In E.B. White’s classic tale of miniature proportions, the novel’s diminutive hero, Stuart Little, comes into the world clocking in at under two inches tall to his unsuspecting and unassuming parents. In spite of several mouselike features, including but not limited to a tail, whiskers, and rounded ears protruding from the top of his head the Little’s accept him as one of their own. Bypassing infancy completely, young Mr. Little’s aging process is not entirely dissimilar from that of the gods of Greek mythology who were capable of cattle theft twenty-four hours after birth. Stuart enters the world with the ability of speech and White presents his readers with a mouselike man child who dons a gray hat and a small cane—a behavior that White attributes to mice, making it evident that the mice he was acquainted with were far more dapper than the ones I have encountered scurrying across my kitchen. Though the Little’s love their miniature son, it seems that they are not entirely sure what to do with him and there is an unspoken tension throughout the novel that places Stuart at odds with his parents who can’t quite decide whether they want to protect him or loose him. The bulk of the novel is concerned with the fortunes and hardships that our tiny hero faces culminating when his only friend, a small bird named Margalo who has been living in the Boston fern on the bookshelf in the Little’s living room, disappears without warning. Quite devastated by his loss, Stuart decides that at seven years old he is mature enough to leave home in search of his avian companion and, without even leaving a note to his parents (who might very well have been relieved by his absence), he sets out into the world in a tiny mouse sized car. Stuart’s travels, as I will explore in depth later on, provide him with experiences that demonstrate both his maturity and childishness, suggesting a complexity to his character that is often overlooked. Unlike his cinematic counterpart, voiced by the ever genial Michael J. Fox, White’s Stuart is not merely an endearing little addition to the family, but rather a complicated creature that teeters in between cute and unsettling, calling forth the notion that there may be a link between the two. Furthermore, the fact that Stuart never really fills the role of child nor adult, may be linked to a state of perpetual adolescence—a state itself that teeters in between cute and unsettling.
The term ‘cute,’ thought at one time to have originated as a synonym of ‘bowlegged’ carries a vague notion that offers both a collective and personal meaning. Not entirely different from ‘beauty’ or ‘ugliness,’ it is rooted in biological function, drawing on a subconscious desire to preserve and care for that which we define as ‘cute’—generally animals or objects that display pedomorphic qualities. Literally living up to his name, Stuart, the child who is regarded as a little man, seems to both epitomize and subvert the idea of what cuteness is, suggesting that that which is small or infantile can reveal creepiness as well as cuteness. Rather than the side of the spectrum that is reserved for baby pandas and sleeping kittens, Stuart occupies an area shared with dwarves and those paintings from the 1970s depicting happy teenagers with
bulbous heads and enormous eyes. They maintain the physical attributes associated with cuteness, yet there is something distinctly unnatural about the way that those attributes are exhibited. Bordering on the uncanny they are trapped between awkwardness and normality, placing them in a position that subverts social expectation. Perhaps with a desire for preservation of the cute comes an equally biological and subconscious desire to preserve the ‘normal.’ This may be seen in Stuart’s interaction with his family, his mother and father in particular. Though the Little’s outwardly appear to protect their son, their actions suggest ulterior motives. A seemingly innocuous gesture, when Stuart is stuck in bed with bronchitis (which it may be of note was contracted after Mrs. Little shut the refrigerator door without realizing he was trapped inside) Mr. Little presents him with a pair of ice skates fashioned out of paper clips as a sign of well wishes, a gift that no doubt will get Stuart out of the house and into danger. He is frequently placed into dangerous situations by his family and it seems that his primary function in his home is to complete tasks that no one else is small enough to do. The act of standing in the piano to lift the stuck key when his father plays is reminiscent of child workers in the early twentieth century who were placed into large threatening machines because their little hands were just the right size to fixed jammed gears. The Little’s present us with a discrepancy between words and actions, treating Stuart as a means to accomplish menial tasks, such as fetching ping pong balls out from underneath the couch and going down the bathtub drain to retrieve his mother’s wedding ring, while showering him with verbal affection. There is an awareness and acceptance of this behavior on some level that always keeps Stuart separated from his brother and parents, placing him in the role of both child and pet.
One of the most significant differences between the novel and Rob Minkoff’s 1999 film adaptation (which on a tangential side note was surprisingly written by M. Night Shyamalan) is that rather than allowing Stuart to be an actual mouse who enters the family through adoption, as Minkoff does, White creates Stuart as a mouselike human that Mrs. Little gives birth to. Though I would assume an easy delivery, there must be something irrefutably disconcerting about giving birth to newborn not only bearing a strong resemblance to a mouse in several respects but also to a fully developed miniaturized man. A complaint of the novel is that this is never explained or discussed in full detail, but really, in what way is it possible to elaborate on such things without changing the tone completely? So much of the action occurs in an episodic structure where things are constantly moving ahead with little regard for what has happened in the past, that it seems reasonable within the context of the story that once Mrs. Little gives birth to a mouse there is no real use in referring back to that. Perhaps the reason that White places Stuart as the Little’s biological son is because it allows for conflict. Unlike the film in which the Little’s actively choose Stuart, in the novel they are stuck with him and have no other option but to take care of him. From the beginning there is a separation dividing Stuart from his family, a misunderstanding almost between expectation and reality, that is based not only on size, but species. So close to both human and mouse, yet neither, Stuart is beside himself. In her essay, “Species Trouble: The Abjection of Adolescence in E.B. White’s Stuart Little,” Marah Gubar writes “Neither fully human nor entirely animal, the status of miniature beings is always problematic: will they be treated like vermin (hunted down, caged, killed) or like humans (incorporated into the family, nurtured, embraced)?"
The feeling of isolation attributed to Stuart may be accounted for by the suggestion of his adolescence. Of his inability to fit as a human Gubar writes ,“it is my contention that such ‘species trouble’ symbolizes and speaks to the condition of another creature caught between two categories: namely, the adolescent. Even as miniature subjects like Stuart Little blur the line between the animal and the human, they also tend to inhabit the fraught frontier of adolescence, that unsettling period during which the boundary between childhood and adulthood is constantly breached and reasserted.”
Assuming Stuart’s adolescence the novel achieves cohesion that works to explain otherwise unrelated and unexplainable behaviors and events. It may be translated into a story about a clean well dressed young man with shifting views of himself who decides that has outgrown his home and goes out to find adventure and the woman he loves. The Holden Caulfield of mice, Stuart spends the first half of the novel trying to hold onto a semblance of childhood in which he desires both comfort and independence from his parents. Upon his departure he gets his first car and goes on his first date, two markedly vital elements of adolescence. Not quite grown, like Holden, his imitation of adulthood signifies that he has not yet made the leap.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Victim of Circumstance: The Agony of Being Thirteen
Yannick Murphy’s coming of age tale, Here They Come, is centered around an unnamed thirteen year old girl and her poor family living in New York City during the 1970’s. This story details the trivialities of being a teenager through the uncouth yet astute narrator. Through her eyes we see the flawed world that surrounds her; the old toothless hot dog vender who feels her up, her emotionally unstable brother with suicidal tendencies, her mother who falls asleep crying every night, and her father who lives comfortably with his girlfriend as his children and ex-wife starve. She seems aware that the world is not fair but her only way of expressing her emotions toward the injustices that she and her family face are through her rough language and irreverent actions. When a police officer disregards her request for help after her bike is stolen her response is to give the cop the finger.
The only escape the narrator gets from her monotonous (albeit, unusual) day-to-day activities happens when her father mysteriously disappears. Her brother (also unnamed) and their father’s girlfriend travel to Spain because they suspect that is where he has runaway. During this experience and, for the most part throughout the book, the narrator appears apathetic toward her family. She explains the things around her with a sense of detachment as if to say, “this is how things are and this is how things will always be.” When she is playing with her brother and their other sisters, the narrator mentions hearing that when you learn how to be a lifeguard, you must learn to not only save lives, but to be able to get the drowning person off of you and prevent them for bringing you down as well. This seems to serve as a metaphor for the family. They love each other and are capable of helping each other, but their own survival must come first. What may appear to be selfishness, is not necessarily so.
Murphy’s narrator brings a new perspective to the teenage girl of the 1970s. She is not discovering her burgeoning sexuality or going to the mall with her friends. The only sexual encounters that she engages in are the mild contacts with John, the hot dog vender, who touches her in exchange for chocolate and hot dogs. Her only friend lives with her drug-addicted mother and her Hells Angels boyfriend in an environment that seems comparable the narrator’s own unstable home life. The story functions not to show the ways of the world to young readers (in fact, this book does not appear to be aimed toward young readers) but rather it expresses what it’s like to grow up in a home that may have at one point been filled with hope and potential that has for whatever reason faded. But I think most importantly, it is a story about what it’s like to be a victim of circumstance. The narrator can’t help but being a thirteen-year-old girl and as a result she must fall victim to its restraints. She must suffer the indignity of being ignored and pushed aside because of the assumption that she is only a child incapable of being taken seriously and respected in an adult world. It is easy to empathize with Murphy’s narrator
because, regardless of financial situations and geographic locations, her narrator suffers the indignities of adolescence.
The only escape the narrator gets from her monotonous (albeit, unusual) day-to-day activities happens when her father mysteriously disappears. Her brother (also unnamed) and their father’s girlfriend travel to Spain because they suspect that is where he has runaway. During this experience and, for the most part throughout the book, the narrator appears apathetic toward her family. She explains the things around her with a sense of detachment as if to say, “this is how things are and this is how things will always be.” When she is playing with her brother and their other sisters, the narrator mentions hearing that when you learn how to be a lifeguard, you must learn to not only save lives, but to be able to get the drowning person off of you and prevent them for bringing you down as well. This seems to serve as a metaphor for the family. They love each other and are capable of helping each other, but their own survival must come first. What may appear to be selfishness, is not necessarily so.
Murphy’s narrator brings a new perspective to the teenage girl of the 1970s. She is not discovering her burgeoning sexuality or going to the mall with her friends. The only sexual encounters that she engages in are the mild contacts with John, the hot dog vender, who touches her in exchange for chocolate and hot dogs. Her only friend lives with her drug-addicted mother and her Hells Angels boyfriend in an environment that seems comparable the narrator’s own unstable home life. The story functions not to show the ways of the world to young readers (in fact, this book does not appear to be aimed toward young readers) but rather it expresses what it’s like to grow up in a home that may have at one point been filled with hope and potential that has for whatever reason faded. But I think most importantly, it is a story about what it’s like to be a victim of circumstance. The narrator can’t help but being a thirteen-year-old girl and as a result she must fall victim to its restraints. She must suffer the indignity of being ignored and pushed aside because of the assumption that she is only a child incapable of being taken seriously and respected in an adult world. It is easy to empathize with Murphy’s narrator
because, regardless of financial situations and geographic locations, her narrator suffers the indignities of adolescence.
Fangs, Fur, and Prom: Sex and Gender in Teenage Monster Movies
Louise Miller is a nerd who can’t seem to catch a break. A shoo-in for president of the Latin Club, all she really wants is the attention of the attractive popular senior who doesn’t even know she exists. Her social status is so low on the high school scale of popularity that the only people who show up to her sweet sixteen are her immediate family and best friend. Not long after her birthday, her life begins to deviate from her nerd girl existence when she discovers that she is a (teen) witch. With her new ability to fulfill her wildest desires she opts to use her power exclusively to gain popularity and win the heart of Brad, the dreamy boy she has been lusting after. Of course, she learns the error of her ways and recognizes that becoming the most popular girl in school, especially through what is essentially deception, is not actually as wonderful as she had assumed. Louise gives up her desire toward Brad because she wants her relationship with him to be based on legitimate feelings of respect and admiration, not lies, trickery, and deceit. The lesson that is ultimately learned is that being yourself is better than being something you’re not, even if you are miserable and you spend your free time with the creepy woman from The Poltergeist.
Like Louise Miller’s tale in Teen Witch, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Teen Wolf, My Best Friend is a Vampire, Once Bitten, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer all follow along with coming of age and discovering the unfathomable about yourself. But what exactly does unfathomable mean in this context? Of course it is unfathomable to become a witch or vampire because it is impossible, but what about discovering that you’re gay or pregnant or have an STD? The changes that the characters in these films face are not specific to the supernatural, they are specific to being a teenager who, for whatever reason, feels separated or different from their peers.
While the Teen Wolf universe offers no (lasting) negative repercussions, the world the vampires inhabit operates with stronger sense of consequence. For Once Bitten’s Mark Kendall and My Best Friend is a Vampire’s Jeremy Capello, the source of their mythical transformation is a result of sexual desire. Rather than their power acting as an enabler for desire, their desires enable their power. After the remarkably average Jeremy is seduced by an older woman his change occurs. With the help of a mentor figure and fellow vampire, Jeremy comes to terms with his “condition” and recognizes that being undead doesn't mean his life is over.
