miracle plays is based on an extremely small, and likely unrepresentative, sample. According to Spivack, devils appear in "only nine of the almost sixty surviving" morality plays,2 but he does not note that this proportion is about the same as the proportion of pageants that include devils in each of the extant mystery cycles.3 If the devils in Protestant morality plays are approached without evolutionary assumptions, continuity with earlier devils is apparent and more important than Chambers's account would suggest. The principal difference is not a gradually evolving secularism but the sudden impact of the Protestant Reformation .4 Devils that appear in Protestant plays are no less morally and spiritually serious than devils in pre-Reformation drama, but the assumptions that motivate them are radically new. The earliest Protestant dramatists, John Bale and John Foxe, were themselves formed by traditional religion—that is, by pre-Reformation Christian faith and practice.5 Bale in fact spent more than twenty-five years as a Carmelite friar until his conversion to the reformed view in 1533. Bale and Fox therefore understood the Devil's traditional role in cosmic history, in the life of the community, and in the individual Christian's life, and they also understood how that role was embodied in drama.6 Early Reformation dramatists' deliberate attempt to redefine the Devil's role was no mean task, but ultimately it succeeded, even if it did so by compromise, in the manner of the English Reformation as a whole. Demolishing prevailing views through satire and iconoclasm was only the first step. Putting something new in place required the ability to assign new meaning and impose a new shape on ecclesiastical, liturgical, and dramatic tradition , to master assiduous historical scholarship according to the new humanist model, to put scholarship to work in winning hearts and minds, to reinvent dramatic convention, and to persevere in all this against overwhelming resistance, both official and popular. The task succeeded when political events eventually took a decisive turn in the reformers' favor, so that their innovations became an established tradition in their own right. The reformers ' opponents' effort to preserve and renew the old faith, including its...

Mass atrocity, collective memory, and the law

Trials of those responsible for large-scale state brutality have captured public imagination in several countries. Prosecutors and judges in such cases, says Osiel, rightly aim to shape memory. They can do so hi ways successful as public spectacle and consistent with liberal legality. In defending this interpretation, he examines the Nuremburg and Tokyo trials, the Eicnmann prosecution, and more recent trials in Argentina and France. Such trials can never summon up a collective conscience of moral principles shared by all, he argues. But they can nonetheless contribute to a little-noticed kind of social solidarity. To this end, writes Osiel, we should pay closer attention to the way an experience of administrative massacre is framed within the conventions of competing theatrical genres. Defense counsel will tell the story as a tragedy, while prosecutors will present it as a morality play. The judicial task at such moments is to employ the law to recast the courtroom drama in terms of a theater of ideas, which engages large questions of memory and even national identity. Osiel asserts that principles of liberal morality can be most effectively inculcated in a society traumatized by fratricide when proceedings are conducted in this fashion. The approach Osiel advocates requires courts to confront questions of historical interpretation and moral pedagogy generally regarded as beyond their professional competence. It also raises objections that defendants' rights will be sacrificed, historical understanding distorted, and that the law cannot willfully influence memory, at least not when lawyers acknowledge this aim. Osiel responds to all these objections, and others. Lawyers, judges, sociologists, historians, and political theorists will find this a compelling contribution to debates on the meaning and consequences of genocide.

Mars, Materials, and Three Morality Plays: Materials Flows and Environmental Policy

SummaryAlthough industrial ecology represents a captivating metaphor and rich repertoire of analytical tools, its impact on environmental policy has been marginal at best. This article examines the insights provided by the studies of three common materials in the US. economy‐lead, arsenic, and silver‐and the abilrty of such studies to illuminate some larger and looming challenges for future environmental policy. Three specific challenges are explored: the flow of materials across national borders, the increasing embodiment of emissions in products, and the dangers of unchallenged assumptions about the drivers of material flows. The article argues that industrial ecology can inform public policy but that it is time for the practitioners of industrial ecology, an applied science, to apply it in the often messy world of environmental policymaking.

