A PEER-REVIEWED
[UNDER]GRADUATE
AMERICAN STUDIES
JOURNAL
[Inter]sections
09
A trimestrial publication of the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest
January - March
ISSUE
No. 1/2010
A WORD FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
by Mihaela Precup
Off with his head! A review of Tim Burton’s Alice in
Wonderland
by Ilinca Anghelescu
The Erasmus Experience
by Silvia Filip
On Homosocial “Secrecy” in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
by Andreea Breazu
“The Yellow Wallpaper” as a Feminist Comment on the Condition of
Women at the Turn of the Century
by Irina Constantin
A Room of One’s Own: Negotiating Space and Identity in Mary
Cassatt’s Images of Motherhood and Leisure
by Olivia Bădoi
Television and Fear of Death in DeLillo’s White Noise
by Nicolae-Andrei Popa
It Ain’t No Fairy Tale: Escaping the Ghetto in Boyz n the Hood and
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
by Elena-Adriana Dancu
Copyright © 2008 - 2010 The American Studies Program of the English Department at the University of Bucharest. All rights reserved.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. A WORD FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF by Mihaela Precup
2. REVIEWS
Off with his head! A review of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
by Ilinca Anghelescu
3. UNDERGRADUATE SECTION
On Homosocial “Secrecy” in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick by Andreea Breazu
“The Yellow Wallpaper” as a Feminist Comment on the Condition of Women at the
Turn of the Century by Irina Constantin
4. GRADUATE SECTION
A Room of One’s Own: Negotiating Space and Identity in Mary Cassatt’s Images of
Motherhood and Leisure by Olivia Bădoi
Television and Fear of Death in DeLillo’s White Noise by Nicolae-Andrei Popa
It Ain’t No Fairy Tale: Escaping the Ghetto in Boyz n the Hood and Precious: Based
on the Novel Push by Sapphire by Elena-Adriana Dancu
5. AMERICAN STUDIES ABROAD
The Erasmus Experience by Silvia Filip
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
PUBLISH OR PERISH/SUBMISSION INFO
1
A WORD FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
by Mihaela Precup
I would like to use the terrible belatedness of the first 2010 issue of [Inter]sections to
make a few administrative announcements which are more relevant now than they might
have been a month ago, when – should the editor have been in better editorial shape – our
journal was supposed to have hit the virtual waves.
I am thus quite pleased to announce that as of this issue, [Inter]sections boasts an ISSN,
which is going to especially benefit those of our contributors who are interested in
pursuing an academic or editorial career. Also, and perhaps most importantly,
[Inter]sections is soon going to come out in printed form as well. For our Romanian
contributors and readers, this shift will hopefully signify increased visibility, if only
around those academic structures which provide our main readership. We shall be posting
more details online (http://www.americanstudies.ro/?category=13) when the printed
version comes out.
As for this issue of our journal, it begins in a most sprightly manner with Ilinca
Anghelescu’s invitation to a beheading (hints: Tim Burton, Alice), and ends with a
cheerful push from Silvia Filip towards the snowy and diverse Högskolan Dalarna in
Falun, Sweden. Our undergraduate section takes off with Andrea Breazu’s
disentanglement of the verbal construction of the homosocial body in Melville’s Moby
Dick and proceeds with Irina Constantin’s unveiling of the feminist manifesto behind
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In our graduate section, Olivia
Bădoi writes about the female readers engaged in intellectual activities and shifting
gender paradigms in American painter Mary Cassatt’s work, Nicolae-Andrei Popa
contradicts Jameson’s theory on the waning of affect by reading DeLillo’s White Noise,
and Elena-Adriana Dancu warns against internalized stereotyping in Boyz n the Hood and
Precious.
2
REVIEWS
Off with His Head!
A Review of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
by Ilinca Anghelescu
In very many ways, Tim Burton is indeed a visionary. Not of the James Cameron kind, a
self-proclaimed visionary whose lens is clogged by clichés, computers and pixel power;
instead, the kind who sees strange things not far in the distance, but close by, under the
guise of the familiar. His characters are people, only with a twist; his fantastic closely
mirrors everyday life, only more grotesque. He reminds his viewers that the cute and
quaint are one step away from the cruel or morbid.
And yet, as many “men of substance” who have found something to say in the world of
arts, he tends to be slightly repetitive – in his choice of bizarre characters, in his
preoccupation with the slightly “off”, and not least in his disturbing preference for
Johnny Depp in every other male part he designs. Not that repetition in itself is a bad
thing; but Alice in Wonderland seems to rehash most his previous repetitions, and add
some confusion on top of it.
The first element of confusion stems from an uncertainty regarding the intended audience
for this film. Is this a film for children, you ask yourself. Should you take your 6 year-old
nephew along? Nah, it can’t be for young children – Lewis Carroll is not for young
children; anyone knows that, though many of us first read about Alice’s adventures in a
child-friendly translation ages ago. And – most importantly - Tim Burton is not for young
3
children. Is it, then, for people like… me? People who read and re-read the book and
loooved every bit of it? Alice afficionados? It’s gotta be, you would think.
Well, if you’ve read Lewis Carroll’s Alice, prepare to have her hijacked in front of your
eyes, abused, utterly mistreated, and possibly forever altered for pop culture. This is not
that Alice, as Burton kindly repeats throughout the film. It’s almost Alice, in the sense
that some of her co-adventurers and sometimes even some of her lines may remind you
of the original character. But this Alice is a proto-feminist, a young woman on the verge
of getting married to a pompous très Victorian young man, at a très Victorian garden
party. This Alice has been fed wonderful stories by her wonderful father, now sadly
deceased, about a wonderful land where red roses are white and rabbits can read the time
and rush accordingly. This Alice decides to take her time in answering the marriage
proposal, and, before the taking of a toast and tea, as the poet says, she leaps down the
rabbit hole in all her, and its, three dimensions.
Here, you would think, the story starts. But no. You see, this is not that story. This is a
meandering journey toward something that must have been very unclear to the director
himself, since he strains so very hard to pull the threads together. And there are so very
many threads: apparently, Alice trying to go back home and blundering across various
Wonderland loonies was too easy for Burton, who felt the need to spice it up with a
Knave who, rather than merely steal the tarts, broods and does evil things; a war between
the two queens who are sisters as different as, oh, blood-red and snow-white; a
bandersnatch who is, after all, quite nasty and therefore has his eye poked out, if only for
a while; and on top of it all, a dragon that Alice has to kill, because a scroll says so. (I’m
pretty sure Lewis Carroll would not have approved of this turn of events.)
Some of the scenes we loved in the book are changed or altogether absent from the movie
(the kitchen scene? Gone. The tea party? Disfigured. The trial? Hah.), in order to make
room for Burton’s new-fangled reading of why Alice is there and who she might be after
all. And some of the characters disappear or are rendered insignificant, freeing up space
4
for the battle of the queens – and, above all, for the actual highlight of the story.
Predictably, that is Johnny Depp.
With computer-enhanced eyes, a hat which sometimes is magic, while at other times it is
just a hat, a funky costume and a strange lisp that sometimes disappears to turns into a
Scottish accent – but only sometimes, mind you – Johnny Depp is meant to steal the
show, and makes every effort to do that. Sadly, he is not half as funny as he was meant
to, and neither can he be a valid replacement for the Victorian chap up there, still
awaiting Alice’s answer. So his relevance to the story is pure overkill.
While the movie is quite likely a vehicle for Depp’s freaky-comedic talents, it is Alan
Rickman as the caterpillar who, in fact, steals the show with the right mixture of
arrogance and irrelevance. Close behind are Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the twins
whom Burton sees as not merely mischievous, but almost evil; Stephen Fry as the
Cheshire Cat, close enough to the original to still remain funny while slightly vicious;
and the two queens. Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen is hysterical, unjust and full of
herself, her metaphorical big head rendered literal; and Anne Hathaway’s White Queen is
a neo-gothic peace princess, so artificial in her pose that you keep expecting her to snap
out of it and stab someone.
Next to them, Mia Wasikowa is a very bland-faced Alice; quite possibly, she is trying to
suggest that she herself does not understand much of what is going on, and is merely
struggling to get through with it. After all, it is rather unclear what killing a dragon that
has never harmed you, or threatened to harm you, might have to do with shaving your
legs.
In the end, Alice in Wonderland is a film for Burton fans who haven’t had too much of
him yet. Formally, the CGI-ed Wonderland/Underland looks wonderful, but sadly underuses its 3D possibilities. Content-wise, where Lewis Carroll went for the absurd, Burton
replaces it with violence; where Lewis Carroll possibly subtly suggested parallels or
allegories, Burton hits you over the head with the literal; where Lewis Carroll created
5
riddles, Burton creates confusion. If, however, there is one thing that Burton should be
commended for here, it is that he points out that Alice is not a cute Victorian children’s
tale, but a multilayered story way ahead of its time. But then, you already know that.
UNDERGRADUATE SECTION
On Homosocial “Secrecy” in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
by Andreea Breazu
Abstract: This paper is a follow-up of a seminar discussion where a question I could not answer was asked:
what is going on between Ishmael and Queequeg and particularly what is going on in Chapter 94?
Therefore it implied some research work so as to retrace the context. Central issues would be homosocial
brotherhood in the context of the history of sexuality (cf. Foucault), and why the very frequent mention of
sperm in “A Squeeze of the Hand” makes that chapter seem a delirium. It is not so much a set of
instructions on “how to read,” but rather of “how not to read (too much) into things” supported by
sometimes anecdotic pieces of (scientific) information.
Probably one of the most fertile manners of interpreting and varying the literary
meanings and cultural implications (in an anthropological view) of a book is through
misreading. Apart from being abusive, misreading can be relevant for the eye of the
reader as though it sheds light more on his beliefs and theories, revealing those
assumptions which shape the foundation of our day-to-day critical and analytical
thinking. The question I want to ask is what Moby Dick reveals today about 21st century
readers when it comes to approaching the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg
and a chapter like 94, “A Squeeze of the Hand.” The answer(s) should be found in a
historically contextual view over Melville’s novel while looking through the modifying
lens of varying structures of power.
A reference to Puritanism is not so far-fetched in correlation with mid 19th century
Moby Dick, and one cannot help wondering about it when stumbling upon phrases such
6
as: “You had almost thought I had been his wife” (Melville 36), “his bridegroom clasp”
(38), “and said henceforth we were married” (72), “in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and
Queequeg – a cosy, loving pair” (74). Although the author states that this bridal ritual
was a custom from Queequeg’s country, at the end of which the two men could call
themselves “bosom friends” (72), the explanation is not completely satisfactory since
there are prior references related to wife and bridegroom and they belong to the narrator
himself.
