Something that’s been knocking around in my head since I decided to go back to uni is the question of why. Not why go back to uni (that’s easy enough: I’m Very Bored in my current job, and I miss learning and researching and being… creative, I guess. Yes, that thesis was creative). Not even why on earth do I want to be an academic, because that turns out to be quite obvious, after a year away (h/t to Dean Dad, who once posted suggesting that it would be a good idea for aspiring academics to try their hands at something else, in the interests of a more rounded skill-set and the definite knowledge that this is what one wants to do, rather than the only thing one thinks one can do).  The amount of time I spend lecturing long-suffering friends on such things as sexuality in medieval hagiography, or the life of Charlemagne, or dirty jokes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, when I really should be taking a chill pill and enjoying Real Life has lead me to the conclusion that I’d enjoy teaching as much as research.

No. What I’m coming back to (again) is: why medieval studies? I mean, really. WHY?

Simple answer is because I happen to LIKE it. There’s also the fact that I can pick up and run with Old French, I could go back to Middle English or Old English, and I know the ins and outs of how to go about the research, and find the key texts and consult the primary sources and cross-reference to other things I’ve studied. But mostly, it’s that I like medieval studies. I like medieval texts and I like medieval social constructs. I like hanging out with the Gawain poet and Chrétien and Ælfric and knowing how they thought and wrote and dreamed. Also I like knowing obscure things like the length of a cubit for the purposes of Venetian ship-builders in the Crusade period (84cm, as it happens) and baffling poor innocent people who didn’t actually care in the first place.

But that only really answers why I want to research in this field (if it even answers that much. I could, theoretically, live a perfectly productive life doing whatever it is that productive people do, and read Chrétien for fun). It doesn’t answer such questions as “why invest a lot of government money in allowing me to do this” or “why subject undergrads to Obscure Things Highly Finds Interesting?” And it really doesn’t answer the question of “isn’t there something more relevant and useful a young female australian with a yen for literary theory could be doing with her time?” Australian lit is not very widely studied. Australian women’s lit, even less so. Early Australian women’s lit: very sparsely indeed. I happen to know of a woman who wrote – not brilliant, but interesting – social novels about late 19th/early 20th century Australian society.  She had some very interesting connections with Federation-era feminist circles and the movement for women’s tertiary education. As far as I know, she’s never been studied.

Am I suffering from a classic case of Cultural Cringe? Isn’t it a bit sad, if some (most?) of the smartest young humanities scholars in the country (not that I’m necessarily the smartest of young scholars. But I’m pretty smart, and very stubborn) are busy running off with their heads in the literature and history and social constructs of countries and time periods removed from our own by half a globe and at least half a millenium?

A friend and mentor justified, in her Aus. govt. research funding application, her intention to study medieval marriage, as being relevant to Australia’s scholarly interests because this country has inherited the institutions and cultural understandings of British society, and therefore her research into the politics of marriage in her particular medieval period would or could contribute to the contemporary debate about the institution of marriage and its place in Australian society. As it happens, I buy this argument (if I had a dollar for every time I’ve brought up the twelfth-century origins of the sacrament of marriage in a debate about the Sanctity of Marriage, I’d be making a substantial contribution to the marriage equality campaign, in the name of good history). But where does “understanding shared cultural constructs” cross over into Culture Cringe?  Can I justify the study of female friendship in the works of Chrétien de Troyes in terms of potential insights into my own culture and context, and should I? How do you reconcile the need to bypass the cultural privilege given to European history with the principle of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake”?

I was tidying up my RSS feed today – removing blogs I never read anymore, and adding, as it happens, some Australian feminist bloggers. And I came across this post at Modern Medieval, in which Matthew Gabrielle quotes an email from a former student of his, on how the study of history changed the way that said student understands his own context.

I was led to these necessary conclusions. If I could, at the same time, be critical of and appreciate St. Francis of Assisi, why couldn’t I also question while appreciating the Founding Fathers or Abraham Lincoln? If describing the Crusades as a struggle between the evil Christian invaders and the Muslims was an over-generalization, why must I accept the generalizations we make about terrorism, politicians, or religious leaders? People are people. Mass movements are mass movements. Heroes and great nations make mistakes and bad guys and rogue nations aren’t often as evil as we’d like them to be. To be sure, I studied the Middle Ages at a time when I was already questioning many of my assumptions and, already, becoming the black sheep of my family, but the study of history, and specifically of this period, further freed my thoughts to allow for complexity so that I can disagree with Bush without thinking him ill-intentioned. So that I could condemn terrorists without condemning fundamental Islam. For me, the Middle Ages weren’t as important for how they still affect the present as they were for how they allowed me to examine the present for what it truly is—a world as complex as the Middle Ages.