“The News Media, the Problem Frame, and the Production of Fear”

The role of the news media in promoting a public discourse of fear is examined. A conceptual model is offered that is based on recent developments in communication formats and frames. The emphasis is on the impact of media forms and frames for guiding the selection and presentation of reports emphasizing fear (e.g., crime, drugs, violence). A “problem frame” compatible with format and entertainment needs is used by the news media as a secular version of a morality play. This promotes messages that resonate fear. The role of the problem frame is described as part of the process for promoting widespread messages stressing fear and danger. Materials from a qualitative content analysis approach, “tracking discourse,” of selected news media illustrate how the focus and content of “fear” shifts over a period of time. Conceptual and methodological implications of this approach are discussed.

The Everyman Movie, Circa 1991

The morality play in its purest form flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Of the surviving examples, Everyman is now the most widely known, and this is ironic because it lacks two elements that made the morality play popular in its day: personified vices (reliable crowd pleasers such as the Seven Deadly Sins) and vulgar humor (the language in Mankind would make Robin Williams blush).1 Instead, Everyman apparently survives on the strength of its central theme: that the recognition of one's mortality forces reconsideration of personal values and a search for salvation. This theme became a staple of commercial filmmaking in the early 1990s. In 1991 at least seven major motion pictures were released in which the main character, when confronted with death, reviews his life and despairs of making anything good of it, but then, thanks to wise counsel, discovers a higher moral or spiritual principle and proceeds to a better life. If one surveys 1990 through 1992 and includes films that share some, but not all, of the elements of Everyman, the total number of films on this theme is at least 17.

China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry (review)

Reviewed by: China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry Andrew Wells China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry. Richard Madsen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 265pp. $27.50/Cloth. My deepest initial impressions of China came from the demonstrations and massacre around Tiananmen Square in 1989. Virtually every American who was in Beijing at the time has written an account of the events leading up to June 4, 1989. Sociologist Richard Madsen’s book is thus hardly the first of its kind. However, Madsen probes far more deeply than most. In searching for an answer as to why the Tiananmen massacre provoked such an extreme, even irrational, response among Americans, Madsen intensely scrutinizes both Chinese and American culture. This study offers no policy analysis, but rather searches for an understanding of the “public philosophy” and “moral drama” that undergird Chinese and Americans’ views of each other. Tiananmen “discredited an important American myth about China,” yet Madsen contends that the roots of mythmaking on both sides of the Pacific extend well beyond 1989. Madsen has received the most acclaim for his coauthorship of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, but he also has a solid background as a China-watcher, beginning his career as a Maryknoll missionary in Taiwan in the 1960s. Although drawing from both Chinese and American sources, China and the American Dream does concentrate more on American than Chinese experience. Madsen traces the origins of a dominant “liberal myth” about China to academic and religious circles in the mid-1960s. In contrast to prevalent views of China as “Red menace” or “leftist paradise,” the liberals saw China as a “troubled modernizer” which could be helped by American support. As SAIS Professor Emeritus, A. Doak Barnett—himself a missionary kid—testified before Senator Fulbright’s Foreign Affairs Committee in 1966, American recognition of the People’s Republic would strengthen “technical bureaucrats” over Maoist revolutionaries, thus helping China modernize “pragmatically.” This concept, Madsen argues, formed the basis for associations such as the National Committee on US-China relations and eventually Kissinger’s and Nixon’s trips to China in the early 1970s. [End Page 189] While conceding that this liberal myth was closer to the truth than its alternatives, Madsen nevertheless sees more psychology and “well-constructed theater” than geopolitical calculation in its application. Whereas a theoretical realist would argue that Kissinger and Nixon acted on power interests, Madsen places the dreams first and rationality second. After Vietnam and Watergate, the “opening” of China—a metaphor Madsen is right to resist—did indeed seem like “a breath of fresh air” (Kissinger). With newfound optimism about the Chinese revolution, academic, religious, and scientific exchanges began in earnest as “missionaries of the American dream.” Not until Tiananmen did it become clear that the optimists had taken too much for granted. In the 1970s and 1980s, Madsen contends, “Americans looking to China usually saw what they wanted to see, or more precisely what their institutional commitments wanted them to see. Chinese looking at the United States were allowed only a few tantalizing glimpses of American life.” The often superficial goodwill of the “liberal center... underestimated the depths of cruelty the Chinese revolution had brought upon the Chinese people, and it overestimated the power of technical reason to bring peace and prosperity to China.” As one American student said of the Tiananmen demonstrators, “They want just what we have”—implying, says Madsen, “a universal model of the good society” based on American capitalism. Hence our appalled reactions to the massacre; All the “right” elements for the realization of the American dream in China were in place, but the ending did not follow the script of the drama. On the Chinese side, which Madsen treats with insight but less depth, contact with the United States accentuated an ongoing debate between tradition and industrial modernism. The fragmentation of Chinese culture in the post-Mao era came about, however, more from internal causes than from any validation by American liberal democracy. For some Chinese, certainly, Western culture brought an “awakening.” For others, the cultural self-confidence, already weakened by the Cultural Revolution, was destroyed by a growing, but false, perception that China...

