Shannon Jackson’s critical work in performance studies has led her to a vital connection between the professional “inter-dependence” exhibited by those who make theatrical productions successful and a similar ethic that drives much of the participatory social practice art that is on the rise in the visual artworld. Post-studio visual art practices that enlist non-artist participants in performance-oriented statements aimed at social change have emerged in earnest since the de-materialization experiments of the 1960s when visual art’s autonomy and commodification, and its tendency to reinforce art’s insular history, would be challenged by artists looking for alternatives to modernism. Near the beginning of Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Jackson asks, “[m]uch has been made recently of the ‘social turn’ in contemporary art…[but] what exactly does it mean? How do we know we are in the presence of ‘social practice’ in art?” (Jackson 11). As visual art has become increasingly conceptual over the twentieth century, and as much conceptual art is also political in its intent, such questions of art’s nature are hardly unusual. However, Jackson’s inclination as a critic interested in the social efficacy of participatory visual art practices tilts this question away from art’s ontology in the direction of its efficacy in realizing social change.

This paper situates Jackson’s interest in participatory art as a backdrop – a theatrical set, of sorts – for a discussion of the ways in which art and theater reveal the inherent sociality of human association beyond the context of the arts. The inherent interdependence Jackson sees as fundamental to collective art processes thus reflects the way people more generally rely on each other to form functioning communities. In contrast to arguments centered on whether art in a social vein qualifies as art, Jackson prefers to focus on participatory and other collaborative social practices that successfully reveal art to be constituted by active social structures operating behind the scenes of both art and everyday life. Jackson writes, “[b]y selecting sites that use performative structures to provoke reflection on larger systemic assemblages, my hope is to raise the stakes of aesthetic conviviality…[and] place social systems in the foreground of analysis despite the fact that they usually occupy the background of experience” (Jackson 6). Jackson thus understands that a connection between the highly visible convivial spirit that drives certain participatory visual art social practices is enmeshed with a less explicit system of social interdependence that nonetheless shapes those art practices, forms of social interdependence that operate not only in the highly orchestrated spaces of theater or art, but in the acknowledged and unacknowledged social systems that drive everyday life.

Jackson understands performance studies to offer necessary support for a theoretical frame for social practice visual art. This notion is particularly important to consider here because it serves as an embodiment of her broader claim that one entity needs another entity in order to flourish. Just as a theater production cannot be successful without the understanding that one agent extends their perspective in order to fill a gap in other agent’s view, in the context of institutions the field of performance studies offers a necessary extradisciplinary perspective that augments emerging participatory social practice visual art discourse. Epistemological and political problems emerge here because such a way of understanding human interaction is grounded in a claim that all agents are limited in what they can know, which in turn, affects how agents interact with others to form social configurations.

Foregrounding the idea that interdependence drives human association — as this claim is contextualized in performance-oriented art — is a compelling way to situate a more fundamental discussion of the relationship between the individual’s autonomy and the inevitable limits to that autonomy in regard to the individual’s dependence on the social group. Just as Jackson sees the individual to need the support of its wider social network, and just as performance studies serves an illuminating supporting mechanism for social practice art, I claim that the strength of Jackson’s claims can be bolstered if her ideas are brought into greater contact with feminist philosophy that functions at the intersection of epistemology and political thought. I contend that Iris Marion Young and Shannon Sullivan’s framing of situatedness in the context of inclusion politics and pragmatist transactional epistemology can further foreground the idea that social limitations are actually generative contingencies that drive social cooperation. In order to contextualize Jackson’s understanding that human limitations are generative, I look to Young and Sullivan because their works intersect with each other in challenging a primary assumption of feminist standpoint theory that sees marginalization to engender privileged standpoints. Taken together, these two thinkers take a positive view of the notion of limited standpoints. Rather than rehearse an association between marginalization and privilege, all agents are understood to be necessarily dependent because they are limited in what they can fully know. In other words, feminist epistemology is helpful in strengthening Jackson’s claim, but only if the notion that an agent’s limited point of view is not seen as something that provides greater insight than other points of view. By questioning whether standpoint theory needs to jettison privileged points of view altogether, Jackson shows that the notion of human limitation understood through the critique of disability supports her claim that social systems of interdependence are incontestable across art and life. I make the claim that Iris Marion Young’s conception of the value of limited standpoints in the process of developing stronger publics through deliberative democratic processes and Shannon Sullivan’s pragmatist feminist epistemology both show how uncertainty and limitations bear out positively in social groups. Young and Sullivan help advance Jackson’s interest in reframing disability as a vehicle for social interdependence when Jackson’s claim for already existing systemic support is understood in a political-epistemological context. The intersection of disability studies and standpoint theory foreground an ethic of care circulating through art and wider social configurations.

The Inherent “Prosthetics” of Social Life and Art

Instead of solely promoting convivial exchange, Jackson insists that social practice art must promote interdependence among participants and situate that interdependence for the purpose of engaging groups of participants in critical actions that either bring attention to inequality or more directly ameliorate a social problem. The desire to develop a more critical form of participatory art that distinguishes rigorous forms of conviviality from projects that do little more than generate a party-like atmosphere among like-minded individuals stems from the propensity of some social practice art to reinforce the values of homogeneous communities rather than challenge social inequities. Jackson’s contribution to social practice discourse centers on her insistence that conviviality can operate in effective social practice art projects as long as it accounts for “larger systemic assemblages” of interdependence that embody a necessary ethic of dependence understood as mutual, rather than charitable or celebratory — lateral rather than top-down. This view rests on the claim that a critical understanding of such practices depends on the recognition that artistic production is only possible when individuals can depend on the support of those whose points of view or skill sets inevitably extend beyond those of the other associated social actors. Mechanisms such as props, stage-hands, supporting actors and backdrops, take on new meaning when they are applied beyond culture of support that runs deep in theater and performance settings. Thus an ethic of interdependence intrinsic to the theatrical culture it draws from emerges for Jackson as the most accurate way to understand the nature of visual art social practices that attempt to address social concerns.

In a vein of thought provoked by a feminist political thinker such as Nancy Fraser, Jackson asks if the rhetoric of liberal self-governance elides the supporting mechanisms affecting even the most seemingly autonomous social actors. Questions of art’s autonomy are thus enmeshed with epistemological problems centered on the individual’s limitations because there is only so much any one individual can conceivably know about the social milieu in which they find themselves embedded. Some important problems inside the discourse of visual art social practice emerge as a result of Jackson’s extradisciplinary (performance studies) view of the visual arts. Jackson asks if the performative turn in visual art demands that art’s stubborn autonomy must give way to a more explicitly conceptualized sociality. In this view, theater cannot successfully function if its agents act autonomously. Where art discourse since the rise of modernity has associated artworks and their appreciation with a high degree of autonomy that frees artistic production from other value systems, Jackson emphasizes a contrary sentiment that has been expanding over the past century – art’s heteronomous relation to other interwoven value systems upon which it both depends and offers support. Jackson thus takes a strong stand against a view of art that demands the sort of artistic-political autonomy that originated with enlightenment liberalism. Instead of understanding the political actor, or the artwork and its viewer, as atomized agents, Jackson aligns herself with a heteronomous conception of art that recognizes the contingency of interwoven standpoints in both social practice art and in social relations beyond art.

Because she understands such interdependence to stem from the fact that agents can only act as far as their experiential standpoints allow, Jackson borrows from feminist epistemology and the discourse of disability studies to make the claim that art and life are grounded by the notion of social “prosthetics,” meaning that supportive structures surround every individual, whether those individuals are perceived as lacking normative abilities. The precariousness resulting from human limitation serves as a primary impulse leading to social reliance, thus Jackson considers how contingent social practices in art can aim to reform or renew wider social institutions. Unlike performance fields, visual art has been slow to recognize the infrastructure supporting its artists, artists who are often elevated for their fierce independence and singular perspectives; invoking a feminist and disability perspective brings social support out of the shadows and into the primary action of art and life. There are important political and epistemological implications of Jackson’s notion of systemic support. Contingency and situatedness are key features of “social assemblages” because she believes that art, like wider social experience, is inherently cooperative; people often want to find agreement even if they cannot claim to know the world in the same way, and they want to address problems together within the social configurations they comprise.

A relationship between disability and the limitation of individual standpoints affirms for Jackson why the notion of support in art and life should be valued rather than dismissed as a sign of weak ethics or superficial political actions. Questions raised around the primacy of aesthetic autonomy destabilize the way autonomy normatively adheres to criticality in dominant art discourse. In contrast, aesthetic heteronomy is then not so much a deliberate move in art practice toward the melioration of social problems as much as it is an ever-present phenomenon of human social experience inside and outside the confines of art. Such an explication brings this discussion closer to the relevance Jackson’s work has to rethinking the epistemological and political ground of more complex and critical social practices and the wider everyday world they refuse to separate themselves from. Jackson sees the relationship between the person perceived as disabled and their environment to further affirm her case for the inextricable heteronomy of art and life. In Jackson’s sense, heteronomy is understood as the deep support systems within which individuals cannot avoid being enmeshed regardless of whether they perceive themselves as highly autonomous or not.

Drawing on the work of Vivian Sobchack, Jackson notes that the way the disabled person traverses her environment, “expose[s] the formal and systemic contingencies of environments that take certain embodiments for granted” (Jackson 5). Contingencies, therefore, are not limited to the disabled even if their ability to navigate the world is amplified by their dependence on social and technological “prostheses.” In this view, so-called abled people not only take their abilities for granted, they also tend to miss the fact that supporting tools help them navigate the world as well. Jackson goes on to say, “[d]isability comes forward not only as a factor through which identities are ‘othered’ but more radically as an impulse to reckon with human contingency in ‘the systemic whole’….[As] Sobchack reminds us, it can be tricky to expose systemic contingency precisely because enabling systems often go unregistered in the moment that we use them” (Ibid.). Jackson takes this point further by noting, “citizens need reminders that bodily capacity can be stopped short at any time” (Ibid). This is because “normative spatial motion disavows the fragile contingency of bodily ability” (Ibid. 6). Sobchack’s own words help elucidate this point further:

As we go about our various projects in the world, in so far as we have learned to use them, we incorporate our prostheses and tools and—unless there’s a function problem or they become of interest ‘in themselves’—they are experienced as subordinate to our focus on our goals and projects; that is, they are generally the ground of our intentional movement and acts, not the figure. (Sobchack quoted in Jackson 6)

Heteronomy emerges as an intrinsic value of social practices (and perhaps all art) because even the most seemingly normative experiences are propped up by what is perceived to be a neutral environment but is nonetheless a support structure teeming with multiple vantage points that extend beyond the individual’s own limitations. She writes,

The social world is in fact a large systemic prosthesis for the normative bodies its structures support. If, however, this social prosthesis is subordinate into our focus and goals, then it requires a break or deviation for us to remember that it is there…when everyday objects are not in reach…we register the contingency of the ‘ground’ that supports our everyday acts of self-figuration. (Jackson 6)

The experience of those deemed disabled thus helps others see the supporting ground that is ordinarily taken for granted. In other words, the limited perspective of the abled person is opened up in such a way that the normative status of the everyday life environment for that person is put into question. As Sobchack stresses, the very act of riding in a car makes life more fully navigable whether one’s mobility is limited or not. Recognizing this dependence on supporting mechanisms thus destabilizes commonly held perceptions of “figure” and “ground” when the meaning of this relationship between person and environment shifts away from that of an autonomous individual who takes the supporting environment for granted to that of an always-fragile individual whose abilities are continually supported by surrounding tools. The aggregate of contingent people and the apparatuses that support them in the wider environment thus constitute “systemic assemblages.” Perhaps the most important aspect of a social assemblage is the dependent connections one has with other people. Jackson thus claims that, “a necessary sphere is one where interdependence is not imagined in compromised terms or where a recognition of heteronomous personhood comes only after grudging acceptance.” Instead, she proposes, “supporting acts that sustain and are sustained by social actors … avow the relational systems on which a conception of freedom rests. It is to make a self from, not despite, contingency” (Ibid. 36).

A connection emerges here between the dependency any person has regardless of ability on the wider social assemblage it constitutes and is constituted by, and the notion that its contingent relationship to the wider environment perhaps drives an illusory desire for self-governance. Jackson’s art criticism takes on political dimensions while raising the point that stubborn Western epistemological assumptions potentially thwart human freedom. The relevance of the move to see the art experience as an assemblage of artist, artwork, environment, and (often participating) art public, on contingent terms, is important here because this particular moment in the development of twentieth century art emergence with concurrent feminist epistemologies. Mid-century participatory artforms that held everyday life in high regard may at first glance appear curious as a context that reflects the seismic political and epistemological recalibration that takes place in the twentieth century west, but as Jackson writes,

It is worth remarking that Alan Kaprow and fellow Happenings and Fluxus artists used the language of ‘assemblage’ to describe their unsettling of figure and ground, object and support, art and life. The perpetual pursuit of autonomy continues to animate a theory of democracy as well as a critical concept of aesthetics, the bounded referents for autonomous personhood and autonomous art become less stable and more permeable in contemporary critical imagining. (Ibid. 35)

Thus the move in art away from gallery objects and toward the collaborative and performative signals the unraveling of “bounded referents for autonomous personhood and autonomous art.” If “contemporary critical imagining” means giving up the hope for a rational, and thus, autonomous individual in favor of a socially constituted (interdependent) self, a self that operates not unlike a social artwork, Jackson wants to emphasize that this move also means that such imagining stands against “the discourses [that] raise autonomous personhood as a self-governing idea against the heteronomously contingent disabled citizen, undocumented migrant, or welfare mother” (Ibid 36).

Crucial to a transformed political and epistemological imaginary then is the recognition made by Nancy Fraser and other feminist critics who, as Jackson explains,

argue that a discourse of dependency simultaneously allows certain citizens to imagine themselves as independent and “self-governing.” The perception of autonomy is once again achieved through a kind of disavowal, a disavowal of the tax breaks, military pensions, public schools, wifely labor, house-keepers, off-shoring, and capitalist alienation that allows certain persons to believe themselves to be unfettered and individually responsible for their private success. (Ibid.)

Thus, the disavowal of systemic support allows the seemingly self-governed person to perceive a sense of autonomy only because they push the supporting mechanisms they rely on into the background of life to the point that these mechanisms become imperceptible. Jackson’s performance studies lens helps foreground that support in recognition of the “staged management” that allows theatrical productions to succeed. For example, actors may occupy the central point in the theatrical production, but the infrastructure that supports those actors is generally perceptible; few would contend that the actor has achieved success in regard to a performance individually. Yet the public perception of the visual arts has been slow to recognize the infrastructure supporting its artists. Contrary to this, it is not uncommon to perceive the success of the visual artist as individually obtained because the distance between the artist, artwork and audience are so pronounced. In theater, there is general consideration of the importance of dramaturges or stagehands; yet these kinds of vital points of view rarely enter into the common conception of the success of the visual art even when curators and dealers play a clear role in the development of the artist. Jackson urges a wider understanding that even the most prominent features of social (art) assemblages have limited abilities and limited points of view contributing to the success of the configuration. This recognition brings out some vital epistemological and political problems that can be worked through when social art assemblages are understood in the context of emergent epistemologies in the context of democratic processes.

Feminist Standpoint Theory, Disability and Social Assemblages

I want to now shift the focus of this discussion of contingent points of view and the constitution of social assemblages by connecting Jackson with Iris Marion Young and Shannon Sullivan – two thinkers with whom she shares common ground. All three address the topic of standpoint theory and its relationship to the perception of disability, yet Young and Sullivan proclaim more explicitly than Jackson that feminist epistemology has to renounce its claims for privileging the standpoints of the marginalized. Bringing such a perspective to the foreground advances Jackson’s claim that purported disability opens up greater recognition of inherent support systems impacting all people, not because Sobchack’s privilege reveals the limits of those who are assigned normative physical or mental status, but because the partiality of one perspective necessarily engages with other standpoints in order to engender a process of mutual social constitution.

Young and Jackson both identify feminist epistemology as a likely source for better understanding social configurations. Young’s perspective comes out of political theory aimed at the inclusion of marginal voices in democratic processes, a view that only partially intersects with Shannon Sullivan’s contemporary feminist pragmatism. Both mak^e a similar claim that feminist standpoint theory provides a logical frame for understanding and engendering more equal social configurations. Both focus attention not only on how these configurations come into existence, but also on the ways in which these social assemblages best operate when the distinction between individual standpoints is understood in relation to the interests of other standpoints and the wider environmental conditions that shape them. Importantly, both Sullivan and Jackson see limitations in the primary argument that has arisen from the standpoint theory originally proposed by such figures including Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, Nancy Hartsock and Patricia Hill Collins, limitations that need attention in order for standpoint theory to better articulate the generative potential of limited viewpoints.

While the possibility of objective knowledge drives the feminist epistemological conversation that brought about an ethos of situated knowledge in western thought in conjunction with second-wave feminism, Young and Sullivan, as should become evident, are less concerned with questions of objectivity than the others. Young provides a good overview of the concerns of standpoint theorists when she notes the tension and potential of “situated knowledge” in the work of the primary contributors for feminist standpoint theory:

Writers such as Donna Haraway, Lorraine Code, Sandra Harding and Ismay Barwell have criticized what Haraway calls a ‘god’s eye’ conception of the process of attaining reliable knowledge, which assumes that there is a standpoint transcending the particularities of history and social position from which the truth can be ascertained. They theorize instead what Haraway calls ‘situated knowledges’, which I interpret as a conception of objectivity as constructed from the partial and situated perspectives of differently positioned social actors. My argument applies to this feminist epistemology to the knowledge and judgment that ideally ought to result from inclusive democratic processes. (Young “Situated” 20-21)

Instead, when they put value on the notion of situated knowledges, they qualify that value on the grounds that political and epistemological concerns should be directed at the better functioning of social groups, the possibility of which depends on a multiplicity of lateral perspectives put into use in the process of forging equitable social associations.

