The Death of the American Western

The Death of the American Western
by
Catharine Sowards

My father was an aficionado of the American Western. He loved Zane Grey, the Lone Ranger, and tales of Wyatt Earp and the James Brothers. When he was ten years old, he had found a stray cat, which he instantly christened Billy the Kid with Two Smokin' Forty-fives. That's exactly what he called that cat, too. Even after Billy had given birth to three litters in rapid succession, all promptly abandoned to be hand-reared by my father and his sister, Dad referred to the cat by the whole name. My grandmother, who, it was said, referred to the cat by other names which she would later decline to repeat to me, once told me it was meanest cat that she'd ever seen. No one could touch Billy without risking bloodshed. Billy was a feral cat, lured to their doorstep by a killing hunger which, once satisfied, merely made a wild, vicious cat a wild, vicious cat with a full belly. Dad never stopped trying to tame that cat, either. Every day of their lives together, he would seek out Billy and attempt to woo her with cat food or table scraps or bits of knotted string from her place in the crawlspace beneath the house. And every day, Billy would make it clear that she would eat the food, scarf the scraps and even bat at the knot, if she happened to be so inclined. But she would not accept a human touch -- any human -- including my father. The scars Billy left on Dad's hands and arms were so deep that they remained visible up to the day he died, 72 years after he'd found her, and 70 after she'd met her own end, under the wheels of Ross Lundy's uncle's brand-new, six-cylinder 1938 Packard.

The Packard, as it turned out, had a whole story of its own. My father wouldn't hear it all until years later, shortly before he left Texarkana forever. But it turns out that that Packard was a bone of contention between Ross Lundy's father, Danny Jay, who could no more afford a Packard during the Depression than a, to use Danny Jay's own favorite expression, "trip to gay Pareeeee," and Ross' maternal uncle, Garrett Swanson, who, apparently, could. Garrett bought that car, Danny Jay told Ross, out of sheer, ornery spite, and then drove it around town to show it off. All of which was designed, according to Danny Jay, just so that Lida, who was Garrett's sister and Ross' mother, know for certain she'd married a first-class failure. "That car," Danny Jay would mutter under his breath every time it swerved off of Elm Street and up into his driveway for family gatherings. "That goddamned car." Garrett Swanson had driven that car for the first time straight off the showroom floor in Mount Pleasant, east on Highway 67, into Texarkana, and directly over the 3rd and 4th thoracic vertebrae of Billy the Kid with Two Smokin' Forty-fives.

Garrett Swanson and that goddamned car were none too popular around Elm Street, I can tell you.

The funeral for Billy the Kid with Two Smokin' Forty-Fives was a simple affair. A shoebox, some beeswax, a box of wooden matches and six mourners, including Ross and Danny Jay Lundy, who felt it was only right they represent the family of the killer in paying respects to the deceased. My father was devastated. It's probably safe to say that Billy was the only thing he had let himself truly love, and her tragic death left him unable to speak at her service. My grandmother was elected to replace him as keynote speaker.

Her eulogy was short and to the point. "Mean and ugly. Glad she's dead." And then, because there are just rules about these sorts of occasions, "Name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen."

Because my grandmother had a passion for begonias and bare-root roses, no cat -- particularly one with the evil disposition of Miss Billy -- was going to be buried in her backyard. She insisted that the burial take place down the hill, at the edge of the man-made pond that dead-ended Elm Street. Everybody but my father spoke a few kind words about Billy, which took almost no time at all. Then my grandmother put the lid on the shoebox, which she'd lined with the beeswax, set it on the surface of the water, struck a match and lit the corner, giving the box a light shove to move it into the middle of the pond. The box rocked and bobbed for a moment, threatening to capsize and spill its payload into the murky pond water. But it didn't. As the mourners watched from the shore, the box smoldered for a moment at the corner, then burst into full flame and Billy went off to Glory in a thrash of orange-and-blue-tinged fire of beeswax and corrugated cardboard.

A Viking funeral, my grandmother called it. My father liked that. It was probably one of the few times my grandmother had been emotionally helpful for him. She was only looking out for her begonias in the end, of course. Still, it was a nice gesture -- a grand gesture -- and my father was one to appreciate grand gestures.

Hence, his love of the American Western.

The Western genre is nothing if not a litany of grand gestures. Wide open spaces. Men of courage trying hard to tame lawless wilderness that's trying hard not to be tamed. Chivalry. Justice. Vengeance. Righteous indignation. Right vs. Wrong. Good vs. Evil. Domestic Shorthair Tabby vs. 1938 Packard.

There is more of a connection between the car and the cat than might be apparent on the surface. A few years after Billy the Kid with Two Smokin' Forty-fives made her way to Valhalla in a shoebox, at the Lundy's annual Fourth of July BBQ, the Packard took a direct hit from an M-80 through the open driver's side window whilst parked at the end of the cul-de-sac. In seconds, it seemed, the vehicle was completely engulfed, and because it was too far away from the front yard garden hoses and the brand new city-installed fire hydrant to be rescued, a decision had to be made quickly as to what to do with the burning car. Even with all the big, strong male Lundys at the back bumper, pushing the car up the grade toward the houses was impractical and possibly dangerous. Leaving to burn, with a full tank of gasoline (which many had wondered aloud about, given wartime rationing) was also not an option, as an explosion might result.

So it was decided that the 1938 Packard, which had been babied and adored by Garrett Swanson for many years, would have to be pushed into the pond. As Garrett stood on the bank, tears welled up in his eyes, while he watched a group of boys and men, including my father and Ross, smash the windows, then collect at the rear bumper and heave the car into the pond. There, it floated for a moment or two, flames licking voraciously out of the window openings. My father stood on one side of Danny Jay, Ross on the other, as they watched the car tip and rock as it took on water. Then, like the burning destroyers my father had seen in the newsreels of Pearl Harbor, the car took one final bow forward, and sank, nose-first, into the twelve-foot depths of the pond. The flames made a mad dash toward the back of the passenger compartment in an effort to survive, and actually managed to glow a bit after the car was submerged beneath the black surface. Finally, they succumbed as the water rushed in and swallowed the car whole.

"What does that remind you of, boys?" Danny Jay asked his voice thick through an inebriated fog.

Ross and my father exchanged puzzled looks.

"A Viking funeral," slurred Danny Jay. And then he began to laugh, uncontrollably. Some might even say, diabolically.

No one ever did know just exactly who it was that had launched the fatal M-80. Nor could they fully explain why the Packard had burned so quickly and so ferociously, although there were some reports of a smell of kerosene. Nothing could be proved, of course. But rumors abounded. Garrett Swanson didn't spend too much time on Elm Street after that. Not that anybody missed him really. There was a war on, after all, and the Packard plant in Michigan had already been re-tooled to build airplanes.

In the end, it didn't matter much. Because, in the end, Billy the Kid with Two Smokin' Forty-fives lay in her eternal resting place beside the burned-out carcass of her killer. That was justice.

* * *

When my father left home, his head newly shorn and wearing the uniform of a United States Army private, he expected that he might not come back alive. People tell stories that way, years after things happen, and one can never be sure if they're exaggerating for the benefit of the story, or whether it is really the way they felt at the time. I suspect, though, that this was exactly the way my father felt. It was the end of 1943. He was heading for France. We were winning the war by then, but there were still plenty of War Department telegrams being placed in the shaking hands of wives and mothers to go around. I think my dad fully anticipated he'd be coming home in a flag-draped coffin. I also suspect that he found this idea quite heroic and romantic, given that he was eighteen years old and had never spent any time in a flag-draped coffin before.

God knows what experiences he had in Europe. He never discussed them with either of his wives, nor with any of his four children. They were bad enough, I imagine, that over a couple of years, somewhere between a blood-soaked beachhead in France and a frost-laden forest in Germany, he stopped fantasizing about the glamour of being sent home, shot up all to hell, in a flag-draped coffin, and just got down to the business of staying alive.

The Nazis never dampened his love of the Western. In fact, the one story he told us about the war happened in a small village in Bavaria, after his unit's jeep had blown two tires on a barbed wire fence. The seven young soldiers walked into the bombed out village, in a futile search for something to replace the tire for which there was no spare. There, they captured – or, rather, stumbled upon -- three German soldiers that had been separated from their unit. One was fatally injured, and the other two had stayed behind to tend to him. They spoke no English, and only one private in my father's platoon spoke Yiddish. The two languages were close enough that each could grab a word here and there and some information could move between them. The sky was just beginning to turn dark when the American platoon came across the two soldiers and they're dying buddy. My father, who was the only one among them with any medic training, attempted to dress the dying soldier's wound, but he was unable to stanch the bleeding, and soon gave up. Nine boys, seven Americans and two Germans, leaned back against the burned out wall of the building and watched the young wounded man slip away into the night.

They said little at first, but there seemed to be no acrimony between them, as if they were all just there, doing their jobs. Maybe this far into a long and damning war, young men in their late teens and early twenties who should have been at home, sitting at their mothers' table, or in cars, entangled in the slender limbs of their young sweethearts, were far more alike than different. This was made clear when, just as the sun was rising, during one of the few attempts at conversation, one of the young Germans spoke the only English he knew.

"Tex Ritter und White Flash."

The next morning, after they had all buried the young dead German soldier together, the Americans abandoned the disabled jeep, and decided to walk the surviving prisoners the eight miles to the American base camp where the Germans would be debriefed and sent to a POW camp in England.

Along the way, the German boys and the American boys shared Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes, saltines and canned beans, and more than one chorus of "Blood on the Saddle" as they made their way through the Bavarian trees to base camp.

Every time Dad told that story, I used to wonder whether those two prisoners would someday tell their own children the story of the singing American cowboys who had taken them prisoner, shared their rations and their American cigarettes, and bonded over another singing cowboy and a horse named White Flash.

So, Just Let Me Make Sure We're Both On The Same Page.

According to the American Bar Association, when the President signs a bill that Congress has passed by a clear majority, then goes back later and attaches "exceptions" to that bill, in order to preserve neo-con dominance and avoid that pesky veto/override process which can be so embarrassing to a President who no longer can muster support for his agenda, even within his own party, then that action is diametrically opposed to the intent of the Constitution and yet another process by which this current Administration continues to erode the Democratic process.