The Indestructible Beauty of Suffering: Diana and the Metaphor of Global Consumption

The Indestructible Beauty of Suffering: Diana and the Metaphor of Global Consumption Scott Wilson (bio) “Cover her face Mine eyes dazzle She died young” —The Duchess of Malfi, (cited by Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian, September 8, 1997, p. 12) Nancy Banks-Smith’s epigraph to her commentary on the television coverage of the death and funeral of the Princess of Wales draws an analogy with Jacobean tragedy. Like many other commentators, Banks-Smith notes the comparison even as she contributes to the media fictionalization of the Princess”s life. The Princess of Wales lived out a life of “brilliant fictions;” 1 the media not only told her story, it wrote and re-wrote that story according to a variety of familiar genres: fairy tale, romance, soap opera, morality play, tragedy and so on. The blanket coverage of Diana’s life and death turned, essentially, on the suffering of a young woman whose beauty, frozen in the glare of photographers’ flash bulbs, did not diminish. As Bank-Smith’s quotation subtly suggests, this “coverage” involved both the endless, painful exposure to the rigors of popular narrative and the effacement of the “real” human suffering it produced. To the end, Diana’s face was covered by the dazzling images that immortalized her. At the same time as her death crystallized the iconic image of Diana, another image was withdrawn from media circulation: the image of the Princess dying in the crumpled Mercedes taken by the “paparazzi.” A taboo was placed on those images that recorded her dying moments, unconscious or in pain. They were subject to universal moral censure, deemed to constitute the very limit of intrusive prurience, the accursed part of the photo-archive, the dazzling, unbearable core of the story that must be covered over. In their place the newspapers printed the image of the smashed Mercedes, a substitution that for some betrayed the same prurient impulse (i.e. she was that crushed Mercedes). Already commanding a high price, the withdrawal of the pictures only heightened their value and desirability—and not just in simple economic terms. The British Sunday newspaper The Observer acknowledged the fascination the pictures would exert: “These crash-photos are likely to become under-the-counter cult objects—authentic-snuff—pictures and a repellent symbol of the amoral code of the tabloid photographers and the editors who profit from prurience.” 2 This sentiment expressed a common view that these pictures do more than simply record a newsworthy event, a view that assumes, without fear of contradiction, that there is something more prurient or obscene in these images than those, for example, depicting the suffering of victims of war or famine. But it is no “amoral code” that allows the photographs to be taken, sold, and reproduced across the world. The profit is gained from the very morality that, as with so many other pictures of the Royal Family taken incognito, likes to see in order to condemn, that shakes its head at the image it has just bought. It is a “News of the World/National Inquirer” morality whose sustenance depends on the objects of its salacious disapproval. In this case, if the volubility of the condemnation is not simply the result of a disappointed moral prurience, then it is because morality wishes to be protected from the destructive reality of its own desire. But in fact some of these “snuff” images were indeed “reproduced” in the British press, on the day after her funeral, by the Sunday Times in an article by the Insight team on Princess Diana’s “Last Hours.” The photographs were not reprinted, but they were described: One was a clear shot of her face, a hand stretched out as if reaching for Dodi. “She looked superb,” said Sola, “she was still very, very beautiful and nothing suggested she would die a few hours later.” The princess was unconscious. Her head was resting in the gap between the front seats. Her face was serene. There was just one bruise under her left eye. A trickle of blood ran down the side of her forehead. 3 The pictures are recorded as described by one of the photographers, the aptly named, to the...