Each takes a pragmatist approach to testing the limits of certain points of view and the truth claims advanced by such positions. As Young puts it, “[a]long the lines of the Deweyan understanding of democracy, the democratic process ideally should be a formal inquiry and the results a kind of knowledge” (Ibid. 21). Young goes on to explain, “individuals have particular knowledge that arises from experience in their social position, and those social positioning also influence the interests and assumptions they bring to inquiry. All positionings are partial with respect to the inquiry” (Ibid. 25). Sullivan’s own vantage point, one that is even more distinctly pragmatist than Young’s, comes out of a phenomenological and epistemological critique of identity as identity is manifested in the transactional body, a view that leads her to contextualize individual standpoints as part of the many “flourishing transactions between organic bodies in the world” (Sullivan 10). This advances Dewey’s transactionalism — the post-epistemological notion that all entities, people included, of a wider environment are mutually entangled and co-constitutive. Normative epistemology would recognize these features of environment as separate entities, but a transactional epistemology see them to shape and define – that is, to co-constitute – each other. Young in a different but complimentary move attends to the relationship between democratic processes as a crucible for the development of positionality. Where Young focuses on the relationship between positionality and the development of thriving and just democratic processes for the purpose of inculcating a more inclusive social body, Sullivan takes this further to say that “[r]ejecting the notion that humans can attain a ‘God’s eye’ point of view does not mean, however, that one must accept judgmental relativism” (Ibid. 10). Where Harding and others locate feminist epistemology on questions of objectivity, Young and Sullivan are less inclined to believe questions of situated objectivity are particularly salient unless they make situated knowledges directly useful to democratic flourishing. They take the rejection of the “God’s eye” view as an opportunity to consider how situated knowledge impacts the way communities are formed, and how they can be made more just when the hope for objective truth outside the individual’s perspective is dropped.

Sullivan and Young thus contend that a step in this process requires the modification of a central assumption of standpoint theory. Where figures such as Harding, Hartsock and Collins promote the notion that marginal standpoints provide epistemological privilege to those marginalized by dominant groups, Young questions the usefulness of this notion when she writes:

By pointing out how the standpoint of those in less privileged positions can reveal otherwise unnoticed bias and partiality I do not mean to suggest, as have some standpoint theorists, that people in less advantaged social positions are ‘epistemologically privileged.’ They too are liable to bias and self-regard in overstating the nature of situations, misunderstanding their causes, or laying blame in the wrong places. (Young “Situated” 27)

Sullivan concurs on this point when she ponders how Harding can claim that, “there is no Archimedean point of absolute infallibility” (Sullivan 137), yet simultaneously stand by the claim that “[u]nlike men, whose view of the social relations of patriarchal society is distorted by their position as ‘master,’ women have a privileged perspective on reality because they are marginalized…thus their perspective can provide the starting point for accounts of knowledge that are undistorted by gender loyalties” (Ibid. 134). For both Young and Sullivan, all points of view come with limitations, and therefore, distortions are pervasive; nobody in particular is free from the potential of blind spots or bias. Therefore, flourishing as a social assemblage requires the lateralization of value placed on points of view. But rather than dismiss this lateralization as relativism, the ethic of care, that is, the desire to be cooperative, drives agents to recognize the limits of their own perspectives and thus enlist useful perspectives from associated (and co-constituted) others.

Putting situatedness in this way draws out the generative dynamics of collapsing the hierarchy of positionality. From her pragmatist perspective, Sullivan puts it in these terms: “[t]ruth can be achieved only through transaction with one’s physical, cultural, political and other environments because there is no self apart from the world in which it exists. Humans are not set apart from an independent reality as detached spectators, but are always already participants in a world that is in part shaped by them.” She goes on to say, from the point of view of the pragmatist conception of truth, “something becomes true when it encourages flourishing…when it promotes…the enlargement of life’s meaning and the growth of experience through enriched transactions with the world” (Ibid. 143). Yet the process of validating truth claims comes with the qualification that “obligates one to examine and update current truths if they no longer serve the interests and needs” (Ibid 145). Doing so, then, requires the participation of associated others who work across their differences.

Difference can be approached with an ethic of cooperation that values thoughtful communication. Along these lines, the process of examining and updating truth claims leads Young to recognize that

Only [by] pooling the situated knowledge of all social positions can positions produce such social knowledge” because “[s]peaking across difference in a context of public accountability often reduces mutual ignorance about one another’s situations, or misunderstandings of one another’s values, intentions and perceptions and gives everyone the enlarged thought necessary to come to more reasonable and fairer solutions to problems. (Young “Situated” 28)

Such accountability – in the form of sharing and processing situated knowledge – thus serves as a form of social recalibration as long as those who lack (political) visibility are given the right to speak, and as long as others are committed to listening. Whether this “gives everyone the enlarged thought necessary” is hard to prove beyond the possibility of engendering inclusion if such values are put into practice because “narrative exchanges give reflective voice to situated experiences and help affinity groupings give an account of their own individual identities in relation to their social positioning and their affinities with others” (Young “Inclusion” 73). Narrative exchange emerges for Young as the primary vehicle for “pooling…situated knowledges” for the purpose of bringing justice to difference (Young “Inclusion” 117).

Returning to Jackson’s interest in disability as a position from which to better understand the way inherent systems of support, Sullivan’s transactional account of social groupings sharpens Jackson’s use of Vivian Sobchack’s account of disability. Jackson writes, “If normative spatial motion disavows the fragile contingency of bodily ability, then citizens need reminders that bodily capacity can be stopped short at any time.” This point is easily illustrated by the kind of confrontation to bodily capacity a broken elevator presents to the mobile person. Discourse on disability offers to defamiliarize the normative environment in order to “expose the formal and systemic contingencies of environments that take certain embodiments for granted” (Jackson 5). In turn, as Sullivan points out, the work of Susan Wendell shows:

that disability is ‘socially constructed,’ by which she means that ‘the biological and social are interactive in creating disability.’ According to Wendell, the biological and social are ‘interactive’ with respect to (dis)ability in two important senses. First, social factors ‘interact’ with bodies to create their health, illness, and levels of functioning. And second, social arrangements can make almost any biological condition that was not a disability into one by making that condition relevant to a social situation, and vice versa. (Sullivan 21)

For Jackson, Sobchack’s observations show why our (social) tools fail to be foregrounded in our experience unless a bodily challenge forces such (social) prostheses into consciousness. As Sobchack writes,

As we go about our various projects in the world, in so far as we have learned to use them, we incorporate our prostheses and tools and unless there’s a function problem or they become of interest ‘in themselves’ they are experienced as subordinate to our focus on our goals and projects; that is they are generally the ground of our intentional movement and acts, not the figure. (Sobchack quoted in Jackson 6)

Sullivan would interpret this point to mean that the figure of the person and the ground of the environment (or tool) should be taken on equal terms. While Jackson and Sobchack perhaps give greater attention to the “grounding” factors, Sullivan is inclined to bring caution to privileging one factor over the other. The point here is that the individual and the environment (including other people), shape each other, and therefore, should be understood laterally. Figure and ground need to be taken on more equal terms.

Jackson aims for a similar understanding when she foregrounds systemic support. As she puts it,

The social world is in fact a large systemic prosthesis for the normative bodies its structures support. If, however, this social prosthesis is subordinate into our focus and goals, then it requires a break or deviation for us to remember that it is there…When everyday objects are not in reach, we register the contingency of the ground that supports our everyday acts of self-figuration. (Jackson 6)

The interruption of a tool’s usefulness serves as the “break” that helps one see this support, which prompts recognition of Wendell’s point that “social arrangements can make almost any biological condition that was not a disability into one” (Wendell qtd. in Sullivan, 21). Young is helpful here in advancing Jackson’s claim for heteronomous systems of support operating across social configurations, a claim that aims to exposes the fallacy of self-governance. She writes, [e]veryone comes to a political conflict with some biases, prejudices, blind spots, or stereotypes. Frequently in situations of political disagreement, one faction assumes they know what it is like for others” (Young, “Inclusion” 77). To restate, the perception of self-governance demands the omission that one’s perspective inherently limits their ability to see another’s standpoint to the point that the individual believes they can fully grasp the perspective of another. For Young, “[t]hrough narrative the outsiders may come to understand why the insiders value what they value and why they have the priorities they have” (Ibid. 75). On Sullivan’s terms, “story” or “narrative” is put in more phenomenological terms as a corporal and environmental transaction in which a false atomized self does not thwart the dependence of one’s point of view on other factors; the self is instead seen as committed to transacting with other points of view in order to overcome epistemological blind spots.

Conclusion

For Jackson, the discourse of ability serves to point out some vital problems with political and aesthetic autonomy, problems that foreground the limitations and opportunities of performance. Ability only becomes dis-ability when capability is constructed in terms of the perception of a generalized normative experience, thus inflating the rhetoric of dependence for those who do not meet normative criteria. Yet the critique of disability also reveals that even the perception of normative experience (the ability to navigate the physical and social world without support), actually requires inherent support structures that can be illuminated when the rhetoric of disability is applied back to purported normative capacities. Tools of everyday living – cars, computers, and associated others – can be made more opaque in regard to the way normative experience depends on such “prostheses.” Thus social practice artworks according to Jackson assume that dependence on the skills of others is necessary to the production’s success. Rather than disregard or designate support as the background labor that silently assists in the production of the traditional autonomous artwork, now the notion of the social prosthetic is foregrounded as inherent to any successful and vibrant social production or configuration.

In this account of art and the politics of dependence, personal success is only possible when others support the individual in ways that allow them to flourish. Mobility, a successful theatrical production, a social practice art project, or a thriving social configuration cannot come about unless the extent of an individual’s limits are enmeshed with other standpoints, which in turn, have their own limits. Standpoint theory, as it is extruded through Jackson’s performance perspective, Young’s politics of inclusion, and Sullivan’s epistemological/phenomenological transactionalism, is made to suggest that the acceptance of the limits of one’s standpoint needs to be “supported” by other standpoints in relation to the “staging” or “background” of social groupings and institutions.

Where these values operate in visual art social practices can be made more explicit is when such practices are put in conversation with the “staged management” of theater and its wider performance genres in order to attend to the “run crews” who make social life possible. Jackson echoes Sullivan and Young’s observations when she eschews the superiority of the performance studies lens in order to recognize its limits, and instead views it as a lateral tool for sharpening the systemic support structures of visual art. She nonetheless puts that performance perspective into narrative transaction with the values and disciplinary concerns of art. By sidelining claims for superior points of view, standpoint theory as Jackson, Sullivan and Young understand it, acknowledges the non-hierarchical nature of all standpoints. Yet as Young and Sullivan attest, such a move should not lead to accusations of a relativistic conception of truth because the transactional and narrative processes strive for parity that can only come about by recognizing the outer edges of a singular standpoint under continual revision. On this view, an ethical commitment to caring for others through cooperative communication aims at democratic exchange.

Collaborative and participatory visual art practices that strive for reordered social reconfigurations are now understood as dynamic assemblages of systemic support that inveigh against atomized accounts of political and aesthetic autonomy. The notion of self-governance as something apart from a process and ethic of social support appears less tenable when it is confronted by the intersecting claims of performance theory, visual art social practices, and the politics and epistemological problems of bodies and their environments. Critical conviviality as a feature of social practices is made sufficiently rigorous, as Jackson sets out to do, because the concept is freed from consensus building and is thus aligned with a more critical transactional process that requires “reflective voice to situated experiences” and a commitment to listening to others without assuming that one can fully grasps one’s own or the standpoints of others.

Long-term conversations grounded in the limits and possibilities of individual, contingent perspectives offer political discourse a direction for imagining the ethos of political and ethical deliberations beyond the “staging” of art – transactions, deliberations, conversations – that can only come about in a culture of acknowledged mutual support. Doing so requires recognition of the ways in which standpoints result in both opportunities and limitations. Recognizing that social action requires the understanding that individuals are able to function as a result of undergirding support systems casts doubt on lingering conceptions of self-governance that more and more appear to rehearse hackneyed ideals of liberalism. The critical perspective of feminist standpoint theory, as it intersects with disability perspectives and feminist pragmatism, give a context for robust social practices in art that point to a generative way to think about broader political life as a form of mutual interdependence.

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Louise Erdrich’s novel Four Souls presents complex and sometimes surprising alliances. Her characters engage in a discourse well beyond that which can be read as a simple criticism of historical practices of allotment and land ownership. Rather than dichotomize good and evil— although elements of the latter loom large—Erdrich emphasizes relationships, in order to challenge perceptions of property, sexuality and colonization. In “Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples,” Andrea Smith argues that “violence does not simply occur within the process of colonialism,” but that “colonialism is itself structured by the logic of sexual violence” (70). Four Souls not only highlights this structural reliance of colonization on sexual violence, but furthermore suggests that decolonization premised on a close attention to “alterity” potentially leads to sexual self-determination. Four Souls leads readers into complex engagement with such alterity through, for instance, its depictions of Nanapush, Fleur, Margaret, Fantan and other characters, who re-inhabit a realm of inter-relationships—not only with other humans but ancestor spirits and the plants/animals/habitats that sustain these relationships. Reading Four Souls in light of Giles Gunn’s The Culture of Criticism and The Criticism of Culture, Michel Foucault’s “Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” and Smith’s “Not an Indian Tradition,” I examine the ways in which Erdrich’s storytelling engages the complexities of self, community, and the continual efforts her characters employ to “practice” the kind of “freedom” Foucault’s ethics demand.

Erdrich’s novel carries the dynamic interplay of history, language, culture, and human relationships such that the work itself creates an alterity that challenges traditional Western dichotomies between self and other, past and present, hero and oppressed. Thus, although Erdrich’s novel concurs with Smith’s assessments of “colonialism” being “structured by the logic of sexual violence,” Four Souls delves into the relationships that continue to be shaped by history and culture, so that the story can emerges from “Under the Ground” (the name of an important character in the novel, the mother of the first character whose name was “Four Souls”) with a resonance that provides a measure of hope, sustained by the potential for decolonization. This decolonization is premised on the polyphony of the novel itself, which is populated by a host of characters, including Fleur Pillager, who says very little but effects change through her actions. Fleur’s actions have been shaped by the ethics of her tribal, familial, and female powers. Erdrich is not creating a heroic or an anti-heroic ontology, but rather a human, and thus flawed model of co-existence. Despite their apparent flaws, each of the novel’s characters and each of its voices hold wisdom and potential for change—for a kind of “becom[ing]” the words of Nanapush describe. Douglas Andrew Barnim draws on this “becom[ing]” and presents an astute inquiry into trauma, its historical legacies, and Erdrich’s complex engagement with “becoming” in relation to “healing.” I depart from Barnim, however, in his suggestion that change is the same as progress. He explains that “Four Souls addresses the healing of the Ojibwe people through a reposition of identity in terms of returning to the land and an embrace of change—i.e. progress” (63). The word “progress” is too reminiscent of the settler-colonial approach toward indigenous peoples to portray the “embrace of change” (63) evident within the novel.  Barnim explains that although “the hybrid identity is, in some cases, questionable as an interpretive lens through which to examine the history of a people that continue to be colonized” (65), he sees this lens as beneficial because it “offers a way of tracing the oscillation that Erdrich’s characters undergo in their search for identity” (65-66).

I concur with Barnim’s assessment that “Erdrich’s characters never possess static identities” and that they challenge readers to remain aware of the potential for healing through an “embrace of change” (63), yet I question his assertion that “they oscillate between cultural extremes” (66), because the idea of “oscillat[ing]” presents a dichotomy, a binary. His attention to Napapush as one who “facilitates the narrative memory of Native trauma” (56) is astute, and his analysis opens with important, dynamic inquiries. However, when Barnim asserts that “Nanapush himself is a hybrid of the seemingly dichotomous cultures” and that Fleur is “a character symbolic of the Ojibwe” (56) these assertions present a fixity and an overgeneralization, which serve to undermine his otherwise useful ideas that focus on healing through culturally-determined means. Neither can one person function as a “symbol” of an entire people, nor can a trickster narrator like Nanpush be accurately fixed as the “hybrid of” binaries. My challenge to the critical lens of “hybridity” within the context of Erdrich’s novel meets a useful rebuttal in the work of Summer Harrison, whose emphasis on hybridity depends upon the trickster identity. She explains that the trickster appears not only among the characters, such as Nanapush, but through the author and the reader, in a relational and dynamic way. Harrison explains that “the reader must hybridize both narrators’ accounts to understand Fleur’s attempt to define her own identity” (58). Such multiple occurrences and intersectional dynamics require the reader to become, as Harrison explains, “a trickster” in her or his own role, as the characters engage in dialogue with one another and with the reader. Barnim and Harrison both present useful inquiries into the dynamic nature of “self” within Erdrich’s novel and has therefore influenced this study in terms of my discussion of self-determination. The term has political as well as social, cultural, and literary importance.