Medieval Studies taught me that gender is a social construct. I’ve still never read a word of Judith Butler; I’m only just now reading Ann Summer’s Damned Whores and God’s Police, which goes through, in great detail, the history of women’s gendered experience in Australia. I ran a mile from feminist theory, in my early undergrad years. But I kept coming back to studying women, because women and women’s place in society and how people think about women and women’s place in society interests me. Ælfric, bless his cotton socks, and the scholars who work on him, taught me about signifiers of gender, and passive/active dichotomies. It wasn’t until I won a prize from the Society for Medieval Feminist Studies for what I thought was an eminently sensible essay about grammar and narrative structure in Ælfric’s Judith, which just so happened to be looking at gender, that I realised I’d accidentally become a feminist scholar. It took another… six months, at least, before I cottoned on that I’d also accidentally become a feminist, after swearing myself blue in the face for years that I was and would always remain an egalitarian, and wasn’t having a bar of that crazy feminism business.

University taught me to think critically about things I’d always taken for granted. Medieval Studies taught me first to think critically about things far enough removed from my own context that I couldn’t take them for granted. And then, as Matthew’s former student says, it’s a lot easier to turn those same critical lenses on the context I live in now.

I’m still not sure that I’m not suffering from Culture Cringe. But I can say that it’s worth Australian time and money researching the distant past (the distant European past. The distant Asian past. The distant American past and Indian past and South American past and African past, and absolutely the distant Indigenous past), even in the absence of any immediate and clear connection to any present political or cultural debate. And it is always worth Australian time and money teaching people to think about the distant past: because it’s FUN. And because once you start thinking, it becomes very hard to stop.

You know how the internet sucks you in and several hundred links later you end up pondering obscure bits of Catholic doctrine? (Or maybe that’s just me. Other people end up at RickRolling or worse…) Random surfing today brought me to the Catholic Encyclopaedia’s page on the sacraments, and this odd piece of information:

For administering Baptism validly no special ordination is required. Any one, even a pagan, can baptize, provided that he use the proper matter and pronounce the words of the essential form, with the intention of doing what the Church does (Decr. pro Armen., Denzinger-Bannwart, 696). Only bishops, priests, and in some cases, deacons may confer Baptism solemnly (see BAPTISM).

I would *dearly* love to know how that piece of canon law came about. Was there some sort of emergency in which a pagan had to be called on to perform baptism? Why would you call on a pagan instead of a nearby Christian? Why would a pagan be inclined to perform baptism “with the intent of doing what the church does”? Or is this some kind of theological brain twister which no one ever expected to use…?

So far as I can make out, the Denzinger-Bannwart thing is a 19th century canon law compilation, but this piece of knowledge tells me nothing about what prompted the decretal in the first place. Fisher Library has it, but it’s out, it’s in Latin, and I’m in Canberra, so it’s not much use to me anyway.

Does anyone HAPPEN to know why a pagan can perform baptism? Not the theological justification, that seems to make sense (as much as canon law ever does) – but why someone felt the need to theologically justify it in the first place?

Failing that, any suggestions as to how to find out this piece of interesting information – short of learning Latin and borrowing the book out, which is possible but rather a long-term goal.

Pertinent advice for early-career researchers, delivered on the basis of the circus that was my application-submitting over the last couple of days:

If you have something accepted for publication by a journal – such as a an article or review – make sure to:

1. Remember that you wrote it, and it was accepted

2. Obtain a copy

3. Write it down somewhere, such as in your CV

4. Remember its existence more than 48 hours before the application deadlines for scholarships, postgraduate programs, etc.

Why, yes, I did manage to have a review published in a peer-review journal and completely forget about it, and spend some time wondering if my not having published ANYTHING AT ALL would impede my scholarship chances, and so on. I let my membership lapse with the Australian Early Medieval Association, so I didn’t get a copy of volume 5, and was thus not reminded. When I happened to glance at the book (Kleist’s The Old English Homily) and think “hmm, I reviewed that, didn’t I OH WAIT”, I actually did not know whether it had been published (because I didn’t keep in contact with the reviews editor, due to forgetting it), and nor did I have all the citation details and so on that you need.

