Three Notes on Crane’s “The Monster”

 

1.  Whilomville and Port Jervis

     Stephen Crane wrote fourteen stories set in Whilomville, a town based on Port Jervis, New York, where the author had lived for five years of his childhood and where he later was a frequent visitor.  His father had been minister of the Methodist Church there and his brother William Howe Crane was later a leading lawyer and judge who held local political office.  I happen to live only a short distance from Port Jervis where the church and William Crane’s home are yet standing.  Like Stephen Crane I have rambled in the woods of Sullivan County and at Twin Lakes, a short distance across the state line in Pennsylvania. 

     “The Monster” was published in The Monster and other stories in 1899, while the other Whilomville Stories appeared as a collection in 1900.  “The Monster” differs radically in theme and style from the volume that followed.  The other Whilomville stories are, for the most part, nostalgic pictures of a semi-rural childhood reminiscent of Tom Sawyer very likely written with income rather than art in the author’s mind.  “The Monster” is altogether different.  Much longer and less likely to appeal to popular taste, it has more in common with “The Blue Hotel” in its engagement with violence and social prejudice, its harsh incidents, and bleak conclusion. 

     Port Jervis has not always been comfortable with its association with Crane.  When he was writing Crane’s willfully bohemian lifestyle offended many.  His sympathetic story of Maggie: a Girl of the Streets was bad enough, but his involvement with social outcasts was not limited to fiction.  He generated scandal by defending in court a prostitute named Dora Clark with whom he was acquainted.  Later he began living with Cora Taylor who had operated a brothel in Jacksonville, Florida called the Hotel de Dream.

     Small towns are, yet today, conventionally regarded as secure and conventional havens where people look out for each other in a bucolic setting.  In the early parts of “The Monster” Crane plays against this expectation with mild satire tinged with affection.  The churches of Whilomville compete over which can produce “the greatest din” with their bells and the various fire companies each boast of enthusiastic partisans. [1]  The young men “affected” dislike for the corny town band, but they attended its concerts  because the young women were sure to be there (though they seem to have been more interested in observing each other than interacting with the boys).  The youth make cynical remarks such as saying that the band sounds like the reservoir water pump because such wit was “fashionable.”  The band’s leader seeks to imitate “the mannerisms of the great musicians.”  For their part, the women, both young and old, prefer gossiping to music.

     The reader might regard such faults as more endearing than blameworthy, but, with the catastrophe that befalls Henry Johnson, Crane’s criticism of the townspeople turns fierce.  Eventually cruel sentiment against the “monster” leads to an effective boycott of Dr. Trescott‘s practice.  Scholars have suggested several disfigured people in Port Jervis whose experience may have served as Crane’s model, but they have recalled as well that the town was the site of one of the few lynchings of African-Americans in New York, that of Robert Lewis in 1892. [2]  To the extent that Crane’s story reminded people of Lewis’s death, it would have been unwelcome to many of the townspeople.

     Crane’s reputation for an irregular life combined with his condemnation of Whilomville’s provincial mindset and what was taken by some as a reference to a dark incident in town history led to animosity against him from the time of his publications until recently. 

     Port Jervis’ suspicions about Crane endured for decades.  A monument to the Civil War dead had been  erected in 1886 in a small park in the center of town called Orange Square.  Though no evidence exists, Crane is said to have gathered material for The Red Badge of Courage in conversations with veterans on park benches there.  Called Orange Square as late as 1933 the name was at some point changed to Stephen Crane Memorial Park.  By 1983 this name had come to irritate some local citizens, including the commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars who was under the impression that the famous novel, often assigned to high school students, celebrated a cowardly deserter and that “Stephen Crane did a disservice to the many honorable veterans when he wrote The Red Badge of Courage.” [3]  The park was renamed Veterans Memorial Park. 

 

 

2.  Men and Women in Whilomville

     Racism, clearly an issue in “The Monster,” has attracted considerable commentary, but the story also encodes information about the relations of the sexes in Whilomsville.  The town is portrayed as no less patriarchal than  most societies.  “’My father says’” the reader is told, “was a very formidable phrase.”  Mrs. Page wishes to hold a birthday party for her daughter, but cannot proceed until her husband has casually consented: “Oh, let her have it.”  Later, the decisive actions – putting Johnson in jail, cautioning Trescott about the town’s animosity – are performed by men.

     Yet the women’s attitude is the basis for the town’s heartless rejection of the unfortunate Johnson.  Mrs. Page is a principal organizer of opposition to Dr. Trescott after her daughter’s party is disturbed by the “monster’s” approach.  The other women all but unanimously  greet the problem as a welcome occasion for malicious talk.  Before they can discuss the issue Carrie Dungen felt choked by “an overplus of information”; she had “a great deal of grist.”  When the ladies do get together her eyes are “shining with delight” at the opportunity, confident in the knowledge that “everyone says” what she thinks.  In the Black community, Johnson’s placement at the Williams home is disturbed by the wife’s inability to receive callers, and Johnson’s onetime fiancée Bella Farragut rejects the injured man with horror.  Finally, in the sad conclusion, Mrs. Trescott is dismayed that no one will attend her teas due to her husband’s attempts to help the injured man.