American Indian insistence on self-determination is evident in Erdrich’s novel, which depicts community as a multitude of human relationships, and elaborates on self- and other-sustaining functions of sexual intimacy, love, and marriage. Sexuality itself is not demonized but rendered through wit and humor as a complex set of relationships with self and other that has the power to create what can be “evil” (and is evident in historical contexts) yet also holds the potential for that which is better than good. Sexual relationships literally hold the power for creation, for healing, for a future to exist at all. In his “Ethics of the Concern for the Self,” Michel Foucault maintains that the “game” of power is premised always on “relationships.” He specifies his definition of “games” as “a set of rules by which truth is produced” (297). This is useful in light of understanding Nanapush, one of three narrators who deliver Four Souls to readers. Nanapush cuts through simplistic themes of private property, colonization, and oppression when he says that “we [humans] are dreams, blasts, shadows […so that] this stub of a grain dealer’s pencil that moves across the page of paper is not real, either, and that the truth lies on the other side of even these words” (58). When “the set of rules” created by certain people negates the value of land except for its monetary price, and when those rules also include the commodification of women, the dynamic is no longer a “game” of “truth” finding, in Foucault’s terms. Foucault’s “concern for the self” before the concern “for others,” as a strategy toward ethical behavior, becomes useful in considering the multi-vocal experience of reading Four Souls, which requires paying close attention to relationships.

Erdrich’s narrative approach in Four Souls can be illuminated through Gunn’s discussion of the “polyphonic” (131). As in Gunn’s characterization of humanistic discourse, Four Souls illustrates that the extension of self to social and political spheres is implicit in the attention given to ethos, to the character one develops in order to engage others. Foucault cites Socrates as an example of such a character, who, as “a person who took proper care of himself would […] be able to conduct himself properly in relation to others and for others” (286). In Foucault’s assertion that “care of the self is ethically prior [to care of others] in that the relationship with oneself is ontologically prior” we see the formation of some of the “rules” of a “game” in which “limiting and controlling” one’s power is crucial. We also see a connection between character as a practice/result of ethos (ethics) and the polyphony of characters in Four Souls as they gain wisdom of “self” and of “other.” The novel is premised upon the destruction and losses that resulted from contact, the transmittal of diseases, colonization, and the intended de-humanization of Native people. This includes not only the capture of lands but the intentional, planned, and often successful destruction of indigenous languages and cultural practices.

In the context of colonization, the very opposite dynamic of that which Foucault encourages was at play: rather than “limiting and controlling” power, the extension and advancement of power were the prerogatives. When Smith argues that “sexual violence is not simply a tool of patriarchy, but it is also a tool of colonialism and racism,” she begins her discourse with a challenge to a dichotomous construction, not unlike the wisdom approach Erdrich has employed. Smith cites Susan Brownmiller’s observation that rape “is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (71) in order to problematize its overly simple “nothing more or less” much more than to challenge the question of “intimidation” and “fear.” This simplification renders the statement “inadequate,” according to Kimberle Crenshaw, whose analyses Smith discusses in order to emphasize “racism and classism” and to shed light on colonization as an embodiment of sexual violence. Further underscoring colonialism objectification of women, Smith cites Aime Césaire’s concise, simplified definition, which is so pared down that even the word equals is replaced by the equal sign: “colonization=’thingification’” (74). Correspondingly, in the still colonial or un-decolonized relationships between landscapes, other people, places, history, and culture depicted in Four Souls, that which is named as chattel (thingified) can be owned and thus mined for its value in the market economy. Erdrich’s characters are embodied within the dynamic roles of humans who have been – in the case of Fleur Pillager and other women in the novel—colonized through marriage, and marriage in this context equaled the ownership not only of the woman’s body, but of lands and bodies of water as well.

In nineteenth-century America, real-life counterparts to characters such as John James Mauser in Erdrich’s novel sought to marry Native women order to access land. In depicting these marriages of expediency, Four Souls not only castigates the woman’s loss of her freedom, but the ecological destruction that followed, as thus acquired lands were frequently mined, for example. The families, the tribes, as well as other disenfranchised groups that have historically not had a voice in decisions of land ownership are given voice by Erdrich through characters, including Nanapush, in a polyphonic embodiment of community, culture, and inhabitation. When he asserts, in light of a turn toward what would become industrial agriculture, that “the stub of a grain dealer’s pencil that moves across the page of paper is not real […] and that the truth lies on the other side of even these words” (58), Nanapush problematizes the literal, the written word as he takes a postmodern, polyphonic approach to ethics.

Foucault’s statement that the “Greeks problematized their freedom, and the freedom of the individual, as an ethical problem” has import for a return to “power, command” (286). It underscores that the “care of the self” is always in “complex relationships with others.” This is true for human connections, but as Erdrich points out, “others” include species such as trees and mammals. Such “care” required a diversity of approaches to living on the land rather than a single-minded attention to mining or clear-cut logging. After “settlement,” a combination of hunting, fishing, and horticulture, the lands and waterways were forced to sustain a single plan: farming. To make matters even worse, land was bought and sold with no attention to sustainable practices. In the words of Nanapush:

Land dwindled until there wasn’t enough to call a hunting territory. That was because we were supposed to learn to farm in the chimookomaan [white man’s] way, using toothed machines and clumsy, big horses to pull them. […]

Just as the first of us had failed at growing or herding or plowing the fields, we were told we could sign a piece of paper and get money for our land, but that no one would take the land until we paid the money back. Mortgage, this was called. This piece of banker’s cleverness sounded good to many. I spoke against this trick, but who listened to old Nanapush?  (80 )

To be clear, Erdrich’s character Nanapush is not without his own complexities and human flaws. His sometimes hapless and often humorous actions convey to readers that Erdrich is neither deifying nor putting on a pedestal this single character. Rather, his voice, often not heard even by his own people (as noted above) becomes the voice of the historian, the one who digs, the one who problematizes. Nanapush continues his story of the land, the results of the pressure to farm that emerged full force from the Allotment Agents:

People signed the paper. Got money. Some farmed. Others came home night after night for months full of whiskey and food. Suddenly the foreclosure notice was handed out and the land was barred. It belonged to someone else. Now it appeared our people would turn into a wandering bunch, begging at the back doors of white houses and town buildings. Then laws were passed to outlaw begging and even that was solved. No laws were passed to forbid starvation, though, and so the Anishinaabeg were free to do just that.

Yes, we were becoming a solved problem. That’s what I am saying. Who worries about the dead? They are safe in the ground. (79)

Foucault asserts that “domination caused by an unjustified political system” arises when power relations are hierarchical and thus unequal. It is vital to distinguish between being “the head of household” (283) and being a master (of slaves or of a dominated wife, for example.) Foucault provides a clear direction for a kind of decolonization centered on these distinctions:  the goal is “to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ēthos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible” (298).

The voices in Erdrich’s novel emerge from a variety of sources, including the first person narration delivered by three of the living characters: Nanapush, Polly Elizabeth, and Margaret. Those who speak, however, come to include not only living characters, such as Fleur—through limited dialogue and through her silences, such as her resistance to naming her son any name at all, and her actions, such as literally standing up to the woman who attempts to shame Polly Elizabeth—but also she who is called “Under the Ground,” Fleur’s grandmother.

This Ojibwe woman’s name was “Fanny” until she transformed herself and her name by having “herself buried alive in a birch-bark covering” and staying “connected only to the upper world by a breathing straw” (49), then emerging from that earth with “her power” and her abilities to heal. While she was there, transforming, “old men drummed and the women sang to give her courage, but all that they could see from the soft earth of her grave was the tube of rawhide” (50), the breathing straw. A simpler story would conclude with a “happily ever after” when the transformation was complete. In this context of alterity, however, names have power beyond the simple dichotomies of happy/sad, good/bad. Nanapush explains that when she took the name “Four Souls,” that “name influenced Fleur’s actions and told her what to do” (57). Thus the power of “voice” in Erdrich’s novel looms eloquently large, both above and below the ground. Because “each of us has an original [which is the name no one speaks] living somewhere underneath the shadow of our daily life” (58), so, too, does the character Polly Elizabeth have a “shadow side.” Through the course of the novel, this becomes her most enlightened and “happiest” side. This transformation is shaped by her relationships within the white, Ojibwe, and mixed families she comes to know intimately.

Polly Elizabeth, the white woman who at first embodies such a depth of racism as to seem a caricature, is poignantly changed by inhabiting the home of Fleur. Erdrich will not privilege the Native over the “other” who is white in simplistic dichotomies. Rather, her novel begins to enact a kind of decolonization with polyphonic resonance, so that such limitations are no longer evident, and such boundaries and dichotomies are diminished. When we are first introduced to Polly Elizabeth, she is simply known as Ms. Gheen, the sister-in-law of John James Mauser. She is describing the house Mauser has built “on the most exclusive ridge in the city,” with its “pure white” presence, as “pristine as a cake in the window of a bakery shop.” We are aware of the caricature quality of the white-ness of it all, including even nature/ even the out-of-doors becoming whitewashed with “white deer at the gate, dusted with a sugar powder, paw[ing] delicately” as they “nosed the glittering air” (11). Here caricature builds to cliché, as readers cannot help but see the explicit reference to having her “cake” and eating it too, as even the suggestion of the un-tamed world requires “sugar” coating and a relegated place “at the gate,” but never engaged nor confronted nor connected with directly.

By the time that Fleur becomes the Mistress Mauser, Polly Elizabeth’s attempts to better understand and embody her own sexuality are on their dynamic course, giving the novel another measure of alterity, as it confronts a postmodern engagement of “colonization” as well as a potential for transformation. This is realized through a multitude of characters and a polyphonic, narrative unfolding. For example, Polly Elizabeth’s initial treatment of Fleur is dismissive, as she is “anxious to hire” her so that she has “a woman specifically to launder, to live in the basement and use the soapstone tubs and iron taps to scald and renew the sheets as Fantan [the manservant to the lord of the home] carted them down and up, down and up, and down again” (13). The ironies of this initial set-up of hierarchies run deep, as the very “sweat” which must be “scalded” from the sheets is the bodily fluid of the materially wealthy Mauser, her brother-in-law, who is, we come to find, suffering from what will be diagnosed as “a locomotor ataxia and melancholic neuralgia complicated by a rare male cholorosis, all brought on by a damming of the sperm” (39). The doctor, upon rendering this diagnosis, asks the ostensibly placid wife, thus named “Placide,” where she thinks this ejaculatory material might go. The couple have been practicing what Polly Elizabeth calls “karezza,” which in Placide’s words, “exercises the mutual power of our wills […] and the power of the heart” […] to “collect and act on loving thoughts.” Placide suggests that this allows “a conscious conservation of creative energy,” and insists to the perplexed doctor that “It has had the most exciting effect on my artistic output” (37).

The fact that Polly Elizabeth is listening to her sister explain this (to the physician and her sister’s husband) through a glass propped up against the door that separates them is both comedic and symbolic. Thus, when the interview is completed, with the advice from the doctor that previous treatments had included placing his “posterior against a cold wall” and “immersion of the male member into a basin of warm water,” it is not surprising that Polly Elizabeth was so overcome with bouts of laughter, that “it was at least half an hour before [she] could compose [her] features and calm [her] nerves sufficiently” to emerge from the room from which she eavesdropped. The doctor answers his own question to Placide, as to where this unresolved matter might go, this sperm that has been reserved: “To the brain!” he explains. “To the brain.” Within this chapter, which is titled “Karezza,” Polly Elizabeth’s laughter takes on the dimensions of symbolic meaning and comedic levity. The laughter is the first release we observe from this otherwise tidy and stiff sister-in-law. The novel traces, lightly though poignantly, her coming of age in sexual terms. This reaches its conclusion with Polly Elizabeth’s love for Fantan, but not before the many-leveled embodiments of her racism, her “white cake” of having and eating too, and her disgust at seeing “the savage woman I hired to scrub clothes” become dear to her heart are dynamic engagements with history and relationships Erdrich presents in the novel.

When Polly Elizabeth sees Fleur “bent over brother-in-law […] like some kind of bird,” she calls her “[h]awk-winged and territorial,” and describes “her brown skirt spread” open, with all its sexual connotations (19). There is depth and irony, however, in this act, as Fleur is securing the safety of Mauser, is nursing not seducing him. The scene is further complicated by the image of Fleur and Fantan together. With the help of Fantan, who “kneeling” next to Mauser’s body that has just survived a seizure, Fleur is tending to this man’s needs. What Polly Elizabeth does not know is that Fleur intends to nurse him back to health only so that she can kill him. Nanapush tells us: “She wanted the man healthy so that she could destroy him fresh.” However, Polly Elizabeth is not privy to Nanapush, his wisdom and his hapless complexities. She sees only the intimacies, first between her brother-in-law and a Native servant, then between Fantan and Fleur, as they tend to the limp body of the master of the house, “the heavy and relaxed form between them” (19). This closeness is only an outward reminder of what they share in the hidden chambers of their bodies, the Native blood. Such closeness between them is, at this moment, suggested in the word “form” but disappears just as quickly. Most central to this scene is the literal form of a man who is both “master” and fool, according to the “game” (Foucault) of power play that Erdrich’s novel masters in its polyphonic (Gunn) complexities. Polly Elizabeth concludes that the “words form against the inside of my skull [and although] I can see them [,][t]hey make no sense and yet compel me with their vehemence” (19). Not until Polly Elizabeth “forgets the borders” of her own body, through loving Fleur’s half-Native child, in deeply compassionate care-giving instincts, and loving Fleur, as a sister, a dearest of friends, does she begin to make “sense” of the place she inhabits, in her body, and in place, on the lands of the Anishinaabeg (the Ojibwe) people she so clearly attempted to disdain.

The complexities of land and human life are so deeply ingrained in the first chapters of Four Souls that throughout the novel the reader cannot separate Mauser’s estate from the mining it necessitated. This is not the toxic mining that Winona LaDuke addresses in her research of “uranium production […] 100 percent” of which takes place on or near Indian land (1993; qtd in Smith 81). Nor is this a reference to the “650 nuclear explosions on Western Shoshone land at the Nevada test site” from which “[f]ifty percent of these underground tests have leaked radiation into the atmosphere” (Taliman, 1991; qtd in Smith 81). Still, Erdrich is well aware that Native peoples are considered “the expendable ones” and are therefore “situated to suffer the brunt of environmental destruction so that colonizers can continue to be in denial about the fact that they will also eventually be affected” in what Cesaire notes as “the boomerang effect of colonization” (qtd in Smith 81). The architecture of Mauser’s estate required that the “soundest of the wood [be] processed right at the edge of the city” and the “best brownstone came from an island called Gichi gami” (5). Nanapush describes a time when “the ground of the island was covered with mammoth basswood that scented the air over the lake, for miles out, with a swimming fragrance of such supernal sweet innocence that those first priests who came to steal Ojibwe souls, penetrating deeper into the heart of the world, cried out not knowing whether God or the devil tempted them” (5). When Mauser’s house was built, “there was more than enough brownstone quarried, cut, hand-finished, shipped, and hauled uphill, for the construction” [and after all] “it proved easy and profitable to deal with the Indian agent Tatro who won a personal commission for discovering that due to a recent government decision the land upon which [the best] trees grew was tax forfeit from one Indian, just a woman—she could go elsewhere” and “there was no problem about moving the lumber crews in” (6). Not only was there wood to be had, despite the fact that by “now the island [Gichi gami] was stripped of trees”; there was slate for the roof shingles, and the “chimneys were constructed of a type of brick requiring the addition of blood, and so, baked in the vicinity of a slaughterhouse, they would exude when there was a fire lights a scorched, physical odor” (7). The descriptions of the necessity of “mining” for the adornments of the house at first seem to reach their apex with this description from Nanapush: “the Moorish-inspired turned railings” required iron that was “mined on the Mesabi Range by Norwegians and Sammi so gut-shot with hunger they didn’t care if they were trespassing on anybody’s hunting ground or not and just kept on digging deeper, deeper into the earth” (7). However, there is more, much more to raise the concern of those interested in a more socially-just wisdom-inquiry in the humanities. These include the sound of “women” as they “coughed in basements of a fabric warehouse” and the gunning down of “more than a hundred sandhill cranes” (7). Such a multiplicity of descriptions serves to describe the momentum of colonization, with its violent and often literally or symbolically sexual references from mining to clearcut logging to inhabitation of a home on the very land that was the “same ground” where “[d]uring a bright thaw in the moon of little spirit, an Ojibwe woman gave birth” (4) to a child. This occasion of his birth was not so surprising, for this was “high ground” that had been “a favorite spot for making camp in those original years before settlement” (4).

Although the descriptions of the mining seem most poignant in Nanapush’s assessment of the necessities of such a manor, providing the most evidence for this kind of sexual colonization Smith contends, there is something more haunting to me as a reader, and that is the relationship between Mauser, his wife Placide, and the lynx he “killed near the building site” (7). For in that moment, it is not so much that the colonizer set the “one claw […] in gold and hung [it] off the watch fob” that dangled from his waistcoat; nor is it the fact that he “presented his wife with a thick spotted muff made to the mold of her tender hands” with the fur of the feline. The embodiment of sexual violence against Natives was most fully realized in Placide’s calling it “ever after as ‘our first housecat,’” for in this vocalization the conflation of the wild and domesticated, the killing for pleasure and adornment rather than for protection and nourishment is presented. The act of hunting becomes counter to need, becomes a way for Mauser to attempt to seduce that which he already owns. A bizarre turning of the tables occurs when we are told that she “meowed at him a little,” which we first experience as flirtation, as her own brief attempt at seduction, but then we are told that “she was much too well brought up to do more than that and stiffened harder than the iron banisters when she was touched” (7). This is where we first learn of her aversion to Mauser, which we may read as her being frigid, for we are told that “to make love to her was for young Mr. Mauser like touching the frozen body of a window mannequin” but later realize is particular to this coupling, to her marriage to Mauser. For she was drawn to her art teacher, we learn from Polly Elizabeth, and was “practicing karezza” with him while still married to her husband. Thus the wife of Mauser does seem to hold some mastery over her husband, whom we at first assume is the colonizer who embodies fully the violence upon which his house was erected. This notion is problematized by not only the power that Fleur holds over him but Placide, as well, in their complex marital arrangement.