The sun safety metanarrative: Translating science into public health discourse

A case study examining the relationship between ozone depletion, UV radiation and skin cancer shows how scientific uncertainty is reduced and, through consensus building, translated into certainty in public health messages. Using narrative analysis we examine Canadian consensus statements on the dangers of UV and reconstruct the supporting logical claims and scientific evidence. Though considerable uncertainty remains about the relationship between the environment and skin cancer, both public health messages and the UV-Index formalize uncertainty and risk; concern then shifts from the less-certain, scientific realm into the apparently more-certain arena of public health messages. In this process the distinctions between science and policy become blurred. The case can be interpreted in two ways: as the result of various players acting in their self-interests or as a moral drama based on the importance of simple, clear messages to allow ‘correct’ actions.

War in the Gulf, 1990-91: The Iraq-Kuwait Conflict and Its Implications

For most Americans, the war against Iraq lingers in memory as a vast morality play, a drama offering ready made heroes and villains: a glowering dictator in military uniform, hapless Kuwaiti refugees with tales of persecution, plucky pilots with high-tech wizardry, and a defiant American president, ringing Churchillian as he drew a line in the sand. But this characterization of the war is greatly oversimplified, a one-dimensional portrait, lacking in context and nuance. In War in the Gulf, 1990 91, eminent scholars Majid Khadduri and Edmund Ghareeb paint a very different picture, one that brings historical depth to the portrait, and displays the actions of many of the participants in a new and revealing light. Khadduri and Ghareeb offer a far more accurate and complex portrait of the Iraq-Kuwait conflict, providing a wealth of background information not readily available before. They made a distinction between the differences between Iraq and Kuwait over frontiers, territory, and sovereignty and the method pursued by Iraqi leaders to resolve those differences. They explore, for instance, the history of relations between Iraq and Kuwait, revealing that Kuwait had once been a part of Basra (in southern Iraq) during the Ottoman rule, and only became a separate country while under British control (it was the British in fact who drew the much-disputed boundary line between Iraq and Kuwait). Khadduri and Ghareeb describe the many decades of struggle to resolve the boundary issue, examining the repeated attempts by other Arab states to mediate according to Islamic traditions of consultation and peaceful resolution within the faith. The authors also show how Saddam Husayn's war with Iran exacerbated the boundary tensions. Because of the decade-long war, Iraq badly needed oil revenue to repay wartime loans and to rebuild, but Kuwait persisted in pumping far beyond its OPEC quota, driving down prices, and costing Iraq billions of dollars of revenue. The book reveals how Kuwait spurned Arab attempts to mediate this clash over oil prices as well as the longstanding boundary dispute, frustrating efforts to resolve this crisis by peaceful means. In one particularly interesting section, the book examines the diplomatic talks during the early summer of 1990, both among various Arab nations (most notably, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Kuwait), and with Saddam Husayn and the United States (they show how messages from Washington and a visit by a congressional delegation lead by Senator Dole convinced the Iraqi leaders that they would be allowed to settle their problems with Kuwait without outside interference). Khadduri and Ghareeb carry us through to the present, exploring the war and its aftermath, from the uprisings against Baghdad, to the continuing U.N. sanctions, to the recent defections from Saddam's inner circle. War in the Gulf is a balanced, eye-opening account of one of the central events of recent years. It corrects the Western views of most reporting, explaining the frame of mind of the participants as no one has done before and causing us to examine anew such questions as who was responsible for the conflict, and what might have happened if the United States had not intervened so rapidly.