Right.

Good to know.

Thanks for the 411.

(Can we impeach this mo-fo monkeyface yet? Puh-Leeeeeze?)

~C~

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Taming the Wild Things at Home

ANIMAL MAGNETISM:
Taming the Wild Things at Home

(Sci 335: Environmental Landscapes)

Our history of bringing wild things into our homes is at least 12,000 years, though most anthropologists estimate it’s more like 15,000. It is believed that the first animal to be tamed was the genetic precursor to wolves, the Tomarctus, which scientists believe looked like a cross between a wolf and a fox. The reasons this we can really only guess, since only a scant amount of archeological evidence of man and animal cohabitation exists. (“History of Dogs”)

Whatever the initial reason for bringing animals into the den or the cave, they made themselves quite at home, and have now managed to be fully ensconced in our lives. We take them with us on holidays, we buy them food and treats at huge expense that we think they will like; we get up at ungodly hours of the morning to walk them and feed them and tend to their needs. When they become sick, we spend small fortunes on their medical care. When they die, we grieve them as we would our own flesh and blood.

Six thousand years after we had mastered the domestication of the dog, it occurred to us that perhaps, if we tamed this nasty little creature, we could set about to taming something else, like a horse or a goat -- something that might actually prove even more useful to us in our newly minted agrarian lifestyle.

On Dogs
"Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement." – Snoopy

According to the Humane Society of the United States, 65 million dogs are kept in the United States as owned pets. Slightly over half reside in single-dog homes, but nearly one-quarter live in a two-dog homes, and approximately 12% live in three-dog homes.

What many scientists do not exactly agree on is why. Some say it was in order to utilize them in the hunt for food – both as assistant hunters and – when the going got tough – as the emergency rations. Others say that early dog ancestors were kept as protection against invasions by neighboring tribes of hostile humans. Still others maintain that tamed wild dogs merely offered companionship and body heat in a harsh environment when both could mean the difference between life and death. (“History of Dogs”)

If the union of dog and man was initially a marriage of convenience, it grew eventually to love in a way most humans do not share with any other animal but the dog. It rests largely on what we have done to the species through selective breeding. Today’s dog is really a wolf pup in shitzu clothing. Ancient breeders chose dogs that held on to their puppy-like traits well into adulthood for breeding until they had bred an animal that, unlike a pure-bred wolf, would never grow up. This ensured that the obedience that a puppy shows its mother, or the other alpha leaders, continued throughout a dog’s lifetime. The key to a dog’s loyalty is not necessarily his undying love and devotion to us, but his reliance on us as the alpha leader of his ersatz “pack” to protect and provide for him.

It is for this reason that animals plucked from the wild, even as helpless infants, are capable of suddenly becoming aggressive and turning on the humans that raised them. Even if they do not become aggressive, they become decidedly less responsive and involved in the human experience. They have not been a product of the selective breeding that allows them to remain obedient, docile puppies. They grow into independent, territorial adults, who are programmed not only to not take orders from the alpha leader, but possibly to defeat the alpha leader and take over the pack themselves. It is for this reason that we do not ordinarly keep wolves, coyotes, jackals and other wild-bred dogs as pets. At the very least, they cease to desire to please us. At the worst, they see us as potential competitors, combatants and/or food sources.

In his book, Man Meets Dog, Konrad Lorenz describes his experience with a Dingo he raised from five days old, which he gave to a nursing dog he owned, to foster until the pup was weaned. At first, the Dingo displayed all the reverence and eagerness to please that any puppy might, eagerly greeting Lorenz when he returned home, becoming distressed when Lorenz disciplined him. However, when the pup was about eighteen months hold (sexual maturity in Dingos), Lorenz began to notice the change in him.

As a young animal his behavior differed in no way from that of an ordinary dog: when he had been punished for some ill-doing, he showed his bad conscience in the usual way of dogs, that is, he tried to conciliate his angry master by submissive or pleading gestures, nor would he rest until he had obtained the forgiving caress. However, his manner changed entirely when he was about one and a half years old: he still accepted every form of punishment, even a beating, without resistance, but, as soon as the business was over, he shook himself, gave me a friendly wag of his tail and ran off, inviting me to chase him. In other words, his frame of mind was in no way altered by the punishment nor did it have the least influence upon him or hinder him from immediately repeating the crime for which he had just been punished, as, for example, making a renewed attempt to murder one of my most valuable ducks. At the same age, he lost all inclination to accompany me on my walks and simply ran off anywhere without paying the slightest attention to my calls. Nevertheless I must stress that he was extremely friendly towards me and greeted me, when ever we happened to meet, with all the usual canine ceremonial. One must never expect a wild animal to treat a human being differently from a member of its own species….

My Dingo evidently harboured the warmest feelings for me that such an animal, when mature, can ever feel for another one, but submission and obedience play no part in these feelings. (Lorenz 22)

Lorenz learned something from his wild Dingo that most people never get the chance to learn – all animals, but particularly wild-bred ones, revert to some sort of wild state, regardless of our efforts in the opposite direction.

We can buy them diamond-studded collars left and right, but in the end, even Paris Hilton’s Chihuahua carries the DNA of the wolf. We have merely infantilized them to keep them puppies for the rest of their lives.

On Cats
"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea." – Robert Heinlein

Cats have been in our homes for a far shorter time than dogs – about 6,000 years. All domesticated cats are descended from African wildcats, which were tamed quite by accident. In true “cat fashion,” it was the cat who initiated first contact with the humans, and the motive was undeniably mercenary. When humans finally settled in one place and got a handle on the farming thing, one of the crops they were able to store with success was grain. Grain attracted vast amounts of rodents. Rodents, in turn, attracted vast amounts of cats from the surrounding wilderness, who subsequently realized that the wild was just fine, if you like that sort of thing. However, hanging around grain silos and waiting for the mice and rats to fall into your mouth has a certain appeal as well, and might leave more time for the truly important things in life, like napping. This first symbiotic interaction between cats and humans can be considered Step One in the process of feline domestication. What demarcates Step Two -- and whether there actually has ever been a Step Two, remains a point of contention in people who know and love cats. (“History of Cats”)

Konrad Lorenz is one of those people. He has several cats, and points out that domesticated cats, even those kept indoors, have lost none of their innate wildness. African wildcats, in the wild, do not live in packs. They are solitary hunters, who mate on the fly, and rear their children in single-mother litters. Our domestic cats have retained this independence and desire for isolation. Lions in their prides are the exception, not the rule.

The cat is not a socially living animal; it is and remains an independent, wild, little panther, with nothing in its character of that infantility of domestication which makes the dog such a grateful recipient of attention and ‘spoiling’. (Lorenz 159)

Indeed, cats neither ask for nor demand human attention every minute of the day, but rather only when they want it. Thus, the cat has developed a reputation for aloofness. Anyone who has spent time with young kittens knows that they are anything but aloof. In reality, cats' seemingly stand-offish behavior can be attributed to the fact that, like Lorenz' Dingo, they merely grow up. While a well-fed domesticated dog will occasionally bite, he will rarely hunt and kill for food. The same cannot be said of cats, who, if left to their devices and taught to stalk, hunt and kill by their mothers, will continue the practice, even if they are being fed regularly at home.

The oft-quoted (and misquoted) observation by Charles Darwin in Origin of the Species, describes how keeping an animal so close to its feral wild self has a direct impact on the environment in which man lives. Darwin's observation is detailed by Robert Ezra Park in his book, Human Ecology. In the mid-nineteenth century, England experienced a population growth, which in turn spurred a profusion of rodents, who thrived on human refuse and crops. This threatened to wipe out England's native humble-bee population, which then created a sudden dearth in the amount of red clover plants along English country hillsides (humble-bees being the only type of bee that will pollinate red clover). Darwin, a native of Shrewsbury, Shropshire, which is surrounded by rolling hills, agricultural land and (now that much of it falls under the National Trust) much wide open space, began to observe a rebirth of red clover immediately outside of towns and villages in the west country region.

Near villages and small towns the nests of humblebees are more numerous than elsewhere and this is attributed to the number of eats that destroy the mice. Thus next year's crop of purple clover in certain parts of England depends on the number of humblebees in the district; the number of humblebees depends upon the number of field mice, the number of field mice upon the number and the enterprise of the cats, and the number of cats --as someone has added--depends on the number of old maids and others in neighboring villages who keep cats. (Park 22)

In fairness, Darwin did not originally mention the old maids in Origin of the Species, but he does draw the direct correlation of the re-emergence of red clover with the proximity to human populations which kept domesticated cats.

On the Good News and the Bad News
It is a long established statistical fact that people enjoy a myriad of health benefits by having pets in their homes. In 1987, the National Institutes of Health published a consensus from a two-day conference in which medical experts put their heads together and came up with some interesting facts which they deemed required more study. One was that people who owned pets were in overall better health, and general had a more positive outlook than non-pet owners. The conference posited that pets were good for everything from loneliness to hypertension. This consensus kicked off nearly twenty years of scientific study which yielded the following conclusions: Pets can be really good for people.

The combination of companionship, nurturing elements and the opportunity for pets to get their owners, especially among the elderly, out of the house and mingling with others meant that pet owners were less lonely not only for their animal companions, but for human companionship as well. Organizations like the Delta Society even specialize in using pets as rehabilitation for non-pet owners as well.

