Writing in The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet

Asher Abrams

I. (A) The Role of Writing in The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet.
In this section I will explore the role of writing in The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet. In particular, I will compare and contrast two themes, which I will call “the death warrant” and “the letter from the dead.” Finally, I will examine the significance of a third theme, “the book of the soul,” which appears only in Hamlet.
In Merchant, the “letter from the dead” appears chiefly in the form of Portia’s father’s will (1:2), including the writing on the caskets (2:7, 2:9, 3:2). Here the will of the dead father forms a seemingly unalterable law that must be obeyed to the letter. Towards the end of the play, this testament is mirrored by Shylock’s enforced “deed of gift” (4:1), in which Shylock is to bequeath all his goods to the husband of his wayward daughter and to his intended victim. Here, in contrast to the arbitrary and capricious “will” of Portia’s father, Shylock’s deed of gift is forced upon him. While Portia’s father’s legacy was one of gratuitous rigor, Shylock’s is one of enforced generosity.

Another instance of the “letter from the dead” in Merchant is Antonio’s first (bad news) letter to Bassanio (3:2), in which Antonio declares that “it is impossible I should live” (l. 318). Here Antonio sees his own death as imminent and writes as one about to die; how different this is from Hamlet’s unexpected letter to Claudius (Hamlet 4:6, 4:7), where the intended victim surprises his audience with a letter, so to speak, “from beyond the grave.”

In Hamlet, too, the power of the posthumous decree is much more tenuous. The compact between the elder Hamlet and the elder Fortinbras (1:1) is flagrantly violated by the younger Fortinbras, who must be kept in check by his uncle, the King of Norway, at Claudius’ behest (1:2) through Cornelius and Voltemand.

The “death warrant” appears in Merchant in the form of Shylock’s bond (Merchant 1:3, 3:1, 4:1), which calls for Antonio to forfeit a pound of flesh (without benefit of medical aid) in the event of Bassanio’s default. This death warrant is subverted in the court scene (4:1), ostensibly by recourse to the Law, although the legal experts presented are not entirely impartial. The result is that Shylock is made to fear for his life, only to be saved by an obscure legal detail.

Hamlet’s death warrant, issued by Claudius (Hamlet 4:3, 5:2), is also subverted by means of forged documents, but here there is not even the pretense of a legal proceeding; rather, the bearers of the instrument are proverbially “hoist on [their] own petard” and summarily executed.

And in Hamlet we see an image not found in Merchant: the metaphor of the human being as a book. This “book of the soul” appears first in the Ghost’s charge to Hamlet (Hamlet 1:5), to which Hamlet vows: “Yea, from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records....” There is also the “painted word” (3.1) of Claudius’ guilt, Ophelia’s mind as a “document in madness” (4:5) and Laertes as the “card or calendar of gentry” (5:2).

Taken together, these images suggest that Hamlet represents a turning point, a time of erasure and re-writing, as Prof. Greenstadt had pointed out in her lectures. Written records are no longer immutable; the records of the soul, too, must be erased and overwritten with new ideas.

II. (B) A Comparison of Two Soliloquies
Hamlet, like Lancelot Gobbo, is contemplating an early departure. For Hamlet, the question is fairly straightforward: “To be, or not to be?” (Hamlet 3:1.53). Lancelot Gobbo’s problem is far more complex: he is considering a career move.

Hamlet is torn between a “conscience” that orders him to remain in this life, and his desire to leave it. The consequences of the latter might well include an unpleasant experience in “the undiscover’d country” of the afterlife. After reflecting on the obvious desirability of making his own “quietus” and quitting himself of the numerous burdens of “a weary life,” Hamlet admits that “conscience makes cowards of us all” in forcing us to forgo the option of self-liberation and stick it out until our time is up. He understands that sometimes the most courageous action is not the wisest; that is why he equates conscience with cowardice, and why he regretfully turns away from the “enterprises of great pitch and moment” he has been speaking of.

Lancelot Gobbo, on the other hand, knows what he must do. His conscience, like Hamlet’s, tells him to stay where he is; but unlike Hamlet, he refuses to listen. Now here is a man in touch with his feelings and in charge of his destiny. Does he agonize over his decision? Indeed he does, and the chorus-like repetition of his worries (ll.4-11, 19-23) speaks eloquently of his predicament. But being the resourceful individual that he is, Lancelot Gobbo reasons that “the Jew is the very Devil incarnation” and therefore his conscience may safely be ignored.
While Hamlet rationalizes his decision-making process, Lancelot Gobbo personalizes his. Not for him the abstract fear of the “undiscover’d country” of unemployment; his demons are real, palpable, and almost visible. They can be reasoned with. Thus it is not surprising that Lancelot Gobbo’s decision-making is far more lucid and productive than the young Dane’s.

