. . . and one of my main takeaways from exploring Fort Warren, finished in 1850, is how little fortification design had changed in the past thousand or so years. The nineteenth-century fort, made from local granite, is focused on its cannon emplacements but also basically medieval.

First off, Fort Warren has a moat:

I was standing on what the signage called the “earthen coverface” but is basically an outer curtain fortification with a mix of bulwarked earth and some strategic stone ramparts. The moat was always dry but would have provided easy targeting of enemy invaders, had they ever gotten that far (they didn’t).

Just for comparison, here’s a now-dry moat of an eleventh-century castle in Bari, Italy:

Fort Warren’s powder magazine, positioned in the center of the fort, hunkered lower than the inner curtain walls, and protected by enormously thick stone, features a medieval-style arrow-slit window:

Note the design: the window is wider at the interior wall so the soldier could aim through about 120 degrees while any enemy trying to shoot into the magazine would have to have extremely precise aim. The design originally worked well for arrows, but I imagine it was successful with guns as well. See the narrow windows in the eleventh-century example tower above for comparison.

Fort Warren was never attacked directly, so its medieval defenses were never tested. Confederate soldiers were imprisoned there during the Civil War, and U.S. soldiers trained there during the First and Second World Wars. I wonder if any of them ever thought about the seeming incongruity of training with cannons and guns and mortars next to a moat.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

(images from imdb.com)

In Book 19, Odysseus enters his own palace, disguised by Athena as a beggar. After the suitors clear out for the evening, Penelope summons him to see if he has news about her husband. At about line 300, their conversation develops in such a way that it’s plausible that she knows it’s him. For those of us who don’t read Ancient Greek, the translator necessarily mediates our understanding of this moment as a potential recognition scene – for example, Wilson twice has Odysseus address Penelope as “Wife of great Odysseus” (l.164 and 336), but she breaks the lines at “wife,” so just the briefest of pauses makes our reading brains think he has just called her “Wife.”

Similarly, Wilson breaks the line when Penelope tells Eurycleia to wash his feet: “wash your master’s / age-mate” (ll.356-7). And “age-mate” just sounds awkward, like Penelope knows she almost said “feet” and threw in a bad improv to try to cover for both of them (of course, Eurycleia knows him from the scar just a few lines later, so there’s a cascade of recognition here).

If you think that Penelope already knows who “the beggar” is, then her announcement of the archery contest for the next day (l.570ff) reads like announcement of a battle plan. Part of the deliciousness of this interpretation, for me, is that she knows who he is, and he knows she knows who he is, and they are plotting together towards their shared goal.

Penelope may have had to stay at home but she is as much of a strategist as her husband, the man she married and knows so well there’s no disguise that could keep her from recognizing him.

Because I went into Nolan’s film already in the “of course she knows” camp, I understood Hathaway’s performance in that scene to include implicit recognition of her husband. Odysseus is not transfigured by Athena in the film - he’s merely wearing a deeply hooded robe in a dark-ish room while partially turned away from her as she sits behind a screen. But her eyes show that she knows who he is, and the resolve in her voice as she announces the “test” of the next day tells me she’s ready to end this 20-year limbo and get on with her life - with the man she loves and would know anywhere.

There’s no hard textual evidence to support an interpretation one way or another - performers and audience members have to decide for themselves whether she knows him by the middle of Book 19 or if the recognition doesn’t happen till Book 23. So your understanding of that scene actually reveals a lot about what you think about marriage, whether a partner bond can be strong enough to endure through twenty years of trauma and plotting and violence and peril. And I think it can.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

(Matt Damon as Odysseus and Zendaya as Athena from imdb.com)

That image of Odysseus and Athena (Matt Damon and Zendaya) is so ubiquitous in the film’s publicity that it would be hard to see that woman as anything other than Athena. But towards the end of the film, Odysseus recounts the horrors of the sack of Troy with flashback cuts to the carnage. We see for the third or fourth time the image of a statue’s head rolling down steps; we finally know that this is a statue of Athena from a temple in the heart of the city.

(sorry about this bad screenshot from one of the trailers- I couldn’t find a good image)

In this epsiode, however, we see as well the decapitation of a young Trojan woman (played by Zendaya), another sort of desecration; that woman is not just “Athena” or perhaps a priestess of the temple but every helpless victim in the face of brutality and terror. Zendaya thus isn’t actually “Athena” - she embodies Odysseus’s realization of the horror he has unleashed and his inability to atone for it. And she haunts him for ten years as he tries to return not just to his home but to his self-respect.

Both David French and Peter Wehner have made similar points about Athena in Nolan’s film. French asks, “Is Athena actually appearing to Odysseus or is she a manifestation of a guilty conscience?” while Wehner suggests that she might be “the ghost of his greatest sin.”

I’m going a bit further, however, in that I think Nolan is reminding us that humanity’s deities are projections of our own emotions and desires - while Zendaya is listed as “Athena” in the credits, “Guilt” or even “Self-Knowledge” would be more accurate.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

(image from vanityfair.com)

Nolan’s Circe differs substantially from Homer’s ”beautiful, dreadful goddess” (Wilson translation 10.136), making us think about the ways that power over others can corrupt the self. Samantha Morton shows us a damaged and suspicious middle-aged woman whose abuse of power seems understandable but not justified.

The usual feminist critique of Circe is that she turns Odysseus’s men into pigs simply because they are pigs, and the film leans into this idea; as she changes them back into men, she mutters that she is returning their “disguises” that mask their inherent swinishness. Her conversation with Odysseus reveals that she’s been a victim before – there are hints of past rape and assault akin those of Madeline Miller’s Circe protagonist – and she has taken the safest route of preemptively transforming intruders before they can reveal their inevitable predatory natures.