     Not quite all the women, however, agree.  Martha Goodwin is a notable exception, the town’s nonconformist.  Unmarried due to her intended having died of smallpox, she is thrown for support on her married sister who exploits her labor.  Yet this marginalized figure is “a woman of great mind” who has developed “adamantine opinions” on world affairs and many public questions.  Due to her outsider status the other ladies “all were required to disbelieve any  theory for which Martha fought.”  The sole woman not bound by local conventions, she is the only one to express wholehearted support for Dr. Trescott. 

     The dialectic of gender relations is thus sketched in some complexity.  While the women of the town are in the end subject to patriarchal rule, they are nonetheless able to exert considerable influence on social decisions.  The persecution of the doctor and Henry Johnson is in fact led by the women who respond with an all-but-unanimous voice in support of Carrie Dungen.  The reader must suppose even the virtuous Dr. Trescott will be moved by the tears of his uncomplaining wife in the concluding scene.  The eccentric Martha Goodwin stands alone, but her example suggests a wild card, the possibility of  independent thinking, whether foolish or wise, free of social coercion, that allows for new ideas and for change.

 

 

3.  Modernity and Whilomville

     The philosophical preference for a rural setting is a classical trope since antiquity but with Romanticism, it became a commonplace.  Not only in Wordsworth and Burns but earlier in Cowper and Gray, poets assume the corruption of the city and oppose it to the unspoiled beauty of areas that remained wild or were devoted to farming.  Such regions were associated with communities in which people’s relations with each other were characterized by mutual support and straightforward honesty. 

     Though stories like Maggie proved that Crane was well aware of the horrors on the underside of urban life, in “The Monster” he is questioning the ideal of innocence associated with small town America as Mark Twain had done in the devastating portraits of small towns in Huckleberry Finn and as, a few decades later, Sherwood Anderson would do in Winesburg Ohio and Edgar Lee Masters in Spoon River Anthology. 

     Crane accents the drama of his scene by depicting Whilomville in the process of modernization.  The disastrous fire that precipitates the crisis is foreshadowed in the recent renovations of the streetcars [4] and electric street lamps.  The “shimmering blue of the electric arc lamps” and the “shrill” calls of the trams conveying “both warnings and simple noise” mark modernization and, perhaps, a loss of innocence and a vague foreboding.  If small town America had ever been an Eden, its prelapsarian innocence was lost.  The very name Crane invented suggests that the town’s time has passed. and the action of the story occurs in a belated space, already looking back to mythic happy days gone by while a once benign provincial conformity turns to heartless cruelty.

 

  

1.  I was surprised when I moved to Goshen, New York, twenty-four miles from Port Jervis to find that this village of less than five thousand inhabitants had no less than four different fire companies, all made up of volunteers, each of which puts on a proud display at area parades.

2.  The so-called “Elephant Man” Joseph Merrick was at the time a sort of celebrity and may have also played a role in Crane’s inspiration.  Though Lewis is sometimes named as the only Black lynching victim in New York history, Robert Mulliner had been hanged by a mob in Newburgh in 1863.  Other incidents of New York mob violence, including the cases of Paulo Boleta, Charles Kelsey, and George Smith were against white people.

3.  Charles Larocca, “Stephen Crane’s Inspiration,” American Heritage 42:3 (May/June 1991).  

4.  Though unmentioned in the story, the yards for intercity rail lines provided the basis of Port Jervis’ economy for many years.  The tram lines of The Port Jervis Electric Street Railway Co. had been in operation for only a year when “The Monster” was published.

Zola’s Nana and the Conundrum of Sex Work

 

Though it engages Zola and Xenophon, this piece is really more about the nature of sexual relations than aesthetics.

 

     Surely in Nana (1880) Zola meant to portray the sordid degradation of the sex workers of his time, even those who populated the more luxurious regions of the demimonde, where salons were occupied by genteel and titled aristocrats as well as by a once penniless girl of the streets.  In this he was contributing to a growing literature of prostitution that included most of the prominent writers among Romantics, Realists, and Naturalists alike.  Among the many who depicted streetwalkers and courtesans were de Vigny in his novel Cinq Mars (1826), Hugo in Marion Delorme (1828), Dumas père in Filles, lorettes et courtisanes (1843) and La Dame aux Camélias (1848), the Goncourt brothers in La Lorette (1853), Eugène Sue in “La Lorette” (1854), Augier in Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855), Huysmans in Marthe (1876), and de Maupassant in “Boule de Suif” (1880). [1]

     Though Zola’s approach was sociological rather than moral, tracing Nana’s ruin to her dreadful childhood, her story very nearly fits the form of a medieval exemplum, so horridly does her beauty dissolve in the end into suppurating lesions.  The chance event of her illness reveals to the reader, though not to the lady herself, the vanity and destructiveness of her career as a courtesan.  Yet Nana herself, despite her ups and downs, her short-sightedness and extravagance, had largely maintained a good humor, while her lovers fall into hopeless perdition one after another in what must amount to the greatest career of romantic destruction prior to Dorian Gray (whose conquests are far more obscurely suggested).  Philippe Hugon falls into crime, Georges stabs himself, and Fauchery, Vandeuvres, and Count Muffat suffer financial collapse in the attempt to support her profligate spending, while Nana herself never realizes what she is doing and is brought low only by the random calamity of infectious disease.