Like Jeremy, Mark endures a similar fate. He is frustrated that his relationship with his girlfriend has not reached the level of intimacy that he desires and so after succumbing to the pressure of his friends (and libido) he allows himself to be seduced by an older more experienced woman. While Mark doesn’t actually sleep with her, he believes that he did. After their encounter he notices several changes but brushes them off and thinks nothing of it. His super sleuth girlfriend discovers what is ailing him and she explains his behavior to his friends, telling them “Mark may have contracted some sort of disease.” When one of Mark’s friends asks, “like a venereal disease?” She replies “sort of.”
Mark is ultimately curable. He can reverse the process simply by losing his virginity, which he does when his girlfriend decides to sleep with him to thwart the woman who is trying to “steal” him away. Metaphorically, he had the syphilis of vampirism and all he needed was a shot of penicillin to make his problems go away. Jeremy’s condition, on the other hand, is permanent and subsequently he is perceived as much more of a threat. His best friend, Ralph, is afraid that Jeremy will “infect” him before he accepts and later exploits his friend’s new power. Jeremy's adversary, the Professor, brings up an interesting connection between the undead and the socially dead. Both are outside of normalcy and while they exist in discourse do/can they exist in reality? Judith Butler writes, "this problem makes itself felt in the uncertainty with which homosexual love and loss is regarded: is it regarded as a "true" love, a "true" loss, a love and loss worthy and capable of being grieved, and thus worthy and capable of having been lived?” Are the vampires considered socially dead? If they could be grieved, would they? The Professor believes that Jeremy and those like him are a threat to society as a whole. He does not, nor does he have an interest in trying to understand vampires and views them as emotionless creatures who aim to not only alter but destroy society on a global scale. The Professor’s proclamation that by his calculations, which he states are always correct, “20% of the human race will be infected by 1990” serves several purposes. It represents the arrogance of older “wiser” generations; he believes that he is always correct in terms of both his calculations and his perception of the world and what is good for it. It seems that throughout the film the idea of homosexuality and disease are interchangeable, and because of the time that this movie was made (1988) they could possibly even be contingent upon each other. Assuming that his statement is allegorical of homosexuality, it is suggestive of an unwillingness to accept and adapt. His argument, undeniably fallacious, is that the world should stay the same because that is how it has always been. If disease, AIDS in particular, are put into the equation the context changes but the solution still remains roughly the same. The Professor sees the danger of a possible reality and is justified in his desire to take preventative action, although the means in which he plans to accomplish this are flawed. He believes that he must destroy those who are capable, though not necessarily inclined, of destroying others. His lack of guilt brings up the connection between guilt and love. Butler describes guilt "as a stopgap against sadistic destruction, [it] signals less the psychic presence of an originally social and external norm than a countervailing desire to continue the object one wishes dead.” Guilt exists as a by-product of love. We feel guilt when we desire to harm an object of love and guilt preserves that loved object. When the Professor almost kills Jeremy's (human) friend he feels no guilt. His desire to preserve humanity does not come from love, rather a desire for destruction. In fact, his behavior is much more destructive than the vampires themselves. It seems that his assumed power serves more to repress him than anything else. He is no longer a part of the normal culture he seeks to preserve, rather is an outsider of his own doing consumed with an unsubstantiated idea.
Unlike the other films, Jeremy’s supposed deviant behavior/homosexuality is not only implied, it is actually addressed. His parents are suspicious that something is “not right” and suspect that their son might be gay. Of course he is not, as Kenneth Kidd puts it, the teen protagonist is returned “to the safe enclave of the heterosexual family after mimicking the codes of gay disclosure.” Scott Howard’s wolf is more ambiguous. He too mimics homosexuality but at the same time retaining a staunch masculinity. When Scott is about to reveal himself as a werewolf to his friend, Stiles, he says, “look, don’t tell me you’re a fag because if you tell me you’re a fag, I don’t think I can handle it.” Scott responds by reassuring that his friend that “[he’s] not a fag. [He’s] a werewolf.” This seemingly superfluous exchange serves to first denounce the idea of being gay and acting on those desires and secondly by denouncing that lifestyle it promotes a sense of masculinity. Judith Butler makes a similar argument about the United States Military’s regulation of homosexuality and how that regulation forms the masculine subject, “one who consecrates his identity through renunciation as an act of speech: to say ‘I am a homosexual’ is fine as long as one also promises ‘and I don’t intend to act.” When Scott comes out to Stiles and proves himself by becoming the wolf he breaks that promise. His situation within this idea is complicated, but it asserts that to be masculine, one must also be heterosexual. Can a gay man not exhibit strength or aggression? Further more, can a woman?
For Louise and Sabrina their desire is not as blatantly sexual and has more to do with the idea of romanticism. They don’t necessarily want to fulfill their sexual desires as much as they actually want to be sexually desired. Teen Witch introduces Louise as she is dreaming about being romanced Brad. This seems to apply to almost all of the female characters in these films. They are as guilty of objectifying women as men are. Like Samantha Stevens and Jeanie, Louise allows herself to be repressed by neglecting her own desires. Samantha and Jeanie were held down by societal (i.e. masculine) ideas of how women should behave. Jeanie's relationship with Tony Nelson is based more on a servant/master relationship than a romantic one. Bewitched and Teen Witch are saying that it's okay for women to have power, as long as they don't use it. The purpose of Teen Witch seems completely contradictory to me. When I watched it as a child it felt empowering, and gave me hope that someday maybe I would have the power to turn my brother into a dog. The film gives just enough power to Louise to convince its young audience, but holds enough back because women can't have too much power, otherwise who would do the laundry?
Peter Parker’s power may have come with great responsibility, but for these female protagonists, their power came with great repression. According to Roberta Trites’, “Foucault points out that power can be simultaneously repressive and enabling because those who are complacent are often less empowered than those who gain power by struggling.” Buffy, Sabrina, and Louise do not work for their power, it is handed to them by destiny. Louise uses her power to influence her classmates’ perception of her to gain popularity but by doing so she also represses herself because she cannot be honest with her new friends. Brad tells her that she doesn’t “play games with people to make them like [her] more.” It seems that the thing that gives her autonomy also holds her back.
Under the guise of campy entertainment, these films still speak volumes about the adolescent experience. I remember watching them as a child not really understanding the subtleties of what was being expressed. These are not just about some wacky supernatural creature during their awkward years; they are about change and how that change is handled. You don’t necessarily have to be magical to experience what they are experiencing. Adolescence is a difficult time and it can hard to figure out who you are and what you want. As Kidd appropriately writes, “There is too much to be afraid of, including werewolves, vampires, and assorted human villains, but the scariest thing of all is adolescence itself.”
Like Louise Miller’s tale in Teen Witch, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Teen Wolf, My Best Friend is a Vampire, Once Bitten, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer all follow along with coming of age and discovering the unfathomable about yourself. But what exactly does unfathomable mean in this context? Of course it is unfathomable to become a witch or vampire because it is impossible, but what about discovering that you’re gay or pregnant or have an STD? The changes that the characters in these films face are not specific to the supernatural, they are specific to being a teenager who, for whatever reason, feels separated or different from their peers.
Love & Destruction
Most of the teenage “monsters” in the aforementioned films are subjected to the agony of unrequited love and/or unfulfilled sexual desire. The plots revolve around not only the supernatural changes the characters are going through, but also and most importantly, the impact that these changes can have on their sexual relationships. Teen Wolf’s Scott Howard distantly ogles Pamela Wells, aware that the dynamic of his one-sided relationship with the prettiest girl in school will remain static. Scott is only able to fulfill his desires with Pamela as “the wolf.” The monster/garden-variety teenager relationships are portrayed in a wholesome way, showing that werewolves are just like anyone else. Everyone has skeletons in their closet; some are just covered in fur.While the Teen Wolf universe offers no (lasting) negative repercussions, the world the vampires inhabit operates with stronger sense of consequence. For Once Bitten’s Mark Kendall and My Best Friend is a Vampire’s Jeremy Capello, the source of their mythical transformation is a result of sexual desire. Rather than their power acting as an enabler for desire, their desires enable their power. After the remarkably average Jeremy is seduced by an older woman his change occurs. With the help of a mentor figure and fellow vampire, Jeremy comes to terms with his “condition” and recognizes that being undead doesn't mean his life is over.
Like Jeremy, Mark endures a similar fate. He is frustrated that his relationship with his girlfriend has not reached the level of intimacy that he desires and so after succumbing to the pressure of his friends (and libido) he allows himself to be seduced by an older more experienced woman. While Mark doesn’t actually sleep with her, he believes that he did. After their encounter he notices several changes but brushes them off and thinks nothing of it. His super sleuth girlfriend discovers what is ailing him and she explains his behavior to his friends, telling them “Mark may have contracted some sort of disease.” When one of Mark’s friends asks, “like a venereal disease?” She replies “sort of.”
Mark is ultimately curable. He can reverse the process simply by losing his virginity, which he does when his girlfriend decides to sleep with him to thwart the woman who is trying to “steal” him away. Metaphorically, he had the syphilis of vampirism and all he needed was a shot of penicillin to make his problems go away. Jeremy’s condition, on the other hand, is permanent and subsequently he is perceived as much more of a threat. His best friend, Ralph, is afraid that Jeremy will “infect” him before he accepts and later exploits his friend’s new power. Jeremy's adversary, the Professor, brings up an interesting connection between the undead and the socially dead. Both are outside of normalcy and while they exist in discourse do/can they exist in reality? Judith Butler writes, "this problem makes itself felt in the uncertainty with which homosexual love and loss is regarded: is it regarded as a "true" love, a "true" loss, a love and loss worthy and capable of being grieved, and thus worthy and capable of having been lived?” Are the vampires considered socially dead? If they could be grieved, would they? The Professor believes that Jeremy and those like him are a threat to society as a whole. He does not, nor does he have an interest in trying to understand vampires and views them as emotionless creatures who aim to not only alter but destroy society on a global scale. The Professor’s proclamation that by his calculations, which he states are always correct, “20% of the human race will be infected by 1990” serves several purposes. It represents the arrogance of older “wiser” generations; he believes that he is always correct in terms of both his calculations and his perception of the world and what is good for it. It seems that throughout the film the idea of homosexuality and disease are interchangeable, and because of the time that this movie was made (1988) they could possibly even be contingent upon each other. Assuming that his statement is allegorical of homosexuality, it is suggestive of an unwillingness to accept and adapt. His argument, undeniably fallacious, is that the world should stay the same because that is how it has always been. If disease, AIDS in particular, are put into the equation the context changes but the solution still remains roughly the same. The Professor sees the danger of a possible reality and is justified in his desire to take preventative action, although the means in which he plans to accomplish this are flawed. He believes that he must destroy those who are capable, though not necessarily inclined, of destroying others. His lack of guilt brings up the connection between guilt and love. Butler describes guilt "as a stopgap against sadistic destruction, [it] signals less the psychic presence of an originally social and external norm than a countervailing desire to continue the object one wishes dead.” Guilt exists as a by-product of love. We feel guilt when we desire to harm an object of love and guilt preserves that loved object. When the Professor almost kills Jeremy's (human) friend he feels no guilt. His desire to preserve humanity does not come from love, rather a desire for destruction. In fact, his behavior is much more destructive than the vampires themselves. It seems that his assumed power serves more to repress him than anything else. He is no longer a part of the normal culture he seeks to preserve, rather is an outsider of his own doing consumed with an unsubstantiated idea.
Unlike the other films, Jeremy’s supposed deviant behavior/homosexuality is not only implied, it is actually addressed. His parents are suspicious that something is “not right” and suspect that their son might be gay. Of course he is not, as Kenneth Kidd puts it, the teen protagonist is returned “to the safe enclave of the heterosexual family after mimicking the codes of gay disclosure.” Scott Howard’s wolf is more ambiguous. He too mimics homosexuality but at the same time retaining a staunch masculinity. When Scott is about to reveal himself as a werewolf to his friend, Stiles, he says, “look, don’t tell me you’re a fag because if you tell me you’re a fag, I don’t think I can handle it.” Scott responds by reassuring that his friend that “[he’s] not a fag. [He’s] a werewolf.” This seemingly superfluous exchange serves to first denounce the idea of being gay and acting on those desires and secondly by denouncing that lifestyle it promotes a sense of masculinity. Judith Butler makes a similar argument about the United States Military’s regulation of homosexuality and how that regulation forms the masculine subject, “one who consecrates his identity through renunciation as an act of speech: to say ‘I am a homosexual’ is fine as long as one also promises ‘and I don’t intend to act.” When Scott comes out to Stiles and proves himself by becoming the wolf he breaks that promise. His situation within this idea is complicated, but it asserts that to be masculine, one must also be heterosexual. Can a gay man not exhibit strength or aggression? Further more, can a woman?