That is the good news. The bad news is that pets can be bad for people as well.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which cites the Delta Society's work with human-animal rehabilitation, on a different page lists a staggering list of health concerns that accompany pet ownership (cat scratch fever, toxoplasmosis, Lime disease). As it happens, snakes carry a fairly aggressive form of salmonella which requires that they be handled with extreme care, lest snake owners run the risk of contamination. Furthermore, the CDC's section on pandemic flu indicates that, while avian flu has heretofore only been contracted by humans who have had direct contact to infected birds, a slight mutation allowing mammals to become infected might be the gateway to human avian flu infection. No such cases have been reported, but the CDC and World Health Organization (WHO) both report an increase world-wide in zoonotic (animal-to-human transmission) diseases, and, on the heels of the SARS outbreak in 2002, expressed concern that, should an avian virus mutate to infect humans directly, the disease might be spread from agricultural birds, to pet birds, to migratory birds so quickly that stopping it would be daunting if not impossible. (Pearce)

On Ferals and Other Wild Things
I had a Doberman pinscher/Weimaraner mix when I was a teenager. His name was Siegfried, and it must be said that he was the most docile, loving creature I have ever owned. Afraid of thunder, undone by earthquakes and cowed by every cat and squirrel in the backyard, Siggy was the dog equivalent of the 90-pound weakling. He fostered three litters of rescued feral kittens, doing everything short of feeding (not that they didn’t try, mind you), until they were old enough to be adopted into other homes. He was an exceptional mother.

My grandparents had a home in Idyllwild, California, where we used to spend every holiday and vacation. Sometime in the early seventies, they acquired a little puppy of dubious parentage (but of enormous feet and head) which they named Barney. When the puppy Barney met the two-year-old Siggy, it was love at first sight, and they were inseparable during our many vacations up to Idyllwild. Over time, Barney grew (and grew, and grew) until it became clear that he was less a dog and more a carnivorous pony. He was also a dog of exceptionally sweet disposition and temperament. The fencing around the Idyllwild house was inadequate to contain either the Doberman or the… whatever Barney was (part Russian wolfhound seems a likely guess)… for any length of time, and the two took to rambling the woods surrounding the house. My mother and grandfather thought little of this, since they always came directly when called, and never seemed to venture far outside the perimeter of the house.

One late afternoon, the local police showed up during a light snow, a couple of days after Thanksgiving, and threatened to destroy both dogs if they weren't contained immediately. It seems they had attacked a neighbor’s son and had bitten him severely on the upper thigh. This was shocking news to us. Two sweet lumbering dogs, beloved house pets who, individually, had weathered the storm of being crawled on by small children and tiny needle-clawed kittens without baring a single tooth, had coordinated a fairly vicious attack on a pre-adolescent human. The boy was physically fine – the bite, apparently inflicted by Barney, had left considerable bruising, but had barely broken the skin. He was an emotional mess, however, and I am quite sure suffered from the after-effects of the attack for a long time. My grandfather placated the boy’s family with promises that we would keep the dogs locked up, which we did from that day forward. Their rambling “wolf” days were over. We remained mystified about their behavioral anomalies, however.

Years later, I was relating this story to an acquaintance who was a professional dog trainer (and self-professed pet psychic, but that’s another story). He explained why two dogs so dear and loving apart became such dangerous allies when left to their own devices.

“It’s quite simple, really,” he told me. “They formed a separate pack, with a whole new hierarchy that didn't include people. It’s what they do, you know.”

In their respective human homes, Siggy and Barney were subordinate to their alpha leaders (me and my mother, in Siggy’s case, my grandfather in Barney’s). They would not act without our say-so. But paired together, for the several weeks during the year that we spent in Idyllwild, they formed an entirely new pack, with Siggy as the alpha, and Barney as his loyal sidekick. The unwillingness to venture past a certain radius from the house was actually a display of extreme wolf-like territoriality. A male dog by himself with no particular delusions of grandeur will be more inclined to wander off and explore the outlying areas. The need to patrol the cordoned off area they’d staked as their own was a very wild thing to do. The neighbor boy most likely innocently stumbled onto the perimeter, unwittingly setting off a canine turf war.

It only serves to demonstrate that, in spite of our best efforts to breed the wild out of them, our pets still are to wild. One small shift in the balance of power, and they easily revert back to their wild states, by instinct and inclination.

“It’s what they do, you know.”

Our control over our animals – even the ones we have bred into precarious domestication – is tenuous. The proof comes when domestic animals find themselves living wholly outside of human aegis. When abandoned and left to fend for themselves, even the tamest cats and dogs can turn feral in short order. Hunger and the need for self-protection drive otherwise tame and loving dogs to commit acts of unspeakable “wildness” – such as attacking seemingly weaker humans, terrorizing children and even devouring each other.

Even dogs which have not been abandoned, but have been reared without proper supervision and care, can turn spontaneously aggressive. As reported on CNN.com recently, on November 27th of this year, an elderly Texas woman was mauled to death by her neighbor’s six Pit Bull/Rottweiler mixed-breed dogs for what appears to be no reason. The dog’s owner was mystified by the attack and claimed that the dogs frequently played with his own young grandchildren without incident.

As the Pitt/Rottie mixes (and my own Doberman) demonstrate, when domesticated dogs find the company of other dogs, rather than humans, the "pack DNA" can still re-emerge and make them scary, sometimes deadly forces. This is why feral dogs are dealt with so swiftly by animal control agencies. Feral dogs are not perceived to offer any benefit to society, and to present an outright danger.

Feral cats seem to survive better than their canine counterparts, probably because they are smaller and more elusive. For one thing, they do not tend to organize in a pack and attack the nice old lady next door while she’s mowing her lawn. Also, as was the case when man and cat first came together, feral cats offer a benefit to the human quality of life. I have already documented in journal entries past the tragic results of misguided attempts to exterminate the feral cat populations at major motion pictures studios. The dessimation of the animals (based on the idea that cats are dirty) left both Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox studios dealing with an infestation of far dirtier than cats -- rats. Big ones. Los Angeles rats, who don't suffer any of the climatic challenges of their brothers in rougher weather patterns, and graced with many man-made habitats (huge ivy beds, landscape shrubs, crawl spaces) get positively enormous. In both instances, the cats were eventually returned to the studios, usually after a highly placed production executive watched a cat-sized rat waddling across her $160-per-square-yard Berber carpet, and decided that maybe life with Mittens wasn't so bad after all. The cats came back, the rat population was brought quickly under control, and foolish notions of tampering with what appears to be a well-ordered food chain evaporated.

In other cultures which are more cheek-by-jowl with wildlife, the taming and owning of truly wild things has begun to cause trouble -- to the people, to the animals and to the environment. In Nicuaragua, animal control agencies have been cracking down on so-called wild animal brokers who claim they can deliver any exotic to your door in twenty-four hours for between $50 and $100 American dollars. The result is startling.

Walk through Managua's neighborhoods-from the gritty ghettos around the airport to the lush enclaves above Lake Managua where affluent homes peak from behind high walls-and it sounds like a rain forest at dawn. The city is filled with the chuckle of parrots, the shrieks of toucans and monkeys, even the occasional low growl of a puma. (Hendrix)

The majority of pets do not go to Nicaraguan households, though. The vast majority of exotic pets rounded up by the brokers in Managua will be shipped here or to Europe, where the demand for unusual wildlife brings top money, especially for a depressed Central American economy.

Our deep yearning to bring home wild things has impacted our environment (and now environments thousands of miles away from ours) for over 12,000 years. Each animal that we add to our list of domesticated things -- the dog, the cat, the horse, the sheep -- both adds to and detracts from our quality of life in some way. They make it, by turns, more companionable, less lonely, more dangerous, less burdensome, more full of humble-bees and wildflowers, less full of rats and field mice. If we change the ground we live on just by living here, then it must be certainly true that the wild things we bring home with us changes the ground as well.

Our initial needs to domesticate animals -- for food, for pest control, for body heat and protection from predators -- have all but evaporated. So why do we still feel a need for them in such large numbers? The attraction that pets hold for us now may lie in their utter and complete lack of self-consciousness. It counterbalances our tendency to overanalyze quite nicely. D.H. Lawrence once said, "I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself." Maybe we keep them so close because we have so much to learn from them about life. And they catch the big rats for us. That's nice too.

Works Cited

"Avian Influenza Infection in Humans." 15 Nov 2005. Center for Disease Control.http://www.cdc.gov/flu/avian/gen-info/avian-flu-humans.htm

Darwin, Charles. Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1901. Questia. 2 Dec. 2005 .

Hendrix, Steve. "WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE - More Than a Quarter of Nicaraguan Households Keep Wildlife as Pets, but Now the Country Is Cracking Down." International Wildlife Sept.-Oct. Questia. 2 Dec. 2005 .

Lorenz, Konrad. Man Meets Dog. London: Routledge, 2002. Questia. 2 Dec. 2005 .

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United States. National Institutes of Health. The Health Benefits of Pets. 11 Sep 1987.

THE VIEW FROM THE TOWER: What Rapunzel Tells Us...

The View from the Tower:
What Rapunzel Tells Us
About Ourselves as Women

(Lit 390B: Retelilng the Myth of
Romantic Love thorugh Fairytales)

The story of Rapunzel has always both fascinated and appalled me at the same time. As a little girl in love with very long hair, the story of Rapunzel, whose hair was so long, it could be fashioned into a ladder, represented something to be striven for. Not that one's hair could actually be grown long enough to create a hair ladder (and who would want to care for such heap if it could), but the fact that one girl -- even a fairytale girl -- had achieved it meant it was worth shooting for.

As I became older, though, the "very long hair" part became less and less attractive, and other, more sinister messages began to emerge. It bears mentioning that I was raised primarily by a single mother who was very, very progressive. Subliminal messages of my limitations as a female went largely unheeded by me, because it never occurred to me they existed. In my mother's house, they didn't. It was not until I ventured into the world that I began to see that Rapunzel, as well as other much loved tales from childhood, had deeper, subtler meanings than just "good vs. evil," "wrong vs. right."

Fairytales are a form of literature and, like most written and oral literature, exist to tell us who we are and where and how we belong in the world. As the cultures change, so do the stories. Rapunzel is one of the oldest of the tales that the brothers Grimm chose to tell, so the incarnations of the story reveal details about the difference in the cultures and people who told the stories, and the messages they wished to convey.