Therefore a look into Puritanism may indicate a hidden heritage of Ishmael’s
Christianity. Starting off from the premise that “The male roles possible within
Puritanism were complex and fluid” (Hughes 303), gender becomes a twofold problem
since men (members of the clergy in particular but not only) supplied both the role of a
husband and that of a bride, the bride of Christ that is. Marital imagery was used to
suggest closeness to God; consequently this emotional investment would lead to
feminizing men and women altogether. The avowed purpose of all this should be a better
understanding of one’s faith and relationship with God through “gendered contrasts”
(Hughes 304). Also, it is here that the first developments of homosocial ties appear as
necessary and essential to building a strong community.
The encyclopedic character of Moby Dick is indebted to the 18th century of
classification, it serves as a parody but also as a monumentalizing strategy of the novel,
so rich in information about whales. But whales were not the only object of exhaustive
study, sex was too. In the History of Sexuality Foucault claims that the plain approach to
sexual domain in a scientific and medical way is a result of power mechanisms, enforced
upon the society in order to better control and manipulate it. But this is no conspiracy
theory. The “incitement to talk about sex” was politically, economically and technically
motivated “and not so much in the form of a general theory of sexuality as in the form of
analysis, stocktaking, classification, and specification, of quantitative or causal studies”
(Foucault 23-24).
To further clarify things, one might consider relevant the fact that the term
“homosexual” preceded in popularization that of “heterosexual” (interdependent words)
and subsequently the gender determination implied a sexual orientation, be it
homosexuality or rather heterosexuality. The key-information here is that “of the very
7
many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated
from that of another […], precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the
turn of the century, and remained, as the dimension” (Sedgwick 8-9).
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, probably the first two
sexologists, deployed the research work upon which the first attempts of defining a
homosexual identity were made as late as the end of the 19th century. Jay Hatheway
brings into discussion literary images from around the 1850s (Whitman and Melville are
mentioned too) claiming that they “celebrated same-sex attraction in a myriad of
situations even though the notion of a specific, homosexual identity in opposition to a
heterosexual one remained unstated” (53). The problem here arises from a contradiction
with Sedgwick’s “amazing” historical fact: if the sexual orientation dimension was
established so late could literary subtext allusions be pointing to such a binary identity?
Or is literature so insightful and subversive as to foretell the “coming freedom” 1?
In this matter I resonate with Caleb Crain’s opinion that “it would not have
occurred to Melville that male sexual desire for men was something that needed to be
affirmed (or denied)” (242). Therefore, the confusion is caused by a subcategory of
misreading, the paranoid reading: we think we know what is going on precisely because
it was not stated openly, and it is a common tendency to take any hint for an
understatement in this day and age of euphemisms and political correctness. The
examples are not scarce: “jumping into bed with me,” “giving a sudden grunt of
astonishment he began feeling me” (Melville 33), “comely looking cannibal” (34),
“Queequeg’s arm thrown over my in the most loving and affectionate manner” (36),
“sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly” (38), “now and then affectionately
throwing his brown tattooed legs over me, and then drawing them back; so entirely
socially and free and easy were we” (75).
This sort of not understanding homosexuality is typical in Melville’s 19th century.
Curious enough, modernity preserves the inkling as a relic of that time, or in Foucault’s
(brilliant) phrasing: “What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they
1
“If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that
one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such
language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he
somehow anticipates the coming freedom” (Foucault 6).
8
consigned sex to a shadow existence, but they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad
infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.” (35). Perhaps this is exactly what a
contemporary misreading of Melville supposes: a sexual overinterpretation of the
bedfellows’ relationship, seen as undisclosed homosexuality going hand in hand with
certain sailor stereotypes.
Reconsidering the same quotes from the novel from an ironist view, one realizes
that homoeroticism had narrowed the possible meanings down to only one while the
“comical predicament” includes them all without contradictions. The comedy emerges
from powerful contrasts and there is nothing as contrasting as Ishmael and Queequeg on
their first meeting: on the one hand, Ishmael is “a sort of country bumpkin, a pedant, a
sidekick, and a tyro” (Kelley 72) and on the other, Queequeg is “cannibal savage, pipesmoking confidant, magnificent and also terrifying tattooed body, and superb athlete”
(idem). Summing up this matter, humor is a much more permissive category of
interpretation allowing the common reader both a satisfactory laughter and a selfsatisfactory “I know what’s going on” smirk.
The most important aspect of this relationship is how it functions inside the whole
of the novel. It has been noted by several literary critics that the novel lacks close human
relationships given the toughness of sea life and the bosom friendships are the only such
instances, while at the same time pushing the story forward. “Starbuck, Stubb, Flask,
Daggoo, Tashtego, Fleece, Pip, and Fedallah often seem more props than characters,”
says Wyn Kelley in The Blackwell Companion to Melville, rendering obvious the lack of
other personal relationships. But if there is no friendship, there is an undeniable spirit of
solidarity, the kind that is amalgamated into a masculine mass and discards individual
identity: “as a mass, the men represent a world of epic labor […] lodged in the
multiracial and multinational forecastle” (Kelley 73).
This mass is not just any international mass, it is a “homosocial brotherhood” (84)
as Greven describes in his article, pointing out that in America “the fetish for fraternity”
(99) has a metonymical relation with the obsession for community. There is a link
between this homosociality and the models of utopias, noticeable in Melville’s Chapter
94:
9
“[while squeezing the lumps out of the sperm into fluid] at last I was continually squeezing their hands,
and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, – Oh! My dear fellow beings, why
should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us
squeeze our hands all around; nay, let us squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves
universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.” (607)
The homosocial bonding that takes place here uplifts Ishmael’s spirits and inspires him
with a vision of a better world, an idealistic one. Although American literature has a
tradition of the loner, the outsider who is defined in opposition with this kind of
brotherhood, appearing to reject the compulsory homosocial ties, here there is no rebel.
And no need for one either. As Greven sums it up, male friendship is “retooled as utopian
homosocial brotherhood, devoid of the threat of male rivalry and enmity, associations
with misogyny, and the taint of homoeroticism” (100-101). Therefore this is no longer
about starting new from scratch in another land, nor about strengthening a young
community, but about a resistance movement in front of a contemporary reality, that of
industrialization and capitalism which had proved to be greater evils than expected. The
only way to fight back the decaying of morals and cruel competitiveness was by working
together.
In the same frame of discussion, this joyous chapter of the squeezing of the sperm
could be correlated with that 19th century fear against which writers warned men: semen
was to be saved and not spent irrationally because that meant wasting “valuable energy
that could be used to work” (White 4). On the Pequod too sperm was the most precious
substance, and if “one ounce of semen equaled forty ounces of blood” (5), claimed a
health reformer, the spermaceti was deductible in money and food. The nominal
confusion of sperm and spermaceti was finally cleared and according to the
Encyclopædia Britannica it is: “a wax, liquid at body temperature, obtained from the
head of a sperm whale” that had been mistaken for “the coagulated semen of the whale.”
Useless to say how amusing it should be for a reader nowadays, unaware of this
definition and paranoid (in a Foucaldian sense) about the secret.
The best metaphor of the novel for the homosocial tie must be the monkey-rope,
the one used to link together Ishmael and Queequeg while one is on the deck and the
other on the whale secured by the boat. Melville resumes the marital image; they were
10
united “for better or for worse” (466), yet the cord is more than a symbol for the
homosocial bond, it is incorporated into both of them and it induces a change in
mentality: Ishmael reconsiders his own individuality from the point of view of this
couple. It is a commitment taken in life and death and this utter dependency on the other
inflicts the “free will” with “a mortal wound.” So here is the homosocial brotherhood
clear of anything laughable and of any suspicion of sexual denial. Taking this to a larger
scale, the revelation should be “the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only,
in most cases, he, one way or another, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of
other mortals” (Melville 467).
Anachronism is more than a mistake, it should be considered a sin – it gives one such
guilty pleasures. It is precisely an anachronism that makes us so suspicion of what is not
said in the more intimate episodes between men from Moby Dick. Adding to this, some
preconceptions related to sea-comrades, so many men away from land for such a long
time, it becomes a matter of what we know to be clearly going on. Such an approach is,
superfluous to say, superficial. As I hope to have pointed out, homosocial relations are
more complex and in a way unrecoverable for a reader of the 21st century living in a
flourishing time for practicing the freedom of sexuality and sexual behaviors, fetishisms
and curiosities as diverse as the law allows. Plus the policy of intimacy is more sacred
than anything else. None of this goes for Melville, or for Ishmael and Queequeg.
Therefore Melville is not trying to be secretive about what is really going on, and he is
oblivious to homosocial correctness. A misreading of Moby Dick tells us a great deal
about ourselves (our current selves) and makes us aware of how much things have
changed – not just in terms of emancipation of “perversion” in the context of intimacy,
but in our view of friendship, especially of brotherhood. We may still be laughing
(probably nervously) at two homosexuals and their bed-blunders, we may very well be
conservative and resent the sperm “orgy” in Chapter 94, but we cannot seem to be able to
retrace the feeling of comradeship, that tie that binds you for life or death, that solidarity
that keeps you sane while at sea. Maybe that is the most troubling insight Melville’s
novel has to offer to a (post)postmodern reader.
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Works Cited:
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. E-Books Directory - Categorized Books, Short Reviews,
Free
Downloads.
Web.
19
Jan.
2010.
<http://www.e-
booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=374>.
Crain, Caleb. "The Heart Ruled Out: Melville's Palinode." American Sympathy: Men,
Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. 238-71.
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Greven, David. “Troubling Our Heads about Ichabod: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,"
Classic American Literature, and the Sexual Politics of Homosocial Brotherhood.
“American Quarterly - Volume 56, Number 1, March 2004. 83-110.
Hatheway, Jay. The Gilded Age Roots of American Homophobia. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003. 1-61.
Hughes, Ann. "Puritanism and gender." The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism
(Cambridge Companions to Religion). New York: Cambridge UP, 2008. 294-309.
Kelley, Wyn. "Part III. Writing New Gospel in Moby-Dick and Pierre." Herman Melville,
An Introduction (Blackwell Introductions to Literature). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
57-82.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Introduction." Epistemology of the Closet. Los Angeles:
University of California, 2008. 1-12.
"spermaceti." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 19 Jan.
2010 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/559400/spermaceti>.
