Month: August 2013

Originally published in England in 1684, Aristotle’s Complete Master-Piece, In Three Parts; Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man saw its first American edition in 1766. The book (which does not actually draw on Aristotle) was the most popular of its kind until 1830:

[W]hile the book’s attitudes toward monogamy are unsurprisingly Puritanical, its conceptions of anatomy and biology are outlandish and exotic, more kin to Medieval travel books than Renaissance anatomy texts. Its pages, “cobbled together from the works of Nicholas Culpepper, Albertus Magnus, and … ‘a good dose of old wife’s tale’” include such cases as parents who conceived “monsters” by looking at images while procreating, such as those depicted … in “The Effigies of a Maid all Hairy, and an Infant that was Black, by the Imagination of their Parents.” Most of the text’s woodcuts, even those meant to be straightforwardly anatomical, show a similar preoccupation with the bizarre. And birth defects, abnormalities, and, troublingly, racial differences, are almost uniformly attributed to some parental sin. …

There’s quite a bit of meaning for early modern literary scholars to tease out and religious conservatives to agree with. Medical historians may find the book’s conception of heterosexual pleasure surprisingly sunny, though this is only because it was thought to lead to “profit.” As Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull’s book specialist Cathy Marsden observes,

There are … interesting bits about the 17th century notion that it was considered beneficial for a woman to enjoy sexual intercourse in order to conceive. It suggests that both men and women should enjoy sex. That’s interesting because much later on, when they realised that a woman didn’t have to climax in order to conceive, the idea of a woman enjoying sex was considered far less important.

Check out illustrations from the book here, and the full book is available here.

For her book Among the Janeites, Deborah Yaffe explored the world of hardcore Jane Austen fans. Here she confronts misconceptions about the community:

You run across plenty of articles that suggest Janeites are a tea-sipping, cat-hugging group of middle-aged librarians who spend their spare time knitting afghans. (Not that there’s anything wrong with all that.) The dress-up side of the fandom, in particular, seems to call forth ridicule from the terminally ironic. The subliminal, or not-so-subliminal, message is that it’s all terribly cutesy and trivial.

There’s definitely a sexist aspect to all this, I think:

Janeite fandom in the 21st-century U.S. is heavily female; the people with the money to attend those photogenic conferences are often middle-aged or older; and condescending to older women is a popular media pastime. And of course, that condescension mirrors the way that Jane Austen herself has sometimes been viewed, as a sexually frustrated spinster pouring her romantic fantasies into her books, or a sweet little auntie penning those charming courtship stories. All these stereotypes (many of them stoked by the Austen movies, I think) miss out on the tough, uncompromising side of her work.

And plenty of the Janeites I met respond to that side of Austen; not everyone sees her in those cozy, tea-sipping terms. In fact, my feeling is that Janeites are quite diverse—if not in their demographics, then at least in their responses to Austen. For some people, she’s a feminist; for others, she’s a conservative. Some believe she lived contentedly in the bosom of a supportive family, and others see her as angry and rebellious. Austen’s books are a lot edgier and more complicated than Austen movies, and so are the people who are drawn to them.

Previous Dish on Jane Austen here.

(Photo of the 2013 Jane Austen Festival in Louisville by Flickr user ozimanndias8)

Malcolm Harris is skeptical about programs like Shakespeare Behind Bars:

The syllogism goes like this: If Shakespeare speaks to universal humanity, and Shakespeare speaks to a prisoner, then the prisoner is human after all. The non-incarcerated can rest easier knowing bad guys get rehabilitated and punished. But this instruction isn’t just a performance for viewers at home, it is educational. What exactly do jailers want their captives to learn?

Wrestling with questions of choice and responsibility, of betrayal and remorse — in the official American curriculum this is called existential thought. But Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth aren’t everymen. It isn’t simply enrichment to dress up a society’s captive marginalized as kings and princes and have them rehearse tragedy. Even if it’s more fashionable to do post-colonial readings of Shakespeare than write him off as emblematic of Western hegemony, the use of treacherous Nordic royals as exemplars of human interiority is suspect.