The library own a copy of volume 5.  The library have lost their copy of volume 5.

Fortunately, I have a very indulgent best friend, and the Centre for Celtic Studies was having a special lecture today so there were Celticists about. Be it known that Pamela O’Neil, editor of JAEMA, is a wonderful human being, the kind who opens up the envelope with the copy of JAEMA she was about to mail off to someone, and runs off photocopies for said very indulgent best friend. The Centre for Medieval Studies all already know I’m a scatterbrain, and now, let my reputation procede me into the Centre for Celtic Studies. :s

One day, I may establish myself as an organised and calm person. That day is not today.

On the bright side, mwahahahaa, I have a Publication Record. Of exactly one thing, and I don’t know how much reviews count for in the scholarship stakes, but something is better than nothing at all!

My google hits haven’t got any less weird during my blog-hiatus, apparently.

Answers to google requests of late:

“Princeton University Press”: here. Not me.

“Gawain vs Song of Roland”: Gawain. Because it has more dirty jokes in it.

“Why doesn’t Roland blow his horn?”: Because the Song of Roland doesn’t have enough dirty jokes in it.

“Strong hairy Denis”

… whut?

Between Women: friendship, desire and marriage in Victorian England – Sharon Marcus, Princeton University Press 2007.

Someone recommended this to me a couple of months back, before I made my excellent if rather sudden decision to apply for an MDST masters next year. I’d been toying with the idea of doing a masters in Aus. lit – an idea which I might have been able to follow up without moving towns again. The author I was (still am) interested in was writing in early 20th century Australia, and besides which, I’ve got a bit of a running interest in late 19th and early 20th century women’s literature at the moment.

So I picked up Sharon Marcus’ book, and as it happens, I think I can use some of her methodology in this thesis I’m proposing (it’s on female homosociality in Chrétien de Troyes’ romances). Between Women is an interesting – and in my opinion, very solid – book in that it is both a historical and a literary study. Marcus has divided her text into three types of relationships or portrayals of relationships: the homosocial, the homoerotic and the homosexual (the distinction between the last two is interesting, and I don’t think I fully understand it after reading the intro – hopefully the respective parts of the book will enlighten me). For each, she has two chapters: one looking at historical sources and reconstructing something of actual women’s experience and practice; and the other looking at Victorian novels and the narrative functions of women’s homosocial, homoerotic and homosexual relationships respectively.

This makes sense: although you can use literature as a historical source,  and you can certainly do a literary analysis of a historical work like an autobiography, here, the division is one of fundamental purpose. The historical chapter attempts to reconstruct what women did, thought, experienced; and the literary looks at one or several author’s expression of an ideal – what women should do, think, experience.

In the literary chapter “Just Reading: Female Friendship and the Marriage Plot”, Marcus looks at female friendship as a “narrative engine” which complements, supports, drives and enforces the heteroromantic plot and its conclusion. She takes issue with feminist readings which see all female homosociality as a rebellion against patriarchal forces (I cannot speak for whether or not this is an accurate assessment of feminist studies of Victorian literature), and emphasises instead the way that female friendships provide space for character development in the early stages of the novel, and are used to reconcile the heteroromantic plot in the later stages.

It strikes me that this is exactly how Lunette and Laudine’s friendship functions (assuming you accept Cheyette and Chickering’s approach to “love” as a social contract within the poem; if you prefer to read Laudine as powerless, Lunette becomes an abusive friend): in the early stages of the poem, their debate over love and marriage provides us with an opportunity to assess each woman’s character and to understand, through their argument, the reasoning which eventually leads to Laudine’s marriage; and in the later stages, Lunette’s intervention serves to reconcile Yvain and Laudine and bring about a stable resolution to the romantic plot. Interestingly, unlike the Victorian era examples Marcus gives, Lunette and Laudine’s relationship is not without its own strife – which Yvain (in disguise) has to step in to resolve.

I’m not yet entirely sure how far I can go with applying Marcus’ methodology – or where I’m going to end up with it – but the take-home message (or the put-in-my-proposal message) so far is: to really understand the value that an author and/or their society place on female homosociality, it is important to look at women’s same-sex friendships as integrated with their heterosocial relationships. Only by considering their weight in the plot as a whole can we get an idea of what weight the author ascribes to them.