White, Kevin. "Introduction." The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male
Heterosexuality in Modern America (American Social Experience Series). New York:
New York UP, 1992. 1-16.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” as a Feminist Comment on the Condition of Women at the
Turn of the Century
by Irina Constantin
12
Abstract: The purpose of my paper is to show how Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
fits perfectly the feminist theories dealing with the unbalanced relationship between the sexes at the
beginning of the 20th century. As an argument, I use Hélène Cixous’s ″The Laugh of the Medusa ,″ a
theoretical essay charged with the energy of a true manifesto. The author’s statement of using her own
post-partum depression experience as an inspiration for the short novel becomes a starting-point for my
essay. Her great achievement is, in my opinion, the fact that she has managed to upgrade a personal
traumatic episode into a tag of feminist struggle.
The purpose of this paper is to show how Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The
Yellow Wallpaper” is the perfect illustration not only of the author’s social views, but
also of the entire feminist movement that had gained strength at the end of the nineteenth
century and beginning of the twentieth. American critic Elizabeth Ammons thinks that,
although feminist theoreticians have taken into account and emphasized different aspects,
all in all, their work is a unitary one. What they have all struggled to affirm since the
1770s and have truly managed starting with the turn of the nineteenth century is that a
wrong, unbalanced relation between men and women has been rooted in people’s way of
thinking, stemming from irrelevant physical differences and the prejudice they had
triggered.
Gilman herself made it clear that the story was a parable of her own situation. In a
short, revelatory article of 1913 (‘Why I wrote ‘‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’’’) she writes
about how for many years she “suffered from a severe and continuous nervous
breakdown, tending to melancholia,” and how her physician advised her to live “as
domestic a life as possible,” and “never to touch pen, brush or pencil again, as long as I
lived.” She later wrote that her purpose was to “reach Dr S. Weir Mitchell [the specialist
in nervous diseases] and teach him the error of his ways’” (Scofield 97-8). Therefore,
using her own real experience of a post-partum depression, Gilman writes “The Yellow
Wallpaper” in the form of a fragment detached from a young woman’s secretly kept
diary. The narrator is, for all intents and purposes, being kept hostage in an old mansion
in the countryside, by her therapist husband John and his sister, Jenny. What is thought to
be a “temporary nervous depression – a slightly hysterical tendency” at the beginning,
grows bigger and bigger and surprises even the “high standing” physician (Gilman 1).
Maybe not maliciously, but decisively doing it, the man finds that it is his job to protect
13
his wife, and the easiest way to protect is by manipulating her. The pacifying wife
accepts her husband’s behavior, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in a
marriage″ (Gilman 1), meanwhile trying to escape from his observation and continuing
with her own dreams and thoughts, and doing what she is not allowed to do outspokenly.
Because she would only express her fear of the scary room in writing, her thoughts being
trapped and kept in her diary, her mental state will get worse. The difference between the
woman’s and the man’s minds cannot be seen by the physician, and this is why he will
prescribe the wrong medication and treatment. By oppressing her thinking he will push
her towards amplifying her illness of the mind, and by asking his sister to guard her, he
will just prompt his wife to isolate herself.
This is a great example of the phallocentric theory (discussed in Hélène Cixous’s
“The Laugh of the Medusa”), and will be found in several other works of fiction of the
time (such as “Tristan” by Th. Mann or “Nora” By H. Ibsen), in a more similar or
different form, but as unfitted and unbalanced as in this case. In the safety of her rest
hours, in her unwelcoming bedroom, the woman would write: “(...) and am absolutely
forbidden to ’work’ until I am well again” (1), “There comes John’s sister (...) I must not
let her find me writing” (6). Although she trusts her husband’s knowledge, her intuition
tells her that he is not right: “John is a physician, and - perhaps (I would not say it to a
living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) perhaps that is
one reason I do not get well faster.” (1); “Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me
good.” (1); “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more
society and stimulus -- but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my
condition” (2). Her sedentary and unproductive life worsens her state of mind. She starts
analyzing the space surrounding her and begins thinking that the old, unaesthetic
wallpaper in her bedroom hides behind its pattern a woman, trapped between the lines. In
the end, the stupefied husband will find his wife lost in the imaginary world she had
discovered in the paper. Overwhelmed by his medical and also human failure, he will
faint, his unconscious act of surrender becoming a statement that men can also be
overtaken by what was dubbed at the time “female insanity” (or any other kind of acts
and ways).
14
Although the short text lacks great action, as it was shown, the fictional
relationships between the characters provide obvious referrals to the real society of the
age. In a time when women were treated as minors or slaves and resembled a piece of
property in their fathers’ or husbands’ hands, cases of nervous breakdowns, “baby blues”
or other mental disorders were frequent and thought to occur because of their native
weakness. The most frequent solution therapists would use was the one prohibiting any
intellectual activity, and this was one of the facts that would prompt feminists to fight for
their social rights: “[“The Yellow Wallpaper”] is also, of course, more than a tale of one
woman’s psychological delusions, but stands as a representative symbol of the oppression
of nineteenth-century women – and in particular women’s writing – by male authority”
(Scofield 97).
Thus, the surreptitious writing in the diary resembles women’s attempts of
publishing literature in the time Gilman lived. “The Laugh of the Medusa,” written by
Cixous in 1975 and designed in the form of a one-of-a-kind theoretical essay, is charged
with an amount of energy and a sort of passionate intensity specific to true manifestos.
Cixous’s aim is to bring into discussion the condition of the New Woman: “It is time to
liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming to know her,” to make women realize
that writing will provide them a place in the history of reason, that they are the only ones
who can write about themselves and that they are themselves and do not belong to men
(Cixous 2042). The French feminist thinker writes about what Gilman was trying to do
almost a century before – show to the world, and to women in particular, that their
specific ways were not being reproduced and distributed by men writers in a correct,
mimetic manner, but in a contorted one, because of the incapacity of understanding men
suffered from.
The way Gilman affirms this idea is by illustrating the entire relationship between
the two spouses, based on the well-known “pposed sexual stereotypes” (Madsen 81).
Their erotic, marital connection is almost inexistent, as he treats her as a spoiled patient
of his, investing no more in this case than in any other one he would meet in his career.
The wrong treatment shows the lack of understanding and, to some extend, of caring. His
ignorance causes serious damage to her mental condition, as his scientific data fail, while
her intuition had not. Therefore, the message for the women is that the only way of
15
getting to be represented truthfully and, more importantly, the only way of getting the
chance of entering history is by literature, just as the only way the narrator in “The
Yellow Wallpaper” can speak up about her issues, her fears and her visions is by writing
them in a diary no one else would read. Writing gains, therefore, much more than mere
aesthetic, artistic, maybe superficial valences, it gains the power to write history, to
project and influence reality: ″Gilman, [along with other early feminists] actively carried
into the new era a tenacious nineteenth century belief in the overt political – even
evangelical – function of literature″ (Ammons 40). Writing is no longer an act of
liberation, it is more than that: it becomes a chance of describing, creating, explaining.
Another fictional relationship is the one between the narrator and her sister-inlaw, which becomes interesting if we continue to see the text as mirroring the society
Gilman lived in. This is a surprising connection and, although it might seem dry at first
sight, it can truly bring new pathways of interpretation. The narrator describes her sisterin-law, Jenny, as being a sweet attentive girl, but still, she hides her diary from her. On
the other hand, Jenny becomes suspicious of the patient’s behavior and only sees her as
an unbalanced woman. She will only fulfill the job her brother has given to her, that is
feed and sometimes watch over the patient. The question that pops into any reader’s mind
(in the case of a lecture in a feminist key – as the text was written) is: why don’t they
have a relation based on complicity?
In my opinion, Jenny’s part in the text, as Gilman particularly designed it, is to
remind the reader that there always exist blind and weak people who prefer being
manipulated to taking a stand. Perhaps the women Jenny represents in the text are those
willing to bow down in front of the manipulating men, in family, social, and artistic life, a
category Gilman considers to be on the enemy’s side, rather than thinking of them as
being confused and juggled with. Serving as an engine for the energetic and determined
feminists, this passive group might have had their own part in the entire movement, as
they shown the activists what they themselves could have become if they had not
struggled until they succeeded (i.e. as a negative example).
Taking a real fact from her own life and from many other women’s and putting it
into fiction cost Gilman a few years of refusals and negative commentaries coming from
critics, editors or readers. Still, what she succeeded in doing by publishing it was
16
contribute in the most important way to the already strong feminist American movement.
She found an analogy between the late-Victorian cure and its ways of refraining women
from doing any intellectual activity and the way men were treating the representatives of
opposite sex in everyday life. The relationships between her characters are realistic and
obvious, and so is the idea she stresses. What she started as a fight against her doctor’s
wrong ways of taking care of his women patients turned into one of the most famous
feminist writings of the time, a clear illustration of the society she belonged to.
Works Cited:
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Project Gutenberg. 01 Nov. 1999.
Web. 21 Jan. 2010. <http://www.gutenberg.org>.
Ammons, Elizabeth, Conflicting Stories. American Women Writers at the Turn into the
Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press: New York, 1992
Cixous, Hélène. "The Laugh Of The Medusa." The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.
Madsen, Deborah L. Feminist Theory and Literary Practice. London: Pluto, 2000.
Scofield, Martin, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006
17
GRADUATE SECTION
A Room of One’s Own:
Negotiating Space and Identity in Mary Cassatt’s Images of Motherhood and
Leisure
by Olivia Bădoi
Abstract: Mostly remembered because of her affiliation with the Impressionist movement, Mary Cassatt is
more often than not brushed aside as a lightweight painter of domestic subjects and pastel scenery.
Recently rediscovered by feminist art historians as a painter who was very much aware of the gender
politics of her time, Cassatt's paintings have more to offer than just their aesthetic qualities. By looking at
some of her paintings from a gender perspective I intend to offer a brief insight into Cassatt's visual
rendition of the gender ideologies which defined Victorian America and the potentially subversive
connotations that might be attached to these works of art. With their careful negotiation of issues of gender
and class identity, Mary Cassatt's paintings bear an undeniable value as social and cultural testimonies
which succeeded in capturing the shifting gender ideologies of the time.
There are few artists whose work and lifestyle succeeds in capturing the
ambivalent positioning of nineteenth century American women better than Mary
Cassatt’s (1844-1926). At a time when the cult of domesticity and idealized womanhood
collided with the rise of a new sense of female identity, Mary Cassatt managed to walk
the fine line between resistance and compliance, as an artist as well as on a personal
level. Despite being praised as “the outstanding woman painter of the nineteenth century”
by some art historians such as Robert Hughes (256), Mary Cassatt is still widely
(dis)regarded, by art critics and the broader public alike, as a lightweight painter of the
American bourgeoisie’s domestic pursuits.
