Would-be Lover Research Articles

TINDER SWINDLERS: SUBSTANTIVE AND PROCEDURAL MATTERS PERTAINING TO ONLINE DATING FRAUD UNDER THE COMMON LAW AND THE CYBERCRIMES ACT

The proliferation of online dating scams or fraud has presented a significant threat to users of online dating platforms globally. Scammers misrepresent themselves as would-be lovers, usually employing false identities, in order to defraud unsuspecting victims of large sums of money. Not only do romance scammers cause great financial harm to their victims, but also often leave victims with long-term psychological scars. As both the common law and the Cybercrimes Act 19 of 2020 address instances of fraud, both may potentially be employed to address the issue of online dating fraud. The State may charge an accused with both offences, but a conviction based on both would probably constitute a duplication of convictions. The offence of cyber fraud under the Cybercrimes Act may however be more onerous to prove, owing to the particular way that cyber fraud must be committed under section 8. A conviction based on the Cybercrimes Act may, however, be more attractive to the State as certain minimum sentences apply, depending on the amount defrauded, whether the accused was a law enforcement officer, whether someone was in charge of or had access to the data belonging to others, and whether the offence was committed in concert with others.

Curating Zilia: The Temple du soleil in Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne

Abstract: Françoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne repeatedly highlights a collection of Peruvian treasures. Graffigny's description of these objects, both when they are on display in Zilia's private room in a French convent and in the Temple du soleil in her country house at the end of the novel, invokes a vocabulary drawn from eighteenth-century French standards of stylish interior design and private collecting. Social status in eighteenth-century France was performative; demonstrating one's own good taste with the displays in a well-decorated room or a private collection communicated that one belonged to the elite. Graffigny's contemporaries would have recognized that the descriptions of the arrangement of the Peruvian objects affirms Zilia's social value—and also that of her would-be lover, the chevalier de Déterville. Déterville, disinherited so that his older brother could keep the family wealth intact, is not able to easily demonstrate his belonging. However, his curation of the Temple de soleil helps rehabilitate his social status, and, at the same time, further contributes to his control over Zilia. Paying attention to the ways in which the Peruvian objects are displayed in the context of contemporary interior decoration and private collections ultimately destabilizes the dominant feminist interpretation of Zilia's final independence.

Kristallisationen von Liebe. Zur Poetik des Gefühlswissens zwischen Romantik und Realismus by Patrick Fortmann

Reviewed by: Kristallisationen von Liebe. Zur Poetik des Gefühlswissens zwischen Romantik und Realismus by Patrick Fortmann Michael Swellander Fortmann, Patrick. Kristallisationen von Liebe. Zur Poetik des Gefühlswissens zwischen Romantik und Realismus. Paderborn: Brill Fink, 2021. 344 pp. Patrick Fortmann's Kristallisationen von Liebe contributes to the study of love as a discourse or code (Foucault, Barthes, and Luhmann) and to literature's privileged place in such studies with an intricate argument identifying German literature around 1830 as a site to observe transformations in the understanding of love in a multiplicity of fields. If, as Fortmann writes in the book's introduction, the Western European understanding of love was shaped by philosophy, theology, rhetoric, medicine, and literature until 1860, after which it has been predominately influenced by experimental psychology and neuroscience, then Heinrich Heine's poetry, Young Germany's prose, and Georg Büchner's dramas, with their modernizing drive, show this understanding in flux. Readers of Vormärz literature will welcome Fortmann's book for rehabilitating love as a central issue for these authors, whose reflections on history, revolution, and political journalism have received much more attention. It was, in fact, to a considerable degree through discussions of love that these authors developed their thoughts on these seemingly weightier subjects in their literary work. The common interest of Heine, Young Germany, and Büchner in love, however, does not make comparing their reflections on it easy, as they have different and not always compatible goals in thematizing love. Büchner, for instance, found Young Germany's openly ideological approach to literature wrong-headed. Furthermore, while Heine's poetry intervenes primarily in the literary discourse of love, a play like Woyzeck engages the expectations of tragedy but also aspires to comment on sociological reality. Fortmann characterizes his methodology for comparing these disparate works as "crystallization," a figure he takes from Stendhal's On Love (1822), in which the author describes the superlative praise of a would-be lover to the salt crystals that form on a branch left in a salt mine. Through the crystals, or hyperbole as it were, one glimpses the object they encase. Fortmann's readings of Heine, Young Germany, and Büchner would then treat their texts as distinct, contemporaneous literary crystallizations around the concept of love. The cultural narrative Fortmann glimpses through this literary crystallography is love's modernization: its old mythologies are ironized (Heine), secularized (Young Germany), and demystified through a materialist focus on physiology (Büchner). Chapter one, "Poetische Mythologie der Liebe—Heinrich Heine," shows Heine wrestling in Buch der Lieder (1827) with Zerrissenheit, the prominent post-Napoleonic literary theme of time being out of joint. One way Heine explored Zerrissenheit, argues Fortmann, was through his distanced, ironic treatment of classical and Romantic "mythologies" of love. Heine's interest in these mythologies, which Fortmann helpfully connects to A. W. Schlegel's lectures on poetry from the turn of the nineteenth century, differs from the Romantic interest in a "neue Mythologie," which would revivify old myths in modernity and [End Page 190] promote a sense of cultural wholeness. Rather, Heine alludes to figures like the classical sphinx and Romantic flowers—"das alte Märchenwald," which Fortmann correctly notes Heine regarded with recognition and distance—to show a historical split between the idealized love communicated by these symbols and a corporeal, consummated love inaccessible to them. Fortmann argues that Heine's book gestures toward a future where love would have an inherent right to exist ("Eigenrecht der Liebe") after overcoming the mythological apparatus of classicism and Romanticism. Chapter 2, "Emanzipation der Liebe durch Prosa—Das junge Deutschland" is the most eye opening of Kristallisationen der Liebe, not least because it discusses the most important Young German novels at length, which have rarely received such sustained comparative attention. A comparative approach is necessary to elucidate the Saint Simonian motto, "Wiedereinsetzung des Fleisches," which recurs in slightly different formulations among Young German writers but is understood differently by each. Fortmann divides the chapter into three subsections, discussing Heinrich Laube's politicized notion of "democratic," as opposed to "aristocratic" love in his Liebesbriefe (1835) and Die Poeten (1833), Theodor Mundt's hope for a reconciliation of the...