     There can be, of course, no question of the fundamental power structure of the patriarchy represented in the novel’s social relations.  The men hold the money and the power and Nana, as she periodically reflects, has nothing but her magnificent body.  Still, the misery and distress she brings her devotees and the disasters they suffer contrast with her generally self-satisfied moods.  She sacrifices true love, perhaps, by cynically using each man she cultivates, and can experience only a cruel caricature of selfless affection in her attachment to Fontan who beats her when he is not simply cold and thoughtless.  Love appears in the narrative only warped by either financial or physical exploitation or hopeless and one-sided obsession.  With fearful concision, Blake knew almost a hundred years earlier in London that “the youthful Harlots curse” “blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”  As the professional in Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” (1930) admits, she can offer “Every love, but true love.”

     If love vanishes when it finds itself in the marketplace, what remains in its place may not be the “trip to paradise” Porter’s lyrics promise, but something more nasty all around.  The world of the Théâtre des Variétés with its titled boxholders may be unknown to the contemporary reader, but comparable phenomena are commonplace today.  One may imagine, without ever having witnessed, the scene in a self-styled “gentleman’s club” next to a truck-stop at an interstate’s exit.  The parallels with Nana’s world are unescapable.  There, daily, groups of men, with more or less furtiveness, sit with overpriced drinks and drop hard-earned dollars in sacrifice to the sexual charms of the performers whose talents, as in Nana’s case, are irrelevant, their nudity (or semi-nudity) being the commodity the customers purchase. 

     This is only the grossest example and it carries the comforting convenience that many can without difficulty avoid that smoky and dim-lit crowd.  Self-interested love may as well be manifested  in the youthful wife of an aging celebrity (or rich man), in a young man’s proclivity for pornography, or the nude scene propelling an actress’ career.  The ordinary course of erotic experience includes moments at least of many sorts, ranging from possessiveness and aggression through mutual respect and responsiveness and on toward self-abnegation and masochism.  In Nana’s world, though, only the ultimately unsatisfying extremes are possible.

     Without questioning the fundamental power relations at play or the oppressive sexism of the dominant ideology, the observer might wonder whether the men or the women are more brutalized in this unequal substitute for love.  Clearly both are denied a satisfying erotic life.  The objectification forced upon the woman descends no less decisively on the man.  Films like The Blue Angel and Of Human Bondage caricature the degradation of an exploitative affair with the man as victim, though the daily newspaper indicates that the reverse is far more commonly the situation.

     Nana’s social position is not entirely unlike that of the ἑταίρα if ancient Greece.   In Xenophon’s account Socrates visits Theodote, a celebrated courtesan, after hearing of her fabulous beauty.  Arriving at her home, he finds her posing for a painter, but when they can converse, Socrates poses her a question.  “Ought we to be more grateful to Theodote for showing us her beauty or she to us for looking at it?  Does the obligation rest with her if she profits more by showing it, but with us if we profit more by looking?”  Eliding the issue of actual sexual contact by describing only her role as the object of visual attention, he observes that “we already long to touch what we’ve seen and we’ll go away aroused and will miss her when we’re gone.  The natural consequence is that we become her adorers, she the adored.”  As she is “sumptuously dressed” and attended by “many pretty maids” in a “lavishly furnished” house, her advantage seems self-evident, and she concedes to Socrates, “Of course I ought to be grateful to you for looking.” [2]  

     Theodote was, of course, quite prosperous.  Her work occurred like Nana’s in a genteel aristocratic atmosphere, just as some women with “sugar daddies” might today mix in moneyed circles.   The answer to Socrates’ question would have been different had he been interviewing a common prostitute, a πόρνη, a word derived from πέρνημι meaning “to sell” and  associated with exploitation and slavery.  Poor, often literally a slave, lacking agency over her own life, such prostitutes resemble today’s street sex workers who are often addicts or victims of trafficking.

     The question that Socrates poses to Theodote ignores a third possibility, that of mutual affection, but that can hardly occur when sexuality is commodified.  Every economic bargain involves a balance of interests, and, when people are buying and selling, a marketplace can assure a modicum of what looks to both parties like “fairness,” but when love is for sale, it is either not really love or not really for sale.  If one party is more powerful, a price must be paid for cynically using another; the possibility of love vanishes altogether.

 

  

1.  Though never prosecuted in France, Zola was the occasion for several major censorship trials in the United Kingdom that ultimately ruined Henry Vizetelly, his publisher.  For a survey of the theme in visual art, see Hollis Clayson’s Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era.  Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) developed an American Naturalism from the considerably more sordid circumstances of the Bowery.  The theme flourished in art movies after World War II in such features as Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (945), Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Dassin’s Never on Sunday (1960), Godard’s Vivre sa Vie (1962), Pasolini’s Mama Roma (1962), Kurasawa’s Red Beard (1965), and Buñuel’s Belle du Jour (1967).