Both Hamlet and Lancelot Gobbo understand that they must make unpleasant choices; but while the former meekly accepts as his fate the “lesser evil,” Lancelot Gobbo defies his conscience and acts according to a higher call.

Providence in the Wilderness

PROVIDENCE IN THE WILDERNESS:
America’s Encounter with the Divine

Asher Abrams


Frederick Douglass writes, in Chapter 7 of his Narrative, that: “It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate” (Norton, 2057). It is this very tendency toward self-reflection, as painful as it is, that recurs throughout the Narrative and gives it its literary and moral power. And this passage is characteristic of the text in another way: for Douglass’s insight into the nature of bondage and freedom is immediately followed by a moment of enlightenment, expressed in appropriately spiritual language: “The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled from every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.”

Recurring throughout the texts we have studied is a perversely anti-authoritarian approach to spirituality. The Divinity, first conceived as an inscrutable but just “Providence” in Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (166), is still dealing out providential affliction on the deserving in Douglass (2044): both the cruel slaveholder and the callous seaman die, fittingly, amid pain and curses.
But such mundane interventions are the exception, not the rule, in a land of conflict and mystery. Mary Rowlandson witnesses a bloody attack and suffers a difficult captivity as a prisoner of war. Unable to understand her captors’ motives, she readily ascribes Divine agency to their actions: “Yet the Lord suffered not this wretch to do me any hurt” (332). She finds her encounter with the Christianized “praying Indians” (331) profoundly disorienting, as suggested by her eagerness to draw a distiction between their Christianness (or lack of it) and her own. She seeks solace in innumerable quotes from Scripture, but confesses at the end of her Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration: “Before I knew what affliction meant, I was ready sometimes to wish for it. ... But now I see that the Lord hath had His time to scourge and chasten me” (340).

Writing almost a century later, a veteran of the other side of that conflict, Samson Occom, describes his own ambivalence toward institutional Christianity: after a challenging and successful career as a missionary, he finds he is being paid a twelfth of what white missionaries make. (The office of “Praying Indian” seems hardly to have become more attractive in the intervening years.) Occom sees God’s hand in the success of his missionary activities: “... and I would come to them with all Authority, saying, ‘These saith the Lord’; and by these means, the Lord was pleased to bless my poor Endeavours, and they were reclaimed” (650). But while refraining from overt criticism of the missionary world, he makes it plain that he sees hypocrisy in the blatant prejudice he faces simply “because I am a poor Indian” (652).

Occom’s contemporary, Phyllis Wheatley, gives an ostensibly glowing account of being brought “from my pagan land” (810), yet declines Occom’s suggestion that she follow in his footsteps as a missionary in her native Africa (823n). Her appraisal of the value of Christian missionary work is illuminating: “Those that invade [the natural rights of Africans] cannot be insensible that the divine Light is chasing away the thick Darkness which broods over the Land of Africa; and the Chaos which has reign’d so long, is converting into beautiful Order, and reveals more and more clearly, the dispensation of civil and religious Liberty, which are so inseparably united, that there is little or no Enjoyment of the one without the other: Otherwise, the Israelites had been less solicitous for their Freedom from Egyptian slavery; I do not say they would have been contented without it, by no means, for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call the Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the leave of our modern Egyptians, I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us” (823; my emphasis). Clearly Wheatley believes that positive changes are taking place in Africa; but what matters is “the dispensation of civil and religious liberty,” not the propagation of a particular religious doctrine. Two and a half years before the Revolution, she notes the contradiction between “the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Dispensation for the exercise of oppressive Power” (824) among those who would enjoy the privilege of freedom for themselves, while turning a blind eye to the fate of those suffering under the slave regime.

Writing in the Revolutionary and Constitutional era, Benjamin Franklin records that having discarded some of the doctrinal points of his Presbyterian education, he nevertheless “never was without some religious Principles; I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity, that he made the World, and govern’d it by his Providence; that the most acceptable Service of God was doing Good to Man; that our souls are immortal; and that all Crime will be punished and Virtue rewarded either here or hereafter; these I esteem’d the Essentials of every Religion, and being to be found in all the Religions we had in our Country I respected them all ...” (590; emphasis mine). Here Franklin’s explicit reference to “all the Religions we had in our country” is significant because it indicates that he understood the importance of American religious diversity in shaping his thinking. His interest in the universal principles of spirituality led him to formulate a self-improvement program drawing on “the moral Virtues I had met with in my Reading” (591). In doing so, Franklin made an unwitting contribution to Judaism: the great nineteenth-century ethicist Rabbi Israel Salanter was so impressed by Franklin’s program that he incorporated it wholesale into his educational curriculum; and to this day, Franklin’s “thirteen virtues” and weekly diaries are taught in religious schools (the thirteen virtues are even printed in some prayerbooks). It is worth noting that such a complete adoption of a moral code from a non-Jewish source is exceedingly rare in orthodox Judaism.