Logical, huh?

And just in case you’re enthused by this, Between women is largely available on googlebooks.

Dear Beowulf studies:

I am changing languages. Please go away.

No, I don’t care if what I’m saying about women’s function as agents of social cohesion in Yvain and Erec et Enide looks surprisingly like the role(s) of a peace-weaver bride, as argued by Rosemary Huisman. PLEASE GO AWAY.

Nyah Nyah Nyah NOT LISTENING. (Besides, the differences in social structures are, I estimate, sufficiently significant that the similarities are more coincidental than meaningful. YES? RIGHT?)

Nolove,

Aspiring Arthurianist Highly

If you haven’t seen the Bayeux Tapestry Cake yet, get ye thence and observe.

Not quite a year since I handed in my thesis, nine months into a Real Job, and less than two weeks before the application deadline for 2010 research degrees, someone finally sat me down and asked me what I really want to do.

Apparently, what I would do if I still had all the guts and confidence I had two years ago (blah blah blah personal crap hit me hard during my Hons year, I’ve been using this year off to get my head screwed back on) is:

1. A thesis, preferably an MPil.

2. At Sydney Uni (I had been considering studying, say, Australian lit at ANU to save myself moving towns again).

3. On Old French (that’s a surprise – I’d been telling myself all along that I’m not good enough at French for that), specifically, on female homosociality in the works of Chretien de Troyes (which I went on about at length here).

4. As soon as humanly possible, and sort out financial questions when they happen.

People, it is ten days out from the application deadline. My Old French professor, a thousand blessings be upon her head, says she’ll take me. The CMS say they will take me.

What I have to do is write a research proposal in eight days and pop it in the mail. It’s an inauspicious start – maybe if I get my last minute deadline scrambling done now, I won’t have to do it at the end? I don’t know what my scholarship chances are, as I’ve no publications. But, by the Venerable Bede, it’s what I’d rather be doing, I’d be an idiot not to try it.

Here goes, folks!

My friend Lucy and I have an excellent arrangement, by the terms of which she’s educating me in Gothic literature and how to apply make-up, and I’m trying to get her hooked on medieval literature. This must be working out reasonably well, since along with a stack of 19th century novels, she recently loaned me R.T. Davies’s (not the Dr Who guy) Medieval English Lyrics, which I’d never seen before and she had managed to pick up from somewhere.

I found this delightful poem, and it is too good not to share. Titled ‘How Death Comes’, it is number 17 in Davies’ collection, and dated to the 13th century.

How Death Comes
Wann mine eyhen misten,
And mine heren sissen,
And my nose coldet,
And my tunge folded
And my rude slaket,
And mine lippes blaken,
And my spotel rennet,
And mine her riset,
And mine herte griset,
And mine honden bivien,
And mine fet stivien -
Al to late! al to late!
Wanne the bere is ate gate.

Than I schel flutte
From bedde to flore,
From flore to here,
From here to bere,
From bere to putte,
And te putte furdut.
Than lyd mine hus uppe mine nose.
Of al this world ne give I it a pese!

Cheery outlook, isn’t it?

Much more cheerful is this book, which I bought because a friend of mine who’s lucky enough to still be at uni told me it’s the set text for Awesome’s MDST course this year. Hopefully when I get back from Brisbane I’ll have time to tell you about it.

UUHEREAS ðe English alphabet haþ been in an vnchanging, ſtatic ſtate for ſome centuries nouu,

KNOUUING ðat flexibility breeds creatiuity and innouation,

IT IS RESOLUED ðat a reuiual and reintroduccioun of certain loſt elements of orthography and the alphabet uuould lead to a flouriſhing of the arts and diuerse intellectual endeauors;

THEREFORE þis post urges all and ſundry to once again integrate þose letters heretofore ſet aſide:

Full explanation at Cliosfolly

The Voynich Manuscript was the subject of an XKCD joke today. It wasn’t a particularly hilarious joke, but it’s still nice to see someone making medieval manuscript jokes.

I don’t know much about the Voynich MS, but I hopefully I will soon! Waiting on a friend to send me through an essay of his, which I will then edit, which looks at the images rather than the text. It’s for Medieval Cosmology, so it should be highly entertaining, although I think David, the lecturer, has given him a false impression of my brilliance in the matter of medieval cosmology.