2.  Memorabilia (III, 11, 2-4) in the Loeb Library translation by E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd, revised by Jeffrey Henderson. 

Transformation of Plot in Several Stories by Aphra Behn

I discuss here “The Adventure of the Black Lady,” “The Court of the King of Bantam,” “The Unfortunate Happy Lady” and “The Fair Jilt,” the short fictions in the very early Grove Press volume Selected Writings Of The Ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn, published before Barney Rosset had become editor.  Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in that edition, and my quotations follow it, including the editor’s unnecessary modernization of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     Though literary convention is sometimes dismissed as a device favored by writers lacking originality, in fact, the use of conventions in literature (as in language in general), enables an increased density of signification and subtlety. [1]  Conventions create reader expectations, which may then be fulfilled, frustrated, altered, inverted, or twisted.  Often conventions foreground important thematic elements, by reinforcing preconceptions in some cases and by challenging them in others.  At the same time, just as in music, a certain idea, like a melodic phrase, may be part of a formal design as it is repeated or varied.  Folk stories and myths are highly conventionalized, indeed to the extent that scholars such as Propp and Levi-Strauss have sought to reduce their patterns to formulae. [2]  The entertaining short narratives of Aphra Behn illustrate this principle of economic variations on a theme and shed light on the uses and pleasures of story-telling  by the creation of patterns that highlight the central concerns of the literate public of her day. 

     Aphra Behn stands at the wellsprings of the English novel.  Though many of us learned from Ian Watt’s The Rise of the English Novel to call Robinson Crusoe (1719) the first novel, Behn had published the extraordinary Oroonoko in 1688 and she was quite likely the author of Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684) even earlier.  While that work foreshadows the epistolary form that dominated the eighteenth century in works by Richardson, Cleland, Fielding, Goldsmith, Burney, and others, Behn wrote a number of shorter narratives with a different sort of voice.  “The Adventure of the Black Lady,” “The Court of the King of Bantam,” “The Unfortunate Happy Lady,” and “The Fair Jilt” are written with colloquial liveliness as if they were transcriptions of spoken story-telling, including hesitations and revisions.  Like folk tales, most romances, medieval fabliaux and tales like those in Poggio’s Facetiae, the stories have very little characterization or description.  Action is what matters.   While more subtle retellings are available in collections such as Boccaccio’s Decameron or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the barer narratives remained popular in collections like Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure and the hagiographies of the Aurea Legenda.

     Long neglected, then studied from the narrow perspective of social implications, Behn’s fictions also illustrate the pleasures of a largely formal elaboration beautiful after the manner of a fugue or an abstract painting.  The sequence of stories in the Grove Press anthology indicates increasingly sophisticated patterns of play between oppositions which, though arising from experience and rooted in the day’s received expectations, take flight and assume independent aesthetic value.

      “The Adventure of the Black Lady” provides the basis for her formula.  As the protagonist’s name suggest, Bellamora seeks a satisfying love relationship.  She has conceived a child with a man of her choice who, though he had persuaded her to bed with “violence” and “accursed success,” is nonetheless sincere in his affection, as indicated by his name Mr. Fondlove.  Consumed by shame and escaping an unwanted marriage to another gentleman “of much better estate,” the “fair innocent” moves from her home in Hampshire to London, feeling “ashamed, ruined, and damned . . .for ever lost” (24) and hoping to stay with a city cousin.  Though Mr. Fondlove had importunately urged his attentions upon her, she is convinced that, by yielding to his advances, she has lost his respect, and he will surely no longer care to marry her.  A country girl lost in the big city, she loses her luggage and cannot locate her relative.  In the sort of unlikely coincidence common in romances, she is charitably given shelter in a home which, as it happens, belongs to Mr. Fondlove’s sister.  Hearing then of her distress, and faithful still in spite of her fears, he arrives to marry her and resolve the plot’s tensions in a happy denouement. 

     Behn has set in play a number of oppositions each of which is resolved in this brief narrative.  The most significant are the tension of the requirement (for women only) of virginity for a respectable marriage and the suspense of placing an unsophisticated young woman from the country at risk in an urban environment.  The damsel in distress is, of course, a universally popular theme [3], pervasive in early English novels such as those by Richardson and the later Gothic novels. 

     As an author of works that aimed for a large purchasing audience, Behn implicitly endorsed the norms of her era.  The imbalance in male and female power in sexual relationships is evident in Fondlove’s impetuous seduction and in her fear that, having had his way, he will no longer wish to be with her.  The move from country to city emphasizes the myriad dangers that might threaten the poor and naïve woman in the city, though Bellamora, through incredible luck, not only escapes all hazards, but also regains her beloved.  The unexpected pregnancy, which had seemed disastrous, becomes an occasion for joy, and the reader may assume that the happy couple will assume their place back in Hampshire as a respected couple.  In this tale the knots of difficulty all vanish in a rapid and satisfying rush, making way for the story to conclude with a tension-releasing joke.