Power is in the Word
Sex and gender in the female films are handled quite differently. Their femininity is never doubted and their sexuality is never questioned. Even Buffy the vampire slayer is distinctly feminine despite her “masculine” abilities. Buffy though, especially in her televised form, is very different from Louise and Sabrina. Rather than complying with what all of the other characters fall victim to, Buffy and her cohorts are resistant to the social standards of gender. Interestingly, Buffy represents the idea of a strong and liberated female figure, while she as an individual is confined by a predisposed obligation to forfeit any existence she may desire outside of her present situation.For Louise and Sabrina their desire is not as blatantly sexual and has more to do with the idea of romanticism. They don’t necessarily want to fulfill their sexual desires as much as they actually want to be sexually desired. Teen Witch introduces Louise as she is dreaming about being romanced Brad. This seems to apply to almost all of the female characters in these films. They are as guilty of objectifying women as men are. Like Samantha Stevens and Jeanie, Louise allows herself to be repressed by neglecting her own desires. Samantha and Jeanie were held down by societal (i.e. masculine) ideas of how women should behave. Jeanie's relationship with Tony Nelson is based more on a servant/master relationship than a romantic one. Bewitched and Teen Witch are saying that it's okay for women to have power, as long as they don't use it. The purpose of Teen Witch seems completely contradictory to me. When I watched it as a child it felt empowering, and gave me hope that someday maybe I would have the power to turn my brother into a dog. The film gives just enough power to Louise to convince its young audience, but holds enough back because women can't have too much power, otherwise who would do the laundry?
Peter Parker’s power may have come with great responsibility, but for these female protagonists, their power came with great repression. According to Roberta Trites’, “Foucault points out that power can be simultaneously repressive and enabling because those who are complacent are often less empowered than those who gain power by struggling.” Buffy, Sabrina, and Louise do not work for their power, it is handed to them by destiny. Louise uses her power to influence her classmates’ perception of her to gain popularity but by doing so she also represses herself because she cannot be honest with her new friends. Brad tells her that she doesn’t “play games with people to make them like [her] more.” It seems that the thing that gives her autonomy also holds her back.
Under the guise of campy entertainment, these films still speak volumes about the adolescent experience. I remember watching them as a child not really understanding the subtleties of what was being expressed. These are not just about some wacky supernatural creature during their awkward years; they are about change and how that change is handled. You don’t necessarily have to be magical to experience what they are experiencing. Adolescence is a difficult time and it can hard to figure out who you are and what you want. As Kidd appropriately writes, “There is too much to be afraid of, including werewolves, vampires, and assorted human villains, but the scariest thing of all is adolescence itself.”
Velvet Suits and Wooden Rafts: How Little Lord Fauntleroy and Huckleberry Finn Helped Shape American Boyhood
In Little Lord Fauntleroy Frances Hodgson Burnett presents her reader with one of the most well behaved little boys in literature, children’s or otherwise. The ‘ideal child’ in many ways, little Cedric with his curly blond hair, his big brown eyes, and his sturdy legs seems to charm everyone he meets from the poor old apple-woman with aching bones to his curmudgeonly grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt. He does everything with utmost care and the purest of intentions; Cedric’s only fault is his perfection. It is, perhaps, because of this fault (that many people found greatly appealing in a way beyond my comprehension) that lead to the immense popularity of this novel and the subsequent fashion craze that it spawned, which caused, as far as records indicate, at least one little boy to burn down his family’s home in protest to having to don the “Fauntleroy suit.” In stark contrast of Lord Fauntleroy, is Mark Twain’s eponymous Huckleberry Finn, another story that may have lead to house fires, though for completely different reasons. Despite Huck’s wild child ways and refusal to be tamed, he has become synonymous with American boyhood and so culturally significant that his escapades along the Mississippi hardly call for reiteration. The only thing that Fauntleroy and Huck seem to share is that they both hold the title of epitomizing American boyhood, a feat that calls into question not only the significance of that title but also what exactly it means to be an American boy. As with childhood in general, we are brought up with notions of what constitute ideal American boyhood yet these notions are vague and ambiguous and seem to exist only to perpetuate the myth of the perfect childhood. The fact that Fauntleroy and Huck are so dissimilar in their function within American boyhood may be traced back to their origins.
Burnett’s Lord Fauntleroy seems to exemplify the perfect childhood for the precise reason that a boy like Huck might be excluded from that role. A mother’s dream, Fauntleroy is generous and unassuming. He gives the needs of others priority over his own and it is through this trait that he has power. However, in examining Fauntleroy in terms of American boyhood it seems reasonable that his nationally should come into question. Though born in New York, he is transplanted to England to inherit earldom after the deaths of all other remaining heirs to the position. However, it may be argued that while Lord Fauntleroy may have British loyalties, Cedric is an honest all-American lad. In her essay “Little Lord Fauntleroy: The Darling of Mothers and the Abomination of a Generation,” Anna Wilson writes that “Dearest has made Fauntleroy what he is; to a quite surprising extent, Fauntleroy is his mother’s creation, the product of a regime of construction through sentiment.” As Dearest (the title he has given to his mother) is marked by her Americanism it may be deduced that if Fauntleroy is his mother’s child than that national identity is passed down along with an almost nauseating temperament among other things.
Wilson also questions Fauntleroy’s identity as a male, suggesting that he is defined by his femininity she writes, “rather than just a boy rendered girl, little Lord Fauntleroy represents a boy functioning as a female substitute.” This argument may have some validity based on Christopher Wagner’s claim on the website he operates dedicated to the historical background of both Fauntleroy and his little velvet suit, that Burnett’s inspiration, her son Vivian, was given the masculine form of the name the Burnetts planned to give the daughter that they had expected. Fauntleroy’s femininity may be further demonstrated by the 1921 film adaptation in which “America’s [Canadian] sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, plays not only Cedric’s mother, but also Cedric himself. It is of note that another classic boy, though undeniably un-American, Peter Pan, is traditionally a role held by women, suggesting an almost inherent femininity or androgyny to boyhood. Despite the fact that Fauntleroy is traditionally seen as effeminate, Burnett attempts to create a little man out of him, describing the Earl’s first encounter with his grandson she writes that he saw “a graceful childish figure in a black velvet suit, with a lace collar, and with love-locks waving about the handsome, manly little face, whose eyes met his with a look of innocent good-fellowship." It’s almost as though Burnett’s attention to Fauntleroy’s more “manly” features is meant to remind readers that he is in fact male. Of his appearance, Wilson claims that “Fauntleroy's effeminacy would present no great difficulty if it were not precisely this version of him, the little boy with the long golden curls wearing the velvet suit with the lace collar, that captured the public imagination.” It may seem that Burnett’s well behaved little man never really stood a chance against his bad boy contemporaries, his timing was just
too off. “The model of manliness that he represents is closer to the androgynous ideal of an earlier time than it is to Tom Sawyer’s world, in which the ‘model boy’ who takes perfect care of his mother is automatically an object of loathing and contempt."
It is “Tom Sawyer’s world” that Huck inhabits, or at least one very similar to it, and unlike the realm of Fauntleroy where cuteness prevails, we are left with gray areas in St. Petersburg and along the Mississippi. This distinction is most notably seen through the relationships of our young heroes. Before being whisked away to England, Fauntleroy and his mother “knew very few people, and lived what might have been thought very lonely lives,” yet we don’t get much of a sense of their isolation, perhaps because they are never truly alone because they always have each other. In contrast to the mother-son relationship that Burnett gives us is the relationship between Huck and Jim. Even in spite of his companion, T.S. Eliot notes that Huck “is alone; there is no more solitary character in fiction.” Huck and Jim have a much more complicated relationship than Fauntleroy and his mother, in that it is almost impossible to define and the source of much conflict in the novel. On one hand they behave in a rather familial way with Jim acting as the sober father Huck never had, yet there is a dehumanization and objectification of Jim as he shifts from person to property depending on what is more convenient for Huck. There is always something that prevents them from ever becoming a singular unit. This behavioral disparity between Fauntleroy and Huck extends to how each interact with their surroundings. Fauntleroy engages in the world around him, he acts as a catalyst for the other characters and his very presence inspires action. Whereas Huck may be seen as a passive spectator. His presence may no doubt influence the situations that he becomes involved in, as with the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, though there is the feeling that even without his involvement things would have progressed similarly. Fauntleroy, like Tom Sawyer, is a doer, while Huck is an observer—a distinction that is not limited to the characters themselves but the narrative structures in which they reside. Rather than utilizing an omnipotent narrator, as is the case in Little Lord Fauntleroy, Twain evokes the voice of Huck providing a first person account of his adventures and allowing his readers stylistic consistency as well as a much more personal connection to his unwitting hero who seems to attract adventure rather than seek it out.
In returning back to the idea of American boyhood and what that means, I think there is something to be said about its mythic quality, as Leslie Fielder wrote in his essay, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!,” “The mythic America is boyhood.” The ideal boyhood is an experience that no real boy ever had, it has been relegated to fiction and its popularity is linked to the fact that it allows us relive experiences that we never had in the first place. Perhaps Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gives its readers the opportunity to fill in fading memories with experiences more desirable than those that actually existed. It is precisely this sense of nostalgia that separates a book like Huck Finn from Little Lord Fauntleroy. While I don’t doubt that there were and still are men that treat Little Lord Fauntleroy wistfully, I do think that Burnett’s book presents a boyhood that is more fabricated by one’s parent than one’s own desire. The fundamental dissimilarity between Fauntleroy and Huck is that it is Fauntleroy who our parents wish we could be and Huck Finn who we wish we could have been.
Burnett’s Lord Fauntleroy seems to exemplify the perfect childhood for the precise reason that a boy like Huck might be excluded from that role. A mother’s dream, Fauntleroy is generous and unassuming. He gives the needs of others priority over his own and it is through this trait that he has power. However, in examining Fauntleroy in terms of American boyhood it seems reasonable that his nationally should come into question. Though born in New York, he is transplanted to England to inherit earldom after the deaths of all other remaining heirs to the position. However, it may be argued that while Lord Fauntleroy may have British loyalties, Cedric is an honest all-American lad. In her essay “Little Lord Fauntleroy: The Darling of Mothers and the Abomination of a Generation,” Anna Wilson writes that “Dearest has made Fauntleroy what he is; to a quite surprising extent, Fauntleroy is his mother’s creation, the product of a regime of construction through sentiment.” As Dearest (the title he has given to his mother) is marked by her Americanism it may be deduced that if Fauntleroy is his mother’s child than that national identity is passed down along with an almost nauseating temperament among other things.
Wilson also questions Fauntleroy’s identity as a male, suggesting that he is defined by his femininity she writes, “rather than just a boy rendered girl, little Lord Fauntleroy represents a boy functioning as a female substitute.” This argument may have some validity based on Christopher Wagner’s claim on the website he operates dedicated to the historical background of both Fauntleroy and his little velvet suit, that Burnett’s inspiration, her son Vivian, was given the masculine form of the name the Burnetts planned to give the daughter that they had expected. Fauntleroy’s femininity may be further demonstrated by the 1921 film adaptation in which “America’s [Canadian] sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, plays not only Cedric’s mother, but also Cedric himself. It is of note that another classic boy, though undeniably un-American, Peter Pan, is traditionally a role held by women, suggesting an almost inherent femininity or androgyny to boyhood. Despite the fact that Fauntleroy is traditionally seen as effeminate, Burnett attempts to create a little man out of him, describing the Earl’s first encounter with his grandson she writes that he saw “a graceful childish figure in a black velvet suit, with a lace collar, and with love-locks waving about the handsome, manly little face, whose eyes met his with a look of innocent good-fellowship." It’s almost as though Burnett’s attention to Fauntleroy’s more “manly” features is meant to remind readers that he is in fact male. Of his appearance, Wilson claims that “Fauntleroy's effeminacy would present no great difficulty if it were not precisely this version of him, the little boy with the long golden curls wearing the velvet suit with the lace collar, that captured the public imagination.” It may seem that Burnett’s well behaved little man never really stood a chance against his bad boy contemporaries, his timing was just
too off. “The model of manliness that he represents is closer to the androgynous ideal of an earlier time than it is to Tom Sawyer’s world, in which the ‘model boy’ who takes perfect care of his mother is automatically an object of loathing and contempt."
It is “Tom Sawyer’s world” that Huck inhabits, or at least one very similar to it, and unlike the realm of Fauntleroy where cuteness prevails, we are left with gray areas in St. Petersburg and along the Mississippi. This distinction is most notably seen through the relationships of our young heroes. Before being whisked away to England, Fauntleroy and his mother “knew very few people, and lived what might have been thought very lonely lives,” yet we don’t get much of a sense of their isolation, perhaps because they are never truly alone because they always have each other. In contrast to the mother-son relationship that Burnett gives us is the relationship between Huck and Jim. Even in spite of his companion, T.S. Eliot notes that Huck “is alone; there is no more solitary character in fiction.” Huck and Jim have a much more complicated relationship than Fauntleroy and his mother, in that it is almost impossible to define and the source of much conflict in the novel. On one hand they behave in a rather familial way with Jim acting as the sober father Huck never had, yet there is a dehumanization and objectification of Jim as he shifts from person to property depending on what is more convenient for Huck. There is always something that prevents them from ever becoming a singular unit. This behavioral disparity between Fauntleroy and Huck extends to how each interact with their surroundings. Fauntleroy engages in the world around him, he acts as a catalyst for the other characters and his very presence inspires action. Whereas Huck may be seen as a passive spectator. His presence may no doubt influence the situations that he becomes involved in, as with the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, though there is the feeling that even without his involvement things would have progressed similarly. Fauntleroy, like Tom Sawyer, is a doer, while Huck is an observer—a distinction that is not limited to the characters themselves but the narrative structures in which they reside. Rather than utilizing an omnipotent narrator, as is the case in Little Lord Fauntleroy, Twain evokes the voice of Huck providing a first person account of his adventures and allowing his readers stylistic consistency as well as a much more personal connection to his unwitting hero who seems to attract adventure rather than seek it out.