As near as can be ascertained, the fairytale Rapunzel, or at least the earliest of what Getty calls the “hair ladder” stories, has its origins in a tenth century Persian tale of a young woman, Roudabe, who is sequestered with the other young women. She has a secret love, Zal, to whom offers to lower her very long hair to her lover to help him up the wall, so they might be together. Zal politely (and quite sensibly) refuses because he fears it will hurt her head. (Getty)

Presumably, the story goes on from here to tell of the while adventures of the Persian princess and her forbidden love, but since those adventures do not involve climbing up a ladder of hair to rescue the helpless woman, they cease to be relevant here. The most relevant difference in the Persian story from its European descendants is that Roudabe’s home in the tower, away from the eyes of men, requires no elaborate explanation. Her separation from the society of men is a given, in a culture where men are fiercely overprotective of their women. And perhaps Zal’s refusal to climb the hair ladder, in spite of his adoration for Roudabe, is a further reflection of a society that has no tolerance for breaking the boundaries between men and women.

When the story of Rapunzel first appears in Europe, it is in Italy, where an Italian writer named Giovanni Batiste Basile began putting in writing the stories of oral tradition that had existed for centuries. He created an anthology called Il Pentamerone, which told the stories inside a framework story of a Prince and his bride who are told fifty stories by ten women of the kingdom over five days as their wedding present. In addition to Rapunzel, the stories of Snow White, Cinderella and others destined to become famous first appeared here. In this Italian version of the tale, there is no happy ending for the audacious prince and the disobedient maiden. They are sussed out by the fairy/goblin/witch (the maiden’s captor takes on several incarnations, and are, invariably, turned into frogs or giving pig snouts or otherwise cursed to a miserable existence.
Not until the story moves to France does it take on some kind of happy result. A lady-in-waiting to Louis XIV put her touches on the story by adding two important, lingering elements – Rapunzel’s exile and the prince’s infirmity at the hands of the witch, and their subsequent reunion and escape into Happily-Ever-After-Land. Further incarnations of the tale in France add the “pregnancy twist” – Rapunzel’s nightly assignations with the prince result in a pregnancy which the girl is too naïve to understand. When she is exiled (eventually to a hut in the desert), she lives there with her twins, a boy and girl, until the prince, blinded with an encounter with the witch, stumbles across them by chance. Rapunzel’s tears fall into his eyes, restoring his sight, and they all rush off to the prince’s father’s kingdom where they… well… you know…. (Getty)

Once the story gets to Germany, in the first collection by the brothers Grimm, it has been renamed The Maiden in the Tower, and it exists more or less as it does today, with only occasional variations between Grimm versions (notably, the elimination of the “pregnancy twist,” as the Grimms moved more from a PG to a G rating). However, the legacy of the tale of the maiden relegated to the tower, imprisoned by both the folly of her careless parents and the cruelty of the powerful witch/crone figure, is the stuff that post-modern analyses are made of, and the tale of the maiden in the tower has spawned many.

Canadian feminist author Margaret Atwood takes the story out for a feminist spin, breaking the tale into four elements that represent the repression and marginalization of women historically. She has broken the story into four elements – the maiden, the tower, the witch/crone and the prince/rescuer. In the Canadian telling of the tale, Rapunzel is not only exiled by the witch, but silenced by her as well. Atwood sees Rapunzel and the tower as two sides the same issue – women who have so internalized society’s set role for them that they are voiceless and imprisoned. Our prince is of little help, as he has been blinded, and his reunion with Rapunzel is not by his own doing, but comes about out of sheer dumb luck. The witch/crone is the powerful woman, always to be feared and ultimately foiled (or, in the extreme, killed). The parents in general – and the mother figure in particular -- are merely the shallow vessels to bring the beautiful maiden into the world, and are disposed of early in the tale (as are Sleeping Beauty’s, Cinderella’s and Snow White’s). As Atwood sees it, the danger in fairytales like Rapunzel is that women who internalize such stories are apt to create their own prisons by buying into to the notion that Rapunzel’s physical beauty, submissiveness and virginity are the most valuable things about her, the things which make her worthy of care and protection. When the crone discovers she’s no longer pure, and that she’s been disobedient, Rapunzel must endure physical abuse and mutilation (the cutting of her precious hair) and exile to the desert where, presumably for the first time in her life, she must find a way to take care not only of herself, but of her children. The lesson women learn, Atwood believes, is that a woman is only as good as she is virginal and beautiful (read, young), and that by being submissive, she can ensure her continued care and inclusion. (Wilson 138)

Psychologist Sheldon Cashdan predictably sees a different side of the maiden and the tower. In his book, The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales, he sees the characters as representing deeply repressed parts of the divided psyche, playing out the story of the human experience. In Rapunzel, he sees the maiden and the witch as representative of both sides of the self, good and evil. For Cashdan, fairy tales were created as morality plays that offered up consequences for things like foolishness, disobedience, premature sex, illegitimate pregnancy, but always offered the opportunity for redemption in the end (the “happy-ever-after”). The witch locks Rapunzel in the tower just as she reaches her sexual maturity, in order to protect her from herself. Rapunzel disobeys and meets with the prince clandestinely, which leads to her ultimate exile and abandonment. Rapunzel, Cashdan points out, is one of the few tales (Sleeping Beauty is another) where the witch is allowed to live at the end of the story.

But what about the witch? Though she punishes both Rapunzel and
the prince for their illicit behavior, forcing them to five apart without
knowing the other is alive, she also survives. Why? Because, like Baba Yaga, she
is not evil through and through. Her decision to keep Rapunzel in the tower
flowed not from malice but from maternal concern. Unlike the evil queen in Snow
White, who is out to destroy the heroine, the witch in Rapunzel wants to protect
Rapunzel. If she were destroyed, it would be tantamount to destroying parts of
the self charged with safeguarding one's sexual well-being, a theme explored in
Robert Louis Stevenson The Strange Tale of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (Cashdan
160)

In spite of Cashdan’s focus on the wider, more universal significance of fairy tales (or perhaps because of it), many still believe that the subliminal messages conveyed in them – the very morality plays Cashdan identifies – are what cause the most damage to children trying to find their places in the world. For better or worse, fairy tales offer the only venue in children’s literature where the central figures are young girls. Contemporary children’s literature is heavily weighted in favor of boy characters. Unfortunately, it is a long-standing belief in literary circles (and film, for that matter) that boys will only read stories about boys, but girls will read stories about boys and girls.

According to Marcia K. Lieberman, in her essay “Some Day My Prince Will Come: Female Acculturation through the Fairytale,” Cashdan’s reasoning breaks down when one looks at the underlying messages of most fairytales, including Rapunzel. Lieberman sees key elements common in the most well-known fairytales which quietly teach young, impressionable girls what is valuable about them. First and foremost is what Lieberman calls “the beauty contest.” Beauty in fairytales is rewarded and honored. It is also despised and envied, by those less “worthy” (read, “beautiful”). Snow White’s beauty makes her a target of the aging Queen. Cinderella’s beauty makes her the object of her ugly stepsisters’ scorn and the object of the Prince’s affections at the Ball (the ultimate “beauty contest”). The beautiful maiden is so valuable, in fact, that she must be protected with any extreme measures possible – she must be locked in a tower, or hidden in the woods by dwarves, or kept squirreled away in a castle fast asleep until she is rescued. Which brings us to Lieberman’s second essential fairytale element. The rescuer, regardless of his level of ineptitude or folly, brings with him salvation for the maiden. He is usually titled – a prince, king or duke – and he is almost always wealthy. His whisking away of our heroine ensures that she’ll lead a life of happiness and leisure befitting her beauty and temperament (and we’ll get to that “temperament” thing in a moment). The most powerful messages entrenched in these symbols serve to teach girls lessons about what makes them important, Lieberman says, and those messages are as follows: a woman is only as valuable as she is beautiful, beauty is the primary thing that guarantees marriage, and marriage is the answer to all of our prayers.

As for the “temperament” issue, Lieberman and Getty both point out that it is a maiden’s primary duty to be “nice.” A girl who is both beautiful and malleable is guaranteed to win the heart of the prince. Passivity is almost as valued as beauty, and qualities which are converse to that – curiosity, willfulness, spirit – are punished in the fairytale. Sleeping Beauty is punished for seeking out the spinning wheel, though it was forbidden, by a 100-year sleep. Red Riding Hood is punished with everything from rape to being eaten (depending upon the version of the tale) because she dares venture off her given path. Rapunzel is mutilated (her hair is cut, thereby rendering her “ugly”), banished and forced into a meager, desolate existence with her two illegitimate children because she dared defy the crone/witch. Even the simple-minded Snow White, who has been told not to talk to strangers, cannot help but venture out to converse with old peddler woman (the queen in disguise), only to be poisoned by that cursed apple.

The image of what constitutes a “heroine” is one of the first things fairytales teach us, and once ingrained, it can be difficult to undo. Lieberman sees the biggest flaw in fairytales as the implication that it is important to girls to sit in the tower of her own making, remote and removed from the world, waiting to be chosen, rather than get up and “do,” lest they miss their chance at life.

There she sits, a waiting prize for whatever man can ride a
horse up the glassy slope. So many of the heroines of fairy stories,
including the well-known Rapunzel, are locked up in towers, locked into a magic
sleep, imprisoned by giants, or otherwise enslaved, and waiting to be rescued by
a passing prince, that the helpless, imprisoned maiden is the quintessential
heroine of the fairy tale. (192)

What Rapunzel, among other fairy tales, tells us about us is that we as women hold secret images and ideas locked deep inside, perhaps so deep that we do not even see them ourselves as they play out in our lives. The drive to partner might be one that pulls us from the strands of our DNA. But it might be directed by the stories we were told – and those which we’ve told ourselves – about what makes us important, valuable, needed and lovable. Only by discarding those old, antiquated notions, can we set our own value and find our own worth.