Does anyone have a decent resolution copy of the Medieval Sex Flowchart from  James A Brundage’s Law, Sex and Christian Society that they can email to me?

It’s not actually for me, mind – I’ve made friends with a very intelligent young lady, who happens to still be in high school. She overheard me and some other friends reading Middle English one day, and was curious – so I started throwing medieval literature at her. I’m probably fostering my own nemesis, since she could read the Chanson de Roland, not perfectly, but as well as I can, the first time we showed her Old French.

Currently, there’s some kind of independant project going on which involves Chaucer (my fault) and Ovid (her teachers’ fault), and requires the Medieval Sex Flowchart, but we can’t find a copy of it of suitable resolution to use in a class presentation.

If anyone has a copy saved from when it did the rounds of the blogosphere, I would be delighted if you could email it to me at highlyeccentric AT gmail DOT com. If not, she’ll have to hie herself to the nearest academic library and find it.

(Also, uh, hi! Sorry I’ve been gone for a while. Not the most brilliant of months. I did graduate, though, and distinguished myself by being one of the only two girls wearing pants at the ceremony; and by half-falling down the stairs after being presented with my red folder thing.)

Well, what do you know. I froze my fingers off on a trip to the letterbox just now, and lo and behold, my copy of Medieval Feminist Forum Winter 08 has arrived! Had a quick look through the index, and there’s a promising-looking article called ‘Gazing at Gawain: Reconsidering Tournaments, Courtly Love, and the Lady Who Looks’, by Elizabeth L’Estrange. :D
So, er, there. I have proof that the Society For Medieval Feminist Studies does still exist. And there shall be tangible benefits from having won that student essay prize – namely, the periodic arrival of journals in my mailbox.

Now, I should probably try (again) to contact them and find out what happened to the other part of my prize, the bit where they were going to publish my essay in the online version of their journal. Someone’s very good at not answering their emails…

One of the things I’ve been doing with my brain in my spare time / while entering things into the government record-keeping system is madly analysing random bits of pop culture from gendered perspectives. I’ve learnt about things like the Bechdel Test; read about your chances of death in the BBC Merlin according to race and gender, and… well, pretty much anything else LJ has decided to teach me.

While archiving a bunch of correspondence the other day, it occurred to me to wonder: why do we so rarely see, in modern fantasy, protagonist groupings where friendships between women are given as much screen-time and weight in plot/character development as are friendships between men or between men and women?

I can think of a lot of modern fantasy, both good and bad, which has strong female characters. However, the most common plot set-ups that I can think of involve:

* A strapping young lad and his best (male) friend(s) or older male mentor(s). Random example: Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy.

* A brave young woman kicking arse and taking names in a male setting. Random example: Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet.

* A lone girl or woman and boy or man on a Dangerous Quest. (There will be Bad Fantasy Sex.) Random example: JV Jones’ Sword of Shadows trilogy (note that I haven’t finished reading yet, and I think when I stopped the characters had parted ways).

* A mixed group of men and women, in which there are usually fewer women than men. There will be a high level of character development through m/f relationships, not all involving sex (there will be lots of Contrasting Gender Roles happening). If the protagonist is male or the book has mixed POV, a substantial amount of plot and character development will occur within homosocial relationships: if the dominant POV is female, it is more common to develop character in the context of heterosocial and heterosexual relationships. Random example: David Eddings’ Belgariad.

* Two or more strong or supposed-to-be-strong female characters who are set up in opposition to each other. Their relationship, or the comparisons the reader draws between them, will be very important to the plot and character development, but they’re not friends or allies; each exists primarily in her own sphere. Random example: Morgan and Guinevere in Mists of Avalon.

Where are the books about girls working together? Why, in a mixed bag of protagonists, are female homosocial relationships always the last thing we hear about? I did a quick and unscientific scan of my brain, and came up with a few books that score highly in this regard: Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic quartet; The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian (granted that the reason Susan and Lucy’s relationship stands out as distinct is that Lewis organises the children’s roles in the adventure by gender); Sara Douglass’ Troy Game series…

and Chretien de Troyes Chevalier au Lion. Ok, Yvain’s our protagonist, and his character development swings on his attempts to balance his homosocial relationship with Gawain against his heterosexual and heterosocial relationships with various women (and his relationship with a lion. WTF IS THAT LION DOING, anyway?). I could go on about this at length. I did go on about this at length and got rather pleasant marks for it, too. But even while sticking almost exclusively with Yvain’s POV, Chretien still manages to pwn most 20th and 21st century fantasy when it comes to strong female homosocial relationships.