In returning back to the idea of American boyhood and what that means, I think there is something to be said about its mythic quality, as Leslie Fielder wrote in his essay, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!,” “The mythic America is boyhood.” The ideal boyhood is an experience that no real boy ever had, it has been relegated to fiction and its popularity is linked to the fact that it allows us relive experiences that we never had in the first place. Perhaps Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gives its readers the opportunity to fill in fading memories with experiences more desirable than those that actually existed. It is precisely this sense of nostalgia that separates a book like Huck Finn from Little Lord Fauntleroy. While I don’t doubt that there were and still are men that treat Little Lord Fauntleroy wistfully, I do think that Burnett’s book presents a boyhood that is more fabricated by one’s parent than one’s own desire. The fundamental dissimilarity between Fauntleroy and Huck is that it is Fauntleroy who our parents wish we could be and Huck Finn who we wish we could have been.
Reading in Dystopia
In her book, The Giver, Lois Lowry offers a utopian society that has attracted children and adults alike into its seductive depths. Popular since it’s publication in 1993 it has won not only the highly regarded Newberry Medal, but a top spot on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books,” a distinction it shares with some of the finest and most progressive achievements in children’s and adolescent literature. The novel is centered around Jonas, a young boy living in a controlled community where “sameness” prevails and “family” is rooted in compatibility over biology. The community, and it is assumed the world, has achieved a passivity and compliance that echoes Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; there is no pain or fear, but neither is there love nor happiness. Language in Jonas’s community has been modified to precision, leaving no room for abstraction. Development, too, has been altered and predetermined to inhibit variation: children know they will receive “comfort objects” and clothing at the same age as the others in their “group.” They will get bicycles at nine. Their vocations at twelve. Should they apply for a spouse the Committee of Elders will select a suitable choice based on compatibility. Even reproduction is regulated as Birthmothers produce offspring to be allocated to qualifying families. They are not forced into submission by an omnipotent dictator, unlike Anthem and 1984, the members of the community do not even possess the awareness that it is possible to live in any other way. Not only has the need for choice been eradicated, so too has the idea.
The only person aware that such complex thought even exists is the Receiver—a human archive of memories from the time before Sameness responsible for guiding the community’s decisions concerning issues with which they have never experienced. Almost a martyr, the Receiver must bear pain of his memories, as well as the isolation of his position for the sake of the community. Chosen to be the new Receiver, Jonas is telepathically given the memories of his predecessor, known to him as the Giver. For the first time Jonas experiences love, color, and snow—alienating him from his friends and family who could never begin to fathom such things and prompting us as readers to not only see the limitations of perfection, but to question our own perceptions of reality and how assumptions effect that perception. It may be argued that The Giver is not meant to remind us that pain and love are contingent upon one another and the necessity of both, but rather of the similarities between our own world and Jonas’s.
There is a moment of realization in The Giver when Jonas first meets his predecessor and describes the burden of his memories.
To read requires more than just the literal comprehension of symbols. We read not only books, but the world around us and we are constantly expanding our understanding through accumulation. Our perception of everything we see is shaped by what we have already seen. Colorblindness not only differentiates the community in the novel from our own, it represents their inability to see and marks their existence as merely biological. It is Jonas’s capacity to “see beyond” that allows him humanity—an understanding of death and empathy. It’s hard to say if there really is “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”—I wouldn’t know.
The only person aware that such complex thought even exists is the Receiver—a human archive of memories from the time before Sameness responsible for guiding the community’s decisions concerning issues with which they have never experienced. Almost a martyr, the Receiver must bear pain of his memories, as well as the isolation of his position for the sake of the community. Chosen to be the new Receiver, Jonas is telepathically given the memories of his predecessor, known to him as the Giver. For the first time Jonas experiences love, color, and snow—alienating him from his friends and family who could never begin to fathom such things and prompting us as readers to not only see the limitations of perfection, but to question our own perceptions of reality and how assumptions effect that perception. It may be argued that The Giver is not meant to remind us that pain and love are contingent upon one another and the necessity of both, but rather of the similarities between our own world and Jonas’s.
There is a moment of realization in The Giver when Jonas first meets his predecessor and describes the burden of his memories.
“It’s as if…” The man paused, seeming to search his mind for the right words of description. “It’s like going downhill through deep snow on a sled,” he said, finally. “At first it’s exhilarating: the speed; the sharp, clear air; but then the snow accumulates, builds up on the runners, and you slow, you have to push hard to keep going, and—”Just as Jonas does not understand snow, we too are left befuddled, unable to comprehend a world in which something so simple and obvious can be misunderstood. We assume there is snow and color in Jonas’s world because there is snow and color in our own and until told differently there is no reason to imagine the world existing in any other way. Lowry does not reveal the absence of such seeming trivialities until more than halfway through the book and up to that point it might be assumed that the vast majority of readers filled in the gaps of the novel with characteristics attributed to their personal lives and surroundings. Jonas’s community is so appealing for precisely that reason; it is so bare and void of substance and emotion that we as readers are able to project ourselves, along with our acquired knowledge and identity, into it. It is only after we become aware of what has been sacrificed to achieve perfection does it lose its attraction. It is impossible to imagine a life bereft of the very concepts of love and desire and so the mirror in which we could once see ourselves turns dark. Though, arguably, this speaks to the inherent hypocrisy of Lowry’s book. Do our own cultural assumptions not guide us as they do the members of Jonas’s community? Though capable of thought, emotion, and choice we are constantly guided by cultural expectations. The way we dress, eat, communicate, even rebel are all in compliance with societal standards. We believe our lives to be natural because that is all we know, yet our community is just as constructed as Jonas’s. Just as the community in the novel cannot even fathom love and pain, we cannot fathom a world without it.
He shook his head suddenly, and peered at Jonas. “That meant nothing to you, did it?” he asked.
Jonas was confused. “I didn’t understand it, sir.”
“Of course you didn’t. You don’t know what snow is, do you?”
The Giver, it may be argued, is a commentary on reading, and subsequently perception, more than anything else. It challenges readers’ own communities, questioning their ability to see the world free from influence. In a way that might have been intended to persuade young readers of the value of books, à la Fahrenheit 451, Jonas notes upon entering the Giver’s room: The most conspicuous difference was the books. In his own dwelling, there were the necessary reference volumes that each household contained: a dictionary, and a thick community volume which contained descriptions of every office, factory, building, and committee. And the Book of Rules, of course. The books in his own dwelling were the only books that Jonas had ever seen. He had never known that other books existed.It is the act of reading that separates us from, not only Jonas’s community, but from other works of dystopian literature frequently assigned in schools. As is the case in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1949) and Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), books and the act of reading signify knowledge and intellectual development. Their ubiquitous presence in middle and high school classrooms may be seen as a response to students who might just as well rather go home and play videogames or watch television. (Something that I always found to rather hypocritical on the part of educators who try to force meaning, contradicting the value of free thought that these novels advocate.) Cautionary tales warning of the danger of illiteracy, and subsequent ignorance, these novels, with The Giver, promote the necessity of intellect. It is not the act of merely existing that makes one human, but rather to “be,” one must exist in relation to a larger community. Similarly it may be argued that Jonas’s community, though it is exists in the literal definition of the word (hinting at their fixation with the precision of words), exists in no larger context. The use of the word “community” was deliberate on Lowry’s part and though there an acknowledgment of other communities, Jonas himself says “I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.”
To read requires more than just the literal comprehension of symbols. We read not only books, but the world around us and we are constantly expanding our understanding through accumulation. Our perception of everything we see is shaped by what we have already seen. Colorblindness not only differentiates the community in the novel from our own, it represents their inability to see and marks their existence as merely biological. It is Jonas’s capacity to “see beyond” that allows him humanity—an understanding of death and empathy. It’s hard to say if there really is “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”—I wouldn’t know.
The Woeful Work of Edward Gorey: Epiplectic Bicycles, Loathsome Couples, and Hapless Children
O, the of it all.
-Gorey’s response when asked of his motto.
-Gorey’s response when asked of his motto.
“It was the day after Tuesday and the day before Wednesday," begins Edward Gorey's enigmatic tale, The Epiplectic Bicycle (1969), in which two young children are involved in a series of seemingly unrelated and frivolous situations. Though not necessarily one of his best known books, that first line captures the prevailing tone of his almost fifty years as an author. One familiar with his work might agree that there is something inexplicably foreboding hidden in between Tuesday and Wednesday, that perhaps it is during this time that the once innocuous gardens and hallways in his illustrations become macabre and sinister. Gorey has a uniquely masterful approach to storytelling and his books, a reader might assume, begin well after they are supposed to; his greatest strength is what he fails to include, leaving the reader to make sense of his contradictions and banal details. When discussing his readers, though, it is difficult to distinguish who exactly they might be. Lacking the formalities of modern children's books that feature bright colors and soft images, Gorey's somber Victorian inspired drawings only contribute to the difficulty of deciphering his readership. There is an ambiguity, which on one hand places his oeuvre as exclusively for adults, claiming his work as either too sophisticated or too dangerous for children. On the other hand though, Gorey's numerous alphabet books and frequent use of rhyme suggest that child readers might find his books attractive, even if they don't fully understand the content. As Alexander Theroux writes, "Gorey's is an unclassifiable genre: not really children's books, neither comic books, nor art stills." This essay will address Gorey's work in a broad sense in order to figure out who his readers might be, with a focus on his books depicting bizarre or unfortunate children.
It is not uncommon for one familiar with Gorey's work to assume that he is both British and long dead. However, Gorey, a native of Chicago, spent almost all of his life in America before dieing of heart failure in April of 2000 at the age of seventy-five. When he was asked in an interview what his favorite journey was, he replied, almost poetically, "Looking out of a window." He traveled abroad only once, to Scotland in 1975, claiming that his greatest disapointment was not finding the Loch Ness monster. One might find the inspiration of Gorey's work by examining his life. Admittedly, a very precocious child, he taught himself to read at the age of three and had completed the works of Victor Hugo by the time he was eight. He was known to have been an avid reader throughout his life, but also made sure to keep up with the escapades of Erica Kane on All My Children. Gorey was a man marked by his eccentricities; an infamous recluse who preferred the company of cats over people, such an ardent supporter of the New York City Ballet that he went for twenty-three years without ever missing a performance, and a man who was as well versed in Japanese literature as he was in Petticoat Junction. Beginning his career as an artist, he worked for Doubleday, illustrating reprints of classics like Dracula and War of the Worlds. His first original book, The Unstrung Harp, was published in 1953, by Brown and Company. He published over a hundred of his own books and provided illustrations to authors such as Peter Nuemeyer and John Bellairs until the time of his death.
Gorey's work is distinctly unsettling and it is, perhaps, because of his vague sense of time and details that just miss our eye, hiding in our imaginations. Though his drawing style calls forth a Victorian/Edwardian tone, he often juxtaposes that with details that conjure notions of the 1920s, such as women wearing dark eyeliner and dressed as flappers. In The West Wing (1963) we are presented with foreboding images of hallways, open doors, and scattered shoes that suggest that we have just missed the action, that there is something lurking on the other side of the panel. Formal aspects aside, Theroux writes that "Gorey's entire canon is a long purgatory of muffled hysteria, danger, and strange attrition where endings are invariably inconclusive and always abrupt." He has created a world filled with threats, in which "legs protrude from ghoulish hedges, topiary threatens, and wallpaper intimidates." It almost seems no surprise that the object of these threats would most frequently be children. Tobi Tobias observed from Gorey's work that he has "a highly immediate feel for the vulnerabilities of childhood." The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963), possibly his most widely known book, depicts twenty-six children, for each letter of the alphabet, dying in rhyming verse with drawings set moments before their demise. "M is for Maud who was swept out to sea/ N is for Neville who died of ennui [. . .] Y is for Yorick whose head was knocked in/ Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin." Gorey's grim humor is made clear in these verses, and as readers we are able to accept the violence of his work as a result of the form in which it's presented.