MARTYRDOM, SACRIFICE and CUNNING

MARTYRDOM, SACRIFICE and CUNNING:
How Three Greek Women Handle Men in
Antigone, Iphigenia at Aulis, and The Odyssey

(Lit 374: Edge Conditions: Women in Greek Antiquity)

Women in the Ancient Greek world wielded little power. Bartered and traded away by their fathers into advantageous marriages, or forced into various levels of prostitution or courtesanship, their value existed in their fertility, their sexuality and to the extent that they could please the men to whom they were beholden.
However, Greek men relied on their women for many things beyond sexual gratification -- paternity, the dowries and riches that came with their brides upon marriage, and for companionship. In any society where the dominant group depends so heavily on the subordinate group, there are always ways in which the subordinates can control their destiny and exert their wills, at least to a certain extent. This was true of American slaves in the nineteenth century, of the indentured convict labor force in Australia, and it was true in Ancient Greece as well.


In order to investigate this phenomenon, I have chosen three women who took three very different approaches in exerting their will, albeit in subtle, clandestine ways.

Antigone, the Martyr

In an effort to prove her love for the dead brother left to rot for his perceived treachery, Antigone defies her uncle, King Creon's, express decree and buries the dead man's body. By doing so, she brings a death sentence upon herself and, with this single act, ends up unraveling her uncle's precarious hold on his empire.

As is true of most heroines in Greek drama, Antigone finds herself in a position of powerlessness. She is betrothed to Creon's son, Haemon, yet she is little more than a girl. Her parents are dead, her brothers are dead, and her only remaining nuclear family is her sister, Ismene, in whom she confides about her plan to bury her dead brother, Polynices. Her actions seem at once loyal and loving, and grandiose and attention-seeking.

In analyzing why Antigone goes to such lengths to bury her brother's body, it is necessary to understand the road she has traveled. Having watched as her family unraveled, and the truth about her parents, Oedipus and Jocasta, came out, Antigone was helpless to stop the events that result in the death of both of her beloved parents. When her brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, launched into a territorial dispute over the Theban throne, and ended by killing each other, she must be devastated. When Creon orders that Eteocles be buried with full stately honors, but Polynices' body be left out for the scavengers, Antigone finally hits her breaking point.

Would any young girl surrounded by so much death be expected to endure these losses without some sort of psychological effect? Antigone's decision, which she acknowledges to Ismene, might very well be the death of her, is a symbol of her taking back some control of her life. Though she can't bring back her dead loved ones, she can care for one who is dead and has been dishonored.
Her stand becomes particularly poignant when she and Creon face off and she refuses not only to back down, but to allow Ismene to share in the punishment for her crime. Instead of having her executed straight away, he begins to question her motives. In some translations, it appears that he is trying to get her to confess to insanity, perhaps so he can pardon her. In others, it seems that he sets out to ridicule her. In either case, Antigone will not be put off. When she asks him if his only plan is to kill her, he tells her that it is -- that once she is dead, his edict will have been satisfied.

ANTIGONE: Then what stops you? Are you waiting for me to accept what you've
said? I never will. And nothing I say will ever please you. Yet, since you did
mention glory, how could I do anything more glorious than build my own brother a
tomb? These men here would approve my actions— if fear didn't seal their lips.
Tyranny is fortunate in many ways: it can, for instance, say and do anything it
wants.
CREON These Thebans don't see it your way.
ANTIGONE But they do.
To please you they bite their tongues. (Bagg, et. al. 197)

It is not enough that Antigone has defied Creon with her actions. She goes so far as to tell him that he is a tyrant, and what's more, everyone else thinks so, too. Creon finally ends the quarrel by declaring that he will not be made a fool of by a woman, and that his son will not marry a traitorous woman. In the version translated by the Baggs, his exact line is "Enough! I want no pernicious wives for my son."

A woman who expresses discontent and anguish in the face of tyranny is pernicious. By the same token, the sweet and docile Ismene, who attempts to join her sister by falsely confessing to the crime, is labeled merely "insane." This attitude is very reflective of a society where the dominant finds itself challenged publicly by the subordinate.

Antigone begins her journey of open martyrdom as an act of love (for Polynices) and defiance (of Creon). It does not appear that she sets out from the beginning to do anything more than obey what she believes is the will and law of the gods. As events move forward, Antigone realizes that she is caught up in something bigger than she, and she is powerless to stop it. As her story spread throughout Thebes, though, the city begins to sympathize with her. They do not wish to see her put to death. This only seals her fate further. As Creon himself says, "Rebellion in the house, then it is certain there'll be no lack of rebels out of doors. No man can rule a city uprightly who is not just in ruling his own household." (Hall) He cannot afford to have his own daughter-in-law defy him, and allow her to live.

In her final speech, Antigone sets herself firmly as a martyr for a cause. She declares that she has no home – she is between Thebes and the netherworld, completely alone. She mourns the loss of marriage and children. The she declares that she is being punished simply for following the laws of heaven. In the end, she goes to her death refusing to capitulate, and in a sense, cursing her wrongdoers with a fate "no worse than mine."

The event that galvanizes Antigone’s role as martyr in Thebes is the moment when Teiresias tells Creon that his wrong treatment of Antigone has brought certain devastation on Thebes. Sickness will befall them, their altars and temples will be cursed, and all because Creon unjustly had her killed.

When Creon attempts to make things right, first by freeing Antigone, who has already killed herself, then by performing a ceremonial burial on Polynices himself, he has all but acknowledged that he was wrong. The "tyrant" has paid dearly with the loss of his son, his wife and the respect of his people, and Polynices has had his proper burial. In her death, Antigone has triumphed.

Iphigenia, the Sacrifice

In Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, the heroine is the epitome of nobility and honor. She arrives in Aulis, certain she has been betrothed to Achilles, only to find that it was all a deception, and she has actually been promised as a sacrifice to bring wind so that her father, Agamemnon, can set his troupes to sea for battle against Troy. This is Eurypides’ last play, and his second characterization of Iphigenia. Since the play was unfinished, the ending has always been under dispute. The most popular seems to spare Iphigenia from the sacrifice by mysteriously replacing her with a deer, but in the translation by Moses Hadas and John McLean, they note that the relating of the deer story originates in a speech by Artemis as she attempts to console the grieving Clytemnestra. Still, this is one of Eurypides’ most unusual plays, and the ending, spurious as it may be, has endured perhaps as an acknowledgement of the breaking with dramatic tradition that Eurypides seems to do.

As Francis M. Dunn points out in his book, Tragedy’s End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama, it is difficult to tell exactly what Euripides actually wrote, since very little of his ending was written at the time of his death. Still, Dunn says it is not unbelievable that Iphigenia, rather than being the sacrificial lamb, might actually have been spared by the gods for her willingness to be sacrificed. He notes that Eurypides broke with the traditional form used in Greek drama, where the hero suddenly realizes his mistakes and is thereby forced to atone for them in some way. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, this is how Iphigenia’s sacrifice is viewed – in retrospect, as if it were committed with complete conviction, only to be discovered later as a tragic error on Agamemnon’s part. But Eurypides does not present it that way in Iphigenia at Aulis. He begins the play, not with Agamemnon’s determination to do this thing and then win the war, but with his uncertainty and doubt. He is preparing to send a letter telling his wife to turn around and go back, when he is told that they have already arrived. Now, he is trapped, with a legion full of soldiers expecting a sacrifice that will send them off to victory.

Instead of coming to appreciate the king's error, we are required to acknowledge
his good intentions and his humanity. Hence the strange and controversial
prologue that opens the play not with a narrative situating the action within a
larger continuum and describing the present crisis as a consequence of prior
events, but with an anxious exchange in broken anapests that dramatizes the
king's abject uncertainty. Hence Iphigenia's notorious change of heart that
implicitly acknowledges her father's helplessness and exonerates him of guilt
for the deed. And hence, we might speculate, the state of the ending, added or
altered at a later date, which Euripides may have left incomplete, still
struggling to find an end that would read neither tragedy nor triumph into the
king's vacillations. (Dunn 181, 182)

It is through this looking glass that Iphigenia’s sacrifice appears to be even nobler. Her plea to him to spare her life becomes even more poignant, when read from the perspective that her father, though he has perhaps committed a grievous error in judgment, is not evil or wicked, but merely human.

I was the first who called you father,
the first you called your child,
the first to climb on your knees,
and we held each other, we loved each other.
You said, "Will I see you living in your husband's house,
enjoying the happiness that is my daughter's right?"
And I answered, touching your beard, as I do now--
but now as the gesture of a suppliant--,
"And what will I do for you then, Father?
When you are old will you come to live with me,
and let me nurse your age, in return
for what you have done for me?"
I remember what we said,
but you have forgotten. (Dimock 78, 79)

When Iphigenia realizes that her father is now powerless to stop the sacrifice, she willingly acquiesces, believing that she will die for a noble cause. She tells her mother and Achilles not to grieve too harshly, and not to hold any hard feelings toward her father. Unlike Antigone, who dies in defiance of her king, and therefore her country, Iphigenia willingly lays down her life for her country.

Because of me, Greece will be free,
and my name will be blessed there.
I must not cling to life too dearly.
You brought me into the world
for the sake of everyone in my country,
and not just for your own. (Dimock 85)

She is rewarded instantly with an expression of love from Achilles, who is enamored of her courage. The desire to further reward such nobility with the ultimate gift – her life – is what Dunn says is behind the persistent deer substitution ending. Even in Ancient Greece, dramatists may not have been immune to the "happy ending."

Like Antigone, Iphigenia may have little control over whether she lives or dies, but she has absolute control over how she dies, and the message she imparts as she dies.

Penelope, the Cunning

Penelope has not seen her husband in nearly twenty years. Odysseus was off fighting a war for ten years, and then became waylaid on the journey home for another ten. Her son, Telemachus, has grown up never knowing his father. Her house is filled with men fawning all over her with the intention of wedding her. Furthermore, she is still does not know for certain whether her husband is a live or dead. It is enough to drive a woman to extremes.

As the wife (and possibly widow) of a warrior of some means, Penelope is different from Antigone and Iphigenia because she has at least some power over her lot. She cannot be married off by a father seeking to meet political or fiduciary benefit. She cannot be forced to marry at all. Indeed, should she decide to marry again, it is Penelope who will be allowed to select exactly who her next husband will be.