Moral Tales: A Selection, ed. Robin Runia

This rich, densely packed collection is an excellent introduction to the range of styles and reception of three of the foremost women writers of the moral tale. As well as sketching career reviews for Hannah More, Amelia Opie, and Maria Edgeworth, editor Runia supplies a precise and contextualized introduction to the moral tale as “a semantic work-around” for these authors, who were all aware of the charges of “romantic escape, sentimental excess, and a risk of moral lassitude” associated with novels. Although all were or became novel writers, their realistic, quotidian, shorter narratives not only enjoyed wide popularity but, as Runia claims, were also “a key component . . . in shaping the nineteenth-century novel.”Like the tales themselves, succinctness and diversity are the hallmarks of this tidy volume. Through an adroit selection of helpfully annotated stories for adults and children the reader hears the distinctive voice of each narrator. While in “Tawney Rachel” More presents the author as acutely attentive to village life and vernacular, a persona promoted throughout the Cheap Repository Tracts, as the reader’s “true friend” she points directly to the moral failing of “tempting Providence.” Pitying Sally Evans, “as harmless a girl as ever churned a pound of butter,” who was duped of a marriage partner by such “a hag” as the title fortune-teller, More clarifies her “duty to print this little history” as a warning against the folly of being “fated . . . to do a foolish thing.” Rejecting the schoolmistress tone, Opie’s narrative voice in “The Black Velvet Pelisse” offers psychological interiors, taking readers inside appearances. The “purse-proud” father, a successful merchant whose opulence “seemed to squeeze out its indulgences from the griping fingers of habitual economy,” aims to have his daughter brilliantly dressed to impress a visiting baronet. Although, “like most women,” Julia “derived great advantages from dress” and “knew the value of external decoration,” she forgoes the luxury of adornment and instead gives the money to a conscripted man to save him from military service and his family from the workhouse. But Opie does not make Julia unbelievably good; even when she has opted for benevolence, she still “felt like a woman . . . (with) an expression of vexation.”The volume includes two tales each by More and Opie. Edgeworth’s single tale, “The Dun,” is the true prize item. Skillfully interlacing scenes of a man of fashion’s obliviousness to his sartorial debts with a now-destitute weaver, the narrator challenges the delicate reader “whose fine feelings can be moved only by romantic elegant scenes of distress.” Instead, she offers “nothing to charm the imagination—everything to disgust the senses” by focusing on the bare interior of the weaver’s room. Neither chiding nor sentimental, this narrator subtly exposes the social injustice of the “political arithmetician” for whom “the happiness of individuals is nothing compared to the general mass.” In this nicely layered tale interventions are not altruistic. When an entrepreneurial, benign-seeming madam, “a woman hardened in guilt,” befriends the weaver’s daughter until the young woman almost consents to a liaison to free her father from jail, the tipping point is the daughter’s declaration to her would-be lover that she “never could be happy with a bad conscience.” As in every choice in this tale, true uprightness emerges in the downtrodden.In addition to contemporary reviews, this volume also includes tales for children from Edgeworth and Opie in which misjudged but generous and honest boys are at last rewarded. The final section, excerpts from Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Practical Education and More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, grounds the fiction in arduous didactic principles. Selecting these passages must have been particularly difficult for Runia in light of the vast possibilities for illustrative theorizing. To exercise “all the powers of the mind,” the Edgeworths denigrate the “moral picturesque” produced by “immoderate novel reading” and “descriptive poetry.” With a related emphasis on lifting “the reader from sensation to intellect,” More calls for “close reasoning” as opposed to frivolous chitchat. Though not included, equally forceful and axiomatic pronouncements occur throughout Strictures in chapters on the practical use of female knowledge, the danger of ill-directed sensibility, and the modern habits of fashionable life.The value of this collection resides in its informed introduction, careful selection of tales, and clarification of sources, all of which highlight pathways for additional investigation.