Though not all of Gorey's work concerning violence against children is done in such a darkly humorous way. Gorey based the notably violent The Loathsome Couple (1977) from the gruesome Moors murders committed in England by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Of the murders Gorey has said that they "upset [him] dreadfully, even after years of reading crime stories" and that he felt compelled to write and illustrate a book about the event. In The Loathsome Couple the two killers begin their lives as rather unappealing children. "Harold Snedleigh was found beating a sick small animal to death with a rock when he was five years old;" "As a child Mona already had thick ankles and thin hair." They grow into insipid adults who meet at the "Self-Help Institute lecture on the Evils of the Decimal System." As is the case in most of Gorey's books, this lacks a complete narrative, and we are left with mundane details; "Following one particularly exciting [crime film], they fumbled with each other in a cold woodshed. After several years they secretly rented a remote and undesirable villa." Perhaps the reason that this book was perceived as so shocking (as well as humorous by some of Gorey’s more fiendish readers) is because it portrays violence against children in such a humdrum way. The line "They spent the better part of the night murdering the child in various ways," carries the same weight as "They sat down to a meal of cornflakes and treacle, turnip sandwiches, and artificial grape soda." The thing that separates this though, from almost all of his other books, is the fact that in the end the killers are punished, Harold and Mona are sent to prison and spend their rest of their lives in isolation.
During multiple interviews, Gorey has remarked that he believes his work to be
quite realistic. A belief, it seems, that has had quite a few opponents, and perhaps for valid reasons. His work hardly seems to depict any reality that I have ever seen, but what picture book does? In comparison to overly moralistic children's books where everything happens for a reason and everybody is happy at the end, I believe that Gorey's books do indeed provide their readers insight into the real world. Real life is not divided into perfect, cohesive narratives where every action serves a purpose and every detail is of consequence. Like so much of the dialogue in Gorey's work, everyday life is filled with mundane details. In truth, the children's books that provide purpose and cause and effect are much less like reality than the vast majority of Gorey's work where things are left largely unexplained. As far as violence is concerned, we live in a world where terrible violent things happen all the time. On the subject of children and violence, Theroux writes that "schoolyards throughout the country are in the national grids of some of the worst cruelty and nastiest torture imaginable." In The Loathsome Couple we are exposed to children as both victims and perpetrators (as young Harold beats the small animal) of violence. In The Hapless Child (1961) poor little Charlotte Sophia has her doll, Hortense, ripped apart by bullies at school. The Beastly Baby (1962) is seen hacking apart carpet and pouring acid onto a sofa. Gorey points out that children are not the innocent little creatures that we have tried to turn them into, but rather, they are fully capable of destruction on the same scale as adults. Three years after the arrest of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, eleven year old Mary Bell was convicted of killing two toddler aged children. While cases like Bell's are exceedingly rare, the point is, they still happen. The fact that children in Gorey's books are just as
guilty of violence as adults only seems to make classifying his work more difficult, and we are left to ponder its appropriateness for child readers.
Classifying the Unclassifiable
The complete ambiguity of Edward Gorey's work has placed him at the forefront of a genre that he solely occupies. Sharing stylistic elements with Charles Addams' famous New Yorker cartoon, The Addams Family, the comparisons end there as Gorey's work fails to deliver the playfulness and cohesion found in Addams'. Much of his work also borders on classic fairy tales due to his excessive use of violence and less-than-desirable endings. Kevin Shortsleeve compares aspects of The Loathsome Couple to Hansel and Gretel, begging the question, "is there really much of a difference between an 'undesirable villa' harboring child serial killers, as in Gorey's tale, and a secluded cottage harboring a witch who eats children, as in Grimm." While I agree with Shortsleeve's implied answer I don't think that Gorey's more child friendly books necessarily contain the morals found in fairy tales. I believe that the closest relatives of Gorey's work are nonsense and absurdism. "Gorey," writes Theroux, "who came into his essential intellectual life just about the time Sartre and Camus were popular on a worldwide scale, found almost everything about human nature absurd." One might find parallels between Gorey's L'Heure bleue, in which two interchangeable dog-like creatures have seemingly inane and nonsensical conversations at dusk, to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in which two interchangeable man-like creatures have seemingly inane and nonsensical conversations at dusk. Both texts (and like many of Gorey's other books) lack definition of time and space. Both take place at cusp between day and night, like the time in between Tuesday and Wednesday, there is something indiscernibly fantastical that allows for nonsense language and openly embraces it. Lines like "It seems to me a fate worse than sinking," to which the other dog replies, "But there isn't any other kind," has a vaguely profound meaning that one can't quite put their finger on. In each of the sixteen images in L'Heure bleue the dogs are in such different locations that it's hard to gauge exactly, or even approximately, how much time has elapsed. Likewise in Waiting for Godot, there is a discrepancy between what we are told and what has happened. The first act begins with a leafless tree, yet in the second act, which is said to take place the next day, the tree bears leaves, suggesting that the perception of time in Beckett's play is quite different from reality. Both stories, it seems, could continue indefinitely without resolution; the dogs will never cease to exchange illogical sentences, just as Godot will never come.When read as absurd, Gorey's work almost seems coherent. After all, absurdism is the subversion of logic, and as absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco wrote, it is "that which has no purpose, goal, or objective." However, though his work bears a resemblance to absurdism in terms of shared ideologies, it doesn't quite fit as exclusively absurdist. Gorey's work also shares similarities with that of Lewis Carroll's and Edward Lear's, the main distinction being the time in which their respective works were published. Had The Wuggly Ump (1963), Gorey's only book marketed specifically for children, been written one hundred years prior, it might have been remembered in the same vein as Carroll's Jabberwocky (1871). Sensibilities and ideas of childhood changed drastically in between the publication of the two aforementioned texts, what once was acceptable for child readers might have been considered 'unsafe' during Gorey's time.
I disagree with accusations that Gorey’s work as whole is unfit for children, it is not simply black and white. While I wouldn’t necessarily read a book like The Loathsome Couple to a toddler, there might me be something appealing about the rhyming verses in The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Though the biggest problem in Gorey's inability to achieve success as a children's author has mostly to do with the way that his books were marketed by publishers. Admittedly, Gorey did indeed intend for several of his books to be published for children and quite a few of them fit very well into that category. The Bug Book (1959), about a group of colorful bugs who overthrow their oppressor, and The Doubtful Guest (1957), about an unexpected visitor who stays long after it is welcome, share the same stylistic qualities as books like The Loathsome Couple, though they are rather unobjectionable and are presented in a way that young readers might enjoy. However, the vast majority of Gorey’s books can no longer be purchased as single volumes, but instead as anthologies—Amphigorey (1972), Amphigorey Too (1975), Amphigorey Also (1983), and Amphigorey Again (2006)—which place his more innocuous stories next to The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Tale by Ogdred Weary (1961), though fairly innocent itself, the title alone would turn most parents off from reading it as a bedtime story.
In attempting to discern Gorey’s readers he may be one of best sources of insight.
When asked in interviews who he thought his audience might be, his answers indicated that there was no common denominator, that children and adults alike appreciated his work, and even then it was hard to break the two groups down into more specific categories. It seems fitting that his readership is so diverse as so much of his work is open-ended. The missing details allow readers to project their own desires and fantasies on to his books, reinforcing their subjectivity. Edward Gorey has become somewhat of a myth, a man with such diverse and extreme interests, he is capable of appealing to almost anyone. Appropriately, like so many of his books, the search for his reader has never been resolved, not by fans, publishers, or the author himself, and as long as his work is so open to interpretation, it may never will.
What is Gained is Loss: Emotional Dissonance in The Zoo Story
Absurdism is, to varying degrees, life exaggerated. It is a theater that “subverts logic [and] relishes the unexpected and logically impossible” (Culík). Aspects of normality are taken to extremes and turn from trivial to uncomfortable. In a note on Kafka, Eugene Ionesco writes “Absurd is that which has no purpose, or goal, or objective.” And yet this purposeless, goalless, and objectiveless narrative structure still provides an insightful look into human nature. Coined by Martin Esslin and derived from Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, the Theater of the Absurd defines the human situation as meaningless. Though, despite nonsense language at times and bizarre situations, Esslin writes, “Not only do all these plays make sense, though perhaps not obvious or conventional sense, they also give expression to some of the basic issues and problems of our age, in a uniquely efficient and meaningful manner, so that they meet some of the deepest needs and unexpressed yearning of their audience.” This theater rooted in the avant-garde, the “experience of World War II”, and “the disappearance of the religious dimension from contemporary life” depicts human existence as it really is: irrational and ridiculous (Culík). Rather, it depicts emotion as it really is. The situations themselves vary from highly unlikely to absolutely implausible but the plays carry an air about them suggestive of the isolation involved with being human. In fact, the prevailing tone of Absurdist theater expresses the inability to connect and subsequently with loneliness and alienation from society.
In Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story Jerry is man who longs for connection. He lives a solitary life in a sickening roominghouse in the Upper West of New York City. Once thin and handsome, Jerry is now at a time in his life where the those facts are hardly still evident and his appearance reflects his emotional wear. He meets Peter on a bench in Central Park. Peter is married man with two daughters, two cats, and two parakeets who lives comfortably; he “wears tweeds, smokes a pipe, [and] carries horn-rimmed glasses.” Jerry approaches Peter asking him if he would like to hear about his recent trip to the zoo. The encounter is frustrating for the both of them as neither of them are quite able to understand the other. Constantly alluding to his trip to the zoo, but never revealing what actually happened there, Peter becomes irritated with Jerry. It is evident that Jerry’s actions are intentional; he is pressing Peter’s buttons and removing him from his literal and also ideological comfort zone on purpose. In the final few moments of the play Jerry begins forcing Peter off of “his” bench, gradually and calmly at first and building up to a forceful climax leaving Peter hysterical and presumably teary-eyed. Jerry challenges Peter to defend himself and his pride to prove that he is not, as Jerry calls him, a “vegetable.” The play ends with Jerry tossing a knife to Peter and charging at him, impaling and killing himself and leaving Peter shocked and stunned. In his final gasps of breath Jerry tells Peter what happened at the zoo:
Linguistic disparity, as Julian Wasserman points out, also applies to Jerry’s aforementioned pornographic playing cards. Jerry talks about the cards saying, “when you’re a kid you use the cards as substitute for a real experience, and when you’re older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.” Wasserman points out, “What is important here is that, whether one begins with ideas and moves toward experience or whether one moves in the opposite direction , a disparity remains.” I think that Albee pin points almost perfectly one of the most discouraging things about being human: that we are not really ever fully content with what we have. The reality will never live up the fantasy and the fantasy will never live up to the reality.
Although, fantasy and reality, as seen through Jerry’s relationship with his “fat, ugly, mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of garbage” landlady, are not necessarily contingent upon one another. Jerry describes himself as the “ object of her sweaty lust.” “
For Jerry, though, the real experience is necessary. He needs the experience in order to exist and, in turn, to die. Jerry is a man on the periphery of society, a man that someone like Peter views as little more than a pebble in his shoe. In a social sense, Jerry is already dead. He looks to Peter to justify and prove his existence. Heidegger makes the point that for a person to really exist they must be part of a larger community, there must be some sort of encounter with others. It can be argued that Jerry’s interaction with the other residents of the roominghouse would suffice, but they are all loners, they are all as socially dead as Jerry is. Heidegger’s “ being” surpasses biological existence. Jerry’s desire for existence through interaction is so interesting because in the end he decides to take his own life, and I think that that begs the question that if “being” surpasses biological existence, can “ being” exist without it? I think that it this case it can. Jerry stresses the idea that “we have to know the effect of our actions.” As long others are affected by our actions we will continue to exist. Though Jerry dies, it is doubtful that Peter could live out his life without ever being affected by his interaction with him and so Jerry continues to exist through the interaction he felt was necessary in life. Jerry looks to Peter to exist and escape the fantasy of a connection, although there are very fantastical elements to their meeting. It’s separated from reality in a very realistic way. The Zoo Story can be seen as an unlikely allegory for the impossibility of human connection, but at the same time, there is something eerily plausible about their encounter. As I noted above Anderson points out that it is “a very real situation,” in fact, I think that to suppose this situation could never happen negates, in my opinion, the entire point of the play. To say that it couldn’t and to say that people like Jerry don’t exist contradicts the entire message. Mussoff says of The Zoo Story that “ it is impossible to identify with these characters whom we do not really understand, whose motives and backgrounds we do not know,” but I wholeheartedly disagree, I believe the exact opposite is true of Jerry. We are aware of his motivations and of his background, in fact he talks in great length about both. He represents a life of loss, which on a very simple level is incredibly relatable. Perhaps the reason this play is so unsettling is because we can see ourselves reflected in its characters and we can empathize with them. Esslin writes:
Perhaps more than with Peter, arguably Jerry’s most important relationship in the play is with his landlady’s dog. It is through the dog that the subjects of love, guilt, and destruction are addressed within the story. The horrible landlady’s equally horrible dog attacks Jerry every time he comes into the roominghouse, though curiously never when he goes out. Jerry says,“ From the very beginning he’d snarl and then go for me, to get one of my legs." This continues for sometime until Jerry decides that if he can’t “kill the dog with kindness[. . . ] he’ll just kill him.” His attempt at kindness is not meet and so, though disgusted with himself, he tries to kill the dog. However, the “murderous” amount of rat poison he kneads into a hamburger is only effective enough to make the dog deathly ill without actually killing it. Ultimately, Jerry is glad that the dog lived, as he says, “not just because I’d poisoned him” but rather he “wanted the dog to live so that [he] could see what [their] new relationship might come to." Once healthy, Jerry says of his subsequent encounter with the dog:
I would like to end on a note by Esslin, which I think is the basic core of The Zoo Story and Absurdism in a general sense,
In Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story Jerry is man who longs for connection. He lives a solitary life in a sickening roominghouse in the Upper West of New York City. Once thin and handsome, Jerry is now at a time in his life where the those facts are hardly still evident and his appearance reflects his emotional wear. He meets Peter on a bench in Central Park. Peter is married man with two daughters, two cats, and two parakeets who lives comfortably; he “wears tweeds, smokes a pipe, [and] carries horn-rimmed glasses.” Jerry approaches Peter asking him if he would like to hear about his recent trip to the zoo. The encounter is frustrating for the both of them as neither of them are quite able to understand the other. Constantly alluding to his trip to the zoo, but never revealing what actually happened there, Peter becomes irritated with Jerry. It is evident that Jerry’s actions are intentional; he is pressing Peter’s buttons and removing him from his literal and also ideological comfort zone on purpose. In the final few moments of the play Jerry begins forcing Peter off of “his” bench, gradually and calmly at first and building up to a forceful climax leaving Peter hysterical and presumably teary-eyed. Jerry challenges Peter to defend himself and his pride to prove that he is not, as Jerry calls him, a “vegetable.” The play ends with Jerry tossing a knife to Peter and charging at him, impaling and killing himself and leaving Peter shocked and stunned. In his final gasps of breath Jerry tells Peter what happened at the zoo:
I think... I think this is what happened at the zoo... I think. I think that while I was at the zoo I decided I would walk north... northerly, rather... until I found you... or somebody... and I decided that I would talk to you... I would tell you things... and the things I would tell you would... Well, here were are? you see? here we are. But... I don’t know... could I have planned all this? No... no, I couldn’t have. But I think I did. And now I’ve told you what you wanted to know, haven’t I? And now you know all about what happened at the zoo. And now you know what you’ll see on TV, and the face I told you about... you remember... the face I told you about... my face, the face you see right now. Peter... Peter? Peter... thank you. I came unto you and you have comforted me.Though their meeting is bizarre and seemingly unrealistic it contains a certain amount of truth to way that people respond and interact with each other. Peter’s failure and lack of desire to understand Jerry is not just about their chance encounter on a bench in Central Park, it is about chance encounters on benches everywhere; it is about human interaction and the impossibility of really being able to understand anyone else. It’s about what it’s like to be lonely when you’re not alone. Ultimately, for Jerry, Peter, and the audience, as Jerry says “what is gained is loss.”