(Antonio Tempesta, “Circe Changing Odysseus’s Men into Swine,” 1606, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In a Vanity Fair interview, Morton states that Circe “just felt very, very of every woman [sic] and all women, and that she carried the pain of all women throughout history.” So, yes: everywoman rather than sexy witch. An updated Circe for an updated Odyssey. A lot of press is assuming a supporting actress Oscar nomination for Morton.

But Nolan shows us how such sympathetic victimhood can corrupt as surely as military success and survival have festered in Matt Damon’s Odysseus. In the course of her conversation with Odysseus, Circe reveals that the crow in a cage in her cottage is her sister, whom Circe has transformed because their relationship is better that way. Since her magical skill is to reveal true nature (the men are pigs), we need to ask what her sister’s crow-like sin was? Maybe she talked too much? Made a lot of noise early in the morning?

That revelation shows that Circe uses her magic to control relationships that aren’t actually threatening – her magical power has corrupted her ability to interact honestly with others. Odysseus leaves her on her island, in her cottage with the crow and a lion and some other animals. Unlike him, she has no family to long for or home to seek. Her isolation exemplifies for Odysseus - and for us - the danger of unlimited power over others.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

(images from imdb.com)

The bard as epic narrator stays out of his story for almost the entire epic. We rarely hear the poet use the first person; the poem blends omniscient third-person narrative with embedded first person speeches (the most obvious is Odysseus's narration to the Phaeakians of his travails between the end of the Trojan war and his arrival on their beach). The very few times the poet breaks that wall, so to speak, focus on the swineherd Eumaeus. The poet consistently refers to Eumaeus as “my swineherd” and addresses Eumaeus as “you,” as if Eumaeus himself is the actual audience of the poem (e.g. 14.166 and many others following).

Much of the commentary on the film refers to Eumaeus as Odysseus’s “friend” or loyal servant, as Nolan presents him in that mode throughout. Eumaeus helps to train Telemachus to use weapons (he can hear Telemachus’s mistakes even if he can’t see them). He keeps tabs on the disloyal staff, he tries to protect Odysseus’s very old dog, he locks Melanthius in the weapons storeroom. Like many translators and commentators before him, Nolan has elided Eumaeus’s status as a slave, even though Homer’s text is quite clear on that point (Emily Wilson discusses this issue in the introduction to her translation of the Odyssey as well as in many interviews). I wasn’t counting, but I don’t think I heard the word “slave” more than once or twice throughout the film - It’s much easier for our modern brains to see Eumaeus as Odysseus’s friend than as his property.

Homer’s blindness is part of his legend, and most internet commentary sees Eumaeus’s blindness in Nolan’s film as homage to Homer the blind poet (Eumaeus is not blind in the original epic). In a Hollywood Reporter interview, Leguizamo says, “And you know Homer was blind, right? I’m blind in the movie as well. I never asked him, but I thought that Chris was conflating Eumaeus with Homer in a way . . . I love the idea. They were specially fabricated lenses that were hand-painted and they did cataracts in both my eyes. One is really cataract and the other one’s partially cataract.”

So a Homer-homage, yes, but let’s also place Nolan’s Eumaeus in the long line of blind characters who see the truth. There’s Tiresias the blind prophet, of course, and his counterpart Oedipus. There’s Shakespeare’s Earl of Gloucester and Jane Eyre’s Edward Rochester. And of course my favorite blind character, Mary Shelley’s old Mr. DeLacey in Frankenstein, the only person who sees the creature’s humanity because he cannot see the creature’s monstrous appearance.

So when you see Nolan’s Odyssey, ask yourself what truths Eumaeus alone can access.

And more Odyssey observations coming soon…..

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Numerous critics and historians have noted that throughout the nineteenth century, teaching was one of the few professions available to unmarried, educated, middle-class women, not just in the U.K. but in the U.S. as well. As Lutz notes, “Besides marriage, teaching remained one of the only respectable positions a middle-class woman could hold – a governess in a private home, instructor in a school, or running one’s own institution” (91). Governesses lived in the awkward position of social inferiority to their employing family but social superiority to most of the other employees (who performed manual labor).

The unmarried Brontë sisters knew they would lose their home and their household budget once their father died, since his position as a clergyman provided the family’s residence and only income. They were intensely aware that they would eventually need to support themselves through some sort of work, and teaching was the most probable means of that support. Unfortunately, they didn’t like it and they weren’t good at it.

Lutz notes of Charlotte Brontë that “she loathed teaching” (93); Charlotte refers to one of her governess gigs as the “miseries of a reserved wretch” as she tries to manage “riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs” (104). In reference to another set of children, Charlotte states that “no one but myself can tell how utterly averse my whole mind and nature are to the employment,” describing the children as “wild and unbroken” (136).

In a letter to her sisters, Anne Brontë referred to her pupils as “desperate little dunces” (101); Anne’s novel Agnes Grey is a thinly fictionalized version of her “travails as a governess” (101). Lutz mentions the “selfish superficiality and ethical emptiness” of another set of children Anne is governessing - Lutz evidently agrees with the Brontë sisters about the caliber of their students.

(Charlotte, Emily, and Anne; images from Wikipedia)

Despite their unhappiness in a variety of teaching positions, the Brontë sisters nevertheless pursued the idea of (as Emily puts it in a letter): “a scheme . . . for setting us up in a school of our own” (146). Once they announced the school’s opening, however, no pupils matriculated and the school was never a functioning institution.