The Passenger and Stella Maris

The Passenger <i>and</i> Stella Maris

The Roles of Romantic Beliefs and Imagined Interaction in Unrequited Love

The present study examined the roles of people's romantic beliefs and imagined interactions in unrequited love. Two hundred and twenty five Chinese college students participated in a survey study. More idealized romantic beliefs were associated with stronger unrequited love. Men's unrequited love was stronger than women's. Would-be lovers who had imagined interactions with beloved ones had stronger unrequited love in contrast to those who didn’t. Unrequited love and romantic beliefs were both positively related to the imagined interaction attributes of frequency and valence and the functions of compensation and relationship maintenance. Frequency of imagined interactions positively mediated the relationship between romantic beliefs and unrequited love.

Consent and Misogyny: Response to Sarah Baechle and Sara V. Torres

Consent and Misogyny:Response to Sarah Baechle and Sara V. Torres Suzanne M. Edwards Sarah Baechle's and Sara Torres's essays illuminate the relationship between medieval consent and misogyny. Misogyny, as Kate Manne describes it, enforces women's subordination in a patriarchal order, by punishing women who deviate from asymmetric gendered norms and rewarding those who affirm them.1 Often, according to Manne, misogyny compels the surrender of feminine-coded goods—such as deference, attention, sexual labor, and care—to powerful men. Normative expectations about women's responsiveness to men's demands structure the medieval texts that Baechle and Torres analyze. According to the knight in "Come over the woodes," "custome" demands the maiden's acquiescence to his sexual aggression, and in the Cruel Lady texts, fin'amors conventions dictate the Lady's pity for the lover's suffering. These texts make explicit that there may be consequences for a woman who does not provide the sexual satisfaction or affective care that social norms (not just the individual men in question) require from her. Such punishment, the pastourelle knight insists, isn't personal; it's simply what a patriarchal order requires. The pastourelle and the Cruel Lady texts code consent as both an individual choice and a coercive demand that, if refused, may result in violence. Consent is thus the switch-point between misogyny's carrot and stick. Affirm consent and gain praise (or at least avoid punishment); deny consent and suffer harm. Moreover, misogyny's coercive power doesn't require punishment to seem legitimate every time; the Cruel Lady is sometimes defended and sometimes condemned, and the pastourelle knight's appeal to manorial law is evidently bad faith. Still, the framing of both scenarios [End Page 335] follows from the premise that women do normatively owe men sexual or affective labor. The lady moved by a would-be lover's suffering won't find herself on trial, and neither will the maiden who assents to the knight (at least as long as they don't run afoul of their obligations to other men). In this sense, debate, between pastourelle knight and maiden, or between the Cruel Lady's detractors and her defenders, does not offer resistance to misogyny, but rather comprises its enforcement function. Androphilia (or "himpathy") reinforces misogyny by positioning privileged men as the most worthy recipients of sympathy. As both Baechle and Torres emphasize, feminine consent is often framed in relation to masculine suffering. The would-be lover demands the Cruel Lady's compassion, her willingness to feel his pain and then assuage it, and the pastourelle knight insists that he and the maiden are equally victims of laws that dictate what they must do. Baechle and Torres deftly expose how this appeal erases unequal social power and harm to "let historically dominant agents get away with murder vis-à-vis their historical subordinates."2 Ultimately, Baechle's and Torres's essays are important for our historical understanding of misogyny and for our theoretical understanding of how discourses of consent function as tools of misogynist enforcement. The repeated refusals of consent by the Cruel Lady and the pastourelle maiden become a locus of rhetorical coercion and anxious debate precisely because they expose the limits of masculine demands to structure feminine autonomy. [End Page 336] Suzanne M. Edwards Lehigh University Footnotes 1. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 2. Ibid., 201. Copyright © 2022 The New Chaucer Society, University of Miami

Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the People’s Republic of China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. xvi, 260 pp. DOI: 10.3998/mpub.9969070. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 978-0-472-05430-5.

Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the People’s Republic of China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, . xvi,  pp. DOI: ./mpub.. Paperback $., ISBN ----. This short history book about a spooky subject takes first its readers to a dark corner of the history of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: How did a kunqu 昆曲 “ghost play” (guixi 鬼戏) by a veteran communist writer named Meng Chao 孟超 became one of the earliest targets of what will be known later as the “Gang of four,” even before the attacks on the plays of the far more famous intellectuals Wu Han and Tian Han? If one of the merits of this study is to shed a new light on the attacks on culture that constituted the premises of the great turmoil of the late ’s—but the author had already publicized this historical “scoop” in an article from  —it is not the main point that this book-length study wants to make. This book has the wider ambition to retrace the resilience of an apparently forbidden topic in the early PRC, the “superstitious and feudal” ghost’s theme. The public appearance of this topic on the stage of the contemporary traditional Chinese theater (xiqu 戏曲) and, more in general, its enduring presence as a subject of heated debates is also explored. Let us first recall the play at the center of the book: the story of Li Huiniang 李慧娘, first appearing in the early Ming Qu You’s 瞿佑 collections in literary Chinese Jiandeng xinhua 剪灯新话, became well known to the Chinese public through the chuanqi 传奇 play “the Prunus pavilion” Hongmei ge 红梅阁. It tells how Huiniang, a concubine of the evil southern Song minister Jia Sidao 贾似道, is slain by her jealous and violent master for having looked tenderly at a young literati near Hangzhou’s West Lake. However, as Jia Sidao prepares to also harm the would-be lover of the late concubine, her ghost appears, chases the assassin away, and scares and humiliates the evil minister. Before coming to the story of Li Huiniang itself, Greene first analyses what happened after the initial chilling ban on a group of twenty-six “superstitious plays,” most of them ghost plays, in the early ’s. Greene shows how the ban initiated a time of confusion. Troops and local authorities were quite puzzled about what was allowed, while intellectual circles began to deploy a salvaging strategy of some of the traditional supernatural themes by drawing a Review©  by University of Hawai‘i Press distinction between permissible “mythological” plays and damnable “superstitious” or “fearsome” works. The second chapter begins with the attempt by a playwright with an impeccable proletarian pedigree, Ma Jianling 马健翎, to produce a “politically correct” version of the story. In his  qinqiang 秦腔 play “Wandering West Lake,” You Xihu 游西湖, Ma does not present a ghost, but still uses the ghost element by staging a ghost-like character, making Huiniang pose as a ghost without being dead. To the author’s surprise, this attempt at a “ghostless ghost play” (which may be found in other genres of the same period, for example in some Hong Kong leftwing movies ) was greeted with harsh criticism in the higher intellectual circles of the PRC by several authors who, while voicing critiques on esthetic grounds against Ma’s play, expressed opinions that amounted to justifications of keeping “real” ghost on the Chinese traditional opera stage. The  relaxing of the initial ban on ghost plays encouraged troops to resume performances. Ma later reintroduced the ghost in the play, without receiving much more understanding from his critics. Chapter  takes the reader right to the middle of the complexity of the Hundred flowers’ time. It compares two contemporary productions, the anthology of classical tales “Stories not to be afraid about ghosts” (Bu pa gui de gushi 不怕 鬼的故事) and the rewriting in  in the kunqu opera form of the Prunus pavilion story by Meng Chao under the title “Li Huiniang.” While the first book, ordered by Chairman Mao himself, gave a new voice to ancient ghost stories by playing on a rhetoric associating ghosts with old and new class enemies (a rhetoric which won’t be forgotten during the Cultural Revolution), Meng Chao created with his “Li...

Edith Wharton and the Architect

Abstract To date, the only scholarly attention paid to the two abandoned Wharton novels called “The Keys of Heaven” has focused on the “Praslin version,” a retelling of a murder-suicide from 1840s Paris. The “Olney-Beecher version” concerns a woman named Catherine Beecher, her would-be lover Jacob Olney, and her husband, a New England architect who sounds a lot like Ogden Codman Jr., with whom Wharton wrote The Decoration of Houses. This overlooked material evidently from the mid-1920s should be of interest to scholars for the potential light it sheds on her writing from the period and on the status of her rift with Codman. The evidence suggests that Wharton's fictional narratives moved from a place where she was writing in “one long shriek” to a space where she could imagine a lover turning the handle of that inner door and crossing the threshold into a room full of treasures awaiting discovery.

Musaeus’ “Hero and Leander”: Introduction, Greek Text, Translation, and Commentary by Silvia Montiglio