Contact Without Communication
One could argue that Jerry serves as a Christ figure, “the park bench might indeed be a church pew, where strangers share in a parody of the Mass” (Mann 23) and although I disagree with any religious parallels that could made of The Zoo Story, Jerry is indeed responsible for providing Peter with autonomy. Peter is a man who is trapped in a childlike state, unable to intelligently articulate himself. He behaves the way he believes that a man in his position should behave, confined to a specific way of thought and communication. Mary Castiglie Anderson writes in Edward Albee: An Interview and Essays, “ Peter has no way of articulating his personal feelings and sensibilities, and without that ability, Peter, it may be argued, lacks any real identity or place within his world. What Jerry effects within the play is the initiation of Peter into an adult world of feelings and the responsibilities which are attendant with their expression.” The idea of Peter entering emotional adulthood idea brings up the theme of disparity in The Zoo Story, both social and linguistic. The idea of who we are versus who we want to be. Peter wants to be an adult, even though in many ways, he is not. He can only become what he wants at the cost of another person, someone he would never associate with due to socioeconomic factors. In Albee’s idea of social disparity Peter cannot exist without Jerry and Jerry cannot exist with Peter; the rich cannot exist with the poor and the poor cannot exist without the rich. Anderson writes, “ Peter in his innocence and Jerry in his ‘over-sanity’ (Albee’s term) both lack completeness; each provides the other with a ‘missing half’.” Anderson also writes that “ Peter and Jerry reveal different aspects of one personality and represent very real people in a very real situation.” Albee himself has claimed the Jerry and Peter represent two sides of himself: “the one who lived back in Larchmont, and the one who lives in New York City.”
This play can no doubt be read as a story about class. Jerry lives in a tiny room in a roominghouse on the upper West Side. Peter lives in the east 70s, a world completely separate from the one in which Jerry inhabits. In Peter’s world he has parakeets and a wife to worry about, ignorant of people like Jerry. When Jerry is talking about his horrible landlady Peter even replies “ I find it hard to believe that people such as that really are.” It is as though Peter might as well be saying that he can’t believe that there are people who don’t have a wife and children and parakeets. Peter’s lack of ability to understand Jerry serves to say that it’s not that people can’t understand each other it’s just that sometimes it’s easier not to, it’s easier to ignore them. Jerry quips, “ I don’t know what I was thinking about; of course you don’t understand. I don’t live in your block; I’m not married to two parakeets, or whatever your setup is.” It could be argued that much of the conflict in this play is based on this social distinction. Their inability to communicate stems from their inability to connect on a social level. The only time Peter even tries to make sense of Jerry is when he believes that he is from the Village. Assuming that Jerry is just an eccentric artist, Peter is suddenly okay with their “situation,” but once he finds out that he is actually from the upper West Side, his response is one of fear. Jerry is no longer a harmless eccentric; he is dangerous and poor. This speaks in volumes about human nature: that we are threatened by that which we don’t understand.
Disparity in a linguistic sense also plays a significant role in Peter and Jerry’s relationship and with what I think Albee is trying to communicate with this play. (On a tangential side note, I find it fascinating that Albee chose Absurdism. In a play about how hard it is to effectively and truthfully communicate, he used a narrative form that is difficult itself to understand.) Physically and financially Jerry is in far worse shape than Peter, although he is able to articulate himself much better and he is at times almost even poetic. Though the educated and supposedly “better” Peter is, as stated above, almost incapable of intelligently expressing himself, both in terms of eloquence (of which he has little to none) and the truth in what he saying. Toward the end of the play when Jerry is trying to force Peter out of his bench, Peter defends his pride and property by hysterically yelling at him to the point of tears, “ GET AWAY FROM MY BENCH.” His biggest defense is that he is an adult and deserves the bench although his behavior suggests otherwise. This discrepancy between idea and experience is similarly seen in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot when at the end of the play Estragon says “let’s go” yet the stage direction reads “they do not move.” This is true of life as well. Meaning is not always obvious. Esslin says of conventional drama that “every word means what it says, the situations are clearcut, and at the end all conflicts are tidily resolved.” But life itself is not like that. I don’t mean to imply that there is a lack of emotion in conventional drama, but I think there is certainly a lack of sincerity. There’s something very black and white about a play like Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, it’s very emotionally exploitive, like watching a kitten get hurt. We sympathize with the characters not because they are necessarily relatable, but because they are so tragic and innocent, you can’t watch them without feeling pity. Whereas The Zoo Story contains gray areas. It conveys emotion without pity. It lacks innocence and conventional tragedy. And because of that it is sincere and it is real in a way that realistic conventional drama could never be. It seems that a major distinction between Jerry and Peter is where they are categorized in terms of dramatic style. It seems obvious that Jerry belongs in the world of the absurd with his repetitive style and seemingly nonsense stories. But Peter, he is a man of more conventional ways. It’s almost as though, with Jerry’s arrival, with his presence to complete Peter’s “ other half,” Jerry brings him into his absurd world. Just as Peter provides Jerry with existence, Jerry does the same for Peter.
This play can no doubt be read as a story about class. Jerry lives in a tiny room in a roominghouse on the upper West Side. Peter lives in the east 70s, a world completely separate from the one in which Jerry inhabits. In Peter’s world he has parakeets and a wife to worry about, ignorant of people like Jerry. When Jerry is talking about his horrible landlady Peter even replies “ I find it hard to believe that people such as that really are.” It is as though Peter might as well be saying that he can’t believe that there are people who don’t have a wife and children and parakeets. Peter’s lack of ability to understand Jerry serves to say that it’s not that people can’t understand each other it’s just that sometimes it’s easier not to, it’s easier to ignore them. Jerry quips, “ I don’t know what I was thinking about; of course you don’t understand. I don’t live in your block; I’m not married to two parakeets, or whatever your setup is.” It could be argued that much of the conflict in this play is based on this social distinction. Their inability to communicate stems from their inability to connect on a social level. The only time Peter even tries to make sense of Jerry is when he believes that he is from the Village. Assuming that Jerry is just an eccentric artist, Peter is suddenly okay with their “situation,” but once he finds out that he is actually from the upper West Side, his response is one of fear. Jerry is no longer a harmless eccentric; he is dangerous and poor. This speaks in volumes about human nature: that we are threatened by that which we don’t understand.
Disparity in a linguistic sense also plays a significant role in Peter and Jerry’s relationship and with what I think Albee is trying to communicate with this play. (On a tangential side note, I find it fascinating that Albee chose Absurdism. In a play about how hard it is to effectively and truthfully communicate, he used a narrative form that is difficult itself to understand.) Physically and financially Jerry is in far worse shape than Peter, although he is able to articulate himself much better and he is at times almost even poetic. Though the educated and supposedly “better” Peter is, as stated above, almost incapable of intelligently expressing himself, both in terms of eloquence (of which he has little to none) and the truth in what he saying. Toward the end of the play when Jerry is trying to force Peter out of his bench, Peter defends his pride and property by hysterically yelling at him to the point of tears, “ GET AWAY FROM MY BENCH.” His biggest defense is that he is an adult and deserves the bench although his behavior suggests otherwise. This discrepancy between idea and experience is similarly seen in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot when at the end of the play Estragon says “let’s go” yet the stage direction reads “they do not move.” This is true of life as well. Meaning is not always obvious. Esslin says of conventional drama that “every word means what it says, the situations are clearcut, and at the end all conflicts are tidily resolved.” But life itself is not like that. I don’t mean to imply that there is a lack of emotion in conventional drama, but I think there is certainly a lack of sincerity. There’s something very black and white about a play like Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, it’s very emotionally exploitive, like watching a kitten get hurt. We sympathize with the characters not because they are necessarily relatable, but because they are so tragic and innocent, you can’t watch them without feeling pity. Whereas The Zoo Story contains gray areas. It conveys emotion without pity. It lacks innocence and conventional tragedy. And because of that it is sincere and it is real in a way that realistic conventional drama could never be. It seems that a major distinction between Jerry and Peter is where they are categorized in terms of dramatic style. It seems obvious that Jerry belongs in the world of the absurd with his repetitive style and seemingly nonsense stories. But Peter, he is a man of more conventional ways. It’s almost as though, with Jerry’s arrival, with his presence to complete Peter’s “ other half,” Jerry brings him into his absurd world. Just as Peter provides Jerry with existence, Jerry does the same for Peter.
Linguistic disparity, as Julian Wasserman points out, also applies to Jerry’s aforementioned pornographic playing cards. Jerry talks about the cards saying, “when you’re a kid you use the cards as substitute for a real experience, and when you’re older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.” Wasserman points out, “What is important here is that, whether one begins with ideas and moves toward experience or whether one moves in the opposite direction , a disparity remains.” I think that Albee pin points almost perfectly one of the most discouraging things about being human: that we are not really ever fully content with what we have. The reality will never live up the fantasy and the fantasy will never live up to the reality.
Although, fantasy and reality, as seen through Jerry’s relationship with his “fat, ugly, mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of garbage” landlady, are not necessarily contingent upon one another. Jerry describes himself as the “ object of her sweaty lust.” “
I have found a way to keep her off me. When she talks to me, when she presses herself to my body and mumbles about her room and how I should come there I merely say: but, Love; wasn’t yesterday enough for you, and the day before? Then she puzzles, she makes slits of her tiny eyes, she sways a little, and then Peter... and it is at this moment that I think I might be doing some good in that tormented house... a simple-minded smile begins to form on her unthinkable face, and she giggles and groans as she thinks about yesterday and the day before; as she believes and relives what never happened . . . and I am safe until the next meeting.Sometimes the fantasy can be the reality. Wasserman asserts, “For the landlady, one may indeed say that memory is the equivalent of the event.” Perhaps the meaning of this situation is that memories themselves are based on fantasy. We remember things the way we wished the reality had been. Life is not the linear narrative that we sometimes remember it to be. We forget the unhappiness and disappointment, and replace that with foggy memories of a reality that may have never been.