When a work of art is discussed solely from an art history perspective, the focus is
invariably and subjectively placed on the aesthetic rather than the oeuvre's socio-cultural
value. This is why there has been a recent attempt on the part of feminist and visual art
18
theorists to recuperate the work of Cassatt and other nineteenth century women artists as
cultural testimonies, highly instrumental in understanding the status and shifting
ideologies surrounding the upper-class women of Victorian America. Applied to Cassatt,
this has translated into a discussion of her portraits as visual reflections of the sociocultural mindset of late nineteenth century America, particularly the doctrine of separate
spheres and the cult of domesticity and their multiple correlations to female identity. In
the field of literature, a similar attempt has been conducted with regard to the work of the
so-called “scribbling women”, the female writers of domestic fiction whose work still
resides in the penumbra of the American literary canon.
By looking at a few of Cassatt's most influential representations of women in the
private space I hope to bring to light the artist's acute awareness of the class and gender
politics which dominated much of the nineteenth century. This awareness becomes
especially transparent when discussing Cassatt's use of space, public and private, in her
paintings. The concepts of space and spatiality are extremely relevant to any discussion
that deals with the visual arts, for the visual art object is experienced in terms of its
corporeality; the terms become all the more necessary for a better understanding of
Cassatt's work and its historical context.
Feminist art historian Janet Wolff argues that the ideology of separate spheres,
male and female, public and private, represents a socio-cultural construct “reinforced and
maintained by cultural ideologies, practices and institutions” (12). Wolff goes on by
arguing that this applies to women's role in the cultural production, as artists, patrons and
members of cultural institutions. However, Wolff insists that the aforementioned
ideology did not necessarily imply a kind of cultural determinism, for culture did not
merely reflect social divisions nor did it produce them.
Mary Cassatt's work has often been criticized for its alleged conformity to
patterns of conventional femininity, especially in its representation of the private space.
The crucial counterargument resides in the fact that Cassatt did not depict these women
as victims of domestic confinement. On the contrary, the artist succeeded in appropriating
the domestic space as a locus of female empowerment. For Cassatt’s sitters, women
reading, sewing, having tea or tending to children, their daily activities and the space of
their performance represent a constituent of the self. What is perhaps Cassatt’s greatest
19
merit is that she did not victimize, nor did she idealize her sitters, but managed to
articulate the experience of nineteenth century upper class women in a way that feels
genuine.
As I hope to illustrate in my analysis of Cassatt's reading women, the nineteenth
century female members of the bourgeoisie took pleasure in an activity that was deemed
improper for their fragile physical and emotional state. Moreover, there is a subversive
quality to the satisfaction these upper-class women received from performing daily
domestic activities, as these rituals excluded men much the way women were excluded
from the public realm.
Cassatt painted numerous works of women reading. The theme, popular with both
male and female artists, was by no means an original one. The fascination for the subjectmatter bears different connotations considering the limited access women had to literacy.
Perhaps one of Cassatt's most famous paintings of this respective theme is a depiction of
Mrs. Cassatt (the artist's mother) reading Le Figaro (fig. 1).
Fig.1 Reading Le Figaro. (Portrait of the Artist's Mother). 1878. Oil on canvas
We can see Mrs. Cassatt absorbed in her lecture of the French newspaper while
sitting comfortably in a gray flower-patterned armchair. The artist's mother is wearing a
light-colored dress and has her dark hair pinned back. She appears to be lost in her
reading and thoughts and the glasses on her nose emphasize this feeling of concentration
and abandonment. As it is often the case with Cassatt, the artist offers a very close
perspective of her sitter, providing the spectator with a feeling of close proximity and
intimacy. The mirror visible on the left hand side of the painting is meant to open up the
closed space and add some depth to the painting.. The newspaper is positioned at the
20
center of the painting, as if to testify “that mothers have more on their minds than just the
private affairs of the family.” (Conlon 53) It is also worth noticing that an upper-class
lady reading a newspaper would not have made a very common theme for a painting, as
the activity was considered far too mundane and to an extent, even masculine; which only
goes to show Cassatt’s interest in depicting the genuine, “unstaged” aspects of everyday
life.
What is interesting about Cassatt's imagery of reading women is that she seems to
have made a point of depicting representatives of various age groups.
Fig.2 Young Woman Reading. 1876. Oil on canvas
As the title points out, Young Woman Reading (fig. 2) shows a young woman
who, like Mrs. Cassatt, appears to be immersed in the lecture of the book in front of her,
placed on a cushion as to facilitate the reading. Unlike Mrs. Cassatt, this young woman
dons a more colorful dress with large bell-sleeves of a heavy silky material, blue and
peachy with salmon-colored stripes. Her undershirt is trimmed with an abundance of
white lace, an unmistakable sign of wealth. Cassatt often uses striped patterns, in the
clothes of her sitters or the backgrounds of her paintings, as subtle “in-built” axes that
help build the spatial structure of the painting. The young woman's coppery hair as well
as the warm nuances of her dress and the crimson and golden stripes of the sofa make for
a beautifully balanced composition. The soft rosey color of the woman's complexion, as
well as the overall glowing effect given by Cassatt's use of light create a warm
atmosphere of relaxation and lack of constraint. As with Mrs. Cassatt, this painting
21
breathes serenity and abandonment in lecture. Both women seem to have created their
own private universe, taking pleasure in their reading activity.
According to James Conlon, the imagery of women engaged in private lecture is
rooted in Christian iconography. Conlon goes on by arguing that there are “metaphorical
meanings inherent in the act of reading itself.” (38) The potentially destabilizing nature of
the act of reading carries an erotic connotation, one that refers to the union between
reader and writer in a Whitmanesque sense “It is I you hold, and who holds you, /I spring
from the pages into your arms..” (Whitman qtd. in Conlon 39), for the words that used to
be on the author's lips have been transferred through the act of reading onto the reader's.
Reading can also be a sensual experience as there is a tactile pleasure a book can offer,
given by the very texture of its pages.
Some of Cassatt's less known paintings of women reading such as Young Lady
Reading (fig.3)
Fig.3 Young Lady Reading. 1877. Oil on canvas.
seem to illustrate to a greater degree the eroticism of reading. The female figure in Young
Lady Reading is lying on a striped sofa in a pose rather uncommon for Cassatt's sitters,
with her left arm resting carelessly on a cushion. She looks a bit disheveled and she
seems to be wearing a daytime attire with white gloves and outdoor shoes. It is almost as
if she had just entered the door and rushed to go back to her own private universe,
without even bothering to change her clothes or take off her shoes. The little dog cuddled
up in the folds of her dress adds to the overall atmosphere of ease, relaxation and intimate
pleasure that the young woman is receiving from her book.
In his reflection on the eroticism of reading, Roland Barthes makes a distinction
between “the text of pleasure (plaisir)” and “the text of bliss (jouissance)” with the
22
former being “a 'comfortable' text and the latter one that 'discomforts', 'that unsettles the
reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions'' (Barthes qtd. in Conlon 39)
James Conlon traces the destabilizing potential of imagery of women reading back to the
depictions of the Annunciation. Consequently, he argues that the scene of a woman
reading “becomes, at least metaphorically, a scene of potential annunciation, a scene of
sexual subversion in which progeny can happen without male input.”(39) In Cassatt's
representations, the lack of male input is quite generalized.
Fig.4 Family Group Reading. 1878. Oil on canvas.
Conlon also argues that paintings such as Family Group Reading (fig.4) draw on
the “Christian iconography of Mary's mother, St. Anne, who is often depicted teaching
the virgin to read.” (53) The three subjects of the painting, two women and a little girl,
focus their attention on the same object: a book. The book is held by both one of the
women as well as the child. The two are seated on a bench while the other woman is
leaning on the back of the bench. The setting is an outdoor one, a garden or park. The two
women look alike but the age difference is too small for them to be mother and daughter.
They are most likely sisters and the little girl is probably the daughter of the woman
sitting next to her. The women wear light-colored clothes in a very similar shade of peach
while the child is dressed in white. All three subjects are fair skinned and blond-haired.
The inferred biological kinship might also function on a more metaphorical level,
symbolizing sisterhood, the shared experience of women. The close proximity of the
23
sitters evokes a feeling of intimacy and the child seems to be surrounded by both women
in a loving environment of protection.
A similar image can be seen in Nurse Reading to a Little Girl. The nurse, a young
woman dressed in a navy blue dress is holding a book for the little girl to see. The
oversized bell sleeves of her dress emphasize the idea of protection, creating a physical as
well as symbolic space of safety around the child. Conlon argues that images such as
Cassatt's Family Group Reading and Nurse Reading to a Little Girl claim “the neglected
truth that it is women who enact the crucial cultural transmission of both spoken and
written language.” (54) A comparison with Cassatt's portrait of her brother Alexander and
his son reading. (fig.5) seems to validate Conlon's theory.
Fig. 5 Portrait of Alexander Cassatt and His Son Robert. 1885. Oil on canvas
Cassatt's brother is portrayed as a middle-aged man sitting in a tawny armchair
reading the newspaper while his young son, about ten years old, is holding one arm
around his father's shoulders. However, despite the close space the two share, the
painting does not evoke the same feeling of intimacy as Family Group Reading. The
father is absently reading the newspaper while his son's eyes seem lost in space. The
practice of reading does not provide the same feeling of bonding and intimacy as in the
case of women reading together. On the contrary, it seems that the act of reading is
preventing the father from spending time with his son and thus each of them creates his
own universe that does not overlap with the other's. Perhaps Cassatt is trying to suggest
that the separation of spheres triggers different relationship patterns between parents and
their children. The male-female, public-private dichotomy is visibly marked by the artist's
choice of colors for each gender group: white for women and black for men.
24
There are very few Cassatt paintings that depict inter-gender interaction. The
Boating Party (Fig. 6) is arguably the most famous one.
Fig.6 The Boating Party. c. 1893/94. Oil on canvas
The work is extremely important both for its subject-matter and gendered implications
but also in terms of style and technique. Except for the Japanesque prints which define
the last part of Cassatt’s career, The Boating Party is perhaps one of Cassatt's least
Impressionistic works, mostly because of its unusual cropping and vivid colors. As the
title suggests, the three subjects of the painting, a woman holding a baby and an oarsman,
are sitting in a boat. The acid-yellow of the boat makes for a powerful contrast with the
intense blue of the sea and the pale yellow of the sail. The woman is wearing a lilac
checkered dress and a light-colored hat garnished with yellow flowers. The baby girl she
is holding, around two years of age, wearing a pink dress and a hat for sun protection,
seems to be restless. The sprawl of her legs is quite realistic and adds spontaneity and a
life-like quality to the painting. The oarsman, dressed in a dark navy blue attire and
matching beret, is positioned with his back toward the viewer.