346 PHOENIX more enjoyable than its satisfaction. Smith sees this posture as unusual and distinctive, and he reads the epigram as engaging with conceptions of manhood: since self-control (enkrateia) was “traditionally” the way to express manliness, the door deprives the speaker of an opportunity to express his masculinity and instead provokes “a complete disregard of encratic practice and an impulse to luxuriate in apparent powerlessness” (125). Here, the adverb “traditionally” does a lot of work and effaces some nuance. From the standpoint of the tradition, Paul’s speaker is also a descendant of the numerous excluded lovers of Hellenistic epigram who stand outside, and sometimes directly complain to, the door of a would-be lover, and who often seem to derive an analogous, self-indulgent pleasure from their exclusion and from their suffering and lack of control. In other cases, too, some additional consideration of Hellenistic intertexts would be beneficial. To give a single example, in Paulus AP 10.15.3, Smith sees a specific allusion to A.R. 2.594–595, where a ship at sea rides the waves “as if on a cylinder” (ºste kul’nd~), but the reference in both passages is to the practice of launching ships on rollers such as is recounted at A.R. 1.375–377 (cf. A.R. 1.377: ¥lisya’nousa). In any case, the idea that encouraging sailors to set sail without fear “exposes the fear and anxiety at the heart of masculine identity” and that it evokes the sailors’ shortcomings relative to the Argonauts in the alleged intertext (154) does not adequately address the direct model provided by Satyrus AP 10.6.5 or account for the tradition, grounded in reality, that all sailors, no matter how brave, had good reason to be anxious, especially outside of the sailing season (e.g., Leonidas AP 7.665.1–2). Such quibbles hardly detract from Smith’s achievement in this pathbreaking book. I have learned a tremendous amount from it, and it has led me to think about the ways that the approach could be applied productively to earlier poetry. It is essential reading not only for specialists in Byzantine literature, but also for anyone working on epigrams or interested in the treatment of sex, gender, and power in antiquity. Georgetown University Alexander Sens Musaeus' “Hero and Leander”: Introduction, Greek Text, Translation, and Commentary. By Silvia Montiglio. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. 2020. Pp. 123. The tale about Leander, the nighttime clandestine lover who crosses the dangerous waters between Sestos and Abydos to see his beloved Hero and drowns in the process, is among the “classics” of European literature. Since the editio Aldina of 1495, Musaeus’ poem has been associated above all with tragic romantic love. Manutius’ choice to print this poem even before the Homeric epics—Musaeus was thought a forerunner of Homer—has marked the reception of the poem as one of the hallmarks of humanism. The present work is a convenient and useful edition. It includes an extensive introduction of forty-nine pages, taking up almost half the book; a Greek text with a facing English translation; and a concise line-by-line commentary. The up-to-date bibliography provides an excellent reference tool as it includes all past and even forthcoming scholarly works. Below I present some of the highlights of Montiglio’s edition as well as some personal thoughts on the poet in his late antique context. The author has succeeded in producing a modern English translation and an excellent literary discussion accessible to novice and expert readers alike. By contrast to C. Whit- BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 347 man, who attempted to maintain the poetic effect of the text by adopting a loose fourbeat verse,1 Montiglio’s adaptation is in free verse and resembles rather Orsini’s poetic French prose for the 1968 Budé edition.2 The interpretation of pœmatow (“hindmost,” “last”) in line 343 (úll}lvn d' úp—nato ka“ \n pum‡t~ per ¥lŽyr~), for instance, translated as “and they had joy of each other even in the extremity of death,” evokes Orsini’s “et ils jouirent l’un de l’autre éternellement, jusque dans l’abı̂me...

Dream Machines: The Motorcar as Sign of Conquest and Destruction in F. Scott Fitzgerald's &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;

Dream Machines: The Motorcar as Sign of Conquest and Destruction in F. Scott Fitzgerald's &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;

Eternal Returns

Eternal Returns Laura Jok (bio) Undoing Kim Magowan Moon City Press www.moon-city-press.com/store/ 216 Pages; Print, $14.9 The stories in Kim Magowan's collection Undoing suspend characters in states of dissolution—adultery, divorce, forgetting, impossible decisions—and contemplate whether the process of undoing itself can be reversed. This double meaning of undoing, to ruin your life or to take it all back, creates an atmosphere of brutal fatalism and brutal hope. Through this indeterminacy, each story is able to hold, in intense compression, the best and worst possible scenarios, the characters' very best and worst selves, as capacious as experience itself and subject to eternal revision. In "When in Rome," the introductory story from which the collection takes its title, would-be lovers salvage their marriage and their extramarital desire, their incommensurate states, through the openness of story. They relegate their potential affair to an "alternate reality," an imaginative space in which their pasts can be rehashed, replaced: We are in Rome. Why Rome? Because it is not the place where either of us live… Perhaps, in the kind of eternal return of dreams and stories, because Rome is where I lost my virginity, and I will undo that night…by replacing it with you. So, we are in Rome. You stand in front of me. Your arms are at your sides, or perhaps you lightly press my shoulders, and you look at me. But I do not meet your eyes. I am concentrating on undoing, one by one, the mock mother-of-pearl buttons of your shirt, to reach your invisible and secret skin. In this passage, the combination of the potential ("perhaps") with the declarative ("We are in Rome" and "You stand in front of me") and tangible detail ("mock mother-of-pearl buttons") valorizes fiction as its own form of truth. Between two unsatisfying choices, characters preserve the path untaken through the stories they tell, which in this case, saves them from destroying themselves and their young families, if it does not protect them from wistfulness. "When in Rome" is bookended thematically by the final story, "This Much." in which a couple conceals their imminent separation so they can watch their daughter walk down the aisle, holding hands, divorcing but not yet divorced, eternally in-between until, unless, they choose to tell the news. Even when the reader can assume that the moment of grace is short-lived—that the characters will make the wrong decisions—the choice to end the stories before the turning point forgives without forgetting that they are capable of doing harm, whether by transgression or neglect. The story "On Air" ends with Alice observing her ex-husband, finally, for a moment, pay attention to their anorexic daughter, after neglecting her in favor of his new baby. Upon Alice's insistence, he looks at Laurel: "She watches the expressions (annoyance, perplexity, then concern) shift and slip across her ex-husband's face. 'I'm looking,' he says at last." The narrator knows Nathan's concern, and this elegant instance of seeing his daughter will not last because the narrator knows Nathan. Even his expression "shift and slip," is transient across his face. He is inclined to boredom, the parent who "refused to read" Curious George to baby Laurel because he found it tedious: "So boring, that book!… Nathan treated parenting as a menu, from which he could choose the entertaining items." [End Page 27] Such a father will not likely attend to his daughter's harrowing long-term illness. The story lets us know that, but kindly does not overwrite his concern with his inability to sustain it. Preserving people at their best selves even as they know better, the omniscience treats its characters with the knowing patience with which we treat our intimates: loving without idealizing. Like these generous stories, we may choose to remember our people in the moment before, when they could have been better. The gift of authoring one's own experience, in Magowan's world, comes with the possibility of redemption but also the cruelty of erasure. In "Palimpsest," a teacher writes lessons on a chalkboard only at the cost of those...

