On Tuesday after midnight I did my usual search for bedbugs and found none. That makes five days since a sighting, and last time I hit the five day mark I saw one, so I'm ahead of the game so far in this two week period.
Shankar's wifi network had once again disappeared from my computer's reach this morning when I got up. I was surprised because it had just came back on Sunday after being gone all weekend and it's never done that right after returning.
I worked out the chords for the first two verses of “Le vieux rocker” (The Old Rocker) by Serge Gainsbourg.
I had time to eat a bowl of grapes and have a few sips of coffee before leaving for the US Lit lecture.
I still had eight pages left of the Henry James novella Daisy Miller and I tried to finish it before the lecture started. I was down to one and a half pages when Professor Morgenstern started talking.
Our essay assignment will be posted before the end of the week and our first assignment will be returned today or tomorrow.
We looked at Henry James's Daisy Miller and Kate Chopin's Deserée's Baby.
In the late 19th Century gender was always shaped by race, even when out of view. It was even more important then. It is important to realize if talking about the construction of gender norms in white culture that they have impact upon everyone, particularly women. Harriet Jacobs illustrates a language of genre and content. Harriet is addressing white women while participating in codes and norms of that readership.
We will look at the figure of the new woman at the turn of the century in the US with Daisy Miller as an example. In the foreground is the question of reading and interpreting bodies and the signs bodies generate. Think back to Hester Prynn's letter “A” as a signifier for communal reading and interpretation. In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne calls our attention to these questions.
Finally an opportunity to look at the relationship between democratic citizens. Look at the language in The Declaration of Independence where it talks of a bond declared with a pledge of sacred honour; or look at Hester and Dimmesdale; or the lawyer in Bartleby declaring Bartleby is nothing.
The figure of the New Woman began in the 1890s, after Daisy Miller, but it was circulating then. The general context was agitation for the vote, more work for women, white women in more pink-collar jobs, physically mobile women, the scandal of women on bikes, changes in fashion, and more high education for women. Clustering with all this at the end of the century were issues inflected with class and race. Every change was subject to sexualization because sexual autonomy was at stake. There were legal changes in property law to help women survive divorce and marry again. These changes prominent in popular press and literature.
A slide showing the image of the Gibson Girl. She's bored and reading a book while sitting with two men depicted as smaller than her.
Ideals of beauty. A picture of a woman properly attired to ride a bike with bloomers and other general costume referred to as offensive.
There was more organization among women's groups. There was a club movement among African American women for suffrage.
She posts an anti-suffrage poster showing a woman holding a ballot with the caption “Hugging a delusion.”
A pro-suffrage series of questions including a quote from Frederick Douglas:
Under a representative form of government, who should make the rules?
The people.
Do the people make the laws?
No; one-half of the people are forbidden any share in the lawmaking.
Who do make the laws?
Men.
Who gave men the right to make the laws?
Men.
Do the laws concern women?
Yes.
May women take part in making the laws they must obey?
No.
If women transgress the law, who tries, convicts, and punishes them?
Men.
Who sits on the juries?
Men.
Is this what the Constitution means by “the judgment of his peers”?
No.
“When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it
was for my people. . . But when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.” -Frederick Douglass
Henry James revised all his writing for a New York editor in the early 1920s. We are supposed to be reading the early edition of Daisy Miller. I have the one from the Norton Anthology and so it's the correct one.
James was born into education and well to do. His brother was a famous psychologist and his sister Alice James was also a writer. James had an ambivalent relationship to his U.S. of American identity. He is also in British literature courses for that reason. His claim about US literature was that there is not enough history and tradition in the US to work with. Yet he wrote numerous works looking at the question of US identity. Daisy Miller is about US citizens in Europe and that is the prototype for his stories about displaced US citizens.
He wrote a book on Hawthorne but sees him as a US exception.
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.” -Henry James, Hawthorne (1879)
“There are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason.” -Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884)
To locate James stylistically, he is a realist at his height but at the same time proto-modernist. He was interested in representing material and social reality and the conventional novel of manners but also fascinated with interiority and consciousness. His prose style becomes more complex as he moves towards more interiority.
She showed the first illustrated version of the Daisy Miller cover. It doesn't represent her face and that is a pointed choice.
The specific publication history of Daisy Miller is that it was first published in Philadelphia. It was initially rejected because it was considered an outrage on US girlhood. The shift and change of gender norms made it a scandalous book. It was picked up in Britain by Virginia Woolf's father and later pirated in Boston.