I’m relieved that any potential future pupils were spared the Brontë educational methods, which I imagine brought just as much unhappiness to the students as to the teachers. Children always know when adults dislike them – and I’m sure the “cubs” and “dunces” leaned into those roles accordingly.

Many great writers throughout history have been great teachers, but the Brontë sisters are not in that group. They were interested in engaging with and creating literature; they found teaching boring and draining. We are richer for the failure of their school: in their search for economic stability, they defied patriarchal expectations yet again and decided to pursue novel-writing instead of education. The results of that decision include Jane Eyre (Charlotte), Wuthering Heights (Emily), and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne). At least partly, we can thank the cubs and dunces for the novels.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

(image from Macaulay Library)

Tuesday featured a guided tour of the Rincón de la Vieja National Park, a moderately active volcanic area home to many birds and other animals. The park’s name translates to “the corner of the old lady” or “the old lady’s area,” and as we approached the park, our guide told us the legend that named the park (this is my approximation of the way he told the story):

Many years ago, the Chief Curubandé ruled the Pacific side of the volcano, while the Chief Mixcoac ruled the Atlantic side. They had agreed never to cross the boundary into the other’s territory; they had agreed that the penalty for breaking the law would be death. But Curubandé’s daughter was curious and adventurous and went by herself to the other side of the volcano to swim in the beautiful rivers and explore the forest there.

Mixcoac saw her, and instead of killing her, he fell in love with her. Every day he met the beautiful princess and showed her the wonders of his side of the volcano, and every night she went back to her father’s territory.

One night, Mixcoac crossed the border to see his beloved. Curubandé discovered Mixcoac, captured him, and threw him into the highest crater of the volcano, ignoring his daughter’s tears and pleas for mercy.

His daughter revealed to Curubandé that she was carrying Mixcoac’s child. When she bore a son, she carried the baby to the crater and tossed him in to join his father in the afterlife. She never returned to her father’s house and spent the rest of her life in the forest, learning its magic and sharing her knowledge with pilgrims from both tribes who came to ask for her guidance. She is the “Old Lady” of the park’s name. Even today, visitors can hear her voice or sense her touch in the waterfalls, trees, and wonders of the park.

So my first thought: what was the princess’s name? Turns out she was Curubandá, the daughter of Curubandé. The guide said he had omitted her name to avoid confusion in his telling of the story. I racked Curubandá up next to all those European women whose stories I know much more deeply, who were so consistently recorded only as a prominent man’s mother, wife, sister, or daughter, whose names were lost or almost-lost to history. I was pleased to discover that many of the versions of the legend available online include Curubandá’s name.

My second thought: hooray for the Old Lady from the legendary Costa Rican past who ignores the territorial rules invented by men and who shares her wisdom with all.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

(except for the first, all photos by the Massachusetts Medievalist)

(Arthur Dixon, Guinevere, 1921)

The Arthurian tradition varies in its presentations of the (fictional!) narratives around the end of Arthur’s reign. Texts agree that the probable adultery of Guinevere and Lancelot led to irreparable fracture in the fellowship of the Round Table, with Arthur eventually chasing Lancelot to Brittany and leaving Mordred in charge of England. Then, as Malory puts it (I’ve modernized the Middle English):

“As Sir Mordred was ruler of all England, he had made letters as if they had come from beyond the sea, and the letters specified that King Arthur was slain in battle against Sir Lancelot. Wherefore Sir Mordred made a parliament, and called the lords together, and there he made them choose him King. And so was he crowned at Canterbury and held a feast there fifteen days. And afterward he went to Winchester and there he took Queen Guinevere, and said plainly that he would wed her.” (Malory, Morte D’Arthur, 486 in the Broadview Anthology of Medieval Arthurian Literature)

Mordred, for all his many faults, was a canny politician, and knew that the best way to solidify his throne was to marry the widowed queen – even though Arthur was Mordred’s father, so marrying Guinevere would have been incestuous even if Arthur had actually been dead. She was the last living vestige of the glory of Camelot. Jacqueline Kennedy played an oddly similar role – the last living vestige of the glory of Camelot – in the swearing-in of Lyndon B. Johnson on 22 November 1963, the day that her husband John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The iconic photograph of her standing next to Johnson on Air Force One was composed to hide the bloodstains on her suit.

Caro describes the moment, from Johnson’s perspective:

“No single gesture would do more to demonstrate continuity and stability – to show that the government of the United States would continue to function without interruption despite the assassination of the man who sat at its head – and to legitimize the transition; to prove that the transfer of power had been orderly, proper, in accordance with the Constitution; to remove, in the eyes of the world, any taint of usurpation; to dampen, so far as possible, suspicion of complicity by him in the deed; to show that the family of the man he was succeeding bore him no ill will and supported him, than the attendance at his swearing-in ceremony of the late President’s widow” (Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power, 329).

All that Johnson wanted from Jackie Kennedy’s presence was precisely what Mordred wanted from Guinevere’s: legitimacy, glamor, compliance, imprimatur. And of course the word “Camelot” rings throughout both narratives, one a medieval fiction and the other United States history.

Johnson got what he wanted that day, although Jackie refused to change her suit, famously stating that “I want them to see what they have done to Jack.”