We have:

* Lunette/Laudine. We’re left in no doubt that Lunette is the biggest influence on Laudine’s life – and Laudine appears to be the only strong claim on Lunette’s affections. There’s that gorgeous inversion of the courtly blind promise trope, and has anyone pointed out that Lunette’s negotiation of Yvain’s marriage to Laudine is a genderswapped version of the m/f/m triangle, with the man as the token between women?

* The Dame de Norison and her maid – a small-scale reproduction of Lunette/Laudine, delicious triangle dynamics and all.

* The tag-team of Questing Maidens on behalf of the Disinherited Sister.  I can never remember how many of them there were, exactly. They don’t have names and they don’t have direct dialogue, but they’re there and they’re a major plot device. A bunch of women (or was it just two? SOME WOMEN, anyway) recognising that another woman is in trouble, and setting out to fix it. That the only way, within Chretien’s social construct, for them to do so involves going and fetching a man, shouldn’t undermine the fact that they’re a bunch of women actively collaborating in the interests of one of their fellows and putting themselves at considerable physical risk to do so.

And in case we thought that everything was all happiness and roses in female homosocial-land, Chretien goes and adds tensions and misunderstandings to the female homosocial relationships he’s set up: Laudine blames Lunette for her betrayal and throws her out; the Feuding Sisters bicker their way across the narrative climax; and even at Norison (which, for a bunch of reasons I shan’t go into here, I think is meant to function as an example of good and harmonious social relationships, as opposed to Yvain’s unbalanced home situation), the Lady gets temporarily cranky with her maid.

What’s more, female homosocial relationships contribute to the narrative not just as plot devices but as character development. There have been reams of paper spent on the question of Laudine’s motives in first marrying and then re-marrying Yvain – does she love him? Is she manipulated? Does she really care? No matter what the conclusion is, no one can attack this question without examining the relationship between Laudine and Lunette, and the changes in their public and personal relations as evidence for Laudine’s feelings and choices.

But wait, it gets better! Or I think it does. I have a rather hazy thought that I swear I will chase up one day, to the effect that the female homosocial relationships in Le Chevalier au Lion also contribute to male character development. I think we’re supposed to read Lunette/Laudine in particular, but also the women of Norison and the tag-team of Questing Damsels, in contrast to Yvain/Gawain. Which homosocial relationships work to preserve a balanced social order? Which are compatible with balanced and mutually beneficial heterosexual relationships? And which homosocial relationship causes constant discord and demands preference above all other loyalties? I’m not sure if Yvain learns anything from the women around him, but I’m fairly sure the reader is supposed to use the examples of the women in the story to evaluate Yvain’s choices and character development.

In short: Chretien de Troyes > modern fantasy in general. But I’m sure we all knew that already .

Well, that’s extrapolation. You see, I just got around to watching the Dr Who Easter Special, during the course of which episode, the Doctor asserted that:

1. He speaks all languages.

and

2. He was at the court of AEthelstan in nine-hundred-and-something.

Ergo, the Doctor speaks Old English.

…

Just give me a moment to properly savour this fact.

…

On the other hand, The Doctor thinks it’s appropriate to bash up priceless medieval relics in order to make an anti-gravity bus. FAIL, Doctor, FAIL.

Medieval relics > anti-gravity buses.  Someone send a memo to the BBC.

Eep, third post in two days, what has gotten into me?

This is a heads-up to say that I’ve posted the fourth review in my Banned Books Meme.  Some time last year I got hold of the American Libraries Association’s data for books most frequently banned or requested to be banned, 1990-1999. A bit out of date, but I couldn’t find later data at the time, and no one keeps this data in Australia at all. I had only read seven, so I set out to read another ten by the time Banned Books Week rolls around again.

Review Number Four is of The Color Purple, and in it I talk about Alice Walker’s choice to narrate the story in first person, in (possibly an inaccurate representation of) black patois, and the effect of this on the reader. I also talk a bit about the novel’s polyamorous dynamic.