     This final humor is at the expense of the “Overseers of the Poor” whom Behn calls “the vermin of the parish,” well-named, she notes, because they overlook the needy they are supposed to serve.  This satirical touch is surprising because the story itself has little to do with social justice of any kind and includes no lower-class character, though the heroine finds herself in need after leaving her home and losing her possessions.  Though unrelated to the main thread of Behn’s narrative, this social comment adds a sassy note to the speaker’s voice.

     In “The Court of the King of Bantam” which Behn claimed she wrote “upon a wager,” [4] the same story is retold with greater complexity and a different tone.  Again, the plot concerns an upright woman who has a bad suitor and a good one.  She evades the first and marries the second.  Yet in the “King of Bantam” the tone is humorous whereas it had been anxious in “The Black Lady.”  Additional characters ornament the plot line like decorative motifs.  The lady and her good lover are symmetrically supplied with a relative, Sir Philip Friendly assisting and Sir George Goodland retarding the relationship.  Lucy is the less respectable (but still worthy) doublet of Philibella.  While the lady of quality must have a corresponding mate, the reader assumes that Lucy, already compromised by her willingness to take a lover for money, is likely well-pleased at accepting the King after Sir Philip has decided to cast her off. 

     The satirical element plays a greater role here.  The Would-be King, the King of Bantam [5] is ridiculous because he is a parvenu, an arriviste who lacks refinement.  Though genuinely rich from his real estate investments, he is a figure of fun to the others due to his lack of taste.  Associated throughout her life with the party of the court, Behn would not have grudged the greedy accumulation of those of aristocratic birth, but this capitalist King is an absurd pretender.  

     With its paradoxical title, “The Unfortunate Happy Lady” once more tells a tale of a virtuous woman, this time in the most melodramatic terms.  The undesirable marriage option here appears in the extreme form of prostitution and the “barbarous” (50) and profligate brother Sir William Wilding is a heightened version of the pushy families of the first two stories.  Just as Bellamora had happened to lodge at the home of her fiancé’s sister, Philadelphia’s first customer in the brothel turns out to be not only compassionate, but takes up her cause and, in the end, marries her as well.  She is indeed “happy” in his arrival, as her escape depends entirely on his aid while she remains largely passive, contrary to the assertions of contemporary critics who would like to imagine Behn’s anticipating modern ideas of feminism. [6]  The heroine sounds very like countless other demoiselles en détresse when she cries, “’O heaven! . . . thou asserter and guardian of innocence!  Protect me from the impious practices intended against me!’” (57)  She appeals to Gracelove, who thought he had purchased her sexual favors, “”for heaven’s sake, hear and help me!’”    Her virtue is so great that he is instantly reformed and says “’By all things sacred, I find my error; I pity you and I fear I shall love you.’” (58)  Indeed, the beneficent effect of her aura is sufficient even for the rehabilitation of her positively wicked brother.  

     Here the story is elongated and embellished in unlikely ways that do not alter the familiar basic pattern.  Before her happy marriage, the heroine acquiesces in a (presumably unconsummated) brief marriage to Counsellor Fairlaw which places her in comfortable circumstances.  In an exotic nod to adventure tales, the good lover, Mr. Gracelove, who had been abducted by pirates and detained abroad, has the good fortune to be spotted by Philadelphia in a carriage as he trudges down the road.  These additions contribute suspense and pathos while preserving the standard plot.

     “The Fair Jilt” (1688) employs a more radical transformation of the narrative by making a manipulative woman the central figure.  (Novel though it is, Behn may have been influenced by the popularity of The London Jilt; Or, the Politick Whore [1683].)   The story opens with a rhetorical paean to love as “the most noble and divine passion of the soul” which becomes the occasion for another of Behn’s adventitious satires, here ridiculing the self-love of fatuous coxcombs. (72)  The leading lady Miranda is universally admired for her beauty and her accomplishments (as her name implies), yet she is a cynical Beguine, a femme fatale who enjoys her power over men and who “loves nothing so much as to behold sighing slaves at her feet.” (76) 

     Capable of even greater villainy than Sir William Wilding, Philadelphia’s brother, this sinister Miranda first contrives to punish the noble Henrick (who has entered holy orders in reaction to his selfish brother’s having usurped his beloved and then intrigued to have him killed) by a false accusation of rape.  Having married Prince Tarquin [7] and squandered their funds, she seeks to kill her sister Alcidiana for her money at first at the hands of a servant and then through the agency of Tarquin himself.   In one of Behn’s improbable turns which strain her readers’ ability to accept her claims that the story is factual, Tarquin’s execution is botched, whereupon he is pardoned.  Following a life of iniquity, matters are now settled.  Father Francisco, born Henrick, is freed; Alcidiana survives; both Tarquin and Miranda are morally regenerated; and all live subsequently happy lives.  So even this plot bends around in the end to the same conclusion of all the others.  