Franklin’s encounter with Nature took the form of a lifelong passion for science, an area in which his contributions are often scanted. Literature texts (such as our Norton anthology) generally concern themselves chiefly with his literary and political achievements. Most physics textbooks mention Franklin only in passing, but Richard Feynman (The Feynman Lectures on Physics, II: 5-6) notes that “It appears that Benjamin Franklin was the first to notice that the field inside a conducting shell is zero.” On a more fundamental level, it was none other than Franklin who discovered the law of conservation of electric charge. (Until Franklin’s time, it had been believed that electricity was composed of two different types of “fluids”.) Walter Isaacson’s biography Benjamin Franklin: An American Life considers this principle to be of comparable importance to Newton’s conservation of momentum. Franklin also coined many electrical terms still in use today: battery, charged, and positive/negative/neutral.

Sixty years after the Declaration of Independence, in an abstruse tract titled simply Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson chafes against the tyranny of the past: “Our age is retrospective,” he begins. “It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” (1106) Emerson adopts the conventions of scholarly writing and establishes his own credentials with copious references to classic thinkers “from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins, to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg” (1118), but his interest is in what is beyond words and scholarship. In language at times strongly reminiscent of the kabbalah, he explores the deep structure of the universe and the relationship between Reason and Spirit (1115). Second-hand experience is next to useless: “These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses for a powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of cities” (1116). The transcendent experience of nature is profoundly religious: “This relation between mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men” (1117).

Now we return to Frederick Douglass. His views of organized religion have necessarily been shaped by his experiences, in which he has too often seen piety used as a pretext for cruelty. It is not surprising that he is less forgiving of Christianity’s defects than, say, Franklin or Emerson. And yet he, too, sees religion as having potential value, particularly as an occasion for literacy and education – which, in turn, lead to the mental emancipation so integral to the true pursuit of freedom.

Nor have Douglass’s bitter experiences with religion deadened his spiritual sensibilities: “My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint ...” (2068); “I am almost ready to ask, ‘Does a righteous God govern the universe?’...” (2076).

One of the most striking features about Douglass’s narrative is the regularity with which his insights into the nature of oppression and freedom are followed by moments of spiritual enlightenment, expressed in spiritual language. To cite a few examples: “... Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her ... ‘It would forever unfit him to be a slave. ... It would make him discontented and unhappy.’ These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation...” (2054); “The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. ... It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness ...” (2057); “The dictionary afforded me little or no help; I found it was the ‘act of abolishing’; but then I did not know what was to be abolished. ... From this time I understood the words abolition and abolitionist, and always drew near when that word was spoken, expecting to hear something of importance to myself and fellow-slaves. The light broke upon me by degrees.” (2058); “This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It kindled in me the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. ... He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, up to the heaven of freedom.” (2072; my emphasis throughout).

This pattern repeats throughout the narrative, but in only one instance does the spiritual language take on explicitly Christian form: in the very final paragraph, where Douglass writes: “I had not long been a reader of the ‘Liberator’, before I got a pretty correct idea of the principles, measures, and spirit of the anti-slavery reform. I took right hold of the cause. .... It was a severe cross...” (2092).

In our course, we have seen how Americans of varied backgounds have engaged, confronted, and often battled one another in the harsh landscape of early America. We have seen how these encounters have shaped a vision of God, or Providence, that is not confined within the walls of a church, but whose ever-evolving meaning is somehow inextricable from America’s own self-discovery. This is why we study American literature.

The Taming of the Jew

Asher Abrams

THE TAMING OF THE JEW:
Resolution and Subversion in Two Early Plays
The endings of two early Shakespeare plays--The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice--illustrate how the Bard uses the device of an ostensibly “conventional” resolution (one that upholds social norms) to advance implications that are actually subversive. The ending of Taming injects a healthy dose of irony into the traditional Elizabethan roles of husband and wife; the end of Merchant gives a still more cynical view of marriage roles. The subversion of Merchant is both deeper and more extensive than that of Taming: for while the latter injects a heavy dose of irony into the gender hierarchy, the former stands that hierarchy on its head; furthermore, it challenges the legitimacy and the primacy of the church and of the state.