The question of who is who, as well as which boundaries hold and which dissolve become crucial to the dynamic interplay of the games of poignant “truths” (in Foucault’s sense of power). Epiphanies are realized through the humor that flows through Erdrich’s novel like an un-dammable river of history, tragedy, and possibility. So much seems to hinge on Fleur, who strategically orchestrates the killing of Mauser. Through a mixture of medicine and domestic chores, alliances and the trust built from those relationships, Fleur sets about her task of strengthening Mauser so that she can kill him “fresh,” and thus make him suffer. When she places the knife against his neck and says “I have come here to kill you,” it is impossible to say who is more surprised at his response, the reader or Fleur herself. “What took you so long?” Mauser asks, and the two begin to converse in Ojibwe. She is further surprised when he says, in answer to her question “Who am I?”, “You’re a relative of one of the women I wronged” (44). Outraged, she replies “One of them? Awanen? I am the woman whose land you stole.” His recognition is internal, confused, shedding light on the history we guessed but are now given from inside his confusion:

Mauser was silent. He’d taken the land of so many it was impossible that he should remember just who they were. His mind was reeling back through titles and false transfers and quitclaim deeds. He thought he’d had her figured. Who could she be? (44)

Among the most compelling elements of Erdrich’s work is that when the reader thinks we have someone “figured,” that imagined construction is undone, problematized by the complexities of a shared history, one in which there is potential for healing, even after such violence.

This is not a simple story nor is the healing going to be a simple process. The novel seems at first premised upon Fleur as hero. Will she kill Mauser now? Will she kill him later? Will that even be the central action of the story? Not until Margaret, the wife of Nanapush, creates the Medicine Dress and invites Fleur to wear it do we see that, just as the dress—something so vitally important—must “begin where all things begin—with the death of something else” (176), so too must Fleur suffer in order to be transformed. Thus, the hero of the story is not a single person, not necessarily Fleur, although she vividly becomes an “agent” of change in the most evidently postmodern sense of understanding agency. The story needs all its characters for “The Healing” (of the final chapter’s title) to occur. Fleur’s transformation, her “healing,” requires that she is “driven past her limit” by the “tiny spirits” Margaret predicts will drive her. Yet Margaret must sew the dress, must experience the accidental “snaring” by her love, Nanapush. She must live the story of her life and participate in the story of Fleur’s life, the life of her un-named boy child, and so on, like the many drops of rainwater in the sacred lake, or the many stitches required to complete the medicine dress, which began with the snaring that almost killed Margaret and then continued with the bones of the “cow moose” that her sons had to kill “without the use of any white man’s weapons” (176). Fleur will need to meet Margaret “halfway there,” in order to receive the medicine of the stitches; only through “let[ing] the dress kill [her]” can she “[l]et the dress save [her]” so that she can “walk the middle way” (206) to “change and become” (210).

Smith’s assessment that “[w]omen of color do not just face quantitatively more issues when they suffer violence (that is, media attention, language, barriers, lack of support in the judicial system, etc) but their experience is qualitatively different from that of white women” (71) is relevant in the novel. When Smith describes her work as a crisis counselor, and details the experience that “every Native survivor I have ever counseled said to me at one point, ‘I wish I was no longer Indian’” (Native American…116 ), I am moved to suggest that Erdrich is presenting a counterpoint to that dynamic in a precise way. She is doing so, if not through her own cognizance of such “experience,” then simply because a story as good as Erdrich’s will find itself accessing the “truths” that Foucault explains as the result of the “game” of ethics. The reason, Smith argues, that one might no longer “wish [to be] Indian” is because of the driving paradigm of institutionalized racism, that Native people are “dirty”; thus they are considered sexually violable and ‘rapable’ […and] in patriarchal thinking, only a body that is “pure” can be violated” (73). For Erdrich, The Medicine Dress represents another side of women, embodied in the “sewing” that begets a transformative healing. The wife of Nanapush, Margaret Kashpaw, tells us that “to sew is to pray” as “[w]e women turn things inside out and set things right.” Margaret, in creating the medicine dress, teaches us that “[w]e salvage what we can of human garments […]. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow… Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears.” Not only do the Ojibwe women in the novel embrace their Indian-ness, so too does Polly Elizabeth become her truest self when she stops creating borders between herself and other women. It is only after she begins to love Fleur, and Fleur’s son, that she is able to express the following:

These were the happiest and most requited times of my existence. […] Sometimes I gazed so long into the baby’s face that I forgot my own face. Or I touched the shining skin and forgot my own borders, melted skin through skin. As I made my way home each night, I had to remind myself that he was birthed of Fleur, belonged to Mauser, that I was nothing and no relation. Yet I had given away my own heart, and once that’s done there is no easy way to take it back.  (69)

One of the most curious words in this passage is “requited,” because so often we hear this dynamic only in the negative, only as “un.” Polly Elizabeth not only expresses her lack of “borders” in words; her actions embody the ironies of colonization and the history of racism in the United States. In the eighteenth century, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur described the surprising dynamic that “[t]housands of Europeans [have become] Indians, and we have not example of even one of these Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!” (qtd in Smith 77). Smith asserts that the fact that “a number of white people chose to live among Indian people while virtually no Indians chose voluntarily to live among the colonists” had much to do with the “egalitarian nature [of Indian life] posing a threat to the ability of white men to continue their ownership of white women because they belie patriarchy’s defense of itself as ‘normal’” (77).

Smith’s suggestion that all Natives share “egalitarian” societal practices is a generalization. However, oft-cited and more accurately generalize-able, is that violence against women is not found in the records of Indian/Native American life and culture. Smith cites William Apess (Pequot) who “once stated in the 1800s: ‘Where in the records of Indian barbarity, can we point to a violated female?’” (77) She goes on to cite Brigadier General James Clinton of the continental Army, who “said to his soldiers as they were sent off to destroy the Iroquois Nation in 1779: ‘Bad as the savages are, they never violate the chastity of any women, their prisoners’” (77). Smith concludes this section of her essay with the assertion that the “demonization of Native women, then, is part of white men’s desires to maintain control over white women” (78). This a potent statement in the context of history and sheds light on the Four Souls (and more) in Erdrich’s fiction. Polly Elizabeth concludes her chapter “The Fortune” with these words:

Everything that happened since I answered the door to Fleur was leading up to this. Warm sun falls on us through diamonds of lead glass as we work. If I am a fool, I am proud to be one. I have married one servant and declared another my sister. My husband and I do not speak in flows of words, but we connect by the heartstrings and by laughter and by signs. I am that rare thing thought only to exist in death. I am a happy woman. (161)

She is engaging in the “work” of living in community, a habitat of human to human relationships as well as deep and significant relationships with the land and the bodies of water that sustain us.

Fleur, too, will be transformed within the pages of this novel, but not as a result of what she thought was the best path: revenge. Rather, the Medicine Dress, the sewn fragments, will assist her in a journey that will purge her from the alcohol that has also colonized her body, and return her to the influence of the spirits of her ancestors, that will heal her. She needs, however, to become “brave enough to experience fear” and at that time “to ask the dress for its name and plead for it to help [her]” (206). As much as we might admire Fleur for the heroics she seeks to employ, Margaret teaches us that she also must carry humility: “If you ask humbly enough, the dress will tell you, and if you have the strength to accept the name, then the dress will give its name to your spirit” (207).  The act of taking a false name was a big problem for Fleur; it is arguably what gets her into so much trouble. When Margaret explains, “Your name will live inside of you,” we realize that this is not exactly the opposite of colonization, but a kind of re-inhabitation of self and place and culture. When she is told, “Your name will help you heal. Your name will tell you how long to live and when to give up life,” we understand that the name, which will arrive with the assistance of Medicine Dress must be a name that can sustain the heroics and the humility alike, so that a kind of “self-determination” is created, but not without the voices of the elders as support. Pollination and fertilization can be welcomed, as can work, and sustained community, and spirit, but as is evident in Four Souls, self-determination is only possible within the support of community. The community extends beyond the bounds of human to human ties, so that Margaret’s words to Fleur, “For you have been lonely so long, you nameless one, you spirit, and it will comfort you to finally be recognized here upon this earth” (207), remind us that being recognized requires a “concern for self” and for “others.” In Erdrich’s novel, we find ourselves engaging in change, in an always-dynamic “game” of finding the truths that sustain such rich relationships of becoming.

An article written in 1899, and cited in Smith, describes the “women of the Iroquois [as having] a public and influential position. They had a council of their own…. which had the initiative in the discussion […] an orator of their own sex to present and speak for them…. Sometimes female chiefs (73). Smith investigates “how a politics of intersectionality might fundamentally shift how we analyze sexual/domestic violence” and Erdrich’s novel embraces such intersectionality to engage the relationships of the past, the present, and the future of Ojibwe/white truths and their consequences. Our humanities inquiry benefits, therefore, from an approach wherein “alterity” rather than a simple idea of “solidarity” is privileged.

Gunn outlines some typical dynamics that push humanities into the “far edges of the academic curriculum” (116) and he critiques them. Erdrich’s Four Souls provides an excellent example of literature that holds the potential for Gunn’s emphasis on alterity, in the dynamic engagement of polyphony. When Gunn returns to the humanities as “a kind of subject matter or body of material […] scientific as well as philosophic, social as well as artistic, anthropological as well as religious” (126), it is easy to see how Erdrich’s novel fits so well into his goals for humanities discourse. In her complex, deeply engaging narrative a “given civilization has conducted its own self-scrutiny” (Gunn 126), while also scrutinizing the colonial powers that arguably raped not only the women, the land, but the history. Four Souls provides an engaging, fascinating narrative within which humanities scholars and classroom teachers alike can encounter the questions not only of colonization, sexuality, and violence but of discovering the self and others as poignantly tied to the bodies that nourish us (lakes and rivers for example) and those we inhabit. In the final words of the novel, Nanapush explains that the Ojibwe can “change and become” (210). Erdrich’s novel engages all of us in a process of becoming that is polyphonic, wisdom-based, and more ethically and socially just.

Works Cited

Barnim, Douglas Andrew. “‘Even our bones nourish change’: Trauma, Recovery, and Hybridity in Tracks and Four Souls.” Native Studies Review 19.1 (2010).

Erdrich, Louise. Four Souls. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004.

Foucault, Michel. “The Ethics of Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom.”  In Paul Rabinow, ed. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. Vol.1 New York:  The New Press, 1997. 281-302.

Gunn, Giles. The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture. New York & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.

Harrison, Summer. “The Politics of Metafiction in Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 23.1 (2011):  38-69.

Smith, Andrea. “Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples.” Hypatia 18.2 (2003): 70. Academic Search Alumni Edition. Web. 1 May 2012.

—. “Native American Feminism, Sovereignty, and Social Change.” Feminist Studies 31.1 (2005): 116-132. Academic Search Premier. Web. 1 May 2012.

Introduction

Using a highly apropos line from the film Becket, I will preface this work by stating that these are only the “clumsy musings of a spiritual gatecrasher.” Understanding nineteenth century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s stages of existence is not an easy task when examined only through his writings. Thus it can be very pedagogically useful to apply the Kierkegaard’s stages to literature to illustrate the nuances. In this essay, I will demonstrate this didactic point through a reading of Jean Anouilh’s play Becket (1959) that serves this educative task particularly well.

Kierkegaard and the Dialectics of Existence

Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, is acknowledged by many to be one of the most influential thinkers of the modern era. Born on May 5, 1813, Kierkegaard was a native of Copenhagen, where he spent most of his life. Kierkegaard’s father was a wealthy merchant of the Old World city, which provided Kierkegaard economic independence for his entire life. He never married and almost never held any sort of job. Because of this independence, Kierkegaard was able to write extensively, although most of his books were published in small quantities of 500 or less. As such, his writing was not widely known outside of Denmark or Scandinavia prior to his death in 1855 at age 42. Some of his most notable works are Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Sickness unto Death, and The Concept of Anxiety. Later, at the start of the 20th century, Kierkegaard’s writings began to increase in popularity with European intellectuals. By the mid-20th century, his influence had spread to include the entire English-speaking world. By the end of the century, his works were translated into all the major languages of the world, making his impact even more pronounced. (Evans, 2009) Enrollment of 60,000 plus learners during the period of 2013 to 2016 in the Kierkegaard Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, on Coursera, “Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity” by the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre only punctuate this impact.

Continued interest in Kierkegaard’s writing is easily understood when looking at the pages of his immense authorship that overflow with both moral and religious insights. For Kierkegaard, existence meant facing and responding to fundamental truths about the human condition. Kierkegaard’s writings explore such questions as: What does it mean to be human? How can I be true to myself or to another person?  How should I use my freedom? How do I live a good life? How do I discover my life’s vocation? How should I respond to suffering? These dialectics of existence can provide a valuable contribution to discourses about life and education.

My fascination with Kierkegaard is not longstanding, especially if considered in relation to the community in which I have become deeply involved. I was aware of Kierkegaard through my study of Western history and thought. But it was only during the first year of my doctorate program that my interest was brought to bear on the Dane. And it is from a unique source that I came across a reference to the Lutheran Kierkegaard. The reference was by the Roman Catholic Pope Benedict XVI in his significant theological work, Introduction to Christianity.  Ratzinger recounts the story of Kierkegaard’s clown, which I cite from the Dane’s own work, Either/Or:

In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed – amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke. (Kierkegaard 30)

For me, Kierkegaard’s effort at indirect communication through this story was amusing and poignant; I was hooked. I explored the background and writings of Kierkegaard, discovering after some preliminary reading a writer wrestling with God, humanity, and himself and determining his relevance to modern life. In addition, I found that his writings defied any academic compartmentalization. Kierkegaard studies involve scholars from a variety of fields including philosophy, theology, ethics, sociology and psychology. In Kierkegaard studies, there appeared to be many disciplinary border crossings, allowing me to think that the interdisciplinary perspective that I was obtaining with my doctorate would be applicable. So I continued through my doctoral program while chipping away at the many sources of information on Kierkegaard and developing my ideas of bringing the relevance of Kierkegaard to education with several summer fellowships to the Kierkegaard Library and a culminating doctoral dissertation.

Thomas Becket and Church and State Politics

Thomas Becket (1118-1170), Archbishop of Canterbury, once described himself as “a proud, vain man, a feeder of birds and a follower of hound.” (Burns 606). Once a friend and advisor to King Henry II, Becket opposed Henry’s legal reforms in relation to the Church. He thought that no member of the clergy should be subject to the laws of England and vowed to oppose King Henry’s Constitution of Clarendon as long as he lived. His stand represents one of the classic confrontations between Church and state in politics.

Becket rose from very humble beginnings to end up challenging a king. He was born in London and studied at Paris under a noted teacher, Robert of Melun. He then entered the service of the English monarchy, working with the English sheriffs as a clerk. In 1141, he became a member of the household of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury. Becket made a name for himself as a man with a considerable future. As a result, he was sent to study law at Bologna and Auxerre and in 1154 he was appointed archdeacon of Canterbury. As a rising young star in English politics, Becket attracted the attention of King Henry II and they became fast friends. Both had similar tastes and interests; both had a love of hunting, women and luxury. Eventually, Henry gave Becket the position of Chancellor of England. Becket wielded vast power in English government and with his gift of administration, he ruthlessly enforced Henry’s political will. As Chancellor of England, Becket reduced the opposition of barons and centralized royal power, often to the detriment of the Church. Since the power of the Church was always a problem for the king, it seemed logical for Henry to appoint his friend and confidante to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury with the death of Theobald in 1161. Becket was reluctant to take the office, but did after Henry’s prompting in 1162.

Becket soon clashed with King Henry II on a number of issues. He excommunicated a baron, one of Henry’s loyal vassals; opposed a tax proposal; and fought against the Constitutions of Clarendon. Becket also rebuffed Henry’s claim that clerics who committed crimes should be tried in secular courts. Henry responded with some harsh measures of his own against his former friend. He had Becket condemned by a council of English bishops loyal to the king. As a result of the condemnation, Becket fled the country and came under the protection of King Louis VII of France. He remained in exile from 1164 to 1170. During this period, Becket appealed his case to Pope Alexander III, while Henry ran the Church of England through the bishop of York, who was loyal to the king. In 1170, Henry and Becket were reconciled. Becket returned to England in November of that year. The people of England, who saw Becket as a hero, lined the roads to greet him as he made his way to the cathedral in Canterbury.

But the reconciliation did not last. By December, the final break between Henry and Becket occurred. Becket refused to absolve any of the English bishops who supported Henry during his exile unless they took an oath of obedience to the pope. Henry, upset over the public displays of support for Thomas, greeted the news with rage and fury. In the end, Henry, angry and drunk, supposedly referring to Becket, asked some of his knights, “Is there no one to rid me of this troublesome priest?” Four of those knights took Henry’s words to heart as a command and murdered Becket as he prayed in the cathedral at Canterbury. Becket’s last words, reported by one eyewitness, were, “Willingly, I die for the name of Jesus and in defense of the Church” (Attwater and John 342).

The death of Becket was universally condemned. Miracles were reported at Canterbury shortly after his death. Soon pilgrims began appearing at Canterbury, making it into one of the most popular holy sites during the Middle Ages. Becket received sainthood quickly from Pope Alexander III in 1173. Henry was blamed for the popular Becket’s murder and performed penance for his sin, which included being flogged naked by monks. The king also agreed to recognize papal authority in Church law and to exempt clergy from punishment in the civil courts. But this did not end England’s conflict between church and state; later another Chancellor of England, Thomas More, would meet a similar fate.

There has been some controversy about Becket’s character, with ambitious and imperious most frequently used as descriptors. But his final defense of the Church has resonated through the centuries and attracted dramatists from Tennyson’s Becket through T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, Anouilh’s play Becket or The Honor of God, which was later adapted into the 1964 film starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole, to the musical drama Becket in 1970. Anouilh’s play has been reproduced several times on the stage with continuing success into the 21st century.