Each of the painting's structural and stylistic elements helps build up an
atmosphere of strange tension between the subjects depicted. The man is a paid oarsman
on duty, he is taking a mother and her child to a particular destination. Is Mary Cassatt
trying to capture the awkwardness of sharing an extremely small space with a stranger?
Or is The Boating Party a subtle attempt at pointing to a double barrier, of gender and
class? Does the thwart of the boat, literally separating the oarsman and the woman,
function as a metaphorical barrier, as a reminder of the two separate spheres that the two
25
figures belong to? Both assumptions are probably correct. What is beyond doubt is
Cassatt's intention to delineate the space in her paintings along gender lines, as proved by
paintings such as The Boating Party and Woman and Child Driving (fig. 7).
The latter depicts a woman and a little girl, both sitting next to each other in a
carriage.
Fig. 7 Woman and Child Driving. 1881. Oil on canvas
The element of surprise is the fact that the woman is driving while the footman sits
passively behind them and we can only see part of his back. The woman is the one in
control, she is “a predecessor of the woman car driver of the twentieth century.”
(Borzello 159) There seems to be a concrete physical delimitation of space between the
female and the male figures in The Boating Party and Woman and Child Driving. The
difference between the two paintings resides in the degree of agency that the women
hold. The woman driving the carriage is obviously the possessor of a higher degree of
agency and control, as symbolized by her position in the driver's seat as well as the whip
and harness that she is holding. In both paintings the mature women are accompanied by
little girls, as if to point to their responsibility to set a good example for the new
generation of women.
Whether depicting scenes of apparent blissful domesticity or images of outdoor
gendered interaction between men and women, there is no doubt that Mary Cassatt was
aware of the changing moral, social and political landscape that American women were
facing at the end of the nineteenth century. Coined a “modern” woman by her
contemporaries, Cassatt, like most women of the time and of her social status, had to
carefully negotiate her modern, independent self (after all, she was a working woman
who never married) outside of the domestic sphere while in the same time keeping the
realm of the home as a locus of self-preservation for her bourgeois identity.
26
Cassatt succeeded in creating works of art that reflect the shifting ideological
construct of gender and femininity within late nineteenth century American culture. The
images of women engrossed in their daily activities that she so skillfully recorded and
transposed onto her canvas exude a certain ambiguity that often puzzles the twenty-first
century audience. Perhaps it is safe to conclude that her portraits did not blindly follow
the patterns of traditional and compulsory femininity, nor did they carry an overt feminist
agenda. In her uniquely subtle and intriguing way, Cassatt’s work leaves plenty of room
for interpretation.
Works Cited:
Borzello, Frances. A World of Our Own. Women as Artists. London: Thames&Hudson,
2000.
Conlon, James. “Men Reading Women Reading. Interpreting Images of Women
Readers”. Frontiers - A Journal of Women's Studies, vol. 26, June 2005
27
Hughes, Robert. American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. NY: Alfred
Knopf, 1997.
Wolff, Janet. “The Culture of Separate Spheres.” Feminine Sentences. Essays on Women
and Culture. LA, Berkley: University of California Press, 1990.
Visual sources:
Fig. 1, 2, 5, 6, 7:
Stable URL: http://www.abcgallery.com/C/cassatt/cassatt.html
Fig. 3, 4:
Stable URL: http://www.globalgallery.com/search.php?af=mary+cassatt
Television and Fear of Death in DeLillo’s White Noise
by Nicolae-Andrei Popa
Abstract: My essay aims to highlight two building blocks on which Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise rests:
fear of death and the influence of television on people’s lives. Both themes shape the characters’ actions
and fuel their desires and anxieties. Firstly, I set out to explore in what ways the two themes juxtapose one
another. Secondly, I am interested whether the overall effect of the novel is in unison with Frederic
Jameson’s view that postmodern fiction is generally related to a waning of affect. What part does irony
play here?
Published in 1985, Don DeLillo’s novel entitled White Noise is an ironic
response to the American postmodern era. As critic Frederic Jameson remarks in his book
Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992), postmodernism is,
historically speaking, the product of “a globalized economy in which power has shifted
from nation-states to huge conglomerates.” The consequences of this historical
28
phenomenon on literary aesthetics is that globalized economy “dominates every aesthetic
production of any kind and any place” (Duvall 80). As far as poetics is concerned, what
Jameson identifies as dominant features of postmodernist fiction are the waning of affect,
a weakening of historicity, the commodification of objects and human alike. Although I
do agree with the last two traits, I cannot agree with the waning of affect thesis when it
comes to DeLillo’s novel. As far as the style of the novel is concerned, the general
impression is that the style is objective and impersonal. However, the author’s use of
short, accurate sentences is an ingenious way of “trapping” or of “hiding” emotion. Irony
too is involved in this control of emotions. It is not the case that characters repress their
emotions, but when they talk, emotion is often involved. Fragments from the text will be
subsequently analyzed in order to prove this point.
The aim of this paper is to show how two main themes of the novel function and
complement one another. Television is given an important role in the narrative. I would
venture to say that television manages to become a character in itself. It shapes identities,
binds a family, triggers strong emotions and is taken for granted as the voice of Truth. On
the other hand, television is one of the mediums which produce white noise, linking it
directly to the novel’s title. The other theme to be discussed, that of death, is an
existential theme inscribed in the postmodern condition. Jack Gladney and his wife
Babette fear it in different ways and Murray Siskind finds it a most interesting subject of
discussion.
The omnipresence of TV and consumerism is punctuated by scenes with
“disembodied voices and lists of brand names.” Indeed, as critic Mark Osteen has noticed
in his Introduction to the novel, the products of consumerism mingle with encyclopedic
knowledge. As a matter of fact, the TV is always on in the novel. Rarely does a domestic
scene develop smoothly, uninterrupted by TV audio messages. There are two reasons
why the Gladneys reunite in front of the TV set every Friday night. On the one hand, it
helps keep the hybrid family together. Be it artificial and impersonal, it holds the family
together triggering emotional responses and teaching encyclopedic knowledge. As a
colleague of Jack’s puts it, “For most people there are only two places in the world.
Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to
find it fascinating, whatever it is” (66). Such a statement implies that television is still
29
capable to enchant an apparently disenchanted world. On the other hand, Jack scrutinizes
television since it causes “fears and secret desires” (85). To reduce the "brain-sucking
power" of television, the Gladneys force their children to watch it with them every Friday
evening. Irony occurs when disasters are shown, for television's power is increased,
rather than reduced, as Jack notices, “There were floods, earthquakes, mud slides,
erupting volcanoes. We'd never before been so attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly.
(...) Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more
sweeping” (64). This comment by Tom LeClair is an opportunity to draw the attention to
an issue present in today’s media as well: the television audience’s wish to see terrible
news on TV. Nowadays, catastrophes receive state of the art coverage and gather millions
of viewers in front of the TV.
Although Gladney has the impression that he can reduce his children’s number
of hours spent in front of the TV set, he is wrong. The traditional parents of “patriarchal
societies” are replaced by a machine that structures the minds of all family members. In
White Noise, it is the TV that has “pastoral power” over its “subjects”. Heinrich, the
fourteen year old son of Jack and Steffie, Jack’s daughter, best exemplifies the great
influence that television can have on young people. For a more accurate description of
Heinrich’s and Steffie’s personalities, we may recall the post-structuralist argument that
“it is not the subject who speaks language, but language which speaks the subject”
(Kearney 181). Although still in his teens, Heinrich’s competence in the field of science
is very high. While managing to amaze his sisters with his knowledge, his father is
sometimes skeptic of his comments, sometimes ironic. It is Heinrich that warns Jack of
the menace posed by the radiation from electronic devices, a threat even greater than that
of the airborne toxins. Jack actually refrained from telling his view on the true nature of
scientific discoveries: “I wanted to say that he would learn to regard all such catastrophic
findings with equanimity as he matured, grew out of his confining literalism, developed a
spirit of informed and skeptical inquiry, advanced in wisdom and rounded judgment, got
old, declined, died” (175). Irony in the passage is produced by the intermezzos where the
narrator comments upon Heinrich’s table manners: “A tension seemed to be building
around the question of whether he could finish the gravy before the potatoes collapsed”
(idem). Again, television is related to death, to anomalies: “Forget headaches and
30
fatigue," he said as he chewed. "What about nerve disorders, strange and violent behavior
in the home? There are scientific findings. Where do you think all the deformed babies
are coming from? Radio and TV, that's where" (ibid). As for Steffie, her most famous
scene in the novel takes place in the shelter. In her sleep, she utters the words of a car
brand. Watching her sleep and hearing her say these words was to Jack the equivalent of
a mystic experience: “How could these near-nonsense words, murmured in a child's
restless sleep, make me sense a meaning, a presence? She was only repeating some TV
voice. Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida. Supranational names, computergenerated, more or less universally pronounceable” (155). In postmodernism, the
language of science and the language of commodity goods manage to structure the
individual. It is language that has power over the consumer and not vice versa.
The last section of the essay will focus exclusively on the theme of death, as it
appears in White Noise. Critic Brian McHale acknowledges the fact that postmodernist
fiction replaces “the articulation not of larger, more dramatic emotions to which
modernist fiction is keyed but of an extraordinary range of minor, banal dissatisfactions”
(21). This statement is in relation to Jameson’s idea that postmodernism is related to the
waning of affect. Although it may apply to postmodernist novels such as John Barth’s
The Floating Opera or Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the waning of affect
does not apply to White Noise because it is a novel very much concerned with existential
themes. From Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste onwards, irony proved to be a rhetorical tool
capable of bantering any serious talk of destiny or the meaning of death. Irony is one of
those slippery narrative instruments that can bring about uncertainty about the revelation
of a truth of any kind. To turn to DeLillo, his extensive use of irony does not mean that
strong emotions are not expressed in the novel. The fact that Jack is able to forgive
Babette’s infidelity does not mean he is taking their marriage lightly. Although it is his
fifth marriage, his feelings for Babette are strong and their dialogues prove this. Some of
the best dialogues in the novel refer to thanatophobia. This is what Jack tells his wife
about the experience of coping with death as potential threat: “How strange it is. We have
these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk
around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and
real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while?”
31
(198). In White Noise, time is an obsessive countdown whose only finality is death. The
next four lines in the chapter make the connection with the title of the book:
“What if death is nothing but sound?” [Jack]
“Electrical noise.” [Babette]
“You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful.”