Mordred did not. Guinevere managed to outwit Mordred, using the time-honored feminine tactic of seeming compliance and needing clothes:

She “spoke fair, and agreed to Sir Mordred’s will. Soon she asked Sir Mordred to go to London to buy all manner of things that she needed for the wedding. And because of her fair speech, Sir Mordred trusted her and gave her permission. And so when she came to London she took the Tower of London and suddenly with all possible haste she stuffed it with all manner of supplies and garrisoned it with her men” (ibid as above).

Johnson was much more successful than Mordred, but this odd Camelot overlap indicates the ongoing, pan-historical need for a woman’s physical presence to legitimize the transfer of power. King Arthur: medieval and modern indeed.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

One anomaly in the room was the only comic image, an undated drawing titled “King Arthur and Guinevere Cooking” by John Tenniel (1820-1914):

(image: photo by MDM, also available Museum of Fine Arts collections)

The drawing is very small (4 3/8 x 3 1/8 in.) but it rewards a long look with one of the study room’s handy magnifying glasses. The basic pencil on paper expertly exploits Tenniel’s focus on the two figures at the stove with the background items of dish rack and side table sketched more lightly. Despite the drawing’s title, only Guinevere seems to be doing any actual cooking, with King Arthur standing expectantly, hands clasped almost in prayer, as he awaits whatever excellent meal she is sautéing and salting in the pan on the stove (an amusing anachronism).

Of course, they both wear crowns and formal medieval robes in this late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century kitchen.

The incongruity of the robed and crowned king and queen making dinner in a middle-class kitchen is funny, and the idea that maybe Arthur and Guinevere occasionally took a break from killing dragons and finding holy grails to chat over a frying pan is also entertaining. I’m not sure if Tenniel’s intent was pro- or anti-monarchical: was he showing that royal people are sometimes just like everybody else? Or did he see his humor to stem from some ridiculousness in the very idea that royal people would do something as plebeian as cook over a stove? More than 100 years later, the class implications of the drawing are elusive.

Tenniel was the lead political cartoonist for Punch from 1850-1901, producing over 2000 cartoons in his expansive career. I don’t think this drawing ever appeared in Punch – a google search produces the rarely-seen “your search did not match any documents” (even though the image is listed in the MFA’s collection catalog?) and a search of Punch’s cartoon archive came up empty as well.

Maybe this sketch was an idea that Tenniel never brought to fruition for the magazine? Maybe it was just entertainment for himself and his friends, never intended to be published? Whatever its origin story, “King Arthur and Guinevere Cooking” exemplifies the way that modern cultural moments continually draw on the expansive Arthurian tradition and reshape it in their own way to suit their own needs.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Doré, “The Dawn of Love” (from The Camelot Project)

Dalí, from La Quete du Graal (from Georgetown Frame)

Cameron, “The Parting of Lancelot and Guinevere” (from Boston MFA)

(No images of Kempe exist, so this illustration of the Wife of Bath on pilgrimage to Canterbury from the Ellesmere Chaucer will have to suffice. Other images are stills from The Testament of Ann Lee.)

Lee’s and Kempe’s lives are remarkably similar. They were both English, Christian, illiterate, well-traveled, married, celibate visionaries who were persecuted for their religious practices and beliefs. One crucial difference is that Kempe lived into her old age while Lee died from injuries inflicted by a violent mob enraged by her radical religious beliefs.

Both women came into their extraordinary relationships with God after giving birth - Kempe had at least 14 (!!) children, and Lee endured the deaths of her four infants. Especially given the vagaries of premodern obstetrical care, I find it completely sensible that both would want to abstain from sex, despite their husbands’ desires to the contrary. Kempe’s husband actually took a vow of chastity with her in front of the Bishop of Lincoln; Lee’s husband left her after they emigrated from Manchester to New York. Each woman decided that she could communicate more fully with God when practicing celibacy.

Members of both their communities found Kempe and Lee incredibly annoying and occasionally heretical. Kempe’s much-vaunted loud crying and sobbing as she meditated on the sufferings of Christ frequently made her a social outcast. Even the chapter headings of her Book show her problems: “She starts from Yarmouth on her way to the Holy Land. She has trouble with her companions owing to her weeping and piety…She sails from Venice and reaches Jerusalem. Much trouble owing to her crying” (chapters 26 and 28). She is repeatedly arrested, assaulted, and tried in court for disturbing the peace, proclaiming her holiness, preaching about God and Christ, and generally making a physical and theological nuisance of herself. God always looks out for her, however, and Kempe is always eventually acquitted and absolved (at least in her version of events). As far as we know, Kempe died of old age sometime after 1438, tolerated if not fully accepted by her community; her Book is now revered as the first autobiography in English.

Lee’s detractors were much more violent than Kempe’s. Accused of witchcraft and heresy both in England and in the revolutionary American colonies, Lee was routinely assaulted and arrested. Her declarations that she received visions from God enraged local authorities; her leadership of the Shakers, whose worship included ecstatic dancing and speaking in tongues, made her a target of angry mobs. Most egregiously, Lee preached that celibacy was essential in seeking salvation. While Kempe had desired celibacy only for herself, Lee’s dicta about sexuality applied to all of her followers. Celibacy was required for Shakers, male and female, and their numbers grew through conversion and acceptance of orphans into their communities (there are only three Shakers left now). Lee died in 1784 from lingering complications of a mob attack in 1783.

My fellow Substacker Peggy Smith Eppig remarked in an engaging post about The Testament of Ann Lee that Eppig sees Kempe and Lee both “trapped within the abusive patriarchal confines of Church and State.” Kempe manages to stay alive in that trap, however, while Lee dies at the relatively young age of 48, when she should have had many more productive years of religious leadership.