The Cyclopic Grotesque in Ovid's Tale of Galatea and Polyphemus

As she recites the story of her courting by the hideous Polyphemus and resings his serenade, Galatea makes use of the creative power of visualization to conjure up his presence. She shows how alien he is to her world of beauty and love, but she lingers on his grotesque appearance and actions as her would-be lover. By such lingering, she demonstrates that he is not alien to the poet's idea of poetry about love and beauty. The presence of the grotesque undermines the logical stability of poetry that considers the non-beautiful foreign to its aesthetic reception.

Vibrations guide thornbug treehoppers in pursuit of love

Cunningly disguised as thorns to avoid the unwanted attention of predators, thornbug treehoppers (Umbonia crassicornis) lead a sedentary existence. Sucking sap from the shrubs that they inhabit, the insects grow up in large family clusters until the youngsters strike out to find a mate. ‘Males fly from shrub to shrub, producing vibratory courtship signals, pausing to listen, then flying on to the next shrub if they receive no reply from a female’, says Jeremy Gibson, from the University of Strathclyde, UK. However, after homing in on an amorous female's shrub, the pressure is on to locate her as female thornbug treehoppers mate only once with the first male to arrive. Embarking on a duet in a bid to become united, the would-be lovers shiver their abdomens and the vibrations are carried down their legs and into the plant. However, Gibson and his graduate advisor Rex Cocroft, from the University of Missouri, USA, were unsure how thornbug treehopper males interpret the responses of their inamoratas in the pursuit of love.Arranging thornbug treehopper blind dates on young false tamarind trees (Lysiloma latisiliquum), Gibson recorded the vibrations generated by the duetting insects as the vibrations travelled through the shrub while filming the male's progress toward his intended. Then Gibson abducted the male, tricking the female into continuing her serenade while measuring the minute vibrations that she generated and the motion of the plant stem at the locations where the male had paused, to build a picture of the vibration features that had guided him.At the outset of each search, Gibson and Cocroft found that the males covered longer distances (up to 34 cm) before pausing for periods of 1.3–14.2 s as they vibrated their abdomens and then waited to feel the females’ responses before going on their way again. The male pursuers also located the objects of their affection more speedily and accurately when the females were located high in the tree, taking more wrong turns when lower down on the trunk. In addition, the males were able to determine the direction from which the vibrations approached – by sensing whether the vibration arrived at the front or rear legs first – and their accuracy improved when the vibrations travelled more slowly through the thinner twigs and as the vibrations became stronger when the male neared the female.It was also clear that the vibrations generated by the females became increasingly distorted the further they travelled through the shrub to reach the expectant males, prompting admirers to travel further between check points in order to improve their chances of making the right choice when next they paused. And sometimes the males continued walking even while serenading, pausing only to pay attention to the female's responses, possibly allowing the male to speed up his search in a bid to reach his lady love ahead of competing suitors.However, Gibson and Cocroft point out that the challenges facing vibration-guided amorous male thornbug treehoppers are likely to be even more testing in the rowdy real world – where the insects must also contend with buffeting wind, rain and the cacophony of competitors and predators – and the scientists are keen to learn more about the sensory strategies that the insects employ to ensure success.

Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760–1830 by Katrin Berndt

Reviewed by: Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760–1830 by Katrin Berndt Renee Bryzik Katrin Berndt, Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2017). Pp. 274. $140.00 cloth. Katrin Berndt’s Narrating Friendship takes on the difficult task of asking how friendship works in connection with formal and thematic developments in the novel during the second half of the long eighteenth century. The text uses moral sense theory to examine the structural underpinnings of friendship in the novel and to make legible the seemingly omnipresent themes of friendship by following values like other-regard and sympathy as they shape-shift through the complex plot twists of novels lauded for decades by feminist critics but left largely unexamined in studies like this one not specific to women’s writing. Berndt integrates years of work on male and female-only friendship, as well as historical research on changing family structures by Naomi Tadmor and Ruth Perry, to show how an enlightenment community spirit of friendship was replicated and reinvented in literature through the 1830s. The text is synchronic, including two chapters on novels from different decades in each of four thematically organized parts, which reinforces Berndt’s goal of demonstrating friendship’s flexibility, how it holds the “potential to embody established structures and sentiments as well as revolutionary tenets” within and between selected novels (38). Part 1 introduces narrative friendship as an Enlightenment principle that enables writers to critique conventions of traditional and modern British society. Chapter one uses Frances Brooke’s The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763) to show how feudal social expectations of patriarchal benevolence fail a family struggling to transition to modern society, and reads the tragic ending between would-be lovers as the unrealized potential of modern friendship (67). Berndt cites early modern divine Jeremy Taylor, whose reservations over modern friendship’s ability to reconcile the selfish desires of the new economy with longstanding Christian values of benevolence and civic concerns became a popular argument during the eighteenth century. Taylor’s appearance here contextualizes later references to Hutcheson, Smith and others who laud friendship for its ability to turn selfishness into morality. Chapter two, on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), also reads tragedy in connection with friendship’s virtues, where catastrophes throughout the novel stem from the protagonist’s inability to transform childhood friendship into mature morality, and cites Francis Hutcheson on sympathy as an essential friendship value for Shelley. Victor’s “imagined sympathies” and “solipsistic contemplation” inhibit the active sensibility that would save his friends (84). Each of the novels in this first part uses a specter of friendship to critique the individual that imagines themself more powerful than their community. The second section argues that the friendship motif fostered the development of utopian and sentimental sub-genres by working at the interface between civic concerns and private desire. Through very different techniques and political positions, Sarah Scott’s utopian novel Millenium Hall (1762) and Helen Maria Williams’s Jacobin novel Julia (1790) employ narrative friendship as a structuring tool to reshape society and as a means of addressing the responsibilities of the individual within that society. Berndt depends on feminist readings by Alessa Johns and Janet Todd, who have articulated the centrality of women’s issues in these genres, but it is in this section where Berndt’s pioneering decision to include a range of friendships (all-female, all-male, and heterosocial) seeks justification. [End Page 483] While friendship in Millienium Hall supports a female utopia based on Christian charity, Berndt convincingly posits that this text is a challenge to “paternal law . . . not tantamount to the discrimination of men” and that heterosocial relationships are essential to transformations in public sphere life (117). Berndt’s reading of Williams’s Julia in chapter four also foregrounds heterosocial friendships despite its primary relationship between Julia and Charlotte. This later sentimental novel uses Romantic aesthetics and rational contemplation of feelings to create morally complex friend characters that demonstrate how private sphere decisions of the heart impact society at large. In part three, Berndt argues that while epistolary narration adheres to techniques established in the mid-eighteenth-century, it serves a unique historical purpose...

Freud's Fictions: Fixation, Femininity, Photography

This article takes off from Freud's literary use of the term ‘fixation’ to explore how female sexuality both establishes the universal foundations of Freud's metapsychology and is excluded from it via a reading of one Freud's strangest and most provocative case presentations. Like a primal word, fixation operates in contradictory fashion: it is associated both with regression and futurity, petrified immobility and contingency. Fixation is Freud's name both for the primal origin of sexuality and the very word for what shuts sexuality down. In ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Disease’, the first case history devoted to a woman after Dora, Freud recounts his brief encounter with a woman who is brought to Freud because she is suffering from a (presumably) paranoid delusion that her would-be lover has arranged to have her photographed during their sexual engagements. On the basis of his fictionalized account of this fictive case (the woman never actually enters into treatment with him), Freud establishes a curiously suggestive link between fixation, femininity and photography, and introduces, for the first time, the notion of ‘primal phantasies’. By looking how femininity, fixation and photography come together, this article explores how and why Freud attributes quasi-photographic powers to female sexuality as a means of trying to produce a figure for unseen and un-seeable images that come from a primal and unrecoverable past.

Adventure, Lealté, and Sympathy in Marie de France’s Eliduc

This essay argues that the resolution of Eliduc, in which Eliduc’s wife Guildeluëc brings his would-be lover Guilliadun back from the dead and takes the veil to allow them to marry, resists the social and political structures that form the lay’s background. Unlike her husband, Guildeluëc acts on sympathy formed through contemplation, rather than on her own desires, and does so using knowledge she gains by observing the natural world. This resolution subverts the lay’s seeming obsession with loyalty (lealté) and fidelity, instead favoring an ethical imperative for behavior rooted in sympathy.