Response: Morality Play

Response: Morality Play

Bomb's Away at the Smithsonian

The quashing of the Enola Gay exhibit provides a vivid example of how political power in the present grants a group of interested actors the ability to define the past—in this case, the history of use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This power to define a national history, a “patriotically correct” history, means that these actors’ beliefs continue to control U.S. foreign policy. These powerful political actors include military veterans' organizations, such as the American Legion and Air Force Association, and their allies among the Right. They control the past by being able to define the dropping of the atomic bomb as the “only” reasonable choice the U.S. could have made to avoid a long, bloody invasion of Japan that would have cost a million or more American casualties. The patriotically correct narrative teaches us that military might and technological superiority are the paths to peace. As described by Stanley Goldberg, one of the historians on the Smithsonian's Enola Gay advisory panel, the quashing of that exhibit has been a “dispiriting morality play.”. By now, the basic plot line of this incident is well known: historians create an historically sophisticated exhibit, veterans and right wing groups angrily react, label it “politically correct history,” and ultimately kill the exhibit by threatening to cut off the museum's funding. But we can also present a more sociologically informed analysis of these events, showing the importance of political power in the social construction of reality. As citizen‐activists, we must understand these dynamics in order to resist them. As educators, we must teach our students how to think about these events, reading between and beyond the lines of popular media coverage. Stanley Goldberg used the analogy of a play to tell the story of the Enola Gay exhibit. We'll do the same here. The story represents a tragic execution of historical truth, complete with cover‐up and betrayal, and as such constitutes a classic tragedy in five acts, with an epilogue outlining the lessons this saga has taught us.

Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies by Gregory D. Black

BOOK REVIEWS 323 is an important story and deserving of serious treatment by historians. A portrait ofAmerican Catholics would be incomplete without it. Joseph Richard Preville Boston, Massachusetts Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies. By Gregory D. Black [Cambridge Studies in the History of Mass Communications.] (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1994. Pp. x, 336. $27.95.) In this history of Hollywood censorship, primarily of the 1920's and 1930's, Gregory Black argues that the movie studios, the Production Code Administration (PCA), and the Catholic Church colluded in a system that prevented the "direct and honest" treatment of serious social, political, economic, and moral issues on the movie screen. Black laments that, as he sees it, the Code and its enforcement required all movies to be "morality plays." In his analysis, however, he runs the risk of devising his own morality play in which the champions of honesty and freedom are stymied again and again by the agents of prudishness and mediocrity. Black first chronicles (Chapters 1 and 2) the earliest struggles over motion picture content, those leading up to the establishment of official industry censorship . In order to quiet public protest, as well as to avoid federal anti-trust action or censorship, motion picture producers agreed to the self-regulation represented by the Hays Office. Black goes on (Chapters 3, 4, and 5) to detail the trials Hays faced in policing three different sorts of movie content: sex, especially the films of Cecil B. DeMiIIe and Mae West; themes and plots drawn from modern literature, especially Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Faulkner's Sanctuary; and gangster and prison films. Black then describes (Chapter 6) how dissatisfaction with the results of Hays's supervision grew, especially among the Catholics influential in the composition and adoption of the original Motion Picture Production Code who in 1933-34 threatened the nationwide boycott implied in the organization of the Legion of Decency. This threat was defused by negotiations among the major players that resulted in the establishment of the PCA, headed by a Catholic layman , Joseph Breen. With the threat of a boycott always available as leverage, Black argues, Breen was able for more than twenty years to insist that movies depict "Sex with a Dash of Moral Compensation" (Chapter 7) and that they avoid serious engagement with political and social issues (Chapter 8). He concludes that the "golden era" of movie production might have been more genuinely golden had the studios not been victims of the "economic blackmail" made possible by the combination of the producers' desire to reach the largest possible audience and the demands of special interest groups, particularly the Catholic Church. 324 BOOK REVIEWS The author has drawn on an impressive array of relevant archives—not only those of the PCA, but also of the relevant dioceses, the NCCB, motion picture studios, and individuals including Will Hays, Daniel A. Lord,Wilfrid Parsons, and Martin Quigley. He offers detailed and engaging descriptions of the controversies over specific pictures, and carefully traces the alliances among various groups both within and outside the motion picture industry. Black's analysis would have been richer if he had supplemented his excellent primary research with a more precise understanding of the cultural and intellectual context of the "morality codes" and the "Catholics" of his subtitle. Catholic involvement in motion picture censorship was motivated by an approach to art and morality grounded in a complex, self-conscious theology, not simply by a conservative desire to safeguard the status quo, still less by an unreflective "Victorianism." Black's analysis would have been more accurate and fairer to the world view of those involved had he achieved a fuller grasp of, for example, neo-scholasticism and natural law philosophy, the imperatives of Catholic Action, and the mechanics and rationale behind Catholic regulation of reading and publication. His assertion that Dos Passos, Dreiser, Faulkner, Hemingway , and Sinclair Lewis were on the Index of Forbidden Books is simply incorrect . For this assertion the author cites Jonathon Green, Encyclopœdia of Censorship (New York: Facts on File, 1990), but he has apparently mistaken a generic list offrequently banned books ("index of banned books,"pp. 136-140) for...