In the final scene of Merchant, Portia and Nerissa disclose their ruse to save Antonio at the price of their respective husbands’ rings. By inducing Bassanio and Gratiano to surrender the rings they had vowed to keep, the women accomplish several things: (1) they undermine their husbands’ moral authority by proving the men untrustworthy; (2) they effectively bind the husbands to the wives’ will by forcing them to take an oath of loyalty; and (3) they assert their sexual autonomy by declaring, in no uncertain terms, their readiness to abrogate the marriage vows. Thus Portia:
I will become as liberal as you,
I’ll not deny him any thing I have,
No, not my body, nor my husband’s bed.
Know him I shall, I am well sure of it. (Merchant, V.i.226-229)

Nerissa joins Portia in this taunt, as she later joins her in asserting that she has already committed infidelity in order to reclaim the very symbol of their vows: “the doctor’s clark, / in lieu of this, last night did lie with me” (V.i.262-262).

Bassanio’s repeated claim that he was “enforced” to give up Portia’s ring recalls his metaphor of being “upon the rack” (Merchant III.ii.25). Here he is referring to the torture of love as a kind of compulsion. Portia then quips that she mistrusts him, since he speaks “upon the rack / where men enfoced do speak any thing” (Merchant III.ii.32-33). In this passage we see a foreshadowing of the tension that climaxes in the final scene. The ending also clarifies the ambiguity of the “rack” exchange, where there is some doubt as to whose love is “torturing” Bassanio; here we see clearly that it was his love for Antonio that “enforced” him to give away the ring.

The theme of sight and sound comes to the forefront in the final scene. Here Portia explains that “nothing is good, I see, without respect” (V.i.99), meaning that nothing can be evaluated properly unless seen in context. She cites the example of birds whose song cannot be appreciated in the noise and glare of day, implying an analogy to her and Nerissa’s courtroom disguise: in the courtroom, the men did not recognize their voices, but they can easily do so in the dark and solitude of night. “That is the voice, / or I am much deceiv’d, of Portia” (V.i.110-111) declares Lorenzo.

The irony of the final scene of Merchant is heightened by the numerous oaths that are taken. The men swear recklessly and ignorantly; the women swear by the things they know to be true. Gratiano swears that “by this hand I gave it to a youth, / a kind of boy” (V.i.161-162), and Bassanio vows “by my honour, Madam, by my soul, / no woman had it” (V.i.209-210). Portia retorts that “by mine honour which is yet mine own, / I’ll have that doctor for a bedfellow” (V.i.232-233), at once reminding Bassanio that she is free to do as she pleases, and that her honor, at least, still has value. So too does her vow: she, after all, was herself the “doctor.” Nerissa, for her part, takes up Portia’s “by heaven” (V.i.190-192) in declaring that she will not sleep with her husband until she sees her ring again.

In the courtroom scene, Shylock effectively undermines the moral authority of the state when he condemns the practice of slavery (IV.i.89-98). Here he shows that in a slaveholding society, no legal judgment can have any moral meaning so long as the inhuman practice of slavery is legally condoned. Thus, from an ethical standpoint, his case is no better or worse than any other.

During the final episode with the rings, we cannot help but recall Shylock’s poignant words on the loss of his own ring: “I had it of Leah when I was / a bachelor; I would not have given it for a / wilderness of monkeys” (III.i.128-130). We must also recall Shylock’s scathing observation about “Christian husbands” (IV.i.299) when confronted with Antonio’s and Bassanio’s injudicious remarks about their devotion (or lack of it) to their wives--all of which occurs in front of the disguised Portia and Nerissa.

At the end of The Taming of the Shrew, the feisty Katherine gives a long and eloquent speech about the duty of a wife to be submissive to her husband (V.ii.147-180). Given the ironic detachment framed by the “induction,” and the fact that Pertuchio has had to go to such absurd lengths to win her love, we can see that Shakespeare is having a little joke with us. This speech is a kind of blind (like what stage magicians call a “misdirection”) to seemingly divert attention from the real power transfer, which has been in the opposite direction. Similarly, we are entitled to wonder, when Shylock is ceremoniously forced to convert to Christianity, how much influence there has been in the opposite direction. And look: the play itself is replete with Old Testament references, from Shylock’s rehearsal of Jacob’s sheep-breeding trick (Merchant, I.iii.79-89) to the re-enactment of Jacob’s “stolen blessing” from the blind Isaac (II.ii) to the climactic scene where Antonio must, like Isaac on Mount Moriah, offer himself up under a knife that ultimately does not fall (IV.i). Also noteworthy is the fact that all of these implicit references are to the Patriarchs, who are putatively the common fathers of both Jews and Christians. Most significantly, the very device of Antonio’s emancipation hinges on an argument that is stereotypically “Jewish” (i.e. legalistic) in its nature, and which derives from a point of Jewish dietary law (see Lev. 7:26). Thus Shakespeare demonstrates the pervasiveness of Jewish influence on Western culture, and Launcelet’s declaration that “I am a Jew if I / serve the Jew any longer” (II.ii.122-123) contains more truth than he knows.

The ending of The Merchant of Venice leaves us in no doubt that Bassanio and Gratiano have effectively and deservedly given up whatever power they held in their respective marriages. It also hints at the political and spiritual bankruptcy of the dominant order.