William Dean Howells divided the world into Daisy and anti-Daisy. “She is a Daisy Miller” was a phrase adopted and used to describe charming and forward young woman on the continent. Daisy hats and other cultural items were circulated.
By the time James wrote the word, “coquette” was already antiquated. But indicative of the formulaic category his obsessed man observes her features and he's read her that she may be a coquette.
Definition of coquette: A woman (more or less young), who uses arts to gain the admiration and affection of men, merely for the gratification of vanity or from a desire of conquest, and without any intention of responding to the feelings aroused; a woman who habitually trifles with the affections of men; a flirt [OED].
Generally this novella is about a man reading a woman's signs. What is a sign? What can be read? It is historically specific and about considerations of gender identity and double standards. What is fascinating is James's awareness of the social and relational trouble that arises from reading signs. We are always in trouble when we read. This becomes more and more his subject. The text calls to our position as readers. We read as his characters read other characters. We look at gendered codes.
She pictures Mrs Costello as played by Maggie Smith.
“A man may know everyone.” The structural irony is that Winterbourn is unmarried and already in an affair. Nobody is reading him but he's intensely devoted to reading Daisy. Her clothes, expression, blush, and words. With all these signifiers, these pieces of signifying materiality, what is the signified? “When can I stop reading?” says Winterbourn. Can I stop at “coquette”? What is funny is that “coquette” has an odd meaning or final way to compare Daisy because coquettes play with signification. She manipulates signifiers.
She shows a slide of a signifier being meaningless. At the moment of signification, we stop reading. She didn't blush so she must be a coquette.
She is an enigma for Winterbourn. A textual and sexual enigma in relation to everything, including language. There is a discrepancy between Winterbourn's language and Daisy's vernacular. She says “old castle” while he says “ancient monument.”
Signifier: any material thing that signifies, e.g., words on a page, a facial expression, an image.
Signified: the concept that a signifier refers to.
Together, the signifier and signified make up the
Sign: the smallest unit of meaning. Anything that can be used to communicate.
Think of the relationship in the narrative between flirting and signification. Flirting by definition is a playful, eroticized withholding of signifiers that are culturally contentious. Another moment is when Winterbourn decides she's a flirt as opposed to a coquette. His repetition shows he's anxious.
Gendered problems of reading are coded as a native cultural problem. He is a US citizen in Europe who has lost the ability to read U.S. of Americaness. After encountering Daisy he consults his aunt. There are layers of reading problems. He can't read Daisy and his aunt points out that Daisy and her mom can't read people and culture. Questions of reading are intertwined with questions of social class. Winterbourn defends Daisy and argues that she is innocent.
We read about reading. Winterbourn is made anxious by reading signs in the invisibility and insistence of the marketplace. We have only in this world been where wealth is naturalized and doesn't show. Mr. Miller is not in the narrative. He is back in the US making money. We read him through the family. Randolph's function is to say what he is not supposed to. He reveals the work of social construction. “We have a bigger place.”
The narrative in Rome and the significance of Roman fever. The trope of the woman who transgresses the social norms of her gender and dies. She needs to die by literary logic. Does James's narrative conform to the trope? Maybe both. Roman fever is malaria. People thought if they went out at night they would get it and that it was caused by bad air. It was later discovered to be spread by mosquitoes but in the novella it was associated with social transgression. Read Roman Fever by Edith Wharton. Both within this narrative and in culture in general a physical disease carries cultural meanings.
Daisy refuses social norms. She refuses Mrs. Walker's carriage. At the Walker party she comes with Giovanelli and Mrs Walker turns her back in a gesture of social rupture. Winterbourn says Walker is cruel.
Use of the words “pregnantly” and “know.” “Pregnantly” is the perfect word. Pregnant means full of meaning, highly significant, suggestive, and implying more than the obvious. How much play is allowed before engagement or marriage or sex? It is never spoken of.
She will flirt with Winterbourn. Can I flirt if I am engaged? A moment of metafiction. I am only what I am to you. You don't get me. I am only what you read.
In the Colosseum Daisy is a sacrifice or martyr. He decides she need not be respected. He is angry with himself over bothering to try to read her.
I say he is relieved that he can now just be revulsed rather than attracted.
James's subtlety makes Winterbourn angry that he bothered trying to read Daisy. He is in danger of showing that his conclusion excites him.