Lee’s affront to patriarchy, it seems, was not so much that she wanted to be celibate as part of her commitment to God; after all, Kempe managed to proclaim her own celibacy, and the celibacy of Catholic nuns has been celebrated for more than a thousand years. Lee’s outrageous offense was that she demanded that men practice celibacy as well. She claimed to have the spiritual authority to dictate sexual terms to male followers and potential male converts. She told men what to do with their bodies, crossing the line from nuisance to threat, and paying for that transgression with her life.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Testaments answered one of my nagging questions about Handmaid’s Tale, which was really a question about me c.2015: in Gilead, what happened to all the hyper-educated middle-aged women? How did the regime oppress and suppress a demographic that should have been its greatest resistors? Aunt Lydia, one of the narrators who presents her testament to the reader, tells us how Gilead’s quasi-Christian fundamentalist patriarchs eliminated or co-opted the women seemingly most well equipped to expose their hypocrisies and lies. Aunt Lydia shows her readers that hyper-educated middle-aged women are both less overtly powerful and more covertly insidious than we’d like to think.

A confession from the Massachusetts Medievalist about my initial resistance to The Testaments: since the novel appeared after the initial TV show of The Handmaid’s Tale, I was skeptical. From afar, it looked like Atwood was merely cashing in on the popularity of HT (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) and I wanted to remain in my text-only Atwood bubble. I still have not seen the HT show, nor do I intend to, and I will avoid Testaments on TV as well.

But then I was forced to read Testaments when two of my Lesley seniors in the fall of 2022 wanted to include it in their seminar papers. I was relieved to learn that Atwood had actually started drafting the novel before the production of the HT TV show. As I read and re-read The Testaments, I found some medieval Easter eggs that Atwood tucked into her text via Aunt Lydia - Lydia knew her medieval literature, it turns out, and a lot of other literature as well. While she was a feminist labor lawyer and then a judge pre-Gilead, I’m pretty sure she was an English major in her undergraduate years.

As our own political structures disintegrate, I’m finding Aunt Lydia oddly comforting. Fully aware of the unstable ethics of her choices to simultaneously work within and fight against the regime, she puts her historical, cultural, and literary knowledge to good use to undermine the totalitarians and assert her intellectual independence. Aunt Lydia is surreptitiously, academically heroic in the age of Gilead, and that’s perhaps a good goal for a hyper-educated middle-aged woman in the age of Trump.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

(all images from IMBD.com)

There are a lot of changes to Shelley’s original narrative, so many that critics who swooned at the film’s release about GDT’s faithfulness to the original text obviously hadn’t read it in years, if at all. I could rant extensively about all the bad changes GDT made (he is credited as the first author of the screenplay as well as the director), but will focus here only on two.

First, the new versions of Victor’s parents provide an extraneous veneer of emotional explanation for his psychopathic tendencies. In Shelley’s novel, Victor is loved and taught by both his parents in an idyllic childhood; his mother dies from scarlet fever when he is 17. In the film, Victor’s father is a demanding, unfeeling martinet; his mother is a warm, loving companion who dies giving birth to William when Victor is about 14. These cartoonishly stereotypical parental figures in the movie make Victor’s flaws seem explicable through some sort of psychology of trauma - that his father’s abuse of him leads to Victor’s abuse of the creature, for example. Part of the horror of Shelley’s obsessed scientist is that there was no trauma in his childhood, that he came to his mania inexplicably, that Victor’s immorality was simply there all along. Shelley forces us to see that love will not necessarily triumph over monstrosity. Del Toro erases this horror.

Second, Elizabeth’s character suffers enormously in GDT’s version of her. We meet her as William’s adult fiancée rather than as Victor’s sister-like cousin who shared his childhood home. The film preserves the novel’s uneasy tinge of incest - Victor decides he desires his brother’s intended and seems unbothered by her repeated rejection of him – but the film makes Victor rather than the Creature her killer, albeit unintentionally (he was aiming for the Creature but shot her by mistake). The overlong following scene where the Creature walks through the silent, immobile wedding guests with the dying Elizabeth in his arms, blood soaking through her white dress, is ridiculous rather than dramatic. Jacob Elordi should have been embarrassed merely filming it.

(note that this promo shot leaves out the blood as well as the non-sexual empathy that Elizabeth feels for the Creature)

Most importantly, though, GDT seems to worry that we might miss the overarching themes of the novel/film, so he continuously inserts tiresome and obvious dialogue about the nature of humanity and the hubris of “playing God,” as Victor argues with university professors and magistrates, Herr Harlander (Elizabeth’s rich uncle who has syphilis and a lot of money? Please tell me why this character needed to be added to the narrative?), Elizabeth, the sea captain, his brother– pretty much anyone and everyone else in the movie, including, eventually, the Creature himself.

The most egregious of these moments is William’s pronouncement after the Creature has left the wedding carrying Elizabeth that, “Victor, you are the monster.” Rather than rush to try to rescue his actually-still-alive fiancée, William takes the time to mansplain the audience about the most obvious thematic question of both the novel and the film: Who’s the human and who’s the monster? Thanks, William (the anglicized version of Guillermo, after all) – we don’t need your assistance with this one!

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Atwood is wrapping up her publicity tour for her 2025 Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, a 500+ page entrancing behemoth full of amusing stories, thoughtful reflections, and engaging narratives. At 86 (!!??$%^!), she’s a lively and incisive storyteller with a droll voice and lot of entertaining asides (refrain: “that was before the internet”).