Lear essay

Asher Abrams
ENG 202 - Late Shakespeare
Katya Amato
Tuesday, June 03, 2003

THE QUALITY OF NOTHING: Nothingness in King Lear
The scene and line numbers in this essay refer to the Everyman edition.

The image of the void dominates King Lear. It is the story of a man who is terrified of the abyss, who deceives himself into believing he has come to terms with it, and in the end is swallowed up by it. The void, in its many guises, appears throughout the play, frequently signaled by references to “nothing”.
Cordelia introduces the theme with her response to Lear’s question: “Nothing, my lord” (I.i.88). This is true nothingness, because her words mean no more nor less than they say. Cordelia’s refusal to play her father’s game, her insistence on truth and honesty, stand in contrast to the deceptions around her.
The play begins with Lear’s symbolic abdication of power, which we soon see is little more than a pretense of giving up power while he retires at the expense of his daughters. In fact, he wants to give up the responsibility of kingship but not the privileges. As Goneril observes at the end of I.i, “this last surrender of his will but offend us.” In contrast to Cordelia, Lear is the paradigm of false nothingness, making a show of giving up his kingdom while actually keeping his grown daughters even more tightly under his control.
Lear repeats this pattern of illusory granting of power when he is lost in the storm with the Fool: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks...” (III.ii.1-9). He is giving the elements leave to do what they’re obviously going to do anyway.
Another example of false nothingness is Edmund’s forged letter. “If it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles,” declares Gloucester, speaking more truth than he knows. Edmund’s elaborate protests about the letter’s “nothingness” give it an illusion of substance.
“Edgar I nothing am” (II.ii.189): this line signals the beginning of Edgar’s encounter with the void. A fugitive as a result of Edmund’s deception, he appears to wander in and out of madness, as does Lear.
There is an association of the idea of “nothingness” with feminine sexuality in the play. It is not coincidental that “nothing” was Elizabethan slang for a woman’s private parts. Thus, for example, Edgar’s reference to the “dark and vicious place” (V.iii.171) of Edmund’s conception. So too Regan’s contemptuous exhortation that Gloucester should “smell his way to Dover” (III.vii.91), where references to the nose were understood to have sexual connotations (and cf. I.v.20-25, where the Fool explains that the nose is so placed “to keep one’s eyes of either side’s nose, that what a man cannot smell out, he may spy into”).
Dover is the locus of the impending French invasion, and thus the object of much speculation and deceit. In reality, the invasion turns out to be a rescue mission authorized by none other than the new Queen of France, Cordelia (IV.iv.21-29).
Throughout the play, Dover functions as a metaphor for the void. It is “the confined deep” (IV.i.73) where Gloucester plans to end his life. But Edgar thwarts his plans, and instead conjures up an elaborate illusion (a false void) so that his father unceremoniously stumbles and falls on level ground. Edgar here is posing as a countryman, and when at one point Gloucester becomes suspicious of Edgar’s verbal disguise, Edgar insists that “in nothing am I changed” (IV.vi.9). After the supposed death plunge, which Gloucester “miraculously” survives, Edgar discloses his true identity. Thus Edgar’s earlier words are proved true: in the nothingness of the abyss--which, again, is truly nothing--his true identity is revealed.
The contrast in Lear, then, is between true and false “nothing”: that is, the appearance of nothingness as exemplified by Lear’s purported renunciation, Edmund’s showy concealment of the forged letter, and Edward’s invention of a nonexistent abyss; and the true void that the characters all discover in exile, blindness, madness, and death.

Writing History

WRITING HISTORY
Asher Abrams
UNST 191B

My late father, Ken McLintock, was on the editorial staff of Choice magazine (which reviews books for academic libraries) for more than 30 years; my mother, a self-educated and highly intelligent woman, raised my sister and me with a love of books, learning, and writing. We were required to keep journals for much of the time we were growing up.

Early on, I showed interest and ability in languages. I was fortunate to attend a public high school that offered both French and Latin, and I took four years of both. Although I didn’t care for French, I got A’s and placed in the National French Contest. In Latin, I enjoyed Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Tristia; the account of the poet’s exile inspired me to write one of my better early poems. We also covered portions of Caesar’s Gallic War, which I disliked; it bothered me that Western academic culture seemed to take the attitude, “OK, so Caesar slaughtered whole villages and referred to women as ‘cattle’--but he sure had a way with the ablative absolute!” I liked Cicero’s Oration Against Catiline but couldn’t understand why that made Cicero such a great orator; after all, he was prosecuting an accused terrorist. Catiline’s defense attorney, I think, would have had the harder job. But I loved Vergil’s Aeneid, and Mrs. Mellen presented it in riveting fashion. The passages we read included the famous Trojan Horse, the romance with Dido at Carthage, and Aeneas’ apparent induction into an ancient mystery rite. Mrs. Mellen’s formula for answering essay questions was “Give me a what and a so what,” meaning that she wanted us to identify the thing or idea in question, and then explain its role and significance in the context of the course.