     The innocent heroine has become a cruel and arrogant villain (a good role perhaps for Joan Crawford [8]) whose iniquities preying upon men match those of the immoral seducers in some of the other stories.  The subsidiary stories of Henrick and Alcidiana grow naturally out of the basic reversed framework; both are virtuous individuals traduced by the wicked Miranda.  Retributive justice takes the life of the servant Van Brune but Tarquin is miraculously spared in a botched execution so that he may provide a match for Miranda to make the required happy ending, leaving Miranda in fact in “as perfect a state of happiness, as this troublesome world can afford.” (116)

     The transformation of convention in these narratives serves several purposes.  These stories foreground certain thematic implications: gender stereotypes such as the lusty man, the weaker woman, and the importance of a good marriage for the female’s survival, as well as the more general hazards of erotic desire.  Apart from these issues, meant to evoke the reader’s unhesitating assent, the use of convention allows the author to manipulate reader expectations.  What the convention may lead one to anticipate may be delivered, heightened, softened, multiplied, twisted, or inverted.  When the writer fulfils the reader’s assumptions, she or he is gratified at a correct presumption, both about the text and about the world to which it refers.  When the convention is altered, there is instead the pleasure of surprise and the possibility for the development of novel ideas, themselves perhaps to be overturned in another generation. 

 

 

1.  See my essay “Transformation of Convention” on this site.  Among the analyses which use this concept are “Transformation of Convention in Early Minnesang” and “The Early English Carol.”

2.  See Propp’s Morphology of the Tale (1928) and Levi-Strauss’s “The structural study of myth,” The Journal of American Folklore 68, (1955) 428–444.  The latter’s so-callled “canonical formula” is fx(a) : fy(b) ≃ fx(b) : fa-1(y). 

3.  Among the countless works using this motif are stories of the Odyssey and the Ramayana, St. Barbara, the Yuan Dynasty play The Injustice Done to Dou E, and the early film serial The Perils of Pauline.  The more immediate context of Behn’s work includes the so-called “amatory fiction” of Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood as well as Defoe’s Roxana and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Other related fictions include picaresque novels in translation, stories by Paul Scarron, and Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665) whose later editions were cowritten with Francis Kirkman.

4.  See Behn’s “An Advertisement to the Reader,” prefixed to the text.  She goes on to say she was simply trying to imitate the style of the French writer Paul Scarron.

5.  The name derives from the location on Java where in 1605 the British established a trading post which apparently seemed so exotic as to be somewhat absurd.  The association of the word with diminutive stature (bantam fowl) made the term appropriate for her mocking use here. 

6.  See, for instance, Juan de Dios Torralbo Caballero, “’I drink to thee’: Female agency and female authority as gender reversal in ‘The Unfortunate Happy Lady,’” Études anglaises Volume 69, Issue 4, 2016, 410-426 and Violetta Trofimova, “Liberated Women in Aphra Behn’s and Jane Barker’s Prose Fiction,” Litinfo: Georgian Electronic Journal of Literature vol. V, no. 1, 2011, available at  https://www.litinfo.ge/vol.5-iss-1/trofimova.htm.              

7.  Prince Tarquin claimed a descent from Sextus Tarquinius, son of the last king of Rome, known principally for his rape of Lucretia.  This seems as outlandish a title as King of Bantam. 

8.  One might also think of Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage or Marlene Dietrich in Der Blaue Engel. 

Efflorescences of Female Poets

This sketchy essay aims at little beyond description. Perhaps other readers will be intrigued with these poets, or the phenomenon of their appearing when they did. Further, these authors provide data for testing whether women’s writing differs in general from men’s.


     Upon being told of a female Quaker preacher, Dr. Johnson reacted, "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." His attitude was, like most of Johnson’s opinions, as reactionary as it was witty, but his asperity was doubtless due in part to the fact that in his own time that the issue of female speakers, writers, and intellectuals became contested. By the eighteenth century not only did female preachers appear; women writers were proliferating. Women made up a good percentage of both the authors and consumers of fiction, and they were just making their way into the list of the period’s poets.
     Yet, surveying the globe through all the centuries of literacy, in the written records of our species the voices of half the species are all but absent. Were there no other evidence of human culture, the record of literature would itself be sufficient to trace the patriarchal bias of civilization since the Bronze Age. Apart from the sporadic appearance of extraordinary individuals, there have been as well as some fascinating efflorescences of groups of female poets, blossoming out of societies that seem otherwise as male chauvinist as their geographical and chronological neighbors.
     In the Western tradition, doubtless the most celebrated female poet is Sappho whose reputation, though not much of her poetry, has survived the centuries. A towering figure very close to the beginning of European literature, she was called “the poetess” just as Homer was “the poet” (or, in more modern times, “the bard” means Shakespeare“). She was celebrated with statues and coins and called by at least three ancient poets “the tenth muse.” One of her most celebrated poems describes the physical manifestations of passion.
     

The man's all but a god
who sits with you and pays such heed
to your sweet talk
and lovely laugh --

listening excites me --
my heart's at odds, unsettled.
And when I look at you my mouth
can't form a word.

My tongue stopped, I'm filled
with thin flames -- vision fades,
and my ears hear the beating
of my blood.

Cold sweat on my side, I'm taken
with trembling and blanch like straw.
Little short of death,
I must last it out,

without you . .