However, Penelope has no wish to marry at all – at least not yet. Publicly, she hasn’t finished grieving for Odysseus, and privately, she still believe he might be alive and coming home. Before his departure, Odysseus gave her a time when it would be appropriate for her to remarry. That time is past – hence, the suitors in her house. She must find a way to balance her position as "eligible widow" with her desire to remain a loyal wife.

She tells the suitors she has one more obligation as Odysseus’ wife – to weave the burial shroud for his father, Laertes. For three years, she weaves part of the shroud during the day, then takes it upstairs and unravels it again. This weaving-unraveling cycle is what keeps the suitors at bay, not wishing to dishonor Odysseus’ memory. Still, it allows Penelope to straddle the border between her loyalty to Odysseus, who is absent, and her desire to consort with the fawning, somewhat treacherous suitors. Her ambiguity with regard to her own marital status continues through most of the book, until very close to the end, in Book 21, where she curses one of the suitors, Antinous, and prays to Apollo for his death.

It is one of the first times in the book that Penelope outwardly expresses a desire. This is the turning point in her character in the book. Until that time, she has resisted making her true wishes known, because that would lock her into one prison or another. If she remained a devout widow, the suitors would leave and she might waste her entire life waiting for the return of a man who might already be dead. If she were to marry without knowing if Odysseus were truly dead, his specter would hang over her new marriage forever. Additionally, if she should marry, she would be answerable to another man. With the suitors, she has no obligation, other than the hospitality which is Greek custom. She may not be rude to them, but she need not answer to them, either. Should she marry, she would lose all of her property and whatever right of self-determination she has. As she tells the disguised Odysseus in Book 19, she fears that now that her weaving ploy has been revealed by her nefarious serving maids, she will be in the position of being forced to marry against her will, and she has no allies who will stand against it. This is how she relates her story to the disguised Odysseus.

Then, when the wheeling seasons brought the fourth year on and the months waned
and the long days came round once more, then, thanks to my maids – shameless,
reckless creatures – the suitors caught me in the act, denounced me harshly. So
I finished it off. Against my will. They forced me, and now I cannot escape
marriage, nor can I contrive a deft way out. My parents urge me to tie the knot,
and my son is galled as they squander his estate – he sees it all. (Fagle 395)

On the other hand, the society of ancient Greece relied on order and a certain class structure that could be easily categorized. Penelope, by refusing to label herself either as a wife or a widow, straddles two distinct categories, and moves between them for much of The Odyssey, until she is absolutely forced to put her cards on the table. Her behavior through many of books is contradictory and difficult to pinpoint, such as in Book 18, when she comes to the hall to warn Telemachus that the suitors are not to be trusted, then admonishes them for not presenting her with gifts. Penelope is a woman in a man’s world, where women are defined by the men in their lives. Penelope is reluctant to stay unmarried forever, though marrying will destroy any opportunity to control her own life.

Further evidence of Penelope’s cunning can be seen in Book 19, when she calls for a contest between the suitors, promising to marry the one who wins. She does this though she has been told by the stranger (the disguised Odysseus) that Odysseus will most certainly be returning and soon. The contest she chooses, though – the contest of the bow – is nearly impossible. The first contestant Leodes is not fooled. He realizes that Penelope is still trying to keep the situation as fluid as possible.

Still, better be dead than live on here, never winning the prize
that tempts us all – forever in pursuit, burning with expectation every day.
(Fagle 429)

Once Odysseus has revealed himself during the contest, and the suitors and treacherous servants are gone, Penelope accepts him with open arms and they are husband and wife again.
In all three cases – Antigone, Iphigenia and Penelope – the women are struggling hard to preserve some sense of themselves in a time when a woman’s sense of self was not highly valued. Each is concerned with the preservation of something dear: Antigone, the memory and
honor of her family; Iphigenia, the glory and honor of Greece in the Trojan War; and Penelope, the household and standing as Odysseus’ wife, preserved through her wiles, until her wandering husband could find his way home. In this way, these three women were able make their mark, independent of their men, each wielding what little weapon she had to influence the outcome of her life, one way or the other.

Works Cited

Ahl, Frederick, and Hanna M. Roisman. The Odyssey Re-Formed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Questia. 3 Dec. 2005 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=103740831.

. Antigone. Trans. Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Questia. 3 Dec. 2005 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=103543126.

Blondell, Ruby, Mary-Kay Gamel, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, and Bella Zweig, eds. Women on the Edge: Four Plays. New York: Routledge, 1999. Questia. 3 Dec. 2005 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=102879512.

Cole, Susan Guettel. Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. Questia. 3 Dec. 2005 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=105929760.

Dunn, Francis M. Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Questia. 3 Dec. 2005 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=99423960.

Hadas, Moses and McLean, John. Ten Plays by Euripides. New York, NY: Dial Press. 1936. Introduction, Moses Hadas. New York, NY: Bantam Press. 1960. New York, NY: Bantam Press. 1980.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking Penguin. 1996. New York: Penguin Books. 1997.

Hall, Edith, ed. Antigone; Oedipus the King; Electra. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Questia. 3 Dec. 2005 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=14569797.

Iphigeneia at Aulis. Trans. W. S. Merwin and George E. Dimock. New York: Oxford University
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Press, 1992. Questia. 3 Dec. 2005 .
Sophocles. Sophocles Antigone. Trans. Richard Emil Braun. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Questia. 3 Dec. 2005 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=83250162.

Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking Penguin. 1982. New York: Penguin Books. 1984.

The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Kolonos, and Antigone. Trans. Robert Bagg. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. Questia. 3 Dec. 2005 .
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BIRTH OF A MYTH: Ondaatje's Use of History as a Backdrop for Fiction

THE BIRTH OF A MYTH:
Michael Ondaatje’s Use of History
As a Backdrop for Fiction
(Lit 336: Lyric and Narrative, History and Imagination in Contemporary Literature)

Myth (n) - a traditional, typically ancient story dealing with supernatural
beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves as a fundamental type in the worldview
of a people, as by explaining aspects of the natural world or delineating the
psychology, customs, or ideals of society.

Michael Ondaatje has a fondness for taking real characters or real historical events and creating fiction around them. In virtually every one of his books, he has used a real event or a real person, then taken what is known and constructing a world that makes that historical figure or event seem almost surreal and larger than life. In one book, Running in the Family, the figures he elevates are his own family and the world they inhabit in Ceylon. In the other, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Ondaatje takes an historical figure about which little is known, and capitalizes on Billy the Kid’s already-mythic prestige in order to tell Billy’s own story.

In Running in the Family, Ondaatje uses family anecdotes told to him by relatives and friends of the family, blended with his own recollections and discoveries, and his poetry, as a way of creating his family's history. It is meant to be a memoir of Ondaatje's family and their days in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) when his parents were young and his grandparents were still alive. His primary sources of information are his family and friends of the family, who have vivid recollections of the past – some of which may or may not be true. The verity of the stories is of only minor consequence to Ondaatje. He treats all the stories with the same respect – as if each one is the teller’s own truth, and that’s good enough for him. It makes for a more varied and interesting history, though perhaps not truly “historical” in nature. One of his aunts takes Ondaatje and his sister on a tour of the island, to places he hasn't seen since his childhood, before he was sent to England as a boy. Until then, Ondaatje admits, his memories are in bits and pieces. Stories of his father's misspent youth, his grandmother's eccentricities and of her death, all come together with relatives filling in the spaces.

Ondaatje weaves the tale of his family and their lives together using narrative prose and family pictures, some of which he never fully identifies. Each chapter moves from one memory to another, reminiscent of how family anecdotes are told, with one story inspiring another memory, which turns into another story, and on and on, until the bulk of the story gets told.

The book is a collective memory, blended with Ondaatje's memories melding with what his sister recalls, and the tales their aunt tells them. Rather than narrow the focus to factual information, Ondaatje delivers the revelations in a way that most family histories exist. Once family history gets blended into anecdote, the figures in the story become mythic. In every family anecdote, there are heroes and fools, saints and mini-gods, both in and outside of the family. Ondaatje’s is no different. He begins the book with a dream he has, one that propels him to travel from Canada back to the land of his birth and early childhood. Fantastic visions from his dream bleed into reality as, for the first time as an adult, he finds himself in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to explore his family and their history.

He moves into the big lie his father told as a youth, where his father pretended for nearly three years that he was attending Queen’s College at Oxford University in England, when in actuality, he was spending his father’s money on living the life of a bon vivant. As Ondaatje tells it, when his father elaborate deception is uncovered, and he is confronted by his family, Mervin Ondaatje’s way out of the mess is to go out to dinner that very night and become engaged to a young girl from a wealthy, prominent family. Already, we know that the Ondaatje family, as depicted in the book, has a fairly unusual way of dealing with conflict and dissent. We know we’re in for a fun ride, as long as we’re willing to go his way and suspend disbelief.

Interestingly, though Ondaatje tells these stories from a personal perspective, there is a part of him that remains unattached and apart from it. Some of that is understandable, as much of the history took place before he was born, or outside of his presence. He relates these stories without injecting himself much at all, other than to occasional give a first-hand accounting of something he himself experienced.

Whether the distance is intentional, in order to give him the freedom of choosing any voice he needs to at any point in the story, or subconscious, as a guard against remembering painful memories, is not altogether clear. However, his observational stance allows Ondaatje to tell some of the most harrowing stories of his youth – the loss of relatives, his parents’ checkered romance and eventual divorce, his father’s descent into alcoholism – with a sort of cool, calm collectedness that lets the reader experience the emotion.

