Wednesday, September 30, 2009

After all the talk of horns I had to find this picture....

In other news, blood libel is alive and well in Russia and Iran.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3521307,00.html
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP105305

Shylock and Jessica - Maurycy Gottlieb

This painting from 1876 is by Maurycy Gottlieb, a Jew from Ukraine. This sympathetic portrayal of Shylock came after the move toward playing him sympathetically on stage, which likely began with Edmund Kean in the 1810s. In the early 20th century, Jacob Adler would play the role of Shylock in Yiddish in an otherwise English language production. Arnold Wesker continued this trend of Jews "reclaiming" Shylock and turning him into an image of the struggles of the Jewish people in his adaptation called The Merchant. It's fascinating to me how stereotypes can be taken back by the community they are perpetuated against and transformed into more positive cultural symbols. I wonder if this sort of reappropriation, much like black people have done with the "n word," or GLBT people have done with "queer," is always positive however. With something given such high artistic rank as a work by Shakespeare, I guess a community has to do something to transform negative images within the text, but I wonder if a hands-off approach wouldn't be better. So much racism or sexism seems to become justified by calling something a great work of art - which I guess is why things like Heart of Darkness still get taught - but it becomes a bit sinister to ask a reader to look beyond prejudice in a work rather than actively thinking about it.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

"A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Cursed Wife" - Some Thoughts

To be honest, I had quite a bit of difficulty reading this without the fun sidenotes and modernized spelling Norton has to offer.
What got me about this was the really overtly violence against women. If I follow, the husband wraps the wife in a horse's hide and beats her with a rod? And he even hits her in bed the morning after their wedding while "dallying together and having good game" - taming basically sounds synonymous with raping here. The author pronounces it all for the good at the end - I guess it makes Shakespeare seem enlightened on gender roles in contrast.

It's interesting to see here again repeated the correlation between ugliness of appearance and ugliness of action in the character of the mother (who is described as plain), just as Katherine brought up the issue in the final speech in The Taming of the Shrew. I wonder how long psychologically we have been groomed (I chose that word before I realized how appropriate it was) to see unattractive people as villains. Did it start during the Renaissance?

The Taming of the Shrew - Katherine's final speech

The speech that Katherine offers in 5.2 presents the reader with a heavy reinstatement of typical gender roles, yet it is curious that Katherine would get the final word in. The sharpness of her tongue is reined in, no longer offering insult and rebuke to Petruchio, however she does have sharp words for the other women. The Taming of the Shrew seems to have no quarrel with women speaking their minds, so long as their eloquence is in support of the dominant discourse on the ideal woman. Katherine has no need of a scold’s bridle to curb her tongue because Petruchio has constructed a new reality for her, breaking her psychologically into adhering to his ideal.
Katherine’s reference to the other women as “froward and unable worms” offers the lowest animal comparison in the play. Although the men previously referred to Katherine as a shrew or a hawk (which though unfair at least suggests that there is at least a kind of strength inherent in her willfulness), Katherine’s broken perception places women who disobey at an even lower level, suggesting that willfulness is weak and easily crushed underfoot like an insect. She also equates feelings of unease and anger with ugliness, suggesting that perhaps she has convinced herself that her ugly behavior has led her to deserve such treatment at the hands of her husband. Though I doubt that Shakespeare meant to suggest such a thing, it reminds one of victims of domestic and sexual violence who blame themselves rather than seeking justice against those who have wronged them.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Shaming Rituals

So, Chris Brown totally deserves to be shamed. But it's just interesting to me how in today's culture high-profile people have to make the rounds of the community via the media to apologize and make excuses for their actions, or be shamed into it, even if what the person did has no bearing on anyone else's life. Maybe tabloids and talk shows are the new shaming rituals.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/09/03/lkl.chris.brown.cnn

Lucrece as subaltern text



Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her work "Can the Subaltern Speak?" writes of a young Hindu woman who commits suicide because of her failure to complete a political assassination. She deliberately waits until she is menstruating to die because she knows that it will be assumed her suicide was out of shame over an illicit affair. In doing so, Spivak asserts that she "rewrites the social text of sati-suicide." It is interesting to me that although Spivak says that the subaltern cannot speak (and certainly I think one could contend that most women could be considered subaltern at this time), there is this idea of women's bodies becoming political text. They cannot truly voice opinions or step outside of their roles in society, but through death they become a symbol. This is an idea I need to flesh out a bit more in relation to this poem, but I feel it relevant. I wanted to include, however, two different depictions I found of Lucrece.

The first is by Philippe Bertrand. I find I generally respond more to sculpture than paintings, and his work certainly struck me. I was unable to find many images of Lucrece's suicide, and that seemed to be the most important aspect of the poem. Others that I did find were rather unviolent and thus unrealistic. In committing suicide, she is reclaiming dominion over her selfhood in a way that she is unable to do in the bounds of regular society.

The second is from Reuben Nakian, which I shared in class. The other images I found of the rape seemed almost celebratory of beauty and some had an erotic edge I found quite uncomfortable. The reduction to movement and chaos takes away any erotic appeal that the depiction of a nude body and a sexual act could have and more truly echoes the violence of Tarquin's act.



A young woman of sixteen or seventeen, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri,
hanged he self in her father's modest apartment in North Calcutta in 1926.
The suicide was a puzzle since, as Bhuvaneswari was menstruating at the
time, it was clearly not a case of illicit pregnancy. Nearly a decad~ later, it
was discovered that she was a member of one of the many groups Involved
in the armed struggle for Indian independence. She had finally been en-
trusted with a political assassination. Unable to confront the task and yet
aware of the practical need for trust, she killed herself.