Ok, i just checked my incoming google results, and as well as the usual ream of unusual ‘naked’ searches, there was this:

what’s wrong with fantasy literature

What’s wrong with fantasy literature? As a whole? Well, based on my wide reading therein, but granting that I haven’t read much new fantasy in the past four years, the major problem with the genre is this: Really Dreadful Sex Scenes. And a reluctance to fade to black. Seriously: weird dodgy sex scenes are what you expect from weird dodgy fantasy novels, but even among the very best fantasy authors I’ve read, there’s this terrible weakness for Incredibly Cliche Magic Sex, or Over-Descriptive Anatomy, and various other sins.

There, O Google, is your answer.

One of the many excellent things about Academic Remainders in Canberra is that I’ve been able to pick up a couple of good books on feminist and/or feminist queer studies. One of these, which I’ve just started in on, is Feminism and Masculinities, ed. Peter F.  Murphy. It’s part of the Oxford Readings in Feminism series (I also picked up Feminism and  Renaissance Studies, which I’m yet to read).

Feminism and Masculinities is an interesting book. I’ve read two of the articles, browsed a few more, and read the editor’s introduction. I love the concepts it explores: the relationship between patriarchal masculinity and homophobia; the ways that patriarchal masculine social structures are bound up in competition and power struggles; the common interests of gay rights activists and feminists (but also their different needs). Flicking through the contents list, it also looks like the collection is going to look at racial factors, which should be interesting.

Here, have my favourite quote from Jack Sawyer’s chapter, ‘On Male Liberation’ (quoted from pg 27):

In the increasing recognition of the right of women to participate equally in the affairs of the world, then, there is both a danger and a promise. The danger is that women might end up simply with an equal share of the action in the competitive, dehumanizing, exploitative system that men have created. The promise is that women and men might work together to create a system that provides equality to all and dominates no one. The women’s liberation movement has stressed that women are looking for a better model for human behaviour than has so far been created. Women are trying to become human, and men can do the same. Neither men nor women need to be limited by sex-role stereotypes that define ‘appropriate’ behaviour. The present roles for men and women fail to furnish adequate opportunities for human development. That one-half of the human race should be dominant and the other half should be submissive is incompatible with a notion of freedom. Freedom requires that there be no dominance and submission, but that all individuals be free to determine their own lives as equals.

Yeah. I could go on about why I like this quote, but let’s move on to the logic!fail.

This is a book entitled Feminism and Masculinities. It is a book which, in every chapter, enjoins men to work together with women to restructure the power-lines on which our society runs. It is a book which addresses other issues of oppression, such as homophobia and race.

It is a book with twenty chapters. Seventeen of them are written by men. None of them are co-written by women *and* men. The chapters written by women are bundled together at the back of the book, as sort of special guest panel.

I quote from John Stolenberg’s chapter, ‘Toward Gender Justice’:

In this model [the heterosexual model, which he is defining], men are the arbiters of human identity. From the time they are boys, men are programmed by the culture to refer exclusively to other men for validation of their self-worth. A man’s comfort and well-being are contingent upon the labor and nurture of women, but his identity – his ‘knowledge of who he is’ – can only be conferred and confirmed by other men.

Granting this fact (which I’m not sure that I do, given the number of men I’ve known to be dependent on their wives/girlfriends for validation): isn’t it just the tiniest bit counter-productive to produce a book about ‘feminism and masculinity’ which is dominated by male writers? In which none of these male authors have done what they advocate other men do, and actually worked with women in looking to define masculinity?

I’ve yet to get to the second half of the book – the half where the three chapters by women are found. But so far, it seems to me to be a book about masculinity, in the context of feminism. I’ve liked every single chapter, as a stand-alone item. But they seem to be strung together in a spirit of ‘what can feminism do for teh mens’, which, last I heard, was not what feminism is for.

Find me a book on feminism and masculinities which is co-edited by men and women, which has at least 1/3 female authors, and in which male and female scholars work *together* on co-authored articles in their respective disciplines… and then I’ll be impressed.

ed: well, hello, I don’t have a feminism tag or a gender tag. Or rather, I didn’t. Hello, new tags.

Dear Medieval Blog:

I must confess, I am unfaithful in my affections. You see, I have this horrible crush on the 19th century. I know, it’s awful. I mean, I’ve spent so long collecting little pictures to illustrate medieval posts, and I’ve got absolutely nothing for the 19th century.