These painful memories do more to tell us about the Ondaatje family than anything he could write. In one chapter, called Dialogues, he steps out of the way and lets the tellers tell. These stories consist solely of people’s personal recollections of Ondaatje’s father. One of his siblings relates the story of a near-fatal car accident, caused by Mervin’s drunkenness:

Once he nearly killed us. Not you. But the three older children. He
was driving the Ford and he was drunk and taking the corners with great swerves
and you know those up-country roads. We began by cheering, but soon we
were terrified. Yelling at him to stop. Finally, on one corner he
almost went off the cliff, he almost went off the cliff. Two wheels had
gone over the edge and the car hung there caught on the axle… We were in the
backseat and once we calmed down, we looked in the front seat and saw that Daddy was asleep. He had passed out. But to us he was asleep, and that
seemed much worse. Much too casual. (“Family”, 173)

He blends several types of genres – narrative, family recollections, passages of elaborate prose, and poetry – to tell the story of his family in a larger-than-life, mythical way. Ondaatje’s family may be no more eccentric or unusual than the next person’s. Almost everyone can point to a Lalla in their family tree – the person who only follows rules she makes, who shuns social constraints and lives according to her own agenda – and most people can point to a Mervin or two – someone who’s life was once so promising, but who fell victim to a hunger or an addiction over which they were powerless. What Ondaatje chooses to tell, and the way he tells it, with fluid, evocative language, unedited recollections, and even his own poetry, builds a fantastic world of odd, passionate, emotional people that become irresistible in his surroundings.

At the same time he tells us the history of the Ondaatje family in Ceylon, he is also telling us the story of Ceylon and the cultural and social battle that was being waged between Europeans and the Sinhalese. Ondaatje does this incredibly subtly, almost interstitially, by using quotes from prestigious British writers – Edward Lear, Paul Bowles, D.H. Lawrence – to illustrate the arrogance and condescension with which most Europeans treated Ceylon and its people. He calls them “Karapothas” – which he has earlier described as a large, unpleasant monitor lizard the size of a crocodile, which are generally viewed as smelly, harmful and something to be avoided by the native population of Ceylon.

Ondaatje uses subtle contrast to discount the harsh words of foreigners:

"The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt the least musical people in the
world. It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line
or rhythm.” – Paul Bowles (“Family”,76)

Immediately, Ondaatje counters this statement with his poem entitled “Sweet Like A Crow”:

Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed through a glass tube
Like someone has just trod on a peacock
Like wind howling in a coconut…(Family, 76)

This is how Ondaatje tells us the reality of what life was like as a European colony, at the mercy of people who had little respect or regard for Ceylon, as experienced by the Sinhalese themselves.

By contrast, in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Ondaatje has no source of information on his subject. Unlike Ondaatje’s family, Billy the Kid comes with his mythology “factory-installed”. Though there is very little factual information about Henry McCarty, alias William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, two pictures have been drawn of him in history. He was either a cowardly thug with extraordinarily poor impulse control, or he was a dashing hero figure who represented the last vestiges of the Outlaw West, depending on which camp you side with. Ondaatje prefers the latter characterization, and he uses fictional correspondence and newspaper interviews, together with poetry from or about Billy to give Billy a voice that tells the story as Ondaatje sees it. He also writes some essays from the perspective of others – Angela Dickinson, Billy's prostitute lover, Pat Garrett, his assassin, etc. -- to further fill in the blanks, and to contrast the difference between how Billy sees himself in the world, and how the world sees Billy.

Billy’s “collected works” not only reflect the story of Billy the Kid, but of those who figured prominently in his life, such as Sally Chisum, Paulette Maxwell and Garrett.

The actual history of Billy the Kid, and some of the best known mythology that encases him, become a framework from which Ondaatje can hang his version of Billy's story. Who he slept with, who he rode with, who he robbed, who he killed, and why -- all of these known facts become pegs that support the weight of Ondaatje's story of Billy.

Ondaatje's poetry, set between his narratives, gives the events in Billy's life an ornate, grandiose feeling to them. Yet, oddly, the more Ondaatje creates the florid embellishments of Billy’s life, and the more mythical he seems to be, the more human is seems as well. Billy is no longer just a cardboard cut-out, black-and-white, good-or-evil symbol. Ondaatje raises him to mythic proportions, but imbues him with the complexity and ambiguity of a mortal human being.

In Ondaatje’s story, Billy is at once a brutal man, capable of killing with impunity if threatened with capture or harm, but also a dapper, vain youth, concerned with his physical appearance, eager to charm the ladies. In fact, the women who know and love Billy describe a different person, even from the person Billy himself presents.

It’s Paulette Maxwell, one of the many women in his life, who expresses her feelings on the most famous photo known of Billy, where he appears disheveled and unkempt, leaning on his rifle.

In 1880, a traveling photographer came through Fort Sumner. Billy posed
standing in the street near old Beaver Smith’s saloon. The picture makes
him rough and uncouth. The expression of his face was really boyish and
pleasant, He may have worn such clothes as appear in the picture out on the
range, but in Sumner, he was careful of his personal appearance and dressed
neatly and in good taste. I never liked that picture. I don’t think it does
Billy justice. (“Billy”, 19)

Ondaatje’s use of photographs – and the absence of them – only bolsters the image of Billy as a mythical hero/villain. Ondaatje uses blank pages with captions to indicate where photographs of Billy should be, but aren’t. It gives Billy almost a supernatural quality, as if he is a vampire whose image cannot be captured photographically. Other images Ondaatje uses serve to give us a glimpse into Billy’s world – a sparsely furnished room with a cot, a rough woolen blanket and a bare wood floor, such as one Billy might have inhabited while on the run; the open range, where Billy rustled cattle and did most of his killing and running; a man and woman, husband and wife, seated stiffly, posing for the photographer, whose body language indicates that, though married, these people are not close.

It’s almost as if Ondaatje has used images to show us what Billy saw, in the same way that he uses the poetry to convey how Billy felt, and yet, leaves any images of Billy himself out. We can see what Billy saw, and know what he felt, but what he looked like, save for the scratched tin-type on the book cover, is for us to imagine, the way we might imagine what Zeus or Aphrodite looked like.

The only image besides the cover image of Billy the Kid occupies a tiny corner of a mostly blank page. It is Ondaatje at about age 9, dressed in a cowboy hat and chaps, with his trusty six-shooters in hand. This is the little boy, captivated by the myth of Billy the Kid, who in the real world, may or may not have been a coward, may or may not have been a dandy, who may or may not have been a kid caught up in a world that swept him away. But in Ondaatje’s world, his Billy is so big he defies those narrow descriptions. Much as the Greek and Roman gods existed, full of jealousy and mischief, too large to pin down to a single explanation, this Billy the Kid lives in a Mount Olympus of Ondaatje’s making, where he will live forever as the legend of America’s last days of the West.

Works Cited
Ondaatje, Michael. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart; New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.

Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart; New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.

"Myth." The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 4th ed. 2000.

CRAZY LADY: Abuses... Dramatized in FRANCES

CRAZY LADY:
Abuses of Women in Mental Institutions as
Dramatized in Frances

(Lit 383: Psychology Of Women Through Literature And Film)

The movie Frances opens in 1931, with a 16-year-old Frances Farmer reading aloud her essay, entitled God Dies. First, she is reading it to her mother, who beams proudly at Frances’ precociousness and independence. She is clearly young Frances’ biggest fan.

Frances’ essay wins first prize in a regional scholastic competition, and when she reads it aloud for her community, and it is not well received. Immediately, we see that Frances is a woman who thrives on nonconformity. Lillian Farmer has fostered a quality of independence in her daughter, rare for the era, and rarer still for Seattle, Washington, which is still a small, provincial town in 1930’s America. However, as Frances matures and begins to chafe under her mother’s controlling influence, Lillian begins to feel alienated from her daughter.

This is the beginning of betrayal in this story. As Frances begins to move out into a larger world, away from the little pond where she was such a big fish, she begins to experience one disappointment after another. The world, which had once been so promising for a bright, provocative 16-year-old girl writing an essay on her loss of faith in God, is now pressuring her to conform to a world she does not understand and in which she has no interest. Her stage career in New York flounders, forcing her to move to Los Angeles and become a contract player at Paramount Pictures during the heyday of a studio system which controlled every aspect of a young actor’s life – what they wore, what they ate, what they read and, above all, how they behaved when in the public eye.

Frances not only dislikes this system, she has no resources with which to cope with it. The more she feels pressured, the stronger her response. When she is pushed, she pushes back – a classic case of an irresistible force colliding with an immovable object. This, coupled with her propensity for excessive alcohol consumption, leads Frances into direct confrontation, initially with the studio, and eventually the law. Her fall downhill begins to pick up speed and momentum, until she finds herself in a courtroom, listening as her mother begs the judge to consider sentencing Frances to time in a private sanitarium, rather than to jail. The judge agrees, and Frances finds herself at the start of what Phyllis Chesler refers to as a “psychiatric career.”

In retrospect, it might have been better for Frances had she simply gone to jail for a few months. Her interactions with institutionalized mental healthcare doom her from the start. The open-ended patriarchal structure of the sanitarium, coupled with what is for Frances an intolerable hypocrisy that they are doing it for her "own good," leaves her with no choice but to try to assert herself in any way she can. Frances refuses to “play the game,” even though by not doing so she prolongs her incarceration. She continually confronts her psychiatrist, Dr. Leonard, calling him on his hypocrisy, and taking pleasure in intimidating him by seeming unpredictable and out of control. At one point, she notes that he is afraid of her because, she tells him, “I’m not doing what’s expected of me.” She makes a conscious choice not to be the meek, subordinate female, docile and subservient to her male caretakers. She chooses instead to continue to be unflappably, relentlessly Frances, without apology, knowing that doing so puts her in danger.

Chesler indicates that for any woman who attempted to hang on to and assert her own personality and individuality in the institutional system, the repercussion for her was frequently punitive. In the sanitarium, Frances' expressions of anger are treated initially with insulin shock therapy which nearly kill her, and then by heavy doses of barbiturates to control her. This was a very common practice in institutions where women were punished for expressing ambivalence about accepting the traditional female role of passivity and obedience. Women in a psychiatric career in the early part of the twentieth century were expected to adapt to a parent-child relationship with their therapists and caretakers. Many did this all too easily, because it was a condition that many women found comfortable and familiar. For those unable or unwilling to adapt, however, punitive therapeutic “treatments” were likely to be administered (Chesler, pg. 76).