The Stages of Existence in Kierkegaard

In Kierkegaard’s writings, including Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and Stages on Life’s Way, he sketches humans as living in one or more of three different spheres of existence. Kierkegaard refers to these spheres in a couple of ways, including ‘the stages of life’s way’ and ‘spheres of existence’. With the importance of these themes to the entirety of his work, Kierkegaard articulates the spheres more clearly in his later writing, Stages on Life’s Way. In Stages, Kierkegaard reduces these to three basic terms: aesthetic, ethical, and religious (Kierkegaard 476). Each stage of existence corresponds with a particular understanding of the world, which includes motivations, values, ideals, and behavior. Through the stages, some humans will express a particular sphere in a less developed way, while others are more pronounced in their expression of each stage. The stages are not automatic but require conscious choice through subjective understanding of the self in relation to the world, in part prompted at times by despair at the inadequacies of the current stage. Yet these different stages should not be viewed as self-contained, in which one spends their entire life. Rather, humans can move between stages as they experience and develop in life. Understanding Kierkegaard’s stages of existence is not an easy task when examined only through his writings. In part, this is because Kierkegaard is less than systematic with the topic. So it can be pedagogically useful to apply the stages to literature to illustrate. This is an area that can be then connected readily to Thomas Becket. Reading Jean Anouilh’s play Becket through the lens of Kierkegaard’s stages provides an excellent demonstrative text to illustrate the stages. Clearly, it is not that a reading of Kierkegaard directly inspired the play Becket or that we have some historical knowledge of Becket’s understanding of his self. But sketching these Kierkegaardian stages in relation to the play can bring more meaning to the choices that Becket makes in text. And although the play is not entirely historical, the exercise provides points to consider, not only in Becket’s historical biography but in our own biographies.

The Aesthetic Stage in Becket

For Kierkegaard, the “aesthetic” stage, as detailed in part 2 of Either/Or, is one that is focused on the immediate and pleasurable life of the senses (Kierkegaard, 178). It is comparable in modern psychology to Lawrence Kohlberg’s pre-conventional stage of morality (Noddings, 169). The general result of this focus is a person who is carefree and indifferent. This state is also subject to the charge of amorality since it is not subject to any ethical considerations except by chance. The ambiguity that accompanies this stage leads to a selfishness mired in indifference to right actions and an inclination to deceive oneself and others. And according to Kierkegaard, the lack of personal resolution, commitment and temporality of life found at this stage ends in despair.

In the play, the aesthetic stage is exhibited as Becket details the way in which his father was able to do so well in Norman England despite being a conquered Saxon:

BECKET: My parents were able to keep their lands by agreeing to “collaborate,” as they say, with the King your father. They sent me to France as a boy to acquire a good French accent.

BECKET: He managed, by collaborating, to amass a considerable fortune. As he was also a man of rigid principles, I imagine he contrived to do it in accordance with his conscience. That’s a little piece of sleight of hand that men of principle are very skillful at in troubled times. (Anouilh 5-6)

The conversation then turns to Becket and his view of collaboration, and Becket discloses his aesthetic tastes, detailing his love of luxury and comfort. He even suggests that the defense of his sister was only a matter of convenience, rather than some ethical or moral code.

KING: And you?

BECKET: I, my Lord?

KING: The sleight of hand, were you adept at it too?

BECKET: Mine was a different problem. I was a frivolous man, you’ll agree? In fact, it never came up at all. I adore hunting and only the Normans…hunt. I adore luxury and luxury was Norman. I adore life and the Saxons’ only birthright was slaughter. I’ll add that I adore honor.

KING: And was honor reconciled with collaboration too?

BECKET: I had the right to draw my sword against the first Norman nobleman who tried to lay hands on my sister…..I killed him in single combat. It’s a detail, but it has its points.

KING: You could have always slit his throat and fled into the forest, as so many did.

BECKET: That would have been uncomfortable, and not a lot of use….My Lord, did I tell you? My new gold dishes have arrived from Florence. Will my Liege do me the honor of christening them with me at my house? (Anouilh 6)

Becket even uses luxury and comfort to end the dialogue of more self-revelatory statements. Later, in a scene after a battle between the invading Norman English and the French, King Henry II inquires about and speculates on Becket’s internal motivations and Becket provides more indications of his location within Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage of existence:

BECKET: My prince, shall we get down to work? We haven’t dealt with yesterday’s dispatches.

KING: Yesterday we were fighting! We can’t do everything.

BECKET: That was a holiday! We’ll have to work twice as hard today.

KING: Does it amuse you – working for the good of my people? Do you mean to say you love all of those folks? To begin with they’re too numerous. One can’t love them, one doesn’t know them. Anyway, you’re lying; you don’t love anything or anybody.

BECKET: There’s one thing I do love, my prince, and that I am sure of. Doing what I have to do and doing it well.

KING: Always the es-es. . . . .What’s your word again? I’ve forgotten it.

BECKET: Esthetics?

KING: Esthetics! Always the esthetic side.

BECKET: Yes, my prince. (Anouilh 44)

The Ethical Stage in Becket

For Kierkegaard, the next stage of existence is the “ethical” stage. This stage is reached after the aesthetic stage brings despair through continual empty choices with which to please the self without gaining the selfhood. The individual at this stage is committed to society and the state, recognizing the benefits of maintaining the social order through positive interpersonal relations, ethics and law. It is most comparable in modern psychology to Kohlberg’s conventional stage of morality. This stage is not without danger since the social order can sometimes work counter to the interests of the individual, leaving one who has championed the social order “out to dry.”

There are several key moments in the play in which Becket demonstrates his strong commitment to the state of England and consequently the ethical stage of existence. The first comes very promptly after Henry II appoints Becket the Chancellor of England in front of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

KING: I have decided to revive the office of Chancellor of England, keeper of the Triple Lion Seal, and to entrust it to my loyal servant and subject Thomas Becket. (Anouilh 7)

There are some brief very appreciative remarks to the king from Becket, interrupted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who also expresses his congratulations to Becket, who used to be a deacon in his Church.

KING: Etc., etc…Thank you, Archbishop! I knew this nomination would please you. But don’t rely too much on Becket to play your game. He is my man. (Anouilh 9)

After a contentious dialogue between Henry II, Becket and the Archbishop of Canterbury over taxes owed to England by the Church for an upcoming war with France, Becket abruptly ends the conversation with an authoritarian gesture demonstrating his newfound power.

BECKET: I think, your Highness, that it is pointless to pursue a discussion in which neither speaker is listening to the other. The law and custom of the land give us the means of coercion. We will use them.

BISHOP FOLLIET: Would you dare…to plunge a dagger in the bosom of Mother Church?

BECKET: My Lord and King has given me his Seal with the Three Lions to guard. My mother is England now. (Anouilh 13)

Becket continues to demonstrate his loyalty to England and hence the ethical stage later in the play, when he discusses with Henry II some troublesome news concerning the rising power of the Church in England while the monarch is at war in France.

KING: Pay attention. Now is your chance to educate yourself. The gentleman is saying some very profound things!

BECKET: Suppose you educate us instead. When you’re married – if you do marry despite the holes in your virtue – which would you prefer, to be mistress in your own house or to have your village priest laying down the law there?

KING: Talk sense, Becket! Priests are always intriguing. I know that. But I also know that I can crush them any time I like.

BECKET: Talk sense, Sire. If you don’t do the crushing now, in five years’ time there will be two Kings in England, the Archbishop of Canterbury and you. And in ten years’ time there will be only one.

KING: And it won’t be me?

BECKET: I rather fear not.

KING: What will God say to it all, though? After all, they’re His Bishops!

BECKET: We aren’t children. You know one can always come to some arrangement with God, on this earth. (Anouilh 46)

The Religious Stage in Becket

Yet as play develops, Becket moves into Kierkegaard’s religious stage, in which the individual’s love is centered on an absolute relationship with God. This stage is initially thrust upon him, as King Henry II is able to maneuver Becket’s appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury after the death of the former archbishop. Becket is visibly fearful of this appointment but without knowing the reason. There is a sense that Becket understands the fullness of such an absolute commitment to God if he becomes Archbishop. But as with much of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, there are some complexities within the religious sphere.

Kierkegaard’s religious state is divided into two parts. The first is religious A, which can be present in any culture, Christian or otherwise. In this stage, the individual is aware of the divine and strives to fulfill its promptings faithfully. It can be considered an easier state of religiousness, as Becket himself attests through his initial experiences centering on the absolute of God through the giving to the poor as Archbishop:

BECKET: There are no invitations. The great doors will be thrown open and you will go out into the street and tell the poor they are dining with me tonight.

1ST SERVANT: Very good, my Lord.

BECKET: I want the service to be impeccable. The dishes presented to each guest first, with full ceremony, just as for princes. I must say it was all very pretty stuff. A prick of vanity! The mark of an upstart. A truly saintly man would never have done the whole thing in one day. Nobody will ever believe it’s genuine. I hope You haven’t inspired me with these holy resolutions in order to make me look ridiculous, Lord. It’s all so new to me. I’m setting about it a little clumsily perhaps. And you’re far too sumptuous too. Precious stones around your bleeding Body…I shall give you to some poor village church. It’s like leaving for a holiday. Forgive me, Lord but I never enjoyed myself so much in my whole life. I don’t believe You are a sad God. The joy I feel in shedding all my riches must be part of Your divine intentions. There. Farewell, Becket. I wish there had been something I had regretted parting with, so I could offer it to You. Lord, are You not tempting me? It all seems far too easy. (Anouilh 63-4)

But the euphoric religious A can eventually give way to Kierkegaard’s religious B. The core of Christ’s message to love your neighbor and die to the world characterizes this uniquely Christian stage.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up the cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What profit would there be to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life?” (Matt. 16:24-26)

The demand of Christ to die to the self is filled with tension. The world attracts the individual with its pleasure and convenience, while the radical demand of Christ is inherently resigned to the suffering of the individual. In addition, Kierkegaard would suggest through his works The Sickness Unto Death and The Concept of Anxiety that this stage encompasses a deep sense of individual sin and dependency on the grace of Christ. For Kierkegaard, this is the beginning of Faith and the “Knight of Infinite Resignation,” who is resigned to the suffering of Christ but who may eventually become a “Knight of Faith.” In his work Fear and Trembling, focused on the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, Kierkegaard sharpened the distinction between the two Knights. According to Kierkegaard, Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac – a teleological suspension of the ethical or the Absolute over the ethical – through his Faith. For Abraham climbing Mount Morai, Isaac will be restored to him after his sacrifice. He has such faith in an unseen God that Isaac’s restoration is absolute despite the absurdity of such a belief. Thus Abraham is the “Knight of Faith” through the paradox of faith and the virtue of the absurd. This is a bridge too far for Kierkegaard; he suggests in Fear and Trembling that he does not have the Faith of Abraham: “I cannot make the movement of faith, I cannot shut my eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd…. Be it a duty or whatever, I cannot make the final movement, the paradoxical movement of faith, although there is nothing I wish more” (Kierkegaard51). To a degree, we can see this movement into religious B in the final scene of the play with Becket as he prepares for evening Vespers service with an innate awareness that he may soon become a martyr after his return to England and Canterbury from a lengthy and contested exile.

BECKET: I’m ready, all adorned for Your festivities, Lord. Do not, in this interval of waiting, let one last doubt enter my soul.

PRIEST: Your Grace! There are four armed men outside! They’re breaking the door in! You must go into the back of the church and have the choir gates closed! They’re strong enough, they’ll hold!

BECKET: It is time for Vespers.

PRIEST: I know, but….

BECKET: Everything must be the way it should be. The choir gates will remain open….Here it comes. The supreme folly. This is its hour. One does not enter armed into God’s house. What do you want?

1ST BARON: Your death.

BECKET: It is time for the service…..Oh how difficult You make it all! And how heavy Your honor is to bear! Poor Henry. (Anouilh 114-6)

This, Becket’s final line, is followed by his painful death and mutilation by the four knights. To a degree, this begs the question: was Becket a Knight of Infinite Resignation, resigned to the suffering of Christ through faith? Or was Becket a Knight of Faith, believing the paradox of Faith and the virtue of the Absurd? For Kierkegaard, there is no answer since we can’t know the secret life of the Knight of Faith. In fact, Kierkegaard suggests that Knights of Faith may be silently walking alongside us, in the world but not of this world. But through the exercise of applying Kierkegaard’s Knight of Infinite Resignation/Faith, we gain a deeper understanding of Kierkegaard’s religious stage and possibly the depth of personal faith.

The Final Stage

Indeed, there are several questions that the play asks of its audience regardless of spiritual perspective or religious persuasion. These can be summed up in the dialogue in the play with King Henry’s barons, who do not care for the upstart Thomas Becket the Chancellor. They are discussing Becket’s character but one of the barons inserts his desire to wait on his decision concerning Becket’s character.

4th BARON: I’m waiting.

1st BARON: Waiting for what?

4th BARON: Till he shows himself. Some sorts of games are like that: you follow them all day through the forest, by sounds, or tracks, or smell. But it wouldn’t do any good to charge ahead with drawn lance; you’d just spoil everything because you don’t know for sure what sort of animal you’re dealing with. You have to wait.

1ST BARON: What for?

4th BARON: For whatever it is to show itself. And if you’re patient it always does in the end. Animals know more than men do, nearly always, but a man has something in him that an animal hasn’t got: he knows how to wait. With this man Becket – I’ll wait.

1ST BARON: For what?

4TH BARON: For him to show himself. For him to break cover. The day he does, we’ll know who he is. (Anouilh 40-1)

And in the end, this dialogue begs the question of us if we examine Becket through the lens of Kierkegaard’s stages of existence. When we “break cover” and finally show ourselves, who will we be? Where will we be on the spectrum of Kierkegaard’s stages of existence? Aesthetic? Ethical? Religious? A Knight of Infinite Resignation? Or a Knight of Faith? And therein lies the real rub of Kierkegaard and the play Becket. They both ask the fundamental question of each of us: Who are we really? Even if you don’t accept Kierkegaard’s categories, the play can provoke an assessment of our personal and spiritual commitments in our lives. And the final result of a reading of the play Becket through the lens of Kierekgaard’s stages is the didactic ease in which the stages are demonstrated to the reader.

Works Cited

Anouilh, Jean. Becket or The Honor of God. Trans. L. Hill. New York: Riverhead, 1995.

Attwater, Donald, and Catherine Rachel John. The Penguin Dictionary of the Saints, 3rd ed. London: Penguin Books, 1995.

Burns, Paul. Butler’s Lives of the Saints. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005.

The Catholic Study Bible: New American Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Evans, C. Stephen. Kierkegaard: An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Becket. Dir. Peter Glenville. Perf. Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud. Paramount Pictures, 1964. Film.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling; Repetition. Trans. H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.

—. Either/Or Part I. Trans. H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

—. Either/Or Part II. Trans. H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

—. Stages on Life’s Way. Trans. H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Noddings, Nel. Philosophy of Education. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995.

Much has been written about the ways in which “The Sneetches” by Dr. Seuss critiques antisemitism and racism. Philip Nel notes that Seuss, whose legal name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, had been sketching out what was to become the Sneetches as early as 1953, when a single illustration of the Sneetches appeared with three paragraphs of text in the pages of Redbook (Annotated 164). The story’s message: “And, really, it’s sort of a shame, For except for those stars, every Sneetch is the same” (Seuss, Redbook 77). The story was published two years before Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat on the bus and in the summer between the two Supreme Court hearings on Brown v. Board of Education. “The Sneetches, ” along with Horton Hears a Who!, as Charles Cohen notes, was “the blade [Seuss] had learned to wield against intolerance, and he was as much ahead of his fellow Americans as he had been in urging them to enter World War II” (221). In the essay “‘No Matter How Small’: The Democratic Imagination of Dr. Seuss.” Henry Jenkins writes that the story “rendered the whole logic of racism absurd” (200). Donald E. Pease notes that “when The Sneetches and Other Stories appeared […] critics saw its antiracist theme as an elaboration of the critique of anti-Semitism that Geisel had directed against Nazi Germany in his work at PM” (118). And according to Walter C. Metz, the story “The Sneetches” represents a “compelling” indictment against the Holocaust. Metz claims the bird appearing in 1941 cartoon “I am Part Jewish” is

an early figure for the Sneetches—he looks exactly like a Sneetch … Dr. Seuss may have been surprised by his friend’s observation that the 1961 Sneetches were reminiscent of war-time Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but at some unconscious level, he had merely returned to his own allegorical tradition of representing Jewish-Americans using his Uncle Sam bird, 20 years prior. (31)

The bird in the cartoon does indeed resemble a Sneetch, but I contend it is instead Seuss’s version of the American eagle. The beard, as well as the stars and striped hat, are allusions to Uncle Sam; it makes more sense for the bird to be our national symbol than the beach bird that would not be created for over a decade.

What has received little scholarly attention in Seuss’s work, however, are the ways in which the “The Sneetches” directly comments on consumer culture and emergent classism – all of which Seuss deemed detrimental to American democracy and his vision of civil society. In this article, I discuss Seuss’s earlier work, particularly the work he produced for the newspaper PM during World War II and the editorial cartoons he produced for the Dartmouth student newspaper Jack-O-Lantern. I suggest that while Seuss’s political perspectives were not without complications – where he offers eviscerating critiques of racism and antisemitism, his perspectives at times included xenophobic, stereotypical, and racist images – “The Sneetches” offers a greater indictment of American consumerism and prejudices based on class status.