Another high school course that turned me on to literature was a world-literature survey course I took in my senior year. It began with Gilgamesh and ended with The Bell Jar. I felt I was finally beginning to understand what reading literature is all about: following the braided strands of the writer’s individual, cultural, and universal identity as they are revealed through the work and reflected in the reader’s imagination and experience. I graduated from South Windsor High School, Connecticut, in 1981.

Beginning in my mid-to-late teens, I became interested in the Jewish tradition and began studying Hebrew. It was slow going at first; Rabbi Kominsky was a patient but exacting teacher and we worked from the rigorous classic grammar of Jacob Weingreen. I am grateful for this, because my detailed knowledge of Hebrew allows me to enjoy the traditional texts on a level not always available to my co-religionists.

During my adult life I served a total of ten years in the armed forces: six in the Air Force, and later four in the Marine Corps. During my Air Force enlistment I attended the military language school in Monterey and learned Korean. Also during my Air Force hitch, I became more deeply involved in traditional Judaism, and after leaving the service and settling (briefly) in San Francisco, I had an Orthodox Jewish conversion, much to the perplexity of my liberal parents. This formalized one of the two major identity changes I’ve had in my life.

I lived in San Francisco for a year and a half; during that time I discovered Raymond Carver, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel R. Delany, and poverty. After trying unsuccessfully to make ends meet as an office clerk, I enlisted in the Marine Corps (again bewildering my parents) and was assigned to a combat unit at Camp Pendleton. During this time I acquired the habit of writing what I came to call “character sketches” of buddies and acquaintances. I would get in a conversation (typically with one of the guys in the platoon) and get him to tell a little about his life. Later, I would write down as much as I could remember, trying to preserve the narrator’s speaking style as much as possible. This proved both a valuable writing exercise and a good way to get to know my companions.

Except for these character sketches, I didn’t do a lot of writing while I was in the Marines, but I did write one short story during that time: a story about an ill-fated Mars mission, which I composed in Saudi Arabia while we awaited the order to cross the border into Kuwait.

I left the Marines in 1993, and my second marriage in 1997. Having settled again in San Francisco, I moved into a downtown hotel room and began to get serious about my writing. It was during this period that I wrote what I consider my first piece of “mature” writing, a science-fiction story based on King Lear. I also became more involved in gay issues, and began making connections with the transgender community.

I moved to Portland at the beginning of 2000 and have begun focusing on certain specific themes that interest me from a social, philosophical, or literary standpoint. Shortly after moving, I began corresponding with Dr. Leonora Leet, a scholar of English literature and of Jewish mysticism (and who, under her married name Brodwin, authored a couple of standard texts on Elizabethan literature). In addition to Dr. Leet’s insights, I have been pursuing my interests in kabbalah, women’s spirituality, and gender identity, as well as a lifelong passion for science fiction. In the summer of 2001 I completed my second mature short story, a lesbian-themed version of the creation myth of Genesis.

As a lifelong liberal, I am also involved in social issues and have been active in the Green Party since I moved to Portland. This has given me the opportunity to write on political and social matters. Sometimes my understanding of world events differs from that of my fellow leftists; it was that dynamic that prompted me to write an essay on the then-impending Afghan conflict in the days following September 11. Nevertheless, I unequivocally share the basic beliefs of the Green Party, and retain the classic liberal values I grew up with.

I can see my parents’ influence in my own writing. I share my father’s penchant for baroque grammar (with lots of comment clauses and parentheticals); but Mom’s passion for science, her clear-minded critical thinking, and her uncompromising sense of right and wrong keep me going. I’m also my own individual, and it is through writing that I am able to discover who I am and how I differ from them.

I think my parents spent much of their lives shut off from the world and from themselves. My mother has been a semi-recluse for most of my life. My father’s poetry paints a picture of a man who looked out at the world through the window of an office. I don’t want to live that way. The story of my writing is the story of my reading, but it is also the story of my life. That’s why writing matters.

M Butterfly

Asher Abrams
Sex, Mind, and the Mask (UNST 191B)
Dr. Jamie P. Ross

“How is it possible that the French diplomat Gallimard in M. Butterfly does not know his lover is a man?”