And that is how I came to read Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. I could say a lot of things about this book. It is long. It is  the longest non-academic book I’ve read for… possibly four years. Maybe more. And since I rarely read an academic book cover-to-cover, suffice it to say that 636 pages of Portrait were an exercise in patience. It’s not a book which moves very fast: it’s a book in which people drift about Europe and converse in drawing-rooms, and all the interest and beauty is in the detail of their characterisation and relationships. There are no explosions, swords, quests, comic relief characters, or even satisfactory snogging scenes. Once upon a time this wouldn’t have bothered me, but apparently I’ve grown shallow in my old age.

Aside from the lack of explosions, swords, quests and the like, the other thing which bothered me about reading 636 pages of 19th century literature is that, when one reads novels, one reads the novel. I’m so used to reading medieval texts in small chunks, responding, commenting, reading secondary lit, reading some more of the original, discussing, making pencil notes and cross-referencing this or that other obscure text, it was very strange to be reading only one thing at a time and having no further purpose to it. My inner cross-referencer went into overdrive, and came up with some interesting points of comparison.

First up, Portrait reminded me of The Picture of Dorian Gray¹, so much so that I wonder if one title references the other or if they’re both referencing something common to them. Not in plot, per se, but they share a common genre – both Gothic, but largely bereft of spooks, ghosts, bloodsuckers, sputtering candles, fluttering curtains, and all the usual bread and butter of Gothickery. Each relies on one chilling figure to underpin the Gothic narrative – although both Wilde and James do use some of the other tropes of Gothic literature (murder for Wilde, ghosts for James) with a light hand. The Picture lurks at the centre of Dorian’s tragedy, and Gilbert Osmond at the centre of Isabel’s. Understatement is the order of the day: both Wilde and James underplay the horror – it is not as if they wish to wind their audience into hysterical fright, or wow them with dramatic thrills, but rather to leave the reader unnerved.

Wilde and James also have in common a knack of Not Talking About Sex while still, very much, talking about sex. They go about it differently – you can tell Wilde is trying to see just how much he can say, just how far he can push people before someone arrests him (again). I read Dorian and sniggered and muttered things to myself like “artistic romance my FOOT”, and then had a look at the appendixes and discovered that all the business about Basil’s “artistic passion” for Dorian was a late addition… the original Wilde MS did not exactly beat around the bush in the early stages, but as far as Penguin’s appendices can tell you, he never went so far as to spell out what Dorian’s sins were, exactly what dreadful influence he had on young men, or the extent of the experiences Dorian pursued for the sake of experience. He leaves the question open: he could mean anything, and whatever answer you settle upon leaves you wondering both if you’re dreadfully dirty-minded, and if you’re incredibly naive and the truth is much more salacious.

James is, in a way, more straightforward: he simply elides sex and desire from his narrative, and the absence tells you very clearly exactly what it is he means. James’ description of Osmond, on introducing him, didn’t make of him the great object of desire which Wilde does of Dorian Gray (you can hear Wilde drooling…). He tells us little of Isabel’s initial reaction to Osmond: she admires his taste, enjoys his conversation… We are told nothing of her decision-making process surrounding her marriage: James keeps the details as shuttered off from the reader as Isabel keeps them from her family. All we know is that she’s somehow gone from a self-analytical young woman opposed to marriage, to one with an all-absorbing devotion to an apparently unremarkable betrothed.

Wilde’s treatment of desire in Dorian Gray was entertaining and intellectually engaging, but James’ handling of the subject in Portrait really got me. It’s the one power which could make Isabel surrender her self-determination, and James doesn’t engage with it as an intrinsic part of her character, or even as one of the life experiences her friends thought so beneficial to her.  He simply marks out the space where desire arrived in her life, and leaves that space for the reader to remember as, in the ruin of her marriage, Isabel holds fast to the determination that she chose her surrender.

Secondly – and more surprisingly than the Wilde connection – Portrait brought my internal cross-referencing system to Little Women and the work of Louisa May Alcott. This post has taken me far too long, so I shan’t continue right now, but as soon as I can manage it without decimating my sleeping patterns, we will consider such questions as the value of experience, a young woman’s potential, and a woman’s duty.

Trying (and largely failing) to catch up on my RSS reader, I discovered this on Dr Nokes’ blog. Clay Paramore sings Caedmon’s Hymn [translated version here]:

I’ve always been immensely jealous of Caedmon, being as I can neither sing, nor dance, nor play any instrument, and years of church-going and piety never inspired Jesus to appear and give ME a miraculous talent for singing .