In Memoriam: Donald W. Treadgold (1922–1994): Teacher, Scholar, Humanist

Don—by which name I knew him since I became his graduate student in 1956—belonged to a rare breed of academicians: he was a devout man for whom the personal adventure of life and human history in its totality had a moral dimension; in his quest for understanding himself and others, there was always an underlying moral drama; there was not just the realm of the true and the false but also a fundamental layer of the right and the wrong. For Don, there was always the issue of good and evil. In the end, men and women, the lofty, such as Stolypin (about whom he wrote insightfully), and the humble, such as the Russian peasants in Siberia (to whom he also gave considerable scholarly attention), all were accountable for their individual and collective actions. We are all free moral agents, he observed, including Lenin (about whose early political struggles he wrote brilliantly). It is a perspective Don never abandoned as the Soviet Union dissolved into the amorphous and morally complex post-Soviet era, a characteristic which qualified Don as a persistent humanist. The individual human person endowed with the capacity to sustain immutable moral values was Don's ultimate interest as an historian and teacher.

"Sinnekins" and the Vice: Prolegomena

"Sinnekins" and the Vice: Prolegomena Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken Preliminary. In this paper we intend to set out the basis of a comparative study of the Sinnekens, the allegorical stagecharacters which are found in late medieval and early Renaissance Dutch drama, and the Vice of the English interludes. The former occur in about 150 Rhetoricians' plays (Spelen van zinne) which were composed over a century and more (C.15Ü0-C.1620). while the Vice (who should be distinguished from 'Vices,' the generic name for the generality of evil characters) is rather more restricted to about thirty verifiable examples in interludes dating from about 1530 to 1 590. ' Each has its own distinctive place in the culture and in the theatrical history of its own country, but we have been struck by a number of similarities in the ways they were conceived and in the ways they operate within their respective theatrical milieux. For the moment we should like to leave open the question of mutual influence, all the more so because such a phenomenon would be very difficult to prove—and it seems unlikely. There might, however, be an underlying similarity of outlook—a similarity possibly dependent upon parallel cultural and historical features. With regard to the origin of the Sinnekens it has been suggested that they developed out of the devils and the vices in morality drama as it was known all over fifteenth-century Europe.: Yet where we can study their history in French drama' this appears to be impossible for both the Dutch and the English traditions. For in order to substantiate a hypothesis regarding a shared origin of Vice and Sinnckens, the Netherlands are in want of a sufficient quantity of texts dating back to the fifteenth century, whereas England faces a relative poverty of morality plays during the first half of the sixteenth century. Despite the fact that we remain unable to give a solid history of a possible common background, it appears, whichever way you look at it, that the Sinnckens were invented earlier than the Vice and that for whatever reason they had a longer run. 248 Peter Happé and Wim Hi'isken249 Essentially both became conventional features on the stage, which means that within each type there were characteristics that recurred frequently, though there are few which could be claimed as indispensable. It is likely that, for a while, they were expected as a matter of routine and presumably pleasant anticipation so that playwrights would naturally turn to them to enhance their plays even