     Her once substantial collected works have dwindled over time to a few scattered fragments with one single whole poem, standing almost miraculous amid the ruins. Indeed, the greater part of ancient Greek lyrical poetry as a whole has been lost, but nonetheless, Sappho was hardly a unique figure in her own day. Other female poets from the time are known, though some by little more than name and a few hints of reputation.
     Kleobulina (6th century BCE) is associated in legend with philosophers. She enjoyed sufficient celebrity that two comedies, one by Kratinos and one by Alexis, featured choruses of “Kleobulinas.” All that survives of her work are portions of three riddles. She seems to have specialized in these gnomic formulations which lie at the foundation of metaphor and poetry as a whole. Whether hers were profound or trivial or simply mysterious must be judged by a few examples. The solution to “a dead ass boxed my ear with his horned shin-bone” is a Phrygian flute. More ambitious and universal , though perhaps little more profound is a version of the year riddle, familiar from many sources including the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata: “There is one father and twelve children; of these each Has twice thirty daughters of different appearance: Some are white to look at and the others black in turn; They are immortal and yet they all fade away.” [1]
     Even in D. L. Page’s prose translation the reader hears an eloquent and natural voice in Erinna’s sixth century “Distaff,” written in memory of her childhood friend Baucis.

These traces of you, dear maid, lie still glowing in my heart : all that we once enjoyed, is embers now. We clung to our dolls in our chambers when we were girls, playing Young Wives, without a care. And towards dawn your Mother, who allotted wool to her attendant workwomen, came and called you to help with the salted meat. Oh, what a trembling the Bogy brought us then, when we were little ones! - On its head were huge ears, and it walked on all fours, and changed from one face to another!

      Among the others female poets who flourished in archaic and early Classical Greek times were Korinna, who according to Aelian and Suidas defeated Pindar five times in competitions. Her choral lyrics were performed by troupes of girls in partheneia; Megalostrata from the 7th century BCE, whom Alkman called a "golden-haired maiden enjoying the gift of the Muses", and Myrtis of the 6th century, first of a line of female Boeotian poets.
     These writers flourished and were not only accepted but celebrated by coinage and statuary as well as by critics. Though their culture was highly patriarchal, goddess-worship provided some occasion for female poetic agency. Thus Sappho’s lines are in a ritual as well as a psychological sense an offering to Aphrodite. Yet it would be a millennium and a half before Europe would see another such flowering of female poets.
     Among the written records of the remarkably luxuriant poetic growth of the south of France in the later Middle Ages are the names of twenty female troubadours or trobairitz. [2] The development of fin’ amors -- what came to be called courtly love in English – doubtless was influenced by Arabic poetry [3], Mariolatry, and the absence of men during the Crusades. Eventually romantic and artistic skills came to be included among the accomplishments required of a courtier.
     Five poems are extant attributed to the Comtessa de Dia, four cansos and a tenson. For one canso, “A chantar m’er de so qu’eu no volria,” music has survived as well. The poem is a complaint of an unsatisfied lover who feels that her beloved behaves toward her in a “proud,” standoffish manner (“orguoill”) while being “open-hearted“ (“franc”) with everyone else. Still, she remains steadfast in her own dedicated love, preserving her nobility and virtue while he betrays his own “great worth” (“rics pretz”) by failing to return her affection.

I must sing of that which I would rather not:
I am so aggrieved by him of whom I am the friend.
For I love him more than anything that be,
But pity and courtliness do not avail me with him,
Nor my beauty, nor my worth, nor my wits:
For I am thus tricked and betrayed
As I should be if I were ugly.

     The canso by Bieiris de Romans "Na Maria, pretz e fina valors" provides a dramatic example of the complex hermeneutic challenges these texts can present. The poem, clearly attributed to Bieiris de Romans, contains a suite of recognizable courtly love conventions, yet is addressed to a woman named Maria. Her peerless excellences, the poet says, elicit true love and a “pure heart” (“cor truan”). She begs for some sign that her love-service will be accepted. In the beloved the poet finds “gaiety and happiness” (“gajess’ e alegranssa”). [4] Scholars, puzzling over what to make of this poem, have sometimes attributed it to a male author or at any rate to a male persona. Some regard the poem as a straightforward expression of lesbianism, while others prefer to view it as an expression of intense but non-sexual friendship. Inevitably, the beloved has also been identified with the Virgin Mary. [5] To some the words of the poem seem a sincere heart’s overflowing, while to others they are ironic or a purely aesthetic game with little relation to lived experience.
     In Heian Japan (794-1185) two of the greatest writers were women. Murasaki Shikibu wrote the lyric-filled Tale of Genji of which Kenneth Rexroth says “most people who have read it agree that it is probably the world’s greatest novel.” [6] This masterful work combines the most intensely self-conscious aestheticism with a highly wrought eroticism and a mystical Buddhism, all from an almost painfully sensitive point of view, as refined as any page of Proust. The lovers, indeed most of the characters, exchange subtly significant verses, often heavily allusive; indeed, the entire book, long as it is, has a lyric sensibility.