Gallimard does not know his lover is a man because he wants desperately to believe in the fantasy that Song has so painstakingly created for him. Beyond the fear of confronting his own homosexuality--which is overwhelming in itself--Gallimard does not want to admit the fundamentally narcissistic nature of his infatuation for Song. Because what Gallimard wants is not even a real woman; he wants the idealized male projection of a woman, an image created by the European heterosexual male culture in which Gallimard has invested so much (both literally and psychologically). Song, for his/her part, is not a transsexual and has no interest in becoming a woman or living as a woman; while Song’s feminine persona no doubt draws on some authentic facet of his identity, its only role and use is as a deception to achieve Song’s goals. It is a role specifically created for the purpose of fulfilling Gallimard’s fantasy of himself as a heterosexual male. Perhaps it is not overly clever to say that Song is not playing a woman; he is playing a “woman.”
The theme of secrecy in the play is particularly interesting. Song’s role as a spy, and Gallimard’s willful naïveté about the secret information he is passing, provide the perfect metaphor for the big “secret” that neither one of them will reveal, even to themselves.
As we learn at the end of the play, “René got a job as a courier, handling sensitive documents. He’d photograph them for me [Song], and I’d pass them on to the Chinese embassy....He knew that I needed these documents, and that was enough” (III.i). Song goes on to explain that Gallimard never asked what Song was going to do with the documents.
Anyone who has ever worked with classified documents has been taught that a hostile agent will never simply walk up and ask for copies of the secret information. Rather, the technique is to get the target into the habit of giving things to the agent; this is a relationship that is built up carefully over time. What Gallimard gives Song is what he is only too eager to give: his own fantasy of domination and control.
So how is Gallimard able to remain oblivious to Song’s sex? If he thinks only of his own pleasure, and never troubles himself to pleasure her, he need not be bothered with her sex organs. “She would always have prepared a light snack and then, ever so delicately, and only if I agreed, she would start to pleasure me. With her hands, with her mouth ... too many ways to explain, and too sad, given my present situation” (II.v).
What of Song’s background, her experience, her childhood, her memories, her dreams, her thoughts? Like her organs of pleasure, these things are no concern of Gallimard’s. “But mostly we would talk,” he says. About what? Well, what else? “About my life. Perhaps there is nothing more rare to find than a woman who passionately listens” (II.v). Gallimard might be astounded to learn that women frequently say the same thing about men. But of course he is right: very few women would be willing to provide the kind of “passionate listening” he requires. And as he speaks these words, he seems to forget that the one “woman who passionately listens” to his satisfaction is not a woman but a man.

WORKS CITED
Hwang, D. H. (1986). M. Butterfly. New York: Plume.