Frances’ relationship with her mother, Lillian, fuels her continuing difficulties. When Frances refuses to return to the Hollywood system she hates, her mother calls her “crazy” and Frances realizes that her mother will bludgeon her with the threat of recommitment whenever Frances refuses to obey her. In a sense, Lillian has actually set Frances up for her fall, by initially encouraging her as a young girl to wave off the traditionally feminine traits of being the “good” girl, and then by trying to force her to be subservient to Lillian’s will as an adult. With one hand, Lillian offers Frances the opportunity to define herself on her own terms, without having to bow to the conventions set for women by society – what Jean Baker Miller calls “personal creativity.” (pg. 25) With the other hand, Lillian pulls it away when Frances’ personal creativity becomes inconvenient for her.

Frances’ interactions with the men around her – studio heads, directors, and her psychiatrists – are straightforward and assertive. She does not back down from direct conflict or confrontation, she refuses to defer, speaks openly and forthrightly, and refuses to accept anyone else’s restrictions of her behavior. Rather than use her beauty and her femininity in subterfuge or manipulation, as Baker Miller suggests is common for women in conflict situations, she simply confronts the men in her life in open-ended conflict (Baker Miller, pg 16). The result is that she is continually punished for it. Frances is a perfect example of the consequences that a woman could face, particularly in the early part of the 20th century, if she overtly challenges the men around her. (Baker Miller, pgs. 18 – 19) This is the threat that all women endure, but particularly those women who are institutionalized.

Chesler speculates that the reason that more women than men gravitate to psychiatric institutionalization is that the condition more closely replicates their experience in the world and in the family than it does for men. Chesler quotes Erving Goffman, who documented patriarchal structures in mental health facilities in his book, Asylum, as saying that the average man would be better off being in prison than in a mental institution because of the potentially debilitating effect for a man of being treated “like a woman” (i.e., as helpless, sexless, dependent and unreasonable – all traits ascribed to the traditional female role) (Chesler, pgs. 74 – 75). I suspect that this is the reason that Frances does not adapt well to her surroundings in the private sanitarium. Lillian has raised Frances outside of the customary feminine role of the era. As the essay scene implies, she is proud that Frances has eschewed the traditional expectation of womanhood as docile and faithful and obedient (until it inhibits Lillian in her attempts to control Frances, that is). Frances approaches her life much as a man would. When offered opportunities to travel or to advancing her career, she does not think twice about any negative impact these things might have on her image. She does not apply different standards to herself than she does to the men around her, and when the people in power over her force them upon her, she openly resists them.

In a very real way, Frances thinks, speaks and behaves in accordance with the male role, as it is defined in Western culture. She puts the primary emphasis of her life on meeting her own needs, sating her own wants and rising to her own ambition, with little or no thought of how this might inconvenience others or fail to meet their needs. Frances puts her own needs first. The traditional expectation for women is that they meet the needs and expectations of others – parents, husbands, children – rather than concentrating on their own needs. Their own needs are, in fact, largely dismissed as being unimportant and insignificant (Baker Miller, pg. 18). Frances not only refuses to do this, but the idea of doing it does not seem to occur to her.

In addition, Frances has absolutely no editorial faculty in the things she says and does. If she feels it or thinks it, she says it, without regard for any possible repercussions. This is a demonstration of what Baker Miller terms “authenticity.” She believes whole-heartedly in her right of self-determination, without apology. This sets her apart from most women, who are conditioned from earliest childhood to be afraid of their potential for power and self-determination (Baker Miller, pgs. 116 – 118).

Frances is also set apart from other women because she has absolutely no fear of angering the men around her. The example that she's had modeled for her -- the marriage of her parents, the strong, vocal Lillian and the passive, malleable Ernest -- must certainly have helped fortify her view of strong women voicing strong opinions, without contradiction by men. Frances meets these men head on and refuses to back down. She takes for her equality with them for granted, and behaves accordingly. This is shown in the scene when she is arrested at the Knickerbocker Hotel for an outstanding traffic warrant, and upon being questioned by the desk sergeant about her name, she replies with an obscenity, much as a man might. It is not done with any kind of coyness or naughtiness. She spits it back at him the way he comes at her – head on, with no hesitation. Even when she should be afraid of angering those around her, she simply does not sense that danger (much to her detriment, as it turns out). This is where Frances differs from the average woman who has been steeped in the psychology of covert conflict and subliminal resistance (Baker Miller, pg. 122, 123).

Frances’ response to her condition as a mental patient is defiance. She manages in spite of years of institutionalization to resist becoming indoctrinated with the idea of her own insanity. Some of this may be denial, especially where it concerns any possibility of alcoholism. Still, years later, when she appears on an episode of This is Your Life, when host Ralph Edwards asks about this time in her life, she maintains that she was never mentally ill, but “when one is treated like a patient, one is apt to behave like one.” (Interestingly, this is one of the only quotes, besides her high school essay, that we can directly attribute to the real Frances Farmer, rather than just as well-crafted movie dialogue.)

One of the most harrowing scenes in the film is the depiction of Dr. Walter Freeman’s trans-orbital lobotomy. Regardless of whether this procedure was actually performed on Farmer in reality (and this is by no means certain), the procedure itself is graphically portrayed in detail. Freeman (as portrayed in the film) treats his patients as if they were something less than human. His claim during his lecture that the insertion of an ice pick through the bone of the occipital lobe and into the frontal lobe of the brain without the benefit of anesthetic is “completely painless, I assure you,” is preposterous, even to the nonprofessional. However, his treatment of women as animals is not out of character for the mental health community of that time. Both male and female clinicians have been defining traditional womanhood and the nature of the female in the narrowest, condescending of ways (Chesler, pg. 110, 111).

The irony of a movie made in the 80's (not a high-point in the women's rights movement) about a movie star from the 30's who seems to embody the most modern ideal of sexual equality -- that a woman can be just as abrasive, stubborn, outspoken, opinionated and irritating as a man, if she'll only give herself permission -- should not be lost here. It is clear, at least in relation to the film, that much of Frances' behavior (alcoholic binges, violent outbursts) cause her many problems. However, it is also clear that had Frances been born a man, her outspokenness, her passion, even her alcoholism would have been much better tolerated and overlooked by the Hollywood community. The roguish behavior, sexual promiscuity and alcoholic binges of actors like Clarke Gable, Robert Mitchum and William Holden were not only tolerated, but also facilitated, and then covered up by the studios.

The message of Frances is one that applies not only to studios, but also to the world at large. It applied in the thirties, and to a certain extent, it applies today. Boys will be boys -- but let a girl try to be a boy, and she becomes not only dangerous, but downright certifiable. Chesler notes that, though the vast majority of psychotherapeutic clinicians have been male, the vast majority of published literature on madness and mental illness focuses on women. Is this because women are actually more inclined to mental illness than men, or is that men have broader latitude in what constitutes "acceptable" behavior? Is it because women seek psychotherapy more frequently, and cooperate in studies more readily? Or is it, as Chesler points out, something a little darker and more universal?

"I think something deeper has tempted and excited male psychiatrists for the
last century to write about the Eternal Feminine gone 'mad.' I think it is both
safe and 'therapeutic' for them to do this. In women, they could study madness
without dread. They would not be turned to stone or pigs -- Valerie Solanas is
no Medusa; Zelda Fitzgerald is no Circe; mad women have no power." (Chesler, pg.
110)

For Frances, who generated so much fear and confusion in the men around her, declaring her crazy was the only way to render her "toothless." In an institutional environment, Frances might be unpredictable, but she could be controlled and observed. Because she refused to do "what is expected of me," as she puts it, she needed to be neutralized in the most effective way possible -- to dismiss her as merely "crazy." The label of "crazy lady" strips her of her power.

It should be noted that the film, Frances¸ is entirely based on two books -- Shadowlands by William Arnold, and Farmer's ghosted "autobiography," Will There Really Be a Morning. The former is the book that first postulated the Frances Farmer/lobotomy story, and it provides no independent corroboration that such a procedure was ever performed on Farmer. The latter, ghost written by Farmer's close friend, Jean Ratcliff (who was also the principal heir to Farmer's estate), was written almost entirely after Farmer's death in 1970, of esophageal cancer. After certain outrageous inaccuracies in Will There Really Be A Morning were brought to light, Ratcliff admitted that she had exaggerated details of Frances' commitment in Western State Hospital (such as the gang rapes, for example) in order to make the book more "saleable." Arnold's book is full of errors and contradictions, including the details of Farmer's life after she was discharged from care and had relocated to Indianapolis. In spite of the fact that Frances Farmer denied for years that she had had a lobotomy, these statements were merely dismissed, both by Arnold and by Ratcliff in their efforts to tell what was supposed to be her story (Kauffman).

The irony is that the real Frances Farmer, who contrary to Mr. Arnold's account, remained fairly outspoken and irrepressible in Indianapolis after her psychiatric career had ended, was still the target of people who wanted to exploit and control her, even posthumously. The film, Frances, is inarguably compelling and a fine depiction of what life might have been like for an outspoken, strong-willed woman committed for speaking her mind. However, it is also a further exploitation of Farmer, because it is based on two sources that have been proven not only inaccurate (see Kauffman), but also make claims that Farmer herself denied. This is what both Chesler and Baker Miller identify as the main problem when a woman is treated in a patriarchal psychiatric environment. She is subject not only to the stripping of her power, but also to the complete denial of her spoken needs, her expectations and even her own history. Merely by being a female, a woman -- any woman -- becomes subject to having her story co-opted and rewritten, in total contradiction to her express wishes, by people who "know better" than she about her needs, wants and past experiences.

In the end, this betrayal is at the heart of the story of Frances Farmer, both as a film character, and as a living, breathing woman.


Works Cited

Film:

Frances. Dir. Graeme Clifford. Perf. Jessica Lange, Kim Stanley, Sam Shepard, Bart Burns, Jonathan Banks, Jeffrey De Munn. EMI Films (Independent), 1982.

Books:

Baker Miller, Jean. Toward A New Psychology of Women. 2nd ed. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986.
Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1989.

Internet:

Farmer, Frances. God Dies. 1931.
Kauffman, Jeffrey. Shedding Light on Shadowland: The Truth About Frances Farmer. 1999.