On Meeting Want Next Time (Again), and: Confessions from Here, and: Letters to my Would-Be Lover on Dolls and Repeating

On Meeting Want Next Time (Again), and: Confessions from Here, and: Letters to my Would-Be Lover on Dolls and Repeating

The critique of Eros: Freud on narcissism and the prospects for romantic love

This paper examines the prospects for real/actual love as viewed from a classical psychoanalytic framework. It is argued that Freud’s prescient and controversial 1914 work On Narcissism: An Introduction holds great importance for an understanding of his views on love, which in many ways were never explicitly defined. After the concepts of narcissism and love are considered, the aim, process, consequences and specific choices of object love are analysed. Perhaps not surprisingly, both narcissism and the residue of infantile love objects permeate and continually influence subsequent object love in a powerful manner. These perseverations of the infantile, along with impediments arising from the beloved, society and the self, create a number of difficulties for a would-be lover. Despite these hindrances from both within and without, real/actual love is certainly possible within Freud’s framework, but it is hard won and appears to require the dispelling of illusions, emancipation through recognition of one’s determinism, acceptance, introspection and continual character development.

DVD Chronicle

DVD Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) Sabotage, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (Cobra Entertainment, 2011) Silly Symphonies, directed by Walt Disney and others (Walt Disney Video, 2001) Betty Boop: The Essential Collection, directed by Max and Dave Fleischer (Olive Films, 2013) Looney Tunes Golden Collection, vols. 1–6, directed by Chuck Jones and others (Warner Home Video, 2011) The Triplets of Belleville, directed by Sylvain Chomet (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2004) The Adventures of Prince Achmed, directed by Lotte Reiniger (Milestone, 2011) Princess Mononoke (Miramax, 2000),Spirited Away (Walt Disney Video, 2003), andHowl’s Moving Castle (Walt Disney Video, 2006), directed by Hayao Miyazaki Up, directed by Peter Docter (Disney Pixar, 2009) WALL-E, directed by Andrew Stanton (Disney Pixar, 2008). Sabotage is Hitchcock’s 1936 version of The Secret Agent, Conrad’s 1907 novel of international intrigue and terrorist attentat. Almost distressingly, the film foresees the world we live in now—a crowded London bus being blown up, a cornered fanatic grimly turning to press the button detonating his explosives-lined vest. These scenes are not in The Secret Agent, and they are far from Hitchcock’s only revisions of Conrad. The director (or the credited screenwriter, Charles Bennett) also changed the main setting from a shabby contraceptives-and-dirty-pictures shop to a cinema run by the Verlocs, husband and wife, and this change leads to the best and strangest scene in the film. Mrs. Verloc realizes that her husband’s plotting has led to the death of her young brother Stevie; she stumbles from their dining room into the cinema, full of stunned grief; but when she hears music on the soundtrack and catches sight of what’s on the screen, she smiles tentatively. Then, as revealed in one of the most heartbreaking close-ups Hitchcock ever photographed, she laughs. It’s a cartoon short she sees, Disney’s 1935 “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, with a Bing-Crosby-voiced Cock Robin crooning to a Mae-West-proportioned Jenny Wren. A second later an arrow pierces Cock Robin, and Mrs. Verloc grimaces, abruptly returned from melodious fantasy to the reality of violence. But we have had a few seconds of laughter, something to be set against, put in ironic juxtaposition with, a coded terrorist message glimpsed earlier in the film: “London Must Not Laugh on Saturday.” I think this moment illustrates two things: first, Hitchcock’s unmatched ability to capture emotions in extremis, especially pain oddly conjoined with comedy; and second, the power of animated images themselves—broadly [End Page 117] drawn figures cavorting or conniving on a screen, providing escapist fun or satirizing reality, compelling laughter. One reason to survey animated films, which is what I’ll do in this Chronicle, is that so many of us have been compelled by them, have like Mrs. Verloc, been seduced by cartoons. Stalin liked Disney; so did Sergei Eisenstein; so did E. M. Forster (see the 1934 essay “Mickey and Minnie” in Abinger Harvest). In Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels a would-be documentary filmmaker drops grandiose plans and discovers his humanity in the course of watching Disney’s cartoon “Playful Pluto,” which is screened in an African-American church for an audience of convicts. In David Lean’s Brief Encounter the two would-be lovers, enjoying a tryst, momentarily forget their English reserve and laugh out loud as they watch a Disney cartoon in the cinema. Alec says, “The stars can change in their courses, the universe go up in flames, and the world crash around us, but there will always be Donald Duck.” Personally, I am less an admirer of Donald Duck (or Mickey or Pluto) than of the various characters of Disney’s 1930s Silly Symphonies, the series to which “Who Killed Cock Robin?” belongs. These seventy-five seven-or eight-minute films earn both terms of their title, being both silly and symphonic, or at least inventive with music, as demonstrated by the very first of them, “The Skeleton Dance.” This is an intricately choreographed and comically ghoulish performance in a graveyard at midnight, with skeletal figures metamorphosing into fiddles, xylophones, and drums. At the start of what would be a lifelong career supplying scores...