§§

In the early 1940s, Dr. Seuss used his political cartoons, most published in the newspaper PM, to speak out against Jim Crow laws, antisemitism, and other forms of discrimination. In a September 18, 1941 cartoon, for instance, he depicts Charles Lindbergh atop a huge pile of “Nazi Anti-Semite Stink.”  Lindbergh, who gave his first openly anti-Semitic speech in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, is shown spreading the filth of Nazi thought across American soil. In “What This County Needs Is A Good Mental Insecticide,” an essay published on June 11, 1942, Seuss shows Uncle Sam using a Flit-like insecticide gun to eject a “racial prejudice bug” from the heads of American citizens. And in a cartoon that appeared on August 19, 1942, Seuss draws Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge, a divided state of Georgia, and Talmadge’s own “national” bird named “Racial Hatred.” These are just three examples of the many cartoons Seuss published about intolerance during his tenure at the newspaper. PM prided itself on being “against people who push other people around” (Minear 13). Seuss developed “the confrontational style later used to great effect in his children’s books – especially the overtly political ones” while publishing with PM (Nel 41-2).

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, however, Seuss’ “confrontational style” took on a decidedly sinister hue. As fears of a Japanese invasion swept the country, Seuss propagated anti-Japanese messages in his PM cartoons and spoke in favor of the internment of Japanese Americans. Seuss’ caricatures in his anti-Japan cartoons were drawn upon longstanding Western stereotypes about the Japanese people. In a cartoon that appeared in March of 1942, as in many similar cartoons of that time, Seuss likens Imperial Japan to Nazi Germany. Given that Japan had signed the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in 1940, Seuss’ relating of the two Axis powers seems reasonable. But whereas Nazi Germany is represented by the clearly recognizable figure of Hitler, Japan is rendered as an unspecified individual who seems to stand for the entire Japanese population. Moreover, Seuss’ portrays this individual with exaggeratedly slanted eyes and pig-like nose. Even more troubling are his anti-Japanese American cartoons that lent strong support to internment camps. Seuss, who maintained a summer home in California, would have witnessed the racist hype and paranoia directed against Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast at this time. A cartoon showing a long line of Japanese men running all the way up the western coastline queuing up to collect bricks of TNT was titled “Waiting for the signal from home.” The illustration was published less than ten weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor when America’s distrust of Japanese and those of Japanese descent was greatly heightened and gave renewed rise to old racial stereotypes. Nel writes that “Seuss’s caricatures of the Japanese are no more derogatory than those of his contemporary cartoonists” (Icon 55). But this can hardly exculpate Seuss, not least because many of his contemporaries were just as derogatory in their depictions of Jewish people and African Americans as they were in their depictions of the Japanese. That Seuss resisted stereotyping Jews and Blacks in his PM cartoons indicates that he deployed racist images of Japanese and Japanese Americans consciously and purposefully.

But that mind-set would disappear from Seuss’ work entirely after the fall of 1953. Jenkins writes that Seuss went on a trip for Life magazine, a “fact-finding mission to Japan, researching the American occupation’s impact on education and child-rearing practices” (188). In the process of this investigation, Seuss interviewed Japanese schoolchildren and this altered his outlook for life. The experience helped transform Seuss’ attitude toward the Japanese people, and his book, Horton Hears a Who! (1954) “drew on his recently acquired knowledge of Japan’s schools, where individualism was a relatively new concept” (Pease 93). Seuss dedicated Horton Hears a Who! to Mitsugi Nakamura, an educator whom he met on this trip, and he never again depicted the Japanese people in a negative light. Additionally, Seuss discovered his books “had been adopted in both Japan and Korea as part of the official post-war re-education curriculum” (Jenkins 188). With this discovery, “Seuss knew Horton would be used to train not only American children, but children in emerging democratic cultures around the world” (Jenkins 188).

Seuss deployed the “confrontational style” he developed at PM to combat intolerance and racism at home. World War II and the Holocaust had no doubt fueled Seuss’ opposition to antisemitism, as did his earlier experience at Dartmouth College, which throughout the first half of the twentieth century had a reputation for limiting the admittance of Jewish students and whose president, Ernest M. Hopkins, declared as late as 1945 that “Dartmouth is a Christian College founded for the Christianization of its students” (qtd. in Honan 16A). Although he was not Jewish, Seuss experienced anti-Semitic sentiments at New Hampshire Ivy League school. As a freshman he found that not a single fraternity expressed any interest in him. “With my black hair and long nose,” Seuss said, “I was supposed to be Jewish. It took a year and a half before word got around that I wasn’t” (qtd. in Morgan 27). Seuss’s ability to deflect painful jibes with sarcasm and biting humor sparked his interest in joining Dartmouth’s student magazine, The Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, as a satirical cartoonist.

§§

The racial climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s in the United States was tumultuous and increasingly galvanized the nation. In 1954, the Supreme Court made the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, stating that state laws that segregated students based on race were unconstitutional and that separate was not equal. Just one year later, Rosa Parks refused to stand on the bus and give her seat to a white man. Each of these situations drew national attention and caused Americans to examine the artificiality of separating people by the color of their skin. In September 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower deployed federal troops to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas after Governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to keep nine black students from entering the school. “By the end of the decade,” William and Nancy Young conclude, “the nation found itself poised, reluctantly or not, to enter some of the greatest social changes of the century” (xx, 9). On February 1, 1960 a sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina was the first of what was to become more than a decade of peaceful demonstrations. Inspired by the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., the activities of civil rights groups such as the Freedom Riders drew increased attention to the discrimination of people based on the color of their skin.

“The Sneetches” tells the story of a society of ostrich-like yellow birds that live on a beach. Some Sneetches have stars on their bellies and some do not. The Star-Belly Sneetches are “a distinct and dominant group,” an elite caste in an “oppressive social structure” (Bracey 83, Klaassen and Klaassen 123). What some critics see as “The Sneetches” generalized condemnation of race and ethnic prejudices appears tied to a fairly specific critique of class-based social inequalities. The Sneetch society is completely homogeneous save for the presence or absence of stars on their bellies. As Johann and Mari-Gretta Klaassen explain:

‘Because they had stars,’ the Star-Belly Sneetches (SBSes) refused social contact with Plain-Belly Sneetches (PBSes), and appear to have control over the Poozer’s share of the resources on the beaches—SBS children excluded PBS children from their ball games; SBS adults excluded PBS adults from their ‘frankfurter roasts/Or picnics or parties or marshmallow toasts.’ These exclusionary social practices were systematic and long standing. (122)

In a show of conspicuous consumption, the Star-Belly Sneetches engage in leisure activities such as playing ball (with the ball featuring a star no less) and roasting hot dogs, while the Sneetches who have no stars are left to stand apart and watch. The Sneetches treat the stars as a type of arti-factual communication that is similar to that of wearing name brand clothing. Although wearing brand name clothing affords no legal privileges, it is often perceived as signaling an elevated social status. By wearing distinctive logos, wears intend to let the world know they are well-off enough to afford the brand. The French sportswear company, Lacoste, was among the first to affix a logo – the distinctive green crocodile – to its garments, which quickly became status symbols. In 1952, Lacoste began exporting their apparel to the United States (Lacoste), where the wealthy would wear them during their leisure pursuits. Ads began to appear toting their signature Izod polo with crocodile on the breast as “the shirt of champions.” That the green color of the Lacoste crocodile is of a nearly identical shade of green as the stars on the Sneetches’ bellies further supports a reading that detects a deep strain of consumer culture criticism in “The Sneetches.”

Further evidence of the reading rests in the fact that the Sneetch stars can be removed and replaced for the right price. And the villain who supplies the means comes in a character drawing on ethnic stereotypes. Sylvester McMonkey McBean looks a little like a chimpanzee, wears a green hat and bow-tie, and has a name mo st definitely has a ring of Irishness to it. He “gives an immediate impression of deviousness” (Bracey 85). Metz notes the racial connections: “[T]he positioning of the Irish capitalist as a subhuman ‘McMonkey’ relies on the same sort of stereotyping that fueled early 20th century antisemitism, a topic that was frequently a major target for the German-American Geisel” (28). Though Seuss said “The Sneetches” was “inspired by antisemitism” (qtd. in Fensch, Sneetches 118), he was certainly not above making racial slurs of his own.

McBean provides the plain-bellied Sneetches with a “magical” solution in a machine that puts stars on their bellies and make them appear like the Star-Belly Sneetches. Once the plain-bellied Sneetches have stars on their bellies, they want to be treated “exactly like” the star-bellied Sneetches (Seuss, Sneetches 12). As Klaassen and Klaassen explain, “The machine erased the external differences between the PBSes and the SBSes—suddenly, all the Sneetches had stars” (124). The external markers of all the Sneetches were suddenly the same as this had been the only thing differentiating the Sneetches in their minds. According to Klaassens and Klaassen, “The sudden shift that the ‘very peculiar machine’ brought about in Sneetch society presented the PBSes with an option they had never had before: they were able to shift from one group to the other” (124). Once the plain-bellied Sneetches acquire the external symbol of privilege, the presence of “stars upon thars,” those who had been in power, the original star-bellied Sneetches, turn to McBean, who uses another machine to remove stars from their bellies and declare the elitists are Sneetches sans stars. Pretty soon, confusion reigns with Sneetches running in and out of machines until no one is sure who was an original Star-Belly Sneetch and who was not.

McBean’s machines allow the Sneetches “to alter and manipulate caste markers, until nobody can be sure who is elite and who is subordinate” (Jenkins 200). After a while, it is pretty clear the only one coming out ahead is the capitalist and inventor McBean. As Mensch and Freeman note, “the scene turns into an orgy of capitalist exploitation, with constant streams of Sneetches paying to enter one machine to be starred and then to enter another to be un-starred, while McBean stands grinning in the center, in front of an ever-growing mountain of cash” (34). The Sneetches run from one machine to the next and McBean, who stops interacting with them altogether,  merely stands by as the birds literally throw their money at him. In the end, the Sneetches are unified by their “shared victimization,” that is, a “complete economic destruction of Sneetch society” when McBean drives away with all of their money. Having been reduced to common economic powerlessness, the Sneetches finally realize a unitary class consciousness” (113). Only total economic destruction brings the two types of Sneetch together. Only absent capital can the Sneetches learn to accept each other.

The enduring value of “The Sneetches” is in the way it  seems to link the constructiveness of race and ethnic categories to economic privileges, yet it falls short in offering strategies on how persistent discriminatory practices may be effectively resisted. Shared economic exploitation may result in something like “a unitary class consciousness,” as Mensch and Freeman suggest, but it seems highly unlikely that this will erase racial and ethnic difference as well. In her 2010 article “Emerging Themes on Aspects of Social Class and the Discourse of White Privilege,” Jennifer Heller argues that a

more comprehensive understanding of racial advantage is achieved when theorists indicate how whiteness leads to the manifestations of materially based advantages as it interacts with other social features such as race, class and gender, which shape identity and life chances. (112).

“Sneetches” does not wrestle with race or ethnic difference – or multiculturalism or the political approaches employed by Black, Asian, Native American or Latino people – because the physical differences in the Sneetches are minor and removable; the society is utterly homogeneous save for the salesman McBean and the bird who observes the story but does not interact. As Michael Kazin notes, “The Sneetches” show Seuss as “a typical 1930s/40s Liberal in that he cared less about multiculturalism than he did about the more fundamental American ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality” (qtd. in Wood).   

§§

Although he found antisemitism and Jim Crow laws reprehensible (or, perhaps, more accurately, un-American), Seuss had a blind spot when it came to people of Japanese descent, whom he once depicted stereotypically in his political cartoons. A 1953 trip changed his views on the Japanese people. He met educators and children alike and shifted his perspective. He understood that books could be used to educate not only American school children but those in emerging democracies, as well. Seuss’ post-war books therefore include the social and political messages he saw as vital in educating an effective citizen. Although problematic with regard to its apparent endorsement of assimilation and its use of ethnic stereotypes, “The Sneetches” presents a sustained critique of the perils of consumerism and classism, and about the construction of difference and our still very pronounced inability to deal with it. The text is an example of radical children’s literature as it does “not guarantee a better future for American children, but […] challenge[s] them to think critically and creatively about their choices” (Zipes, Tales ix). As Julia Adams notes in “Class Analysis and Culture: What the Sneetches Can Teach Us”: “The ending of “The Sneetches” is a sly vision of utopia, in which the Sneetches decide to be just one big happy mutually indistinguishable group” (11). The Sneetches learn a lesson that Seuss hopes everyone will learn – to be inclusive and accepting of all others in spite of how they look.

Works Cited

Adams, Julia.  “Class Analysis and Culture: What ‘The Sneetches’ Can Teach Us.” Yale Journal of Sociology 5 (2005):  5-12.

Bracey, Earnest N.  “American Popular Culture and the Politics of Race in Dr. Seuss’ The Sneetches.” On Racism. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003.  81-88.

Buchsbaum, Tamar. “A Note on Antisemitism in Admissions at Dartmouth.” Jewish Social Studies 49.1 (1987): 79-84.

Chase Group, LLC. “Dr. Seuss Biography.”  Dr. Seuss Art. 2008.

Cohen, Charles D. The Seuss, the Whole Seuss and Nothing But the Seuss: A Visual Biography of Theodor Seuss Geisel. New York:  Random House, 2004.

Diener, Sam. “You CAN Teach a Sneetch: Dr. Seuss and Conversations about Social Responsibility.”  Peacework. July/August 2009.  11-13.

Fensch, Thomas. The Man Who Was Dr. Seuss: The Life and Work of Theodor Geisel.  The Woodlands, TX:  New Century Books, 2000.

Fensch, Thomas, ed. Of Sneetches and Whos and the Good Dr. Seuss: Essays on the Writings and Life of Theodor Geisel.  Jefferson, NC:  McFarland & Company, September 2005.

Gould, Stephen Jay.  The Mismeasure of Man.  New York: Norton, 1996.   

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.”  Media, Culture, and Society 2.1 (1980): 338-347.

—.  Representation.  London: Sage Publications, 1997.

Heller, Jennifer.  “Emerging Themes on Aspects of Social Class and the Discourse of   White Privilege.”  Journal of Intercultural Studies 31.1 (2010): 111-20.     

Honan, William.  “Dartmouth Reveals Anti-Semitic Past.”  New York Times. 11 November 1997.  A16.

Jenkins, Henry.  “‘No Matter How Small’: The Democratic Imagination of Dr. Seuss.”   Hop on Pop.  Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2002.

Klaassen, Johann and Mari-Gretta. “Humiliation and Discrimination: The Role of Shame in the Politics of Difference among the Sneetches of Dr Seuss.” Social Philosophy Today 24 (2008): 121-29.

Kohl, Herbert.  “A Plea for Radical Children’s Literature.”  Should we Burn Babar?  Essays on  Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories. New York: New Press, 1995.  57-69.

—.  “Little Rebels.”  Rethinking Schools Online 22.2 (Winter 2008/09).   

“The Lacoste Story.”  Lacoste Press Kit.  May 2010.

Lipsitz, George.  “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness.”  The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics.  Philadelphia, PA:  Temple University Press, 1998.  1-23.

MacDonald, Ruth K.  Dr. Seuss.  Boston:  Twayne Publishers, 1988.

McGregor, Sue L. T.  “Critical Discourse Analysis: A Primer.”  Kappa Omicron Nu.  FORUM 15.1 (2003): 10-20.

Mensch, Betty and Alan Freeman.  “Getting to Solla Sollew: The Existential Politics of  Dr. Seuss.”  Tikkun 2.2 (1987):  30-117.

Metz, Walter C.  “‘Show Me the Shoah!’:  Generic Experience and Spectatorship in Popular Representations of the Holocaust.”  Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 27.1 (2008):  16-35.

Mickenberg, Julia and Philip Nel.  “What’s Left.”  Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 30.4 (2005):  349-353.

— (Eds.).  Tales for Little Rebels:  A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature.  New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Minear, Richard H.  Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of  Theodor Seuss Geisel. New York:  The New Press, 1999.

—.  “Dr. Seuss Went to War: A Catalog of Political Cartoons by Dr. Seuss.”  2000.  Ed. UC Regents.  (2000): Mandeville Special Collections Library.  7 April 2007.

Morgan, Judith & Neil.  Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel:  A Biography.  New York:  Random House, 1995.

Nel, Philip.  The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats. New York: Random House, 2007.

—.  The Avant-Garde and American Post-Modernity: Small Incisive Shocks.  Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.

—.  “Children’s Literature Goes to War: Dr. Seuss, P. D. Eastman, Munro Leaf, and the Private SNAFU Films (1943-46).” Journal of Popular Culture 40.3 (June 2007): 468-87.

—.  “Dada Knows Best: Growing Up ‘Surreal’ with Dr. Seuss.”  Children’s Literature 27 (1999): 150-184.

—.  “The Disneyfication of Dr. Seuss: Faithful to Profit, One Hundred Percent?”  Cultural Studies 17.5 (2003): 579-614.

—.  Dr. Seuss: American Icon.  New York:  Continuum, 2004.

—.  “‘Said a Bird in the Midst of a Blitz…’: How World War II Created Dr. Seuss.”  Mosaic 34.2 (2001): 65.

Pascoe, Peggy.  What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Pease, Donald E.  Theodor SEUSS Geisel.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.   

The Political Dr. Seuss.  Dir. Ron Lamothe. Terra Incognita Films, 2004.  VHS.

Roby, Cynthia A.  “Separate Waters Exhibit to Highlight ‘Blacks-Only’ Beaches.”  South  Florida Times [Miami, FL] 29 February 2008. South Florida Times Online.

Seuss, Dr.  Horton Hears a Who!  New York:  Random House, 1954.

—.  The Sneetches and Other Stories.  New York:  Random House, 1961.