“Uniform, white” (idem).
As Murray Siskind explains to Jack, science is so vulnerable when it is confronted with
the mystery of man’s death: “Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a
new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent” (150). In short, this is
what Murray thinks the nature of “modern death” is.
Although Jack does not seek religious consolation in particular, he is amazed at
the nun’s attitude in the hospital where he is treated for his wound towards the end of the
novel. Gladney was shocked when he realized that the nun was not a true believer: “Our
pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious
than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, people find it
more necessary than ever that someone believe.” Exploiting the widespread lack of
belief, the nun is an impostor, but her code of gestures and of clothing still make her
status still recognizable. She has become sign whose original meaning has been lost.
Hinting at the idea that true monastic tradition is no longer what it used to be, the nun
wants to at least support the concept of Truth and to make possible other people’s
agnosticism: “Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools,
idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues” (319).
In the end, neither Jack nor Babette manage to find a remedy for their fear of
death. While it is true that both have tried to keep their private fears at bay, death itself
proves to be a meaningless passion when the setting is that of a B-movie thriller. Mink,
the grotesque anti-hero, becomes Jack’s double. Surrounded by white noise, in a space of
simulacrum, even death demonetizes itself. Once you are a character in a serial movie
about jealousy, one’s death is nothing more than a soap opera whim. As for the narrator,
he cannot offer any cure for thanatophobia, but can certainly describe its symptoms. At
the end of the story, we are left with a beautiful “postmodern sunset” to ponder upon
what we have just read.
32
Works Cited:
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Picador, 1984
Duvall, N. John. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, Cambridge University
Press, 2008
Kearney, David. “The Postmodern Imagination.” Poetics of Imagining. New York:
Fordham University Press, 1998
LeClair, Tom. “Closing the Loop: White Noise”. Don DeLillo. White Noise. New York:
Penguin, 1998
McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism, New York: Routledge, 1992
Osteen, Mark. “Introduction.” Don DeLillo. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1998
It Ain’t No Fairy Tale: Escaping the Ghetto in Boyz n the Hood and Precious: Based
on the Novel Push by Sapphire
by Elena-Adriana Dancu
33
Abstract: In this essay I am analyzing two instances of the American ghetto film and interpreting the stories
they tell as rites of passage. I am going to look at how and if the young protagonists of Boyz n the Hood and
Precious manage to survive and escape South Central L.A. and Harlem, respectively, by drawing on
theories of Film Studies scholars Manthia Diawara and bell hooks and by employing Cathy Caruth’s
reading of traumatic experiences. Ultimately, I believe that, although both Precious and Tre Styles are
empowered to reject the images of African-American youth constructed by mainstream media, only Tre is
able to start a new life outside the ghetto.
The purpose of this essay is to read Boyz n the Hood (1991) by John Singleton
and Precious (2009) by Lee Daniels as samples of rites of passage, and compare the
representations of maturing within the African American community depicted in the two
films. While there are many differences between the style of filming, story-line,
protagonists, I believe that a comparison between the two films might be useful in
evaluating the evolution of the ghetto film over a span of almost two decades. I also
intend to look at the filmic representations of South Central Los Angeles and Harlem,
both of which focus on one form or another of violence, be it gang violence and harsh
policing, or physical and sexual abuse within Black families. What is more, I would like
to analyze trauma as one of the main issues behind such occurrences of violence, within
the framework devised by Cathy Caruth. At the end of the two films, it seems that both
protagonists have reached adulthood and are thus empowered to leave behind the ghetto
and forge a new way of living. However, it seems to me that this is not the case for
Precious, the heroine of the film by the same name, who, as empowered as she may feel,
does not actually find a way out of the ghetto the same way as Tre Styles does. At the
same time, I am going to draw on Manthia Diawara’s interpretation of Boyz n the Hood
in “Black American Cinema: The New Realism” and use his framework to comparatively
assess how the young protagonists grow up and overcome their trials.
According to Black film scholars such as Manthia Diawara and bell hooks, Black
independent films such as the two under discussion in this essay provide the audience
with alternatives to the mainstream, Hollywood representations of African Americans.
Diawara argues that D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) set the tone for
Hollywood’s handling of race and race relations for the next century, by fixing Black
34
people in certain stereotypical roles, such as villains and criminals, which have always
been a “problem, a thorn in America’s heel” (3). As a consequence, the purpose of
independent film-making has been to denounce racism, sexism and homophobia and tell
stories of Black people without any reference to the White world (Diawara 4), or in
Cornel West’s words during his 2004 conversation with Toni Morrison, to “just take for
granted the fundamental humanity of black people. You [Morrison] just assume that
black folks are like everybody else. They’re human beings. Because that’s a
revolutionary notion in a civilization deeply shaped by white supremacy” (20). bell hooks
remarks in the essay “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” that even
African American film-makers such as the reputed Spike Lee may replicate mainstream
patriarchal cinematic practices in their representation of women as “the object of the
phallocentric gaze” (298). This also happens, I might add, in hip hop culture; rap songs
and song-writers often depict women as “hoochies,” “hoes,” and “bitches,” as a female
character in Boyz n the Hood rightly points out. However, for the most part, African
American films do not single out Blackness through stereotyping, but rather choose to
marginalize Whiteness (5); similarly, ghetto films, which generally deal with race
conflicts in urban poverty-stricken areas, depict Blacks not as objects to the will of the
police and other state authorities, but as subjects enacting their own will.
Boyz n the Hood takes place in South Central L.A. and spans over a period of time
from 1984 to 1991, following the trials and tribulations of Tre Styles (Cuba Gooding Jr.)
and his friends, and their conflicts with the police and Black gangs. The film’s motto is
also a hint at its moment of climax: “One out of every twenty-one Black American males
will be murdered in their lifetime. Most will die at the hands of another Black male.”
Diawara accurately evaluates this ghetto film as both a rite of passage about “the Black
man’s journey in America” and a strongly didactical story which cautions the viewers,
trying to implement a politics of caring for the community (21). I would argue that
Precious might be interpreted as a rite of passage as well, but Lee Daniels depicts the
journey toward adulthood of Claireece ‘Precious’ Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), an
overweight, illiterate, poor, sexually and physically abused African American teenage
girl. This film, too, has a motto: “Everything is a gift of the Universe” by Ken Keyes, Jr.,
and although it is more metaphorical, it hints at Precious’s passage from self-loathing and
35
abuse to self-acceptance and empowerment. Both films have relatively traditional, linear
story-lines, but Precious is interrupted by occasional flights into fantasy: whenever she is
faced with humiliation and hardship, Precious escapes in a world of her own, where she
is a movie star attending red-carpet events, or a singer starring in her own music video, or
taking part in Vogue fashion photo shoots. I would argue that, in spite of all this, both
films are representative of the realistic style of the new Black cinema discussed by
Diawara, because the narrative time coincides with the events unfolding chronologically
in the lives of the characters.
After the divorce of his parents, Tre moves in with his father, Furious Styles
(Laurence Fishburne), because his mother Reva (Angela Bassett) is worried that he might
turn to alcoholism, drugs or gang violence without the supervision of a man, and she is
proven right by the end of the film. Seven years later, under his father’s influence, Tre is
a well-adjusted teenager, doing his best to survive both the violence inflicted upon the
hood, or the ghetto by gangs and the authoritative police―shootings, sirens and
helicopters are constant companions of the characters. As he is getting ready to graduate
from highschool, his best friend and neighbour Ricky Baker (Morris Chestnut), who
wants to leave the ghetto with his young girlfriend and son by any means, be it an athletic
scholarship or joining the army, is mortally shot in the back by a gang with whom he had
had a prior conflict. Ricky’s brother, Doughboy (Ice Cube), who, unlike him, spends
most of his time in and out of prison, avenges Ricky along with his friends and shoots the
three African Americans responsible for his brother’s death. Although he initially wants
to accompany them, in spite of his father’s warnings, Tre changes his mind and returns
home safely. He and his girlfriend Brandi (Nia Long) escape the cycle of unending
violence by going to college in Atlanta. Two weeks later, Doughboy is murdered; as the
motto had hinted, there is only half of a happy ending, as only one of the young African
American males depicted in the film is successful in starting a new life.
The story of Precious is quite similar, in some ways. The film starts in 1987
Harlem, when Precious is sixteen and pregnant the second time with her father’s child,
and follows only a year of her life. She lives with her abusive mother, Mary (Mo’Nique),
who collects welfare support for her and her daughter’s first child, Mongo (short for
“Mongoloid,” because she has Down syndrome), although Mongo is being cared for by
36
Precious’s grandmother. After being suspended from her old school on account of her
pregnancy, Precious starts attending an alternative program called “Each One, Teach
One” where she meets a dedicated teacher, Blu Rain (Paula Patton), and makes friends
with a wide array of teenagers living in the ghetto; it is here that Precious learns to read
and write, and it is here that she finds a safe haven for her and her son Abdul, after a
violent encounter with her mother.
With the help of her teacher, Precious finds a secure home in a halfway house for
her and her son, continues attending school and starts counseling sessions for victims of
incest. She receives a visit from her mother, who informs her that her father had died of
AIDS, and thus she finds out that both she and her mother are HIV-positive, although her
son is not. Finally, she briefly reunites with her mother in the presence of Mrs. Weiss
(Mariah Carey), a social worker who had been trying to help her find employment;
during this encounter Precious recovers her daughter Mongo and witnesses how her
mother admits she allowed Precious’s father to abuse her and abused her daughter in her
turn because she felt jealous, insecure and rejected, and because she needed someone to
make her feel good about herself. Precious informs her mother that she will never see her
again, and, at the end of the film, Precious is depicted confidently and proudly carrying
her two children.
Both Precious and Boyz n the Hood have a strongly didactical tone, as far as
cinematography, themes and characters are concerned; as Diawara argues, Boyz n the
Hood’s didacticism is revealed from the very beginning: in shots of the posters of Ronald
Reagan pierced by bullet holes; in children’s drawings of police helicopters, wanted men
and gang violence; in the camera’s insistence on liquor stores, homeless people and street
signs, which can be seen all over the hood and which limit the movement of the people
(22); in the perpetual motif of airplanes flying over the hood, away from such an enclosed
space (23); and ultimately in Tre’s victory over adversity. The cinematography is fairly
traditional and slow-paced, unlike Precious, which, I believe, is shot in a manner similar
to a documentary, with the possible exception of the fantasy sequences featuring Precious
as a film and music star, which present the viewer with a glamorous world with bright
colors and rapid camera movements.