His broader argument:

At the heart of both the Shakespearean tragedy and the story the American justice system tells about itself is a bad choice. Prisoners, it’s nice to think, are people who have made mistakes and are facing the consequences. But this national bedtime story is contradicted on the front page of the paper every day. An alien observer looking at the US prison population would never guess its organizing principle is justice. Rather, the penal system is index and engine of social marginalization, with the groups who most frighten the people who run it — young black men, trans women — facing the highest incarceration rates. Adam Gopnik is right when he calls the American mass incarceration “a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.” American prisons are central to defining and maintaining the host of unequal, intersecting relations that make up the national fabric, all while literally acting out tales of human universality in middle English.

This American Life‘s episode on prisoners’ performances of Hamlet is here.

In a Paris Review interview from 1969, E.B. White confesses:

I was never a voracious reader and, in fact, have done little reading in my life. There are too many other things I would rather do than read. In my youth I read animal stories—William J. Long and Ernest Seton Thompson. I have read a great many books about small boat voyages—they fascinate me even though they usually have no merit. In the twenties, I read the newspaper columns: F.P.A., Christopher Morley, Don Marquis. I tried contributing and had a few things published. (As a child, I was a member of the St. Nicholas League and from that eminence was hurled into the literary life, wearing my silver badge and my gold badge.) My reading habits have not changed over the years, only my eyesight has changed. I don’t like being indoors and get out every chance I get. In order to read, one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I’ve never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.

Asked to name books in the previous decade that impressed him, White responds:

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all. As for what comes out on paper, I’m not well equipped to speak about it. When I should be reading, I am almost always doing something else. It is a matter of some embarrassment to me that I have never read Joyce and a dozen other writers who have changed the face of literature. But there you are. I picked up Ulysses the other evening, when my eye lit on it, and gave it a go. I stayed with it only for about twenty minutes, then was off and away. It takes more than a genius to keep me reading a book. But when I latch onto a book like They Live by the Wind, by Wendell P. Bradley, I am glued tight to the chair. It is because Bradley wrote about something that has always fascinated (and uplifted) me—sailing. He wrote about it very well, too.

I was deeply impressed by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It may well be the book by which the human race will stand or fall. I enjoyed Speak, Memory by Nabokov when I read it—a fine example of remembering.

(Hat tip: Longform)

Kera Bolonik eloquently unpacks Breaking Bad‘s nods to Walt Whitman. She describes a scene in which Walter White’s lab assistant, Gale, recites “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”:

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” is, among other things, a declaration of disillusionment with convention, and of liberation, of emerging from the passive seat and propelling oneself into the world to participate and engage with it:

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air,…

How the poem applies to White:

Though Walt initially gets into meth cooking for what he thinks will be quick and easy money, he soon discovers that it gives him a second chance: not only as Jesse’s teacher, not only to redeem his legacy as a legendary chemist (if only in an illicit universe), but as a way of embracing life full throttle. The lessons of the “Learn’d Astronomer” apply to Walter White too. He has been a consummate underachiever, trying to impart in vain his vast wisdom on unappreciative, disrespectful students, including Jesse, whom he flunked out of high school chemistry years before.

The Walter White we first encounter in the pilot is a shell: hapless, mild-mannered, self-effacing, a public high school chemistry teacher struggling very hard to support his pregnant wife, Skyler, and his teenage son with cerebral palsy. It takes a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer just after his 50th birthday to breathe life into a man who’d been hiding behind “the charts and diagrams,” cleaving to his resignation. Getting a death sentence and subsequently turning to meth production (ostensibly, he first does it to build a nest egg for his family) thrusts Walter out of the “lecture-room” and into the “mystical moist night-air.” As he declares to an incredulous Jesse, who can’t believe that this is his former straight-and-narrow teacher: “I feel … awake.”

Mike Chasar has more.