—.  “The Sneetches.” Redbook.  July 1953: 77.

Templeton, Alan R.  “Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective.”   American Anthropologist 100.3 (1998):  632-650.

Wood, Hayley.  “Interview with Filmmaker Ron Lamothe about ‘The Political Dr. Seuss.’”  Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities Website.  August 2004.

Young, William H. and Nancy K.  The 1950s: American Popular Culture Through  History.  Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004.

Zipes, Jack.  Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization.  New York:  Routledge, 2006.

—.  “The Twists and Turns of Radical Children’s Literature.”  Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature.  Eds. Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel. New York: New York University Press, 2008.  vii – ix.

…the poet’s traditional function on behalf of society… proposed
to make virtue delicious. He compounded a moral effect with
an aesthetic effect…. The name of the moral effect was
goodness; the name of the aesthetic effect was beauty.
— John Crowe Ransom, “Poets Without Laurels”

Introduction

John Crowe Ransom’s quote epitomizes a coalescence of aesthetic and moral stimuli that has motivated American artists and conditioned American arts for decades. A list of artist-moralists in American culture would include in addition to Ransom such names as Sojourner Truth, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Edward Arlington Robinson, Allen Tate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, e.e. cummings, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsburg, Edward Albee, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Woody Allen and many more. The moralism conveyed by artists (and, importantly, the aesthetic designs this moralism is embodied in) may reach a different audience than a preacher’s orations – perhaps a more secular, liberal, “worldly” audience – but it has just as important a role in American life. To borrow Wayne C. Booth’s diction, such artists, directly by way of persuasive hortatory, and indirectly by way of characterization, camouflaged argument and other narrative techniques, collaborate with audiences in “providing mature moral judgment” (307).

The artist-moralist current is so pervasive that virtually all authors could be included in this context. Consider Cormac McCarthy’s hard-hitting aggressions and recall what McCarthy writes in Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West: “Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised”? And Mark Twain, the ultimate practical-and-plain-dealing writer, writes of a great “moral sense” in mankind. Even if we did find a wholly “amoral” and straight-from-the-hip writer, I suspect he would be limited to a remarkably transparent and guileless readership, hardly a readership at all, because the moralism I am discussing is exactly what all readers want and need, it is in essence why we read.

There are many possible moral agendas providing direction through the complex ethical circumstances in life, including: the absolutist, highly structured claims of many world religions; supernatural/mystic/mythic philosophies; lay/scientific outlines; ascetic philosophies and retreats from the material world; fatalistic/pessimistic understandings; secular humanist beliefs in communitarianism and humanitarianism; anarchic world views; animistic/vitalistic interpretations; cognitive/constructive philosophies; agnostic/atheistic views; and a range of others. We might find evidence of any of these moral programs coloring the work of different American artists, but it is my stance that one encompassing covenant most prominently conditions the American aesthetic-moralist impulse: a set of virtue ethics principles in support of a moral life “center[ed] in the heart and personality of the agent – in his or her character” (Pojman 388), or as Aristotle simply said “to do good” (from Nichomachean Ethics, Book IV). I contend that, for Aristotle, “good” and “right” were, in essence, one in the same. Virtues and virtuous behavior were both good in and of themselves, as well as instruments to cultivate a best life. There is a slight differentiation here between modern views on doing the right thing in what are often specific instances versus Aristotle’s broader view onto a lifetime. The varied values of this framework, which aims at the rightness and beneficence of acts based on good and decent motives, include (among others) love, honesty, truth, fairness, faith, justice, benevolence, loyalty, temperance, courage and duty. These virtues are “the right things to do,” and many accept that they are intuitively understood and practiced by good people.

Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography that “[my father] convinc’d me that nothing was useful that was not honest” (7), while Toni Morrison has written that her “single gravest responsibility … is not to lie” (303). Arthur Miller had John Proctor declaim in The Crucible, “Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.” Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in his Breakfast of Champions, inscribes protagonist Kilgore Trout’s tombstone with “We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson said in his “American Scholar” address that “character is higher than intellect.” Walt Whitman, always the passionate moral and spiritual advocate, urged his readers toward best behavior and beliefs in “Song of the Open Road”:

They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where
they go,
But I know that they go toward the best – toward something
great.

In this article I will examine selections from two American dramatists who function within the American artist-moralist tradition described here. My choice of drama is pointed. Some readers may venture that a roomier format, such as the novel, offers a more expansive platform for elaborate “theorizing,” comprehensive analysis, and realistic and/or creative depiction of moral topics. I grant that this may be true, but I believe that the drama form – public as it is, oral, with characters “speaking” to audiences, and audiences having a measure of “interaction” with live figures on stage – provides the most insightful look at our topic. The messages in drama not only become a kind of preaching, with the presentation of living exemplars of moral parables, but the stage also becomes a kind of tribunal, highlighting the importance of “defenders” of best behavior (the dramatist and a play’s characters), and “witnesses” (the audience, and again the characters) who can “testify” in defense of right, or in opposition to wrong behavior, all with the aim of reaching “just” verdicts on a play’s messages and content.

Note that this conception is seen by way of audience reaction, a more extant and operative conception that requires the actual viewing and responding to plays, which of course this paper cannot generate. Like any art form, drama can, of course, be seen and interpreted in varied formats. This is to say that drama may be read silently, and understood by a reader in a private sense, as dicta or in a narrative series. Similarly, drama could be read by a small group, not staged, but analyzed in this way. Drama can of course also make its way onto television and film, which might condition its messages in other ways. These varied formats could potentially open the analysis in this paper onto other interpretations, but I will solely refer to drama as activity staged by living characters in front of live audiences.

This discussion also highlights an interesting point about the ethical concepts I am discussing. The study of ethics can be broadly divided into two pursuits, that of ethics, proper – the definition and dissemination of prescriptive ethical codes and conduct – and meta-ethics – a more elevated, less directly practicable analysis of the creation and delineation of these codes and conduct, their logical coherence, limits, origins, justification, interpretation, etc. My points about the public and juridical natures of dramaturgy indicate a given focus on pragmatic, prescriptive ethics conveyed to audiences, but there is no reason that we could not find instances of higher-level meta-ethical analysis in drama as well. In this paper, however, I will focus on the former point.

The two dramatists I will examine are Sam Shepard and Neil Simon, who I believe will give us an inclusive picture of modern-day moralizing in American drama (always with the aim of “doing good,” or perhaps I should say “saying good” within a virtue ethics framework). These two artists are at something of opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. Shepard, younger than Simon, is a fiery dramatist of contradiction and incongruity, conveying gloomy themes made even more foreboding by infusions of black humor and violence. Simon, of an older generation, is a middle-of-the-road playwright, emerging from a tradition of easygoing American humor and conservative moral values with a soft, humanistic edge. Different as these two dramatists are, we find that they each take up the moralist torch I have described, showing how the America aesthetic-moralist impulse insinuates its way into diverse beliefs and styles. Shepard is the “bad cop” in our scenario, the hard-hitting disciplinarian moralist, shouting from the pulpit, on the verge of flaying reprobate listeners; Simon, meanwhile, is the “good cop,” a friendly counselor, father-figure or trusted cleric warming our hearts with reassuring homilies about family, life and “the right things to do.” In our analysis we will compare and contrast these two artists in varied ways.

The Congruence of Moral and Aesthetic Ideals

In this section I will explicate an important analytical consideration that underpins my analysis of Shepard, Simon and the American artist-moralist tradition: the congruence of moral and aesthetic ideals. Consider this a look at my analytical methodology.

Moral and aesthetic frameworks, broadly, are both created with the aim of cultivating conceptions of best form and ideal content, substantial coherence, beauty, truth, and ontological and epistemological significance within intersubjective environments of audience and observer, speaker and listener, influencer and influenced. This confluence of the moral and the aesthetic – though admittedly the aesthetic considerations of artists often modify or re-channel moral/virtuous impulses – lends something of a helping hand to artist-moralists, imbuing their messages with fluency, comprehensibility and authenticity. (In an interesting turn in terms of this convergence of actuality, note how both “character” and “action” are basal constituents of both drama and ethics.) I have cited John Ransom, and at the risk of again citing an analyst sometimes considered overly-conservative and obsolete, Ransom also wrote that “the union of beauty with goodness and truth has been common enough to be regarded as natural. It is the dissociation which is unnatural and painful” (453). To turn to an aesthetic philosopher that Ransom venerated – and who is rarely considered out of date – Aristotle, in his Poetics, also examined the linked roles of morality and aesthetics as they are evinced by poets and dramatists:

… the objects of imitation are men in action and these must either of a higher or lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. (Book II, 52)

The above analysis indicates how morals and moralism are at the very heart of aesthetic structure. Such a view has not been overlooked in the past (particularly in literature, but we may apply these concepts to dramatic narrative). For Wayne C. Booth, who has explored this issue in extreme detail, “moral qualities as inferred from characteristic choices or as stated directly by the author, have always been an important basis for literary form” (Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction 130), while Hayden White continues, “Where, in any account of reality, narrativity is present, we can be sure that morality or moralizing impulse is present too” (“The Value of Narrativity” 284).

To examine one key element of this isomorphism of morality (understood in the common sense of doctrines concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad) and aesthetic design, I will explain how one particular moral value inheres in artwork “below the surface” (this is to say that other moral values that I will examine in the work of Sam Shepard and Neil Simon in the remainder of this paper, such as truth, loyalty or love, are often much more visible or urgent in given works, above the surface as it were). This value is, simply, beauty. Emerson, when he wrote in his “Thoughts on Modern Literature” that “[o]ver every true poem lingers a certain wild beauty, immeasurable,” recognized not only the beauty stemming from skilled artistic rendering, but also a more mystic view of aesthetic beauty as something of a spiritual force. Even in those works that contain ostensibly “ugly” elements – and we certainly see these in Sam Shepard’s dark, violent dramatization – we often acknowledge a given aesthetic beauty, emerging from their skilled, accomplished depiction. White writes that the “value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary” (The Content of the Form 24). If we interpret White’s “coherence, integrity, fullness” (not to mention the “imaginary”) as potential attributes of beautiful artistic creation – and I think that we may – then his analysis points toward the actuality of one moral concept – beauty – that is integral to aesthetics, as I have stated. I will examine other moral principles within the context of Neil Simon and Sam Shepard in the following sections.

Neil Simon: Playing if Safe

Neil Simon emerged from the Depression and WWII in America, a time of conservative ethics and a cautious world view that often looked to the past and righteous, absolutist principles for security. Simon’s youth and early development were far from the advent of deconstructionist angst and turbulent cultural politics of the late twentieth century, and the aesthetics of his time had only a dash of political and social critique. Simon’s drama, in a word, resides comfortably in a world of “family values” – unstinting loyalty, trust, honesty, respect and hard work – which resonated with American audiences in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, but which also finds devotees into the twenty-first century (though admittedly my definition here does not strictly apply to modern-day family values of the Dan Quayle variety, with its somewhat reactionary meaning in support of the nuclear family and strict gender roles). Family values in this sense can no doubt become claustrophobic (or worse, exclusionary), but at best (as in my view here) they can fit into a beneficial virtue ethics framework. Simon’s are the moral guidelines radiating outward from the loving family circle, values that have been delivered from pulpits, taught in classrooms, and propounded from soapboxes from the earliest days in America.

I will examine selections from two of Simon’s plays, Brighton Beach Memoirs and Lost in Yonkers. I believe these plays, based on Simon’s early family life with his parents, siblings, relatives and neighbors, will best illuminate his moral universe.

Brighton Beach Memoirs at first glance looks like a birds-eye view of a fourteen-year-old boy’s uncomplicated world – a world of baseball and early adolescence, of big brothers, mothers and fathers, of masturbation and first glances at pretty girls, and dimly emerging adult dreams and responsibilities. But the play is much more than this, and focused through the lives of ordinary people living ordinary lives in their families and neighborhoods – Simon’s preferred milieu –  Brighton Beach Memoirs becomes a sustained examination of a variety of moral precepts, from the personal to the communal, from the local to the universal.

Virtually all of the characters in Brighton Beach Memoirs are upstanding types, tested by different ethical challenges, but always falling back on the standard list of virtue ethics and family values I have discussed, when solutions are needed. Kate urges her sister early in the play to “stay on your own side of the street” (10), while Blanche later retorts to Kate in no uncertain terms, “I keep my word” (11). Nora, when she is arguing for her chance to be hired as a dancer, offers charitably to her mother, “Let me do something for you now” (16), while Jack generously offers of his sister-in-law’s date that he will “Make … him feel comfortable” (90). A larger, threatening world looms in the background of these characters’ lives – Jack is sympathetically “afraid for all of us” with the onset of World War II (124) – but always Simon grounds his ethical framework in the immediate family. “The world doesn’t survive without families” (53) Kate tells Jack, and Stanley and Eugene make every effort to contribute to the family’s well-being, even scraping together a few cents worth of stamps to make up for Stanley’s lost salary. When Jack ponders where their family members who have escaped from the Nazis in Europe will stay, Kate interrupts with a brisk, filial “With us” (130). Any anger or disputes that crop up between family members are definitively settled for the better, with all coming out happier and more well rounded.

The most striking example of ethical conduct at work in the play emerges out of the possibility of Stanley losing his job, where he has defended a black co-worker he felt was being abused by the boss after a mishap. In a series of statements and explanations that elevate Stanley to the status of youth-hero, he tells his brother Eugene that his co-worker’s accident “wasn’t his fault” and the boss’s angry reaction “wasn’t fair” (24). Stanley felt no less than that “the dignity of everyone who worked in that store was in my hands” as he defended his co-worker and stood up to his boss (25). In the end, in the classical individual ethical response, Stanley firmly states “you always have to do what you think is right in this world and stand up for your principles” (of course he learned this from his father) (27). When Stanley tells his father that he could be fired for his actions, Eugene reports that he (Stanley) gives a stirring speech “like that movie, Abe Lincoln in Illinois … defending … his principles” (70), which leaves his father acknowledging to Stanley, “you did a courageous thing,” which was “something to be proud of. It was what you believed in” (71). The difficulty passes over with nary a black cloud – Simon in his mild-mannered way – and the further difficulty later in the play of Stanley gambling away his salary is also breezed over, with Eugene coming to his brother’s defense, and defusing any possible conflict.

The other important moral examination Simon conducts in Brighton Beach Memoirs is his look at bias among the different nationalities in the Brighton Beach neighborhood. This mistrust breaches the surface when Kate nastily tells Blanche about her (Blanche’s) upcoming date with Mr. Murphy, who is Irish, “I warned you the first day about those people” (100). Ostensibly she is referring to the fact that Murphy has injured himself while driving while intoxicated (which Murphy’s mother has generously informed the family about in a letter, in which she also tells them that her son has never failed to exhibit “honesty and sincerity” [99]), but the real source of her bitterness is her mistrust of Irish people. Her resentment prompts the following exchange:

BLANCHE: Stop calling them “those people.” They’re not “those people.” She’s a mother, like you and me.

KATE: And what is he? Tell me what he is.

BLANCHE: He’s somebody in trouble. He’s somebody that needs help. For God’s sake, Kate, you don’t even know the man.

KATE: I know the man. I know what they’re all like.

BLANCHE: Who are you to talk? Are we any better? Are we something so special? We’re all poor around here, the least we can be is charitable. (100)

Simon here not only instructs readers and listeners about the innate value of a charitable attitude toward others, he also slips in a comment on equality in a given society (“we’re all poor…”). With such ethics extending beyond insular family values, Brighton Beach Memoirs enters a larger moral environment linking individual, family, societal and universal ethics. Such an environment is seen again in Lost in Yonkers, to which I now turn.

While lacking Brighton Beach Memoirs’ tight focus on virtue ethics, and with a slightly sharper edge than the previous play, Lost in Yonkers in many ways revisits the same moral themes, in the same family surroundings, evincing values from a now-bygone age in America. “Families should sort of stick together,” Jay tells his grandmother (44), while Bella tells her mother, “I promise you, you would never worry about being alone ‘cause you’d have us” (133). Jay risks his life for his uncle by tricking the gangsters, and then says “I thought someone in this family ought to help somebody else” (135). The homemade card from Jay and Arty to their grandmother in the concluding scene wraps up the conceptions of family love in the play.

These American family values of the mid-20^th century are spiced up by a cross-section of principles from an old-fashioned European system – a classic “strict but fair” moral doctrine also widely practiced in American families. Early in the play we are reminded that the “right thing to do” includes such traditional strictures as youths not playing hooky or smoking, finishing one’s dinner, hard work, unreserved respect for elders, and possession of a tough exterior in a demanding world – “moxie,” as the characters call it. Grandma Kurnitz herself was “from the old European tradition: ‘You will behave, you will not talk back, you will work hard’” (Irene Worth in Simon, Lost in Yonkers 139). No doubt Grandma Kurnitz is imperfect – she can be “so mean” (98), and her relationship with Bella is deeply strained and hurtful. But even she admits responsibility – “If I’ve done wrong by you [Bella], den it’s for me to take care of” (144), and to Louie she was a “Hell of a teacher” (93). Louie provides something of a moral foil in the play, as an illicit presence. In spite of his apparent lawbreaking and shady company, however, he is at heart constructive and committed to the family. In his rough-edged way he protects and tutors Jay and Artie, he always credits his mother, and he steps in forcefully to protect Bella from the weak Johnny – an apparently worthy contribution to her future.