37
The documentary style reinforces the powerful didactical message of the film, that
it is possible for a young African American teenager to grow into a confident woman
after surviving unspeakable abuse in the ghetto. However, Tre’s father, Furious Styles,
and Precious’s teacher, Blu Rain, are the most important to the instructive tone of the
films. Furious Styles is acknowledged by Tre’s friends as a “Malcolm,” as a preacher, as
the “central figure of judgement” (24). He gives Tre lessons on sex education, on the
responsibilities of fatherhood and tries to illuminate the people in the hood about Blackon-Black crime, the selling of drugs to African Americans, the importance of businesses
owned by African Americans for the regeneration of the ghetto from the inside out, and
on gentrification. 2 The name “Furious” carries a symbolic significance: although he is
angered by the perpetual cycle of violence in the ghetto, Furious is nevertheless quite
collected and self-contained, and chooses not to let his anger manifest itself through
violence, but rather through professional and personal achievement. He is the reason why
Tre develops what Diawara calls “a politics of caring” (9): he attends school and stays
alive, successfully transitioning to manhood. Diawara also emphasizes that, thanks to his
father, Tre becomes responsible toward the community (12); however, it is difficult for
me to agree with this last point; as I see it, Tre learns to become responsible and care
primarily for his own life. He and Brandi leave the community behind and move to a
completely different world; they both attend historically Black liberal arts colleges in
Atlanta (Morehouse and Spelman, respectively), and it is uncertain whether they ever
return to the ghetto in order to make a difference. Of course, it is possible to argue that
the only way to improve the lives of the people living in the ghetto is to attempt to
improve the lot of one African American at a time, but the poor state of urban ghettos in
the U.S. today proves that this has never been enough. 3 Boyz n the Hood offers solutions
for individuals: of surviving in the hood, of making an escape through educational
achievements, but I believe that it fails to provide solutions of improving the community;
the shootings and gang wars will most likely continue after Tre’s departure.
2
The process by which middle-class people move to a previously poor and degraded urban area, restore
and invest in it in order to make it suitable for their standards of living, and thereby displace lower-income
residents: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Gentrification
3
According to an article published in 2007 by the Illinois News Bureau
http://news.illinois.edu/news/07/0327ghettos.html
38
Blu Rain, the teacher who befriends and helps Precious overcome one of her
moments of crisis, is the most important figure for the didactical character of the film.
She is the one who first makes Precious aware of the love she deserves, and she is also
the one who helps her accept her body image. She plays a role similar to Tre’s father, by
directing the course of Precious’s life and helping her grow. However, Mrs. Weiss, the
social worker who reunites Precious to her mother toward the end of the film is also a
didactical character, because she is the one who draws a confession out of Mary,
Precious’s mother and because she is the one steering the reactions of the audience; her
attitude during the reunion most likely mirrors that of the viewers: she is disgusted and
furious, and at the same time feels pity and sympathy toward Mary and Precious.
Unlike the ghetto from Boyz n the Hood, the Harlem represented in Precious is
not a ghetto because of the presence of white surveillance, but rather because of the
overall Black violence and aggressivity. In Boyz n the Hood Tre and his friends are in
conflict with the police and with African American gangs for control over their lives
(Diawara 22). Tre is stopped and humiliated by a Black policeman because the media has
created a representation of all young African American males as dangerous gang
members, whose lives are not worth much. Diawara correctly argues that the people of
the hood are disempowered and confined because they have internalized the racism of the
Whites, and because they have accepted constructed stereotypes; Tre struggles to gain
agency and learns to reject these unilateral representations of himself (idem), and this is
the true nature of his victory. In Precious, whites are present only in the guise of social
workers and teachers; what makes Harlem a ghetto is the internalized violence. Precious
suffers the most at the hands of her parents and of other Black youths who harass her on
the street and at school. However, it might be argued that the poverty, the predominant
Black-on-Black violence, the representation of Mary as a welfare queen 4 and Precious’s
initial loathing of her body are also the responsibility of the Whites, of centuries of
racism and discrimination, and, most importantly, of trauma.
The internal violence of African American communities might be a result of
previous traumatic experience. Cathy Caruth views repetition as lying at the heart of the
4
She constantly demeans Precious by calling her stupid, and never encourages her to attend school,
sending her to the welfare office instead.
39
traumatic event, and, thus, it might be argued that the violence from the days of the
slavery, lynchings and segregation has become such an integral part of the African
American psychological structure that Black people cannot function without it even
nowadays, and thus inflict it upon themselves. In Unclaimed Experience. Trauma,
Narrative and History, Caruth claims that pain tells us about “the reality or truth that is
not otherwise available” (4). The voice that expresses trauma might not belong to the
speaking subject; sometimes, it can reach him or her only after having been wounded by
another. Thus, it might be argued that Mary inflicted violence upon her daughter and
allowed her husband to abuse Precious because she herself might have been physically
and sexually abused in the past, or she might have felt a lack of affection that prevented
her from showing affection toward her daughter and grandchildren. Similarly, Precious is
depicted in the film as aggressive toward colleagues from school and neighbours who
attempt to abuse her. For instance, she does not hesitate to punch Consuelo when the
latter makes offensive comments about her weight; her aggressivity could be interpreted
as her attempt to express the abuse to which she had been subjected.
Like Tre Styles, Precious succeeds in overcoming the issues concerning her body
image. From the beginning of the film, the viewer is made aware of the fact that Precious
has day dreams about her White Mathematics teacher; she even imagines him inviting her
to live with him in the affluent suburb of Westchester. Whenever she looks in the mirror,
she sees a beautiful, thin, blond girl. However, her teacher helps her shed the mainstream
representation of her as ugly and worthless, a stereotype that had been internalized by her
mother as well. As Precious starts counseling classes for victims of incest, she learns to
look in the mirror and accept herself as beautiful.
Mary Jones, Precious’s mother, seems to not only unquestioningly accept the
stereotyping of her daughter, but also that of herself as the welfare queen. What is more,
she encourages Precious to rely on the state’s support as well. Where does this stereotype
really come from? I would argue that, on the one hand, it is caused by what Frantz Fanon
called “the internalization – or better – the epidermalisation” (13) of the inferiority
complex felt by Blacks toward Whites, and, on the other, it comes from within the
African American community itself, which does not cease to perpetuate and feed into
these types of unilinear representation of Black women. According to Patricia Hill
40
Collins’s Black Feminist Thought, a better suited name for such stereotypes is controlling
images, i.e. the mammy as the “good Black mother, the faithful and obedient domestic
servant” (73), the matriarch as the “dangerous, deviant, castrating Black mother” (75),
the jezebel, the whore or the hoochie as the “sexually aggressive wet nurse” (81), the
Black lady, a more benign controlling image of middle-class single professional women,
which are usually seen as “too assertive” (idem). All these images justify and support not
only racial oppression, but also the widespread sexual assaults committed by White men.
The welfare mother, or the welfare queen, on the other hand, provides ideological support
for the constructing of African Americans as lazy; she is deemed to be the cause of her
own poverty: she lacks the support and care of a man, she has low morals and she is
unable to control her sexuality. Thus, the victims of poverty receive the blame for their
own state and also for the increasing deterioration of the American way of life (80-81).
All in all, these stereotypes combined with race, class and gender oppression represent
White male perspectives and help justify the system of domination present in the U.S.
(84), but they seem, at the same time, to have been accepted and internalized by the
African American community. This “epidermalisation” of racial oppression is one of the
factors that make Harlem a ghetto world, and, like the unending cycle of violence from
South Central L.A., it is almost impossible to escape.
According to Manthia Diawara, Black cinema’s mission is primarily
emancipatory; films such as those analyzed in this paper display a straightforward critical
attitude toward Hollywood representations of African Americans (7), and often present a
self-sufficient Black world, barely mentioning any Whites. However, this begs the
question whether Boyz n the Hood and Precious offer concrete solutions for escaping
urban poverty in ghettoes. As I have argued above, I believe that John Singleton’s film
does provide ways out and ways to survive, albeit in a didactic fashion. Tre Styles not
only survives in the hood, but he also manages to pull himself up by the proverbial
bootstraps through educational achievements and following his father’s careful guidance.
Precious, too, receives loving supervision from Ms. Blu Rain, learns to read and write,
flees her abusive mother’s house and, at the end of the rite of passage, appears to be an
empowered and self-accepting Black woman. Be that as it may, Precious still is a 17year-old unemployed mother of two children (one of them with special needs); she is
41
HIV-positive, lives in a halfway house and her reading level is that of a 7th-grade student.
She may feel stronger and more optimistic than in the beginning, but the fact of the
matter is that Lee Daniels’s film does not take her out of the ghetto. It is a story of
survival, not of survival and escape, like Boyz n the Hood.
In May 2009, at the Cannes International Film Festival, Precious received a sixminute long standing ovation. 5 The same happened at film festivals at Sundance and in
New York, where it won awards for acting, directing and screenplay. After his success at
Cannes, Lee Daniels declared that he felt reluctant to show Precious because he worried
it showed African Americans in a negative light. From this statement it would follow that
Precious, despite being an independent ghetto film by an African American director, 6
with an almost all-Black cast, still promotes less than flattering images of African
Americans, such as the welfare queen. Do Black films deconstruct or reinforce the
formulaic representations of African Americans provided by Hollywood? I doubt there is
a definitive answer to this question. Both Boyz n the Hood and Precious are ghetto films
which start out with strong stereotypes of African Americans as prone to violence and
abuse, but what really distinguishes them from mainstream Hollywood productions is the
fact that they humanize their characters by hinting at what makes them tick, their
motivations, their weaknesses and fears. In a word: although they might start out with
controlling images, I feel that both films are quite successful in establishing the
complexity and depth of the characters along the way.
Precious Jones and Tre Styles are the protagonists of two ghetto films which can
be interpreted as rites of passage. Both Lee Daniels’s and John Singleton’s films depict
characters who find ways to survive in the rough world of Harlem or South Central L.A.,
and both point out that education is one possible means of improving the fortunes of
young African Americans and empowering them to reject the representations of them
constructed by White media. However, only Boyz n the Hood depicts the main character
5
In the review which appeared in the New York Times: “The Audacity of Precious” by Lynn Hirschberg
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/magazine/25precious-t.html?_r=1
6
Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, the most powerful Black figures in American showbiz, offered to support
the film through their production companies only after Precious started to win awards at festivals; with
their help, the film made it into the mainstream, received national distribution, a Golden Globe and an
Oscar.
42
as actually leaving the ghetto, whereas Precious, although ending on a positive note, does
not effectively portray the heroine as being able to finally leave Harlem behind.