For Jerry, though, the real experience is necessary. He needs the experience in order to exist and, in turn, to die. Jerry is a man on the periphery of society, a man that someone like Peter views as little more than a pebble in his shoe. In a social sense, Jerry is already dead. He looks to Peter to justify and prove his existence. Heidegger makes the point that for a person to really exist they must be part of a larger community, there must be some sort of encounter with others. It can be argued that Jerry’s interaction with the other residents of the roominghouse would suffice, but they are all loners, they are all as socially dead as Jerry is. Heidegger’s “ being” surpasses biological existence. Jerry’s desire for existence through interaction is so interesting because in the end he decides to take his own life, and I think that that begs the question that if “being” surpasses biological existence, can “ being” exist without it? I think that it this case it can. Jerry stresses the idea that “we have to know the effect of our actions.” As long others are affected by our actions we will continue to exist. Though Jerry dies, it is doubtful that Peter could live out his life without ever being affected by his interaction with him and so Jerry continues to exist through the interaction he felt was necessary in life. Jerry looks to Peter to exist and escape the fantasy of a connection, although there are very fantastical elements to their meeting. It’s separated from reality in a very realistic way. The Zoo Story can be seen as an unlikely allegory for the impossibility of human connection, but at the same time, there is something eerily plausible about their encounter. As I noted above Anderson points out that it is “a very real situation,” in fact, I think that to suppose this situation could never happen negates, in my opinion, the entire point of the play. To say that it couldn’t and to say that people like Jerry don’t exist contradicts the entire message. Mussoff says of The Zoo Story that “ it is impossible to identify with these characters whom we do not really understand, whose motives and backgrounds we do not know,” but I wholeheartedly disagree, I believe the exact opposite is true of Jerry. We are aware of his motivations and of his background, in fact he talks in great length about both. He represents a life of loss, which on a very simple level is incredibly relatable. Perhaps the reason this play is so unsettling is because we can see ourselves reflected in its characters and we can empathize with them. Esslin writes:
The human condition being what it is, with man small, helpless, insecure, and unable to ever fathom the world in all it’s hopelessness, death, and absurdity, the theater has to confront him with the bitter truth that most human endeavor is irrational and senseless, that communication between human beings is well-nigh impossible, and that the world will forever remain an impenetrable mystery.There is truth to Jerry and Peter, and, appropriately, it is frightening that their encounter is not so different from any other.
The World is a Zoo
The Zoo Story is not only a reference to Jerry’s rather unimportant a trip to the zoo, but also his experience with Peter. Jerry went to zoo because he wanted to “find out more about the way that people exist with animals, and the way animals exist with each other." It’s curious to note the zoo itself is not an intrinsic element of the narrative. The existence and function of a zoo perhaps is, but for Jerry’s purpose having actually gone to the zoo is a negligible element of his story. As Mel Gussow writes, “For Jerry, life is a zoo.”Perhaps more than with Peter, arguably Jerry’s most important relationship in the play is with his landlady’s dog. It is through the dog that the subjects of love, guilt, and destruction are addressed within the story. The horrible landlady’s equally horrible dog attacks Jerry every time he comes into the roominghouse, though curiously never when he goes out. Jerry says,“ From the very beginning he’d snarl and then go for me, to get one of my legs." This continues for sometime until Jerry decides that if he can’t “kill the dog with kindness[. . . ] he’ll just kill him.” His attempt at kindness is not meet and so, though disgusted with himself, he tries to kill the dog. However, the “murderous” amount of rat poison he kneads into a hamburger is only effective enough to make the dog deathly ill without actually killing it. Ultimately, Jerry is glad that the dog lived, as he says, “not just because I’d poisoned him” but rather he “wanted the dog to live so that [he] could see what [their] new relationship might come to." Once healthy, Jerry says of his subsequent encounter with the dog:
I loved the dog now, and I wanted him to love me. I had tried to love, and I had tried to kill, and both had been unsuccessful by themselves. I hoped... and I don’t know why I expected the dog to understand anything, much less my motivations... I hoped the dog would understand. It’s just... it’s just that... it’s just that if you can’t deal with people, you have to make a start somewhere. WITH ANIMALS! Don’t you see? A person has to have some way of dealing with SOMETHING. If not with people... if not with people... SOMETHING!We see how important the idea of connection is for Jerry. Ultimately, his attempts to connect failed and he says of it, “we neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other. And, was trying to feed the dog an act of love? And, perhaps, was the dog’s attempt to bite me not an act of love? If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word love in the first place?”
I would like to end on a note by Esslin, which I think is the basic core of The Zoo Story and Absurdism in a general sense,
Ultimately, a phenomenon like The Theater of the Absurd does not reflect despair or a return to dark irrational forces but expresses modern man’s endeavor to come to terms with the world in which he lives. It attempts to make him face up to the human condition as it really is to free him from illusions that are bound to cause constant maladjustment and disappointment.... For the dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its senselessness; to accept it freely, without fear, without illusions—and to laugh at it..
How Strange it is to Be Anything At All: The Essay Turned Album Review I Went Crazy Trying to Write
Like the object you constantly encounter until you need it and then it’s nowhere to be found, I thought that by this point in my life I would capable of intelligibly articulating why it is that I find certain things appealing—why I prefer David Attenborough’s narration to Planet Earth over Sigourney Weaver’s, why I think that everything looks better when it’s covered in wood grain shelf liner. But the moment I attach pen to paper—or more accurately, fingertip to keyboard—explanations that were once so clear in my head evaporate until they are little more than shadows of words with missing letters and muffled meanings returning only after they are no longer needed. This is exactly how I feel about Neutral Milk Hotel’s magnum opus, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It exists in my consciousness as a complete artifact, cross-filed among memories of high school and long car rides. It is only when I try to actively recall it do I realize that it’s incomplete. Words and notes that were so clear in my head become impossible to decipher and I’m left dumbfounded unable to offer anything other than, “there’s just something about it—his voice, its simplicity—I can’t explain it.” And maybe that’s why it achieved the cult success that it did: the only explanation that can be offered is the album itself. When I told a few friends that I would be writing about Aeroplane they agreed with my assessment that its attraction is indefinable and yet, it did not occur to me that trying to write about Mangum’s ability to transcend language may in itself be a more difficult task than I had originally planned. How exactly can one write about the incompleteness of words without lacking in their own words? Rather than try to offer an explanation as to how Aeroplane is able to evoke such a visceral response or even what it’s about, the most I can hope to impart is my own experience in trying to undertake such an endeavor.
I lost track of the hours I spent listening to Aeroplane in the dark trying to find something that wasn’t there. Hoping that maybe this time it would make sense, that I would discover the prophetic significance of “God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life.” Angels never descended from Heaven and I would like to hope that at some point my friends became concerned about my well-being. Doing dishes and sleeping became secondary to sitting on the couch in my pajamas trying to figure what a wandering genie was, as though being able to identify what type of sound it produced was on par with finding the Holy Grail. (Incidentally, it’s a type of organ made by Lowrey.) At some point amid the mess around me, I came to the realization that writing about a pop record—no matter how awe-inspiring—should not be a maddening experience. I can’t tell you what Mangum is singing about, and I’m not sure that I would want to even if I could. I think that on a very basic level Aeroplane is about the relationship between personal and collective history. Just as Mangum is trying to reconcile with the death of Anne Frank—one of the album’s predominant figures—through his own experiences, I can only understand these songs through myself. It has such personal significance for listeners that to try to turn it to an objective narrative would be a distraction from what may be read about this piece of music: our perspective is shaped by everything that we have done, or seen, or read. We are less detached from history than we may imagine. Though I rarely think about the conquests of Charlemagne as I brush my teeth, so much of my knowledge of the past—conscious or not—informs my decisions and opinions.
Amid the scores of flowery reviews I have read (a recent search on Google with the words “aeroplane over the sea review” yielded about 67,000 results) some have written that it took multiple listens before they were able to discern it, others have freely admitted that it brought them to tears, one in particular notes its impact: “For the ways the album has influenced so many people, I wish more would take this away from it—that it's OK to examine, and be nakedly emotional, about stuff aside from the lint in your belly button." Despite this ‘call for emotion’ these reviews, and perhaps even reviews written of anything, lack a sincerity that just can’t quite be translated. I am not doubting the emotional authenticity of tears shed over the album, and I am not above admitting my own guilt to having done so. The failure of these reviews reflects the failure of language; it’s like trying to describe “purple.” When I hear it I don’t think, “wow, this is ethereal,” but something that sounds more like the indiscernible mumblings of Charlie Brown’s teacher. While Roland Barthes may not have had a concept album about Anne Frank in mind, it remains just as relevant that he wrote in A Lover’s Discourse, “the more I experience the specialty of my desire, the less I can give it a name; to the precision of the target corresponds a wavering of the name; what is characteristic of desire, proper to desire, can produce only an impropriety of the utterance.” Perhaps the reason Aeroplane has generated so many reviews and responses, my own included, is in part due to the fact that the album arouses a desire to do so, or rather a desire to be a part of it. We can hear its beckoning call of singing saws and flugelhorns drawing us closer and right before we can make the leap, as Mangum sings in “Communist Daughter,” “the bridges burst and twist around” sending us back to reality. By writing about it we can take a little piece of it back with us. When I was in third grade I remember being so awestruck by the movie Now and Then that the only way that I could deal with it was to spend several months worth of recess writing myself into a sequel. What had become an epic sixty page screenplay written on wide ruled notebook paper unfortunately never made it to the big screen, but it let me feel like I had become a part of that world.
What I can best describe as a collage of everything that has ever come before it, Aeroplane creates a world that exists outside of time where zanzithiphones and Uilleann pipes fill the air with uncanny melodies. The ghost of Anne Frank floats about but she never really died, as Mangum sings, “now she’s a little boy in Spain/ Playing pianos filled with flames.” Though she is regarded as the glue that binds Aeroplane together, it is much more about his own response to her diary than an historically accurate account of her life. Around the time I was first getting into Neutral Milk Hotel I was coming out of a big They Might Be Giants kick. I was charmed by their quirky lyrics and unorthodox subjects. I was at an age where the cleverness of “Birdhouse In Your Soul” and “Doctor Worm” really struck me and I loved the idea that you could write a song about that kind of stuff and it was okay. At first I think I saw Aeroplane in a similar way; “it’s so weird and cool that this guy is singing about how much he loves Anne Frank!” Without delving too deep into what I’m sure has been the basis of countless theses and dissertations, this brings up a relevant point about the cultural significance of Anne Frank and the division between her as a person and her as a commodity.
Of the millions upon millions of people killed during the Holocaust, Anne Frank’s is the only name I can recall. I imagine that it is the only name most people can recall. When I was in middle school a boy in the next grade that I didn’t know very well suddenly passed away. I don’t think I ever thought twice about him during our exceedingly rare and brief encounters. I don’t even think he knew my name. But for weeks after he died he was the only thing my friends and I would talk about. Suddenly he had become a meaningful part of our lives as though he had always been a friend. As callous as this may seem, we were only interested in him because he was dead. I had seen Casper enough to know that ghosts make the best friends. But why? What fuels this morbid attraction? Maybe my friends and I were curious, maybe it forced us to confront our own mortality in a way we didn’t really understand, maybe we just wanted to be pitied. Had Anne Frank survived the war it's doubtful she would have become the cherished emblem of unbridled optimism and courage. It would make her too real, too complete. Trapped in eternal youth, she has become the quintessential dead friend.
Her diary is so intimate, so familiar, so inviting. It’s not hard to identify with her, separating her legacy from the life she actually lead. Perhaps she has become the voice of the Holocaust precisely because that is not what her story is about. It’s bereft of the insufferable torment displayed by the innumerable survivor accounts. The curtain closes before she is stripped of her dignity to die in the most monstrous and inhuman way possible. It’s so easy to ignore the fear she must have felt when the annex was discovered. Or that upon arriving to Auschwitz she was forced to stand naked in a huddled mass while she was tattooed and the beautiful hair that graces her iconic photograph was shaved off. In her essay “Who Owns Anne Frank?” Cynthia Ozick wrote, “In celebrating Anne Frank’s years in the secret annex, the nature and meaning of her death has been, in effect, forestalled. The diary’s keen lens is hopelessly opaque to the diarist’s explicit doom—and this opacity, replicated in young readers in particular, has lead to shamelessness." Subsequently, she is best remembered for the words she wrote on July 15, 1944: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Words that have been applied to everything from the corruption of Wal-Mart to dating advice—it seems so obvious that getting over a bad girlfriend can be so easily compared to a teenage girl who spent over two years in an attic with seven other people subsisting on boiled lettuce to avoid being murdered because of their religious affiliation. I’m not sure what’s worse: the way that she died or the fact that it has become trivialized to the extent that her capture is referenced as a joke on Family Guy alongside quips about Coach and Hollywood Squares. Ozick points out that since the diary’s publication it “has been bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitchified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.” I suppose that if the moon can be claimed, so too can Anne Frank.