The final scene is not the final moment. She says “He cuts me,” so what kills Daisy metaphorically? He kills her with his final reading. He reconsiders her.
Her last sign is a raw protuberance among April daisies. I say her gravestone is her final signifier, though it is probably a mound of dirt and not a gravestone. The raw protuberance in Daisy's life was the judgment of those around her.
We took a break
We looked at Kate Chopin's Deserée's Baby.
Chopin was a white southerner from Missouri who moved to New Orleans. She was French-influenced and her mom was French Canadian. The Awakening was her most famous story. It was an overtly controversial story of young a white woman who decides to live radically and abandons her marriage. But it is not relevant to the discussion we are having.
The Awakening was rediscovered in 1970s. There are other ways to read it.
Deserée's Baby can be compared with Chesnutt's The Sheriff's Children. Deserée's Baby was published in the early 1890s but the story is about before the Civil War in the 1850s. The more sophisticated question to ask is the relation between those two moments. How is it a story of the 1890s?
After the Civil War anti-miscegenation statutes, laws against interracial sex were passed. In some ways racism intensified after the end of slavery. In 1863 journalists discredited abolitionists. They said it would be the end of civilization if whites started having sex with blacks. Interracial marriage prohibition was not ruled unconstitutional until 1965 in the case of Loving vs Virginia.
In Deserée's Baby a marriage between a young woman adopted as a baby when she was a foundling takes place with an aristocratic man of a proud line. Why does he want to marry her? In his power to give her a name, name is last name readable as a subject in the social order. Cover her with a name. Love codes as a natural force of distaste conquer any foundational obstacle.
Not the baby. What is important, interesting, and clever is the role of the two enslaved women. Nurse Zandrine and LaBlanche's cabin. Reading the baby. There is a disjunct of Deserée and her mom reading. It can't be the baby unless it is white. She begins to read the baby differently later. The enslaved characters are not reading because there is no need. We don't know why. The baby goes from being white. What does Armand say? It must be claimed by a white father.
A quadroon is a quarter black. Skin tone is not indisputable. Someone with the same tone could be white. She suddenly sees signifiers. But what she might really see is a familial resemblance between the baby and the slave who is fanning him. The baby looks like La Blanche's son. This is not just allegorical. The supposed white patriarch gets to say the meaning. But the story shows the position of white patriarchal authority. What rings hollow is that it is Armand who is not white. We don't know about Desirée because she is illegible. The woman's body and the child's are read by the master reader. Mom says “come home” but Deserée doesn't. She just disappears. Armand burns everything. We don't know what happens. Chopin gives the last word to the black mother. Possible resolutions haunt the real end.
I say the ambiguous ending brings home the idea that this is probably the tip of the genetic iceberg. How much is hidden?
The baby is left. Reading what a baby legitimately needs is up to the father. But there is just mom and baby in the title.
I told Professor Morgenstern that the judgments of Daisy Miller reminded me of the Simone de Beauvoir essay “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome.” The descriptions of Bardot as the perfect example of the ambiguous nymph that is the child-woman reminded me of Daisy Miller. The professor said she would like to read it.
I rode to Yonge and Bloor and then home.
I weighed 88.4 kilos before lunch.
The wifi was still down. I was able to tether and get some stuff done but even that stopped and so I could only start my blogs and not post them.
I wasted a lot of time trying to reconnect.
I weighed 88.8 kilos at 18:00.
I had a potato with gravy and a chicken leg while watching an episode of Gomer Pyle.
This was a rehashed version of a story from early in the first season. They really ran out of ideas in this final year of the series.
Carter's platoon is on MP duty but Gomer is not good at working the streets because he always accepts explanations for bad behaviour or Marines being out of uniform. When a Marine has a button missing Gomer pulls out his sewing kit and fixes it for him. He makes a Marine and a sailor who are fighting shake hands and then lets them go but then they start fighting again. Finally Carter puts Gomer on guard duty at the main gate. He tells him not to let anyone through without proper identification. But later when Carter is on a date with Bunny and he wants to buy her a burger he realizes he forgot his wallet on the base. He goes to get it but Gomer won't allow him to pass. He tries to sneak under the fence and Gomer catches him. He tries to sneak in as a lady who works at the PX and then Gomer arrests him. The lieutenant thinks this was a brilliant plan on Carter's part to test Gomer and he says that Gomer passed. Gomer and Carter walk together back to the gate and Carter thinks the situation is resolved but Gomer still won't let him pass.
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