Atwood answered questions about many of her novels, referred to ballet and opera versions of some of her work, plugged PEN and general freedom of speech, and read from Book of Lives, an episode from her graduate days in Cambridge that occurred two blocks away from last night’s event.

At one point, as part of a response to a question about the TV series vs. the text of Handmaid, she mentioned that Aunt Lydia’s name is a reference to Lydia Pinkham, the nineteenth-century inventor of “Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound,” a quack remedy for general “women’s troubles.” I suspect that part of the remedy’s popularity was its 18% alcohol content, if the ingredients list on Wikipedia is accurate. Atwood even sang a bit of the “tonic’s” radio jingle for us. Lydia Pinkham, not Lydia O’Leary. It’s official.

But all is not lost - towards the end of the evening, Atwood reminded us that she has no control over what happens to her books once they leave her desk - that the readers make the meaning and the culture and the value of the texts. For me, Aunt Lydia now hearkens back to both entrepreneurs, O’Leary and Pinkham, who invented best-selling products designed to make women’s lives better, whether through concealing makeup or cocktails disguised as medication.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

The Danish princess Hildeburh must marry Finn, King of Frisia, to seal the peace between their warring tribes with her body and an heir – but she has already pledged herself to the cult of Freyja, the matriarchal goddess who shares wisdom and magic only with her solitary priestesses. An enigmatic and minor figure in the Old English Beowulf, Hildeburh steps forward here as the heroine of her own story as she tries to wield queenly power in Frisia and appease the goddess whose service her father forced her to abandon. In fifth-century northern Europe, an era of Viking ships, named swords, and precarious existence, can Hildeburh keep the peace and keep her people alive?

Medievalist and professor Mary Dockray-Miller brings her expertise in women’s history to her first foray into fiction, re-shaping a minor section of Beowulf into a novel focused on an early medieval princess torn between her duty to her family and her own desires. Fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe and Natalie Haynes’s Stone Blind will recognize the impulse to center the narrative on a woman struggling in a world dominated by men.

Available in hard copy through Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Freyjas-Garden-Mary-Dockray-Miller/dp/1959360124/

Available as an e-book through Signum Press:
https://collaboratory.signumuniversity.org/store/150

Signum University Press, 2025 ISBN-10 :‎1959360124 ISBN-13 : 978-1959360124

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

(Posy of Flowers with a Beetle on a Stone Ledge, 1741)

Ruysch (Dutch, 1664-1750) is one of those “newly rediscovered” female artists who’s been hiding in plain sight for more than two hundred years; this is her first solo exhibition. Acclaimed in her lifetime, she was a court painter to Johann Wilhelm, the Elector Palatine, and the first female member of the Dutch artists’ group Confrerie Pictura. Her paintings commanded high prices, so high that her husband cut back on his own painting career to market and broker her work. And did I mention that she had ten children?

Ruysch’s technical virtuosity explodes from each canvas. The grapes are shiny, the flowers textured, the colors vibrant and scientifically accurate. Ruysch accessed local greenhouses exhibiting plants from throughout the Dutch Empire as well as illustrations of animals and plants by natural historians like Maria Merian. She mixed geographies to create visually exuberant compositions: “Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge” (1735) includes 36 species from five continents while “An Arrangement of Flowers by a Tree Trunk” (1683) shows a bridled skink from Africa eating a North American swallowtail (as the herpetology curator from Harvard in the MFA video notes, a logistical impossibility!).

One common analytical point about Ruysch’s precise animals among her flowers is that they represent some sort of warning about ugliness or danger that necessarily accompanies the botanical beauty that dominates the composition. The MFA’s educational resources for the exhibit exemplify this train of thought:

“At first glance, Rachel Ruysch’s paintings dazzle—opulent bouquets brimming with exotic blooms, their petals shimmering in soft light. But look closer. Scattered among the lush abundance are clues that point to something darker. Roses bow under their own weight, leaves grow limp and yellow, and a blue lizard crouches, ready to snatch a fly. These are not mere embellishments; they hint at the decay lurking beneath the surface of beauty.”

And that may well be accurate – but these lizards and beetles and caterpillars seem to me not to be dark or menacing or negative in any way. They are just as beautiful as the flowers, although their beauty is unconventional as Ruysch revels in the intricate grace of a praying mantis or a whorled snail. Perhaps this visionary, technical, and ambitious woman identified with these subjects – both were commonly perceived as monstrous or revolting. Could a successful eighteenth-century female artist celebrate herself as a beautiful beetle among the flowers?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

(all images from mfa.org or my own photographs)

Constellation is not for the faint of heart - it’s more than 500 pages! – but it rewards a long, deep engagement with Sze’s work. Far beyond the title, Sze invokes astronomy and physics, combined with images of the natural world, immersion in Asian and Southwestern US cultures, and global literary traditions. Throughout Constellation, the resonances of these themes enlarge and refract one another, until it seems obvious that descriptions of mushroom foraging, acequia, sleet, cooking, sex, and black holes belong together in the harmonies of Sze’s lyrics.

At its heart, Constellation reinforces appreciation and acknowledgement of the beauty of the English language. The poems almost demand to be read aloud, slowly; I stumbled over many unfamiliar names and terms (selenographer! dehisce!). Early in the collection, a poem consists entirely of the names of widely varied natural items (section 3 of “The String Diamond”):

….
humpback chub,
large-flowered skullcap,
black lace cactus,
tidewater goby…..