Simon colors his central family values with brush strokes of universal moralizing principles, such as beneficence (which I maintain is indeed of universal significance) when Bella stands up for Jay and Arty, and subverts her mother’s will by announcing “No momma. They’re not going. They’re staying. Because if you make them go, I’ll go too” (47), and later when Jay gamely launches the conversation after dinner allowing Bella to bring up the topic of her new love interest; honesty, such as when Bella says of the boys’ father, “He never takes anything from anybody” (35), and grandmother Kurnitz tells Jay “You’re not afraid to say the truth. Dot’s goot” (147); moral courage and loyalty, when Jay confronts his uncle and tells him “Maybe you don’t rob banks or grocery stores or little old ladies. You’re worse than that…And I’ll tell you something about my father. At least he’s doing something in this war. He’s sick and he’s tired but he’s out there selling iron to make ships and tanks and cannons. And I’m proud of him” (103); and the straightforward dictum to do the right thing when Jay asks his uncle Louie, when he (Louie) is moving the boys into position to protect him from the gangsters, “We wouldn’t be doing anything wrong, would we?” (81).

As I have noted, a key moral dynamic that I am examining is a juridical element, which frames, advocates and explicates moral factors. This feature is essential to the structure of drama – with the “defenders,” “witnesses,” “accused” and “verdicts” conditioning stage action and audience participation. In Lost in Yonkers, Jay directly engages the audience, sharing his eyewitness view of the drama, which enables deeper retrospective deliberation and informed conclusions about action, behavior, and character motivation and decisions. (In Brighton Beach Memoirs Eugene similarly advertised to the audience, “You’re all witnesses…” [30].)

All in all, Neil Simon takes a somewhat circuitous route in his moralizing, or perhaps I should say that he simply wears kid gloves. Simon does not hit his audiences over the head with his beliefs and principles. He packages his moralism in a user-friendly wrapper that mostly accords with the values of the older generation of our parents and grandparents. Simon’s is an “old fashioned” morality, and in some ways he may be preaching to the choir of his devotees. Simon’s is not so conspicuous a moral stance as Sam Shepard’s, but it is no less important in American aesthetics and culture. His is an easier ride, a necessary, centrist complement to the fiery preaching of “true believers,” angry sermonizers (with both edifying and didactic aims, and always with the aim of expounding a virtuous reality) and gloomy fatalists. We find Sam Shepard in various respects resides in these groups, and to his work I now turn.

Sam Shepard: The Angry American

Sam Shepard’s plays cut to the heart of anxious existence and broken relationships, lacerated life in a mediated world, and personal dreams on the bier of hard-won experience. Always just outside the door of his ramshackle motel on the edge of nowhere is the threat of corporal violence and metaphysical havoc. Few would disagree that Shepard’s dramatic worlds are peopled with characters in environments that are eerily “wiped out,” “screwed up,” and “un-communal, cut off from [their] own past” (Bigsby 12). Such a dramaturgy hardly seems fit for constructive moral examination, but Shepard nevertheless hews to this path. His aim is a view onto the dark side of moral and/or ethical behavior in human life, though with a simultaneous examination of many good qualities (not least family values), which in the end twins the good and bad, enabling us to see that which is first and that which is last in a Biblically concurrent sense (see Matthew 20:16).

Shepard, in contrast to Neil Simon, emerged out of the late 1950s and into the 60s in America, a time when morals were contested sharply across yawning gaps of experience separating generations. During this era something like an entirely new moral understanding arose in the United States, an understanding that was on the one hand accommodating and humanitarian – an “Age of Aquarius” world of peace and love – while on the other bitterly angry, reproachful and dismissive of the “over 30” generation (Neil Simon’s generation) which Shepard and his peers saw as nothing less than a rot at the core of American culture. This rot was first and foremost a political and cultural disease of exploitation and imperialism, bigotry and racism, individualism gone mad at the expense of community, and a realpolitik existence that sought only zero-sum gains at the expense of others. The more personal and familial sides of these problems were the resulting dysfunctional relationships that seemed to be rending American culture apart – with husbands and wives, parents and offspring, brothers and sisters, and extended family members lost in storms of divorce, heartbreak, hurt, crime, drug and alcohol abuse, abandonment and adultery. The critical reception of Shepard’s treatment of these problems has long celebrated the playwright as a postmodern dramatist and hell-bent-for-leather hanging judge of modern American culture. Such views, while in part true, are faulty for two reasons. First, to hurl Shepard into a postmodern maelstrom would be to strip him of agency, placing him at the mercy of a de-centered reality lacking any substantial referentiality – and this is surely not true of his work, which cuts to the heart of lived experience. Second, although Shepard is to be sure harshly critical in his laying bare of disquieting trends in American society, he is anything but wholly denunciatory, nor, in another possible postmodern take, simply in it for the fun, reveling in the chaotic, acidly humorous existence portrayed in his artwork. I venture to say that for Shepard the sickness in American society is not only harmful to individuals, families and communities, but also to the very metaphysical and ethical heart of American (and, for that matter, any) culture and existence. Shepard’s aim is nothing less than to make a beneficent contribution toward healing this diseased moral life at large, and his moralizing – though a bitter pill to swallow – ultimately has constructive objectives.

To obtain the results he is after, Shepard employs a sophisticated, two-pronged strategy, which comprises an incendiary mixture of utopian (moral) and dystopian (amoral, immoral) messages. We can see this twofold approach in that although Shepard has long crafted a hard-hitting “critique of the ‘real world’ [and the] superficiality of contemporary life,” he also peoples his drama with more positive “‘hero’ figures…who actively battle against forces of oppression” (Bottoms 59-60). To probe deeper, on the dystopian side, Shepard’s work incorporates nihilist portrayals crafted of emotionally intense and neurotically split contrasts, fractured communication, rejection of tradition, grotesque and violent imagery, and intense graphic effects. This approach should not surprise us, for many angry moralists and preachers in American culture have painted uncomfortable fire and brimstone pictures of failed moral lives, in contrast with the promise of glorious righteousness and ultimate reward. However, on the utopian side, Shepard grew up in a generation seeking a positive rebirth of human consciousness into an improved state of virtuous behavior and belief – the Age of Aquarius, as noted. Such an ideal world can be seen in Shepard’s work, providing a necessary positive foil to his negative dynamic. The combination of these dark and light sides, Shepard’s heat and light, yield volatile but salubrious outcomes.

A primary way in which Simon effects his dualistic marriage of opposites is to douse his drama in intense emotion: “HEEZ MY HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAART!!!” shrieks Beth in A Lie of the Mind (20), expressing both devout love and searing pain. Some critics have evaluated the emotional outbursts in Shepard’s plays as showy fireworks, explosions of bottled-up, intensely caustic feelings. While this is no doubt in part true, a more complete understanding is to view them as the “lively and sympathetic representation” (very lively and sympathetic representation) of individual and communal dilemmas (Frankena 455), and the demonstrative (very demonstrative) psychological milieu characters are immersed in during their ultimate search for a better moral life (Shepard’s path to redemption won’t be easy). In a word, Shepard plunges his characters into these personal and communal quandaries and conflicts so they can sort through the damage, craft adequate responses, and learn better behavior, with the ultimate aim of effecting a better, changed world: “It’s all right. Once we’re together, the whole world will change. You’ll see. We’ll be in a whole new world,” Beth tells Frankie in A Lie of the Mind (114).

The instances of moral indignation and endorsement in Shepard’s work are so numerous that it is peculiar they have not been analyzed in depth before. Stephen J. Bottoms hints at such an appraisal when he writes that Shepard’s work at times exhibits “traces of a search for some unifying vision, a source of hope beyond the deadly, all-pervading hollowness” (59). John Blackburn, further, writes that Shepard’s characters “endeavor to defend themselves against the weight of the past and the anxiety of the present by searching out a deeper, more essential origin” (Blackburn). Bottoms and Blackburn are on the right track, but they do not query deeply enough. If, following Wayne C. Booth, “The author’s voice is […] dominant in a dialogue that is at the heart of all experience with fiction” (272), then Shephard’s voice is loud and clear in his drama, and moral indignation and sanction are integral to his “dialogue.” One most important element of morality in Shepard’s work, for example, is his celebration of love, an emotion (“the emotions are essential and central in our effort to gain understanding on any important ethical matter” after all [Nussbaum 21]). that girds the virtue ethics framework I have discussed. The love among Shepard’s characters is a tested love, a bruised and often broken love, a misplaced love, a lost love – but love it is, deep and often wistfully present, as in Fool for Love:

EDDIE: We’ve got a pact…. You know we’re connected May. We’ll always be connected. That was decided a long time ago.”

– or A Lie of the Mind –

JAKE: (Softly) I – I – I – I love you more than this earth. (126)

– or heartbreakingly absent, as in Buried Child –

DODGE: Tilden was the one who knew. Better than any of us. He’d walk for miles with that kid in his arms. Halie let him take it. All night sometimes. He’d walk all night out there in the pasture with it. Talkin’ to it. Singin’ to it. Used to hear him singing to it. He’d make up stories. He’d tell that kid all kinds a’ stories. Even when he knew it couldn’t understand him. Couldn’t understand a word he was sayin’… (65)

Sometimes Shepard’s love is secure, strong, and deeply filial –

JAKE: No! Don’t leave.

FRANKIE: All right. You okay?

JAKE: Yeah. Just sit with me for a while, stay here.

FRANKIE: Okay.

JAKE: Don’t leave.

FRANKIE: I won’t. (A Lie of the Mind 14-15)

– and sometimes loose-limbed, pushed to the breaking point, where it becomes neurotic or compulsive –

THE OLD MAN: It was the same love. Just got split in two, that’s all. (Fool for Love 48)

Intense love, out of control love, angry love, love neurotic to the point of being unrecognizable – but Shepard’s love remains. We can perhaps understand that critics have viewed the love that infuses Shepard’s work in a jaundiced sense. We would all agree that Shepard’s dramatic virtues have a gritty edge, and more than a modicum of attached pain and loss. But to lose sight of Shepard’s portrayals of love as love in all its potential and realized glory, is a serious mistake, and can lead to diagnostic distortions.

Other key virtues that tint Shepard’s plays are honesty, truth, loyalty and righteousness. Such values again may stem from Shepard’s youth in the 1960s. The Vietnam War and Watergate impacted his entire generation, eliciting much cynicism and anger at the decrepit values that seemed to infest establishment life and politics. Bob Dylan, himself a visionary moralist artist who Shepard idolized, sang in 1964’s “The Times They Are A-Changin”’:

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
…
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.

Loyalty often combines with truth and love in Shepard’s work. In Fool for Love, a play that is something of a sustained meditation on truth, love and loyalty, Eddie and May demand in their own lives mutual truth and supportive love, a pact which has given them direction and stability through the deceitful tumult of their lives. Yes, they still retain traces of disquieting doubt and they are often unsure about what exactly to believe, but the siblings stick together, and at the end of the play, as their father equivocates about the “truth” of their past, Eddie – who himself “got it all turned around” (52) in his mind – rejects the old man’s attempts to re-inscribe the past, and simply announces the truth that “It was your shotgun. Same one we used to duck-hunt with” (54) that Eddie’s mother used to kill herself. With the truth in the open air, Eddie dismisses the confused, lying old man with a simple “You were gone” (55), and does not say another word to him. We then see Eddie and May embracing, kissing tenderly, with gestures of affection that the stage directions tell us “never stop” during the last moments of the play (56). For Jake in A Lie of the Mind, the faithful impulse is equally simple – when Lorraine asks him of Sally “What do we need her for?”, Jake answers plainly, “I can trust her” (67-68).

Other instances of moralizing about truth, loyalty and trust pepper Shepard’s plays – with his approach allowing him to adhere to his moralizing impulse while embedding his evangelizing in an indefinite postmodern world where the very validity of these values can be questioned. In spite of this, Shepard evinces an appealingly straightforward commitment to truth for truth’s sake. Jake, in A Lie of the Mind, tells Beth, “Everything in me lies. But you. You stay. You are true.” (129). Cecilia at the conclusion of Simpatico modestly tells Carter, “Your money’s all here. You can count it if you want to. I only used a little bit for sandwiches and tea. I’ll pay you back, I promise” (135). In Fool for Love, May announces to Eddie early in the play in no uncertain terms: “I’ll believe the truth! It’s less confusing” (24), while later, Eddie, in a delightfully playful, but seriously moralizing, mood, challenges Martin by saying, “She suggests it’s a lie to you and all of a sudden you change your mind? Is that it? You go from true to false like that, in a second?” (51). In Simpatico, Carter and Vinnie expound at length on truth, “right motives,” and not a few other virtuous traits:

CARTER: (laughing): Scared and guilty?

VINNIE: One or the other. Or both.

CARTER: Scared and guilty!

VINNIE: Neither one is the right motive.

CARTER: Oh, well, I apologize for that!

VINNIE: Neither one has to do with kinship or brotherhood or any sense of another man’s suffering at the hands of a woman.

CARTER: Oh, so now we’re suffering! We’re suffering now!

VINNIE: One of us might be suffering!

CARTER: But the other has no conception of it! Is that the idea!

VINNIE: That’s the idea but the idea is a long way from the truth!

CARTER: Aah! The Truth! The Truth! And only one of us is able to have a handle on that I suppose!

VINNIE: One of us is a helluva lot closer to it than the other one! (17)

Interestingly in Shepard, as with Simon, we find a strong commitment to family, with this the primary compass of Shepard’s moral universe allowing characters to find their bearings in harsh worlds. Needless to say, this very harshness sometimes stems from broken and hurtful family relationships, some of which retain their toxic residue – Vince’s announcement in Buried Child that “I’ve gotta carry on the line. I’ve gotta see to it that things keep rolling” is clearly not an unblemished commitment to unsullied fealty (70). In spite of grim examples like this, however, a more beneficial family love can be seen in Shepard’s work. A Lie of the Mind, with its varied family connections, contains many of Shepard’s most penetrating examinations of family relationships, and the brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers all remain close in their various ways (though again, their closeness sometimes has a gritty or injurious edge). Lorraine says of her son Jake, “He’s not gonna hurt us. We’re related. […] Outsiders he’ll hurt. That’s guaranteed. But not us. He knows us.” (27). Late in the play Mike shouts to Jake, “He’s the traitor, not me! I’m the one who’s loyal to the family! I’m the only one.” (125), and earlier he had reassured his damaged sister Beth:

MIKE: You’re safe here. Long as you stay with us.

BETH: What’s “safe”?

MIKE: Safe. Safe from injury. You won’t get hurt here. (48)

Often these family values and an array of universal virtues are combined and brought into sharp relief at the conclusions of Shepard’s plays (a standard technique of the evangelizer that all “get their due in the end” and that a better world awaits those who persevere and do the right things.

Here we are led into moral worlds that feel completed, almost optimistic (if still colored with doubt and pain), and the characters who had been feeling such confusion and instability during the course of the plays are often given a taste of virtue and glimpses of futures that maybe, just maybe, will not be as bleak as they had been led to believe. Eddie appears to leave May at the end of Fool for Love, but their separation feels more like a necessary severing of their unfortunate past than an abandonment – something like the pruning of a diseased limb that may lead to regeneration (and I have already noted their tender attachment at this point in the play). In A Lie of the Mind, Jake kisses Beth softly before he exits, while Baylor, flush with the triumph of folding the American flag with his wife, kisses her on the cheek and, though unsure and awkward, tells her with some affection “Let’s go on up to bed now” (130). In the conclusion of Simpatico Vinnie turns to an endeavor he truly appreciates – meting out justice, which “fills [him] with purpose” (134). Even in Buried Child – no doubt the most baleful of the plays examined here, and anything but truly “optimistic” – Vince is seen in the end making plans to “[get] rid of some of the vermin in the house” and start “brand new” (71). Meanwhile, Tilden exposes to the light of day the murder that has tormented the family for years, while Halie revels in the “paradise out there” in the back yard. She is last heard making a plea for a “good hard rain” that will scrub the “stench of sin” from their lives, “[take] everything down to the roots,” and make way for “a miracle” and “the sun” in their dark existence We see in the denouements of Sam Shepard’s plays at least hints of new, constructive moral orders, which perhaps should not surprise us, for as Hayden White asks, “What else could narrative closure consist of than the passage from one moral order to another?” (“The Value of Narrativity” 283, emphasis in original).

Conclusion

Neil Simon and Sam Shepard: moralist playwrights inscribing ethical frameworks for their American (and global) audiences. One, a fire-breathing sermonizer, a radical preacher and teller of horror tales, ready to denounce amoral listeners for illicit behavior; the other a friendly family advisor looking to the best sides of life for examples of best behavior. Vastly different they may be, but both emerge from an American artist-moralist tradition, a tradition that has existed side-by-side (if often uncomfortably) with more traditional methods of moralizing and preaching in the nation. For like it or not, America is a moral nation, a nation that from its founding professed to individuals and communities the necessity of “doing the right thing.” Edward Winslow, Mayflower pilgrim and first governor of the Plymouth colony, wrote for those who were beginning their new lives in Massachusetts –

…if there be any too desirous of gain, to entreat them to moderate their affections, and consider that no man expecteth fruit before the tree be grown; advising all men, that as they tender their own welfare, so to make choice of such to manage and govern their affairs, as are approved not to be seekers of themselves, but the common good of all for whom they are employed… (Winslow)

– while across time George Bush orated in his 2005 inauguration –

That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards…. Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before – ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Bush)

Beliefs like these have infused American society across the social and political spectrum for hundreds of years, moving outward from individuals and families to larger communities; from the local, to the national, to the universal. Such an environment has in turn influenced American aesthetics and arts, nurturing the artist-moralist impulse. Neil Simon and Sam Shepard, if influenced by a variety of other (and often conflicting) aesthetic, social, and political motivations, follow in this long line, and they pick up and transmit these aesthetic–moral traditions to their audiences. For Simon and Shepard, it’s the right thing to do, for as Halie says in Shepard’s Buried Child, “We can’t not believe in something. We can’t stop believing” (60).

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