Murasaki:
The troubled waters
are frozen fast.
Under clear heaven
moonlight and shadow
ebb and flow.

Answered by Prince Genji:
The memories of long love
gather like drifting snow,
poignant as the mandarin ducks
who float side by side in sleep. [7]

     Genji was so successful that it became itself the source of countless later references and works of visual art. Murasaki (the name is both the author’s pseudonym and the name of the heroine in the novel) also wrote a journal and a book of waka.
     In her diary, Murasaki says waspishly of one of her contemporaries: "Sei Shonagon is very arrogant. She thinks herself so clever and litters her writings with Chinese characters, but when you look at them carefully you will find many errors. Those who want to behave as if they were superior to others will lower their reputation. Will their future be brighter?" [8]
     Though Shonagon’s lyrics are included in contemporary anthologies, her Pillow Book, a sort of informal journal belonging to the Japanese genre zuhitsu, is her most well-known work. Her super-cultivated sensibility and the extraordinary refinement of the Heian court, are evident on every page. She compiles lists of “things that should be large” “Nothing annoys me so much,” she says as “someone who arrives at a ceremony in a shabby, poorly decorated carriage.” After including “rice starch that has become mixed with water” in a list of “things without merit,” she apologizes at length for mentioning such a vulgar item, saying “I never thought these notes would be read by anyone else.”
     Though she also wrote waka, the prose of the Pillow Book is highly poetic. The books opens with this passage.

In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful. As the light creeps over the hills, their outlines are dyed a faint red and wisps of purplish cloud trail over them.
In summer the nights. Not only when the moon shines, but on the dark nights too, as the fireflies flit to and fro, and even when it rains, how beautiful it is. [9]

     In an example of a curious dialectic potential within sexist custom, women were not considered appropriate for the study of Chinese and the composition of prestigious Chinese poetry or kanshi, (though some acquired Chinese anyway). One result was that women writers concentrated on waka, in Japanese, and were thus likely to write more apparently natural and sincere verses than the practitioners of a learned and artificial tradition.  The breadth of participation  by women in the literary life of the time may be suggested by the title of Akazome Emon’s volume Thirty-Six Female Poetic Sages. Among the many other poets writing during the Heian era were Lady Ise who became concubine to Emperor Uda, the Princess Shikisi, and Izumi Shikibu considered by many the greatest poet of the time. [10]
     Though I claim no professional expertise in any of the three cultures in which these poets lived, I will nonetheless venture a few suggestions toward an explanation of their popularity. Ancient Greek, Heian Japan, and the Languedoc during the high Renaissance were all societies which placed an unusual value on the aesthetic. The refined cultivation of the pursuit of beauty is evident in such phenomena as the well-organized program of pleasures at ancient Greek symposia, the courts of love under Eleanor of Acquitaine, the Countess of Champagne, and others during the High Middle Ages, and the moon-viewing and poetry parties that originated in Heian era. These practices all imply a certain space for hedonism, though all include intellectual or artistic as well as corporeal pleasures.
     Undeniably each culture also has individual characteristics that may have been influential in making space for female poets: tolerance for homosexuality in archaic Greece, Buddhist aesthetics in Japan, Mariolatry and chivalry in the Western European Middle Ages. Critics have argued is whether certain of these texts represent authentic women’s voices or merely women who have gained acceptance by learning to compose patriarchal poetry. What cannot be disputed is that, in spite of their comparative silence through much of history, women have figured conspicuously in certain great eras of poetry. The phenomenon of these efflorescences of female poets and their individual works themselves deserve greater attention.




1. Both may be found on p. 165 Greek Elegy and Iambus I, J. M. Edmonds (Loeb Library).

2. The accessible text is Meg Bogin’s The Women Troubadours (W. W. Norton: New York and London, 1980). I acknowledge the substantial service she provided in assembling this volume, though I find her unreliable both as to facts and interpretations. She relied for texts on Oscar Schultz’s Die Provenzalischer Dichterinnen (Leipzig : G. Fock, 1888).

3. See Alois Nykl ‘s convincing Hispano-Arabic Poetry And Its Relations With The Old Provencal Troubadours.

4. The Consistori del Gay Saber "Consistory of the Gay Science") was a poetic institution founded at Toulouse in 1323 to foster the revival of Old Occitan verse.

5. Proponents of male authorship include François Zufferey, Oskar Schultz-Gora, Gianfranco Folena, Jean-Baptiste de Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye and Elizabeth W. Poe. Those who consider the work lesbian include Pierre Bec, Magda Bogin, Renat Nelli, and John Boswell, which an advocate of affection is Angelica Rieger.

6. “Tale of Genji” in Classics Revisited.

7. Kenneth Rexroth, Translations from the Japanese.

8. The Diary of Lady Murasaki, translated by Richard Bowring, 1996, Penguin, p. 54.

9. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, translated by Ivan Morris (Penguin), p. 201, 159, and 21.

10. Asian poetry was highly influential for European and American Imagism in the early twentieth century. Amy Lowell introduced a collection titled Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan, translated by Annie Shepley Omori and Kochi Doi, with an introduction by Amy Lowell. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920.