While towards the close, another names Native American tribes:

….
Mescalero Apache,
Siberian Yupik,
Jemez Pueblo,
Pawnee,
Chugach/Alutiiq……. (section 5, “Spectral Line”)

He includes Shakespearean echoes (“red numbers on the clock incarnadine the time,” [Section 4, “Quipu”]) and associates seemingly unrelated ideas (“I recognize fractures in turtle plastrons, / glimpse the divinatory nature of language,” [“The Angle of Reflection Equals the Angle of Incidence”]) . Throughout, Sze juxtaposes the micro and the macro to dazzling effect:

Pearls ripen in a lacquer bowl on the butcher-
block table. A red shimmer arcs across
the northwest sky as a galaxy bends the light
of a quasar. (Section 6, “Six Persimmons”)

The collection’s last line provides an enormously satisfying finale: “gazing into a lake on a salt flat and drinking, in reflection, the Milky Way–” (“Transpirations”).

Even in this fraught political moment, the Library of Congress has stupendously fulfilled its task of recognizing and elevating for us a poet deserving of our deep reading, our extended rumination. Start with the Poetry Foundation’s short selection of Sze’s work, and be prepared to marvel at lines like “The world resembles a cuttlefish changing colors / and shimmering” (Section 5, “Streamers”).

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Logan’s Run, set in 2116, is not great literature but it does provide great world-building and a fast-paced, picaresque quest for Logan as he runs from his government-mandated death on his 21st birthday (the chosen method to control explosive overpopulation). Towards the end of the novel, Logan hides in a “Re-Live” parlor, where clients can re-experience memories of their choice while wearing electrodes on their heads and reclining in a “life drawer.” In one of the memories, we learn how this culture raises their children– robots and machines fulfill all caregiving roles in institutions where the only humans are children.

We share Logan’s memory of his seventh birthday: “it was time to leave the nursery and go out into the world and Logan was afraid. He wanted to take Albert 6, his favorite talk puppet, with him – but they wouldn’t allow it….the puppet ran after Logan, tiny feet pattering across the nursery floor. ‘Loge, Loge! I’ll never forget you, Loge! Never forget you.’ They caught Albert and put him away in a box” (122-23).

“They” refers to the “autogovernesses” (even machines are coded female when there’s childcare involved, I guess?). Part of the horror of Logan’s world is the lack of intergenerational ties, with all the nurturance and connection and wisdom implied in those relationships. In that world, nobody has to expend energy and time to love or care for children; the designers of the “Thinker,” the giant AI system lodged under the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota, figured that robots would raise the children, freeing up the short-lived “adults” to indulge in elaborate pleasures before reporting to the Sleepshop when they turn 21.

(screen grab here and below from the 1976 Logan’s Run film starring Michael York)

All dystopian literature shows us an exaggerated version of potential evils that already lurk among us, and Grem is a realization of Logan’s Albert 6. While its creators hawk Grem as a beneficial alternative to parking a child in front of a screen, Grem is basically an audio-only Large Language Model chatbot tucked into a plush wrapper. In one of the ads, Grimes (yes, the musician who had children with Elon Musk) says that “As a parent, I obviously don’t want my kids in front of screens, and I’m really busy” so she suggests the “AI playmate” instead.

Yair Rosenberg’s essay in this month’s Atlantic refers to both the “AI Wearable” called “Friend” and the Grem toys in an excellent analysis, concluding that “virtual technologies that supplant shared spaces and conversations will not succeed in solving America’s loneliness epidemic, because they are the same technologies fueling it in the first place.” A kid who “interacts” most frequently with Grem and other digital paraphernalia doesn’t learn to interact with real people. Logan has no friends or family because his society is explicitly designed to prevent those relationships from forming.

So with the AI Wearable and the Grem toys, we seem to be one step further down the road towards Logan’s Run and its world of emotional isolation. Backlash online and in the media to these products is enormously entertaining – check out the comments on the Friend announcement. Do note, however, that along with a space colony populated by successful runners, Logan discovers that the Thinker is failing and the under-21 population has no idea how to fix it, ensuring the culture’s eventual destruction. Let’s leave Albert 6 and Grem in that box.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Convergent evolution typically refers to life forms that have independently evolved similar characteristics in geographically separate areas, usually because of similar environmental pressures - think about Galapagos and Aldabra giant tortoises, or the Emu in Australia and the Ostrich in Africa. And it turns out that medieval Japanese and medieval European devils in hell exhibit striking similarities, despite geographical and cultural isolation.

One of the highlights of the Tokyo National Museum is the array of the “Ten Kings of Hell,” gorgeous fifteenth-century scrolls of silk with paintings of the Kings who will judge humans after death. King Henjo’o’ is obviously a busy judge, surrounded by assistants as his minions torture the unfortunate soul:

The demons, humanoid but not human, sport elaborate hairstyles, animal-skin loincloths, and bulging musculature; they work together as one holds down the human soul and the other breaks the soul’s elbows with a sledgehammer. And note that Henjo’o’ isn’t even really paying attention to the torture - he and his assistants, obviously human, wearing elaborate robes and hats, look at each other and the paperwork stacked in front of them, not at the demons and the torture.

The signage in the Tokyo Museum notes that in these paintings, Hell is a bureaucracy –it’s full of torture and demons but also middle managers who are disturbingly unaffected by the violence right in front of them.