In getting back to Aeroplane, I retract what I might have thought about it years ago. I’m not sure what Cynthia Ozick would say about the album, as she wrote that “almost every hand that has approached the diary with well meaning intention of publicizing it has contributed to the subversion of history," but I don’t think that in any of its almost forty minutes Mangum ever once lays claim to Anne Frank. Though she may appear in impossible places—“and one day in New York City baby/ A girl fell from the sky”—he never sees her as something she is not, he never glorifies her. In an interview shortly before the album’s release in 1998 he spoke of the impact her diary had upon him:
his ability to create songs that overflow with grief without being emotionally exploitative. They border on absurdism, mimicking the human condition in an unsettlingly real way while defying the physical and social constructs of our own world. I’m reminded of Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs, in which an elderly couple prepare for invisible guests who are arriving to hear an orator deliver what the old man has discovered is the meaning of life. Believing that their message will be heard and that they can die happy the couple throw themselves out of a window into the ocean. Though as the orator begins to speak it becomes evident that he is a deaf mute, reciting nonsense and scribbling unintelligible symbols on a chalkboard. As with Aeroplane, there is a question as to whether it’s genius or madness. There’s something about Mangum’s voice as he sings “I will shout until they know what I mean/ I mean the marriage of a dead dog sing/ And a synthetic flying machine” that suggests that there is something to be read beyond the union of a dead dog and a synthetic flying machine. And quite likely, there is. Before Neutral Milk Hotel, Mangum played in a band called Synthetic Flying Machine when he first recorded a version of what would become the second half of Aeroplane’s second track, “The King of Carrot Flowers parts 2-3,” the song in which the lyrics mentioned above appear. So much of the album is based on his own personal experiences and memories, as he notes in an interview, “A lot of times, each lyric, each line is sort of a moment in my life and somehow they get crammed together into a song that makes sense to me… So many of the words are little filmstrips that are rolling through my head.”
To try to describe Aeroplane as a sequential narrative is simply not possible—tenses shift, point of view changes. It’s never explicitly clear what’s happening or to whom. A two-headed boy stuck in a formaldehyde jar and Siamese twins lost and dying in a forest are caught in Aeroplane’s exhaust, calling forth crumbling sepia photographs of Depression era circuses and freak shows interlaced with Nazi occupied Holland. And yet, it maintains an effortless fluidity guided by an overwhelming sense of loss. The title track celebrates life and love but acknowledges that “one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea.” There is little distinction between life and death, everything is bound by an unearthly give and take where things work themselves out. Stranded in the woods and facing death, one of the Siamese twins tells her sister: “We will fold and freeze together/ Far away from here/ There is sun and spring and green forever/ But now we move to feel/ For ourselves inside some strangers stomach.” They’re going to die, but it will all right because whatever happens they will still be together. Mangum addresses the album’s theme of “endless endless” in the liner notes suggesting the interconnectivity that pulses through his words and music alike. Just as songs bleed into one another themes and characters reoccur throughout. Mangum acknowledged this in an interview saying, “everything is reliant on everything else to exist, and everyone is a part of that." It doesn’t matter what a wandering genie is or what he’s trying to convey as he sings two verses of “I love you Jesus Christ/ Jesus Christ I love you/ Yes I do.” What is gained, or at least what I gained after over a month of looking for clues in old interviews and demos, had much more to do with my own understanding of how I read the world. I didn’t have a life changing epiphany and I don’t think that the album affected my attitude anymore than anything else that I have been exposed to and enjoyed, and I think that that’s the point. It stresses the significance of everything.
I lost track of the hours I spent listening to Aeroplane in the dark trying to find something that wasn’t there. Hoping that maybe this time it would make sense, that I would discover the prophetic significance of “God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life.” Angels never descended from Heaven and I would like to hope that at some point my friends became concerned about my well-being. Doing dishes and sleeping became secondary to sitting on the couch in my pajamas trying to figure what a wandering genie was, as though being able to identify what type of sound it produced was on par with finding the Holy Grail. (Incidentally, it’s a type of organ made by Lowrey.) At some point amid the mess around me, I came to the realization that writing about a pop record—no matter how awe-inspiring—should not be a maddening experience. I can’t tell you what Mangum is singing about, and I’m not sure that I would want to even if I could. I think that on a very basic level Aeroplane is about the relationship between personal and collective history. Just as Mangum is trying to reconcile with the death of Anne Frank—one of the album’s predominant figures—through his own experiences, I can only understand these songs through myself. It has such personal significance for listeners that to try to turn it to an objective narrative would be a distraction from what may be read about this piece of music: our perspective is shaped by everything that we have done, or seen, or read. We are less detached from history than we may imagine. Though I rarely think about the conquests of Charlemagne as I brush my teeth, so much of my knowledge of the past—conscious or not—informs my decisions and opinions.
Amid the scores of flowery reviews I have read (a recent search on Google with the words “aeroplane over the sea review” yielded about 67,000 results) some have written that it took multiple listens before they were able to discern it, others have freely admitted that it brought them to tears, one in particular notes its impact: “For the ways the album has influenced so many people, I wish more would take this away from it—that it's OK to examine, and be nakedly emotional, about stuff aside from the lint in your belly button." Despite this ‘call for emotion’ these reviews, and perhaps even reviews written of anything, lack a sincerity that just can’t quite be translated. I am not doubting the emotional authenticity of tears shed over the album, and I am not above admitting my own guilt to having done so. The failure of these reviews reflects the failure of language; it’s like trying to describe “purple.” When I hear it I don’t think, “wow, this is ethereal,” but something that sounds more like the indiscernible mumblings of Charlie Brown’s teacher. While Roland Barthes may not have had a concept album about Anne Frank in mind, it remains just as relevant that he wrote in A Lover’s Discourse, “the more I experience the specialty of my desire, the less I can give it a name; to the precision of the target corresponds a wavering of the name; what is characteristic of desire, proper to desire, can produce only an impropriety of the utterance.” Perhaps the reason Aeroplane has generated so many reviews and responses, my own included, is in part due to the fact that the album arouses a desire to do so, or rather a desire to be a part of it. We can hear its beckoning call of singing saws and flugelhorns drawing us closer and right before we can make the leap, as Mangum sings in “Communist Daughter,” “the bridges burst and twist around” sending us back to reality. By writing about it we can take a little piece of it back with us. When I was in third grade I remember being so awestruck by the movie Now and Then that the only way that I could deal with it was to spend several months worth of recess writing myself into a sequel. What had become an epic sixty page screenplay written on wide ruled notebook paper unfortunately never made it to the big screen, but it let me feel like I had become a part of that world.
What I can best describe as a collage of everything that has ever come before it, Aeroplane creates a world that exists outside of time where zanzithiphones and Uilleann pipes fill the air with uncanny melodies. The ghost of Anne Frank floats about but she never really died, as Mangum sings, “now she’s a little boy in Spain/ Playing pianos filled with flames.” Though she is regarded as the glue that binds Aeroplane together, it is much more about his own response to her diary than an historically accurate account of her life. Around the time I was first getting into Neutral Milk Hotel I was coming out of a big They Might Be Giants kick. I was charmed by their quirky lyrics and unorthodox subjects. I was at an age where the cleverness of “Birdhouse In Your Soul” and “Doctor Worm” really struck me and I loved the idea that you could write a song about that kind of stuff and it was okay. At first I think I saw Aeroplane in a similar way; “it’s so weird and cool that this guy is singing about how much he loves Anne Frank!” Without delving too deep into what I’m sure has been the basis of countless theses and dissertations, this brings up a relevant point about the cultural significance of Anne Frank and the division between her as a person and her as a commodity.
Of the millions upon millions of people killed during the Holocaust, Anne Frank’s is the only name I can recall. I imagine that it is the only name most people can recall. When I was in middle school a boy in the next grade that I didn’t know very well suddenly passed away. I don’t think I ever thought twice about him during our exceedingly rare and brief encounters. I don’t even think he knew my name. But for weeks after he died he was the only thing my friends and I would talk about. Suddenly he had become a meaningful part of our lives as though he had always been a friend. As callous as this may seem, we were only interested in him because he was dead. I had seen Casper enough to know that ghosts make the best friends. But why? What fuels this morbid attraction? Maybe my friends and I were curious, maybe it forced us to confront our own mortality in a way we didn’t really understand, maybe we just wanted to be pitied. Had Anne Frank survived the war it's doubtful she would have become the cherished emblem of unbridled optimism and courage. It would make her too real, too complete. Trapped in eternal youth, she has become the quintessential dead friend.
Her diary is so intimate, so familiar, so inviting. It’s not hard to identify with her, separating her legacy from the life she actually lead. Perhaps she has become the voice of the Holocaust precisely because that is not what her story is about. It’s bereft of the insufferable torment displayed by the innumerable survivor accounts. The curtain closes before she is stripped of her dignity to die in the most monstrous and inhuman way possible. It’s so easy to ignore the fear she must have felt when the annex was discovered. Or that upon arriving to Auschwitz she was forced to stand naked in a huddled mass while she was tattooed and the beautiful hair that graces her iconic photograph was shaved off. In her essay “Who Owns Anne Frank?” Cynthia Ozick wrote, “In celebrating Anne Frank’s years in the secret annex, the nature and meaning of her death has been, in effect, forestalled. The diary’s keen lens is hopelessly opaque to the diarist’s explicit doom—and this opacity, replicated in young readers in particular, has lead to shamelessness." Subsequently, she is best remembered for the words she wrote on July 15, 1944: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Words that have been applied to everything from the corruption of Wal-Mart to dating advice—it seems so obvious that getting over a bad girlfriend can be so easily compared to a teenage girl who spent over two years in an attic with seven other people subsisting on boiled lettuce to avoid being murdered because of their religious affiliation. I’m not sure what’s worse: the way that she died or the fact that it has become trivialized to the extent that her capture is referenced as a joke on Family Guy alongside quips about Coach and Hollywood Squares. Ozick points out that since the diary’s publication it “has been bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitchified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.” I suppose that if the moon can be claimed, so too can Anne Frank.
In getting back to Aeroplane, I retract what I might have thought about it years ago. I’m not sure what Cynthia Ozick would say about the album, as she wrote that “almost every hand that has approached the diary with well meaning intention of publicizing it has contributed to the subversion of history," but I don’t think that in any of its almost forty minutes Mangum ever once lays claim to Anne Frank. Though she may appear in impossible places—“and one day in New York City baby/ A girl fell from the sky”—he never sees her as something she is not, he never glorifies her. In an interview shortly before the album’s release in 1998 he spoke of the impact her diary had upon him:
You love people because you know their story. You have sympathy for people even when they do stupid things because you know where they're coming from, you understand where they're at in their head. And so here I am as deep as you can go in someone's head, in some ways deeper than you can go with even someone you know in the flesh. And then at the end, she gets disposed of like a piece of trash. And that was something that completely blew my mind… And I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I'd have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank.Yet, she is never an object of pity. One of Mangum’s greatest talents as a songwriter is
his ability to create songs that overflow with grief without being emotionally exploitative. They border on absurdism, mimicking the human condition in an unsettlingly real way while defying the physical and social constructs of our own world. I’m reminded of Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs, in which an elderly couple prepare for invisible guests who are arriving to hear an orator deliver what the old man has discovered is the meaning of life. Believing that their message will be heard and that they can die happy the couple throw themselves out of a window into the ocean. Though as the orator begins to speak it becomes evident that he is a deaf mute, reciting nonsense and scribbling unintelligible symbols on a chalkboard. As with Aeroplane, there is a question as to whether it’s genius or madness. There’s something about Mangum’s voice as he sings “I will shout until they know what I mean/ I mean the marriage of a dead dog sing/ And a synthetic flying machine” that suggests that there is something to be read beyond the union of a dead dog and a synthetic flying machine. And quite likely, there is. Before Neutral Milk Hotel, Mangum played in a band called Synthetic Flying Machine when he first recorded a version of what would become the second half of Aeroplane’s second track, “The King of Carrot Flowers parts 2-3,” the song in which the lyrics mentioned above appear. So much of the album is based on his own personal experiences and memories, as he notes in an interview, “A lot of times, each lyric, each line is sort of a moment in my life and somehow they get crammed together into a song that makes sense to me… So many of the words are little filmstrips that are rolling through my head.”
To try to describe Aeroplane as a sequential narrative is simply not possible—tenses shift, point of view changes. It’s never explicitly clear what’s happening or to whom. A two-headed boy stuck in a formaldehyde jar and Siamese twins lost and dying in a forest are caught in Aeroplane’s exhaust, calling forth crumbling sepia photographs of Depression era circuses and freak shows interlaced with Nazi occupied Holland. And yet, it maintains an effortless fluidity guided by an overwhelming sense of loss. The title track celebrates life and love but acknowledges that “one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea.” There is little distinction between life and death, everything is bound by an unearthly give and take where things work themselves out. Stranded in the woods and facing death, one of the Siamese twins tells her sister: “We will fold and freeze together/ Far away from here/ There is sun and spring and green forever/ But now we move to feel/ For ourselves inside some strangers stomach.” They’re going to die, but it will all right because whatever happens they will still be together. Mangum addresses the album’s theme of “endless endless” in the liner notes suggesting the interconnectivity that pulses through his words and music alike. Just as songs bleed into one another themes and characters reoccur throughout. Mangum acknowledged this in an interview saying, “everything is reliant on everything else to exist, and everyone is a part of that." It doesn’t matter what a wandering genie is or what he’s trying to convey as he sings two verses of “I love you Jesus Christ/ Jesus Christ I love you/ Yes I do.” What is gained, or at least what I gained after over a month of looking for clues in old interviews and demos, had much more to do with my own understanding of how I read the world. I didn’t have a life changing epiphany and I don’t think that the album affected my attitude anymore than anything else that I have been exposed to and enjoyed, and I think that that’s the point. It stresses the significance of everything.
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