though both were inherently malevolent. These characters would establish their presence on stage by a number of quickly identifiable characteristics; where these were visual they are inevitably very hard to recover. Naturally it became necessary and convenient to give them generic names as the two conventions developed and as appreciation of them increased. It is a feature in common that Sinnckens and the Vice were often specifically identified on cast lists and title-pages. This practice makes it certain that the names 'Sinnekens' and 'The Vice' had contemporary currency: they are not retrospective labels invented by entrepreneurs of criticism. In view of this we shall not attempt a premature "definition" of the two types. In drawing attention to similarities between the Sinnekens and the Vice we are conscious that wc are not dealing with identical figures, and it is hoped that part of the value of this comparison will be the many distinctions which will also be noted. Such a process might help in the greater clarification of each type. We hope that this paper will be the first of a number of studies which will extend the detail and scope of the comparison and also bring to light many details of a remarkable and extensive corpus of extant drama. In the case of the interludes the plays are moderately well known, though not all of them have been satisfactorily edited in modern times. With the Rhetoricians' drama the situation is quite different. Some progress is being made with regard to publication, but the number of plays is so great that there are very few scholars (even in the Netherlands) who are thoroughly acquainted with...

Austin and Antin about "About"

THIS IS AN ATTEMPT TO READ, in two cases, the meaning of resistance to metalanguage. The notion of metalanguage has long played an allegorical role in the morality play of linguistic debate.' To put it melodramatically, metalanguage appears as a superego or an arm of a police state of consciousness; as Jonathan Culler observes, it makes its users feel securely outside and in control (199). It follows that instances of resistance to metalanguage register protests against self-deluded sovereignity. Culler continues:

Re(dis)covering the Witches in Arthur Miller's The Crucible: A Feminist

Arthur Miller's The Crucible is a disturbing work, not only because of the obvious moral dilemma that is irresolutely solved by John Proctor's death, but also because of the treatment that Abigail and Elizabeth receive at Miller's hands and at the hands of critics. In forty years of criticism very little has been said about the ways in which The Crucible reinforces stereotypes of femme fatales and cold and unforgiving wives in order to assert apparently universal virtues. It is a morality play based upon a questionable androcentric morality. Like Proctor, The Crucible "[roars] down" Elizabeth, making her concede a fault which is not hers but of Miller's making: "It needs a cold wife to prompt lechery,” she admits in her final meeting with her husband. Critics have seen John as a "tragically heroic common man,” humanly tempted, "a just man in a universe gone mad," but they have never given Elizabeth similar consideration, nor have they de constructed the phallologocentric sanctions implicit in Miller's account of Abigail's fate, Elizabeth's confession, and John's temptation and death. As a feminist reader of the 1990s, I am troubled by the unrecognized fallout from the existential humanism that Miller and his critics have held dear. The Crucible is in need of an/Other reading, one that reveals the assumptions of the text, the author, and the reader/critic who "is part of the shared consciousness created by the [play]." It is time to reveal the vicarious enjoyment that Miller and his critics have found in a cathartic male character who has enacted their sexual and political fantasies.