Works Cited
Boyz n the Hood. Dir. John Singleton. Perf. Cuba Gooding Jr., Laurence Fishburne, Ice
Cube, Morris Chestnut, Nia Long, Angela Bassett. Columbia Pictures, 1991. Film.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment. 2nd edition. New York and London: Routledge, 2000.
Diawara, Manthia. ‘Black American Cinema: The New Realism’. Black American
Cinema. Ed. Manthia Diawara. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. 3-25.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Grove Press, 1962.
hooks, bell. ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’. Black American Cinema.
Ed. Manthia Diawara. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. 288-303.
Morrison, Toni and Cornel West. ‘Blues, Love and Politics’. The Nation 24th May 2004.
18-28.
Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire. Dir. Lee Daniels. Perf. Gabourey
Sidibe,
Mo’ Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey. Lee Daniels Entertainment, 2009.
Film.
43
AMERICAN STUDIES ABROAD
The Erasmus Experience
by Silvia Filip
Since 2009, the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest has an
Erasmus agreement with Högskolan Dalarna in Falun, Sweden. This means that each year
two students from Bucharest, who are enrolled in either the BA or the MA program, can
go to the Swedish university and study for one semester, and get a scholarship!
The selection of candidates usually takes place in April; in order to apply, you
need a CV, a letter of intent and a transcript of records. Also, before applying, make sure
that you will be able to study both your major and your minor at the host university. The
main criteria for selecting the candidates are the grades (it is important to have passed all
the exams) and an interview. Once selected, there’s a long way paved with application
forms, agreements, contracts, etc ahead, but the international offices at both Dalarna and
University of Bucharest are always there to help you.
44
Being busy with all the documents and preparations, you won’t even notice that the time
to leave has already come. So one day you wake up in Falun and can’t really realize that
you’re to spend the next 5 or 6 months there. It is a small town (somewhere around
30,000 inhabitants), very peaceful and very quiet. Students must book accommodation
before coming here, and you might be lucky enough to be given a room in Britsen, the
only place where students live together. Otherwise, you’ll have to make friends there,
because most of the parties take place there and most of the activities start there.
Contrary to popular beliefs, Swedes are wonderful people. They are very friendly,
always willing to help you and always ready to do anything it takes to make things work.
Everybody speaks English, so getting along is quite easy.
One of the most shocking aspects of Sweden is the student life. Forget about
paying for your studies, about up to 4 classes a day and about courses that last a whole
semester. There is no tuition fee in Swedish universities for any of their BA, MA or PhD
programs. Students have at most 3 or 4 lectures/seminars a week, and the rest of the time
is dedicated to studying and working at home. Courses may last between 4 and 20 weeks,
depending on the frequency of lectures and on the amount of hours students are supposed
to study on their own. There are also online courses, taken by people all over the world.
The examination system is slightly different from the Romanian one: students are
examined continuously, by means of assignments and seminar discussions; some of the
courses require a final exam or a final paper; also, there are only 3 possible grades: U
45
(fail), G (pass) and VG (not only did you pass, but you’re also good at this!). The only
thing Romanian students will find familiar is the good old 75% mandatory attendance in
order to be able to get your grade.
It is very important to mention that Högskolan Dalarna doesn’t have an American
Studies Department, but it does offer a wide variety of interesting courses in the English
department, such as Interpreting Films in English, English Speaking Cultures, Literature
and so on. Just remember that most of these courses have 7.5 ECTS each, so you won’t
be able to choose too many of them!
Given such a busy schedule, you have of course a lot of free time. For people who
love outdoor activities, Falun with its surroundings is the place to be! One can find
anything here, from ice skating on lakes and almost any sport one can think of (hockey,
canoe, bandy – just to mention a few), to amazing landscapes which make you want to
stroll all day long. It is also easy to book trips to great places, such as Kiruna (the
northernmost town of Sweden) or Stockholm. As for partying and socializing with other
students, the Student Union is the right place. It is mandatory for students to be part of a
union, and among the numerous advantages I would mention now a lot of discounts and
the weekly parties. Also, they sometimes organize funny and unusual activities, such as a
sled race for which each team had to build their own sled.
Some advantages of living in Sweden, even if for half a year, are the chance to be
part of a fascinatingly multicultural environment (even in a small town like Falun you get
to know people from all over the world), free access to the public library, the health
insurance system, which covers expenses for every person officially registered here.
Some of the downsides would be the very high prices (the money you get through the
Erasmus program – 400 or 500 € per month – is definitely not enough to survive; around
800 € will cover the basic needs – rent, food, Internet connection, books and so on) and
maybe the weather, which is really cold during the winter.
As a conclusion, the Erasmus program is for sure something worth trying. Not
only do you get to know another culture and another system, but you also broaden your
horizons, make a lot of new friends, experience things you’ve never thought of. Our
American Studies department has a great Erasmus partner - Högskolan Dalarna, so the
only suggestion I have for our students is “stay tuned for the next selection in April!”
46
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Ilinca Anghelescu is Long-Term Scheduling Editor for the Romanian TV station
CineStar.
Olivia Bădoi graduated from the American Studies department at the University of
Bucharest in 2008. She spent her sophomore year studying at a small liberal arts college
in Virginia, as a recipient of a Soros grant. As a graduate student she was awarded a
bilateral agreement scholarship by the Institute of English Philology in Poznan. She is
currently completing her MA thesis on American cultural history at the University of
Wroclaw. Her interests range from the fields of cultural history and sociology (such as
current reconceptualizations of the idea of American exceptionalism, the role of the
media in (trans)national imaginaries), to Gender and Women Studies and their
intersection with visual culture (theories of gender and sexuality, body politics, visual
constructions of female desire and identity).
Andreea Breazu is a third-year student in World and Comparative Literature and a
Foreign Language (English) at the University of Bucharest. She is a co-founding member
and a permanent collaborator at Doamna Grasă, a student magazine edited by the Faculty
of Letters and available online at http://doamnagrasa.com/. Her main research interests
include modern and postmodern literatures, reception theories, and issues related to
literary histories and canon(s). The topic of her graduation paper approaches 20th century
poetry from the perspective of modern programmatic texts, essays and conference
transcripts relating tradition, originality, (the anxiety of) influence, reclaimed authors
47
holding a special interest for Gongora's "canonization" taking into account literary
histories and translations.
Irina Constantin is a third-year student in World Literature at the University of
Bucharest, with a minor in English. Her graduation paper consists in observing how
Andromache, as a character initially mentioned in ancient Greek literature (Homer,
Euripides), suffers changes once discussed during the Classicist Age (Jean Racine) and
the inter-war period (Jean Giraudoux), respectively, and to point out the reasons for the
noticed differences. Other research interests include current trends in art and literature.
Nicolae-Andrei Popa is a first-year MA student in British Cultural Studies at the
University of Bucharest. He graduated from the Faculty of Foreign Languages and
Literatures with a major in English and a minor in French in 2009. His interests range
from English Romanticism (hence his 2009 diploma paper) to contemporary debates in
the history of ideas and anthropology. As far as American Studies are concerned, he
enjoys reading novels by Melville, Poe, Faulkner, Pynchon or DeLillo. Andrei spent a
good deal of last summer reading the classics of American poetry: Whitman, Sandburg
and Edgar Lee Masters. He keeps in touch with the latest conquests in the visual arts &
poetry by logging in to www.ubu.com or www.poetryfoundation.org.
Elena-Adriana Dancu is a first-year MA student in American Studies at the University
of Bucharest. She graduated at the top of her class from the same university with a major
in English and a minor in German in 2009. She studied at Humboldt-Universität zu
Berlin on an Erasmus grant and attended a summer course on postmodernism in British
and Irish literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her main research interests include
postmodern and postcolonial literatures, diasporic cultures and twentieth century AfricanAmerican literature by women.
Silvia Filip is is a second-year student of the undergraduate American Studies Program
and of the Faculty of Letters from the University of Bucharest. She is currently studying
48
at Högskolan Dalarna in Sweden on an Erasmus grant. Her further studies will probably
focus on social sciences and/or international cooperation.
PUBLISH OR PERISH/SUBMISSION INFO
[Inter]sections is a trimestrial peer-reviewed publication which comes out in March,
June, September, and December.
Submission Deadlines for 2010
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Submission Guidelines
49
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51
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Mihaela Precup
PEER REVIEWERS
Bianca Barbu
Olivia Bădoi
Elena-Adriana Dancu
Ilinca Diaconu
Alexandra Magearu
Mihaela Mircia
Ioana Pelehatăi
Alexandru Măcărescu-Rotari
Anca Stoiculescu
Marius-Bogdan Tudor
Maria Zirra
Should you wish to apply for a peer reviewing position with [Inter]sections, you are
kindly invited to e-mail us at [email protected]. Please include a short bio
(200 words), a CV, and a sample essay.
52
As [Inter]sections is a trimestrial student publication, you are kindly invited to send contributions to our editors. Also, should
you wish to respond to any of the articles published in this and any other future issues, send your comments to:
[email protected].
I
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF:
MIHAELA PRECUP
PEER-REVIEWERS:
CONTRIBUTORS:
BIANCA BARBU
MIHAELA PRECUP - Assistant Professor, American Studies
Program, University of Bucharest
ELENA-ADRIANA DANCU
ILINCA DIACONU
ALEXANDRA MAGEARU
MIHAELA MIRCIA
IOANA PELEHATĂI
ALEXANDRU MĂCĂRESCU ROTARI
ANCA STOICULESCU
MARIUS-BOGDAN TUDOR
MARIA ZIRRA
ELENA-ADRIANA DANCU - Graduate Student, American
Studies Program, University of Bucharest
ILINCA ANGHELESCU – CineStar Long-Term Scheduling
Editor
OLIVIA BĂDOI - MA Student, American cultural history,
University of Wroclaw
SILVIA FILIP - Undergraduate Student, American Studies
Program, University of Bucharest
ANDREEA BREAZU - Undergraduate Student, World and
Comparative Literature and a Foreign Language, University of
Bucharest
MIHAELA PRECUP
IRINA CONSTANTIN - Undergraduate Student, World and
Comparative Literature and a Foreign Language, University of
Bucharest
NICOLAE-ANDREI POPA – MA Student, British Cultural
Studies, University of Bucharest
LAYOUT
Alexandra Magearu
Alexandru Măcărescu Rotari
COVER PHOTO
Alexandru Măcărescu Rotari
Center for American Studies, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, 7-13 Pitar Mos St., 1st Floor, Bucharest, Romania.
Tel. no. +4021-318.15.79/80/81 /int.28 Office Hours: 10am-4pm