Medieval European hell-demons share some notable similarities with their Japanese equivalents (see detail above).The demons in this largely typical thirteenth-century French historiated initial (BL MS Harley 1526, f.21r) also work as a team: the light gray demon removes the soul from the mouth of the dead bishop and passes it to the brown demon, who places it in the cauldron while the dark gray demon stirs the boiling hell broth. Like their Japanese counterparts, the European devils have substantial facial hair and non-human ears; the brown one wears a loincloth that reveals his almost-cute tummy.

The Kings of Hell scrolls were made before Europeans came to Japan (16thc), so these seemingly brotherly demons must be convergent - separately, both cultures depicted potential suffering in the afterlife to be inflicted by semi-human-like monsters. These devils show a fascinating cross-cultural correlation in images that warn us to behave ourselves now to avoid devil-inflicted torture later.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Craven’s flowers are both enormous and intricate. Some of her work in series is smaller, but the most memorable pieces in this show are monumental. Here’s her 2024-25 “Dahlias (For the Yellow Moon, Cushing, Always),” architecturally flanked by two of the moon paintings:

Note the ways Craven plays with perspective, how the individual flowers are larger than the moon and their stems are almost larger than the tree trunks. The vivid colors are almost garish - the yellow moon reflects in electric ripples on the sea and on the outlines of the trees. The catalog lists the canvas at 84x60 inches - it’s hard to look away from this enormous, bright, mesmerizing image.

Giant flowers recall Georgia O’Keeffe, of course - “White Rose with Larkspur #2” (1927), at Boston’s MFA, is about half the size of Craven’s “Dahlias,” but evokes a similar quality of manipulated perspective, with the gigantic rose isolated from any setting beyond the adjacent larkspur.

And O’Keeffe and Craven are both hearkening back to early modern Europe, especially the Netherlands, where a few women actually supported themselves and their families with their flower paintings and botanical illustrations (the MFA will feature one of these artists, Rachel Ruysch, in an exhibit that opens this Saturday and runs through December). Ruysch and her compatriots strove for an almost photographic realism in lush compositions; for them, scientific accuracy and aesthetic appeal were equally important. In their patriarchal society that celebrated history paintings and massive commissions, these artists flourished with their appropriately “feminine” subject matter that did not require human models, expansive studio space, or public appearance.

(Rachel Ruysch, Posy of Flowers, c.1700; Georgia O’Keeffe, White Rose with Larkspur #2, 1927; Ann Craven, Dahlias…, 2024/25)

Craven knows this lineage and confidently moves away from it into her own vision. Her flowers are not scientifically accurate; her canvases are enormous; her images are riveting. Summer is winding down, but Painted Time is up till 4 January – get there if you can!

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Much of the short-form publicity and reviews refer to the “dangerous species of hyperintelligent octopus that may have developed its own language and culture” (book jacket). Lots of the online commentary complains that the novel neglects the octopus focus in favor of the three ultimately entwined plotlines, but I think the problem lies with the marketing-speak and not with the novel. There are octopuses, yes, but if you come for the octopus, then stay for the dystopian horror, created and staffed by humans rather than cephalopods.

There’s a lot to choose from, in the dystopian horror category, including a fish-harvesting and -processing ship worked by abducted and enslaved men and controlled by AI systems programmed to maximize profit at the expense of human lives and natural resources management. The subtler horrors are perhaps more generally, painfully recognizable – Nayler has exploited the dystopian tradition of presenting a world uncomfortably close to our own historical moment.

The world of Mountain in the Sea is organized by economic interest clusters rather than by nation, and corporations have “security” departments that function as privately controlled, global military systems. All of the characters we meet are isolated from community, family, friends, networks; readers discover that isolation is more of a feature than a bug in this new world order.

One night, as Rustem and Aynur are talking after sex, Aynur says, “I was lying here thinking I haven’t talked this much to a person in a long time. Usually if I have a long talk like this, it’s with my point-five” (145). Along with the reader, Rustem doesn’t know what a “point-five” is, so Aynur explains:

“..people don’t really want to date other people. They don’t really want equal partnership – you know, two full people in a relationship. Two people with demands and desires and differences of opinion about everything. What they want is one-point-five people in the relationship. They want to be the complete one, the person who controls the relationship – and they want the other person to be half a person. You know, someone who gets them but doesn’t have their own demands…..So six or seven years ago, this big company in the SF-SD axis that specializes in AI started cranking these things out” (145-6).

In this world, humans try to meet their emotional and social needs through these AI “partners” known as point-fives. Nayler plays a wonderful narrative trick on us when we realize that a character we met before Aynur’s explanation is actually a point-five, not a human.

Right after I finished Mountain, I found Lila Shroff’s article about AI systems marketed to children in this month’s Atlantic, which references “chatbots that promise simulated social relationships” via “extremely personalized AI systems.” Mountain was published three years ago, but Nayler saw clearly where we are headed, complete with the perils of replacing actual humans with machines that superficially simulate but do not provide human connection. We are well on our way to normalizing human-machine “relationships,” prioritized over actual human relationships, and that idea is more frightening than any smart octopus I can imagine.

Speaking of humans, Nayler flings us back to the question Mary Shelley posed in her 1818 Frankenstein: is the Creature human? No spoilers, but any reader will be thinking about Evrim’s humanity and place in the world after finishing this novel. Like Brave New World, 1984, Oryx and Crake, or Our Missing Hearts, The Mountain in the Sea forces us to reckon with our own culture’s reckless choices and acknowledge the possibility, or even likelihood, that the dehumanized, digital world Nayler depicts could be lurking in our near future. Please post a comment about what kept you awake in the middle of night after finishing this novel!

Leave a comment

Subscribe now