Adrienne Rich

Asher Abrams
Sex, Mind, and the Mask (UNST 191B)
Dr. Jamie P. Ross

“How and why is Adrienne Rich’s Jewish identity masked differently from her lesbianism?”
To someone raised with the comfortable moral certainties of Yankee liberalism, it is a continuing education to learn that not all prejudices are alike--in the South or anywhere else. I say this by way of introduction because the role of homophobia in Adrienne Rich’s essay is seemingly marginal. Like Southern lesbian Dorothy Allison , Rich experiences prejudice because of her sexuality, but it is only one strand in the complex web of social norms, customs, and taboos that define her experience. (Oh, how I wish I still had my ex-girlfriend’s dog-eared copy of Rita Mae Brown.)
At age 31, Rich tried, by her own admission, “to have it both ways” (Rich, p. 366). There’s a certain cleverness, an intellectual sophisication brought to bear here as a defense mechanism. This, I think, is a natural phase for a young adult to go through in confronting something unpleasant. As we shall see, Rich will come to terms with the fact that she is indeed “neither Gentile nor Jew,” but as she matures she will have to deal with the complex particulars of this contradiction.
The story of Adrienne Rich’s Jewish girlhood is a story of avoidance. “Denial” would be too strong a word: it would suggest that something was acknowledged and then denied. What Rich describes is a perpetual politeness, a daintiness around a subject that can’t be discussed. “We were taught that any mention of skin color in the presence of colored people was treacherous, forbidden ground. In a parallel way, the word ‘Jew’ was not used by polite gentiles.” (Rich, p.368). The dirtiness of the word “Jew” was reinforced by the use of euphemisms--“of the Jewish faith” or “Hebrew.” (The latter early-twentieth-century conceit was adopted by many Jewish organizations.)
Particularly affecting is her recollection of being called to play the part of Portia (she who lectures Shylock on “the quality of mercy”) . In order to claim an identity as a gentile, she must adopt the spiteful tone of voice her father feels the part calls for. In other words, her father counsels her on how to be a role model of anti-Semitism.
Not that anti-Semitism was acknowledged, either. “...I gained the impression that Jews were in the Bible and mentioned in English literature, that they had been persecuted centuries ago by the wicked Inquisition, but that they seemed not to exist in real life. These were the 1940s...” (Rich, p. 369). No anti-Semitism, no Jews; no problem.
Something changed in 1946. “Alone, I went downtown after school one afternoon and watched the stark, blurry, but unmistakable newsreels. When I try to go back and touch the pulse of that girl of sixteen, growing up in many ways so precocious and so ignorant, I am overwhelmed by a memory of despair, a sense of inevitability more enveloping than any I have ever known.” (Rich, p. 369).
This is the beginning of a long and painful process in which Rich learns that “I had never been taught about resistance, only about passing.” On entering college in the North, she discovers that there are Jewish women who are actually proud to be Jewish. It is at this point, she says, that she begins “flirting with identity.”
Her father firmly believed in that airy universalism which is so perversely and particularly Jewish: “ ‘You know that I have never denied that I am a Jew. But it’s not important to me. I’m a scientist, a deist. I have no use for organized religion. I choose to live in a world of many kinds of people.’ ” So Rich remembers her father telling her. But a colleague of her father tells a different story: “I have always believed that his attitude toward other Jews depended on who they were. It was my impression that Jews of his background looked down on Eastern European Jews ... who generally were not very well educated.” (Rich, pp. 372-373).
Near the end of the reading, Rich closes in on an approximation of what Jewishness ultimately means in her experience: she uses words like “intensity” and “meaning” (Rich, p. 374). She concludes with some reflections on her role: “The middle-class white girl taught to trade obedience for privilege. The Jewish lesbian raised to be a heterosexual gentile.” (Rich, p. 375). And here--almost incongruously, and seemingly as an afterthought--we have a mention of her lesbianism.
But Adrienne Rich did not tell us that she was going to write about being a lesbian. What she says is: “I would have liked, in this essay, to bring together the meanings of anti-Semitism and racism as I have experienced them and as I believe they intersect in the world beyond my life.” (Rich, p. 375). And what of being a lesbian?
For Rich, at this point in her life, focusing on her lesbian identity is too easy. Her identity as a lesbian is a subset of her identity as a woman, and her idenity as a woman (and especially as a lesbian) is bound up with her mother’s identity (Rich, p. 367). Her mother, though, was not Jewish, but “the gentile,” “that white southern woman, that social christian.” This is not what she wants to talk about at the moment. (Notice, too, that, in contrast to the quote from her early writing cited above, Rich now omits the honorific capitals, not just on “gentile” but also on “southern” and even “christian.”)
It would be tempting to conclude that Rich’s lesbianism is less important, or less problematic, than her Jewishness. Either of these things may or may not be true. But in this reading, her identity as a lesbian forms the backdrop against which events happen; it is not an event in itself.
Being a lesbian means not being a heterosexual woman, and therefore being both excluded and excused from the woman’s traditional roles. “Heterosexuality as protection, but also drawing white women deeper into collusion with white men.” (Rich, p. 367). “Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian...” (Rich, p. 374). These two mentions of Rich’s lesbian sexuality bracket the narrative of her Jewishness but do not intrude into it. They suggest that as a lesbian, she stood in a particular vantage point to observe the interplay of Jewishness and anti-Semitism in her life; it is that interplay which is the subject of the reading.
Adrienne Rich’s indoctrination about Jewishness began early and was reinforced by her assimilated Jewish father. It was a carefully crafted tale of disempowerment: the historical victimhood of ancient Jews, and the living victimhood of a people afraid to speak their own name. Only when this disempowerment reaches its logical conclusion, with the grainy celluloids of corpses stacked like cordwood, does the reality hit home. Now, shocked into consciousness, we see the young Adrienne Rich confronting her father over his collusion in this insidious mass hypnosis.
But it is to him that she owes such Jewishness as she can claim. The fact of his acquiescence is also the fact of his survival--and her existence. Nor can she find comfort in the religion of 613 commandments: that very religion does not recognize her as a Jew . She has no choice but to come to terms with her father--the living embodiment, literally, of the “patriarchy,” as Rich observes elsewhere (Rich, 1986, p. 9). In this poem, she goes on to say: “I saw the power and arrogance of the male as your true watermark; I did not see beneath it the suffering of the Jew, the alien stamp you bore, because you had deliberately arranged that it should be invisible to me. It is only now, under a powerful, womanly lens, that I can decipher your suffering and deny no part of my own.”
In claiming her lesbianism, Rich is able to value herself as a woman; thus empowered, she is able to confront, and finally accept, her ambivalent feelings toward her Jewish heritage.

WORKS CITED

Allison, D. (1995). Two or three things I know for sure. New York: Plume.
Rich, A. (1986). Your native land, your life. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Rich, A. (1995). Split at the root. In G. Colombo, R. Cullen, & B. Lisle (Eds.), Rereading America: Cultural contexts for critical thinking and writing (5th ed.) (pp. 365-375). Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press.
Shakespeare, W. The merchant of Venice.